Before we start: You might notice I changed a couple lines in yesterday's post. I may have gotten a little carried away in over-hyping the book. It's not for everyone; nor is the practice of contemplation. Plus I'd forgotten that the book starts out a little slow. If you can make it through the first two or three chapters it does pick up after that.
Okay, on to the next post...
Who can be a contemplative Christian? Does it require some special expertise, or can just any ol' schmuck like me experience the silence (salvation) of God? Well, I'd say this book says YES, you can do it!
Yesterday we began to lay the groundwork for entering Into the Silent Land, as told in Martin Laird's fine book by that title. Today we will look at chapters 1-3 as he begins to take us there.
The first two chapters emphasize this foundational aspect...
"Union with God is not something that needs to be acquired but realized." (10)
Laird quotes a prisoner who has been working with the Prison Phoenix Trust, whose aim is to address the spiritual needs of prisoners by teaching them how to pray: "All beings, no matter how reactionary, fearful, dangerous or lost, can open themselves to the sacred within and become free. I have become free even in prison..."
For many of us the biggest hurdle is our own minds.
Martin shares a story in chapter two of a man he used to see every day who walked four dogs. Three of the four romped and roamed all over the open fields where they were, racing along in these wide open stretches of freedom. But the fourth stayed behind and, off to the side of its owner, ran in tight circles. One day he asked what was up with that fourth dog; why did he do that? The owner explained that before he acquired the dog it had lived practically all its life in a cage and could only exercise by running in circles. For this dog, to run meant to run in tight circles. Laird comments:
This event has always stayed with me as a powerful metaphor of the human condition. For indeed we are free, as the Psalmist insists, "My heart like a bird has escaped from the snare of the fowler (Ps 123:7). But the memory of the cage remains. And so we run in tight, little circles, even while immersed in open fields of grace and freedom.
All of us play videos in our minds of things from our past. Sure, some are pleasant, but many/most of the ones we replay are of hurtful memories we struggle to escape from. We can be held captive by our very own minds.
"The friend of silence comes close to God," Meister Eckhart says, "The noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within."
This brings us back to something from the introduction:
God is the ground of our innermost being, yet we skim along on the surface of life. The result is that our lives are rather like that of the deep-sea fisherman who was fishing for minnows while standing on a whale. "You were within me and I was outside myself," as Augustine famously put it. (29)
Chapter three then introduces us to the practice: The Body's Call to Prayer. This chapter describes three components of contemplative practice: posture, the use of a prayer word, and the breath. These are all described in more detail in subsequent chapters, so I will leave you with this gem from p. 45:
The body is a great reservoir of wisdom. Something as simple as bodily stillness and breathing make a contribution of untold value to discovering the unfathomable silence deep within us. This silence, as R.S. Thomas tells us, "is when we live best, within listening distance of the silence we call God."
I admit, the mind is the greatest struggle for me. I have long been bent on searching for God, or striving after God, and it's a whole new "movie script" for me to get used to the idea God is already right here within. What should be reassuring is so foreign a concept that it almost doesn't seem right. So it's been slow going thus far, but I don't know that that makes it any worse, more difficult, or less possible...
Taking five or ten minutes to practice contemplation in this way is completely doable for me, and most people. The biggest question is... will I do it?
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