This piece is about Imaginative Contemplation, sometimes known as Visualisation Meditation or, if you are a Catholic, Ignatian Prayer (of which more later). Normally I am a hardcore contemplation kind of person. That is, I wait upon God using nothing but the bare word or silence. However, if you are going to commit to devoting a significant part of your day, every day, for the whole of the rest of your life, to prayer then it will help you to have a wide repertoire for your Smörgåsbord. (Also, having a willingness to boldly mix your metaphors isn’t strictly necessary but I find that it helps).
Two benefits flow from this variety. One is that you minimise the risk of boredom. Now, sometimes boredom is a benefit, in the current epoch we suffer from over-stimulation so experiencing its opposite occasionally will probably do us more good than harm. But, when ‘occasionally’ becomes all the time so that we dread our prayer period because it is so dull then a little variety is indicated as being a useful tool to help our relationship with God. The Church herself recognises this truth which is why feast days and seasons and Jubilee Years and Eucharistic Congresses and pilgrimages and so on can appear in the calendar.
A second benefit, which is not unrelated to the first, is an avoidance of mechanical routine. Elsewhere I have written about the spiritual advantages of habit but every good can be turned into a bad through excess or defect. It can happen that you devote a certain period of time every day to sitting still and saying certain words or reading from the Book of Psalms or whatever. And while you are doing this on auto-pilot your mind and heart is elsewhere busy planning your holiday or reflecting on the upcoming elections or the number of likes you are getting on social media. Then, after prayer time is over you go away feeling that you have done God a favour and made your quota for the day. This is not good. You need to be aware of what you are doing while praying. You don’t have to be analytical or discursive but you do have to be attentive.
So, whether your normal mode of praying is contemplation or saying litanies or praying the Rosary or psalmody or something else now and again turning to Imaginative Contemplation is a thing worth considering. Or, it would be unless you happen to be worried about falling into heresy by doing so. And therein lies the problem.
Although there are exceptions the practice of Imaginative Contemplation, at least within Catholicism and possibly more widely, is largely associated at this time (2024) with people on the theologically liberal end of the spectrum. That being so others may give it a body-swerve (or a mind-swerve to be more precise) to avoid liberalism-by-association. I think, though, that this conflation is an historical accident produced by contingent events and not a necessary consequence of the essential content of the prayer form. There is no reason at all why every shade of theological opinion from being correct all the way through to being liberal cannot safely use this technique with spiritual benefit.
Which brings us back to the word ‘Ignatian’. The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola are the starting point for much in the way of Catholic Imaginative Contemplation. Which is fine and good. So, for centuries the Catholic bodies most involved in promoting this method were those inspired by the Saint: the Jesuits for men and the IBVM (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary) for women. Which, again, is fine and good. But then, following the Second Vatican Council in the 20th century, those organisations began to pursue one particular interpretation of the ‘spirit of the Council’ which led them away from traditional understandings of Catholic theology. And, in this instance, lex credendi became lex orandi, the way that theology was done affected the way that prayer was done.
Specifically, I think that there are three practices in Imaginative Contemplation that can lead away from an hermeneutic of continuity with the pre-conciliar faith and towards an hermeneutic of rupture. Those are, an excessive focus on the feel-good parts of the Gospel, encouraging people to imagine themselves as actual characters in those stories, and, following on from that, telling people that it’s alright to change how the episode ends if that’s where your imagination leads you.
Now, the Gospel as an object of meditation is pretty much as good as it gets you might think. Certainly meditating on the Passion, Death and Burial of Jesus Christ (and on the Sorrows of His Mother) represents, arguably, the highest of all possible forms of contemplation. Also, if we meditate, as St Ignatius recommended, on the Final Judgement, the punishments of Hell and the joys of the Beatific Vision in Heaven we can gain benefits. But, if you only look at the fluffy bunny aspects of the Gospel and imagine yourself into them in order to make them fluffier and bunnier then you will have departed from the path of Christian wisdom.
As for how you imagine a story in the divinely inspired word of God, well, I suggest that the best way is to be an observer. During the course of that episode you may look at events for a while though the eyes of one or other of the participants, when, for example, the glances of Jesus and Mary meet while He is carrying His Cross towards Calvary, but that is not the same as pretending to be Jesus or Peter, or the Good Samaritan or the Forgiving Father or whoever. And, if the Holy Spirit, not to mention the Son of God, decided that events should happen in one way and not another then Imaginative Contemplation should not be treated like a form of fanfiction allowing you to improve on the work of the Creator and upholder of the whole Cosmos and all of time.
“It’s very easy to be critical, thoughtfully catholic” I hear you say. “But how would you practise Imaginative Contemplation in a theologically sound way?” Well, I would begin by vigorously counter-programming. I would not only give a body swerve to the fluffy bunny aspects of the phenomenon but I would focus for a while on Old Testament stories as objects of meditation using the imagination. And, to begin with, I would use the stories of The Priest, The Drunk and the Dangerous Chair. If God spares me I will write about this in a future piece. In the meantime, for homework, I suggest that you read 1 Samuel (sometimes called1 Kings) 1:9-18 and 1 Samuel (1 Kings) 4:11-18.
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The picture is Reverie by Jean-Baptiste Corot.
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