Monday 30 July 2007

Working on a sermon last week I found a wonderful piece on contemplation. Walter Burghardt makes some comments about how to realize the capacity to discover the Holy - for contemplation.

First, some sort of desert experience. Not necessarily the physical desert that runs through the Bible, through salvation history, through the desert fathers. Rather that the process can best be initiated by the experience that even with the powers of life and death beyond your control where the values of life are presented in clear, stark terms. And experience that evokes your capacity for initiative, exploration, evaluation; interrupts your ordinary pattern of lie; intercepts routine piety. You know yourself, not a statistically polled image of yourself. You know God, not abstractions about God, not even a theology of God, but the much more mysterious and might God of theology.

How important it is to hear such an description of desert. Sometimes the biblical world seems so far away because of images of people going out into the desert or wilderness and there having some kind of experience that enables them to be pulled beyond themselves by this God who is always inviting us into new life. Well, the desert and the wilderness were not really that far away in many of those biblical days. Take a walk and there you are! Well, for the many of us who live in the middle of urban areas, we need to be reminded that this experience is a close by as the day through which we walk. It is the experience that pulls us and begins to help us look again at the world around us and the life that is right in front of us and the God who is always pouring forth a love that can renew all things. There may be great desert fathers that have written many things about spirituality and contemplation and prayer. And yet, the desert places around us are enough to help us see the presence of our God and increase our capacity to wonder and imagine and dream and go about living within the Reign of God as it is already unfolding...on the streets and neighborhoods and work places of our lives.

Connection: To notice the desert, we must open our eyes. The opportunity for taking a new look at our God and the life that God invites us to enter is already at hand - look around.

Lord of the Day, inspire us to stop and to listen and to look at what we so often run by during the day. In the middle of that exercise of daily life, you promise that you are with us and leading us and inviting us into the expansive life of your Reign. We praise you, O God. Amen.