January Journal - Hope Through Contemplative Prayer
When our oldest daughter was a little girl, during the winter she would say, "The cold makes me very angry." I discovered similar sentiments last week when the wind chill factor was minus twenty.
For those of you who don't know what I mean by "wind chill factor" consider yourself lucky. It means the actual temp really doesn't matter, because you are going to be freezing your butt off no matter what. It is even colder out there than what they are telling you.
I have now spent a good part of my life here in these midwestern winters and they take some psychic manuevering to maintain hope when you don't see the sun for weeks on end and planning simple trips require checking the weather conditions.
Decades ago these words were new to my California vocabulary, "lake-effect advisory", "white-out conditions", "black ice" and "snow-flurries". These little adjectives of the conditions outside cancel many plans, except for the bravest or most foolish (my husband is a native midwesterner and goes out in anything--let's call this one "bravery").
I am not writing to complain about winter (okay--maybe a little bit), but to describe the importance of daily contemplative prayer.
Winter provides the landscape that reflects an interior journey of solitude and silence. Winter naturally provides the stripping of busyness, noise, and stimulation that is easily inserted into other seasons of landscape, other seasons of life, and within our American cultural. We are a culture of extroverts and we seem to believe that we require continual stimulation.
Contemplation, meditation, reflection, prayer, yoga are inroads to sitting within the solitude and silence required to learn to "be". The healing effects of this time spent in contemplative prayer, alone with God are evident when you discover someone who has a contemplative life.
This contemplative prayer time wears away jagged edges of pain, stress and anxiety in our lives creating fluidity and presence between ourselves and the world. I believe our world would be much more peaceful if we allowed even ten minutes of this timelessness within our daily lives.
When periods of aloneness, solitude and reflection are thrust onto people through circumstances of loss, grieving, recovery from addictions, physical illness, incarceration, loneliness, and divorce they can be real opportunities to heal, enforcing a slowness that allows one to really listen to God.
I attempt to cultivate small amounts of this contemplative prayer time within my life and although I feel grateful for what I am able to carve out, I often find myself confused or anxious about this "solitude". I feel safer being a human-doing, rather than a human-being.
My hope is to find...God's hope discovered in a prayer life. During a brutally cold winter, an economic recession, various setbacks and struggles God's hope awaits us. The hope discovered is a knowing that God can and will do something beautiful with whatever impossible situation exists in your life, right in the middle of the blizzard.
Hope during winter may come from waiting for the transformation of spring in our lives, but hope is also discovered today. It comes in the ability to see winter's beauty within the cold, gray reality of a winter day, or the winter of your life.
Hope is seeing differently and absolutely knowing that God is taking care of you whatever your circumstances.
Our faith is a faith of hope and demands a heart with total reliance on an unseen God. It is the freedom to believe that whatever our circumstances God's promises give us a reason to hope each day of our earthly existence.
Our faith acknowledges that even in the darkest places, the coldest winter, the places of absolute aloneness and even despair we can trust in God and accept His love. It is not blindly believing or denying our present circumstances, but through the process of contemplative prayer, entering into the depths of suffering and discovering that hope confronts and overcomes the ugliness and suffering of our life and creates something of astounding beauty.
As the fourth century theologian St. Augustine said, "Even in the wintertime the root lives on."
For those of you who don't know what I mean by "wind chill factor" consider yourself lucky. It means the actual temp really doesn't matter, because you are going to be freezing your butt off no matter what. It is even colder out there than what they are telling you.
I have now spent a good part of my life here in these midwestern winters and they take some psychic manuevering to maintain hope when you don't see the sun for weeks on end and planning simple trips require checking the weather conditions.
Decades ago these words were new to my California vocabulary, "lake-effect advisory", "white-out conditions", "black ice" and "snow-flurries". These little adjectives of the conditions outside cancel many plans, except for the bravest or most foolish (my husband is a native midwesterner and goes out in anything--let's call this one "bravery").
Winter provides the landscape that reflects an interior journey of solitude and silence. Winter naturally provides the stripping of busyness, noise, and stimulation that is easily inserted into other seasons of landscape, other seasons of life, and within our American cultural. We are a culture of extroverts and we seem to believe that we require continual stimulation.
Contemplation, meditation, reflection, prayer, yoga are inroads to sitting within the solitude and silence required to learn to "be". The healing effects of this time spent in contemplative prayer, alone with God are evident when you discover someone who has a contemplative life.
This contemplative prayer time wears away jagged edges of pain, stress and anxiety in our lives creating fluidity and presence between ourselves and the world. I believe our world would be much more peaceful if we allowed even ten minutes of this timelessness within our daily lives.
When periods of aloneness, solitude and reflection are thrust onto people through circumstances of loss, grieving, recovery from addictions, physical illness, incarceration, loneliness, and divorce they can be real opportunities to heal, enforcing a slowness that allows one to really listen to God.
I attempt to cultivate small amounts of this contemplative prayer time within my life and although I feel grateful for what I am able to carve out, I often find myself confused or anxious about this "solitude". I feel safer being a human-doing, rather than a human-being.
My hope is to find...God's hope discovered in a prayer life. During a brutally cold winter, an economic recession, various setbacks and struggles God's hope awaits us. The hope discovered is a knowing that God can and will do something beautiful with whatever impossible situation exists in your life, right in the middle of the blizzard.
Hope during winter may come from waiting for the transformation of spring in our lives, but hope is also discovered today. It comes in the ability to see winter's beauty within the cold, gray reality of a winter day, or the winter of your life.
Hope is seeing differently and absolutely knowing that God is taking care of you whatever your circumstances.
Our faith is a faith of hope and demands a heart with total reliance on an unseen God. It is the freedom to believe that whatever our circumstances God's promises give us a reason to hope each day of our earthly existence.
Our faith acknowledges that even in the darkest places, the coldest winter, the places of absolute aloneness and even despair we can trust in God and accept His love. It is not blindly believing or denying our present circumstances, but through the process of contemplative prayer, entering into the depths of suffering and discovering that hope confronts and overcomes the ugliness and suffering of our life and creates something of astounding beauty.
As the fourth century theologian St. Augustine said, "Even in the wintertime the root lives on."
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