What Is Contemplative Christianity?

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I am often asked what I mean by "contemplative Christianity." While there are major authors that convey the message of contemplative Christianity in their very useful writings (i.e. Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating), I have not found a concise, biblical definition. So, here is my attempt. Let me know what you think.

In sum, contemplative Christianity is the spiritual experience of no separation from God and others, and that requires grace returning us to the heart of divine love. Philosophers speak of this state as nondual or integral.[i] St. Paul puts it this way: “in Christ nothing can separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8.28). In actuality, God is not only here, God is also there, and indeed, as one Jewish mystic has recently articulated, God is everywhere.[iii]

Two scriptures are useful to frame the conversation regarding God’s presence:

“Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10.1).

And:

“For as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7.39).

These passages link the perennial question of God’s presence with the perennial problem of human suffering. We ask: where is God? As one matures in the spiritual life, one sees the beauty of the Christian insight that in Christ by the Spirit God is everywhere – but not in the way you might think. It is a spiritual presence, hidden underneath and within, like an emotion or a law. The presence and action of God extends from the Beingness of God, from distant realms beyond the created universe. In this way, God is both here, there and everwhere by the relational presence of the Spirit. This knowledge took time to come to humanity. First God was the revealer God calling individuals through Angles and burning bushes. Then God was with us in the person of Jesus Christ, playing out on the stage of history the mystery of divine love for humankind. And then, after the glorification (or ascension) of this Jesus the divine was released in a new way by the Spirit who brings God relationally close so that we might experience the non-separative, integral spiritual life right here and now in the fullness of our normal day to day life.

Moving through the levels of spiritual faith is a voluntary, open ended journey. No one will compel you to move beyond your current level of religious or spiritual experience. However, the Spirit of God will woo you, forever drawing you up into a deeper knowing and a fuller being. What is challenging is that such a move requires a shift of perspective in how we conceive of God. This shift in perception is an ongoing, personal process. Each human partakes of this process throughout one’s lifetime.[iv] It is a relational process because the one we “move and live and have our being with” (Acts 17.28) is a relational God, and that is the invitation of contemplative Christianity: be with God. There is more beyond this union, but that is also beyond contemplative Christianity.

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[i]For example, Ken Wilber, No Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth (Boston: Shambhala, 2001) or David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

[ii]Such as Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston: Shambala, 2000); Michael Wash-burn, The Ego and The Dynamic Groud: A Transpersonal Theory of Human Development (Albany, NY: State Uni-versity of New York Press, 1988) and the more personal account by Jim Marion, Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality (Charlotte, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2000), and Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (New York: Crossroads, 2009).

[iii]Jay Michaelson, The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Boston: Trumpeter, 2009).

[iv]Such an evolution of faith is no different from what we know about our own human development. For example, as we grow from childhood to adulthood, we do not throw away our earlier forms of being, but we both incorporate and transcend them. In this way, we are layered beings; one day upon another, until years pass and we discover that our life is a woven wonder, one stage upon another recollected in memory and remembered in the depths of tissues. Ken Wilber suggests that a simple example of this dev-elopmental dimension of incorporating, but also moving beyond the earlier forms is the way alphabet letters become words which become sentences which become paragraphs which become books, and the book is at once both just letters and also something so much more. It has transcended a simple alphabet letter through a process of development to become a complex whole, yet retaining all its individual parts.