Musings of a Failed Contemplative

“All contemplatives are failed contemplatives.” - Eugene Peterson

Evelyn Underhill claimed that there was a mystic temperament and that either you have it or you don’t. I much prefer Eugene Peterson’s view. “Contemplative,” he writes in Eat This Book, “is a designation that any of us can accept for ourselves and one that we all should.” He also adds the helpful observation that “‘Contemplative’ is not a term of achievement. It is not a badge of merit.” Rather, it is simply a way of seeking God, one that involves an effort to push the truth of Scripture through our minds and hearts right out to our nerves and muscles. If the image of “pushing” sounds too Pelagian or (perhaps worse still in some ears) Armenian, try an agricultural metaphor: contemplation is that process by which the sun’s rays suck dirt and dark and damp out of the soil and up through the trunk until, transformed to aqua vita on the journey, it bursts out as life and leaves on the ends of the tiniest twigs. “Contemplation” - Peterson again - “means living what we read, not wasting any of it or hoarding any of it, but using it up in living.”

So, I’m a contemplative and - in my cockier moments - a mystic. And bless Eugene Peterson’s bearded little face, a failed one, because knowing God in the hermeneutic of active faith is never a completed process. I’ve been intentionally walking this route, treading what Susan Howatch in one of her novels calls “mystic paths,” for about twenty years now and it occurred to me the other day (actually I was at the gym, slogging along on an elliptical trainer) to wonder if I’ve actually gotten anywhere. What do I have to show for a couple of decades of reading Richard Foster and John of the Cross and fasting occasionally and spending time in solitude and all the rest of it? Legend says that Teresa of Avila floated above the floor when at prayer in her cell. St. Francis received the stigmata and preached a man-eating wolf into submission. I don’t have any such experiences to report. I have preached to man-eating deacons but I don’t remember any of them ever repenting.

Actually, real mystics will tell you that things of that nature aren’t the point at all and are as much a distraction as anything else. Teresa, for instance, warns in The Interior Castle that even if the Lord speaks directly to one in prayer, “do not think that . . . you will for that reason be any better. After all, He talked a great deal with the Pharisees.” Still, I wondered, with none of the classic racks of antlers to hang above my spiritual fireplace, what can I say that being a contemplative has brought me? I’m going to try to express a few things that surfaced in my musings.

First of all, I think I have become more aware of other people. I’m sort of a high-functioning autistic (not to mention a depraved sinner) and other people, for me, have too long been basically so much scenery and stage property. I sometimes think that I glimpse, after a score of years spent softening up my granite selfishness, the beginnings of an ability genuinely to notice other people, to think about what might be nice for them in a given situation. I don’t always DO anything about it. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that other people have been upgraded in my soul from objects to irritants, but at least irritation is a form of interaction.

Next, I have become much more aware of my own sinfulness. Good Baptist children like me (and I was a very, VERY good Baptist child; all right, with a few lapses just in case any of my Sunday school teachers or children’s choir directors are reading this) are taught simultaneously to 1) admit how deeply sinful we are and 2) avoid sinning. Those of us who are adept at the second lesson (or, as Robert Burns said, have a “better art o’ hidin”) sometimes feel genuinely hypocritical in practicing the first. I can’t honestly stand before the congregation and trace in the needle-tracks of my tattooed arms the trail of my misspent youth. I’ve succesfully nevered all the thou-shalt-nots on the evangelical list of deadly sins.

But contemplation has helped. For a few years now I have attempted to spend an hour each morning in silent prayer. That sounds more impressive than it is. What it usually amounts to is sitting in a chair staring into space as random thoughts boil through my mind like a cloud of gnats whose last stop was a half-empty can of Red Bull. Lately, though, I’ve noticed something about these thoughts. More and more, they tend to take on the form of remembrances from my good Baptist past - in which, it turns out, I’ve said slighting and hurtful things to perfectly nice people, shoved myself into the center as the subject of conversations, eaten the last piece of fried chicken on the plate and generally behaved like an Adamic pig at a trough full of forbidden fruit. Funny how my depravity could Ghillie suit itself in perfect camo culled from the rags of my self-righteousness. My behavior hasn’t necessarily improved, but at least my repentance is more sincere.

Finally, I have learned to enjoy all my life more by constructing it as spiritual experience. When folding laundry flows more naturally out of folding my hands in prayer, when cooking for someone seems less distinct from offering the elements at the Lord’s Supper table, when scrubbing the toilet and cleansing my soul become not only similar actions but two steps in the same task, then I don’t feel quite as often that I’m wasting my time.

So there it is. Hardly enough to earn me that coveted St. Benedict decoder ring I’ve always wanted, but useful all the same. I think contemplation is like that scene near the end of C. S. Lewis’ novel That Hideous Strength, the one where the women suit up for a medieval-style wing-ding. The group picks each person’s dress; she is not allowed to select it for herself. And there’s no mirror: each woman can gauge the beauty of her appearance only by the effect it has on the others. This means that the more they want to know about themselves, the more carefully they must attend to each other.

So when we stand ’round the throne to get eternally pimped-out for the unending praise of God, we wear what he gives us with no nonsense from us about our best color or how slimming vertical stripes are. And at this particular prom nobody takes our picture. We only know how brightly we shine by looking carefully at the throne, and paying attention to how well our presence helps others to praise.

Not bad, on balance, for twenty years of failed mysticism.

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