In the end, contemplation

Instead of being the first Friday of this new year, today is the second Friday. As I continue, not so much to ponder as to wait and see, how my posting here will go this year, I initially determined not to post something today. But, since I have time and something prompted me, I've decided to write.

Discernment is not a straightforward affair. As I once again make my way through Saint Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, studying them, not "making" them, as it were, this becomes clear. What initially caused me to decide against blogging today was the thought of taking on the revival of the Friday traditio. It kind of exhausted me. As I was thinking quietly today about certain self-imposed commitments, I realized that once I make such commitments I put a lot of internal pressure on myself to keep them.

Now, keeping commitments is the right and good thing to do. But making commitments is where prudence and discernment need to be exercised. So, I am going to write it (for my own benefit): this is not in for a penny in for a pound. I am still going to wait and see how this goes. Okay, so much for blogging about blogging!

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My prompt for today came from Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Specifically from his book entitled in English simply Prayer. Even more precisely from the final part of the book's fourth section of Part One. This fourth section of Part One is called "The Reality of Contemplation" and the fifth and final part of this section is entitled "Eschatology."

In my Advent preaching over the years, I have often pointed out that salvation history, which is part and parcel of history and not something over or above it, can be viewed as two long Advents, that is, periods of waiting for the Lord to appear- his parousia. It is with this that Balthasar begins his section on contemplation as it pertains to eschatology or last things. Our contemplation, he notes, takes place in the age of the Church, which is "the 'end of time.'"

"Thus," our contemplation Balthasar states, "is situated between the two parousias of the Lord." This end time, he insists, is particularly suited to contemplation. This needs pointing out more now than when Balthasar wrote this in 1955 because we very often think and act as if this time calls for immediate and ceaseless action. Consider two responses to a question like "What would you do if the world were to end tomorrow?" The story has it that Saint Francis of Assisi was asked something like this by another friar as they worked in the communal garden. Francis replied by saying he would just keep working in the garden. Martin Luther once quipped: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree." Contrast those to responses to the funny but often sincerely meant quip: "Look busy. Jesus is coming!"

"There is no greater humility," Simone Weil observed, "than to wait in silence and patience."

Frankly, nothing gets more tiresome than all the things, as a Christian, I'm supposed to be doing. Von Balthasar posits something different: "So this 'waiting' means that our life in the Church is emphatically contemplative." It's not as if God is waiting for me or even for us. Rather, we wait for Christ.

He does not insist on contemplation to the exclusion of action. Because the world has not yet fully realized its redemption in and through Christ, any fruitful activity "is an activity in the strength of the grace, already bestowed, of the New Covenant" and this is nothing apart from "the strength of contemplation."

Our first traditio for this year is the Anima Christi prayer: