THROUGH PRAYER
Contemplation (the prayer beyond words and ideas) is a way to describe what Jesus did in the desert. It is not learning as much as it is unlearning. It is not explaining as much as containing and receiving everything, and holding onto nothing. It is refusing to judge too quickly and refining your own thoughts and feelings by calm observation and awareness over time—in the light of the Big Picture.
You cannot understand anything well once you have approved or disapproved of it. There is too much you there. Contemplation is loosening our attachment to ourselves so that Reality can get at us, especially the Absolute Reality that we call God.
Contemplation is the most radical form of self-abandonment that I can imagine. It is most difficult if there is not a profound trust that there is Someone to whom I can be abandoned! Such self-forgetfulness paradoxically leads one to a firm and somewhat fearless sense of responsibility. Now I can risk responsibility precisely because I know the buck does not stop here. There is a co-creation going on, a life giving synergism that is found somewhere between surrender and personal responsibility, God fully “co-operating with those who love God” (Romans 8:28), as St. Paul says it.
-Richard Rohr: Adapted from Near Occasions of Grace, pp. 18-19
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“The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
—Ellen Bass
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As Ram Dass states so eloquently in his new book, “Be Love Now”:
“Although you may devote yourself to an aspect of the Beloved, like the guru or the deity as mother, child, or lover, you are in it for the love, not for the attainment, not for the object. It’s one of those wonderful paradoxes you encounter on the path. You can’t attain it; you have to become it. In the process subject and object, lover and Beloved become One. “
“Open your eyes of love, and see Him who pervades this world. Consider it well, and know that this is your country.”
- The Songs of Kabir LXXVI
“tu surat nain nihar”
[Translation by Rabindranath Tagore]
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“tu surat nain nihar”
[Translation by Rabindranath Tagore]
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“What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?”
T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
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“Let all be simple. Let all stand still
Without a final direction.
That which brings you into the world
To take you away at death
Is one and the same.”
Charles Simic, from “Evening”
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“The universe is like a dome; it vibrates to that which you say in it, and answers the same back to you; so also is the law of action; we reap what we sow.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan
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