Then the final thing that Jesus says is, be in the present moment. Don’t be worrying about tomorrow. Again, this is not a platitude. It is not false consolation. It is a teaching on how we should be at the time of prayer. In the present moment here and now. God is; I am. So if you put these elements of Jesus’s teaching on prayer together, we have interiority, we have silence, we have equanimity, not worrying about things, laying aside our anxieties, we have single-pointedness, attention, and we have being in the present moment. Put those into a blender and what do you get – contemplation. Jesus is a master, a teacher of contem-plation before being a moralist, before being a rule-maker. He only has one rule which is to love one another. And he is a contemplative master of prayer, a spiritual teacher, speaking about the heart of the human condition. And the question we have always to ask ourselves: Are we as church following in his footsteps?
( Christian Life in the Light of Christian Meditation 3, Laurence Freeman )
