"Contemplation is that quiet, still opening of the mind to what is before it.
It is that calm presence to what is not oneself, resisting the temptation to take it over, to own it or to use it.
It means letting the other person be different from oneself, refusing to absorb them into one's own way of thinking.
One must let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see." 1
I read this early yesterday. Even earlier I took the photo of my favourite rose. The rose is called Rhapsody in Blue, and its appearance in our garden every year is one of my deepest joys. The name fits exactly with the essential thereness of this rose; telling it as it is. The colour is extravagant and attention-seeking, a joyous cry that is inaudible but visible. A rhapsody in blue. And each rose on this florabundant display is playing its own note in the composition and performance of the rhapsody.
To gaze into a rose is to encounter that which is not oneself. Such beauty puts me in my place; try as I might I can't "think" this rose, fully capture or own it in words which are always proximate to reality. Instead I am invited to look, to spend time, to be touched into gratitude for a beauty I cannot make happen, but which I am privileged, yes, privileged to encounter as gratuitous gift.
Contemplative waiting is the demeanour of the hospitable, willing to "let one's heart and mind be stretched open, enlarged by what we see". Contemplation is an act which is mutual gift, so that we give ourselves to an attentive looking and the patient enjoyment, without control, of 'the other'.
It may be that one of the qualities that could give our lives a deeper rootedness, is to have a heart and mind ready to acknowledge beauty by paying attention to it. The transient delicacy of a flowering rosebud is a contradiction of our unexamined working assumptions about our own importance in the world. We are just as transient, and just as fearfully and wonderfully made.
Transience is a quality of time, posing the mystery of how we exist at all, and the fleeting finitude of each existence. What we do with time becomes one of the defining questions of a life well lived. It is a relatively modern assumption that our time is best crammed with activity, traded for productivity, then invested in the accumulation of possessions gained in exchange for our units of time. Transience contradicts our drivenness, and makes of time a non returnable gift, which once used is gone.
Contemplation is not, therefore, about spending time but of giving time, nor is it about wasting time but redeeming time. Being possessive of time makes us selfish and unwilling to give time to what does not profit us, benefit us, further the project that is our life. To give time to notice the beauty of a rose, or to attend to the presence of another person, or to reflect on the truth of who we are becoming, is to receive time as a gift to be given to the other, and as an opportunity for ourselves to change and receive an inner realigning of mind and heart.
All of this from an early morning meeting with a rose, a reminder of the importance of contemplative gratitude for that which is not me. In a world too busy to consider its own transience, too absorbed in economic production and consumption to be comfortable with the notion of gift, and increasingly, in a world so afraid and suspicious of those who are other than ourselves that we cannot spare the time to understand or befriend those we fear; in such a world the contemplative Christian bears witness to another way of being, and another way of seeing.
1. Timothy Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian, (Continuum, London: 2005), page 122.
It's a problem that life is such a rush we forget to contemplate; we see the effect of contemplation in the character of John in his gospel.
Posted by: David C Brown | July 30, 2018 at 12:43 PM