Christ-Centered Catholic Spirituality as Practiced in the Early Church: From Meditation to Contemplation

The birth of the Church took place on the first Pentecost Day when the Holy Spirit came down onto and into Our Lady and the apostles before 9 o’clock in the morning. Because Our Lady was Immaculately Conceived, there were no barriers in her to prevent the Holy Spirit totally possessing her and therefore reuniting her with her beloved Son—now Risen and glorified—in a way that would not be possible for the apostles, as we shall see.

In the future, whenever she prayed, she would be taken up into her beloved Son and into His sublime contemplation of the Father to receive the fruits of contemplation like never before—in short, and in the words later used by St. Thomas Aquinas, to receive the infused theological, cardinal, and moral virtues together with further supernatural gifts that had been seen perfectly embodied in her Son Jesus when He was on earth.

This enabled her, firstly in Jerusalem and then at Ephesus, to be a Mother to the early Church until the apostles and the disciples were sufficiently ready and prepared to take full responsibility for the ongoing growth of the newly-born Church. Although the Holy Spirit came down on the apostles on the first Pentecost day, they were still sinners, as recent events had shown. So, before the Holy Spirit could do in them what He had been able to do in Our Lady, a prolonged preparation and purification would have to take place.

The apostles, then, would need to spend up to 10 years or more in Jerusalen praying, as they had seen Jesus praying before them. He taught them, by His example, how to receive the inner help and strength they would need to combat the same power of evil that had tried to prevent Him giving His all for the world that could not have been redeemed without Him.

Although we do not know what went on in the individual prayer life of each apostle, one of them, St. Paul, gives us a clue. He did not begin as poor and humble of heart but proud and arrogant. That is why, having chosen him to become the apostle to the Gentile world, God had to first rescue him from his self-assured arrogance because, and here is the great secret of the spiritual life, as St. Paul himself would later express it, “God’s power finds full scope in weakness.” That even includes human sinfulness, if that sinfulness leads a person to turn back to God in their need. That is why God had to reveal Himself to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, for there is nothing more humbling than being suddenly confronted by the power and goodness of God.

Then, so that he would continue to experience his weakness after God had left him, he was rendered blind until Ananias baptized him in Damascus. Once again, this was not the end but the beginning of his quest to enable the Holy Spirit, whom he had received in baptism, to prepare him for the work God had called him to do. The great Catholic Church historian Msgr. Philip Hughes said that he then spent 10 years prayerfully preparing for the apostolate ahead in what he called his “novitiate.” Firstly, he spent three years in the Arabian Desert, then seven or so near his own home near Tarsus, after a very brief visit to Jerusalem where the other apostles were in their novitiate preparing for their future apostolate.

If you want to know what happened during this time, read chapter 12 of St Paul’s second chapter to the Corinthians when he speaks of how, during this time, he had ecstasies, revelations, and how he was raised into the third Heaven and how he even experienced something of Paradise to come. If you want to understand what happened in the language of a Doctor of the Church, then you will have to read The Interior Castle,by St. Teresa of Avila. Then you will have to read The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross, to see the deep and prolonged purification that is required not just to experience such mystical states but to be purified in order to be united with Jesus Christ, Risen and glorified.

Then they would receive the infused wisdom with which all his preaching, teaching, and writings, like his brother apostles, were replete. That is not to mention receiving the infused virtue of fortitude to help sustain him in years of suffering, when St. Paul, for instance, was imprisoned, tortured, and whipped many times over, scourged twice, and rejected many times, even by his own, before dying a martyr’s death, as did his brother apostles. And do not forget that Our Lord spent up to 30 years preparing for His apostolate. And, for obvious reasons, He did not practice meditation but spent every moment in prayer in contemplation to receive the fruits of contemplation from God that we see at work in Him and overflowing into everything that He said and did.

Once God leads you into the contemplation that St. Paul experienced, then you are permanently in the contemplative way; and when you pray, no matter how you start to pray, it will always lead you into the contemplative way. There you are continually sustained and supported by the infused virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit—sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light. However, a person will always find himself in darkness to begin with, to keep bounty hunters at bay and purify them to be united with God by first being united with Christ.

