Contemplative
Spiritual
Formation
Meets Online Every Two Weeks
“One should love God mindlessly.
By this I mean that your soul ought to be without mind
or mental activities or images or representations.
Bare your soul of all mind and stay there without mind.”
Meister Eckhart (1260-1329)
The format
- Our usual 90-min. format:
- Check-in;
- Spoken opening prayer;
- 20 min. of silent, apophatic prayer (i.e., emptying the mind of words, thoughts and ideas – simply resting in the presence of the Divine in the present moment);
- Video, presentation or reading, followed by discussion;
- Spoken closing prayer;
Contact us
English and Filipino: argel.tuason@gmail.com
English and French: trainlvr13@gmail.com
Spanish and Deutsch: ricardo.schoen486@gmail.com
Or contact us at: csf@gnrcatholics.org
Who we are
- Offering contemplative practices, including prayers of silence which make us more aware of the Divine indwelling in everyone, we are LGBTIQ+ contemplatives who gather every other Saturday in a prayerful space graciously offered by the Meditation Chapel-Online Meditation Community (https://meditationchapel.org/).
- We aspire to become a “Centre of Inwardness” without borders and where everyone is welcome. By welcoming everyone as Christ does, we have become a diverse group of people coming from different backgrounds and countries. This includes those who regularly attend church services and those who do not.
In much of Europe and North America, 10-20% of baptised Catholics attend weekly services. This is comparable to other mainline Christian denominations. Possible reasons for this low attendance include the harmful institutional teachings on sexuality, uninspiring sermons, the sexual abuse of minors by some clergy and subsequent coverups, clericalism, and systemic discrimination against women. Some Catholics also have trouble with the guilt-ridden language used in the Mass, such as the repetitive “I am not worthy.” “I have sinned through my fault… grievous fault”.
Where is God? Most of the spoken prayers at the Eucharistic liturgy imply a distant God. We pray for God to come to us, to be with us, to hear us, to bless us… This frames the Divine as principally a supernatural being who lives just above the sky. But how does this fit with our understanding of an expanding universe that is 13.8 billion years old? The mystics, though, spoke of the indwelling of God freely present in all humans, regardless of merit… and in all of Creation. Imagine the Holy Spirit being present in every breath you take from birth to death. And Christ being as close to you as your beating heart.
Karl Rahner, a leading theologian at Vatican II, said that the devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ – one who is experiencing the indwelling of Divine in oneself – or will cease to be anything at all.
The question then becomes: How do I engage with the Divine presence in me (and in every person)? One important means is in prayers without words – contemplative prayer – through which we let go of all thinking and enter into the present moment – the only time when the Holy can be experienced. In contemplative prayer, for 20 min. we let go of our monkey brain: often useless repetitive thinking which is largely rehashing the past over and over, and/or continually worrying about the future.
Paradoxically, many people find it helpful to engage in silent prayer while in the presence of others. Contemplative prayer is one aspect of seeing the world and living contemplatively.
Contemplative Spiritual Formation Gathering (click on this link)
The GNRC Contemplative Spiritual Formation committee invites you to its upcoming bi-weekly online gathering . Date and Time: Our next gathering will be on Saturday, September 5th. We meet every two weeks on Saturdays (e.g., Sept. 5, 19, Oct. 3, …) 7 a.m. San…