In my Prayer class, we are reading a book entitled Space for God. This highly unconventional book includes everything from Scripture to Van Gogh paintings, all designed to help transition our souls into communion with God and contemplation of the deeper realities of life. This may sound like fluff. It is not. The book is not fluff. The idea is that we have become so frantically busy that we have no space for God. As Robert Louis Stevenson says, “There is a sort of dead-alive people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation .. They have dwarfed and narrowed their soul by a life of work, until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material for amusement, and not one thought to rub against another while waiting for the train.” I do not want to be that person. But often I am. Often I cannot stand the thought of just stopping, just stopping and sitting with my son or watching him play with a toy or gazing in his eyes or smelling his cheeks or tasting his kisses. I’m not content doing nothing with him the same way I’m not content doing nothing with God. I don’t think I’m alone in this. We are a people who cannot stop. We don’t slow down enough to see. We don’t see into the spiritual realm, we don’t have communion with God, we don’t drink of the depths of God’s amazing presence. We have become bored with life and too afraid to sit still, for fear of what we may discover. We dull our minds with entertainment, afraid to be alone with ourselves.

Hence, this class. This class is an attempt to cultivate a prayerful, meditative, deep, reflective, contemplative life that steeps in the presence of God. The assignment, for this book, is to spend one hour each week interacting with the book and soaking in God’s presence. One hour. Not a lot. But that’s one hour more than before, and one hour more than the norm.

Coming to this task, I am more than aware of my being a beginner. In prayer I am a beginner. In the spiritual disciplines I am a beginner. In this attempt at living a contemplative, deep inner life I am a beginner. I am aware of my need for some structure, (i.e. one hour block of time with a book to read) in order to aid my attempts. As I was reminded at a leadership retreat this weekend, some people are naturally structured and some aren’t. I am. Tell me to sit quietly and meditate for one hour and I will run the other direction. But the book provides me with some structure, a springboard, if you will, for diving into the depths of God’s presence. So as I came to this book, painfully aware of my status as beginner, I read Postema’s thoughts on this very topic: “One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience oneself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they “know” from the beginning never, in fact, come to know anything … We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all of our life.”

How glorious! My status as a beginner in the life of contemplative prayer and meditation is nothing to be scorned or ashamed of! I am beginning. I am gloriously beginning, which means I have much in front of me. Just as it glorious to be at the beginning of a delicious meal, I am at the beginning of a delicious journey. I have much to anticipate … in fact, I’m beginning to drool.

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