Illuminated Life

by Joan Chittister

  To be a contemplative, we must have the faith that is beyond our need for magic solutions to daily questions. We must allow the soul to soar far freer than simply to the thought of a God who exaggerates the natural order in our behalf. Faith comes only when we are willing to trust the Blackness that is Light, the hard spots of a fragile world, each of which we would rather have had made easy.

  rowth

  Abba Mios was asked by a soldier whether God would forgive a sinner. After instructing him at some length, the old man asked him: “Tell me, my dear, if your cloak were torn, would you throw it away?” “Oh, no,” the soldier said. “I would mend it and wear it again.” And the old man said to him: “Well, if you care that much for your cloak, do you think God does not care as much for a creature?”

  ENLIGHTENMENT OPENS THE SOUL to an awareness of the God-Life everywhere, to the holiness of life, to the connectedness of the universe, to the realization of the Oneness of creation. It is a consciousness that makes morality and maturity possible, but it is neither morality nor maturity. Union with God is not the perfection of the self, nor a badge of excellence. Union with God is a realization of the living presence of God everywhere, in me, around me, above me, below me. “Before me and behind me, to my right and to my left,” as the Irish mystics said.

  Union with God is not a static thing which, once achieved, marbleizes the soul into one arrested, unending moment of illumination suspended over life. On the contrary. Life is life. It does not freeze at any time, under any conditions. Life goes on, whatever our consciousness of God. And we with it. We go on grappling with life. We go on growing into awareness. We go on struggling to be worthy of the awareness in which we now walk. And we fail often.

  Life is simply not about perfection, because perfection is not something that life offers. Our bodies do not develop to some ultimate state and then become fixed into some eternal form. Scientists tell us that all the protein molecules of our bodies change every six months. Every six months we are made new again, not ostensibly different, perhaps, but new. Nor do our souls reach a static state. Every day we make our souls new again. Every day we rethink old decisions and make new ones. We grapple and struggle and distort and repent over and over again. Every day of our lives we grow a little more into God or a little more into self.

  Contemplation has something to do with the ways in which we choose to grow. It is possible to give ourselves over totally to the satisfaction of the self. We can crave and hoard and accumulate and demand obeisance from the rest of the world until our lungs ache from screaming inside and our hearts echo our hollowness. We can cling to the worship of the self forever if we choose. We can spend our whole selves on ourselves, picayune as the topic may be. Western culture not only supports a concentration on the self alone; it encourages it. Getting it all and keeping it forever is the banner under which we march in this century. But there is another choice.

  We can choose to grow beyond the self that is a shrine to the idols of the day. We can struggle to put down the notions that choke our souls in the name of pseudo-superiority: that women are invisible, that men are superior, that foreigners are grist for our economic mills, that nature is for our satisfaction alone, that we are, as human beings, above the rest of the universe and beyond its restraints and restrictions. We can, on the other hand, make ourselves our own God. But if we do, we lose the very gift that life is meant to give: the gift of growth. The contemplative lives to grow in unity with the universe.

  To be a contemplative we must, then, live in sync with the mind of God, in tune with the rest of the human race and in touch with the weaknesses of our own souls, those places where the love of God breaks in to fill up what we ourselves do not have. Growth is not simply about avoiding sin, whatever we know sin to be as we move from stage to stage in life. Sin, in fact, may be the very thing that brings us to enlightenment. When I am most angry, I know best my need for peace. When I am my most arrogant, I realize how puny is my bravado. When I am most unyielding, I know how isolating is my strength. No, growth—real growth—is about discovering that God stands by, waiting to consume us. If and when we ourselves can ever cease to consume every moment, every person, every event, every experience for ourselves, God can prevail in us.

  To be a contemplative it is necessary to set out every morning to grow into more than I was when I began the day by growing into the consciousness of the silent God so great within me.

  umility

  Abba Xanthias said: “A dog is better than I am because a dog also has love but, unlike I myself, the dog does not pass judgment.”

  Abba Sarmatas said: “I prefer a person who has sinned if he knows that he sinned and has repented, over a person who has not sinned and considers himself to be righteous.”

  HUMILITY AND CONTEMPLATION are the invisible twins of the spiritual life. One without the other is impossible. In the first place, there is no such thing as a contemplative life without the humility that takes us beyond the myth of our own grandeur to the cosmic grandeur of God. In the second, once we really know the grandeur of God we get the rest of life—ourselves included—in perspective. Reaching the moon told us how really insignificant we were in the universe. We begin to rethink all our dearly held notions of human consequence. Humility leads directly to contemplation.

  Humility enables me to stand before the world in awe, to receive its gifts and to learn from its lessons. But to be humble is not to be diminished. Indeed, humility and humiliations are not the same thing. Humiliations degrade me as a human being. Humility is the ability to recognize my right place in the universe, both dust and glory, God's glory, indeed, but dust nevertheless.

