A really nice place.

. . . a really nice place

“The presence of God is infinte, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. It is we who are not present to Presence. We’ll make any excuse to be somewhere else than right here. Right here, right now never seems enough. It actually is, but it is we who are not aware enough yet.” (Richard Rohr, https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/)

I’d be the first to admit that the contemplative life—including the language that contemplatives use—escapes me most of the time. “Contemplative prayer,” “emptying oneself,” “living in the here and now,” “God as presence,” these phrases mostly leave me feeling inadequate. I think of monks and gurus and orders like the Franciscans of Richard Rohr and wonder what I’m missing . . . and then wonder if it’s they that are missing something substantial that my Anabaptist heritage bequeathed to me.

Radical Reformation Anabaptism and Evangelicalism/Revivalism (what began as the Protestant Reformation) individualized faith and spirituality: we all stand (now) naked before God with never a bishop, a priest, a pope a confessional booth, a sacrament or rosary between us and the throne. The responsibility to “save the world, single-handed if necessary” is imprinted upon us, opening at the same time a whole new guilt compartment and the opportunity to live with constant “measuring up” doubt. That Christ should have offered us salvation, freedom and assurance of our worth is easily overshadowed by the conviction that only we—individually—stand between the lost, hungry, imprisoned world and its perdition. Not the contemplatives, the Anabaptists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Catholics, etc., stand before the judgment throne as a species; it’s you in the docket, and then me, and then the brown guy.

The realization of Gelassenheit (contentment and submission) gets submerged under the weight of obligation and consequences, real or imagined.

As I understand it (vaguely), contemplation seeks to lead us back to contentment and submission with an accompanying disposition of well-being and wholeness. In a novel I’m working on, Sarah and her pastor-husband, Ike, are talking about prayer—he about the prayers uttered at Wednesday night meeting and she about prayer more generally. He laments the groping for words to say when people have an obligation to pray put upon them; she says she doesn’t pray with words at all, that for her prayer is listening, and it’s private. I wonder why I wrote that; was it my longing for the contemplative life, the Gelassenheit that seems so distant, so inaccessible?

There is in the writing of contemplatives a consciousness suggested that doesn’t come automatically. In our struggles to live in a more peaceable kingdom, our denominations, our preferred biblical interpretations, our gurus and preachers and pastors and popes, our prejudices, our politics just can’t lead us to the place where we are truly meant to be. Inadequately put, it’s the place where we stand toward creation in the place of grateful beneficiaries instead of as makers. It won’t do to stake our place in the universe on the pronouncements of the Reformation, on the sensibilities of Christendom, on the covenants God made with Moses and Abraham, on the first inklings of human choice so poignantly allegorized in Genesis 1 and 2. The secret may lie in submitting to the lesson of creation itself, way before Adam and Eve, when a Cinderella planet evolved and the stirrings of life promised that someday, somehow, there would be me, and you.

I can’t think of any more contemplative exercise than observing the rhythms of creation and submitting to the sure knowledge that we are neither above or below, but a part of it all. There is really only one miracle and it’s a big one. In a cold and unfathomable universe, conscious life exists and beauty and joy are possible. 

John Keats seems to have experienced a deep, contemplative moment when he ended his most famous poem with the epiphany, Beauty is truth, truth beauty after focusing long on a graceful Greek vase.

I sometimes wish I could put aside my TV, my laptop, my smart phone, my newscasts, my schedules and just be for a time . . . whatever that means.

I imagine it to be a really nice place.