An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation

at some moment, when we spontaneously stopped looking at ourselves as objects of fascination, we cease using the practice of contemplation as a means of controlling any aspect of our progress in contemplation. Each time we sit, it is as though for the very first time and we are too innocent to expect anything at all.

Whenever we turn to God, there is a light that shines and burns in us, guiding us to what we should do and what we should not do, and giving us all kinds of good instruction, of which we had no knowledge or understanding in the past.”

Its receptivity is not passive. It is a generous receptivity that contributes to the life all round it:

this inner spaciousness, perceived as always having been present, is at the same time always new.

The sheer generosity of receptive mind continues its expanse, an expanse generous enough to cradle in its arms the joys and burdens of a lifetime. Pain still hurts. Joy still gladdens. Despair still flattens. But we are less demanding that the present moment—whether pain, boredom, or bliss—be other than it happens to be.

As the twentieth-century Serbian Orthodox monk Thaddeus of Vitovnica writes, “Everything is constantly changing; nothing remains static.”

All these stories are the spawn of the originating story of blame. Adam cannot resist blaming God for the predicament Adam now found himself in, “the woman whom you put here with me—she gave me the fruit from the tree, and so I ate it”

Martin Laird, O.S.A., “Continually Breathe Jesus Christ: Stillness and Watchfulness in the Philokalia,” Communio 34 (2007): 243–263.

As John Chapman writes in his Spiritual Letters, “Progress will mean becoming more and more indifferent as to what state we are in.”

The simplicity of God is too intimately present for the thinking mind, whether reactive or receptive, to fathom.