Posted on: February 5th, 2009 ++Rowan on Contemplation
“To use a word like ‘dispossession’ is to evoke the most radical level of prayer, that of simple waiting on God, contemplation. This is a complex area: let me venture some dogmatic assertions. Contemplation in its more intense forms is associated with apophasis, the acknowledgement of the inadequacy of any form, verbal, visual, or gestural, to picture God definitively, to finish the business of religion speech (the acknowledgement which is at work in praise as well), and the expression of this recognition is silence and attention. Contemplation is giving place to the prior actuality of God in what is misleadingly called ‘passivity:’ misleadingly, because it is not a matter of suspending all creaturely activity (as if that were possible) in pure attention to the divine void.” — Rowan WIlliams, On Christian Theology, p. 11.
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