Contemplation

Walter Burghardt,SJ

But if the purpose of kenosis is to transcend self, to come into loving communion with
Someone Transcendent and with his created reflections, how is this achieved? After four decades of
searching, my response is: through contemplation. Oh, not the popular sense of “contemplate,”
which all too many instantly associate with “navel.” Contemplation in its profound sense is
something just as real as your navel but immeasurably more exciting. My Carmelite friend William
McNamara – a contemplative whose spoken word is fused of fire and softness, who sparkles with
Isaian woe and Irish wit – once called contemplation “a pure intuition of being, born of love. It is
experiential awareness of reality and a way of entering into immediate communion with
reality. Reality? Why, that means people, trees, lakes, mountain…. You can study things, but unless
you enter into this intuitive communion with them, you can only know about them, you
don’t know them. To take a long loving look at something – a child, a glass of wine, a beautiful meal –
this is a natural act of contemplation, of loving admiration…. To be able to do that, there’s the rub. All
the way through school we are taught to abstract; we are not taught loving awareness.”
Never have I heard contemplation more engagingly defined: a long loving look at the
real. Each word is crucial: the real. . . look. . . long . . .loving. The “real” here is not some far-off,
abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky. Reality is living, pulsing people; reality is fire and water; reality is
the sun setting over the Poconos and a gentle doe streaking through the forest; reality is a ruddy glass
of Burgundy, Beethoven’s Mass in D, a child lapping a chocolate ice-cream cone; reality is a striding
woman with wind-blown hair; reality is Christ Jesus. Paradoxically, the one thing excluded from
contemplation is the one thing we identify with it: abstraction – where a leaf is no longer green, water
no longer ripples, a woman is no longer soft, and God no longer smiles. What I contemplate is always
what is most real: what philosophers call the concrete singular.
This real I “look” at. I no longer analyze it or argue it, describe or define it; I am one with it. I
do not move around it; I enter into it. Remember Eric Gill’s outraged protest? “Good Lord! The thing
was a mystery and we measured it!” Walter Kerr, in his delightful book The Decline of
Pleasure, compared contemplation to falling in love:

To fall in love with someone is, in a real but maddeningly inarticulate way, to know
someone. But not in terms of its height, weight, coloring, ancestry, intellectual quotient,
or acquired habits. A person who is “known” is known through these qualities but never
simply by them. No one of these things – not all of them together – precisely identifies
the single, simple vibration that gives us such joy in the meeting of eyes or the lucky
conjunction of interchanged words. Something private and singular and uniquely itself is
touched – and known in the touching.

In contemplation, I simply “see.” This look at the real is a “long” look. Not in terms of
measured time, but wonderfully unhurried, gloriously unhurried. For Americans, time is a stop
watch, time is money; life is a race against time. To contemplate is to rest – to rest in the
real. Not lifelessly or languidly, not sluggishly or inertly. My whole being is alive, incredibly
responsive, vibrating to every throb of the real. For once, time is irrelevant. You do not time
Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony; you do not clock the Last Supper. I am
reminded of the Louvre in Paris and the haunting Mona Lisa. I recall an endless line of tourists,
ten seconds each without ever stopping; over against that, a lone young man on a stone bench,
eyes riveted, whole person enraptured, sensible only to beauty and mystery, aware only of the
real.

