The reality of the gift at our feet – a corncockle wild flower
Quoting a monk on Mount Athos, David Bentley Hart writes:
‘… contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that one will be able to see God in himself.’
For Hart, contemplative prayer is nothing to do with special practices or techniques – he even calls it an extremely simple thing. Rather it is about encouraging certain ways of thinking:
‘It often consists of little more than cultivating certain habits of thought, certain ways of seeing reality, certain acts of openness to a grace that one cannot presume but that has already been granted, in some very substantial measure, in the mere givenness of existence. It is, above all else, the practice of allowing that existential wonder that usually comes to us only in evanescent instants to become instead a constant inclination of the mind and will, a stable condition of the soul rather than a passing mood.’
This is an interesting act of reframing the very way of looking at the world – with wonder to the fore and an open expectant feel to what we may see and experience. Hart also says that furthering this into a deeper place is about entering the depths of the self – where the gaze is inward and not outward, and focused on the depth of our: ‘own “heart,” and here the final state that one seeks is nothing less than a union of love and knowledge with God.’
It is inevitable that the search for the experience of God involves the search for the experience of what Thomas Merton would have called the true self and what Carl Jung called the Self (capital “S”). Indeed, Hart quotes (amongst others) Symeon the New Theologian: ‘he who is beyond the heavens is found in the depths of the heart’. Here’s the paradoxical mystery that seeking for the experience of God involves both the most outward of realities and the most inward.
Hart warns us against the seduction of our apparent mastery of technology over nature as a sign of some larger mastery over reality – as if we now in the 21st century are vastly superior to earlier ages or the “less” advanced. Mistaking technology as wisdom means that our thinking and being is closed to the “real” reality – we have forgotten the vital things of life, including the self-evident mystery of existence: ‘that manifests itself not as a thing among other things, but as the silent event of being itself.’
Experience of God begins in our ordinary experiences of the world, and we are pushed to seek the highest truth by the way that the transcendent shows itself within the immanent. When we wonder about our life and the mystery of being, or the beauty of the natural world or the love we can feel for another that is a partial encounter with a divine reality.
Opening ourselves and letting go of much of our crowded and clouded thinking means that we are awake and can see that:
‘… the truth shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience … that nature is in its every aspect the gift of the supernatural … that God is that absolute reality’
A reality in which we live and move and have our being.