Although he does not himself draw out all the implications of his words, there is a letter of Saint John of Ávila which touches on the mysterious boundaries and differences between meditation and contemplation. To a friend, John writes,
And since you have toiled like the magi in seeking the Divine Child, imitate them in their faith and in their gifts to Him when they found Him. Contemplate God Himself, humbly lying in a crib within a stable, where human reason would never have led the Kings to look for Him.
To “toil” in prayer – as the Doctors of the Church never cease to tell us – is to meditate: to apply one’s faculties (imagination, memory, intellect, senses even) in the pursuit of understanding and, especially, loving God. But the simpler unity towards which one’s meditation tends is contemplation. And indeed it tends there, for the acquired bases of love in meditate can, if God so wills it, serve as a foundation on which something simpler can stand. Contemplation, a simpler, unifying gaze on the Beloved, is the term or goal of all “exercises”. And if it’s not, you’re doing it wrong, so to speak.
Here, Saint John of Ávila tells us that one “toils” in seeking the Divine Child, like the magi. And then one stops and “looks” at the humble Divine Child, where “human reason” (a faculty of the mind) would never have arrived; without crossing the boundary between me applying my work in prayer (meditation) and a divine, loving peace infused by God into my soul (contemplation), we would never find the Divine Child to simply look on. No small wonder we are all called to become contemplatives! It means to more simply see Jesus, without our own mental work getting in the way.
Some related posts:
Contemplative in the Mud 