Cultivating contemplative life
This may still sound like breaking news to many of us, but actually we all are meant to have contemplative life. It’s not only nuns and monks hidden and sunk in prayer in convents and monasteries who need to be contemplatives. Contemplative life is for all of us!
We are actually equipped for it. Contemplative life is a great need for us since it represents the full maturity of our consciousness. And as our radical connection with the very foundation of reality who is God, contemplative life is indispensable to us.
That we are conscious of ourselves and of the world means we are made for contemplation. It’s the seed that needs to grow, blossom and bear fruit. It’s the seed that needs to realize its full potentials. Let’s not frustrate or abort it.
We are equipped for it because we have the spiritual faculties of knowing and loving, our intellect and will, that go beyond the appearances of things, beyond the sensible aspects of things.
With our intellect and will, we penetrate into the very essence of things, establish relationships and form and develop our life according to what we choose to know and love. We need to realize more deeply that our most important relationship is that with God. All other relations should flow from that.
This abiding and living relationship with God that our contemplative life produces would enable us to see and understand things in their most radical and ultimate dimensions. It is what gives us the complete picture of things.
In a sense, we cannot help but live a contemplative life, at least, some basic forms of it. Our problem is that we often fail to go all the way in developing the fullness of contemplative life proper to us.
We let ourselves to get entangled with its primitive forms, fully captured by the physical and sensible world, and hardly entering into the metaphysical, spiritual and supernatural world. We linger in the world of feelings and passions, the carnal life in short, and hesitant to enter into our spiritual life.
That’s why we need to find some appropriate place and time to develop our contemplative life, since the world, especially today, is so full of blare and glare that prevent us from being recollected and contemplative. We are pushed and pulled in every which way, leading us to all sorts of distractions.
This is not to mention that as beginners in the art of contemplation, we need some controlled environment and close supervision, something that is hardly felt and done by us in general. We need to do something about this.
Besides, in our pursuit to develop and maintain this contemplative life, we always would be in need of some plan or strategy to keep us going. Even great saints, already acquainted with mystical life, always felt the need for some plan to help them. But sadly, this idea has not yet seen the light of day by many of us.
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