Cultivating a Contemplative Consciousness: Weekly Summary
Sunday
There’s an important place for practices of contemplation. I’m not throwing them out, but any practice of contemplation is for the sake of helping us sustain what we temporarily learn through great love or great suffering.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
The aspiration to monkhood is intrinsic to human life—a universal quality of being that continually draws us into silence. The deep self seeks something more radical and intense from life, and longs to be united with its Source. This is the monk within.
—Beverly Lanzetta
Tuesday
I began to realize that what I wanted more than anything else was to be grounded once again in the experience of the communal presence with God that had so transformed my life since I was a small child, and which had deepened all the more in the monastery.
—James Finley
Wednesday
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love.
—Mirabai Starr
Thursday
It is not possible, or even desirable, for most seekers of God to live in remote solitude or join a monastic order. I cherish going on retreat and revel in praying the monastic hours, but my true vocation is not to be a monk. My call is simply to be the most loving version of myself.
—Mark Longhurst
Friday
My Franciscan tradition and superiors have allowed me in these later years to live alone, in a little “hermitage” behind the friary and parish. When I am home, I am able to protect long hours of silence and solitude each day, which I fill with specific times of prayer, study, journaling and writing, spiritual reading, gardening, walking, and just gazing.
—Richard Rohr
Week Thirty-Nine Practice
Purity of Heart
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister identifies purity of heart as an essential commitment for the Desert Monastics:
The Desert Monastics built their spirituality on two major ideas: the practice of the presence of God and a commitment to purity of heart. Total concentration on the one thing necessary—a heart centered on the will and love of God—determined every action of their lives. Purity of heart, this commitment to the consciousness of God, was the laser beam of the monastic life. It constituted the operational center, the energy, and the rudder of their lives….
Being committed to something keeps life expanding for us, even when we think that there’s nowhere else for it to go. Purpose gives us a sense of importance, of wanting to do even more, even better the next time, no matter how many things we’ve done already. Finally, a sense of purpose, of resolve, makes getting up every morning worthwhile, win or lose. It is the undaunted determination to do what must be done, however long it takes, whether we get it finished or not. For the Desert Monastic, the purpose was to continue an unending search for God….
No doubt about it: Total concentration on the one thing necessary—a heart centered on the will and love of God—determines every action of your life. It will carry you through life as much as life carries you—only with more fulfillment. It is a beacon from the desert calling you yet to continue your own pursuit of the presence of God, to concentrate always on the purity of heart that seeks one thing only and always.
Your heart is the real compass of your life. The Desert Monastics knew that over fifteen hundred years ago and you know it yet: Purity of heart is the gift that guides you, leads you, shepherds you from one end of life to the other, always content knowing that you have done what you were born to do. What else could possibly be worth a life?
Reference:
Joan Chittister, The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a. Contemplative and Fulfilling Life (New York: Convergent, 2021), 238, 239–241.
Image credit and inspiration: Jacob Bentzinger, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like the light of a stained-glass window making new patterns and shapes on a wall, we look at old things and old ways with new eyes and discover new ways of being.
