Interviewer:
One of the great challenges of our time is the rediscovery and renewal of the Christian mystical tradition. Hi, I’m Jim Arraj, and my wife, Tyra, and I are at the Kino Institute in Phoenix, AZ, to visit Ernest Larkin, one of the pioneers in this modern attempt to reconnect with the Christian contemplative tradition.

Father Ernie Larkin:
Well, my name is Father Ernie Larkin, and I’m a Carmelite of the old observance, O.Carm. I just celebrated my 50th anniversary as a priest this year, so I’ve been around a long time. I’ve spent my whole life in educational work. I’ve never been in a parish, never been on the missions except visiting and helping out in parishes, but I taught for 20 years in the Carmelite seminary in Washington and at Catholic University.

And then I came out West in 1970 and worked with the laity here mostly—also the clergy and religious. We started this Kino Institute, where we’re meeting right now, in 1972. There’s no Catholic college in the whole state of Arizona, so this was to supply the pastoral education that would be available in a Catholic college were there one here, and so we rather grandiosely called this “a college without walls.” So it’s flourished and done a lot of good, and I’ve been part of it most of that time.

I’ve also done a lot of retreats and seminars and short courses here and there, taught summer school in many places. I’d like to start by talking a little about this document called The Institution of the First Monks. It’s a document that comes from the 14th century—dated at the present time to 1370—and the author is a Spanish Carmelite, a Catalonian named Philip Ribot.

This document has been around a long time. We’ve known about it; we’ve used it. But it wasn’t given the importance it is getting today because we didn’t realize the intrinsic nature of the document. It was looked upon in my youth as a legendary account. In fact, it used to be dated way back in the 5th century, and it has the old Elijah tradition—the founding of the Carmelite Order by Elijah on Mount Carmel in the 9th century. That whole story is recounted in great detail in this book.

Because of that fact, when we realized that the Carmelite Order was not that old—it was founded in the 13th century, early 1200s in the Holy Land on Mount Carmel—well, this book assumed less importance because it was looked upon as being very legendary. However, it was always regarded as an important religious document because it describes the life of the Carmelites in ideal terms. In the life of Elijah himself, he represents the kind of life that Carmelites would like to pursue, and it’s a life of contemplation and prophetic action.

This document has been studied in depth in the last 10 years by an Australian Carmelite named Paul Chandler, and he headed up a team who presented a workshop on this book a few weeks ago in Washington, DC, at the Washington Theological Union. I attended it, and it was a very marvelous experience. There were Carmelites from every observance, both Calced and Discalced, and everyone was much taken by the presentations because it opened up the radical—and I use that word in its etymological sense—the radical contemplative dimension of the Carmelite Order.

One of the speakers was a Dutchman named Heine Blumenstein. He’s a Carmelite who teaches at Nijmegen in Holland, a professor at the Catholic University. He commented on the second chapter of the first part of the book, which has to do with the aim of the Order. The aim of the Order, according to this document, is (first) to present to God a pure heart, freed from every stain of sin, and (second) to experience in this life the sweetness of the divine power and presence. That’s not an exact quote, but it’s close.

The document points out that the first part of the Order’s goal is attainable by ordinary human effort, and the second part is pure gift of God. And so the first part is the ascetical; the second part is the mystical.

Well, this Heine Blumenstein studied the document in its context and in its sources—namely, John Cassian—and he maintained that this double goal of the Order was not a separate ascetical aim that one pursued and maybe, if you reached a high degree of excellence, God would give you that free gift of contemplation. He says that isn’t the picture of the document at all. The picture is that God inspires us to get going on this search, and we take the journey step by step. The beginnings are our own efforts under grace, but we enter the center of our life where God dwells, and the action of God, which has been covert up until this point, becomes overt now. God takes over, and the person is in that new mode—but it’s the mode that was there all along.

So this document presents a very optimistic view of the relationship between asceticism and mysticism, and it holds out the mystical goal as a real possibility for one who will get on the journey and cooperate with grace. This was very illuminating to me. I liked especially the fact that the mystical element was part of the journey from the journey from the beginning—it was interior to that ascetical life—and it would come out into the open eventually if you persevered. So I say that is optimistic, and it gives a more hopeful presentation, I think, of contemplation as a goal in life than one would have if the two ends were not so closely interconnected.

