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This summer I was vacationing with my family in Europe when I was slapped in the face by a sentence hiding in a book. We were near the end of our adventure and had worn most of the print off our four Eurail passes. My wife and two daughters were napping, and by reading Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions, I was trying not to join them. Somewhere between London and Edinburgh, I found the words that left me red-faced: “Paul, whose letters epitomize the concerns of the early Church, knew what Jesus had taught, but he almost never quotes him.”

To anyone who knows me even superficially, my writing an article on contemplative prayer might seem ludicrous. By temperament I am far from being a natural contemplative. I am active (often impulsive), restless, and non-reflective. And anyone who knows my spiritual life well knows also that I have always struggled with disciplined prayer, in fact, with spiritual disciplines of any sort. How, then, could I be one who dares to offer others anything about this seemingly most advanced of all forms of prayer?

After graduating from high school, James Finley did something unusual. He became a monk. For the next six years, he lived at the Abbey of Gethsemane and learned from one of the great contemporary spiritual figures, Thomas Merton. Now married and the father of two, Finley has built a career as a teacher, clinical psychologist, writer, and speaker. He is the author of Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, The Awakening Call, The Contemplative Heart, and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God.

Ever since I’ve been a Christian, I’ve asked God for lots of things He hasn’t given. There have been times I’ve begged God for clear guidance on how to handle messy relationships or on what direction to move in a confusing situation, and it never came. I could name a dozen nasty spots in my life, probably more, when I’ve felt desperate to hear from God yet heard only silence.

David: I hope I have not embarrassed you by introducing you as Ate Thelma, but hearing you addressed in this way in your culture, I sense that spirituality remains more central to your culture than is true in the secularized West. You have lived in both worlds, completing some of your training in the U.S.A. Does this generalization seem true to you?

God led me to contemplative prayer through back roads.

I became active in church when I was a teenager and a very attractive girl invited me to youth group. God uses all kinds of ways to enlist people in His service! My next step was to be a Volunteer in Mission in the West Virginia Mountain Project after my junior year in college. Seeing the love and generosity of the Presbyterian men and women who served this group of churches in a poverty-stricken area profoundly challenged me; I wanted what they seemed to have.

This past summer, while awaiting the arrival of our fourth grandchild, I stayed at our son’s house in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. It’s an old house with small bedrooms and limited closet space. My bedroom, the smallest, presented minor living challenges. In the morning, my air mattress was pushed up against the wall to allow enough space to unfold the card table which held my laptop and working papers. This small room was where I studied, read, prayed, attended to wounds (the dog gashed my foot with her sharp claw), and wrote this article. It was also where I received guests; my two-year-old granddaughter came across the hallway each morning to do morning stretches with Grandma after she assisted me in pushing the air mattress against the wall.

As a woman from a conservative, southern, Protestant background, I am grateful for the grounding love in which my faith journey was birthed. The foundational gifts within this crucible enabled me to explore my spiritual self in the world without losing the essence of faith, even as the search would eventually lead to avenues of expression beyond the spiritual landscape of my early church life. I have been compelled for some time by the words of Paul in Romans 12:2: “Be not conformed to the world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (KJV). Within the context of my journey, the experience of transformation has been powerfully facilitated by two discoveries: poetry and the cultivation of inner stillness. Through these gates I have found that the search for this kind of renewal is part of the very fabric of life itself. It is a  search that can take a lifetime and, perhaps, not less than everything.

My favorite definition of contemplation is “the act of viewing steadfastly and attentively—as a piece of art for its own sake.” When we leave an art museum, having contemplated great art, we see life differently. Viewing art steadfastly and attentively affects us.

Spiritual direction is a process by which one person assists another in becoming increasingly aware of the action of the Holy Spirit in one’s life. This “assistance” often involves the simple encouragement to slow down and become more aware of God and his love.