This two part posting examines a movement which often occurs in our spiritual life, the movement from our minds wandering hither and thither to our minds focused in meditation, and from meditation to our minds lost in contemplation, and from contemplation to compassion for the world, and that brings us back to our minds stretched in many directions. These reflections are rooted in the thought of Richard of St. Victor, a 12th century spiritual author who for a long time has been a favourite of mine. The fuller and more scholarly version is found  here. 

Part One: From wandering minds, to meditation, and then to contemplation

The shift from our minds wandering and in free flow to our minds focused on a theme or topic of thought is part of our daily experience. We might be trying to pray, or to carefully sort out some particular issue in our lives or our work, or we might want to concentrate on what we are reading rather than lose ourselves in day-dreaming. In the religious field we would be applying our minds to meditation. For those of us who are trained in the ways of Ignatian spirituality, this is very familiar territory. Other spiritual schools deal with it in their own way.

 When we are trying to focus on the topic of our meditation, often our wandering mind seeks to gain the upper hand, pulling us back to the to and fro of consciousness which presents us with a kaleidoscope of feelings and images, some fleeting, others recurring. We experience this inner merry-go-round all the time, but when we decide to enter into prayer, to focus on a text, a line of reflection offered to us, we readily experience the tension between what we want to focus on and a variety of distractions.

We try to hold our minds focused on the topic of our prayer (meditation), but so often our mind wants to wander off in a direction of its own, and often it succeeds in doing so. As a result time and time again we have to resume control and return to our prayer. Meditation requires effort, going against the grain. The random meanderings of our mind do not achieve a purpose, nor do they bear a fruit, but meditation will sooner or later bear some fruit as we carry out our focused reflection.

A better word for our wandering minds is psyche, which is the restless and rapidly changing inner world of consciousness to which we are present and which constantly beckons us. It presents both images and feelings to us, which we can simply allow to subside, or to which we can give an act of consent. For example, we might be engaged in meditation, but a painful or joyful event that took place recently comes back to us, we rehearse the conversation we had with our imagination, imagine what we might have said instead of what we did say, and the feelings of joy, love, anger, frustration, whatever, invade us again. We find ourselves back with that event rather than where we intended to be in our prayer.

We might simply abandon our prayer to cultivate those feelings / images and enjoy them. Or we might make them the topic of a focused and prayerful reflection, with the sense that maybe the Lord wants us to deal with what they present. Or else we might fight to stay on course with our original intent.

In meditation what is at work is our reason, often termed discursive reason because it moves from one point to another in an orderly reflection which is intended to come to a conclusion. The use of reason requires attention, and attention requires a sustained act of the will. There are many methods of prayer which can be subsumed under meditation understood in this sense. Lectio divina is one: we concentrate on a text, taking it phrase by phrase or word by word. Many of the exercises in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius fit squarely into this category: they call for reflection on a number of points linked together logically, like the Principle and Foundation or the exercises of the First Week on sin.

This is the type of prayer suggested by the meditation books that used to be given to novices – like those of my generation – in religious life. Their suggested meditations had three points and a process of ratiocination, leading to an application to oneself and one’s own quest for moral perfection, and appropriate feelings and will acts already suggested for you.

When we moved to the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius taught us another method for entering into the various mysteries of Christ’s earthly life, a method sometimes known as Ignatian contemplation. Its purpose is to move towards contemplation in the sense we will define later, but it begins with the effort, for some quite arduous, of using one’s imagination to re-create the text, its sights, its sounds, the feelings and attitudes of those who play a role in the scene and with whom we identify.

Why would we do that? In this way we put our psyche to work for a purpose, and are better able to ward off the all too overwhelming tendencies to simply embrace the free flow that seeks to take over.

Meditation leads beyond itself to contemplation. How do they differ? Let us begin with a simple example. You or I might be struggling to understand something, marshalling images and instances and examples in our mind to help us in our quest. This is the work of discursive reason at its best. We work hard at it, and eventually the eureka moment of insight occurs. Our effort is a thing of the past. We now experience a release, a fulfillment. How could we have missed the point which was so obvious?

Or else we are going for a mountain hike, which is an arduous experience, and at a certain point a vista emerges that totally absorbs us and we experience a powerful feeling of peace. A tree, a leaf, a flower can do the same, often unexpectedly. During those moments effort ceases and fruit is given. Our gaze is penetrating and intuitive. Rather than seeking to grasp what eludes us, we allow ourselves to be grasped by what is real, true, beautiful, good.

Likewise in any meditative prayer we seek the living presence of God and take the best steps we can to dispose ourselves to receive that presence as a gift. The common instruction to those engaged in meditative prayer is to simply pause and relish those moments, more fleeting or more lasting, in which the presence of God takes over, usually through the medium of the text or image or topic with which we are struggling in our prayer. These are moments of contemplation, when we rest in God’s presence shown to us at a time of God’s own choosing.

This does not always happen. Some will remain in meditative prayer, not moving towards any contemplative moment, and the effort required in persevering with the meditation will have its own purifying and transforming effect on them. Others will be drawn into contemplation, a simple presence of God which fulfills them, like the old man who answered the priest who asked him what he said during his lengthy prayers before the tabernacle. “It’s like this, Father: I look at him and He looks at me.”

Why do some receive this grace and not others? That is the mystery of the provident love of God, who knows what is the best gift for each one and how and when it should be granted. Rather than a sharp distinction between meditation and contemplation, we might talk of a life of prayer which usually begins as more meditative and ends as more contemplative.

Indeed at a certain point the one who cultivates prayer might – at least during certain times during his/her life – move into sustained contemplation, and experience at some length the mystical fruit that is pure gift without effort. But even in one who has arrived at that form of prayer, there is a preparatory discipline – akin to the effort of meditation — of allowing all the thoughts, images, feelings that naturally occur within the psyche to subside, and enter into what appears to be a dark space of silence and nothingness to allow God to reveal himself.

How God reveals himself varies from person to person, and from time to time. God might give an experience of a love which totally envelops our being, or a light that enables us to enter into the mystery of God and perhaps bring together many aspects of the complex mystery of our own lives, or else a darkness that reminds us that God is totally other, not a force to be domesticated or manipulated. When sustained, this darkness may be known as the dark night of the soul.