Shaker Tree of Life

[ uhn-der-goh ]   undergo — to experience, go through, endure, bear, withstand, sustain, suffer

In his book The Shattered Lantern, Ronald Rolheiser asserts that one essential task of contemplation is not to make of God “something to be studied, analyzed, conceptualized, figured out, or captured,” but rather “to live in openness to the mystery and presence of God,” to celebrate that presence, and to let God be God beyond any preconceived expectations or demands.1

I love this definition—or description—of contemplation. It removes any woo-woo or elitism that some people mistakenly associate with the word. I like that it expands our notion of prayer to living rather than locating it in some set time or set words or method or set place. Being open to the mystery and presence of God is a worthy and evocative understanding of prayer. If we teach our children “to say their prayers” and never help them to connect prayer to a way of being in the world, to an experience of the ineffable, and to a holy suspicion of the presence of God, we fail them.

In The Shattered Lantern Rolheiser associates the contemplative way with celebration. Our culture has largely traded entertainment, that is, being entertained, for celebration which is a participative act. No standing on the sidelines; no playing the wallflower. This is why the mystics have written about prayer as participating in the divine life. To pray is to consciously and gratefully participate in the life of God offered to us and embodied for us by Jesus. What in life is greater to celebrate? During the few years that I taught high school, I used to tease the students that they knew how to party but knew little about how to celebrate.

The Christ-life means simply, and not so simply, to participate in the life of Christ—which means to be a light in the world, to bear witness to and celebrate what is true, good, and beautiful, to be kind, to extend mercy, to be with others when and where it hurts, to incarnate love, to spread joy, to suffer with dignity while hoping in hope, to concern oneself with what concerns God which is justice and shalom and reconciliation that all may be one and especially to care for the least of these, the most vulnerable in our midst,

I also greatly appreciate Rolheiser’s connecting contemplation and prayer to letting God be God. This sentiment is captured by the Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart’s famous disclosure, “I pray each morning for God to rid me of God.” Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, let them realize that the position of G-O-D has already been filled. Rolheiser explains:

To let God be God means to undergo the presence of God as a tree undergoes the presence of summer. . . . A tree is brought to bloom by summer. It does not capture summer, understand summer, conceptualize summer, nor is it even able to project what summer will do to it. It simply undergoes summer, acts under its presence.[2]

In other words, God is not met in and through cognitive analysis or captured in doctrinal statements but is approached by wonder and awe, whereby we live contemplatively. To be wonder-full, to stand in awe more than once each day, to consciously be under the influence of the Spirit as a tree is under the influence of summer, to let God bring us into bloom, to let go of the illusion that we are in control or that G-O-D is something or someone we need to or already have figured out, THIS is what it means to pray, to celebrate, to be contemplative, to undergo God, and to become more wholly human.

[1] The Shattered Lantern, 125, 126.
[2] Ibid., 125-26.

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