Answering the Contemplative Call by Carl McColman

Author:Carl McColman [McColman, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612831756
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing
Published: 2013-01-31T23:00:00+00:00

Behold!

“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything,” said Julian of Norwich.49 This simple statement not only provides an important clue to the heart of mystical spirituality; it also points to the centrality of beholding as the essential contemplative practice. Our longing for God arises out of God's love for us—a love that beckons us to this fullness of joy, by inviting us to behold God in all.

John Skinner, who translated several mystical classics including Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love into contemporary English, has this to say about beholding: “Perhaps the mental image to be conjured is a boy gazing with adoration across the room at the girl he knows loves him and she returning his glance with reciprocal love.”50 Beholding, in the mystical sense, is so much more than mere seeing or looking. It involves gazing, loving, receiving love, a sense of mutuality. We behold God in response to God beholding us. Maggie Ross, the Anglican solitary who has written eloquently on the centrality of beholding to the contemplative life, notes that “in our core silence, through our beholding, we realize our shared nature with God; we participate in the divine outpouring upon the world: incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection become conflated into a single movement of love.”51

Ross also points out that, despite the fact that many modern translations of scripture have replaced the word behold with much more anemic words like see or even remember, both God's first word to humans (Genesis 1:29) and Jesus's last words to his disciples (Matthew 28:20) include the word behold. This is God's first and final call to us, the heart of the contemplative call: Behold. Behold God's presence in your life, whether seen or unseen, felt or unfelt, sensed or at a level deeper than sensation. Behold God's love for you, implicit in your desire for love and your ability to love, wounded and imperfect as it may be. Behold God's call—the very call summoning you to this intimate, transformed way of seeing. This call to behold is implicit in your awakening, no matter how subtle or dramatic your sense of being awakened may be. Even if you have no sense of being awakened, this call is yours. If you in any way long for God or God's blessing in your life, this call is hidden in the heart of your longing.

Beholding is about learning to see mindfully, to watch, to pay attention. One of the Desert Fathers—whose name is lost to us but who was thought to be named Macarius and so is known to us as “Pseudo-Macarius”—compared the act of beholding Christ to an artist's model holding his or her gaze steadily on the painter while the portrait is being made:

Just as the portrait painter is attentive to the face of the king as he paints, and, when the face of the king is directly opposite, face to face, then he paints the portrait easily and well. But when he turns his face away, then the painter cannot paint because the face of the subject is not looking at the painter.

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