I’ve asked before, What is the difference between meditation and contemplation? Actually I’ve probably asked it many times. At least once I’ve put some thoughts together.

Another approach, which I come to appreciate more and more, I’ve picked up from a long passage of René Voillaume, called “The Stages on the Path of Prayer”:

There are something like two stages on the path of prayer – stages separated by the desert of a great destitution. During the first stage, our prayer seems to us predominantly as a personal work. Our faith, leaning on meditation, nourished by sentiments, tries to impose on our senses, on our imagination, on our spirit, the attitude of a child of God – an attitude that is neither spontaneous nor natural for us. Still engaged in everything that is sensible, weighed down by our natural instincts, we feel the need to lean on something exterior to ourselves. We have a need to be, so to speak, socially aided by our brothers, by the teaching of the saints; we make our own their prayers, their sentiments regarding God, because we are not yet fully ourselves before God… It is the time when meditation dominates among the means that we have to recollect ourselves in God.

Then comes a time of impoverishment of the spirit in the act of prayer, impoverishment that is a detachment from things, loss of self, slow maturation of the spiritual above and beyond the sensible. The Passion of Jesus must penetrate our life, and our prayer bears the marks of it. We are really poor before God, because we have taken stock of how we really appear before him. We learn, little by little, to receive in prayer, without feeling what we receive, rather than striving to give to God while knowing that we give. Our being, in its poverty, learns to give itself and abandon itself to God – not only in sentiments or in words, but in painful truth: we are born by the cross…

There is no opposition between these two forms of prayer, nor are they two different paths; they’re just two stages of the same road. Naturally, there does not exist a well determined border between the two parts of the road…

Perhaps this one of the ways to try to put the progression “meditation – dark night – union and contemplation” into words for those of us outside the cloister.

In any case, this seems to me a fundamentally true assessment of the situation and journey of the contemplative in the world.