The contemplative life should not lead us just to suppress the imagination in order to get more pure messages from God. We must allow both for a contemplative prayer in which the imagination has little or no part and for a creative, imaginative, genuinely poetic side in our life. Our imagination must be able to click and find correspondences, symbols and meanings. It should point up new meanings. It should create nuclei of meaning around which everything can collect significantly.
— Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action1
Contemplative practices like Centering Prayer stress the beauty and grace of cultivating what Cynthia Bourgeault calls “objectless awareness” — in other words, a keen awareness that refrains from focusing on any one thing. As part of this process, we rely on a sacred word, phrase, image or even simply the rhythm of the breath, in order to release any internal thought, feeling, or daydream that clamors for our attention. Rather than zeroing in on this or that idea or notion, we release them all lightly, returning ever-so-gently to the sacred word which symbolizes our silent consent to the Spirit working deep within us.
Centering Prayer is a meaningful and spiritually rewarding exercise, and I commend it to anyone who feels called to deepen their spiritual practice through such attentive observance of silence. But it seems wise to remember that wordless meditation is not the only path up the mountain. No matter how beneficial silent prayer is, it is not meant to replace every other means for nurturing inner growth. And the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton understood this (even though he would never have called contemplation “Centering Prayer,” since that term was not used until after his death).
Merton sees spiritual methods like Centering Prayer, where “the imagination has little or no part” as needing a complementary practice, in which “a creative, imaginative, genuinely poetic side in our life” has free rein to pray.
While it might be logical and easy to assume that Merton is endorsing Ignatian spirituality here — a type of meditation that uses the imaginal faculty to foster a prayerful encounter with Christ or the saints — I believe Merton sees more possibilities for the imagination than just as a tool to facilitate prayer. He is not just telling us it’s okay to pray using the imagination; he is saying that spirituality needs opportunities where our imaginal potential can be truly creative. As Merton notes, “The imagination should be allowed a certain freedom to browse around, find its own spontaneous material and work with that material.”
What happens when we just let our inner creativity play, without giving it excessive guidelines or boundaries that it must observe? Sometimes, this might lead to aimless meandering, or an experience where all our wondering (and inner wandering) seems to yield little. But Merton knew that a slew of bad or half-baked ideas is the price we pay for the occasional insight that shines and glimmers with inexplicable genius. When we get out of the imagination’s way, it just might choose to dance with the Spirit. At that graced moment, suddenly everything becomes possible.
As I reflect on these words of Merton’s, I am reminded of a concept valuable to me as a writer: reverie. It’s that place where being lost in one’s own thoughts shades off into a pleasant daydream. It’s not practical and there’s no (immediate) profit in it. It also seems to be the opposite of Centering Prayer, where the game is to let all thoughts flow by — not to get lost in them. But when I am writing, I have learned that reverie is an important tool for my creative process. Journalist Burton Rascoe noted that a writer is working even when just staring out the window. What’s true for the writer is true for the contemplative — and the mystic — as well. May we all learn to pair our practice of intentional non-attachment to the reverie that puts us in touch with that creative place deep within us, where the Spirit dwells.
Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action: Second Edition, Restored and Corrected (Gethsemani Studies in Psychological and Religious Anthropology Book 1), Kindle Edition, p. 229.