The following are quotations about the nature and experience of contemplation, drawn primarily from Christian mystics and authors throughout the centuries.
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Christ filling the hearing, sight, touch, taste, and every sense
Origen
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Divine wakefulness
with pure and naked intuition
Gregory of Nyssa
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With the flash of one trembling glance, my mind
arrived at
THAT WHICH IS,
but I could not fix my gaze thereon
Augustine
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Utter pureness,
myriad lightnings,
flashing forth,
beyond all being
Pseudo-Dionysius
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The mind, gazing upon the universe of God's handiwork,
rapt by the divine and infinite light
Maximus the Confessor
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The mind stolen from itself
by the ineffable sweetness
of the Word
Bernard of Clairvaux
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Seeing truth
in purity
and simplicity
Richard of St. Victor
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The alertness
which finds everything plain
and grasps it clearly
with entire apprehension
Hugh of St. Victor
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Receiving the clarity of God
without any means;
a single nakedness
that embraces all things
Jan Van Ruysbroek
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A blind feeling
of one's own being,
stretching unto God
The Cloud of Unknowing
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The enlightening of the understanding, joined to the
joys of God's love
Walter Hilton
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Right understanding,
with true longing, absolute trust,
and sweet grace-giving mindfulness
Julian of Norwich
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Hanging
by God's thread
of pure Love
Catherine of Genoa
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The secret of Christian contemplation
is that it faces us with Jesus Christ
toward our suffering world
in loving service and just action
Catherine of Siena
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Finding God
in all things
Ignatius of Loyola
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Awareness
absorbed and amazed
Teresa of Avila
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The window of the soul
cleansed perfectly
and made completely transparent
by the divine light
John of the Cross
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The pure, loving gaze
that finds God
everywhere
Brother Lawrence
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The mind's loving, unmixed,
permanent attention
to the things of God
Francis de Sales
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Seeing God in everything
and everything in God
with completely extraordinary clearness
and delicacy
Marie of the Incarnation
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The pure, virgin awareness
of a little child
in the state of innocence
Thomas Traherne
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Continual communion
through all things
by quite simply doing everything
in the presence of the Holy Trinity
Elizabeth of the Trinity
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The world becoming luminous
from within
as one plunges
breathlessly
into human activity
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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Seeing through exterior things,
and seeing God
in them
Thomas Merton
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A continual condition
of prayerful sensitivity
to what is really going on
Douglas Steere
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Looking deeply at life
as it is
in the very here and now
Thich Nhat Hanh
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A long, loving look...
William McNamara
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A long, loving look at the real
Walter Burghardt
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Continually renewed immediacy
Thomas Kelly
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Awakening to the presence of God in the human heart and in the universe which is around us... knowledge by love.
Dom Bede Griffiths
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