REALISING THE SACRED -The Ways of a Contemplative Synodal Church
This book is a pastoral reflection. It quarries the wisdom of others. It asks: how best can we be equipped to bring the love of God to a fragile and threatened world, to empower all the baptised to become the missionary, synodal church of the first Christians and Popes Francis and Leo? Aren’t we doing that already? Yes and no.
It argues that a contemplative vision lies at the heart of Jesus. All Christians equally by virtue of their baptism are invited to imitate that love of the ‘Sacred Heart’. To cultivate a ‘loving personal relationship with Jesus’.
Yes – but how? We are to use prayer – personal, the Church’s prayers, the rosary, worship, the Eucharist, adoration, lectio divina, meditation.
Is anything missing? The book turns to the wisdom of the Church’s largely forgotten contemplative tradition and to the voices which are increasingly arguing for its restoration.
“By consciously reinstating, repositioning the contemplative vision, mind and practice (‘heartsight’) at the centre of the Church’s ‘mindsight’ (theology, teaching, beliefs), in its worship, life in parish and communities and crucially as the bedrock of its mission to the world, all these will be enabled to circle round, as planets round a sun, the gravitational pull of the love of God.”
But what exactly does all that mean? The book tries to explain how by the steady practice of ‘letting go and letting God’, of silent ‘contemplative’ prayer, of letting God speak; in not talking or praying or thinking at all – we slowly adapt the contemplative spirit and mind. In that spirit Jesus bids us not only to love our neighbours but also our ‘enemies’. The Heart guides the Head. It was and is the Way of Jesus we are invited to follow.
The book turns for aid in this to the Church’s mystics and the contemplative tradition stretching back to Jesus to Paul, past the Desert fathers and Mothers to the monasteries, to the Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich, St Benedict, St Francis, St Therese of Lisieux and a whole chorus of others. Contemplative practice has broken out of the monasteries and religious houses. It has always existed unacknowledged in our pews. The book describes the growing number of organisations opening the contemplative door in ways to ‘realise the Sacred’ and thereby to anchor worship, parish life and mission securely in the search for union with God.
Lastly the book argues that this spirit lies behind the ‘conversations in the Spirit’ which underpins the synodal process. In the spirit of contemplation we listen, we are silent and only then do we speak –out of minds guided and unfused by that ‘heartsight’ which is Christ’s.
Read the book for the full explanation of this crucial theme. The author prays that in this way the ‘Sacred’ may truly be ‘realised’ – as the very definition of the Church we love, in its mission to the world we love in Christ.
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