Being a Contemplative in the World
image by Julie Elliot
The participants of SoulGuiding met online recently to enter Phase 3: A Contemplative in the World. Janet Gear responded to the same theme at a SoulGuiding retreat in 2016. Janet grappled with the question: How do we make a difference in the world? We appreciate her reflection on this perennial question that many are asking today.
by Janet Gear
“How do I make a difference in the world?” is a big question. It is literally a question of biblical proportion. It is the question of our ancestors, the prophets, who asked, “How then shall we live?” It is a profoundly human question that is multi-layered. It’s an existential question about the purpose of our lives; an ethical question about what to do with our lives; a very practical question about how to live our lives; and a spiritual question about inhabiting our lives.
Any answer would be too small. We keep a question like this within us rather than carry an answer. One is enlarging and one is confining of what life might teach us. Union with Divine Life is about being different in the world. It’s not a movement up into the sky of God but a plummet down into the real world – toward God in the world not away from the world. It’s not a choice between the contemplative life and the active life. It’s all one path. Inward and outward are the same with no beginning and no end. Out sends you in. In sends you out.
So, when we ask a question like this, if we’re honest, we don’t really want to be told an answer. That would be a waste of a good question. What we’re looking for is a way to have the question lead us:
· somewhere bigger than we are now
· somewhere deeper than what we understand now
· somewhere wider than our capacity to love now
· somewhere freer than how we live now
A question this big is a companion for the long haul when we ask it from the heart and with something at stake. Rilke speaks of these kinds of questions as lifelong companions in his Letters to a Young Poet:
“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I don’t pretend to know what he meant when he wrote that letter to the young poet but it rings true for me. Keeping a question within you sets you on a path toward the unfolding of a life in ways that having ready answers does not. Looking for answers is about putting things into your life. Carrying questions is about putting yourself into something larger than your life. We surrender to something bigger, deeper, wider and freer than where we are now. It’s not about holding on. It’s about letting go.
Janet Gear
preaches, teaches and leads retreats across British Columbia and beyond. Ordained in the United Church of Canada, Janet served the faculty of the Vancouver School of Theology in practical theology and spiritual formation. She is a member of the Pacific Jubilee Advisory Council. Janet lives in North Vancouver and worships at St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church.
