On Contemplation, a Word from Gerald May, and the Gift of Longing
A Note from Me
Sometimes I look at the flame of a candle and marvel at its energetic stillness. How can something be so full of energy and yet so still? That’s the mystery of the flame.
To live like that—to be a bright and shining light, to burn wildly with love, while at the same time being still—is a mystery worth longing for. I don’t mean being still in body, though that matters, but still in mind, in attention, in desire. A kind of stillness that comes from an inner ordering, where love for what is good steadies my every movement.
That’s how I imagine the experience of contemplation.
I’ve read the old descriptions—of souls stilled in God, of hearts lifted into a quiet fire—and it sounds almost too good to be true. I don’t know if I’ve experienced it. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t. But I can dream...
The dream looks something like my attention resting on God with ease as I water my hanging baskets on the porch. I’m not straining to attend, I just am. There’s no tug-of-war. No restless shifting of thoughts. Just a steady interior gaze, as reliable as my breath.
I guess that’s why the mystics spoke of contemplation as gift more than achievement.
I can’t muscle my way into it. I wait, I long, and sometimes—if grace permits—I’m given the gift of contemplation.
A Voice from the Christian Tradition
“This love divine in its nature and glimpsed only through the gift of divine light, is the greatest of all mysteries. It is the source, means, and end of all life, yet no one can explain or define it ... It is the one sheer gift of contemplation, completely unattainable by autonomous human effort. The realization of this love always remains mysterious. We may fall into it, wake up within it, discover that it pervades us, but no matter how we might try, we can never reduce it to an object for study or definition.”
—Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul
A Question to Carry
What image best captures your dream of being united with God?
Until next week,
—Jon
I have this lovely image which I go to often where I'm sitting with Jesus in a boat on a [picturesque lake. Think Lake Jasper or Lake Louise near Banff in Canada.
Strangely, I'm not a stare-guy. But I'd like to be and it's something I'm looking forward to in in the next life.
Typically, Jesus and I are just sitting together. Sometimes we talk, often not. Sometimes we fish (I don't fish) as he shows eye how it's done. And sometime she takes me ashore and he shows me how to scale the fish we';ve caught, how to build a good fire, how to cook the fish over the fire and then we eat it, together. Talking is at a minimum.
It's lovely. And I always long to go back there ...
Thanks for the inspiration, Jon.
Go well.
The image of a flame has long held significance in my life with God, but uniquely so in the past few years in the rhythm of soul care with my spiritual director. As the candle is lit before us, there is a gift of mystery that we are ushered into as we restrain the fire of our own energy that is constantly moved to action and begin to rest, no matter how long it takes, in the flame of Trinitarian Love. It is always gift.
For me, the afterglow of this time always translates into the moments of my ordinary life by remembering and receiving that stillness as gift and, as you said, waiting… for those moments where that quiet interior flame is kindled again, startling me and sheltering me beneath a Sacred Gaze. Learning to live beneath that Gaze, growing in attunement to that Love, does feel like a dream some days, but I think the contemplatives themselves didn’t so much live beneath that Gaze in perpetual reciprocity as much as they held a perpetual expectancy for the possibility of that Flame and Gaze to break into their ordinary. That’s the space I’m learning to live.
A prayer image I was given that has guided me onto a path of that growing expectancy in my own life is of Jesus on the shores making breakfast by the flames of a fire (John 21). I’m on the boat with the disciples and Jesus is waving at me, motioning for me to come to Him. I jump overboard, fully trusting that I will be at rest in His presence and Gaze. I often return to this image knowing that though my own ability to reciprocate that gaze ebbs and flows, Jesus’ does not. He is always waiting to shelter me beneath His gaze, waiting for me by the fires of Love.
Also, just pre-ordered your book! It sounds like a wonderful companion for the journey 🕯️