Buddhists say enlightenment is always accidental,
but that spiritual practice makes us accident prone.

Jim Finley, clinical psychologist, teacher of the contemplative way, and former student of Thomas Merton describes contemplative practice this way:

A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment. Your practice might be some form of meditation, such as sitting motionless in silence, attentive and awake to the abyss-like nature of each breath.1

Because mysticism or contemplation is also an all-inclusive way of engaging in life and with all reality, contemplative presence can be fostered in any number of ways, some explicitly religious and faith-based, others simple and with no religious content at all. The person hoping to cultivate contemplative presence is called to learn to be present to everything and to everyone, to each thing and to each one in its own unique, precious particularity. Using the image of gardening, the poet David Ignatow describes the importance of this capacity to be present to the particular and the immediate in his poem, “Each Stone.”

Each stone its shape
each shape its weight
each weight its value
in my garden as I dig them up
for Spring planting,
and I say, lifting one at a time,
there is joy here
in being able to handle
so many meaningful
differences.2

            To understand contemplation as “a long, loving look at the real,” to use William McNamara’s definition, is to suggest that before experiencing things as allusions to the divine, we must first simply experience and appreciate them as they are. To the poet and the gardener, the mystic as well as the contemplative, nothing is incidental. In addition to and as an extension of contemplative prayer, it is in this practice of directly beholding, appreciating, and being moved by “so many meaningful differences” that persons learn to be present to another singularly unique person.

Understood in this way, the prayerful, attentive study of Torah, or for some Catholics, the prayerful presence before the Blessed Sacrament are more than study or adoration respectively. They are occasions when persons experientially learn the meaning of being present. What this means is more than just attention before an object the way an assembly-line worker watches intently for blemishes on products passing by. To be present to God who is Real Presence is not merely a matter of mental concentration but of openness and receptivity. Finley maintains, “The critical factor is not so much what the practice is in its externals as the extent to which the practice incarnates an utterly sincere stance of awakening and surrendering to the Godly nature of the present moment.”3

By allowing ourselves to be susceptible to and acted upon by that which we behold—whether the Torah, the Blessed Sacrament, a daffodil, the photo of a hooded and humiliated prisoner, light playing on the water of a pond, a child at play, or the agony on the face of a young mother who has just been told her baby is still born—we participate in the presence of that which we behold, engage in the history, mystery, and inner life of that person or thing. Midrash Haggadah, centering prayer, lectio divina, mitzvot, praying before an icon, meditative walking, yoga, Tai Chi, sitting in a rocking chair on a front porch, peeling potatoes, peeling and eating an orange slowly, or gardening in your backyard, are all legitimate and possible opportunities to cultivate contemplative presence and have the capacity to aid us in being present to others as well as to the Real and Elusive Presence who too cavalierly call God.4

1 Finley, Contemplative Heart, 46.
2 David Ignatow, Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 123.
3 Finley, Contemplative Heart, 46.
4 With a few minor changes, the paragraphs above are taken from Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy: A Mystical-Prophetic Approach to Pastoral Theology and Care Inspired by the Works of Abraham Joshua Heschel (i.e. my Ph.D. Dissertation)

⊕ Walking Partners, tell someone about THE ALMOND TREE where they will find a blossom for their cup of water, someone to sit with in the shade of the trees, and a nut to chew on for some food for thought and action. Thank you.

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