It was not just Our Lady and the apostles who received the Holy Spirit on that first Pentecost Day but also several thousand others who had come from all over the Roman world to celebrate the great feast in memory of the law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. In addition to celebrating that law, they received into them the New Law of Love, which was the Holy Spirit who called them to repentance, baptism, and to the prayer that led them to union with Jesus Christ. These new disciples already said the Shema every day of their lives, which called on them to love God with their minds and hearts, with their whole bodies and souls, and with their whole strength throughout the forthcoming day. However, they had not been taught that they could now love God in Jesus Christ, who had Risen from the dead. They were, therefore, taught a new form of aid to prayer that later came to be called meditation, as you can read in the early sources. Read, for instance, Josef Jungmann, S.J., in general and, in particular, his work The Early Liturgy.He writes:

Throughout the first three or four Christian centuries, it was the widespread and common practice of the faithful to reflect on Christ being condemned and accepting His Cross at nine O’clock in the morning, His crucifixion at midday, and then His death on the Cross at Three O’clock, then to reflect on the Resurrection at night. (p. 104)

The great St. Athanasius, the tireless opponent of Arianism (298-373), whose episcopy spanned 45 years, writes about and commends this ancient practice in his work De Virginitate. In earliest times, sometimes two or more disciples who had known Christ personally would retell the story of Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection at Mass on Sundays and around the fireside in the evening on other days.

Although there were many different forms of vocal prayer in the early Church, the Jewish Shema that consecrated the whole day to God continued in the early Church and eventually came to be called “Morning Prayer” in general, which included other prayers, and the “Morning Offering” in particular. The morning offering enabled the first Christians to pray as Jesus, Mary, and Joseph did in Nazareth and as Jesus continued to do with His first disciples.

There is no evidence to show that Jesus Himself ever offered a physical sacrifice in the Temple—because He was the New Temple, who had come to supersede the old Temple and the practice of offering physical sacrifices with a new and more interior form of offering that He referred to when speaking to the Samaritan woman. He called it “A new offering in Spirit and in Truth.” This offering was, of course, of Himself.

His “followers,” therefore, were taught to follow His example by saying their Shema—or Morning Offering, as it came to be known—so that their whole day and everything in that day would be offered to God as a living sacrifice. It would be offered to God but not as before—but in, with, and through Jesus Christ their Lord, thus enabling them to receive the fruits of contemplation from the Father, whom they contemplated together.

Everything that they sacrificed each day in trying to love God—directly in prayer and indirectly in their love of their neighbor, with whom God identified Himself—was taken with them to be united with the Sacrifice of Christ at their weekly Mass (Matthew 25:31-46).

The gifts and graces received in this sublime sacrificial action enabled all the believers to continue the following week offering themselves through all that they said and did to the Father—in, with, and through Jesus Christ, their ever-loving Lord. Although in subsequent centuries other religious practices were added and integrated into a believer’s spiritual life, the essence of Catholic Spirituality would always remain the same. It involved the daily offering of oneself to God, in, with, and through Jesus Christ, in all and everything done each day, in imitation of Christ.

St. Paul had called upon the faithful to examine their consciences (2 Corinthians 13:5). The practice of doing this soon became an essential ingredient of evening prayer, followed by a resolution to try to do better the following day, to sacralize that day, making that day into the Mass, the place where, in the words of Fr. Jungmann: “The whole of our lives become the Mass, the place where we continually offer ourselves to God through Jesus Christ.”

Contrary though it would seem to many modern amateur liturgists, the communal Sunday liturgy is not the sum total of Catholic Spirituality on which all else depends. It is the expression of the daily sacrificial spirituality of those who do and do daily what Our Lord called “the one thing necessary,” to enable them to sacrifice all that they say and do to God in, with, and through Jesus Christ. When, in the early Church, St. Euplus was being interrogated before he was brutally put to death for refusing to sacrifice to Roman gods, he made a simple and profound statement. The prefect of the town asked, “Why is it that Christians do not make sacrifices?” St. Euplus replied, “We do, but the sacrifice that we make to God is of ourselves.”

In order to do this, St. John Chrysostom said that “we carry around with us an altar, and that altar is prayer.” For whenever we pray, we endlessly sacrifice to God the time we give in turning away from the evil that presents itself to us in endless distractions and temptations in order to turn back to God. When one of the young, modern visionaries asked Our Lady if she would take her back to Heaven with her, Mary answered, “Why? What sacrifices have you to bring with you?”

It is not just pious fancy to imagine Our Lady, meeting us as we go to Sunday Mass to celebrate “The Heavenly Liturgy,” asking us, “And what sacrifices are you bringing with you to be united with the supreme sacrifice of my Son?” If you do not take your own personal sacrifices to offer with Christ’s sacrifice at Sunday Mass, then what are you going for. Do you expect to receive from God when you are not prepared to give anything to Him? The Mass is not magic.

I hope that the absolute simplicity of the early God-given spirituality that was first lived by Our Lord Jesus Christ can now be seen. If you seriously want to begin again, return to the morning offering to offer the forthcoming day to God. And without becoming too self-absorbed, examine your conscience each evening before resolving to try to do better in the following day. Then try to find some further time in your week—and, eventually and hopefully, each day—to come to know (in order to love) God daily by meditating on His vital living presence as embodied in Jesus Christ Our Lord. If you want help, you can turn for free to my 15-part series on prayer.

