Contemplative Prayer Terminology
Contemplative and Mystical authors use specialized terminology. Sometimes they use the words in different ways. Here are the definitions we’ve synthesized.
Awakening
Even though no sound was heard, the soul knows it was spiritually awakened by God.
Contemplation
A deep love communion with the Triune God. We cannot produce it; we can only receive it. It is a wordless awareness and a love that we cannot initiate or produce ourselves.
It can be described by its effects:
- Deep peace
- A new love of God
- Delight
- Emptiness
- A new, dark knowing
- A loving knowing
- Humility
- An inflowing of God
- Delicacy
- Transformation
It cannot be figured out; it cannot be understood fully.
Flight of the spirit
The soul is suddenly carried off to an entirely different region different from this one in which we live.
Infused Recollection
A passive experience of recollection. A drawing of the faculties gently inward.
The recollection achieved at the cost of human effort is different than this.
Intellectual vision
Feeling the nearness of the Lord Jesus without seeing him with the eyes of the body or with the eyes of the soul.
Prayer of Quiet
Also known as Initial Contemplation, this is a deeper form of infused recollection:
- The will finds rest.
- The intellect continues to move.
- The heart is held
- The mind and the imagination are free to wander.
There is a quiet, deep and peaceful happiness in the will.
Prayer of Union
Like the Prayer of Quiet, but the faculties become completely silent (“suspended”).
The soul has a certitude that it was in God and God was in it.
Rapture or Ecstasy
God draws the soul out of its senses, gently carries it off and begins to show it some part of his kingdom.
Spiritual Betrothal
Also called ecstatic union or absorption.
God gives the soul raptures that draw it out of itself.
During this experience, the soul is without outward consciousness and can no longer communicate with the outside world.
Spiritual Marriage
An increase of the betrothal that culminates in an intellectual vision of the Most Holy Trinity.
Wounding
The soul feels as though it was stabbed by a fiery arrow of love by an angel.
The soul thinks of this wounding as something precious, and the wounding satisfies it much more than the delightful and painless absorption into the Prayer of Quiet.
RESOURCES
Great Books about Contemplative Prayer
Contemplative Prayer Terminology
Bible Verses on Contemplative Prayer
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Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotations on this page are from the World English Bible and the World Messianic Edition. These translations have no copyright restrictions. They are in the Public Domain.