  The Rule of Benedict reminds the monastic to pray with the psalmist, “I am a worm and not even human.” What may sound to a me-centered generation like the destruction of human dignity is, in fact, its liberating truth. I am not, in other words, everything I could be. I am not even the fullness of myself, let alone a pinnacle for which my family, my friends, my world, the universe should strive. I am only me. I am weak often, struggling always, arrogant sometimes, hiding from myself most of the time, and always in some kind of need. I cover my limitations with flourish, of course, but down deep, where the soul is forced to confront itself, I know who I really am and what, on the other hand, however fine the image, I really am not. Then, the Rule of Benedict says, we are ready for union with God.

  It is not when we become perfect—the whole idea of which becomes ever more suspect in a daily expanding universe—that we can claim God. It is when we accept the callow material that is ourselves that we can come to see beyond ourselves. It is when we cease to be our own god that God can break in.

  The Rule of Benedict lays out the four dimensions of humility that lead to contemplation. The first calls us simply to recognize the presence of God in our lives. God, the Rule says quite clearly, simply is. God is with us whether we recognize that presence, that power, or not. God is not bought or gained or won or achieved. God is the ground of life. The point is not that we arrive at God; the point is that we cannot remove ourselves from God. We can only ignore the impact and the meaning of God's presence within us. “O God, come to my assistance,” we say at the beginning of every prayer period of the day in my community. Even the desire to pray, we acknowledge, comes from the God within us.

  The second level of humility requires us to accept the gifts of others, their Godself, their wisdom, their experience, even their direction. By revealing our inmost selves to someone else, we recognize the presence of God in others, yes, but we also free ourselves from the masks we wear and the lies which, in the end, are likely to fool even ourselves about us. For a woman it is the ability to realize that she is not nothing. For a man, it is the grace to understand that he is not everything. Open to the gifts of others and the truth of the self, we can see God where God is.

  The third stage of humility requires us to let go of false expectations in daily life. When I am truly aware of my own littleness, I am not driven
to spend life satisfying my ego more than my needs. I do not harbor the delusions of grandeur that compel a person to require the best car, the best chair, the best piece of meat on the plate, whatever the effect on others. The person full of God has much more security than any of the baubles of life—the comforts, the trappings, the titles, the symbols—can give.

  The fourth level of humility reminds me to receive others kindly. Knowing my own limitations, I can accept theirs. Then I can walk through the world quietly, without bluster, without calling attention to myself and concentrated on the God within.

  Finally, realistic about the self, the mind is free to become full of God.

  To be a contemplative it is necessary every day to remember the God within. The posture is a crucial one. Only then can we empty ourselves of the need to play God that day, with anyone, in any way.

  nteriority

  Abba Isidore of Pelusia said: “Living without speaking is better than speaking without living. For a person who lives rightly helps us by silence, while one who talks too much annoys us. If, however, words and life go hand in hand, it is the perfection of all philosophy.”

  IT IS A HURRIED AND A NOISY WORLD in which we live. It is not an Egyptian desert of the third century. It is not a hermitage on a mountaintop. We are surrounded, most of us, at all times by the schedules and deadlines, the crowds and the distractions of a dense and demanding society.

  We are an increasingly extroverted society, called away from our private selves on every level of life. Institutions even plan family events for us. They organize civic celebrations for us. They design financial plans for us. We spend the greater part of our lives meeting and satisfying the social requirements of institutions which, ironically, are supposedly designed to make personal expression possible and end up consuming us instead.

  Even the spiritual responses people make to the God who created us are determined in large part by religious bodies that carry within themselves the traditions of the denomination from which they spring. But the contemplative knows that ritual and rite are not enough to nourish the divine life within. They are, at best, the appurtenances of religion. Spirituality is not the system we follow; it is the personal search for the divine within us all.

  Interiority, the making of interior space for the cultivation of the God-life, is of the essence of contemplation. Interiority is the entering into the self to be with God. My interior life is a walk through darkness with the God within who leads us beyond and out of ourselves to become a vessel of divine life let loose upon the world.

  Going into the self, finding the motives that drive us, the feelings that block us, the desires that divert us, and the poisons that infect our souls brings us to the clarity that is God. We find the layers of the self. We face the fear, the self-centeredness, the ambitions, the addictions that stand between us and commitment to the presence of God. We confront the parts of the self that are too tired, too disinterested, too distracted, to make the effort to nurture the spiritual life. We make space for reflection. We remind ourselves of what life is really all about. We tend to the substance of our souls.

  No life can afford to be too busy to close the doors on chaos regularly: twenty minutes a day, two hours a week, a morning a month. Otherwise, we find in the middle of some long, lonely night when all of life seems unraveled and disoriented that somewhere along the line we lost sight of the self, became fodder in the social whirl and never even noticed until psychic darkness descended that it had happened to us.

  The contemplative examines the self as well as God so that God can invade every part of life. We are an insulated society. We are surrounded by noise and awash in talk. We are smothered by a sense of powerlessness. And frustrated by it all, we suffer temper tantrums of the soul. The contemplative refuses to allow the noise that engulfs us to deafen us to our own smallness or blind us to our own glory.

