Lecture 2

Contemplative Practices

One Perspective

Contemplative practices quiet the mind in order to cultivate a personal capacity for deep concentration and insight. Examples of contemplative practice include not only sitting in silence but also many forms of single-minded concentration including meditation, contemplative prayer, mindful walking, focused experiences in nature, yoga and other contemporary physical or artistic practices. We also consider various kinds of ritual and ceremony designed to create sacred space and increase insight and awareness to be forms of contemplative practice

 --CCMIS website (http://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/)

Contemplation as Pivotal to First Year Learning - Why

• Major transition

• Living arrangements
• Personal management
• Intensity
• Intellectual
• Personal
• Transitions require reorientation
• Being
• Thinking
• Feeling
• Seeing
• Contemplative practices promote the growth needed to manage transition

Contemplation and Presence

• Contemplation involves presence - living, thinking, and feeling in the moment
• Learning is fundamentally a contemplative exercise
• Embodied
• Active
• Transformational
• Some argue that contemplation amounts to single minded attentiveness

Contemplative Pedagogy

Brother Lawrence

Profile

• Nicholas Herman
• Born/died in France
• Former soldier
• 17th century Carmelite lay brother
• Worked in priory kitchen
• Sayings and letters collected posthumously (read online)
  
• Many today find his work inspiring
  

Mariam Kamell on Brother Lawrence and Spiritual Discipline

Prayer as Presence

He was never hasty nor loitering, but did each thing in its season, with an even uninterrupted composure and tranquility of spirit. “The time of business,” said he, “does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess GOD in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.

-- Brother Lawrence, Practice of the Presence of God: 9

The First Year of College

Learning to Be Present and Digest

• The first year of college/university life is a time for honing the skills needed to contemplate, be present, and read for intellectual/spiritual nurture
• One learns to be fully present and to be nourished by wisdom
• From the perspective of Catholic liberal learning, these tasks have a sacred quality - they are not to be treated frivolously
• These activities are transformational
• In some ways, they require those who would do them well to balance immersion with disengagement