Contemplation is Judged by its Fruits

True contemplation, as the mystics are constantly assuring us, must always be judged by its fruits. If it be genuine, work has been done during the period of apparent passivity. The deeper self has escaped, has risen to freedom, and returns other than it was before. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism P. 241

When one looks on God in contemplation, it is not just for the satisfaction of the one who contemplates. The contemplative looks with loving and adoring eyes upon the God of love, he desires to be totally at one with God, and seeks to be more like God.

Seeking to be more like God, the roots of the spiritual plant are in the soil of the essence of God. Thus the plant gets its divine spiritual nourishment, causing the spiritual fruit to grow and mature, and the contemplative to return from his time in the presence of God other than what he was before.

I have tried to express this in the following poem Cocoon.

I wind silk around my being,

Silk spun from my own inner self,

I bind myself in darkness,

To be transformed into a new being

Of light and freedom.

I am becoming a winged creature,

A being capable of spiritual flight

Into the rarer atmosphere,

Nearer to the Creator of life.

I learn to temper the once

Destructive powers of my will,

Binding them with silken bonds

In the dark, silent cocoon.

In the quiet darkness

My being is transformed;

In the silken, gold-glittered,

Chrysalis, hidden and

Protected ’neath my Creator’s hand.

Slow is the secret process within;

So much to be done; change

Cannot be rushed, if beauty

Is to be the new being’s end result—

If my transformed being,

My freed, winged being,

Is to be revealed, soaring

In rarefied air

To the glory of God.

© Judith Lawrence  September 2011