Author: admin

The activism that is generated by Evangelical experience, and which is a largely unexamined element of Evangelical spirituality, worship and church lifestyle, has made Evangelicals at best impatient and at worst suspicious of the contemplative tradition of Christian spirituality. Not that many Evangelicals would have much interest in harking back to the privatised spiritual traditions of French Quietism, or the apparently world denying flight of the Desert Fathers and Mothers away from a sinful world, in their criticism or rejection of the apparent passivity and introspection and individualism of such self-absorbed piety. Always assuming such parts of the varied Christian tradition were known well enough for such critique, and assuming even more doubtfully whether such criticisms of Fenelon, Francis De Sales and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are anywhere near the truth and realities by which these earlier Christians lived.

But there is within Evangelicalism an inner reluctance to validate forms of prayer other than petition and intercession and personal devotion, and a dismissive superiority when comparing the activism of an evangelistic imperative and impulse to mission, with a more monastic and meditative approach to the world, to God and to the relations between them. As with much of my own thinking, I don't see an either-or here – I am pleading for a both-and. Only as the church learns to recover and practice its contemplative disposition to the life of the world, the church and the created order of God, will it have some deeper and fuller sense of what mission is in that world, and its own purpose within the creation and redemptive goals of God, and therefore its call to adapt and respond to this context of time and place that is our own peculiar calling in history . 

Contemplative Mission sounds like an oxymoron, a strained attempt to bring two mutually exclusive mindsets together. But I am not so sure. It may be that if mission is building a city, contemplation is designing and planning it; if mission is the artistic masterpiece of God executed by the church, then contemplation is the artist seeking vision, shape and composition in those preliminary sketches, essential to the completion of that realised vision in beauty and truth.

Thoughtful compassion is another form of contemplative mission. John Stott in a small Falcon publication on mission reminded Christians decades ago of the call of Jesus to practice "uncomplicated compassion". By that he meant no ulterior motives – you make friends to make friends, you care because you care, you reach out because that's what you do. It isn't a preliminary tactic for evangelism, or to create a chance to witness – the act of love in the name of Jesus is its own witness, the reaching out is to embody the way Jesus is, you care because God has shown his care for you and you live under an imperative of love, so you love for no other reason, benefit or goal.

Add to that the word thoughtful, look at the world around and bring thought to bear, ask the questions that matter about peace and its absence, pervasive and chronic hunger, persistent intractable injustice, gratuitous systemic cruelty, lethal levels of poverty – and then ask what is to be done. And the answer won't always be obvious, there may not even be one, humanly speaking. Contemplative mission means a disposition of caring about the world around us, noticing what is going on, seeing the global and the local and the glocal as that God loved world into which Christ came and comes, pervaded by the Spirit of God, held in the purposive intentionality of the Creator Redeemer.

Thoughtful compassion is to think God's thoughts after Him, and to align our affections with the faithful mercy, redemptive patience, and imaginative energy of Divine Love described as inexhaustible, immeasurable and indescribable. Thoughtul compassion embodies, and then seeks ways of practising so that the inexhaustible becomes available, the immeasurable visible and the indescribable finally described in the miracle of God loving through human acts of kindness, conciliation and caring. The photo of Dorothy Day shows how radical that can be – the face is that of a thoughtful, compassionate confronter of injustice, in the name of the God made known in Jesus

Contemplative Mission is that inner disposition of the Body of Christ that is patiently attentive, thoughtfully compassionate, humbly receptive and intelligently critical in its outlook not only on the world but on the church. And for each contemporary follower of Jesus that same inner disposition is developed not in programmatic activism justified by the word missional, nor by that too confident diagnosis of what is wrong with the world, nor with the church's uncritical view of its own message as embodying the essential and authentic Gospel. That Gospel is vaster than the church, a mighty cataract of grace and truth, an infinite eternal mystery of Divine Love that simply overwhelms our categories and conceptual controls. As well stand under Niagra with a bucket and think we have captured all that is important in that endlessly thunderous torrent.

To be patiently attentive is something I find very difficult, and I'm not the only one. Our cultural instincts for more speed and endless novelty, constant challenge and continuous change, making money and saving time pay, are now so deeply embedded in our minds and souls that maybe an authentic 21st Century Christian spirituality is about recovering these remorselessly receding gifts of human consciousness. I'm writing this while listening on Spotify to some of the most beautiful music I know.

Now here's a question I've been meaning to ask myself for a while – is multi-tasking the ability to do a number of things in synchronised activities, but doing none of them with our whole heart? Can I be patiently attentive to two things at once? The music is background, the writing is foreground – I'm aware of the music, its loveliness at times makes me slow down on the keyboard and listen with mind and heart as well as ears. But then thoughts interrupt, and the inner structure of emotion formed by harmony and rhythm are deconstructed, as the mind goes chasing after these urgent thoughts I'm keen not to lose.

Patient attentiveness cannot multi-task. It is the gift of paying attention to the other, it is the opposite of self-preoccupation, and it isn't in a hurry to speak, to understand or to control. There is a radical humility in that inner act of surrendered selfishness. Yet paradoxically it is in so doing we are likely to reach a deeper understanding of this person now patiently attending to the other. Because patient attentiveness is a prerequisite to being able to interpret ourselves, our world, our neighbours, and that cultural context which so insidiously and patiently shapes and moulds us in its own image.

So having said all that, I've just put on Gabriel's Oboe again, and patiently attended to a melody that performs what great music often does – breaks the heart while healing it, and strengthenes the will to surrender to that which is greater than it, and reconfigures our fugitive feelings into a new resolve to live attentively, patiently, as a child of a Kingdom where seeds grow slowly, but towards the fulfilment of fruitfulness.

The photo looks across Loch Skene, one of the places where occasionally I try to be patiently attentive. 

Beauty is its own language, and beyond words.

Description diminishes rather than enhances beauty.

To look, and see, is a prayer of thanks.

Delicacte fragility of informal geometry.

A world of loveliness enfolded in fragrance.

The precise arrangement of crumpled petals creates beauty by accident.