Developing the Loving Awareness of God
Union with God is not something we acquire by a technique but the grounding truth of our lives that engenders the very search for God. Because God is the ground of our being, the relationship between creature and Creator is such that, by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent. The fact that most of us experience throughout most of our lives a sense of absence or distance from God is the great illusion that we are caught up in; it is the human condition. This illusion of separation is generated by the mind and is sustained by the riveting of our attention to the interior soap opera, the constant chatter of the cocktail party going on in our heads. For most of us this is what normal is, and we are good at coming up with ways of coping with this perceived separation (our consumer-driven entertainment culture takes care of much of it). But some of us are not so good at coping, and so we drink ourselves into oblivion or cut or burn ourselves "so that the pain will be in a different place and on the outside."
--Fr. Martin Laird, O.S.A., Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
The great common illusion of our human experience is that we are somehow separated from God, that God is absent from us, that He is distant. There exist any number of reasons why this distance is perceived, but the reality is that we as humans are built for contemplation. We are created with a God-given capacity for knowledge of God's nearness, for the intimate experience of God's indwelling within us, as the very ground of our being.
St. Augustine wrote well of this illusion of separation in his Confessions when he exclaimed, "You were within me, yet I was outside, and it was there that I sought You." In his own way Augustine here points to a condition common to all of humanity, yet expressed in varied and diverse ways. Knowledge of and intimacy with God is a fundamental human desire, yet because of the way in which we perceive His absence this desire frequently becomes disordered and manifests itself in any number of ways. The drug addict, the alcoholic, the one who acts out in licentiousness, these are just some of the more extreme and harmful ways in which we seek that transcendent experience. There are other ways, of course, which are actually of themselves quite healthy and can often pave the way for a deeper encounter with God. I am thinking here of our various friendships and community participations, where we seek to be part of something bigger than ourselves and at the same time experience some sort of intimacy.
The point is that in all these varied ways humans seek God from without when in reality He must be sought within. As the ground of our being He is calling us deeper into silence, so that deep below the cacophony of the world and of our thoughts we may learn to Be still, and know that I am God (Ps 46:10, RSV).
Contemplation is not a practice, it is not a technique. It is a loving awareness of the soul's union with God. St. John of the Cross often refers to it as passive, but Fr. Laird suggests that perhaps a better word is receptive. We do have a part to play in our preparation for this awareness, this self-same communication of God's Being which comes forth from the living spring dwelling at the deepest depths of our spirit. We must learn to exercise the soul in this receptivity. This comes from our listening to the Spirit speak in Scripture; by receiving God's Being in the Eucharist; by liberating ourselves from the darkening of our soul's ability to perceive, which comes from sin, by our frequency of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and by our tender devotion to prayer, especially to silent prayer. We learn to pray through the many vocal prayers of the Church, and while we never set them aside, we also grow into the practice of the silent, loving awareness of God. For those who walk this path, there are many to whom God will then draw into contemplation, into that perfect awareness of the soul's union with Him that serves as the perfect foreshadowing of the sublime beatific vision. Even those who do not experience the grace of contemplation will nonetheless most certainly find themselves immensely blessed in prayer.
So many of us experience such pain, desolation, anguish, or perhaps the slow torture of banality. This need not be so. We are built for contemplation. God has revealed Himself to us in Christ, and through Christ, through our union with Him, He the Bridegroom, we the Bride, He wishes to communicate to us the awareness of His intimate presence, an awareness that will dissipate all darkness, heal all pain, absorb all desolation, and invigorate our hearts with a profound appreciation for the beauty of life. We need simply learn to travel into the silent land.