What is tactical contemplation?

Institute for Contemplative Living -- contemplative resources for active people

How do we understand contemplation?

We understand contemplation as the process simply of making connections between God and any thing, person, memory, or event. God is the origin and ever-present foundation for all existent beings, and when a person or community connects their lives to God, they begin to contemplate.

The Greek word for contemplation is theoria, which originally means to send a person to consult an oracle for the people and by extension means to see the mind of the divine. Contemplation is the process of training the eye, the mind, the emotions, and the body to “see” God in everything. Contemplation traces the associations and connections of every person and thing back to God.

Contemplation involves working through the appearances and surface of things, persons, relationships, and experiences to find God’s pervasive presence. Contemplatives, that is, look beyond the mere appearance of things as disconnected from each other and God, and seek that perspective in which God is evident and present.

This working through of appearances demands hard work, because humans are not predisposed to seeing God as present. The process of working through the false appearance that God is not present involves training the mind, the emotions, the body, in essence all human energy to relate to God directly.

How is contemplation tactical?

We all use tactics every day in our lives. We may have a plan for a day, but the realities on the ground mitigate against achieving that plan. So we engage in tactics to respond to the realities of daily living to achieve our higher goals. Take for example, planning a menu for a party. We plan out the ideal correlation of foods and drinks. But when we get to the grocery store, we discover that something is not available. There is no asparagus when we have planned for asparagus, so we substitute broccoli or some other vegetable. This is the use of tactics to achieve a goal.

The capacity to see God is not a set program. It is a larger goal set in place by a desire to contemplate. But daily life intrudes. We cannot sit for hours praying in silence alone, because our days are filled with work, meetings, family obligations, and even church work! So we need to develop contemplative tactics that will allow us to see God in the midst of daily realities of living.

The contemplation the ICL promulgates is precisely these tactical contemplative practices. Tactical contemplation is a set of contemplative practices that serves as a resource from which we can draw to respond contemplatively to the realities and contingencies of daily, active living.