Contemplative prayer and Christian discipleship

By Jonathan Montaldo

I am writing this series of articles to bring renewed attention to the work of Ladislaus Boros and Thomas Merton in regard to the role of contemplative prayer in the lives of aspiring Christian disciples.

Ladislaus Boros (1927-1981), once of the Society of Jesus, left its company honourably, later to marry and raise a family. Although his entire written legacy has been recently republished by Chalice-Verlag in Germany, this once famous personality in print and radio talks, has only one of his fifteen books translated into English currently in print, The Mystery of Death (Monkfish, 2020). A confessed disciple of Karl Rahner, s.j., Romano Guardini, and Teilhard de Chardin, s.j., Boros wrote specifically for laypersons about contemplative prayer and Christian discipleship. He was a professional theologian who translated perennial Christian values for a modern audience.

The Trappist-Cistercian Thomas Merton (1915-1968) remains popular internationally and his books in English are easily accessible. He was a prolific writer on meditation whom Pope Francis recognized as a bridge-builder in contemplative interreligious dialogue. Like Boros, he wrote embedded in a tradition of Christian and Roman Catholic contemplative prayer and was emphatically, like Boros, Christo-centric. He was a poet and spiritual writer, not a professional theologian.

With so many aging populations across the world, time has come to stress again the spiritual exercises of contemplative prayer and living. Without these spiritual exercises, billions might end their lives less fruitfully. If we are aging and not practicing contemplative, ascetical spiritual exercises, the last chapters of our lives could be bleak. If one is unskilled in the practice of solitude, for instance, old age will seem like confinement. In the best of all worlds in the future, all elder Christian disciples would have converted to living contemplatively.

These articles might be valuable to the young, but they are not the audience that with a sense of emergency I shall address. I am writing primarily for seniors who are on the precipice of less social usefulness. Without spiritual exercises in self-abandonment, we might face “the sacrament of our deaths” (Boros) with no reserves of energetic hope.

My use of “spiritual practices” owes much to the Stoics as interpreted by Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) as it does to Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) who regarded his Jesus-centered philosophy as primarily “a way of life”. In his chapter on “Spiritual Exercises” in his acclaimed book, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot offers an account of spiritual exercises utilized by the ancients to live philosophically, that is, contemplatively. His definition of the term “spiritual exercises” elaborates intellectual practices to achieve a transformation of being and perspectives:

“Philosophy for [the ancients] was an ‘exercise’. In their view, philosophy did not consist in teaching abstract theory nor much less the exegesis of texts — but rather exercises in the art of living. Philosophy is a concrete attitude and determined lifestyle, which engages the whole of existence. The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to be more fully and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it. It raises the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life, where they attain self-consciousness, as an exact vision of the world, inner peace, and freedom.”

Catholic contemplative prayer is for everyone

Contemplative prayer is foremost a practice to transform one’s perceptions and change one’s life by practicing the art of living as modeled by Christ. Boros, a Jesuit — like unto Jesus — and Merton are foremost “imitators of Christ” and speak to all outside their faith who cannot stomach a life of mindlessness without purpose, without hope of a personal and communal fruition eternally. More to come upon which I shall ruminate for our common good and the greater glory of God.

I confess that one can write about contemplative living without exercising it. So, even in so small an enterprise as these brief, six articles, I begin with humility. Thomas Merton believed that in the matters of being a Christian, loving God and one another with all our heart, we are always novices.