In a few months I will be completing nine years of writing for ‘Mystic Mantra’. These columns are written as much for my own spiritual awakening and benefit as, hopefully, for that of the readers. Much like my own wish to grow closer to God daily, I presume that you too entertain the idea of getting closer to God (by whichever name you may address him/her) and having a deeper experience of the divine, as I do.
Often, as one progresses in spiritual life, some questions or confusions crop up crying out for clarifications. One such confusion arises from the terms — ‘meditation’ and ‘contemplation’ — used sometimes interchangeably but are, at least, according to Christian tradition, quite different, both in theory and practice. While both are forms of prayer, the fundamental difference between meditation and contemplation is that meditation is a human mode of prayer whereas contemplation is divinely infused. It means that in meditation one uses images, concepts and reasoning to basically think of created things in relation to God through human effort. Such an activity can open us to interior devotion and yearning for God and directing our lives.
Interestingly, meditation is intended to lead to contemplative prayer. Spiritual masters and mystics tell us that contemplation is not a prayer that we can initiate or make happen. It is divinely produced. The action here belongs to God. The only work we do is to dispose ourselves to receive God’s graces.
At this stage one enters into a wordless prayer, an awareness of the divine guest within through a knowing, loving and deep communion with God. It is a prayer of quiet calmness in which we drink deeply, as it were, at the life-giving fount.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church summarises meditation as, ‘a prayerful quest engaging thought, imagination, emotion and desire. Its goal is to make our own in faith the subject considered by confronting it with the reality of our own life’.
‘Contemplative prayer’, on the other hand, ‘is the simplest expression of the mystery of prayer. It is a gift, a grace; it can be accepted only in humility and poverty. Contemplative prayer is a covenant relationship established by God within our hearts’. Put more simply, meditation helps us to know God and contemplation helps us to love him.
Let us be also clear that meditation and contemplation are not contrary to one another. Meditation can be considered a stepping-stone to arrive at contemplation. As the book of Isaiah says: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.’ And again St. Paul says: ‘Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!’ Our efforts should, however, continue to get as close to God as possible.