An Introduction to Christian Contemplation

Brother Lawrence was a lay brother and cook in a Carmelite house in Paris in the seventeenth century. He disliked kitchen work, and he found that by doing each small task for the love of God it became easy and full of peace. The Conversations record how he spoke of this to a visitor. A question for the week: choose one task you dislike and do it, each day, as if for someone you love.

For Lawrence, prayer was nothing but a sense of the presence of God, and the set times of prayer were no different from the rest of the day. His letters return again and again to one counsel: turn to God often, simply, without fuss, and begin again whenever you forget. A question for the week: how many times a day can you remember, even for a moment?

Our essay on contemplation, prayer and attention across the traditions.

In May 1373, gravely ill, Julian of Norwich received sixteen showings. In the first she saw something no bigger than a hazelnut in the palm of her hand, and understood that it was all that is made, and that it lasts because God loves it. A question for the week: hold something small in your hand each day and consider what keeps it in being.

Julian asked why sin was allowed, and received the answer for which she is best known: that sin was necessary, but all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. She does not pretend to understand how; she holds the promise and the unanswered question together. A question for the week: what in your own life would you most need to hear this about?

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Dominican, begins where Lawrence and Julian end: God is beyond every name, even good and wise and being, and the soul must let go even of its ideas of God. Inge’s selections, translated from the German, gather his sermons under themes: God, grace, detachment, prayer, union. A question for the week: which of your ideas about God might you be asked to give up?

The Library’s entry on the Godhead, Eckhart’s name for God beyond God.

The Theologia Germanica, an anonymous fourteenth-century treatise that Luther later printed, says that sin is nothing but the creature turning from the unchanging good to itself, and that the whole of the spiritual life is the undoing of this turning. A question for the week: notice when you say “I”, “me” and “mine”, and what each one is protecting.

To close the path, our essay on the passage beyond concepts that every contemplative tradition describes.