This Contemplative Life.

Imaginative Prayer, Dark Contemplation

When He sat down at table with them, He took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and offered it to them; whereupon their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him; and with that, He disappeared from their sight.
(Luke 24:30-31)

The visible Jesus who accompanied the disciples to Emmaus was less comprehensible to them than the invisible Jesus who accompanied them from Emmaus. But it would be a mistake to think that the Eucharistic moment of encounter was the one thing necessary to open the eyes of Cleopas and his companion, the preceding journey of the unrecognised Jesus and the unseeing disciples was an essential precondition for that dramatic denouement.

We could see in the post-Crucifixion episode uniquely recorded by St Luke an allegory of three types of prayer. From Jerusalem to Emmaus we have what Catholics have classically called meditation, that is, the mind engages directly but not analytically with the unfolding revelation of God in the world and in the Scriptures. It has not yet reached understanding but the foundation for understanding has been laid.

At supper we have the direct encounter of the mind and heart with the Logos of God. That this occurs in the context of the breaking of the bread and in the fellowship of the disciples is a sign that the Eucharist, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, is the preeminent form in which this encounter takes place (although it is not the only one.)

From Emmaus to Jerusalem we have contemplation. The disciples come close to Jesus through His absence. He is now without visible form, His presence is not physically tangible in any way. Yet now they have begun to know even as they are known, they can each say with with faith and hope what St Paul later wrote "I shall recognize God as He has recognized me." (1 Corinthians 13:12)

These are not three rival forms of prayer struggling for supremacy. They are component parts of an healthy spiritual life, and because we are all different we are each called to have and to develop those components in ways and in proportions which most suit our particular needs. Direct encounter is a thing which depends on the action of God, although we can do things to prepare ourselves for it. Meditation and contemplation although they are inspired by the grace of God do require from us determinate and discrete acts and so they shall be the focus of this essay.

St Maximos the Confessor wrote-
If you theologize in an affirmative or cataphatic manner, starting from positive statements about God, you make the Logos flesh, for you have no other means of knowing God as cause except from what is visible and tangible. If you theologize in a negative or apophatic manner, through the stripping away of positive attributes, you make the Logos spirit or God as He was in His principial state with God: starting from absolutely none of the things that can be known, you come in an admirable way to know Him who transcends unknowing.
(Second Century on Theology: 39)

We do not clothe God with fleshly and physical attributes and features, He did that Himself. When we pray we can let our mind rest upon Him as He was in the world and as He is after His Ascension to heaven. And the imagination is part of the mind. There are few things that Christians do which other Christians will not fiercely criticise and the use of imagination in prayer is no exception. Certainly any prayer technique is open to abuse, misuse and foolishness, especially if we forget that it is a means and not an end. However, the God who gave us an imagination and the God who illustrated His teachings through parables surely did not impose a ban upon us using that particular faculty under all circumstances.

There are a number of Catholic devotions like the Rosary or the Seven Sorrows of Mary which invite us to meditate on particularly vivid episodes in the lives of Jesus and Mary. One way we can do this is through visualisation or through other imaginative ways of entering into the events as they occurred in history. Doing this repeatedly doesn't necessarily lead, as you may suppose, to us rerunning the same mental images again and again. Rather it can lead us into seeing more and more deeply into the event as layers are added to layers, as we see and hear from different perspectives, as we come to inhabit a space which is not merely historical but is also archetypal and eternal.

St Maximos also said-
When He draws near to men who cannot with the naked intellect come into contact with noetic realities in their naked state. He selects things which are familiar to them, combining together various stories, symbols, parables and dark sayings; and in this way He becomes flesh. Thus at the first encounter our intellect comes into contact not with the naked Logos but with the incarnate Logos, that is, with various sayings and stories.
(Second Century on Theology: 60)

Imaginative prayer, or at any rate praying while holding conceptual images of some kind in our minds, can act, so to speak, as a gateway drug to the direct encounter with God in the same way that walking with the unrecognised Jesus was the gateway to recognising Him in the breaking of the bread. In its turn this encounter can act as the gateway to imageless contemplation.

When we pray in silence with a mind emptied of all forms and all words it does not mean that we present ourselves like the cleaned and emptied room which prompts our familiar demon to invite seven others more wicked than himself to come and inhabit (Matthew 12:43–45.) Our mind is not without a direction or a purpose, it is directed toward the One Whom we have encountered and whom we now know to be beyond words and images, and it is purposed to wait in that place because He wills us to do so until He shows Himself to us again. And if He never wills do do so again in this life we continue to patiently, lovingly, trustingly wait because the knowledge we have gained includes an assurance that what is best for us, that, and that only, is what He does.

What are the ends to which these forms of prayer are the means? I've mentioned one already several times. It is to grow in knowledge of Christ and through Him of each of the persons of the Holy Trinity. Gaining such knowledge is also a way of growing in love as we get drawn, by participation not by essence, into the loving exchange of which the inner life of the Triune God consists. And the more we know in the heart of our heart and in the depth of our soul just how perfect the self-emptying love which led the Logos from heaven to the Cross for the sake of redeeming His enemies is then the more we will seek to replicate it in the way we relate to our neighbours. Or, to put it another way, the perfection of love, a love which is made real through deeds, is the purpose of prayer.