THE ART OF CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE, LESSON ONE: Listening to Christ “with the ear of the heart.”

One of the greatest blessings of being a Lay Cistercian is learning how to use the techniques of the Benedictine/Trappist/Cistercian traditions to place myself in the presence of Christ and be aware that I am aware of Him by listening to what He tells me. It is the discipline of waiting without words, an agenda, or extraneous thoughts that seduce one into focusing on Mammon and not Jesus. I share with you some Cistercian (Lay Cistercian) techniques that I have developed based on my understanding of Cistercian practices (Lectio Divina, Eucharist, Contemplation, Liturgy of the Hours) and charisms (humility, obedience, abandonment of self to put on the new Christ, making new wineskins).

I find it interesting that, after a lifetime of doing what I thought it was to be a disciple of Christ, the Holy Spirit told me who I actually am, and it scared the Hell out of me. You might think that would be a wake-up call at 80 years of age, but it was more than that. I absolutely dissolved all that I thought I knew about Catholicism, what my decades of faithfully (or so I thought) practicing the paradigms of prayers cumulatively forged into who I am today, or the prideful thought that Jesus works through me. Ironically, none of that is true, but all of it is real and has led me to recapitulate an iceberg-like topsy-turvy change in what I thought was solid spirituality. I now wish to place myself in the presence of Christ and wait for instructions. When instructions come from Jesus, I try to Do What He Tells Me. 

What I experienced is what I would imagine would happen when there is a polar reversal. I actually do exist in three separate universes of reality, all one but all different. Remind you of the Trinitarian template of all reality? There is a conversio morae that happens when you first realize that Jesus is Lord. That happened to me in Eighth Grade in Vincennes, Indiana. When it grabbed me (the only Way an average or lower person of intelligence like myself housed in my young body), I remember thinking that, if I did nothing else, I wanted to “Know, Love, Serve God in this life and be happy with that God in the next.” (Baltimore Catechism, Question 6). I still do. My pilgrimage on this earth was that life and death in this life was to be more like Christ (capacitas dei) and less like my old self. Over the years, it was not that I was evil (came close a couple of times) but that I set my Catholicism on the shelf and became a settler Catholic rather than a proactive one, who must dig for heavenly gold ceaselessly my whole life to find that mother load. I was a Catholic who never got his hands dirty. I got lazy and sat back on the fact that I was Catholic and smugly went into hibernation (Catholicism being only the degree to which I complied with rules and authority that, while good and true, I nevertheless did not take into myself to make new wineskins for the wine Christ was offering me each day.

Seeking to become more and more like Christ, I was accepted by the Abbot of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery (Trappist) in Georgia, to abandon self and strip away everything I thought I knew about the Catholic Church (not abandoning the Catholic Church, like some moderan schismatics, but to abandon me and my assumptions, replacing them with nothing except to perfer nothing to the love of ChriLoveTo do that, I had to learn to listen to Jesus “with the ear of the heart,” as St. Benedict says in the prologue to his Rule. Remember, I am 80 years old, a broken-down, old temple of the Holy Spirit, having had two cardiac arrests (2007 and 2025), a diagnosis of cancer (CLL type) in 2012, and a pacemaker installed.

The quest to “Have in me the mind of Christ Jesus,” (Phil 2:5) is a rough road, a road less traveled for me, one with boulders that have hurt my feet, since the Holy Spirit shared with me a foretaste of what would await me if I took up my cross daily and walked His Way, to drink of the cup that He drank, yearning with an intensity, even in the confinds of my house with all my woes, to prefer nothing, nothing to the love of Christ. What I found was what I share with you. I am not you; you are not me (thank God); God is not us; and we, more certainly, are not God. I used these techniques gleaned from the Lectio Divina session with the Holy Spirit and Jesus, as Magister Noster, My Lord and My God.

What has happened to me might or might not happen to you, but I struck it rich by digging for heavenly gold, treasures that I can take with me to decorate that mansion in the place prepared for me in my Father’s House.

Gold and silver I have none, but what I have that I consider gold, found by renouncing self, seeking mercy and forgiveness for myself and others each day, and preferring nothing to the love of Christ I share with you. All of my works, for whatever they are worth, I will to you, readers and subscribers of my website: https://thecenterforcontemplativepractice.org. I offer them free of monetary cost (I don’t charge for what Christ died on the cross to share with all who listen in humility and obedience to His energy). I don’t ask you to use these techniques to do what I do, but rather to become who you are as one who seeks to always dig deeper into the mystery of your humanity and ask three questions:

• What do I need to know to reach and maintain knowledge of what it means to be human at the deepest level of my evolution?
• How can I love so fiercely to prepare myself to stand in the presence of Love and Love present, as I have learned to do while on earth?
• What is absolute truth beyond corruption of nature, above my humanity’s capacity or capability, where there is only resonance with all that is and not the dissonance in which I had to walk through the minefields of life with the Way oWayesus as my guide?
  

SIX QUESTIONS: The Divine Equation

The Divine Equation is the result of a Lectio Divina meditation that I think turned into a contemplative overshadowing of the Holy Spirit to answer my longing and need to know who God is and to prove God’s existence. The answer, it seems, happened over a period of seventy-five years, where I kept converting my life deeper and deeper. I did not know who helped me or why, but an energy beyond my human capability shared that the Divine Equation was the six morphings or shedding of my skins, over a lifetime of self-awareness.

These six questions enabled me, in hindsight, to move ever deeper into the mystery of Faith and thus illuminate my own mystery of my humanity, as I was capable of absorbing it. At a later date, I grew into thinking that all humans had to answer these six questions with answers that came from their life experiences and choices of good or evil. The Divine Equation had nothing to do with God’s proof or existence, a hopeless Quixotic tilting of windmills that is not possible with mere human reasoning and free choice.

The Divine Equation was Divine because both the answers and the only questions must come from God’s energy to tell us who we are as humans, each one of us. Whatever you place as your answers, which may change over time, is who you are and where you are as a human in the evolutionary chain of movement toward complexity and consciousness (Teilhard). Only you can fill out these questions with answers you have discovered at your very own Center. You won’t know if you are correct until you stand before Magister Noster and see how closely your answers tally with reality. While on earth, all I have is Faith that the Way is true, Hope that Jesus keeps His word, and a life led that is worthy of adoption by the Father.

I. What is the purpose of life?

II. What is the purpose of my life?

III. What does reality look like?

IV. How does it all fit together

V. How can I love fiercely?

VI. You know you are going to die, now what?

What answers we give to these six questions, whether you are Christian, Jew, Atheist, Pagan, Mormon, Hindu, or Muslim, or none of the above, defines who you are and your view of reality—a note. Because we have reason and free will to choose or unchoose any of these ideas, they are fluid and need to be constantly addressed to keep them from drifting into the realm of rationalism and irrelevance. Life is a process of accumulating what each individual chooses as the answer to these six questions and what energy each of us uses to sustain it each day against the corruption of original sin. It is my choice that the Christ Principle provides not only the questions for deeper penetration into my humanity, but also the energy to know what cannot be known by human reasoning alone and to choose what seems like the opposite of what my free will and human tendencies pull me towards. There is only one Way to move forward: to place myself with total abandonment of my reason and obedience to be in the presence of Christ in that upper room of my inner self, then wait, and Do What He Tells You.

Stay tuned for the next installment.

Copyright 2026. Michael F. Conrad, Ed.D. The Center for Contemplative Practice. All Rights Reserved.