Contemplative Prayer -- Lent 2011
This is a reprint of Pastor Dan's February 11 blog (www.indwellingspirit.org), which explains the Lenten series for 2008:
Our Thursday evening Lenten services begin on Thursday, March 10, using the contemplative worship style of Taize with simple music, periods of silence and free prayer and intercession.
About Contemplative Prayer
Our age is hungry for a more mystical experience. Many people in the “Emerging” or “Emergent” church movement are experimenting with contemplative prayer and centering prayer. (The two are quite distinct.) But because so many faithful Christians have little experience with contemplation and meditation, our prayers are usually at best intercessions – requests that God will help, heal, rescue, fix or forgive something.
Our prayer life is rather like small children who want to run and play outside all day, and only come in to their father’s presence to ask for something (usually, permission) and when they have received it, they exit at top speed to go out and play again.
Contemplative prayer asks for nothing, petitions for nothing, seeks nothing. It does not demand, plead or intercede. Contemplative prayer puts us in the presence of the holy because we both enjoy (find joy in) and hunger for that presence and that holiness.
Contemplative prayer invokes the name of God. It is not self-emptying as much as God-focusing. It is not based on the human search for aspiration for God, but on the revelation which God gives to us. As Lutheran theologian Kelly Fryer (“Reclaiming the F word”) constantly stresses, God always comes down.
If God is spirit, God is mystery. That we may receive God remains suspended in mystery also. Contemplative prayer allows us and invites us to enter into God’s mystery as redeemed children of God. We are born “of the spirit,” after all. If we allow our own spirits to atrophy, we would find that we have lost ourselves. In order to find ourselves, we must be willing to enter into God’s mystery. Contemplative prayer asks us to shift gears, slow down and give ourselves time to experience the mystery of God.
What blocks us? But too often our interior life is crammed, crowded, with our worries and concerns, our desires, our random thoughts, and even unhealthy obsessions of guilt, shame, and grief. It is as if our interior life is a large house full of cluttered rooms, and we are stuck, constantly sorting and sifting through the clutter we have accumulated, looking for something we have lost, or something of value, or something to amuse ourselves. Spiritually, what happens to us is like “writers block” in the soul. We become blocked, stuck, immobilized by our own concerns and problems. Contemplative prayer summons us to open more of our consciousness, to open the door, as it were, to an unused room, to open ourselves more and more to God’s presence than we do.
We pray “through Jesus Christ our Savior.” In his name we have confidence to draw near to God’s presence, rather than to run from God in fear and terror. We see that Christ is the open door to God, and that his merciful sacrifice is a sign of God’s reconciliation with humanity. In Christ, we are invited, urged, even commanded to come into God’s presence with prayer.