Contemplative Prayer is not what you think!

Rev Neville Watson 15/4/2020

When people learn that I rise at 4am, they often ask “What do you do at that unearthly hour?” I find it a difficult question to answer because I don’t “do” anything. I just sit and “contemplate” my life, and life in general. 

Why 4am?  This is the time I am most alive. Of owls and fowls, I am definitely a fowl! And how long do I “contemplate” my life and times? It averages about two hours – the first in silence and the latter in reading and journalling.

And what do I mean by  “contemplate”?  This is where the rubber hits the road!

For me there are three kinds of prayer. The first is “vocal”, where we use words. The second is “meditative”, where the lips are still but the mind is active. The third is “contemplative” where both the lips and the mind are inactive and we simply open ourselves to the “ground of our being”. As a less scholastic peasant put it “Oi just sits wif im, and he wif me, an we are appy”.  There is vocal prayer, there is meditative prayer, and there is contemplative prayer, and the greatest of these, as far as I am concerned, is contemplative prayer.

We desperately need today to recognise that “being” and “doing” belong together and that the “being” part is very much neglected in our every day life.

 This is something that I learned from my old friend Gordon Cosby of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC. Being present to the presence of God is what it is all about – and by “God” I do not mean a guy in the sky who manipulates the levers of life on request and guarantees a life in some kind of heaven. I see God in terms of the “life energy of the universe”. God is not a being! God is the ground of our being, the life that is in everything, the life that connects me to everything and everyone.

This is not something new.  Moses was “contemplating” a bush that seemed to be burning for an inordinately long time and became convinced that he should do something about the slavery of the Hebrew people. The question was “Who will I say has sent me?” And the conclusion he came to was that “I am” (the verb to be) was sending him. And off he went to confront Egypt.  And in so doing established for us a pretty good precedent of the efficacy of “contemplation”.

In 2003 I contemplated a burning city. It was shocking and it was awful. One of the other members of the Iraq Peace Team asked me what I meant when I spoke of “Contemplative Prayer”. My answer, for what it is worth, was:

“Contemplative Prayer for me is about awareness: experiencing awareness, enjoying awareness and deepening the awareness of what we sometimes call ‘ultimate reality’ – that which really counts. Prayer is not a matter of earning or achieving. It is about “seeing” - and from that seeing everything else proceeds.  

And we must never presume that we see. We must always be ready to see anew, to see beyond the cultural hypnotic trance in which most of us live and move and have our being: the culture of fear, producing and consuming. If these are the only games we play, they harden and become our reality. What we aim to do in contemplative prayer is to break free of that reality and become aware of a greater reality. Einstein pointed this up in his words “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it.” 

Contemplation is the cleansing of the lens of perception so that we can see things as they really are”.

I make no claim to having achieved such awareness but I do know where it is to be found – and for this I am very grateful.