No Specific Task

The contemplative life is scandalous precisely because contemplative experience orients you. But that to which is orients you is to no specific task.

There is definitely a timeline involved in this, which is namely that before this all this happens you were actively engaged in trying to manage your life according to the enculturated patterns in which you were raised. But afterward the functions and values of these all got thrown into confusion. And through the overwhelming effects of these, over time, these you systematically deconstructed them, or rather, they deconstructed themselves.

The real danger of the contemplative life is twofold. In the first instance you come to recognize the power of the artificiality, and myth, and the illusion that cultural identity leads you to live, unbidden, as if it were a calling or your birthright. And the second danger is exactly the same as the first, namely that you live in artificiality, myth, and illusion, except that this time the contemplative life itself becomes the cocoon for those cloistered identities.

The only authentic product of the direct experience of God is the genuine liberation from the routines and servitudes of human activity. It is in a very real sense the conveying of permission to directly see, to directly sense, and to directly understand. These are ways of being, not tasks, or roles. It is easier to describe this than to realize it because: of one's own having been so trained otherwise, and because people impose so much of their own wills in their individual search for meaning, as well as because it is so incredibly difficult to evade the massive social gravitational attraction that cultures exert.

But ultimately, it is this direct discovery of being loved and the freedom to love and one's orientation to love alone that is unreasonable and scandalous and is a sure and certain sign that Christ is living in us.