Without Contemplation the People Perish
Walter J. Burghardt, S.J.

For most Christians, contemplation is an awesome word. It conjures up a Paul of Tarsus "caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor 12:2), a Teresa of Avila with a vision of "the sorely wounded Christ," Ignatius Loyola seeing or feeling "the Being of the Most Holy Trinity," Lao Tzu apprehending the spiritual essence of Tao. Here I want to speak of a contemplation that is open to all who believe, who love. What is it and how do you get that way?

This is the contemplation that Carmelite William McNamara once called "experimental awareness of reality," a way of entering into immediate communion with the real. "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."

Never have I heard contemplation more excitingly described: a long loving look at the real. Each word is crucial. The real is not simply some far-off, abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky. Reality is pulsing people, fire and ice, a gentle doe streaking through the forest, the sun setting over the Rockies. Reality is a ruddy glass of Burgundy, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," a child lapping a chocolate ice-cream cone, a striding woman with wind-blown hair. Reality is the risen Christ with the glorified wounds of his passion. Paradoxically, what alone is excluded from contemplation is abstraction. What I contemplate is always what is most real: what philosophers call the concrete singular.

This real I look at. I do not analyze it or argue it, describe or define it; I am one with it. Lounging by a stream, I do not exclaim "Ah, H20!" I let the water trickle gently through my fingers. I do not theologize about the redemptive significance of Calvary; I link a pierced hand to mine. And but eyes and ears, smelling and touching and tasting, emotion and passion of which a dehumanizing AngloÄSaxon legacy has made us ashamed. Little wonder that noted theater critic Walter Kerr compared contemplation to falling in  love. Not simply knowing another's height, weight,  coloring, ancestry, I.Q., acquired habits; rather, "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."

This look is a long look. For many Americans, time is a stop watch, time is money, life is a race against time. To contemplate is to restËto rest in the real. Not lifelessly or languidly, not sluggishly or inertly. My entire being is alive, incredibly responsive, vibrating to every throb of the real. For once, time is irrelevant. You do not time the New York Philharmonic, clock the Last Supper.

But this long look must be a loving look. It is not a fixed stare, not the long look of a Judas. It demands that the real captivate me, at times delight me. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake Ballet or Lobster Cardinal, the grace of God's swans or the compassion in the eyes of ChristËwhatever or whoever the real, contemplation calls forth love, oneness with the other. For contemplation is not study. To contemplate is to be in love.

True, contemplation does not always summon up delight. The real includes sin and war, poverty and race, illness and death. The real is AIDS and abortion, apartheid and MS, bloated bellies and stunted minds, respirators and last gasps. But even here the real I contemplate must end in compassion, and compassion that mimics Christ is a synonym for love.

From such contemplation comes communion. I mean the discovery of the Holy in deep, thoughtful encountersËwith God's creation, God's people, God's selfËwhere love is proven by sacrifice, the wild  exchange of all for another, for the Other. Thus is fashioned what the secondÄcentury bishop Irenaeus called "God's glory--man/woman alive!"

But how realize this capacity for contemplation? Several swift suggestions.

First, some sort of desert experience. Not necessarily the physical desert that runs through the Bible, through salvation history, through the desert fathers. Rather that the process can best be initiated by an experience that  even with powers of life and death beyond your controlËwhere the values of life are presented in clear, stark terms. An experience that (in Fr. McNamara's rhetoric) evokes your capacity for initiative, exploration, evaluation; interrupts your ordinary pattern of life; intercepts routine piety. You know yourself, not a statistically polled image of yourself. You know God, not abstractions about God, not even a theology of God, but the much more mysterious and mighty God of theology.

Second, develop a feeling for festivity. Festivity, as Josef Pieper noted, resides in activity that is meaningful in itself--not tied to goals. It calls for renunciation: you must take usable time and withdraw it from utility--and this out of love, whose expression is joy. Festivity is a yes to the world, to the reality of things, to the existence of woman and man, to the world's Creator.

A third suggestion, intimately allied to festivity: a sense of play. Not "fooling around"; rather what poet Francis Thompson meant when, in his essay on  Shelley, he likened the poet's gifts to a child's faculty of makeÄbelieve, but raised to the nth power. It demands a sense of wonder that many of us lose as we grow older, get blase and worldly-wise and sophisticated, believe that everything can be explained. No, let your imagination loose to play with ideas--what it means to be alive, to be in love, to hope even in this valley of darkness.

Fourth, don't try to possess the object of your delight, whether divine of human, imprisoned marble or free-flowing rivulet. Here a paragraph from Walter Kerr that has influenced my living far beyond my ability to describe:

To regain some delight in ourselves and in our world, we are forced to abandon, or rather to revere, an adage. A bird in the hand is not worth two in the bushËunless 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 be known only at a discreet and generous distance.

Fifth, make friends with remarkable men and women who have themselves looked long and lovingly at the real. I mean biblical figures like Abraham and Mary; martyrs like Ignatius of Antioch and Martin Luther King; uncanonized women of vision like Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. I mean Lao Tzu doing everything though being, an d Abraham Joshua Heschel doing everything through worship; philosophers Like Jacques Maritain, insisting that the culmination of knowledge is not conceptual but experimental: man/woman "feels" God. I mean Mr. Blue, Myles Connolly's New York "mystic" w ho flew kites and exulted in brass bands; shortÄstory writer Flannery O'Connor, dead of lupus at 39, with her mature acceptance of limitation, with so much Christlife in her frail frame--grace on crutches. I mean Thomas Merton, always the contemplative but moving from renunciation to involvement, making contact with Hindu and Buddhist and Sufi, protesting Vietnam and violence, racial injustice and nuclear war. Touch men and women like those, and you will touch the stars, will touch God.

The point of all this? These men and women are not solitaries. Not neurotic escapists. Few of them fled the world, even when they removed to a discreet distance. They are contemplativesin action, flesh and blood in a world of grime and grit-unique, however, because each has smashed through boundaries and stretched human limits to the walls of infinity.

The world is a thirst for men and women who know God and love God; for only such can give to today's paradoxical world the witness to a living God that this age demands. My personal failing is to me agonizingly apparent: at times I do not come through as a man who looks long and lovingly at the real. The consequence? Some men and women who touch me do not thrill to the touch, and so they abide in their loneliness, continue to experience the absence of God.

 Without contemplation, the people perish.

Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., is president of The Living Pulpit and one of its editors. This article is an abridgment, with permission, of an article on contemplation that appeared in the magazine Church, 1989. His most recent book is When Christ Meets Christ: Homilies on the Just Word.