Contemplation as a Path of Healing
A person can’t be healed within simply through discipline. Dealing with thoughts, along with concrete exercises, helps to calm the passions and make the soul healthy. But it takes contemplation to actually achieve that health. That was the monks’ experience, and that is how Evagrius Ponticus described it.
Contemplation is pure prayer, prayer without respite, praying beyond thoughts and feelings, praying as oneness with God. Evagrius never tires of calling prayer the most beautiful present God has given humans. The dignity of human beings consists in the fact that we can become one with God in prayer.
“Is there anything better than passionate communion with God, and anything higher than living completely in God’s presence? A prayer that is no longer deflected by anything is the highest thing that human beings can accomplish.” “Prayer is the ascent of the mind to God.” In prayer one must first be free from one’s passions, above all from anger and care. But then too one must leave behind pious thoughts. We are not supposed to be reflecting on God, but to become one with God. Evagrius never tires of writing about this: “If someone has become free from disrupting passions, that does not yet mean that he can really pray. Perhaps he is only familiar with the purest thoughts, but lets himself be seduced into pondering them; then he is far from God.”
“The Holy Spirit has compassion on our weakness and often comes to us, although we are not worthy of him. If he visits us, while we are praying to him out of love for the truth, he fills us and helps us to let go of all the thoughts and reflections that hold us captive, and so he leads us on to spiritual prayer.”
“Be watchful that during prayer you do not cling to any ideas, but remain in deep silence. Only in this way will he who takes pity on the ignorant visit such an insignificant person as you and present you with the greatest of all gifts, prayer.”
“If you are really praying, there will arise in you a deep feeling of trust. Angels will accompany you and reveal to you the meaning of the whole of creation.”
“Prayer is an activity that corresponds to the dignity of the spirit; or, better yet, it corresponds to its nobler and actual effect.”
In contemplation, according to Evagrius, we reach a state of deepest silence. We discover in ourselves a space of pure silence. Evagrius calls this” God’s place” or “the vision of peace.” In a letter to a friend he writes: “If the intellect now by God’s grace flees away from these things [passions], and casts off the old man, then his own condition at the time of prayer appears to him like a sapphire, of the color of heaven, which Scripture calls the place of God, whom the elders of Israel saw on Mount Sinai (Exod. 24:10). It also calls this place the vision of peace; here one sees in himself the peace that is more exalted than all our understanding and that watches over our hearts. For in a pure heart another heaven is stamped, whose vision is light and whose place is ghostly, where – how wonderfully! – we contemplate the insights of the things in existence. And even the holy angels gather with those who are worthy.”
In prayer we look upon our own light; indeed we become aware of our own nature, which is all light, participating in the light of God. In this place of God, in the place of peace in the interior of the soul, only God dwells. And there everything is whole. There, in the love of God, all the wounds that life has inflicted on us close up. There all thoughts about people who have hurt us fade away. There our passions are not allowed in, there people with their expectations, their opinions, and their judgments cannot reach us. There we become one with God. There we plunge into God’s light, into God’s peace, into God’s love. That is the goal of the spiritual path.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