The practical side of pursuing a contemplative life that hopefully would issue in contemplation has engaged me in terms of retreats. The last 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time giving retreats, most of them having to do with the contemplative life, or more specifically, contemplative prayer. I personally think that contemplative prayer is THE way—with the proper support system—the way to grow in that mystical experience of God that The Institution of the First Monks refers to.

So I’ve been trying to design a method of contemplative prayer in my retreats, and the method comes out of examining a lot of other methods that are proposed. I begin with lectio divina. I present lectio divina, which is a very popular form again today of contemplative prayer in the wide sense. It can mean very many things to different people. So lectio divina as such, I would say, is contemplative prayer in a wide sense. I want to be more specific about contemplative prayer.

I like to locate contemplative prayer between the third and fourth acts of lectio divina. The four acts are: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation. I think contemplative prayer, as a form of prayer—as a method—fits between those last two, because contemplative prayer is the choice of being quiet, of holding oneself distant from thinking and imagining and expressing feelings, pouring out your heart. Contemplative prayer is a silent prayer. It’s alone. It’s being very present to the Lord as best you can, saying nothing—being loved by God. That’s what contemplative prayer is. I use Edwina Gateley’s little psalms; she describes contemplative prayer beautifully in a number of little phrases like that.

That’s a form of prayer that we choose to do. I don’t have to wait until God is calling me in a special way or moving me in a special way to do that. I choose to be quiet and silent and alone, and I can therefore control that action. I say that is contemplative prayer.

Now, contemplation is what one hopes will be given as I pursue this goal of contemplative prayer. I don’t know when contemplation is present in my prayer. I suppose if I am a very holy person, I can be more aware of contemplation in a direct way. But for the most part, in my own case, I don’t know if I’m experiencing contemplation in my contemplative prayer—but I’m making myself open to it. I’m making myself vulnerable to the in-breaking of God, and I think that’s a legitimate way of praying for those who feel called to pray that way. And I think it’s a wonderful practice to develop.

So I start with lectio divina and say lectio divina is part of contemplative prayer. It’s presupposed—not necessarily immediately and directly. I don’t have to engage in lectio divina when I engage in contemplative prayer, but I have to have lectio divina as a background in my life. I have to have a scriptural mindset—a scriptural setting—if I’m going to pray as a Christian contemplatively. That’s the first quality I set down: it has to be scriptural.

The second quality I say is Christological. I pick this up from Teresa of Ávila, who places such immense importance on the sacred humanity of Jesus. Teresa prayed contemplatively with her “prayer of recollection.” She describes it doctrinally in many places, but I think the best place to understand what she’s talking about is her own life and to observe how she came to see her contemplative prayer as really “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ,” allowing the Lord to take possession of her being and be incarnated—enfleshed—in her being. In her imagination, her mind, her will, her whole being, Christ became more and more present, and that was her way to God.

Once she learned this way of praying—which she developed from Osuna’s Third Spiritual Alphabet—she prayed this way all her life. When she departed from it for a couple of years, she suffered some bad effects, and through the instruction of the Jesuits she returned to this practice of contemplative prayer that is very Christological. So that’s the second quality I set down for contemplative prayer: however we pray, whatever method we follow today, it has to be rooted in Christ and in the idea that we are taking on a new configuration in our lives—a new imaging—of God in Christ Jesus in our life.

The third quality is from John of the Cross: the apophatic, the mystery quality. For John, contemplative prayer is not a special category (as far as I know). John talks about meditation and contemplation; he doesn’t talk specifically about this “contemplative prayer” that I am describing, but it’s very close to what he identifies as “loving attention to God.”

John practices loving attention to God when he can—when he exhausts the usefulness of discursive meditation and reasoning. The soul, in John’s teaching, is forced into this new way of praying—the person can’t pray in the old way, and so they pray in this new way. There is a transition in John’s teaching—especially in Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book II, chapters 12–16—John definitely is describing a transitional state where I think you can locate what we’re talking about—contemplative prayer. But his categories are cleaner and more distinct between what I can do and what God does (therefore: meditation and contemplation).

