Afghanistan
Do not these words “contemplative” and
“contemplative vocation” frighten you. Do
not picture
an exceptional vocation so high that most people can never come near it.
Brother Charles of Jesus tells you what it means. It
is a
completely simple, trusting and loving attitude of someone talking
intimately with Jesus. It is the affection of a little child
for
his father, the confident sharing of a friend with a friend:
When we love someone, we
want to speak
to him endlessly. Prayer is nothing else: a familiar conversation with
our Beloved. We gaze at him, we tell him we love him, we
rejoice
to be at his feet. (Brother Charles of Jesus)
Praising God means to lose
ourselves at
his feet in words of admiration and love. It means to tell
him in
all the ways we know that he is infinitely perfect, infinitely worthy
of love. It means to tell him over and over again and never to stop
saying that he is beautiful and that we love him. (Ibid.)
This is the essence of prayer and the meaning of contemplation.
As you work, as you come and go, as you pass among the crowds,
to be
a contemplative will means simply that you try to turn to Jesus within
you and to enter into conversation with him, as with the one you love
most in the world:
May God be the
King of our
thoughts, the Lord of our thoughts. May the thought of him
never
leave us, and so everything we say or do or think will be for him and
will be guided by his love. (Brother Charles)
Then you will not lose your way in the midst of the
world’s activity:
When you love, you do not
lose sight of
the one you love. When you love you think of only one thing,
the
one you love. You worry about only one thing, the good of the one you
love and possessing him. When you love, only one thing
exists,
the one you love. When someone loves God, can there be room
in
his heart for material cares and worries? To pray is to think of Jesus and love him. The more you love him, the better you pray.(Ibid.)
