To anyone who knows me even superficially, my writing an article on contemplative prayer might seem ludicrous. By temperament I am far from being a natural contemplative. I am active often impulsive , restless, and nonreflective. And anyone who knows my spiritual life well knows also that I have always struggled with disciplined prayer, in fact, with spiritual disciplines of any sort.
How, then, could I be one who dares to offer others anything about this seemingly most advanced of all forms of prayer? But, as we shall see, far from being for either spiritual elites or particular personality types only, contemplative prayer is part of the call of all Christians to abide in God. And far from being the most advanced form of prayer, it is really the most basic. Perhaps, therefore, before exploring contemplative prayer, we should first remind ourselves of what prayer itself is.
As a child, I was taught that prayer was conversation with God. As it turned out, this was not a bad way of summarizing some of the most important components of my part of the conversation. It lacked, however, the big picture of what prayer really is.
The problem, of course, with this childhood understanding of prayer was that it presented a seriously one-sided understanding of communication with the Divine.
It was all about talking, not listening. And it made prayer something that I, not God, initiated. In short, it failed to recognize that God always has both the first and the last word in the Divine-human conversation. God is ever reaching out in love and has no more ceased being Revelation than he has ceased being Love. The essence of prayer is not so much what we do as what God does in us.
