In order to experience spiritual transformation, one must take up the practice of contemplative prayer, in addition to prayers of thanksgiving, praise, and worship. Prayer can be practiced as a one-way conversation, with praying for what we need and thanking God in advance that He will grant our desires. This practice of thankfulness, praise and worship, are directed one way – towards God, asking Him to listen. We should pour out the inner most thoughts and wants to God, but prayer shouldn’t stop there. When praying to God, we are not necessarily listening or communing with Him. The practice of contemplative prayer, listening to God, is concisely defined by Thomas Keating in Open Mind, Open Heart.
“Contemplative prayer is a process of interior transformation, a conversion initiated by God and leading, if we consent, to divine union. One’s way of seeing reality changes in this process. A restructuring of consciousness takes place which empowers one to perceive, relate, and respond to everyday life with increasing sensitivity to the divine presence in, through, and beyond everything that happens.”
Contemplative prayer leads to our spiritual transformation. In order to begin a contemplative prayer practice, one must be willing to surrender to the Holy Spirit and listen to God. This requires us to quiet our thoughts, our self-talk, to sit in silence and be mindful of God’s presence. This practice requires developing the discipline of the Christian mind.
There was a time when man practiced contemplative prayer. What happened? Two developments emerged in the late nineteenth century that contributed to the loss of the Christian Mind in America. The legacy of the Pilgrims and Puritans waned and new movements emerged from which the evangelical church has never fully recovered. The first development was during the 1800s when there became an overemphasis on theologically shallow preaching. Churches looked to convert believers by “revitalist preaching,” instead of requiring reflection and a deep grasp of the nature of Christian teaching and ideas. We entered an era that J.P. Moreland calls “anti-intellectualism” and saw the rise of three sects: Mormonism in 1830, Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1884, and Christian Science in 1866.
The second movement was the rise of new philosophical ideas in Europe. David Hume, the philosopher who lived in the 1700’s, argued that since we couldn’t experience God with our five senses, “the claim that God exists cannot be taken as an item of knowledge.”1 Immanual Kant, who lived into the early 1800s, also asserted that “human knowledge is limited to what can be experienced with the five senses, and since God cannot be so experienced, we cannot know He exists.”1 These ideas had a tremendous impact on Christian culture not only in Europe, but in North America. We experienced a shift from the regular theological study of the Bible as a common practice among Christians to seeking the Bible as a guide for ethical decision-making and spiritual growth. This is not to discount that the Bible is a guide and extremely important for both of these. But that is not all that it is. It is a guide for contemplative prayer, in which we receive God and are spiritually transformed by Him. This is His gift, and we are the ones who get in the way of receiving transformation.
We need to return to integrate our minds with our spiritual lives, not segregate our minds into our “secular” lives. I believe we have lost the influence of Christian mind and serious religious discussions in our universities, our government and in our media. Christians must not come off as shallow, defensive and reactionary. We must be thoughtful, confident and articulate about our beliefs and why they are true. We must defend our beliefs, not only with our emotions, but with our minds. And this is one reason to practice contemplative prayer, in order to restore our Christian mind and our relationship with God.
Follow me for my next segment on contemplative prayer and spiritual transformation.
1Moreland, J. P. (1997). Love Your God With All Your Mind.