Finally, all the sacrifices that you have made in trying to imitate Jesus Christ can be taken with you each time you go to Mass to receive the help and strength to continue making your whole life into the Mass—the place where you continually try to love God though all you say and do each day.

Although what I have said might seem simple, that does not mean that it is easy. Let me explain what I mean by detailing what is meant by one word that I have used that modern Catholics simply do not understand. That is the word “contemplation,” which was the daily spiritual diet upon which the first Christians were fed. When, as promised, Jesus rose from the dead, He became the New Temple so that, in the future, His disciples would pray not just in Him but with Him, as He now spends His time in Eternity lovingly contemplating His Father—hence, the word “con-templation.”

Through meditation, we learn how to love God made flesh and blood in Jesus Christ on earth. In meditation, we not only come to know Him but to love Him. Like all genuine love, this actuates within us the desire to be united with Him. However, as we cannot be united with Jesus as He once was on earth, God leads a beginner into contemplation to be united with Him and with His loving contemplation of God.

We are, however, so sinful that at first, and for prolonged periods of time, we have to undergo an ongoing inner spiritual purification, as did our forebears, the first apostles and the first disciples. Only then can we be, like them, sufficiently united with Christ as He is now, to contemplate our Father in Heaven through Him, and so receive the fruits of contemplation that make us like Him.

For our first forbears, persevering in this profound mystical purification—later detailed by St. John of the Cross—involved taking up one’s daily cross to follow Christ. They called it white martyrdom, as the old selves, who St. Paul called the “old man” in us, had to be put to death so that we could be united to the “New Man,” Jesus Christ, and with His loving contemplation of His Father, who then gives us the same fruits of contemplation that He gave to His Son, Jesus, while He was on earth—and further supernatural gifts to which I will refer later. 

If the overall spiritual journey on earth could be seen as taking place in one hour, then the first minute would be spent in meditation, after which God would lead those who demonstrated their desire to be united with Him into contemplation for the next 59 minutes. Sadly, however, and in the words of St. John of the Cross, through ignorance, 90 percent of those who are led into contemplation run away because the sweetness and light that they expected to experience is nowhere to be found. Instead, they find only dryness and aridity and a hundred and one distractions and temptations.

I have shown how to pray in this “dark night” in my last essay in Crisis. If St. John of the Cross were writing today, he would have to revise his percentage upward to something like 99.5 percent of those who are led into the contemplative purification who run away—once again from ignorance but also because of our aversion to the very idea of sacrifice that is the essence of our Catholic Spirituality. Why else do we place crucifixes in our churches, in our homes, in our schools, and around our necks but to remind us of what, truth to tell, we no longer wish to know about—namely, the sacrificial nature of our spirituality to which we are called in imitation of Christ. Modern Pharisees are up in arms when anyone tries to take the idea of sacrifice out of the Mass, but when it comes to putting it into our daily lives, their silence is to be heard everywhere.

That is why as the sacrificial nature of our love of God has been progressively taken out of our Catholic Faith, so also have the fruits of the contemplation that we shun even before it started because it involves the sacrifices that we are not prepared to endure. That is why our faith is, for most, no more than a nominalism. In short, we use all the right words and perform the expected liturgies; but without the practice of self-sacrificial loving in our daily lives, they simply become meaningless.

That is why we can stand by in silence as the true meaning of our Faith is being taken aways from us. Without what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the “fruits of contemplation,” we do not receive the wisdom to see what is wrong in the Church; and so, like all too many, we become fence-sitters and ditherers. What human wisdom alone does enable us to see, we do nothing about because we have not been given the infused virtue of fortitude.

Without contemplation, we are bereft of the fruits of contemplation; hence the spiritual bankruptcy and the chaotic dissension and disunity that always prevails when the greatest of all the infused virtues is missing—namely, the theological virtue of love. This can only be received by doing what Our Lord called “the one thing necessary” and doing it regularly. Without God’s love and the fruits of His Love alive and active in us, we are finished.

That is why Our Lady, the mother of the Church who guided our first ancestors, has returned in recent years with the selfsame message that her Son preach 2,000 years ago. That message is to repent, pray, and sacrifice.

Since 1960, all popes have followed Pope John XXIII in failing to proclaim this message to the universal Church that Our Lady asked us to proclaim. This is the real calamity of the famous Fatima letter, ensuring that what was once only conditional is now becoming a reality. We are, therefore, in the last minute of extra time. So, what are we waiting for?