Contemplation Is Communal

Now and again I meet people who think of meditation or contemplative prayer as an isolated act -- an individual practice that might discipline the mind, foster equanimity, or deepen one's relationship with God, but still: basically navel-gazing.

But people who have become more seasoned with these practices -- staying the course and returning despite bouts of boredom or dark nights or myriad other challenges -- often come to realize that it is actually the opposite of navel-gazing. Rather than an isolated focusing, contemplation is an opening to, an offering up, and a flowing with. Instead of strengthening personal concentration, contemplatives empty themselves, finding an inner spaciousness that can, with their permission, serve as a conduit for Spirit.

My Centering Prayer group has lately been reading Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault -- I believe it's my third time through this wonderful book, yet it still seems to be striking new ground in me. In the chapter entitled "Centering Prayer and Christian Life," Bourgeault talks about Centering Prayer as being part and parcel of perichoresis: the divine dance of Love that is always relational --  never an isolated act. She writes:

I have spoken so far of Centering Prayer as being rooted and grounded in kenosis, the self-emptying love of Christ understood as the core gesture of his life and the source of his sacramental power. But in Christian mystical theology, the word kenosis is used in another context as well: to describe the internal life of the Trinity. It speaks of the self-emtying love with which the Father spills into (or gives himself fully into) the Son, the Son into the Spirit, the Spirit into the Father. This complete intercirculation in love is called perichoresis. It's sort of like the buckets on a watermill; as they empty one into the other, the mill turns and the energy of love becomes manifest and accessible.

The same analogy I believe holds true for our life in God. What we experience in Centering Prayer as kenosis, or personal self-emptying, is always part and parcel of a greater perichoresis, one self-emptying spilling into another in the great watermill of love, through which God shows us his innermost nature and bestows this vital energy upon the world in a cascade of divine creativity.

"I am the vine; you are the branches; abide in me as I in you" (John 15: 3-4). The most profoundly beautiful imagery in the New Testament is communal; it speaks of this great intercirculation of love. So often we think of Centering Prayer -- or any form of meditation -- as alone, withdrawn, or focused on one's own personal development or special relationship with God, not shared with others (because we're under the impression that the only way to share with others is to talk). But in point of fact, whenever we participate in that act of kenosis, it is always as part and parcel of perichoresis. That is the essential Mystery, the beauty that Jesus lived and died and through which he rose again. There is no gesture more ultimately communal than kenosis, for it is the ultimate act of self-transcendence. As we participate in this gesture, no matter how isolated it first may feel, how divided and cut off from others, the deep truth we will eventually come to know is that any act of kenosis reconnects us, inevitably and instantly, to that great vine of love.

Thomas Merton learned this lesson through a long and difficult journey, perhaps the only way that this lesson is ever fully learned. When he entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in December 1941, the one thing he knew for certain was that he wanted out of "the world" and straight into God. As he took one last backward look before the monastery gate clanked shut behind him (he hoped forever), all he could see was a hopeless wasteland of sin, hypocrisy, noise, and illusion. Ahead lay a vast Himalayan silence ahd holiness. Or so he thought.

But the contemplative life is full of its own surprising plot twists. Once you give yourself fully to it, once you sign on the dotted line of kenosis, perichoresis is what you'll eventually get. Seventeen years later, that inexorable inner blueprint bore fruit in him in a completely unexpected way, when, on a routine shopping trip into town he was suddenly engulfed in a blinding epiphany of love. He describes the experience in an essay movingly entitled "A Member of the Human Race":

"In Louisville, at the Corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping  district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and that I was theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of a pure self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness."

Nor was this a fluke "mystical experience." What Merton saw in that moment stayed with him till the end of his life; it was a permanent transformation of his consciousness. This is the unitive seeing we are all called to: the secret of Jesus' great commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself." Not as much as yourself, as egoic consiousness always interprets, but as yourself: interchangeably One in that great vine of love which is the mystical body of Christ.

If you embrace a path that begins in kenosis, you will wind up in perichoresis; that's the wager. That's also the Church -- its vision and its path in a nutshell.