  Interiority is the practice of dialogue with the God who inhabits our hearts. It is also the practice of quiet waiting for the fullness of God to take up our emptiness. God lies in wait for us to seek the Life that gives meaning to all the little deaths that consume us day by day. Interiority brings us the awareness of the Life that sustains our life.

  The cultivation of the interior life makes religion real. Contemplation is not about going to church, though going to church ought certainly to nourish the contemplative life. Contemplation is about finding the God within, about making sacred space in a heart saturated with advertisements and promotions and jealousies and ambitions, so that the God whose spirit we breathe can come fully to life in us.

  To be a contemplative it is necessary to spend time every day stilling the raging inner voice that drowns out the voice of God in us. When the heart is free to give volume to the call of God that fills every minute of time, the chains snap and the soul is at home everywhere in the universe. Then the psyche comes to health and life comes to wholeness.

  The fact is that God is not beyond us. God is within us and we must go inside ourselves to nourish the Breath that sustains our spirits.

  ustice

  Abba James said, “Just as a lamp lights up a dark room, so the fear of God, when it penetrates the heart, illuminates, teaching all the virtues and commandments of God.”

  THERE IS A DANGER in the contemplative life. The danger is that contemplation is often used to justify distance from the great questions of life. Contemplation becomes an excuse to let the world go to rot. It is a sad use of the contemplative life and, at base, a bogus one. If contemplation is coming to see the world as God sees the world, then see it clearly we must. If contemplation means to become immersed in the mind of God, then we must come to think beyond our own small agendas. If contemplation is taking on the heart of God in the heart of the world, then the contemplative, perhaps more than any other, weeps over the obliteration of the will of God in the heart of the universe.

  Contemplation, the search for the sacred in the tumult of time, is not for its own sake. To be a contemplative is not to spend life in a spiritual Jacuzzi, some kind of sacred spa designed to save humanity from the down and dirty parts of life. It is not an entree into spiritual escapism. Contemplation is immersion in the driving force of the universe, the effect of which is to fill us with the same force, the same care, the same mind, the same heart, the same will as that from which we draw. The mystics of every major religious tradition speak to what those concepts imply. “Within the lotus of the heart, God dwells,” Hinduism tells us. “Buddha is omnipresent, in all places, in all beings, in all things, in all lands,” the Buddhist master says. “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God; God is all embracing,” Islam teaches. And Christianity reminds us always, “Ever since the creation of the world God's invisible nature, namely, God's eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” But if all things are of God, then all things demand the soft hand of a caring God called justice.

  Indeed, the teachings are traditional and the teachings are clear: God is not contained by any one people, in any single tradition. So must the contemplative respond to the divine in everyone. God wills the care of the poor as well as the reward of the rich. So, therefore, must the true contemplative. God wills the overthrow of the oppressor who stands with a heel on the neck of the weak. So does the real contemplative. God wills the liberation of human beings. So will the true contemplative. God desires the dignity and full human development of all human beings, and God takes the side of the defenseless. Thus must the genuine contemplative. Or, obviously, the contemplation is not real, cannot be real, will never be real because to contemplate the God of Justice is to be committed to justice.

  True contemplatives, then, must do justice, must speak justice, must insist on justice. And they do. Thomas Merton spoke out against the Vietnam war. Catherine of Siena walked the streets of the city feeding the poor. Hildegard preached the word of justice to emperors and to popes. Charles de Foucauld lived among the poor and accepted the enemy. Benedict of Nursia sh
eltered strangers from the danger of the road and educated peasants. And so must we do whatever justice must be done in our time if we claim to be serious about sinking into the heart of God.

  A spiritual path that does not lead to a living commitment to the bringing of the will of God is no path at all. It is a pious morass, a dead end on the way to God. Clearly, contemplation consigns us to a state of dangerous openness. It is a change in consciousness. We begin to see beyond boundaries, beyond denominations, beyond doctrines, dogmas, and institutional self-interest straight into the face of a mothering God from whom comes all the life that comes. To arrive at an awareness of the oneness of life and not to regard all of it as sacred trust is a violation of the very purpose of contemplation, the deepest identification of life with Life. To talk about the oneness of life and not to know oneness with all of life may be intellectualism, but it is not contemplation.

  Contemplation is not ecstasy unlimited; it is enlightenment unbounded by parochialisms, chauvinisms, genderisms, and class. The breath of God which the contemplative sets out to breathe is the breath of the spirit of compassion. The true contemplative weeps with those who weep and cries out for those who have no voice.

  Transformed from within, the contemplative becomes a new kind of presence in the world, signaling another way of being, seeing with new eyes and speaking with new words the Word of God. The contemplative can never again be a complacent participant in an oppressive system. From contemplation comes not only the consciousness of the universal connectedness of life but the courage to model it as well.