Streams of Living Water: The Contemplative Stream

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Howard grew up in the Jim Crow South. He daily knew the experience of being less of a person than those who looked different than him. He grew up being not quite enough. Not lovable enough. Not valuable enough.

But then, he got in his rowboat, and quietly slipped out into the Halifax River. The waves lapped against the side of his boat, and he would feel the rhythm of them beating the rhythm of his heart. Or he would go out at night to the shores in his native Florida. The night sky filled with stars, as the sea grasses blew in the ocean breeze. He experienced a mystical connection with God, beyond description or explanation. Here…he was enough. Beloved.

He wrote, “My response to the sense of Presence always had the quality of personal communion. There was no voice. There was no image. There was no vision. There was God.”

Howard Thurman is considered a Christian mystic. He is a part of a long tradition of Christian thinkers and authors and pray-ers who have taught us what it means to connect to God in a meditative, contemplative, or even mystic way. Richard Foster writes about this tradition in his 25-year-old book Streams of Living Water. One of six great streams of the Christian faith, the contemplative tradition has been with us from the beginning. According to Foster, we can see its beginnings in the writings of John. The Gospel of John, the Letters of John, and the Revelation of John are all rather mystical encounters with God. John and the Johannine community saw a similar connection to God as Howard Thurman did. It is no accident that these books are filled with natural images: light, bread, wind, water, beasts, rivers. This mystical, contemplative connection to the Jesus life is something that has been there from the beginning. John handed it off to the desert mothers and fathers, those who entered the wilderness in order to find truth, not “out there” but “in here.” They handed the contemplative baton to folks like Clare of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, and Brother Lawrence, all experts in the practice of prayer. What is sometimes called the Dark Ages intellectually was a time of wise contemplative study and writing about prayer. They handed off the work to Evelyn Underhill, Frank Laubach, Thomas Kelly, and Howard Thurman, all voices who wrote during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution; while the rest of the world decided all we needed was a more mechanized and assembly-line way of being, these authors sought an experience with God that was mystical and organic and prayerful. In fact, Foster calls this way of being the “prayer-filled life.” Today, Christian contemplatives and mystics continue their prayer-work, teaching us another way to be.

So what is that way of being? What is the Contemplative Tradition? Let me offer a handful of Foster’s strengths of the tradition, as a way of defining what it is about.

Three Strengths of the Contemplative Tradition

“All You Need is Love”

• At the heart of the contemplative tradition is the practice of a relationship with God. Foster uses words like “love,” “peace,” “delight,” and “wisdom,” to convey the emotional connection that this tradition seeks to have with God. In every denomination, since Jesus walked the earth, there has been a movement to move closer to an organic, emotional, and mystic relationship with God. Whether it comes through nature, like Howard Thurman, or the wilderness like the desert mothers and fathers, or a monastic life like Thomas Merton, Christian contemplatives have sought to seek the heart of God through their own hearts.

“From Head to Heart”

• …which leads us to a second point. The contemplative tradition moves beyond a cognitive and theological knowing of God, into an emotional knowing of God. The mothers and fathers went into the desert so that they would not be distracted by the things of the world. I have talked before about the difference between kataphatic prayer, which seeks to explain all that God is in our understanding and intellectual experience…to apophatic prayer, which acknowledges that in the end we simply cannot fully understand God. Foster uses the descriptor of “emptiness” to suggest that we at some point simply find ourselves at a loss of words, images, and descriptors of God. Like Howard Thurman wrote: “there is no vision, there is no image. There is only God.”

“The Power of One”

• Finally, a third point about the contemplative tradition. We as a culture are pretty terrified of being disconnected. Take away our phones. Turn off our internet connection. Place us in solitude. Disconnect us and we find ourselves unmoored and lost. But the contemplative tradition suggests that when we do this, that is when we can begin to find God. Find our mooring in the Holy. Connect to the ground of all being. The practice of solitude is one that allows us to truly know ourselves and our God…we should not run from it but embrace it. Prayer sage Henri Nouwen talks about intentionally quieting the distractions outside and around us…and then working to quiet ourselves and the chaos inside (which can sometimes be more distracting.) When we learn to practice solitude, we are blessed by the fullness of God’s grace.

But that is not the end of the story of the contemplative tradition. For all of its strengths, there are also limitations. Potentials for excess. You may not be surprised that they are connected to the strengths of the tradition.

Three Potential Weaknesses of the Contemplative Tradition

Too “Pie-in-the-Sky”

• There is a danger of mystics becoming, well, too mystical. Too pie in the sky. Too unhinged from the everyday experiences of life. The desert mothers and fathers have much to teach us about the inner journey, but also ran the risk of disconnecting from the outer experiences of the life of faith, out in the desert. Foster suggests that this tradition must be concerned with “diapers and babysitters and PTA meetings,” not just an ethereal mysticism.

Too Anti-intellectual

• Another concern is that this contemplative way, a heart-centric way of connecting to God, runs the risk of rejecting an intellectual faith. I hear occasionally folks talk about “faith versus science,” or “godless intellectuals,” as if God didn’t create everything that science and scholars study. We cannot forget the head, on the way to a heart faith! We need both.

