What is contemplation? Contemplation is the highest expression of a person’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself: fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is the vivid realization of the fact that life and being, in us, proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source.
Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision, to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it, they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees without seeing, and knows without knowing. It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols… but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows, the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by unknowing. Or better, we know beyond all knowing or unknowing.
Poetry, music and art have something in common with the contemplative experience. But contemplation is beyond aesthetic intuition, beyond art, beyond poetry. Indeed, it is also beyond philosophy, beyond speculative theology. It resumes, transcends and fulfills them all. And yet, at the same time, it seems, in a certain way — to supercede and to deny them all. Contemplation is always beyond our own knowledge, beyond our own light, beyond systems, beyond explanations, beyond discourse, beyond dialog, beyond our own self.
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must, in a certain sense, die. But this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.
And so, contemplation seems to supercede and to discard every other form of intuition and experience, whether in art, in philosophy, in theology, in liturgy or in ordinary levels of love and of belief. This rejection is, of course, only apparent. Contemplation is, and must be, compatible with all these things, for it is their highest fulfillment. But in the actual experience of contemplation, all other experiences are momentarily lost. They die, to be born again on a higher level of life.
In other words, then, contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God, by seeming to touch It. Or rather it knows God as if it had been invisibly touched by God. Touched by That which has no hands, but which is pure reality, and the Source of all that is real.
Hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness. And awakening to the Real within all that is real; a vivid awareness of infinite being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality, as received as a present from God, as a free gift of love. This is the exisitential contact of which we speak, when we use the metaphor of being touched by God.
Contemplation is also the response to a call. A call from that which has no voice, and yet which speaks in everything that is, and which most of all speaks in the depths of our own being — for we ourselves are words of That. We are words that are meant to respond to That, to answer to It, to echo That — and even in some way, to contain That and signify That. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit, in which our very life loses its separate voice, and resounds with the majesty and the mercy of the hidden and living One.
It is that which answers itself in us, and this answer is divine life, divine creativity — making all things new. We ourselves become that echo, and that answer. It is as if, in creating us, God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation, God answered the question; so that the contemplative is, at the same time, question and answer.
The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and second, awareness of the answer. Those these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is itself the answer, and we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this, until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness, not a proposition, but an experience: I Am.
The contemplation of which I speak here is not philosophical. It is not the static awareness of metaphyiscal essences apprehended as spiritual objects, unchanging and eternal. It is not the contemplation of abstract ideas. It is the religious apprehension of God, through my life in God. As The New Testament says,
“For whoever are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons and daughters of God. The Spirit itself gives testimony to our own spirit, that we are the sons and daughters of God. To as many as received That, God gave the power to become sons and daughters of God.”
And so the contemplation of which I speak is a religious and transcendent gift. It is not something to which we can attain alone, by intellectual effort, by perfecting our natural powers. It is not a kind of self-hypnosis resulting from concentration on our own inner spiritual being. It is not the fruit of our own efforts. It is the gift of God, who, in Its mercy, completes the hidden and mysterious work of creation in us, by enlightening our minds and hearts; by awakening in us the awareness that we are words spoken in its One Word; and that creating spirit dwells in us, and we, in it; that we are In Christ, and that Christ lives in us; that the natural life in us has been completed, elevated, transformed and fulfilled in Christ by The Holy Spirit. Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each person obscurely believes. “It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me.”
Hence, contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God. More even than effective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. Hence contemplation does not simply find a clear idea of God, and can find that within the limits of that idea, and hold it there as a prisoner, to whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by That, into its own Realm, its own Mystery, and its own Freedom. It is a pure and aversional knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity to follow The Word wherever it may go.