Contemplation, transcendentals, "greatness of the soul".

The pure Transcendalists saw everywhere evidence of the greatness of the soul. -Octavius Brooks Frothingham

And what of the "greatness of the soul"?  That which is part and parcel imputed by our Creator, in as much as their is a Divine Idea, and we thusly are part of the Divine Idea, the infinite imagination of God.

The purest sensibility would be the rank ignominy of speculation, and the orgasmic bliss of the realization of the soul; we have a sin nature, a sin debt, but that is a terminus of knowledge--the very subject of speculation in the realization is so very beyond the intellect, and exponentially more sensible--hands in the air, and the brain unfurled and in a thousand different directions, countings accountings statistical metering and tabulations, forwards and backwards and tangents and cosines--the alchemy of a mathematic synthesis of what appears but fog in the glass.

The magic of absolutely nothing at all--that particular alchemy, as of contemplation--parsing that which is without paucity, and the emotional uptake of it, whatever one might have imprinted upon one's mind but such indistinction--realizing nothing in particular, but aware that there is, somewhere beyond the senses, an entire world: that was as much the faith, the practice of faith being sort of an empty, unoccupied stare, rather than the shot-gun repetition of scriptural sessions or hymnal singings.

Contemplation of God, for those precisely oriented in that regard, is a communion with God.

 "A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe."

-AW Tozer

 

Contemplation and learnings, dimensions between thought and prayer....

Always make it a practice to stir your own mind thoroughly to think through what you have easily believed. Your position is not really yours until you make it yours through suffering and study. The author or speaker from whom you learn the most is not the one who teaches you something you didn’t know before, but the one who helps you take a truth with which you have quietly struggled, give it expression, and speak it clearly and boldly. -Oswald Chambers

Immediately, talking about the synthesis between faith and knowledge, we know the heart can be mislead, and the mind will "poke holes" in our faith, but there is "heart knowledge" and "head knowledge".  Oh how the metaphors are used so differently even among the 66 books of the God's Word.

But that synthesis between faith and knowledge leads us to a kind of mystical contemplation, something blurring the dimensions between thought and prayer.....

Good deeds that happen from a good heart.

Just as the Pentacostals look for a move of the spirit, or other denominations might look for a code of conduct, or prayerfulness, or an appearance of meekness, contemplatives look for that prayerful meditative state, and in that, God is revealed in things all around the believer, in the everyday minutia, and Christ in all details, from the most important to the smallest of things.

In the opening Psalm, David says that those that meditate on God's law are blessed, but how many of us are simply given a few lifestyle edicts to act on, and that at most?

Could we not only ever do more, but be mindful of our own fallen sin state, and the continual need for God's grace and mercy.

We could do more still in the practice of love, and I say that, everyone, not pointing to anyone other than myself, but meditating on that too, the overgrowing practice of love, contemplation of God, good deeds that happen not out of necessity, but grow from a Christian heart.

Psalm 42, "the health of my countenance".

"...why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him, who is the health of my countenance; and my God." -Psalm 42.

To remember hope in God is the "health of my countenance", a sure way to elevate one's mood about worldly concerns.

The man that heeded the birdsong.

 

A man was concentrating hard, prayerfully concerned about his family. There were five of them, he and his family, all at various stages of life. Like anyone else, the family was not so different from others in the sense that they each had struggles of their own.

He was reaching out to God with his heart and mind, hoping for solace, for not only himself, in his concerns, but for the his family: the object of his concerns.

In hopes of relief from his weary mind, he went into his yard and walked around in the morning light.

The Bible tells us that there is nothing better than to lay down one’s life for his friends, but here he has invested, not his life, but his emotional well-being, leading him to a perplexed countenance. But here, too, he was prayerful and carried his cares to the Lord.

Suddenly there came a bird to nearby tree branch in the man’s yard, and the bird sang briefly.

“There you are Lord”, said the man.

Lost in culture and centuries of enforced church doctrine, is the concept of different levels of heaven. Peter and Paul each had writings about varying levels of heaven, and again, today, the concept is lost, exorcised from the consciousness of the church.

In Paul’s writing he noted a man caught up in the “third heaven”, who wasn’t sure at the time if he were alive or dead. He was having an experience, likely in the province of the mind or soul. Paul notes this as an experience of the Gospel and the Living God. Consider, as a side note, that this was before clearly established church doctrine, during a time when varying ideas circulated, even before some of the infamous heretics of the early church era.

Calling it being “caught up in the third heaven”, the text indicates an experience of God, a mystical experience that befuddled the mind, but encompassed and utilized the spirit—the person seeming out of body, and possibly even unaware of time and space. This is just as Thomas Merton defines Christian Mysticism as trying to reach to God with the spirit, instead of the mind.

Just as the world gets in the way of some good deeds and good intentions, for whatever reason, established doctrine, centuries ago, stamped-out some of those stray concepts. Here we are told so much in the so-called “secular world”, via capitalism and cultural items shared with various religions and forms of governments, that a thoughtful person can scarcely catch a moment of reverence of God, beyond an hour or two in a church service.

Doctrine is, at best, a pathway to God, but at worst it can seem like a locked doorway that blocks us from egress towards God, locking us into ritual and rote, “vain repetitions” more than the experiential Joy and Peace that can be accessed by earnest religion. We could become quite lost in all the rules and minutia that, while living a good life, we do not live our best life, in the full light of realizing the Lord’s grace.

And even that much can become empty, or even an object or dread, perhaps even boring as the believer goes through repetitive motions of corporate worship without any inner-prayer life, without the spirit or the consciousness taking time for reverence or communion with God.

Think on, pray on, lest we become like Paul, sinking below the waves.

Like that concerned man in the lines above, we look to creation, sometimes, natural formations for a revelation of God.

We know God to be the chief architect, the grand designer and the physical builder of everything that is. As science marches on, men observe and research ever-increasing layers of complexity, and even the most learned of them marvel at God’s handiwork.