Contemplation as Worship; True vs. False Self
So what is this “contemplation” thing all about? What does it look like in a person’s life? It’s simply a form of worship—the purest form there is, I believe—what earlier generations referred to as adoration, reduced to its most basic form. There are several components to contemplative spirituality, but the most important is contemplative prayer. (We’ll get to the other ones in a few pages.) Many have learned the practice known today as centering prayer—a gateway into contemplation. This basically means simply waiting on God in silent adoration—a wordless prayer (or a one-word prayer) of just being in God’s company. To the natural mind, that may sound totally pointless, but its purpose is to bring us beyond the natural mind, to the place of silent surrender where, wordlessly, we can open our heart and mind totally to God. This is contemplation: being in a place of intimacy with God beyond the realm of thoughts, concepts, desires, memories or emotions, where God can mold and shape us to become more and more like him as we learn to die to self. By yielding every thought to God until the thoughts stop coming— if only for a breath or two at first—we learn to come to the place of detachment from thoughts, watching them as they come and go, but not becoming attached to them. There, we become more deeply aware of God’s abiding presence and love.
During centering prayer, you use a word to help you keep your focus on God. It can be one of the short names of God, such as “Christ” or “Abba,” or “love,” or whatever one- or two-syllable word God gives you to use as a reminder of God, and to help you to be present to God instead of your own thoughts—even thoughts about God. You don’t repeat the prayer word constantly, like a mantra; you only use it occasionally to help you refocus your mind on God and away from your train of thought (but very gently, not like a guard dog to chase thoughts away; that doesn’t work). It’s probably helpful to think of centering prayer not as a technique, but as steps on a path. Unlike a technique, where we are in charge, it has to come from God and from a willingness of the heart to allow God to be completely in charge. It begins with the opening of the heart, which again—like open heart surgery—is not up to us, except for the willingness, and even that we must trust God for; it has to come from Adonai Roph’ekha, the Lord our Healer.
Why is it important to get rid of thoughts? Because most of the everyday thoughts, mental images, memories, feelings and desires that float through our consciousness are either generated or used by the ego. What is the ego? It’s the false self, the pretender self, the voice inside that claims to be your true self. Other names for the ego are the small self or the false self…The way I see it, the false self is the expression of the old nature that continues to live in us even after we’re born again; it’s the face of the sinful, carnal self. That’s right, the same old sinful nature Paul wrote about in Romans 7:15-24, the thing in us that causes us to do what we don’t want to do and hinders us from doing what we do want to do, what we know is right. We see ourselves as the good Dr. Jekyll, but there’s a Mr. Hyde hiding in all of us. We can hide Mr. Hyde from others, we can deceive ourselves into thinking Mr. Hyde’s gone, but we can never completely hide Mr. Hyde from ourselves or from God.
Of course, if there’s a false self, there must also be a true self, and thank God there is. I think of the true self as the human spirit, what Peter called “the hidden person of the heart” (1 Peter 3:3-4—which, though addressed to women, is not just for women but applies equally to men, by the way). Thomas Merton said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self…We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin.”
It may be helpful to picture the inner man as being like matryoshkas— Russian nested wooden dolls, one inside another (5 to 7 or more in a set), each carefully and intricately decorated. With each doll you open, you find another inside, all the way down to the smallest doll which is solid, not hollow like the rest (that’s important). The largest of the dolls is like the outward appearance—the false self; get inside that and you find there are several more layers, hollow but highly developed. The whole process of centering prayer and contemplation can be a many-years-long process of allowing God to reveal to us the layers of our false self—and our true self, made in his image, buried in the depths of our psyche where we seldom encounter it.
Book excerpt from Contemplation: Only the Crucified are Truly Alive
Gary Michael Hassig
From Chapter 1, Beyond Worship, pp. 29-31