Practising Christian forms Mysticism, from the medieval mystics is an often neglected approach to spirituality. There is a strong English tradition of this going back at least a thousand years in the UK, an approach of using silence and spiritual readings to encounter the divine rather than through learning facts. This form of contemplation needs to be learnt, it is an important skill, but often people find more eastern approaches more sexy. Well I want to say that forms of contemplation coming from the mystics is definately as sexy as the Eastern. As a process, you move through your embodiedness - your fleshness, through to the
intellectual and then into the spiritual, to be able to encounter a
loving deity in prayerful encounter.
Helpfully - such prayer
starts with having self awareness, of
understanding your feelings and self. This is crucial so that you
'withdraw' your projections - projecting out at others what is within
you, projections that distort you, and prevent you from encountering
God. Projections are about our inner fragemented selves, that in us we
carry the experiences of childhood to now, all the unresolved, all the
pains and experiences. Contemplation is about finding inner peace with
these first. Often, we run straight to the intellectual, and not face
the emotional first. This makes the enquiries of our brains driven
by our unconscious desires and compulsions, or the projection of angst
or anger straight into the intellect, which is not healthy for us or
others. So contemplation begins with being self aware of our emotions
and our motives, to find peace with these before engaging with the
mind, and then to move onto the spiritual.
So unlike Budhist
meditation mystical contemplation from the Christian tradition is not about getting beyond your
heart and mind to find nothingness, more of a prayer of ordered peace,
that draws in a form of holism to a God that loves you. In this way,
this form of creative prayer helps you to become poised and balanced,
not because you are believing right, but because we experience the love
of God. This process says that whilst we are lost in the projections of
our emotions, projected thinking and self-led prayer around our own
stuff, we are in exile of being our full selves. So this form of
contemplatiive prayer, is about saying that we start in exile of
ourselves, and have something wonderful to find and discover in
ourselves and the cosmos.
It then frees us up to befriend the
world as God befriends us. To befriend God and not to attempt to
dominate God with such modernistic phrases whether we by some hypothesis
believe in God as a logical process to accept or reject. To befriend
creation and not to dominate it, to befriend friends and not to
dominate them, to befriend work colleagues and not to dominate them.
The list goes on. The challenge is for us to try and be disciplined and
fit in this type of prayer, which has to be learned. I am wondering
whether we should have a regular slot for this type of learning to
pray, as we can't expect to learn this from nowhere or from ourselves.
The monastics and mystics learnt this from others, so may I suggest, we
need to learn this from others.
However, there are some key
texts about this stuff - Evelyn Underhill, a recent find for me, has
loads on this, St
John of the Cross etc.
This form of creative, mystical and
contemplative prayer are very exciting and powerful.
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