Contemplation In the Age of Twitter
When I guide retreats, people often ask me, what is contemplation? It is one of those words — like charisma and creativity — that defies easy definition. We know it when we experience it.
We often say people who live in monasteries are living “the contemplative life,” as if somehow a life of mindfulness and reflection is off limits to the rest of us. I like to say I take my contemplative moments where I find them. It might be in the middle of Chicago’s busy Michigan Avenue shopping district, at O’Hare Airport, waiting to catch a plane, or sitting at my writing desk.
The great Trappist monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton once said the contemplative life boils down to three tiny words: now, here and this. If we live aware of the present moment wherever we are, fully engaged in the this we are doing, then we are living a contemplative life. We will have nothing to regret. Now. Here. This.
Merton offered a definition of contemplation that is simple, yet challenging. He said it is a way of being “fully active, fully aware, and fully alive.” I like that he included active as well, because I have found being contemplative doesn’t mean we don’t or can’t live dynamic and energetic lives. It means that we bring a reflective, attentive attitude to whatever we do.
We need both contemplation and action. One informs the other. Contemplation without action would be like driving a car without wheels. And action without contemplation would be like building a house without a blueprint. Contemplation alone, Merton warned, doesn’t feed the hungry, teach the uneducated, clothe the poor, or stop the violence. We need the prayers of monasteries, yes. But we need actors to carry out those prayers too.
“We must work together,” Merton wrote, “I with my books and prayers, you with your work and prayers. Separately we are incomplete, together we are strong with the strength of God.”
Edward Hirsch is one of my favorite poets — and not only because he grew up outside my beloved adopted home of Chicago. He is someone who combines a day job as head of the Guggenheim Foundation in New York with the reflective attentiveness necessary for writing poetry. In his poem, “I Am Going to Start Living Like a Mystic,” he debunks the notion that it takes an other-worldly persona or environment to live contemplatively. He starts out in the poem by pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across a park during a snowfall. It is dusk. He counts the trees — twenty-seven of them — and imagines each one is a stop on a pilgrimage.
He examines the few remaining leaves, as if they were pages of a sacred text. He kneels to observe a “vanquished” squirrel, and stares into the surface of a pond to see forms taking shape there. He scours the sky, looking for signs of the constellations. Finally, he begins the long trek back to where he started:
I will walk home alone with the deep alone
A disciple of shadows in praise of the mysteries
In this loving act of careful observation, he encounters the mystery at the center of all things. He becomes an everyday mystic. It started with simply pulling on a wool sweater and taking a walk. Much simpler than anyone could have expected. His attentiveness brings him to a place of praise and thanksgiving. It reminds me of something my friend Brother Paul Quenon of the Abbey of Gethsemani once said. “Contemplation is just a big fat word for gratitude.”
I look upon contemplation now, not as something to be worked at or aspired to, but as an attitude I carry within me wherever I am. A case of what the late Benedictine writer Imogene Baker once described as “Be where you are and do what you’re doing.”
In her book Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, Natalie Goldberg writes of watching her Zen teacher wait at a curbside for his ride to arrive. When he’s told his driver is running late, he doesn’t appear worried or impatient. He simply nods and says, “Thank you.”
“What was he doing while he was standing there?” Goldberg’s friend wants to know.
“Nothing, he was standing. Until I saw that kind of equanimity, I didn’t think it was possible,” Goldberg says.
Just standing. Doing nothing. Letting the moment soak in, which looks a lot like contemplation.
Toward the end of his life, my friend, the Benedictine Abbot Owen Purcell, told me he regretted having wasted so much time rehashing the past and worrying about the future. He wrote a little limerick to help keep his attention centered on the present moment. The now, here, this.
I’ve never been where I am not
I’ve always been where I am
Goodbye to the past that was
Hello to the now I’m in
Now that’s living like a mystic.
