From The Church Times-CONTEMPLATION is not "just one kind of thing that Christians do", the Archbishop of Canterbury said in Rome on Wednesday.
"To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit."
Dr Williams was addressing the Synod of Bishops in Rome, at the invitation of Pope Benedict XVI. The Synod's task is to examine a "new evangelisation" in response to the rise in secularism.
Dr Williams suggested that "to be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person - a person in communion with God, and with others, through Jesus Christ."
An intrinsic element in this process was contemplation, he said. "To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me - this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God's own relation to God, to come alive in me."
Such prayer was not an alternative to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "righteous action", Dr Williams said; rather, it provided the clarity and energy needed in the pursuit of justice. "True prayer purifies the motive; true justice is the necessary work of sharing and liberating in others the humanity we have discovered in our contemplative encounter."
More here-
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2012/12-october/news/uk/‘contemplation-is-the-answer’-dr-williams-tells-rc-bishops
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