Contemplative Prayer

A Theology for the Twenty-First Century

James P. Danaher

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781610975995
  9781498214339
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621890508
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

The current popularity of contemplative prayer is not accidental. A twenty-first-century understanding of the human condition has made us suspicious of words and the understanding we craft out of words. Theology generally offers us words that purport to give us a more precise and certain understanding of God, but the mystic has always known that our relationship to God transcends words and the kind of understanding that words produce. The theology of the mystic has always been about understanding our communion with the mystery that is God in order to fall evermore deeply in love with the Divine. That is the ultimate purpose of contemplative prayer, and the purpose of this book is to offer a philosophy and theology of contemplative prayer in the twenty-first century.

1

Contemplative Prayer
and the Twenty-First Century

Many people today have come to realize that the human condition in which we find ourselves is much more mysterious than both modern science and modern theology had led us to believe. One of the ambitions of modern science was to eliminate all mystery, and religion in the modern period did little to oppose that ambition. In fact, most modern theologies strove to offer an understanding as objective, certain, and precise as their scientific counterparts.

By the twenty-first century, however, we have become aware of the fact that the kind of understanding that the modern mind sought in both science and religion does not best reflect the reality of our human condition. God, who sees things from the perspective of eternity, may see things in their objective certainty, but we do not. We see things from a limited perspective within our time and place. From that perspective, we perceive things with all of the historical, cultural, and linguistic biases that we first acquire at our mother’s knee and continue to acquire through our interaction with the socio-cultural world of our experience. Unlike our modern ancestors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who imagined that reason and science could bring us to know objective reality, we now know that our experience is never objective but always filtered through the understanding we bring to our experience.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was the first to explain this filtered or phenomenal nature of our experience. Kant believed that the filters that created the phenomenal world of our experience were innate ideas that constituted a universal mental hardware through which the data of experience was processed. Thus, although filtered, we all, for the most part, experienced the same world. By the twenty-first century, however, we now know that what we bring to our experience is much more than what Kant had imagined. With the nineteenth century, we became aware of historicism and the fact that the understanding by which we process the data of experience is relative to our own historical epoch and changes with the vicissitudes of time. Albert Einstein did not have the same understanding that Isaac Newton had concerning the physical universe, nor do physicists today have the same interpretive understanding Einstein had. A psychologist in the twenty-first century does not believe the same thing that Freud believed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even people who consider themselves Freudians do not have the same understanding that Freud had less than a hundred years ago. Our understanding changes over time, or at least it should. As we experience the world or a text, anomalies often appear that make it difficult to accept the interpretation we had inherited. Thus, we devise new understandings to overcome the anomalies and, once we do, we settle on a new interpretation.

With the twentieth century and the advent of cultural anthropology and a greater understanding of linguistics, we became increasingly aware of just how relative that understanding was to our culture and language community. We now know that the concepts through which we interpret the data of our experience are not God-given but largely the result of human judgments made within history, culture, and language communities. Even the physical place from which we take in the data of experience alters our interpretation of it, as Albert Einstein convincingly demonstrated by showing the relativity of simultaneity.

Today’s science has conceded that our understanding will always be perspectival rather than objective, and probable rather than certain. We now know that what we claim to know through experience is not merely the result of given data but is largely an interpretation of that data. The world that we experience is phenomenal, or a composite of both the raw data of experience and all of the biases within the understanding through which we interpret that data. None of us possesses a God’s-eye view. We are interpretative beings, and human judgments passed on to us through history, culture, and language shape our interpretations. Perhaps other creatures without history, culture, or language interpret the data of their experience through a God-given understanding, but human beings certainly do not. It may have been natural in the past to trust our interpretations and treat them as a given reality, since we do not experience a distinction between the data of our experience and the understanding through which we interpret it. Today, however, we know that our experience is a composite of those two very different elements.

In the past, because we were unaware of this complex nature of human experience, we treated every new insightful interpretation in science or theology as if we had finally arrived at the truth rather than simply a new interpretation because of the new understanding we brought to the data of the experience. Today, we have finally conceded that there is no way to know whether our present understanding provides the ultimate interpretation. Religion, for the most part, has been slow to accept this, and many religious people continue to insist that their understanding is objective and certain rather than an interpretation. They claim their interpretation represents objective reality and that God does not change. But it is not that God changes—what changes is our understanding of our God-experiences. Just as our interpretation of everything changes with changes in our understanding, so too do our God-experiences change with changes in our understanding.

