Practising Christian forms Mysticism, from the medieval mystics is an often neglected approach to spirituality. There is a strong English tradition of this going back at least a thousand years in the UK, an approach of using silence and spiritual readings to encounter the divine rather than through learning facts. This form of contemplation needs to be learnt, it is an important skill, but often people find more eastern approaches more sexy. Well I want to say that forms of contemplation coming from the mystics is definately as sexy as the Eastern. As a process, you move through your embodiedness - your fleshness, through to the intellectual and then into the spiritual, to be able to encounter a loving deity in prayerful encounter.
Helpfully - such prayer starts with having self awareness, of understanding your feelings and self. This is crucial so that you 'withdraw' your projections - projecting out at others what is within you, projections that distort you, and prevent you from encountering God. Projections are about our inner fragemented selves, that in us we carry the experiences of childhood to now, all the unresolved, all the pains and experiences. Contemplation is about finding inner peace with these first. Often, we run straight to the intellectual, and not face the emotional first. This makes the enquiries of our brains driven by our unconscious desires and compulsions, or the projection of angst or anger straight into the intellect, which is not healthy for us or others. So contemplation begins with being self aware of our emotions and our motives, to find peace with these before engaging with the mind, and then to move onto the spiritual.
So unlike Budhist meditation mystical contemplation from the Christian tradition is not about getting beyond your heart and mind to find nothingness, more of a prayer of ordered peace, that draws in a form of holism to a God that loves you. In this way, this form of creative prayer helps you to become poised and balanced, not because you are believing right, but because we experience the love of God. This process says that whilst we are lost in the projections of our emotions, projected thinking and self-led prayer around our own stuff, we are in exile of being our full selves. So this form of contemplatiive prayer, is about saying that we start in exile of ourselves, and have something wonderful to find and discover in ourselves and the cosmos.
It then frees us up to befriend the world as God befriends us. To befriend God and not to attempt to dominate God with such modernistic phrases whether we by some hypothesis believe in God as a logical process to accept or reject. To befriend creation and not to dominate it, to befriend friends and not to dominate them, to befriend work colleagues and not to dominate them. The list goes on. The challenge is for us to try and be disciplined and fit in this type of prayer, which has to be learned. I am wondering whether we should have a regular slot for this type of learning to pray, as we can't expect to learn this from nowhere or from ourselves. The monastics and mystics learnt this from others, so may I suggest, we need to learn this from others.
However, there are some key texts about this stuff - Evelyn Underhill, a recent find for me, has loads on this, St John of the Cross etc.
This form of creative, mystical and contemplative prayer are very exciting and powerful.
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