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What are some of the common symptoms of rigidity that come up in the first few years of doing centering prayer? We get caught grinding away on the sacred word. We try to use the sacred word to battle against thoughts. We unconsciously hammer on the sacred word in our mind. We try so hard, and in our trying, find that God is far away from us. We hope that the sacred word, if we use it just right, will get
oh yes. I know this one...
Saint Thomas Aquinas taught that God is existence and hence is present in everything that exists. If God is present everywhere, it follows that under no circumstances can we ever be separated from him. We may feel that we are; we may think that we are. But in actual fact, there is no way that we can ever be apart from God even if we try!1
There, on the city street that drab, gray morning, as easily as I noticed my breath, I recognized that everything was already in God—both the special conditions that create contemplative openness and everything else that seems so separate from contemplation. There was no separation between grace and ordinary life, nothing special to receive. Everything was all there already, in God.
Too often you create your own obstacles in prayer by thinking that thoughts are a problem, when really it is your unconscious attitude of achievement that is getting in the way.
There is something very simple about God. Simple like a child’s laughter that breaks forth, spontaneously, without guile. Simple like when you act, immediately and directly, to help someone who falls in front of you. Simple like the way you just find yourself awake in bed, all of a sudden, in the morning sunlight. God is simple like the way every moment of time, in its ordinariness, holds the gift of your life—like this moment, now.
Contemplation is effortless in the same way that the falling of snow is effortless. It is effortless in the same way that a light breeze blowing on your neck is effortless. It is effortless in the same way that the petals of a flower open into the sunlight.
Unfortunately, these defenses also keep you from God. In the Christian tradition, the experience of the raw, existential depths of the human condition—in all its felt separation from God—is called self-knowledge. Contemplative practice not only brings you into contact with this kind of self-knowledge, but also helps you avoid getting trapped there. You have to go through self-knowledge to come to the abiding knowledge of God.
contemplative practice and self-knowledge