I think what contemplative prayer does—use this image—is “raise the bottom.” Twelve-step programs used to say that you have to hit bottom before you can be healed. Now people say you don’t have to hit bottom; you can raise the bottom and get into the steps. In a similar way, I think you don’t have to reach the point where contemplation is definitely a strong factor in your life; you can raise the bottom. You can hope to promote this kind of experience, and so you pray contemplatively.

I think what John brings to the question is the fact that in contemplative prayer we don’t engage in a lot of activity. We are simply there, waiting for the Lord. We’re present to the Lord. That’s the apophatic—or spiritual—aspect.

The next author I look at for designing this prayer form is The Cloud of Unknowing. I take The Cloud here—even though it’s not in chronological sequence; it’s a couple of centuries earlier than Teresa and John—because I want to introduce Thomas Keating and Centering Prayer as a form of contemplative prayer, and they depend very much on The Cloud. Especially Keating who identifies Centering Prayer as consenting—consenting to the action of God in your heart. That consent is an act of your will; it’s an act of love. The Cloud of Unknowing emphasizes that we don’t pierce the cloud by our thoughts, but only by our love. Keating picks up that idea and helps a person move into a state of quietude and aloneness with the Lord. He suggests using the holy word as a support when you’re losing focus, and that support is simply and solely an act of consenting to the divine presence and action of God.

My final element in this picture is the element of silence, and I take this from John Main because  John Main comes along and teaches a way of Christian meditation. He’s not as well known as Thomas Keating, but he’s becoming more known in our country. He’s an Englishman who learned to pray with a mantra under a Hindu swami as a young man. He brought this way of praying with him to the Benedictine monastery he entered in England, and he was dissuaded from praying with that mantra because that wasn’t the Benedictine way; he was told to use discursive meditation. He looked upon that later as a loss.

When he was headmaster of a prep school in the United States, in Washington, DC, he discovered his way of praying with a mantra in John Cassian, and so he took up that form of prayer again and proposed it, taught it, widely in the remaining years of his life, both in Montreal and in London.

John Main’s way of contemplative prayer is to emphasize the silence—emphasizes the poverty: emphasize the fact that we are going to receive God in proportion as we are open to God with poverty of spirit. His prayer is a very “dry” saying of the holy word—and his holy word is Maranatha. You say that holy word, and that’s the prayer. You don’t have anything else to do in the prayer but say that holy word and be present to the Lord. Don’t get lost in thinking or feeling or imagining—just say the holy word and be present to the Lord and you are cultivating what he calls a very unselfish attention to Christ. That exercise, that discipline, will bring one into the presence of God and the gift of contemplation more and more.

I argue that his prayer is an adequate summary of those qualities I’ve been talking about. In the retreat, I develop the support systems necessary for practicing this kind of prayer—namely, Teresa’s detachment (which I identify as biblical faith), Teresa’s humility (self-knowledge), and Teresa’s community/fraternal charity. John Main puts a lot of importance on the fact that this form of prayer brings you into the center of your life where you meet everybody; where you meet people—it’s a communion goal as much as a union-with-God goal.

I just think that John Main’s prayer is quite a good way of praying. I’ve been using it myself for about a year, and even though I still find it very dry and dreary, it’s still a wonderful way of praying for me. I think it’s very much like the way St. Thérèse of Lisieux prayed in her convent years. When she went into the convent, she entered one long dark night—it was just darkness—and she prayed by simply accepting that darkness in faith and loving God anyway. It had nothing of self-satisfaction in it whatsoever; it was a very dry, desert prayer of aridity. I think John Main’s teaching is somewhat along the same line as hers.

