Contemplative hospitality

The contemplative church is a fundamentally hospitable church. The contemplative path is a gracious invitation to all to exit the tumult of everyday life with its onslaught of obligations and controversies and then slip down through the constant cascade of thoughts and feelings that flow along one’s stream of consciousness to the spacious inner landscape found on the ground floor of one’s own being where the very nature of the place and space within is stillness and silence. In the depth of one’s own soul each of us is welcomed with the infinity of God’s own hospitality into the original union that is the source of all that is and ever will be. One teacher has said that, “There is perhaps nothing so like God as silence.” This silence is within you and is the ground of your being.

Having been welcomed so hospitably into their own interiority contemplatives then make space in the church where it is safe for their neighbors to come in out of the weather of everyday life that they too might let go of attachments and obligations for a bit and rest in the presence of God who dwells within us all. To be clear contemplatives don’t make the rest happen, they don’t summon God who then comes when called, rather contemplatives clear the space and signal that it’s safe to retreat from the endless coming and going of daily living with its barrage of communications to rest for a bit in the stream of being that is our “participation” in the very being of God. All that happens in the rest is pure gift.

Contemplative hospitality is a signal to all who come our way that it is safe to pray without action or the fervor of need, rather our prayer is a posture of intention. The intent is to consent to, that is to say, “Yes,” to the presence and action of God who dwells within the soul as source and sustenance. 

For those who fear that the contemplative welcome is a trap to lure you into isolation and solitude forever separated from the troubles of the suffering world, do not be afraid. The contemplative path is decidedly not a summons to solitude. All contemplatives go forth from the deep rest of prayer into the world with a charge to join the suffering of the world in acts of service and sacrificial love. In this way God welcomes all God’s troubled children into His own heart through the hospitality of the contemplative church.