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Revelation and Contemplation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Peter Harvey
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Extract

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An article under this heading, as part of a series on how God speaks to us, is presumably meant to presuppose that revelation and contemplation are two ways or contexts in which God does so. I want to suggest that the two are inseparable, and that they have much more to do with mundane realities than is commonly thought. To illustrate both points here is an extract from John M. Hull’s account of what it is like to be blind:

This evening, at about nine o’clock, I was getting ready to leave the house. I opened the front door, and rain was falling.

I stood for a few minutes, lost in the beauty of it. Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience.

This seems to me to be at once a revelatory and a contemplative experience. It is also about something so ordinary that sighted people take it for granted, namely rain. Hull’s account of this moment provides an extraordinarily vivid example of de Caussade’s doctrine of the sacrament of the present moment:

The rain presents the fulness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another.

...I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me. I feel that the rain is gracious, that it has granted a gift to me, the gift of the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 72 , Issue 847 , March 1991 , pp. 152 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 John, M. Hull, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, London 1990, pp. 22–24Google Scholar.

2 John 9:3.

3 Hull, opp. cit., p. 64.

4 Exodus 3:14.

5 Ezekiel 36:27.

6 John 5:39.

7 cf. New Blackfriars, September 1990. pp. 387–390. It is significant that the frightened ones labour to make this shift mean as little as possible.

8 Sebastian, Moore and Kevin, Maguire, The Experience of Prayer, London 1969, p. 11Google Scholar.

9 Margaret, Spufford, Celebration. London 1989, pp. 92–93Google Scholar.

10 Craig Dykstra. Vision and Character: A Christian Educator’s Alternative to Kohlberg, New York 1981, passion. He uses the phrase ‘mystery-encountering’ in contrast to ‘problem-solving’, but the point is the same. A problem looks to a solution rather than to a mystery, and there is unreality in this where the deepest things in life are in play.

11 Sebastian, Moore and Kevin, Maguire, The Dreamer Not The Dream : Studies in the Bi-polar Church. London 1970, pp. 110–111Google Scholar.

12 cf. Nicholas Peter Harvey, The Morals of Jesus, in process of publication by Darton, Longman and Todd. London 1991.

13 Ernest, Becker, The Denial of Death, London 1975Google Scholar, passim.

14 Sebastian, Moore, Let This Mind Be In You: The Quest for Identity through Oedipus to Christ. London 1985, p. 168Google Scholar.

15 Ezekiel 36:23.

16 Laing, R.D., Sonnets, London 1979. pp. 54–55Google Scholar.

17 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

18 II Cor. 3:18.

19 Thomas, Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, London 1961, p. 50Google Scholar (translation slightly altered here).