Sunday
If our prayer goes deep, “invading” our unconscious, as it were, our whole view of the world will change from fear to connection. In meditation, we move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being fear-driven to being love-drawn.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
If we can allow our thoughts and feelings to pass through us, neither clinging to them nor opposing them—and without ever expecting perfect success—I promise that we will come to a deeper, wider, and wiser place. Even our inability to fully succeed is, in itself, another wonderful lesson.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Our new frantic pace is like poison to our holding hands with those we love. That is where contemplation comes in. It reconnects us to ourselves, to God, and to others. It helps us learn to forgive and heal our souls.
—Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Wednesday
As we receive God’s compassionate gaze in contemplation, all negative energy and motivation is slowly exposed and eventually falls away as counterproductive and useless.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
We can pause and “be still” enough to remember that we are made in God’s image, and we can honor our own voice, God’s voice within us. We don’t have to wait for a special key. The key is already within us.
—Carmen Acevedo Butcher
Friday
Whatever you behold, you eventually become beholden to. You enter into a love relation. And sometimes grace carries us away, and we glimpse, maybe even for several seconds at a time, the whole interconnected, openhearted world welcomes us.
—Amy Frykholm
Week Twenty Practice
Why I Meditate
Spiritual director Therese DesCamp reflects on her commitment to a contemplative practice:
I don’t meditate to improve my mental acuity. I don’t meditate to slow down the effects of aging. I don’t meditate to lower my blood pressure, reduce my stress, or improve my frame of mind. I don’t meditate to be a better Christian. Sure, all those things can be byproducts of my meditation practice. But that’s all they are, byproducts….
I meditate because I am, in a sense, blind without it. Without the surrender inherent in my practice, I lose my deepest vision, my insight. I lose the ability to see myself and the world with compassion, the forgiveness, and humility of God.
Here are some other thoughts about my practice: I do not meditate to have insights or mystical experiences. My practice is not measured by how I feel or what I experience when I sit in place for a twenty-minute session. The true test of my practice is my behavior the other twenty-three-plus hours of the day.
A practice is just that: a practice. By definition, a practice gets me ready to do something else. One person practices scales on the piano so she can play a concerto beautifully. Another practices French so that he can converse easily. I practice Centering Prayer so that when life is coming apart at the seams, I remember how to stand steady. I practice Centering Prayer so that I can learn how to stand aside and let God work in and through me.…
Meditation practice can turn me into a sponge. The true nature of a sponge is that it gathers up water and it releases water. It does not hold onto, own, or create water…. In meditation, I am filled with the grace of God, the flowing waters of life. (If I am lucky, I will actually experience this in some way. But whether I consciously experience that grace or not, it is always true that I am filled with it.) Hence, the only goal I can truly name for my meditation practice is this: to let myself be filled, over and over, so that I can act as a streaming, saturated sponge, leaking Love in a dry and dusty world.
Reference:
Therese DesCamp, Hands Like Roots: Notes on an Entangled Contemplative Life (Santos Books, 2025), 135–136.
Image Credit and inspiration: Patrick Hendry, untitled (detail), 2015, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A person stands in a contemplative “just this” moment with the night sky.
