In this one-paragraph chapter Anonymous tells us “who should engage in this [contemplative] work of
grace?” (67)
More precisely,
Anonymous unpacks this concern by tellings us who should practice contemplative prayer, when should
that person do it? and how it should it be done. Contemplative prayer, he says, is for everyone whno “forsakes the world and
the active life to dedicate [herself or himself] to the contemplative life.” It
doesn’t make any difference—not a whit!—if such a person has or has not been a
“chronic sinner.”
It should be noted,
however, that while Anonymous in this chapter seems to say that someone inclined to contemplative prayer and living may wish to
become a monk, nun, or hermit, he does not
exclude people whose lives may be described as “active,” that is,
engaged in
compassionate activity in the ordinary work-a-day world. As you may remember, in his “Preface” he says
that such people may be “stirred by God’s mysterious Spirit, allowing them to
participate in contemplation at the highest level from time to time” (6).
Anonymous might well have in mind the kind of Christian from another well-known contemplative, Walter
Hilton (ca. 1340-1396), wrote his “Mixed Life,” a letter sent to a devout
lay of wealth and household responsibility, advising him not to give up nhis
active life to become a contemplative, but to mix or combine the two. Such a possibility means that we may
live contemplatively, maybe not as monastics or nuns or hermits but as ordinary people who are in
love with God and want to “be” with him.
Might it be that this understanding motivated
Karl Rahner, an insightful Roman Catholic theologian, to say several years ago that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist"?
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