Amateur [am-uh-choo r]

This week’s word is amateur.

Would you rather know what you are doing or love what you are doing? It depends. No, that’s not a response. You have to choose. Would you rather know what you are doing or love what you are doing? In our culture, someone who knows what they are doing is called an expert, a professional. Someone who loves what they are doing is called—well, all sorts of names: fanatic, fool, enthusiast, obsessed, odd, zealot. But that’s unfair. Or inaccurate. Whereas there are plenty of people who have unhealthy relationships to something, an obsession is not a love. It’s an addiction. In truth, someone who loves what they are doing is called an amateur.

In an increasingly professionalized society, the word amateur has come to mean dabbler, unskilled, novice, not very good at, a professional-in-training, second best. If professional conjures up words like accomplished, competent, well-trained, and full-time, amateur conjures up words like part-time, uninformed, less capable, and untalented. Considered within the purview of the spiritual life, I think we would do well to resist these contemporary connotations and retrieve the original meaning of amateur.

In truth, at least etymologically, what distinguishes an amateur from a professional is not expertise but motivation, not remuneration but intent. An amateur (from the Latin amātor lover, and the infinitive amāre to love), is someone whose involvement is motivated by love. For the amateur the chief interrogative is not how or how well but why. Why do you do what you do? Former Catholic nun, best-selling author, and scholar Karen Armstrong claims as a theologian she is an amateur. Not feigning modesty, she is merely explaining why she does what she does, pointing out the origin of the word amateur refers to the love of one’s subject. What the amateur does is not for any ulterior motive. Rather the motive force of her actions is love for the thing itself. What she gives herself to, is given from love.

The fly fisher would fly fish even if he didn’t come home with dinner just as Vincent Van Gogh came home for dinner after a full day of painting and then got up the next morning to paint again even though he sold but one painting his entire life. Almond trees and calligraphers and parents and painters and gardeners and knitters and rivers and kite-flyers and poets and choir members and birders and rock climbers and environmentalists and some cooks and all good friends and contemplatives are amateurs.

The contemplative is perhaps the amateur par excellence. In an important article written in 1981 titled “The Contemplative Mood: A Challenge to Modernity,” philosopher and theologian Raimon Pannikar writes:

Contemplation is something definitive, something connected with the very purpose of life and is not a means to anything else. A contemplative act is done for its own sake. It rests on itself. Contemplation cannot be manipulated in order to gain something else. . . It has no further intentionality.

Showing how contemplation and contemplative living run counter not only to the guiding principles of modern Western society but also to the assumptions and incentives in much of religion, Pannikar continues:

If you act for the sake of a reward in heaven you may get what you desire, but this is not a contemplative act (that is, a loving act), whose only care is that of acting with desire to reach perfection or attain a reward. When the contemplatives eat, they eat; when they pray, they pray as the masters remind us. They act sunder warumbe, “without a why,” as Eckhart would say. The contemplative cannot conceive of what is meant by an afterlife, as if life now witnessed were not life, the Life, the thing itself.

So which is it– why or without a why? In a sense both. What Eckhart means is not that the contemplative amateur and the amateur contemplative act for no reason but rather for no external result or recompense. The value and purpose of an act— whether praying or playing or singing or dying— is the act itself, not its utility or what it will produce or pay in return. The contemplative is an amateur through and through knowing the meaning, joy, and significance of an action comes in giving oneself in love to the moment and the act. It is not that the contemplative is flippant and could care less, only that her care (or love) in a given moment or action is oriented toward being present not toward resultant perks.

One of the reasons so many fail to maintain a regular contemplative practice is because their motivation for doing so is exposed as being connected to some unconsciously expected result, blessing, or benefit to which they felt entitled or for which they had hoped (peace, happy marriage, admiration, cure of an illness, etc). Contemplatives are amateurs of each moment, in each act, during each conversation, at each meal, present in and grateful for the moment just as it is. They understand St. Catherine of Siena who said “All the way to heaven is heaven.”

The world always can use experts. But in the spiritual life, in the graced work of becoming human and holy, and in these times in which we live, it is a good thing to retain our amateur status. We need more amateurs because the world needs more lovers. And lovers live freely in each moment for its own sake as an act of love and an expression of contemplative presence.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:

What are some things you love to do, not for any external reason or reward, but just for the actions themselves? In what sense might this be a form of prayer, an expression of a contemplative orientation to life?