What is contemplation? The realities and the words are all mixed up when we ask this question. Contemplation is hard to understand. It’s good to have recourse to as many helps as we can find. One of them is language.

In Thai, we call contemplative religious institutes “secret” (ลึกลับ). I have a very good friend who speaks, in English, of “secret nuns”. I like this. He isn’t saying that they are secretly nuns (this wouldn’t make any sense). He’s saying something more like this: The purpose of their vocation, their charism, and their apostolate is entirely secret or unseen.

This seems to me a wonderful way to emphasize another aspect of contemplation. We should welcome any opportunity to learn from our language or others’.

In English, we say “contemplative”, which seems to imply some sort of contrast to action. In many cases, noting such a contrast is good, because it shows us that contemplation is not a work to be done. It is good to remember this.

But in other cases, the word “contemplation” carries a heavy baggage that implies a withdrawal from action or a withdrawal from the world. This is not the case at all, for there are laypeople who have and religious orders immersed in the world which have a contemplative way of life, a life and charism primarily guided by the contemplative Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The word contemplation has its good points and its bad points. Learning Thai helps me to correct some of the bad points.

In Thai, we say “secret” or “mysterious” (ลึกลับ). And that’s something that every contemplative’s, every person’s, inner life is. Whether in the cloister or in the world, the inner life is secret of itself, secret and hidden to all but God alone. The location doesn’t matter for “secrecy”. It’s simply secret. Everyone understands that.

Of course, its effects, even upon our body, may not be secret. But the inner reality itself is a secret, and it is precisely this secret that makes and transformation or transfiguration of our actions and our body to be so much a cause of admiration or awe in the first place: its source is a secret. It is precisely the secret that makes the actions alive. It is precisely the secret that makes a deeply inner life deeply felt.

These tensions between secrecy and visibility are tensions which were lived especially strongly by Marcel Văn CSsR in his novitiate year. He was “secret” with Jesus in his conversations: just the two of them. But, he asked himself and Jesus, if his brothers knew, what would happen then? Could he endure it? Is it easy to be secret and visible at the same time? The links between secrets and transfiguration are themes of the lovers of God.

And the saints sometimes put the theme of “secrecy” into words, too! As a young child, Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity would often go around telling people about her “secrets”. As she grew older and entered Carmel, she used the same word to describe her life with God and her way of living it: her “secret”.

Well, in Thai, we express this reality every time we discuss contemplative vocations: the “secret”. Isn’t it true? Isn’t this another, constant aspect of contemplation: the “secret”?