But this long look at the real must be a “loving” look. It is not a fixed stare, not the long look of
a Judas. To be one with the real means to love the real. It demands that the real delight me, captivate
me. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Ballet or lobster cardinal, the grace of a woman’s walk or the
compassion in the eyes of Christ – whatever or whoever the real, contemplation calls forth love,
pleasure, delight. For contemplation is not study, is not cold examination; contemplation is not a
computer. To contemplate is to be in love – with the things of God, with the people of God, with God
himself.
A long loving look at the real – this alone is contemplation. It is seeing things as they really
are. It is the biblical “Be still and know that I am God,” (Psalm 46:10). It is Saint Teresa of Ávila gorging
on a roast partridge. The nuns are scandalized. Teresa laughs: “At prayer time, pray! At partridge
time, partridge!” That is why Kazantzakis loved her so lustily. From such contemplation comes pure
pleasure, the pleasure modern man resists because it is “useless.” From such contemplation comes
communion. I mean the discovery of the Holy in profound human encounters, where love is proven
by sacrifice, the wild exchange of all else for God. Thus is fashioned what the second-century bishop
Irenaeus called “God’s glory – man/woman alive!”
Is this “for real”? Am I seriously submitting that a cultural model for the aging is discoverable
in contemplation? In one word, yes. In our passion for doing, we have forgotten or betrayed an
ageless tradition that transcends cultures, that permeates not only the Hebrew Testament and the
life of Jesus but the Platonists and Aristotle, the Stoics and Plotinus, not only the desert fathers of
early Christianity and the medieval mystics but the daily life of India and Islam.
Oh, I know, contemplation as a model for the aging confronts obvious obstacles. First, it
clashes with our culture; it runs counter to a twentieth-century American article of faith: only useful
activity is valuable. If you are not active, you are not alive. Second, the model meets resistance in
the real: most of the aging are anxious, are concerned about sheer survival, how to pay for today,
how to cope with arthritic joints and tumorous flesh; it is so hard to “rest” in the real. Third, we are
not educated to contemplation; we have not been taught loving awareness. At sixty-five it is not easy
to begin looking long and lovingly at the real; it is easier to start jogging.
And still it must come to pass. Without contemplation we will continue to find or create
“things to be done” as therapy for enforced idleness, a therapy that makes the old into second-class
citizens on the edge of human living. Without contemplation the people will perish; for aging will be
meaningless, Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But with
contemplation the aging can afford to let go, to be emptied, because kenosis is recognized as the way
to living in the present, receiving this moment as a gift rich in its possibilities. With contemplation I
do not merely remember an irretrievable past, mourn each autumn leaf that falls. All that has gone
is gathered together, comes to focus, to a still point, in my now. With contemplation old age can be
growth as well as decline, a time of increased innerness. I am no longer what I do; I am who I
am. With contemplation suffering need not be painful waste; the Christian can transform it into
sacrifice, by making it an expression of love, a sharing in the Christ whose self-giving was
redemptive. With contemplation I can crystallize my Christian conviction that God cares. Even
loveless and alone, I am loved.
But how realize this capacity for contemplation? Four practical (or impractical) suggestions.
First, as William McNamara never tires of repeating, some sort of desert experience. Not necessarily
the physical desert of the Bible, the proving ground of Jesus and the desert fathers. The process can
be initiated by any experience – old age itself – that brings you face-to-face with solitude, with
vastness, with powers of life and death beyond your control, with your vulnerability; some
experience – like old age – where you opt for living or life destroys you. Your pattern of life is
interrupted. You learn to be still, alert, so that the real is recognizable. You know yourself, not some
statistic. You know not a theology of God, but the much more mysterious God of theology, the God
of Abraham and Moses, of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the God of Peter, Paul, and John, the God of saints and
the God of sinners.
A second suggestion: develop a feeling for festivity. Festivity, Josef Pieper insists, resides in
activity that is meaningful in itself. I mean activity that is not tied to other goals, not tied to “so that”
and “in order to.” Festivity, therefore, calls for renunciation: you take usable time and withdraw it
from utility. And this you do out of love, whose expression is joy. Festivity is essential to ideal aging,
because festivity is a yes to the world, a yes to the reality of things, a yes to the existence of man and
woman; it is a yes to the world’s Creator.
A third suggestion, intimately allied to festivity: don’t try to “possess” the object of your
delight, whether God or man, imprisoned marble or free-flowing rivulet; and don’t expect to “profit”
from contemplation, from pleasure. Here Kerr’s Decline of Pleasure has a profound paragraph that
has powerfully affected my life:

To regain some delight in ourselves and in our world, we are forced to abandon, or
rather to reverse, an adage. A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bush – unless
one is an ornithologist, the curator of the Museum of Natural history, or one of those
Italian vendors who supply restaurants with larks. A bird in the hand is no longer a bird
at all: it is a specimen; it may be dinner. Birds are birds only when they are in the bush
or on the wing; their worth as birds can only be known at a discreet and generous
distance.

A fourth suggestion: read, make friends with, remarkable men and women who have
themselves looked long and lovingly at the real. I mean Augustine of Hippo and Antoine de Saint
Exupéry, Catherine of Siena and Margaret Mead, Nikos Kazatzakis and Lao-Tzu, Julian of Norwich and
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, Dag Hammarskjöld and Dr. Zhivago,
Thomas Merton and Thomas More, Gandhi and Thoreau, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Abraham Joshua
Heschel, and a host of others. But note what kind of men and women these are: not solitaries, not
hermits, not neurotic escapists, but flesh and blood in a flesh-and-blood world, unique however
because each of them struggles daringly for self-transcendence, each smashed through boundaries
and stretched humankind’s limits to the walls of infinity.
Have I gotten away from the aging? Quite the contrary. As I see it, all our agonizing efforts to
make aging palatable will be band-aid remedies unless the elderly can move through kenosis to
contemplation. The task is awesome indeed; for that task is to create a new climate – social and
economic, political and psychological – where the aging can be freed to look long and lovingly at the
real, freed to see themselves and their world as these really are, freed to grow inside by growing in
oneness with God and with all that God has so lavishly fashioned, to laugh once again because so
much of human activity is absurdly incongruous, to rejoice and be glad because this day of their lives
the Lord has made!