Contemplatio

Contemplation springs from God's initiative, that and that alone. That initiative is love. If we can say at all that we love God it is simply because God, in God's love, already placed within us before our birth, this love, along with the ability to recognize and respond to this love with love. In that sense contemplation is not a secret possession of a select few, but for which everybody may have a hunger.

If there is no hunger for this it is because there are too many diversions (divertissement - Pascal) everywhere today for people to even notice this seed of love, let alone to search out its meaning, even in the church. Yet this is not without historical precedent; both scripture as well as the lives of the saints witness to the perpetual re-flourishing of contemplation in relationship and response to the ever perpetual concerns, anxieties, hopes, and needs of individuals and communities over vast expanses of time. God's ancient interactive love with people is ever old and ever new, ever fresh and ever re-freshed.

Almost everything that needs to be pointed out in writings such as this one finds its origins and justifications in the writings of the twelfth century and in particular in the authorship of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. St. John of the Cross comes at it from a Spanish Carmelite calling. And there are many others: Franciscans, Carthusians, etc. There is nothing that is written on this computer now that is either revolutionary or original; there is certainly nothing new here to the Christian tradition as a whole. It is only a witness...a finger pointing.

And on a final note, true contemplative experience is never a top-down imposition, but a bottom-up welling-up. It allows for differences in temperament, personality, and psychology. No one is outside of its prevue. Indeed, it is the ordinary fulfillment of a life of grace. Practically anyone with these experiences and insights can write about it who has a keyboard. In this sense contemplative binding to God's love is deeply non-esoteric and most ordinary.