The Connection Between Your Light and the Contemplative Stance

12/1/20

Dear friend,

When I was in college, I participated in a classics honors program that ran all four years and included the requirement to write an end-of-semester thesis paper working with at least two of the texts included in the canon of study that semester.

I loved this semesterly assignment.

It provided me with the freedom to choose my own subject within the helpful containment of the semester's texts. I could do anything, but I also had parameters of scope.

Also, I got to write, and think, and write some more.

Every semester, this was a gleeful exercise. What had caught my interest in the preceding months of study? Where did I want to camp out and puzzle things through some more? What had seized my imagination or pushed the expanse of my thought?

It was a chance to notice, in miniature, who I was becoming, based on what I cared about in that season.

And I wanted others to notice and care about this too.

One of my favorite conversation starters, around about the midpoint of the semester, was to ask my fellow students in the program, "What are you choosing for your thesis paper?"

I knew, in asking, I'd get a glimpse of who they were becoming too. What did they care about? What had captured their imagination and scope of thought?

When I was hired straight out of college to be the writing director of that same honors college—when it was literally my job to ask each and every student, "What are you choosing for your thesis paper?"—I thought I'd died and gone to job-placement heaven.

I say all this to say that I've cared about this question of our light—who we are becoming and what we're being invited to do with that becoming—for a really long time. I could tell you high school, junior high, and elementary school versions of these same kinds of stories in my life, too, which is to say that I've cared about it even longer than my college days.

The questions about your light burn bright in me.

But here's the thing. There are lots of ways of thinking about and exploring and naming our light.

I've come to know, both through the experience of my own life and the work I've done with others and the way my schooling and training eventually settled in spiritual direction and spiritual formation, that the lexicon native to me in this work is contemplative in its origins.

It's a lexicon of discernment, of invitations, of silence and stillness and listening and noticing and naming, of inner knowing and inner wisdom.

It's a lexicon rooted in prayer.

There are many ways to notice and name and live into our light in the world. The contemplative stance is ours.

Over the next few weeks, I'll focus our attention on the intersection of these two things: our light and our contemplative stance. How do they speak to each other? How do they inform one another? What do we notice about them? How might these noticings help us in the ways we keep living our lives?

I'm looking forward to sharing this conversation with you.

Until then, yours in light-bearing curiosity,
Christianne