Who is Christ?   

        Jesus of Nazareth was a person who lived 2,000 years ago.  He is also a manifestation of God -- the Logos -- whose presence always existed and is always present to us.  The Christ consciousness that was in Jesus was offered to his followers with his Resurrection.

        Contemplative prayer is the term used to describe the process and path by which our own consciousness and behavior are transformed by Jesus’s person and his presence.  To open to this gift of transformation, specific practices have always been shared throughout the 2,000 year history of the Christian contemplative tradition. Through contemplative practice, we are better able to receive the gift of transformation in Christ that is spoken of in scripture by Paul: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rm 12:2).

        Although for a Christian contemplative, Jesus the Christ is in some way “the way, the truth and the life” (Jn 14: 6), the contemplative experience opens us to seeing how God also works through other spiritual traditions.  A loving God would not have left people of the rest of the world for millennia without their own means of accessing God.

        Now, in the globalizing world, all the world religions can dialogue together about spirituality, show their common values and learn from each other.  Contemplation allows us to enter into this conversation of silence, respecting each tradition’s uniqueness as well as the Christian revelation.   Christianity’s encounter with the other great religious traditions in the last decades has been a “mirror” for it to see its own contemplative heritage more clearly and bring it forth. 

        In the mystery of the Incarnation Jesus was both fully divine and fully human.  His life and death transforms the possibilities of human life.  Although human beings are still wounded, ignorant and in need of God, the potentials of the human condition are changed.  From the perspective of Incarnational contemplation, Jesus’ life and identity as the Christ opened for his followers a contemplative path to this divine project, a path that can be pursued in ordinary human life.