15 Definitions of Contemplation

FREEDOM comes at a cost, but such a concept of freedom has its own benefit. It’s the space within that awkward place of our soul’s that are wrought as divided, called liminal space.

Freedom’s paradox is that it is found in the place we are apt to run from!

Freedom is available only as we stand apart from ourselves.

Freedom is the by-product of a greater contemplation that takes our lives from existing to transcending.

Now we enter true contemplation.

Here are some disconnected and autonomous thoughts on what contemplation is:

1.     Contemplation is stepping out of the world into eternity whilst in the backyard of your own mind.

2.     Contemplation is drawing aside the flurry of life, to look to the left or right, and there see Jesus.

3.     Contemplation is being, for a time, invisible and inaccessible, happily watching the world spin and toil.

4.     Contemplation is knowing nothing in a moment — direct from a state of knowledge, where knowledge has value, to unknowing through seeking to unknow everything.

5.     Contemplation is the inexplicable grace of God through the losing of everything transitory for the gaining of the things of eternality.

6.     Contemplation is rest that forsakes leisure, laziness and luridness, for the untold features of the Spirit known eternally now, beyond the world.

7.     Contemplation is craziness in the quiet, stillness in torment, and the opposite of our response to things that tend to anger us.

8.     Contemplation is everything we cannot do in and of ourselves, where a true contemplation is a gift of God; an absolute miracle.

9.     Contemplation is reading a book by reading ourselves into the fissures of the metadata of the story, and, in that, God speaking to us.

10. Contemplation is taking a walk in the park, a swim in a river, or a drive down a lonely highway.

11. Contemplation is where God speaks and we listen; it’s where we have nothing to give and we are in the position only to receive.

12. Contemplation is a long warm hug when our souls are empty, three deep breaths between gear changes, and a trip to the bathroom during the early hours.

13. Contemplation is the grace extended to humanity in order for a human to again become human.

14. Contemplation is feeling to complement faith, hope that comes to mean happiness, and contentment even in the midst of calumny.

15. Contemplation is everything our whole lives ever needed to know, communicated in one nanosecond.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.