Meditation and contemplation

[Harland]

Please help me understand the difference between meditation and contemplation.

 

[may_leitch]

dear harland
meditation is when you say take a piece of scripture and you meditate on what it is saying to you at this moment in your life - lectio divina

contemplation is when you contemplate on god, you stay in silence and listen for god to speak to you it might help to say a mantra such as the jesus prayer.

 

[FCEGM]

Please help me understand the difference between meditation and contemplation.

Harland, simply put, meditation is something WE do; contemplation is something GOD does in us.

Meditation is our response to grace wherein we ponder the mysteries of our Faith, often by reading and slowing considering a passage of Scripture or some good book that helps us raise our hearts to God. It is our own “work”, under God’s grace.

Contemplation, is God Himself drawing us into a deeper experiential communion with the Trinity. IOW, we go from thinking/praying about God to experiencing Him to varying degrees as our spiritual life matures under His grace.

The late Benedictine, Gerard Sitwell, OSB, gives this helpful definition of contemplation:

In its full sense in Catholic theology contemplation means the highest form of union with God that the soul can attain on earth. It is necessarily an obscure and mysterious act, and its nature has been much discussed, but it will involve in some way the occupation of the mind and the will with God, for it is only by his mind and his will that a man can be united with a spiritual substance. The raising of the mind and the will to God is prayer, and contemplation is essentially transcendent prayer, the culminating experience of prayer of which the soul is capable in this life. The experience is indeed very far reaching, for it is to be noted that the knowledge of God attained in the full act of contemplation is not just a knowledge about Him, a knowledge of His attributes such as could be arrived at by a process of discursive reasoning, but a knowledge of God is some way direct – there is an immediate contact of the soul with the Godhead. Such is the act of contemplation at its fullness, but it admits of degrees. Indeed even the fullest contemplation attainable on earth is itself only partial. The Beatific Vision, which is Heaven, represents the most complete union with God of which the individual soul is capable, and its highest experience on earth will fall short of this.

A book you would find helpful on the subject is Fr. Thomas Dubay’s Fire Within.

 

[johnco]

frances,

you know your stuff.

another suggestion may be “interior castle”

then complete works of john of the cross.

God bless

johnco