A Different Order Of Living

Contemplative prayer, whether lived in community or in solitude, is simply a life of prayer and of witness. The direct experience of God does not lend itself to teaching or to administration or to organizing or to pastoral care even. This life simply entails full surrender, existing fully outside of enculturated ways of acting the world. It is egoless, and so, light as a feather. The prayer life elicits a deeper witness of the mystery of Christ in one's heart, others and the natural world; this is everything. The world, one's surrounding society, politics, even family - and perhaps especially family - these are transient nothings. Contemplative prayer is literally a lived, fully embodied theology that is birthed from the liturgy of the natural world itself. And other, genuine, fellow travellers are more than simply a group of pious men and women who are intent on meritorious works for the gratification of their own souls.

Stay away from the places where men gather in order to cheat and to lie to one another.

- Thomas Merton