Contemplation or Contemplative Prayer?
One of the main critiques of spiritual formation is about contemplative prayer. Over 10 years ago, a group of us who teach, write, and speak in spiritual formation were talking about how odd it was that contemplative prayer has become such a target by so many, given how little of a role it has had in the spiritual formation discussion. As we talked about it together, none of us had made contemplative prayer a center of our ministry or teaching, and yet we were attacked as if we had built our entire teaching on it.
So we decided to put together, in an academic forum, a discussion of contemplative prayer, and what we discovered was interesting. First, there were almost as many notions of it as people presenting. In other words, there was not an agreed upon definition of contemplative prayer. Second, it became clear that while there is a broader conversation in the Christian tradition about contemplation, contemplative prayer is an oddly new discussion. In fact, I think it is a confused one.
Pausing to consider the category of “contemplative prayer” has led me to believe it is a confusion of terms. In other words, contemplative prayer is a category fallacy. It isn’t a thing - not in the Christian tradition at least.
I realize that may seem like a shocking claim to some, and to others it might even appear obvious, so let me explain. This goes along with my post on a Rule of Life and how we need to be more honest about the language we use. Unless I am mistaken, which is certainly possible, one does not find “contemplative prayer” in the Christian tradition. Instead, what we find is something called contemplation and something else called prayer.
Importantly, within conversations about prayer, there is a kind of praying that is often called wordless prayer. My guess is that, at some point (probably in the 20th century), someone started calling wordless prayer contemplative prayer. The problem with doing so is that we tend to lose contemplation as a fundamental act of the Christian faith.
Furthermore, contemplative prayer became a kind of elite practice, segmented off to a certain class of Christians who were seen as uniquely spiritual (following the monastic focus of wordless prayer in the tradition). Or, alternatively, contemplative prayer became a mere secular act to promote mental health available to all who would learn a specific model. Both are problematic.
Instead of contemplative prayer, what we find emphasized in the Christian tradition is contemplation. Contemplation was an act, either understood as an intellectual act or a more integrated act of heart, that led one in ascent to God. Contemplation was an embrace of the call to draw near to love God with one’s mind and heart, and was seen as the underlying orientation for all Christian practice.
If you are allergic to the word contemplation, remember that, exegetically, one’s view of contemplation will follow how you interpret Colossians 3:2, “Set your minds on things that are above.” Every Christian who wants to be biblical has an account of contemplation. It is necessary given passages like this.
It could be that the current focus on contemplative prayer (a focus, it should be said, that has no agreed upon definitions) is simply an attempt to recover wordless prayer. That is possible. What we need to ask, however, is what are the distinctively Christian ideas and doctrines that govern and guide an account of wordless prayer?
It can’t simply be that wordlessness is somehow better than wordedness. That is sometimes found in the Christian tradition, but we must know and name it as false. In the beginning was the Word. The very ground of reality is a worded one. Pushing beyond words is not obviously good in a Christian vision of reality, although I think there are important and meaningful reasons why we should have an account of wordless prayer.
So what is wordless prayer and why is it meaningful? Likewise, what have we lost by shifting contemplation into prayer?
What seems to have happened is that we lost a focus on contemplation entirely, either because we didn’t want to associate with contemplative prayer or because we assumed that contemplation and contemplative prayer are the same thing.
Contemplation, is one of the, if not THE overarching focus of spiritual practices in the Christian tradition. Spiritual practices were ordered to and by contemplation, because all spiritual practices were modes of seeking God, the perfection of which is the beatific vision when we will see God face to face (1 Cor. 13:12, 1 John 3:2). Losing this emphasis means losing sight of the logic of the Protestant spiritual tradition (not to mention the broader Christian tradition).
On the other hand, the focus on contemplative prayer that I see today is often unconnected to a distinctively Christian vision of prayer. Because of this, those of us who were wrestling through these things thought it would be important to have a conversation about contemplation and contemplative prayer. What started out as an academic discussion at the Evangelical Theological Society, turned into the book Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice. I also co-published a popular-level book on embracing our finitude, which ended with an evangelical account of wordless prayer, called Beloved Dust: Drawing Close to God by Discovering the Truth About Yourself (with Jamin Goggin).
Our hope in both projects was to regain a distinctively Christian and, in fact, evangelical account of contemplation and wordless prayer, and not succumb to whatever is currently on the market of pop-spirituality. Embracing Contemplation, in particular, tries to attend to the idea of contemplative prayer in relation to contemplation and wordless prayer, but it does so through the lens of a group of evangelical scholars wrestling with the biblical, historical, and theological dynamics of these things.
So when we think about the nature of spiritual practices, whether that is prayer, worship, preaching, fasting, or something like contemplation, we must not merely turn to a practice as if it can be abstracted away from theology, the gospel, or the nature of life in Christ. We have to have a theological vision of reality that makes sense of how we draw near to God.
I realize that there is a lot to consider in all of this. Below you can find an interview I gave on contemplation and contemplative prayer that might help answer some further questions you have about this topic. I hope it helps!