Without A Task

There can be absolutely no doubt: Christian contemplative experience is thoroughly scandalous. It does not aim for this, but it is scandalous simply because of a completely humble, low-level, and totally ignorable epiphany. Then...there is no longer any sanctioned usefulness that can be found in any society. Without trying they can no longer be assigned any specific task, because they have no specific way to experience the world other than through this waiting, this uselessness, this passivity, this anticipation that something could happen...in a vacuum. Superficially what most people will see about them is that they have most definitely been liberated from the routines and servitudes of the world. What they now know about themselves is that they are the most free of all people: free to see, free to understand, free to praise, and free to love. Obviously they still live a social life like anybody else. And they still suffer the same temptations: to envy others, and to evade being their true self. And they still have to carry out the basic life-duties that simply being alive requires. But the tasks that other people find compelling and definitive of their selves have disappeared. And the centre of this direct and dark experience simultaneously calls and enables them to face the self in all of its stark and unadorned reality. This is always disconcerting, drab, disappointing, factual, without excuses, beyond all of the manufactured and useless explanations, and lacking subterfuge. It has torn down all fictions.