Mindful Living
Thinking hinders the coming into awareness of the unconscious, including our awareness that the spirit of God dwells in us. It is through contemplative prayer that we are able to experience, albeit to a very different degree, the kind of experience Jesus had in prayer with his father.
Christian dogma and doctrine, important as they are, must take second place to personal spiritual experience; they must be interpreted through the lens of personal contemplative experience, as well as the lens of scripture and tradition. Jesus experienced God as Abba and the great gift of contemplative prayer is that we – when we cease thinking about anything, including God, at the time of contemplative prayer – is that God somehow communicates the mystery of his presence in the silence. In contemplative prayer we apprehend the possibility of a deep communion with God that passes all understanding, including our understanding.
Christ did not have to earn the love of his Father – neither do we. It may be difficult to appreciate this truth especially if, as we grew up, we sensed that we did indeed have to earn the love of our biological father and mother. But once we have experienced the deep love of another human being at any stage of our lives, we will find that our heart has been cultivated by that love and we can begin to apprehend the truth that we are, and always have been, loved by God simply for being ourselves.
I see eternal life as sharing fully in Christ’s consciousness of God. I have always resisted the doctrine of salvation, when understood as the saving of the soul from sin and its consequences. Christianity has traditionally placed the concept of original sin at the centre of its theology and considers that Jesus’ death on the cross was the once-for-all sacrifice that atoned for the sin of humanity. I prefer the Franciscan approach, as articulated by Richard Rohr, which places original blessing at the heart of the Christian Gospel message. That message is a call to at-one-ment, not atonement.
This is the beginning of a right relationship with God and allows for the development and deepening of that relationship from our side”
Jesus always prayed as if God was present with him and to him. St Teresa of Avila warned us that the great danger in prayer was praying as if God was absent. The gift of meditation is that it awakens in us a very keen sense of being always in God’s presence. This is the beginning of a right relationship with God and allows for the development and deepening of that relationship from our side. St Paul often speaks about developing a deep knowledge of God. He writes in Ephesians 3:14-19: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Jesus prayed that we would experience that deep sense of being in God, being united with God when he asked that “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” [John 17:21]. In other words, that we would experience the fullness of Christ’s consciousness, that we would discover within us the mind of Christ, the kingdom of God that resides within us and in which we already reside, even if we don’t realise it.
This is central to our spiritual journey and contemplative prayer; the practice of meditation, has the capacity to awaken us to this dimension of consciousness. The Christian churches today need to embrace contemplative prayer at every level. They need to promote the practice from the home to the parish, the diocese, and across all structures of the Church.
Although I speak of personal spiritual experience because I want each person to experience it for themselves, it is ultimately the same experience that I am pointing towards – where ultimately our consciousness becomes Christ’s consciousness. That is the goal of our spiritual journey, of our life’s journey. By referring to his Father as Abba, which was in Jesus’ time a deeply intimate and loving way of referring to one’s father, Jesus revolutionised our understanding of God as Love; to God as a loving father who is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
When we sit in the stillness and silence of meditation, our intention is to open ourselves to this loving presence; to leave ourselves open to a graced encounter with him who dwells in our hearts; to an unselfconscious yet deeply intimate encounter with him who is always present to us, even when we are not present to ourselves; unconscious communion with him in whom we live and move and have our being.