The theologians of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation believed that the sun went around the earth. That is no longer our interpretation. Our understanding has changed. We now know that the mind is not a tabula rasa, and we do not simply record data as given. Thus, people with a twenty-first-century understanding find it hard to believe in theologians who thought that the sun did go around the earth, and whose theologies were the direct result of what they saw in the biblical text. If religion is to have an appeal to people with a twenty-first-century understanding of the human condition, it must offer theologies that are more compatible with our present understanding. Instead of theologies that purport to offer objective certitudes, what we need are perspectives that will allow us to explore our ever-changing understanding of the great mystery that is our relationship to God.

In order to develop such perspectives we need to begin with a suspicion concerning our present understanding and the interpretations it produces. Since we are interpretative beings—though most of us are not as aware of that as we should be—we easily mistake our interpretation of an experience for the data of that experience. This is true of all of our experiences but it is especially true of our God-experiences. Although we are generally quick to assign words and concepts to our God-experiences, they are woefully inadequate to interpret our experience with the divine.

While we have only recently become aware of the hermeneutical or interpretative nature of human experience in general, the true mystic has always been aware of this, at least regarding their God-experience. Because of this, while theologians have been intent upon explaining our relationship to God with words that give concrete meaning to that relationship, the contemplative mystic seems content with simply being present to God, without rushing off to create an interpretation of that experience.

This is the prayer of the contemplative. It is a prayer that distrusts one’s own understanding because the mystery of God always goes beyond the words and ideas that make up our understanding and provide our interpretation. For contemplatives, their experience of God’s presence is always ineffable, unable to be captured in words, and they know whatever words they do later attribute to those experiences will be different from the experience itself. Long before twenty-first-century minds became aware of the hermeneutical nature of our experience, the contemplative mystics knew that the raw data of their God-experience was very different from whatever interpretation they might assign to it.

Of course, there have always been people who claim to be mystics that are very different from what I am describing. Such people claim that their mystical experience is not mysterious at all. They know exactly what God communicates to them and they suffer no self-doubt concerning whether their interpretation replicates what God communicates. To them, their God-experience and their interpretation of that experience are identical. This, however, is unlike the experience of the contemplative mystic, and it is unlike what we now know to be the human condition. We now know that what we call our experience of the world is really an interpretation of data that we form out of the historical and cultural prejudices that make up such a large part of our understanding. The true mystic has always understood that our communion with an infinite and eternal God will necessarily be inexpressible in terms of finite, temporal words. We may need to record our God-experiences somehow in memory, and that requires that we put our experience into words or images, but the mystic knows that the words and images are always insufficient.

I once heard a story of a man who had a dream and when he awoke, he tried to explain it to his wife. He said it was as if he was a big balloon and God’s finger was inside of him. As God’s finger pointed and pushed in one direction the balloon went in that direction, and when the finger pointed in another direction, he went in that direction. He then admitted to his wife that that was not what actually happened in the dream. Her response was to ask why he had lied about the dream, especially a dream about God. Of course, it was not that he had lied; it was just that divine communication is otherworldly, but if we wish to share those experiences with other human beings, we must use this-worldly words and ideas.

The Mystic Tradition

There had always been a mystic tradition that understood just how ineffable our God-experience is, but after the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century (e.g., Francisco de Osuna [1497–1541], Teresa of Avila [1515–91], and John of the Cross [1542–91]) there were few noted mystics in the modern period. Apart from Brother Lawrence (circa 1614–91) and Madame Guyon (1648–1717) in the seventeenth century, the modern mind abandoned the mystic tradition as it increasingly sought to eliminate mystery rather than explore it. One exception was the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–58). Although many would not consider Edwards to be a mystic, he, like the mystics, did have an acute understanding of the mysterious nature of our God-experiences.

Edwards was one of the leaders of “The Great Awakening,” which swept through the American colonies in the 1730s. During that revival, there was a great dispute over whether the manifestations that were taking place were from God or the imagination of the people involved in the revival. Edwards took the position that they were both; that is, that God was doing something amid the people but it was the understanding that the people brought to those experiences that created their interpretation and reaction. Furthermore, he held that the understanding through which we interpret and react to such divine experiences is always inadequate, since with “truly spiritual sensations, not only is the manner of its coming into the mind extraordinary, but the sensation itself is totally diverse from all that men have, or can have, in a state of nature.”1 Thus, for Edwards, our human understanding, which has its basis in our experience of this world, is ill equipped to interpret and assign a concrete meaning to such an experience. Of course, we do interpret and we have to assign a meaning in order to tie the experience down in our memory, but that interpretation and meaning will always be something other than the data of what we actually experienced.

Today, we know that the way Edwards and the mystics understood their God-experiences is the way we human beings experience everything. Since our conceptual understanding is largely the product of the biases we inherit from our historical, cultural, and linguistic traditions, our interpretation of our experience is very different from the raw data of that experience. Thus, like the mystics, twenty-first-century people are aware of just how biased our interpretation may be. This contemporary insight concerning the hermeneutic nature of our human condition should make us suspicious of our own understanding and the interpretation it yields; therein providing us the kind of humility that a life of following Jesus requires.

What makes followers of Jesus different from most religious people in any age is a humility that comes from not knowing or being suspicious of what they know. In Jesus’ day, his followers did not worship their own understanding. Instead, they were open to having their understanding changed by Jesus. Unlike many of the religious people of Jesus’ day who were confident in their own understanding, those who became followers of Jesus saw how insufficient their understanding was in the light of what Jesus was revealing. Like those religious people of Jesus’ day, many religious people today are not open to the Jesus revelation because they are confident in their own understanding. They suffer no self-doubt and their religious faith amounts to little more than a confidence and pride in their own understanding.

By contrast, the ever-greater experience that God desires to draw us into is possible only if we are able to look to God rather than our own understanding for the security we desire. The philosopher John Dewey said that insecurity is what generates the quest for certainty in both philosophy and religion. Religion often appeals to human insecurity by offering doctrinal certitudes rather than God. Today, however, we have come to realize that certainty is beyond our human reach and its illusion is a poor source of security.

This represents good news for the gospel, since the truth of the gospel was never about giving us certainty concerning our understanding. The truth of the gospel is something that we access through a faith journey that is antithetical to certainty. It is only as we step out in faith into the things to which God calls us that we experience God’s faithfulness, but the step is always one taken in uncertainty and with a lack of understanding. Much of modern religion supplanted such a spiritual journey and claimed that faith was simply a matter of believing in the truth of certain sacred doctrines. That is very different from the kind of faith to which the gospel calls us. Jesus never associates faith with a belief in sacred doctrines. Instead of doctrinal beliefs that offer certainty, Jesus simply says, “Follow me.”2 When we do follow him, we discover a God who is very different from what we had anticipated. The Jesus whom religion and theology presents is often very different from the Jesus of the Gospels. The religious Jesus is usually a tribal Jesus who has our values and conforms to our notions of right and wrong. He is a Jesus who will punish evildoers and reward good people who, like ourselves, have believed the right things and practiced the right kind of behavior. That is who we would be if we were God, so we make Jesus into our likeness and ignore all the things he says that are so strange and mysterious. We somehow convince ourselves that he did not really mean that we are to turn the other cheek and love our enemies,3 that the last are really not first and the first last,4 and that God is not really “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”5 A God who prays for hi...

Table of contents

• Contemplative Prayer
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Contemplative Prayer and the Twenty-First Century
• Chapter 2: Contemplative Prayer as Being in Love with God
• Chapter 3: Prayer as Presence
• Chapter 4: Prayer as Being in the Spirit
• Chapter 5: The Practice of Prayer
• Chapter 6: Prayer, Forgiveness, and the Nature of Sin
• Chapter 7: The Sermon on the Mount and the Presence of God
• Chapter 8: Getting at the Heart of the Gospel
• Chapter 9: Freedom, Morality, and Judgment
• Chapter 10: The Problem of Evil
• Chapter 11: The Saint
• Chapter 12: Theology in the Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography
• Index