Too Individualistic

• And finally, while contemplatives teach us about the inner journey of solitude, it cannot be at the expense of community. The Two-Way [Sermon Discussion Group] brought this up in their discussion last week: we cannot think that we can have all six of the streams figured out on our own, without needing others to show us other ways. They tied it to Paul’s body of Christ metaphor: we cannot all be contemplative eyes, without relying on the ears, feet, and elbows of the other streams. We ought to seek solitude…as a part of our journey to the other.

So, how do we celebrate the successes of the contemplative tradition, without falling to its excesses? Thanks for your patience, wondering when we would get to the Old Testament reading. I wanted to set the groundwork before I read Moses’s story in Exodus, because I wanted you to listen for how Moses might teach us that healthy contemplative way. As I read, ask yourself: how do you see Moses as an example of the contemplative tradition?

Exodus 3

¹ Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. ² There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. ³ Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” ⁴ When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” ⁵ Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” ⁶ He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

⁷ Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹ The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰ Now go, I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” ¹¹ But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” ¹² He said, “I will be with you, and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.”

¹³ But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” ¹⁴ God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ”

Do you see it? Let me highlight a handful of phrases here, as Moses teaches us the way to a healthy prayer-filled life.

Moses Teaches Us the Prayer-filled Life

“He looked”

• This sounds simple, but the bottom line is that Moses could have missed the most important call of his generation. The fact that “he looked” means that he was paying attention. He had his eyes open to the Holy. The contemplative tradition reminds us that if we rush through life, heads down, we may never see the burning bush just beyond our focus!

• Some of you may remember that part of my sabbatical a few years ago had to do with this idea. In fact, I looked up the calendar, and today is actually the 5-year anniversary of the beginning of my sabbatical, in which I studied photography as a spiritual discipline. Some of the contemplative scholars that I read talked about a “flash of perception,” which involves going through life open to the Holy in your midst. A part of my sabbatical practice, indeed continued for these last five years, has been to stop 6 times a day and take a prayerful picture, a “flash of perception.” The sun’s shadows on the ground. Brilliant colors of spring flowers. A simple and stark winter scene. As I fill the frame with this flash, it becomes for me a prayer. Like Moses, I choose to look.

“I must turn aside”

• But Moses did not stop there. He chose to look, but he also chose the intentionality of turning aside to see the flash of perception that caught his eye. Remember that this was a work day for Moses, in the middle of tending the flocks. Yet, he chose to pause with intentionality and see what God might have to show him in this moment.

• Cole Arthur Riley talks about this in her book This Here Flesh in her chapter about Wonder, in which she invites us to do the same thing—how do we turn aside? How do we stop in the middle of our busyness to pray, to be aware of what God is doing?

“Wonder, then, is a force of liberation. It makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway. Find God in the soap bubble.

Me? I meet God in the taste of my gramma’s chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone’s voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn’t I? My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.”

• So Moses chose to look, and chose to turn aside. And that contemplative practice is what made all of the difference. Because he did, he was able to hear God’s voice, speaking to him. Which leads us to the message that he heard…

“Remove the sandals from your feet.”

• Like the contemplatives, Moses chose to hear God, and enter into a space of love and trust, and prayerful worship (or worshipful prayer?) Think about the vulnerability required for Moses to take off his sandals. Like a cowboy taking off his boots in the wilderness, he became vulnerable in that moment. Which is what God asks of us in our contemplative practice. Let down our defenses. Set aside our assumptions. Practice risk and vulnerability and trust…for we stand on holy ground.

• Moses’ verbal version of this vulnerability is the phrase “Here I am,” an acknowledgment that he is open and willing to go where God wants him to go…which leads us to the final phrase…

“I am sending you to Pharoah.”

• This is how Moses resisted the temptation to stay in a navel-gazing, pie-in-the-sky moment. We don’t know about Moses because he went to a worship service at the Burning Bush Baptist Church. We know about him because God used him to free the people from their oppression under Egypt and the Pharaoh.

• But let me suggest that we wouldn’t know about Moses if it weren’t for the burning bush. Because that is where he received his calling. The experience of contemplation must be attached to action. God calls us through the moments of quiet prayer…so that we can raise our staff over the Nile. The ancient contemplatives called it “ora et labora,” prayer and work. And they must be tied together.

That’s what Howard Thurman believed, anyway. After those quiet moments on the river, or by the waves on the sea, his contemplation drove him into action. His prayerful study of the life of Jesus led him to believe that Jesus, like him in the Jim Crow South, had been raised with his back against the wall. And Jesus chose to stand up—in a nonviolent way—to that oppression. So, in the same way, Thurman looked to those whose backs were against the wall, and chose to stand on their behalf.

And it was said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King always had a copy of Thurman’s book in his coat pocket, as he marched through the streets. It was that contemplative mystic who became the spiritual founder of the civil rights movement. Moses. Jesus. Thurman. King. Those whose backs were against the wall, but found the strength in contemplative prayer, make a difference. May we follow suit today.