The Contemplative Life

The last three weeks in my own life illustrate the reason why, in every culture, contemplative orders or aggregations have come into being and still persist despite the violent churn of Modernity around the globe. A sudden up-surge of work caused me to turn my head away from blogging—and the blog that I neglected most was Borderzone. We live in a layered environment in which the most demanding is the lowest level, the physical; the social is next; we will neglect it when we are ill or injured; and we neglect the one above that, the mental and the spiritual, when turbulence draws our attention downward.

I was editing novels I wrote about ten years ago to prepare them for publication. These books are not exactly time-bound in that they deal with an imagined future, and if anything has changed in the outer world since about 2000-2001, it has merely confirmed the trends that I used in my sagas as the base of my projections into the twenty-first century and beyond. But the effort to pummel these works into shape had to be done in the eternal Now, and my attention pulled me well in-land and away from the borderzone.

The men and women who formed and still inhabit the zone of contemplation, to give it a novel name, scorned the kinds of self-centered motives that make me wish to see my work enjoyed by others. For this reason they created environments for themselves in which “the world” was walled off to the maximum extent.

This has some curious aspects. One is that I wrote these novels while I held a demanding job and typically worked about 10 hours a day, not counting two hours of commuting. The writing itself, then, was a form of contemplative activity. It energized me and kept me sane. I used to carve out the time in the early morning, rising at 4 a.m. to write until 7. Contemplation is not, repeat NOT idle musing and idyllic walks. It is creative work. Its chief outer manifestation is concentration, but with the mind and heart in an invisible dimension. This is as true of writing as of sculpting—or cooking, or singing, or scientific work. The other aspect I would touch upon is that the contemplatives typically do a great deal of work, but they set boundaries to it, keep it as routine as possible, and pursue it in a structured manner. Some historians assign virtually all credit for the agricultural restoration of Europe to St. Benedict (480-547), at a time when the shattering of the Roman Empire and wide-spread depopulation had allowed large tracts of Europe to grow wild. In due course, the monastic orders, of which the first was the Benedictine, slowly accumulated immense wealth that, as other historians suggest, was the capital that Europe seized to underwrite the Industrial Revolution. In other words, not mere musing and idyllic walks with the occasional holding out of a begging bowl. But this sort of thing is not taught in our grade- and high-schools, therefore it comes as a surprise to some.

Indeed the contemplative life is not the contradiction of action, per se. But it has a very conscious and sophisticated view of action and thus harnesses its power more effectively. My own short-comings as a contemplative were demonstrated in the last several weeks. I allowed the excitement caused by revisiting my vivid imaginary worlds to break my usual routines. Live and learn. It’s possible at all ages. Indeed trying to do so is a sign of youth. A neighbor passed on to me just the other day a wise old saying that I hadn’t heard before: “If you want to stay young, keep going uphill.”