“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him”
Practice makes perfect. I have yet to learn how to ride a bike and this is a failure on my own part. It takes practice and, well, I did not want to practice. My parents are great people and made attempts to encourage me to hop on that piece of machinery, but my will won out in the end. I did not want to learn how to ride a bike. I did not have the passion nor the desire and my attitude reflected that. To this day, I do not care if I ever learn. I think that I can have the same amount of fun in life without learning this skill. I believe the way I view learning to ride a bike is the way many of us view the spiritual disciplines that allow us to grow into the people God desires us to be.
Contemplation is one such discipline that I am drawn to as it brings me peace. Now, contemplation is sometimes confused with its contemporary: meditation, but they are slightly different. Meditation is more about clearing the mind or bringing a sense of rest by letting the mind wander where it naturally goes. Contemplation is honing in on or focusing on a certain thought or idea. Also, in my opinion, this act brings clarity and helps these thoughts to take root in our lives. Contemplation helps to form the change proclaimed in the powerful truths of Scripture.
I think contemplation matters because I believe the way we think about God matters.
I have been wrestling with this assertion for the last few months and, though I am not very far along, I highly recommend Chris E. W. Green’s book Surprised by God which dives further into this topic. I believe that we have lost sight of why it is important to analyze the ways that we think about God.
God is more than we could ever imagine. We will never grasp the extent to which His being covers and our understanding of him will never be anything more than an inkling, but that does not mean how we think about Him does not matter. In fact, it shows the opposite to be true, because the further we go, the more there is to learn about Him.
I am tired of the notion that everything that works in our favor is a “God thing.” God does lie within the good that we may find in life, but I am not so sure he is why you passed that test or why gas prices dropped this week. I think He lies within those moments that we need to chew on, the places where we are stifled by the changes that we experience. These moments take place more often than we would like to admit, but we tend to lock them away into the recesses of our mind, trying to ignore them and act like everything is fine. We need to face these uncertainties and pains so God can shine the truth of His promises on our broken places or as the late Leonard Cohen puts it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
Contemplation is painful. It takes focus, but it brings us closer to ourselves and closer to the truths that God wants to reveal to us. Contemplation brings light to the cave of truth and as we begin to understand truth, we gain confidence in the revelation of this truth in our lives. Facing those cracks in our lives allows us to find the meaning of our stories. It helps us to recognize our worth and the love that God has for us.
Take time to appreciate the truths found in Scripture and embrace the importance of silence on a daily basis. It brings gratitude. It builds confidence. It reveals truth.
“But perhaps I’ve still not quite made clear what it means to contemplate God. It means, as Rowan Williams has said, ‘to look to God without any regard to my own instant satisfaction.’ It means allowing God to be God for me, making room for ‘the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me’ so that I am opened up compassionately to my neighbor. In contemplation, the Holy Spirit broods sweetly over my spirit, slowly and secretly freeing me from ‘slavery to the cravings and fantasies,’ making me permeable to Christ so that his character begins to alter mine, filling me with the goodness of his own Spirit—joy and peace, gentleness and self-control. In contemplation, in other words, we open ourselves up to the sanctifying work of God, a work that takes time and happens almost entirely below the level of our conscious awareness. In Joseph Pieper’s phrase, contemplation is ‘a knowing which is inspired by love,’ a knowing that God creates in us just as we give ourselves, heart and mind and soul, to considering God as he is and all things as they are in him.”