Imaginative Contemplation

One of the features of Ignatian spirituality is imaginative contemplation. To use the imagination in contemplating scripture is to turn the stories of Jesus into an experience. It is about the "application of the senses" to a passage. By picturing our self in the scene and by listening and looking we find ourselves touched and changed from the encounter.

It's not that we let our imaginations run wild, but rather we enter into the passage with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and allow him to speak to us and show us something new or surprising; something which speaks to our heart or emotions. I find this a challenge as I'm very drawn to the cerebral - to thinking and using my mind, to applying my intellect. But Ignatius encourages us to allow God to speak to us in our inner most being. The journey is an interior one.

One of the passages I was meditating on a few weeks ago was the passage where Joseph is warned in the middle of the night to get up and take the child and his mother and flee. To feel the emotion of the situation, to enter into the fear, to the sense of having to leave everything in the dark of the night and flee for your life and the life of your child; to go to a strange land. And to then to enter into the passages about the children being slaughtered, the horror, the anguish, the grief, the disbelief; Joseph's fear on returning from Egypt, to learn that the land was now ruled by the son of the man who was seeking to murder your child.

The feelings have stayed with me for these past weeks - it's almost as if there is a residue.

I was thinking about the fact that in many, many places in the world people live like this all the time. They have no security, they are fearful for their children, they live in countries where the government is corrupt and their lives are insecure, not knowing what will happen next, displaced and hopeless.

And I was reading psalm 147 which says

He has made your city secure,

He blessed your children among you,

He keeps peace at your borders;

He puts the best bread on your tables.

And I am so conscious of how blessed we are in this country. We might moan about the weather, or the rubbish on telly, or the the traffic driving to work. But we really don't understand how blessed we are. We are secure, well fed, our children are educated and have so many opportunities; and most of the time we are not even conscious of it.

How do we Christians in the West live in a way that really makes a difference to the poor and displaced and fearful and that also fully comprehends how incredibly blessed we are?

Things I'm Reflecting On

I've been on an interesting spiritual journey for a number of years now - very influenced by Ignatian spirituality. This forms around some ways of living my everyday life and being open to

• Discovering who I really am
• Directing myself towards God
• Noticing God's actions in my life
• Responding to the movements of my heart
• Discovering the nature of my deepest desire
• Seeking God's will
• Becoming free of all that distracts me from my deepest desire
• Making choices in line with my truest self
• Connecting my lived experience with the life, death and resurrection of Christ
• Responding to God's love for me
• Finding God in all things

I'm hoping to do something called 'making the exercises' later this year when the liturgical year turns. But all of this coupled more recently with my experiences on the streets as a Pastor has led me on a theological journey. It's to do with lining up my theology and my 'felt experience' of God. I'm not where I was in my understanding of God, of how The Creator works in the world. So I'm asking some big questions - I know they might not be the things that other people might grapple with but they are real for me;

• Does God really have 'a plan' for our lives? Don't have any problem with God having a purpose.
• How transcendent is God and how immanent? What level of involvement does God have in my life?
• How much is God working and active in the world and what does that look like, how does it feel to people and how do God and I co-create?
• Is God really sovereign? How does that fit with 'free will' does God set self-imposed limits (which I will come back to in a subsequent post)
• How do I reconcile the God of the Old Testament to the God revealed in the New Testament?

In all of this the incarnation is the touchstone, the place I anchor myself - Christ, God making himself as vulnerable as any one could possibly be, born as a human infant, subject to torture and a harrowing death.

At my meeting with my Spiritual Director as I discussed all of this particular theological journeying, she suggested I read the theologian Karl Rahner. Did the 'google' thing and came across this;

"Rahner believed that the polarity between "transcendence" and "immanence" was false, being imposed upon Christianity by secular world views. Human experience is unintelligible unless it is interpreted in light of the transcendent mystery of God... Humans transcend themselves in every act of questioning and thinking, by which they demonstrate themselves to be both part of the natural world and yet simultaneously oriented towards the mysterious horizon of being that Christians know as God, the infinite horizon of hope and love. The dilemma of immanence or transcendence of God must thus be overcome without sacrificing either. Due to the ability of humans to discern the transcendent element of their situation, there is an implicit knowledge of God latent within humanity, which it is the function of transcendental reflection to identify. The sense of relation to God, a natural knowledge of God, he terms "transcendental revelation," but is inadequate in itself and needs to be supplemented by a supernatural knowledge of God, or "categorical revelation." This revelation reaches its climax and fulfillment in Jesus Christ."

That pretty much sums up where I'm at, but much more articulately, and I've bought the book - the really big thick one called "Foundations of Christian Faith: Introduction to the Idea of Christianity" and now I'm really looking forward to reading it.

Here's another quote from Rahner

"Emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God's, that God's silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.”