Week Thirty-Five: A Contemplative Heart
Compassionate Contemplation
James Finley encourages each of us to continue on the
contemplative path:
Through our renewed fidelity to our contemplative
practices we learn to discern and take steps to correct
any tendencies to drag around dust-gathering trophies
of things past…. Sitting silent and still in
meditation, walking with attentive gratitude at sunset,
reaching out to cup the beloved’s face in our hands, we
find ourselves once again at the never ending origins
of the one unending present moment in which our lives
unfold.
We know by experience that in a relative, but very real
sense, we are the arbiters of our journey, that we must
take responsibility to cooperate with the grace of
being faithful to our contemplative practices. If we do
not meditate there will be no meditation in our lives.
If we do not patiently work through the obstacles
encountered along the way, we can lose our way and lose
ourselves in the process. But at a deeper level, the
entire journey is one in which we are called over and
over again to surrender to a self-transforming process
not of our own making. Each time we give ourselves over
to our contemplative practices, whatever they might be,
we find ourselves, once again, one with the communal
mystery in which there is no separate self. [1]
Finley reminds us that solitary contemplative paths
simultaneously invite us to respond with compassion to
real world needs:
Let me emphasize … the need to discern and take steps
to correct the ways in which our contemplative self-
transformation is hindered by our failures to
compassionately love others. Ideally speaking, a
commitment to contemplative living is synonymous with a
heightened awareness of and response to the real
suffering of real people. The difficulty however, is
that our own wounded ego can circle about contemplative
experiences in ways that make us less, not more
sensitive to our own real needs and the needs of those
around us. Religious faith, artistic inspiration,
romantic-sexual love, the process of psychological
healing, and all other arenas of contemplative
experience and self-transformation, can and should be
arenas of heightened compassionate sensitivity to the
real needs of those around us….
Contemplative wisdom discerns that we hinder ourselves
in our ongoing self-transformation when we catch
ourselves expounding, through clenched teeth, the
principles of a dance that our own self-absorbed
rigidity will not let us dance. But no matter how
foolish and broken we may be, compassionate love is
always ready to drain the fear-based rigidity out of
the situation to the point that we might begin to
recognize our ever present invitation to join in the
general dance of God, one with us in our brokenness.
The dance never ceases to stir within us, beating “in
our very blood whether we want it to or not.” [2] The
dance is deathless, childlike, and free; an infinite
Presence wholly poured out in and as the concrete
immediacy of who we simply are, beyond grasping in any
way whatsoever. [3]
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