Contemplative Prayer and Spirituality

By

Robert A. Jackson, Jr.

The Contemplative Prayer has been the most powerful and formidable form of prayer that I have ever practiced.

This is the prayer that I spoke about in my blog post about my Silent Retreat at Poustinia. That was an incredible experience. But let me tell you about the first time I practiced this form of prayer.

I was sitting in Spiritual Formation Class in Seminary studying the spiritual discipline of prayer. While my professor (Dr. Jackie Halstead) was introducing us to this new practice, I remembered what I had been taught at church.

She explained that she wanted us to practice this form of prayer for twenty minutes by writing to God for ten minutes and then waiting for God to answer in the last ten minutes.

I was reluctant to practice this prayer because it went against what the Church of Christ had taught me about how God speaks to us. Because of how I was taught, I believed that the Bible was the only way that God spoke to us now.

This assignment was given to us right before we took our lunch break. As my Aunt Emma Carter used to say, “Believe me you”, I fought against completing this assignment because of my strong belief in what I had been taught my entire life. But I didn’t want to miss out on trying this new type of prayer.

In the last ten minutes of our lunch break, I decided to give it a try. I cannot remember exactly what I wrote on paper. But I do remember that it had something to do with what I was experiencing with the tension that I was having with the Churches of Christ in my hometown.

After I had written what I wanted to say to God, I waited for the answer. Of course, I was skeptical because of my background. But I was not prepared for what happened next.

As I sat in the room filled with my classmates, I heard an audible voice with my ears, but the voice came from within my body. I don’t remember what the voice sounded like, but I remember what the voice said. I heard the voice tell me, “I’m with you my son”.

I was in awe. I was speechless. I had absolutely no explanation for what I had just heard except for the fact that this was just one of the ways that God responds to the Contemplative Prayer.

In that moment, with tears in my eyes, I knew there was more to God than what I had been taught. My experience of God communicating with me in that moment totally contradicted what I had learned and what I had taught about God’s mode of communication only being through the Bible.

This was my crossroads of where Tradition, Scripture, Reason, and Experience met each other. I knew that my Tradition taught against this event. But my Experience proved it was real. The Scripture I have previously used seemed to side with my Tradition and speak against my Experience. But there was Scripture that supported this Experience. Being that I could not logically explain my Experience, Reason had no answer. 

I had a decision to make. I knew that I could not share this experience with everyone because some would think I was crazy, and would think that seminary was causing me to slide down the proverbial “slippery slope” of either “leaving the church” or “teaching false doctrine”.  

I decided to start sharing this experience with a small group of family and friends. It was then that I figured out I was not going crazy. They had experienced something similar to where they had asked God for guidance and had either experienced something, heard something, or saw something they could not explain but knew that it was of God because it improved their spiritual walk.  

The people that I initially mentioned this to were fellow members of the Church of Christ. This was alarming to me because I now knew there were people who were a part of the same religious group that I had known my entire life that had experienced the same thing I did despite how we had been taught.

This and many other spiritual experiences caused me to want to explore the ways I had been stifled by the church tradition of my youth.

In future posts, I may share how God has used a dog to teach me about worship, how birds give me hope and encouragement, and how nature, songs, and music help me to connect to the ancestors and give me comfort and guidance.

Is this special revelation to draw people away from the Creator of the Universe, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Mary Jane, Pearl, and Maggie? God Forbid! I want to share my spirituality to help others to experience more of God than what American Christianity has allowed us to experience.