+JMJ+
+JMJ+
Let me put it into this: How would a loved one think and feel if you have to take some substance to be able to love him/her? Let’s say, a girlfriend, or wife, or parent, or child?
I loathe to end this thread in such a negative tone so at the very least let me give some better parting words.
Simply put, one starts to love somebody by
knowing that person. In the beginning, it just might be an academic knowing of that person, but even such knowledge can be of surprising power to one’s heart. For example, imagine you learning for the first time that you have a child, that he or she is of such age, lives with the partner you were with before, lives in such a place, etc.
However, the *experiential *knowledge of somebody is the kind of knowledge that truly leads to love. This is why “falling in love” is so powerful. You meet a person for the first time, and you are attracted to the physical beauty. And yet the more you interact with the person, the more you
experience the person’s presence, that your love deepens, to the point that the physical attraction, although it still affects your heart, takes a progressively smaller role as you “fall in love” even more.
It is this knowledge that lets you transcend the feelings of love, so that you may still love a person even if you do not “feel” the love. For example, your teenage son was living irresponsibly, and he eventually gets into prison. You may not feel any feelings of “love” for this son of yours; in fact, what you feel are annoyance, anger, disgust, sadness, and the like. And yet, you still get up in the middle of the night, change your clothes, and bail him out of jail (with a sound thrashing of course after everything), because you
know he is your son.
And this is so with loving God. You just do not generate “feelings” of love towards Him and your neighbor using substances or mental techniques or anything like that. “Contemplative prayer” that uses such is (sorry to be blunt) fake and even sinful.
To be able to love God, you must
know Him. And the only way to know God is through Jesus Christ.
Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied.”
Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (John 14:8-9)
Many who practice contemplation (whether they do it wrong or correctly) point to
The Cloud of Unknowing as one of their foremost guides. However, most of these people do not even know that its anonymous author later wrote another book entitled
The Book of Privy Counseling. It is a more advanced book than the
Cloud, yet there is one passage there that should have been in the first book, because
it tells you the steps to beginning contemplative prayer, and what false contemplative prayer is:
The interior life is a wonderful home for us because the Lord is not only the doorkeeper but also the door. His divinity makes him the doorkeeper, and his humanity makes him the door. He himself says this in the Gospel: “I am the door. Whoever enters by me will be saved. They will come in and go out and find pasture. Whoever does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in another way is a thief and a robber." (John 10:1,9).
In the context of our present discussion, our Lord is saying to us: “I, almighty God, am the doorkeeper, and my omnipotence gives me the right to let in anyone I want, any way I want, but I chose to clothe myself in the humanity common to everyone and become totally accessible, because I wanted to create a shared, obvious way, open to all, so no one could say, ‘But I didn’t know the way!’ Through my humanity, I am the door, and whoever comes in by me will be safe.”
To enter by the door, spend time meditating on the Passion of Christ, and feel sorry for the sins you’ve committed, which caused that very Passion. Blame yourself bitterly, because, though you deserved to suffer, you didn’t. And feel nothing but pity and compassion for our good Lord because he suffered terribly and deserved none of it. Then lift up your heart and focus on the love and goodness of his divinity. Be thankful that he would stoop so low for us, putting on our deadly humanity. Do this, and you’ll enter by the door and be safe. As you go in, meditating on the love and goodness of Christ’s divinity, and as you go out, remembering the suffering of his humanity, you’ll find what you need. This is the spiritual food of devotion. In fact, those who never go further than this early stage of prayer will still find sufficient, even abundant food, plenty enough to heal and save their souls.
But some refuse to enter by this door. They think that they can reach contemplative perfection their own way, and because they’re brilliant and clever, they let their minds run wild, indulging in sophisticated and false lines of questioning and rejecting the obvious, ordinary entrance we discussed earlier and the sound advice of their spiritual mentors. **Anyone doing this—and I do mean anyone, no matter who—is a burglar by night and a pickpocket by day. **They are like burglars because they walk about in the darkness of sin, banking on their own understanding, never consulting the wisdom of others nor trusting the universally open way described above. And they are like pickpockets because they pretend to be beyond suspicion and good, while secretly they lift the gestures and phrases of the contemplative, clandestinely picking their looks and words while having none of their fruit.
It clearly shows that contemplative prayer is reached by first
knowing who God is through meditation of Christ’s life in the Gospels.