Well, the question is: how does contemplative prayer fit in the categories of meditation and contemplation of St. John of the Cross? Contemplative prayer, as I propose it, definitely belongs to John’s “meditation.” It’s a very simplified way of approaching God by your own efforts and methods—using your faculties in a certain way—to achieve the gift of God, the hope that God is going to come to you and that God is going to be present to you.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently that Karl Rahner’s transcendental theology is a real help here, because Rahner maintains that God is coming into us with infused contemplation—he uses the very words “infused knowledge and love.” God is coming into our life in all our activities, in our meditation, as much as in the extraordinary gift of contemplation that a Teresa or John would have. Rahner’s theology of “ordinary mysticism”—his theology of the experience of God in ordinary daily life—I think is a great help to see the validity of praying contemplatively the way I’m describing it, and not letting yourself open to quietism, for example, but really being attentive and hoping therefore that God is coming into your life. In Rahner’s theology, God certainly is coming into your life if you’re spending time there attentively and lovingly. So there are these elements of at least ordinary contemplation. Maybe the contemplation is not so strong that it’s out in the open and self-validating, but it’s there, I say.

Interviewer:
If someone is starting something like Centering Prayer and they’re told to simplify their activity, sometimes they’re left with the impression that they’re not using the faculties. In the contemplative prayer you’re describing, are we not using the faculties, or are we using them in a very simplified way?

Father Ernie Larkin:
I think in the kind of contemplative prayer that John Main teaches—or Thomas Keating and the Trappists teach under the rubric of Centering Prayer—I think in those types of prayer you certainly are using your faculties in a simple way. You’re not engaged in discursive reasoning, really, but you’re using your mind, and your imagination, and affective faculties in a very simple way.

Now, John Main promotes a more “abstract” approach to prayer than Thomas Keating. I think Thomas Keating’s prayer, as I understand him, is a more natural way of just being present affectively to the divine indwelling. But John Main says: say the mantra, and that empties your mind; that creates the space for God to come. I think that still is something you’re doing though—it’s not just sitting on your hands. You are praying “Maranatha—Come, Lord,” and that is something very real you’re doing. So I do think that this practice does involve some human activity on the part of the pray-er.

The “loving attention” that John (of the Cross) speaks about, for example in The Living Flame, is the response of the person to the gift of contemplation that is there—so it’s part of the contemplation. The way I’m using “loving attention” takes a bit of liberty with John’s words because the loving attention I’m talking about is something in my control; I give it in the hope that something be returned from God. But even in John, this loving attention has some free exercise involved, because he says you use this loving attention as long as you can, but if you’re moved into solitude or listening, you forget even the loving attention. So there is a certain openness there, I think, to a broader interpretation for it.

The question is “Why is this form of prayer attracting so many people today?” I think it’s attracting them because they aren’t able to pray in the ways that are traditional. I don’t say they’ve “exhausted” these ways in the sense of John of the Cross, but these ways no longer appeal to them; they tried them and weren’t getting anywhere, and they’d still like to be on the journey—they certainly are still on the journey. So this is a new way of praying that appeals to them.

I have a little phrase: I speak of the people who are in the “dark night of the senses—garden-style variety.” These are people who’ve been struggling and gotten nowhere in their life, tangibly or according to the way they feel. They pray and their prayer seems to be very distracted; they’ve started over many times. They still have the same faults they’ve had all along. They’re kind of depressed—maybe about their vocation, maybe about not having a lot of return for what they’re doing in their life—and so they don’t have a great deal of natural motivation or ordinary energy in the spiritual life. I think those are the kind of people who are persevering who can benefit very much from this kind of prayer because this tells them: here is a form of prayer where you can get in some direct contact with God. It’s something you can do, and something that I think may bring great graces to you.

I don’t agree with presenting contemplative prayer to the wide spectrum of Christians. I think people who are going to pray this way are people who have experience of praying and who have a certain spiritual formation in the faith. For example, I don’t think Centering Prayer should be presented to a parish from the pulpit. It could be presented to people who were invited to come to the practice of centering prayer, but if people have no experience of praying mentally/discursively, I think they would well do some lectio divina before they ever get into the practice of this contemplative prayer.

Interviewer:
And how would you describe that lectio divina?

Father Ernie Larkin:
I describe lectio divina as discursively praying the Scriptures—praying the truth of our faith: attending to them, reflecting on them, applying them to oneself, and praying for the experience of these gifts.