Contemplation. Not to be entered into just for enlightenment, or to heighten my consciousness, or to find greater peace and inner serenity, or even just to feel more intimate and connected with God. That may be the reason we begin such a practice. But it will not keep us there. We have to be convinced by St Paul to rather be transformed in the newness of your mind, so as to determine for yourselves what is the good and pleasing and perfect will of God. Rom 12:2
What Paul speaks of in being transformed in the newness of your mind we know as metanoia, a radical turning of one's life, heart, soul, will, everything to God. We turn toward God until we are in a face to face encounter with him. Movement is the key here, turning toward, continually. Without the movement of the soul turning, the concept of radical holds no meaning.
St. Bernard writes For contemplating it [the Father] with unveiled face [the result of metanoia] we are transformed into the same image from glory to glory as by the Spirit of the Lord. Speaking of contemplation, John Eudes Bamberger OCSO writes ...our Cistercian Fathers...bear witness to their dynamic understanding of the tradition that affirms the purpose of our way of life [is] to be a radical transformation of our very being and not merely the adaptation to the subculture of the cloister....divinization, which is the highest expression of transformation, as in the well-known saying of Saint Bernard: Sic affici deificari est (Dil 10).
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