Father Richard Rohr describes prayer as a practice of being present before the mystery of God.
Anyone familiar with my writing knows that I believe that immediate, unmediated contact with the moment is the clearest path to divine union. Naked, undefended, and nondual presence has the best chance of encountering the Real Presence. I approach the theme of contemplation in a hundred ways, because I know most of us have one hundred levels of resistance, denial, or avoidance. For some reason in our complicated world, it is very hard to teach simple things. Any mystery, by definition, is pregnant with many levels of unfolding and realization. That is especially true of the “tree of life” that is contemplative awareness.
In my novitiate I was exposed to an early method of silent Franciscan contemplation called pensar sin pensar or no pensar nada as described by the Spanish friar Francisco de Osuna. I didn’t totally understand what I was supposed to be doing in that silence of “thinking without thinking” and probably fell asleep on more than one occasion. Yet it had the effect of moving me away from the verbal, social, and petitionary prayers I had been taught almost exclusively up to that time.
Prayer is indeed the way to make contact with God/Ultimate Reality, but it is not an attempt to change God’s mind about us or about events. It’s primarily about changing our mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. A small mind cannot see great things because the two are on two different frequencies or channels, as it were. The Big Mind can know big things, but we must change channels. Like will know like. [1]
Of all the things I have learned and taught over the years, I can think of nothing that could be more helpful than living in the now. It’s truly time-tested wisdom. So many leaders in so many traditions have taught the same thing: Hindu masters, Zen and Tibetan Buddhists, Sufi poets, Jewish rabbis, and Christian mystics, to name a few. In the Christian tradition, we have heard it from Augustine, the Cloud of Unknowing, and the Carmelite Brother Lawrence. Contemporary teachers like Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Ekhart Tolle have done much to help us understand the importance of living in the now. It’s a shame that this real and deep tradition of the present moment has been lost to so many.
Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade called this type of prayer the “sacrament of the present moment.” In his book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, the key theme is: “If we have abandoned ourselves [to God], there is only one rule for us: the duty of the present moment.” [2] To live in the present is finally what we mean by presence itself! God is hidden in plain sight, yet religion seems determined to make it more complicated. [3]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (Crossroad Publishing, 2009), 105, 113, 102.
[2] Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. John Beevers (Image Books, 1975), 81.
[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Living the Eternal Now (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2005). Available as MP3 download.
Image credit and inspiration: Bruce Tang, untitled (detail), 2019, photo, Japan, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Attentive to the moment and the task at hand, we find that holiness lives in simple, ordinary rhythms—no grand cathedral required, only the quiet altar of a kitchen table.
Story from Our Community:
Brother Lawrence’s little book is the oldest possession I have. I found it in my teenage years in my grandmother’s library. I was deeply inspired and blessed beyond measure to recognize God’s amazing presence in my own life. My Gran gave the book to my mother in 1972 and she in turn passed it on to me many years later. This precious little book has given me consolation at different periods of my life in much the same way as the CAC continues to today.
—Bridget W.
