I want to share a very favorite quote from a very favorite teacher, Beatrice Brutreau:
“Meditation is a way of meeting God. It is not a matter of thinking about someone who is absent. It is engaging someone who is present, indeed supremely present. It is the realization of this presence that is the main point of meditation.” [1]
Yes!
So many people approach contemplative prayer and meditation as a way of trying to “find God.”
But the reality is that God is already here and now.
There is no-thing to find when God is already at the origin of your search.
But we can be asleep and unaware of this Divine Reality…it is we who are not present.
God is a “someone who is present…indeed SUPREMELY present.”
Supremely present like the Ocean is supremely, unavoidably present to the fish. God is closer than breath.
And the waking up to this presence is what our spiritual practices are all about.
Centering Prayer is my way of slowing down, being still, and centering into my own deepest self, that part of me that is already in simple union with God because God is the origin of myself and not at some destination outside.
And that’s the case for you as well, and all beings, including our worst enemies.
God is our source and meditation and contemplative prayer are simple means of waking up to this reality.
In the 12 Step Tradition, they call prayer and meditation
…making conscious contact with God… (Step 11)
Conscious contact.
So contemplation, prayer, meditation: It’s all about being conscious….awake, aware, present…not “asleep”, not on automatic or autopilot. Not living unconsciously.
Contemplation is about seeing with the “eyes of the heart”…consciously aware of the divine reality we live in.
In fact, that is what the mystic-contemplative is: anyone who makes conscious contact with the Divine Reality. . . .
The contemplative doesn’t want a 2nd hand God! We desire the first hand experience.
As Rabbi Rami Shapiro writes:
. . . a mystic is a person who refuses to settle for a second-hand god. [2]
References:
[1] Beatrice Bruteau Radical Optimism: Practical Spirituality in an Uncertain World (Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications, 2002) 54.
[2] Rabbi Rami, Are You a Mystic?
