From time to time, it dawns on me that surrender is at the heart of what contemplation has come to mean, at least in my own practice. It’s a state that doesn’t really lend itself to being described dualistically – surrender to anyone or anything – but more a quality of attention that relinquishes any attempt to interpret, let alone direct. It doesn’t take an object, in fact.

Such surrender is easier to conceive of, or at least to describe, in religious terms; but that brings us again to that dualistic “surrender to”, and that is not what I am trying to express. An inner sense of release is more like it: alert and wakeful, but not irritably questing, or looking for words to describe something that might be carried off like a prize back to the world of the transactional.

Of course there is a paradox here – there always is! – but language can only go so far, helpful as it is. Richard Rohr writes:

Reality is paradoxical. If we’re honest, everything is a clash of contradictions, and there is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying. St. Augustine called this the “paschal mystery.”

Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. At least we “worship” these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus…

The easiest thing, so easy that we mostly do it without ever recognising its being done, is to put our own interpretation on spiritual events. If we know what we have experienced, if we can even stand over against it as one who experiences, then we feel we can keep it – and in so doing, it is lost. Or we are; only if we truly admitted that, we might be back on track.

Stillness, then, is at the heart of our – what, prayer? It is more than a mere discipline, this sitting still. What rises in the stillness holds us, as it always has. It is the source and end of all that is, and precedes time itself. Light is possibly as near as we can get…