A Path of Service and Community     

        When we are attuned to God’s life within, when we are living in faith, we feel naturally and joyfully called to be of service in the world, to help others from a place of unconditional love, forgiveness and connection.  But too often we live instead in a perceived place of isolation.  We feel separate from our true selves, from other people, from the natural world, and even from God.  Living in separation we behave self-destructively, neglect the needs of others, and damage the world around us.

       From the contemplative perspective, the answer to this perceived separation lies in how we relate to God.   

As we grow in union with Christ we begin to see the oneness of everything else, in God.  The diversity of life -- other people and their needs, God’s creation endangered by human activity, our own true happiness -- is actually all in unity, in God. 

        How can we let this realization of unity deepen within us and be expressed towards others?  How can we practice contemplative service and strengthen our sense of connection with others, to create true community around us and protect the delicate balance of life on earth?

        Contemplative practice lets the fruits of our relationship with God gradually come forth in life.  All the branches of the Path of Centering Prayer help us in being progressively freed from our own distractions, anxieties, faults and false selves... freed to serve other’s needs from the growing realization of unity.  Our dependence upon God frees us to be simple servants of the Divine Mystery, in love and forgiveness.

        Contemplative Service and Community -- the eighth branch of the Path of Centering Prayer -- takes this gradual movement further by bringing the realization of unity in God to life.  It presents the scriptural understanding of the deepening levels of contemplative service.  It points towards perspectives that allow these different levels of contemplative service to come forth in us more easily. Otherwise, we can easily become trapped in our efforts to serve others--trapped in our emotions, our agendas, and in our false selves. 

       Instead, we learn how to settle our awareness in God’s presence within, and to see God in others and in creation, recognizing the unity that already exists. From this place our acts of service are more freely given and, although quiet and perhaps unnoticed, tend to be much more effective in the world.

        Contemplative service brings us into the mystery of community with other people as we deepen our communion with God.  We can not be freed from the false self -- in fact, we are not fully on the Path of Centering Prayer -- until we begin to discover communion in service and community.

        For the vision that Jesus points to is one in which God is in all creation and in all people, and all creation and people are in God.   Contemplative service -- God in us serving God in others -- gives us a spiritual way to respond to the people around us and to the crucial issues of our time: social injustice, religious intolerance, and the destruction of the environment.