A Prayer for Activist Contemplatives (and Contemplative Activists)
Because We Need Both Solitude and Community, Both Stillness and Action.
Sacred Spirit, Holy Mystery, I come to you in silence, stillness, and solitude, knowing that we are never fully alone, never entirely still, never completely quiet. Lead me into solitude so that you may immerse me in communities of peace, justice, and joyful service. Lead me into silence so that you may give me a prophetic voice to speak words of compassion and care. Lead me into stillness so that you may call me into life-giving action, meaningful activism, and balanced activity. Show me when it is time to enter the inner room, and when it is time to wash one another’s feet. Trusting in your grace, mercy, and felicity I pray, Amen.
Note:
This prayer was written in response to two of my favorite quotations from contemporary contemplative writers, Rowan Williams and Kenneth Leech. I think both of these authors done wonderful jobs at articulating how necessary it is for us to embed our contemplative practice in the social and cultural realities of our lives and our communities. In the immortal words of St. Basil the Great, challenging spiritual growth among the desert hermits: “If you live alone, whose feet shall you wash?” We can recast that as, “When you pray in silence and solitude, how does it inform the way you move and act in the world?”
I hope my humble prayer might contribute to our discernment along these lines.
Contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.
— Rowan Williams, Address to the Catholic Synod of Bishops in Rome, 2012
Contemplation has a context: it does not occur in a vacuum. Today’s context is that of the multinational corporations, the arms race, the strong state, the economic crisis, urban decay, the growing racism, and human loneliness. It is within this highly deranged culture that contemplatives explore the waste of their own being. It is in the midst of chaos and crisis that they pursue the vision of God and experience the conflict which is at the core of the contemplative search. They become part of that conflict and begin to see into the heart of things. The contemplative shares in the passion of Christ which is both an identification with the pain of the world and also the despoiling of the principalities and powers of the fallen world-order.
— Kenneth Leech, The Social God (also in Prayer and Prophecy: The Essential Kenneth Leech)
