I am a Poor Clare nun. By choice I live a life entirely dedicated to prayer and contemplation. I believe passionately in this contemplative life, and its powerful and irreplaceable contribution to a society approaching the third millennium.
On the international scene it is now good to be Irish. Our athletes, musicians and scholars have excelled, and we feel a legitimate pride and a joy in their achievements. At home, we are experiencing an almost incredible economic growth. This is so good. But what if this economic growth, this boom, leads to bust? What then will sustain us?
Despite all the signs of progress and prosperity, many are harshly disillusioned. Why has prosperity not brought the peace and security we long for so much? Why are so many of our young people finding life so meaningless that they are taking their own lives? Why are marriages breaking down at unprecedented levels?
These are the questions we need to ask ourselves lest we lose the greatest treasure we as people have, our spiritual heritage.
What has the contemplative to say to this disillusioned society? It is my firm belief that society is dispirited and disillusioned because by and large we are living "outside of ourselves". Cut off from our true selves, from our own deepest centre, we find ourselves cut off from God, our neighbour and nature itself.
We are disconnected and alienated, and deep loneliness is the result. The witness and the call of the contemplative life are to "come back", to come back to one's own heart, one's own deepest centre, and "live" from within there. If we do, then everything will look differently. If we don't, we are living on the surface and in the control of forces outside ourselves. What then of the contemplative life? What is contemplation? One could say in a nutshell it's about things we long for so much and search for, too, but search for in the wrong place. It's about a deep and abiding peace and joy that comes from the experience of being loved by God. I stress that word "experience". It's not an intellection, but an experience similar to two people in love. A single glance across a room can communicate that love without the sound of words. We can experience God in this way.
Some people are called specifically to devote their entire lives to contemplation. These respond in a genuine way to Christ's invitation to "come away by yourselves to a lonely place". But it is not a call to loneliness: rather is it a call to closeness, closeness to God, one's self, one's neighbour, and nature itself.
Dag Hammarskjold said: "The longest journey on this Earth is the journey inwards". Those who devote their lives to contemplation genuinely embark on this journey. Outwardly the contemplative life appears a life of utter simplicity. About six or seven hours are spent each day in prayer, and outside of that time the members of the community are engaged in very simple and ordinary work so that the prayer spills over and gradually transforms the whole day into a living prayer.
We all have a world of hopes, dreams, desires and ambitions within us, and these must be confronted, named and relinquished, because this call to contemplation is a call to become totally poor within. It is a call to create an inner space for God so that one can gain, as it were, power over the heart of our God.
Those who embark on this contemplative way of life do so, not for themselves: their agonies and ecstasies are for others. They stand before God in praise, thanksgiving and intercession. Their intercession is "a feeling with", "a solidarity with" the pain, the anxiety and the hopelessness of our world.
What of the rest of us? The truth is we all have a spiritual or contemplative dimension. Because this is so undernourished everything else falls out of place, resulting in confusion and disillusionment if not outright chaos.
We are so aware of our physical life. All our glossy magazines tell us in so many ways how to care for and pamper the body. We have an emotional life, and we have an intellectual life as well, but holding them all together and at their centre is the life of the spirit, our "contemplative dimension".
Most of us at some time in our lives have stood before an open coffin and contemplated "the remains" of someone we have known; and how apt the expression "the remains". As we look on, we know for certain that the real person is not there. The bodily remains are, but the spirit, the soul has gone out and entered eternity. Why then do we spend so much time feeding and pampering the body which eventually goes down into the earth and so little time on the spirit, which will live for ever?
Our world is God's gift to us. Our country, our land with its people with its culture is His gift to each one of us. The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart and in its power to reflect with meekness and responsibility, out of the integrity of its own soul.
We need to care for life, to nurture it, to develop it, to beautify it, but how can we do this if we don't pause to see which way we are going, pause to think of the giver of the gift and what His intentions might be?
As a people we don't have to go out in search of our soul. We have to come back home and drink from the same well within us as our ancestors did. They were so conscious of the soul as the divine spark within themselves. This divine spark sang out from their hearts: Christ is with me, Christ within me etc. Isn't this in the same vein as what Vaclav Havel says we need to explore? "To see the very Earth we inhabit linked with the heaven above us".
Sister Therese Murphy is Abbess of the Poor Clare monastery in Ennis, Co Clare
