Part Two: From contemplation to compassion: the return of our wandering minds

A quote from Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Major, a major source for our reflections here, will sum up what we have explored in Part One:

                                By means of inconstant and slow feet, cogitation (Richard’s term for the activity of the distracted mind) wanders here and there in all directions without any regard for arriving. Meditation presses forward with great activity of soul, often through arduous and rough places, to the end of the way it is going. Contemplation, in free flight, circles around with marvelous quickness wherever impulse moves it. Cogitation crawls; meditation marches and often runs; contemplation flies around everywhere and when it wishes suspends itself in the heights…Cogitation always passes from one thing to another by a wandering motion; meditation endeavours perseveringly with regards to some one thing; contemplation diffuses itself to innumerable things under one ray of vision. (Bk 1, ch 3)

If we have climbed the ladder from distraction to meditation to contemplation, the foundation laid by our wandering minds remains crucial. The to and fro activity of our psyches is not simply to be discarded. We must build on it as we move into meditation and contemplation. God has created us with our restless psyches and he makes use of them to guide us in prayer. Very often the images or feelings that come our way come directly from our imagination without external stimulus (a recent event which left strong feelings in me comes back to me), but they can also directly come from our outward senses (I am deep in prayer and the doorbell rings).

At times the best approach is to interrupt my effort to pray and to deal with the person at the door or the feeling, especially when it recurs. God uses our psyches and their constant movements to direct us to where he wants us to be in our prayer. A persistent and intrusive feeling/image might point to an unresolved issue which ought to take priority over what we had resolved to deal with in a prayer period. This is not falling back into the effortlessness of random psychic activity but changing the focus of our effort in prayer.

In other words what might have been a distraction becomes that which we pray about. But an image/feeling more often than not might be a distraction, not one we need to combat – that would embed the distraction even more deeply into our psyches – but one we allow to fade from our consciousness.

This suggests to us an attitude towards the wandering of our minds during prayer. On the one hand we should not adopt a laissez-faire attitude of welcoming any distraction and just going with the flow: the outcome would be not meditation but reverie. On the other hand we should not exercise rigid control over our own psyches during the time of prayer, such that any inspiration from God through the medium of our psyches would be systematically lumped together with unwelcome distractions and set aside.

How to manage the bubblings of our psyche during prayer is a matter for discernment, and over a period of time, perhaps through the help of a spiritual guide, we will learn how to make that kind of discernment. Ignatian contemplation of the mysteries of Christ can play a key role in taming our psyches: rather than repressing images and sounds and feelings altogether, we harness them, allowing them to play their role as we relive a Gospel scene.

Richard’s analysis can be sharpened and enhanced with pertinent contemporary reflections on the workings of human consciousness, and with many other creative contributions that he himself makes in his Benjamin Major and other writings. Indeed, he does offer us a new path for exploration.

Cogitation, meditation, and contemplation lead beyond themselves, as we see in his masterful work The Four Degrees of Violent Love: one may have pursued the pathways of prayer and have moved from cogitation to meditation (first degree), contemplation (second degree), and even been absorbed into a unitive experience of God’s presence (third degree). One could think that when experiencing a unitive experience of God’s presence there is nothing more for us to do but to remain there. To be totally and forever absorbed in the presence of God may be our ultimate destiny, but we have to come down to earth and its mundane concerns.

For Richard the final word is compassion (fourth degree), which entails a return to the vulnerability and uncertainty of human life and the psychically intrusive encounters with the persons and situations God puts on our path of service.  We are to love as God loves, as Christ loves. The God who envelops us in prayer is a God of love and compassion, and God draws our attention to what concerns him a world desperately in need of compassion and healing. We must hear the cry of the poor.

The random activity of our psyches may have been slowed down in the first three degrees, but as we return to our life of service, it is speeded up, and once again we are bombarded by a plethora of images, feelings, challenges. We seem to be back in the bleak period of our distractions.

But there is a difference. Rather than create distractions for us in our prayer, and make it fruitless, the world reflected in the images, feelings, challenges that come to us in this phase of compassion will be perceived as a sacred place where God is present and at work. These experiences will find their way into purposeful meditation and ultimately be subsumed in the unifying vision of contemplation. In this way the very texture of our active lives and ministry becomes for us the vehicle of new contemplative graces.

Contemplation in action is an appropriate term for this. But the focus of this contemplation is not ourselves and our activity. It is God and God’s activity in the world, activity for which we are thankful and within which we want to subsume our own activity. 

The relation between compassion and contemplation is approached differently in different spiritual paths. Contemplation in action is a term which finds its source in a Jesuit who knew Ignatius, Jerome Nadal, and has become a key theme in Ignatian spirituality. A contemporary expression of its meaning is found in an official Jesuit document of the 20th century, the concluding decree of the 34th General Congregation (1995):

The God of Ignatius is the God who is at work in all things: labouring for the salvation of all as in the Contemplation to Attain Love…not just any response to the needs of the men and women of today will do. The initiative must come from the Lord labouring in events and people here and now. God invites us to join with him in his labors, on his terms, and in his way. (from Decree 26, par. 7 and 8)

We might struggle to manage the interplay of our contemplation and our compassion, but we know that at root contemplation and compassion are at one. Absorbed as we may be in the God we contemplate, that God is not self-absorbed but absorbed in compassion for his creatures and their struggles to find fulfillment, and God points us towards them. We share in God’s labours, but we also find the renewal and deepening of our own contemplative union with God’s mystery.