Knowing God: The Transformative Power of Contemplation

Blog by Alan Fadling

Two weeks ago, I talked about how there often comes a point in our journey with God when his invitation is more to unlearn than to learn. This is because growing to know God better is more than thinking abstract truths about God. It is more than feeling God’s presence in some meaningful way. These are good, but they are not everything.

In his book New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says that “contemplation…is an awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.”* I had to read that sentence a few times before it began to sink in.

Contemplation is a way of talking about relationship with God and is more than accurate theologizing about God. It is what Paul is talking about in 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he says, “We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” Contemplation is focused on God’s beauty and God’s presence. It is a loving knowing that transforms us.

There is such grace in deepening our interactive knowledge of God. It is more like seeing God than thinking about God. We sense the work of God’s Spirit deep within us, waking us up and shining his light in and through our lives.

In New Seeds, Merton continues to share his insights in a second chapter appropriately titled “What Contemplation Is Not.” He says that “nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. ‘I think, therefore I am.’ This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence (!) based on the observation that he ‘thinks.’”†

This remarkably insightful response from a Christian perspective to Descartes’ big and philosophically impactful idea was just what I needed at that time in my spiritual life. Because of this basic philosophy, much of Western knowledge has become very rationalistic, cerebral, and thinking-focused. We assume that thinking is the proof of and justification for our existence apart from God creating us in his image.

Another passage that spoke to me in Merton’s New Seeds was this: “Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations! The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply ‘is.’”‡

Abiding in God’s presence will, by its nature, involve a steady dying process in us, even as we experience God’s life at our innermost places. Dying never feels comfortable, and unlearning is a kind of dying to ideas of God we’re attached to but that no longer serve us well. It sometimes involves sharp pain, and at other times long, drawn-out aches and weariness.

The hardest of all is the dying and death of dearly held “spiritual” ideas and practices. What I believe of God is refined in the presence of God. There is a way in which the presence of God starves that which is unreal in me. This is agonizing because so much of these things have felt like the “real me,” when in fact they are a mere shell of my true identity. I am more than my roles, more than my current convictions, more than my ideas about myself.

The real me is created in God through Christ. The contemplative journey is about becoming who God has actually made us and unlearning all that this world has distorted in our identity formation. Contemplation destroys the idols that remain, making the temple of my inner life a place of simpler worship and adoration.

Consider your own journey of knowing and unknowing, of learning and unlearning. (Much of the talk about deconstruction is, I believe, another way of talking about these necessary losses.) Contemplation is not a quick fix or a comforting spiritual exercise; it’s a continual process of letting go of the clutter of ideas, expectations, and assumptions that obscure our view of God.

It’s about embracing the mystery and grace of being fully seen and known by the One who created us in Christ. We can learn to release our grip on the familiar but false notions of ourselves, allowing God to reshape us in the light of his presence. And even in the pain of letting go we can experience the deep joy of being transformed by his love.

For Reflection:

• What familiar but false notions about God or yourself might God be inviting you to let go of?
• How might focusing on God’s presence rather than your ideas about him transform your relationship with him?
• What would it look like to embrace the mystery of God rather than striving to comprehend God fully?

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*Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), 5.

†Merton, New Seeds, 8.

‡Merton, New Seeds, 13.