What is Contemplation?: An Interview With Stephanie Paulsell

Conducted by Erin Burke, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia and a Research Assistant at the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: What do you think contemplation or contemplative practice is?

SP: I’m a medievalist by training, and so the texts I study from the Christian mystical tradition often describe contemplation as distinct from prayer, distinct from meditation, and distinct from reading. It’s not a capacity we possess; it’s a gift from outside of us—from God. For example, Guigo II, who is a great theorist of lectio divina or religious reading, writes about what he calls a “ladder of monks” that helps us move toward the possibility of contemplation. The first rung is reading; the second is meditation, which is bringing all the intellectual resources you have to bear on the text; and the third is prayer. Then, if you’re lucky, God will give you an experience of contemplation. There are these things you can do to make yourself vulnerable and available to the experience, but contemplation is a form of wordless prayer that’s a gift from God.

I’m influenced by that understanding of contemplation, of course. And it’s not unrelated to more modern definitions. But my own definition is probably closer to Thomas Merton’s, who says contemplation is life itself—it’s being fully awake and fully alive and fully aware that you are alive—or Howard Thurman’s, who describes contemplative prayer as a swinging door through which your life goes out and other people’s lives come in and intermingle as well as the way that God within us calls to the God outside of us.

Contemplation is also, for me, what Simone Weil describes as a form of attention, paying attention to something that’s not us. This form of attention can be learning to be present to God or learning to be present to our suffering neighbor without trying to turn them into ourselves in some way. I also think of contemplation as the attention to what Virginia Woolf calls moments of being, those sort of moments in ordinary life where we sense the connections between things or what she calls the reality at the back of life that breaks through for a moment and becomes more visible. As an artist, she’s being very attentive to those moments and trying to find language to describe them. I think of all of these things when I think of contemplation.

Contemplation is… a form of attention, paying attention to something that’s not us. This form of attention can be learning to be present to God or learning to be present to our suffering neighbor without trying to turn them into ourselves in some way. 

JCS: That’s great. That’s a really much more diverse way than I’m used to thinking about it, especially in terms of contemplation being given as a gift from God.

SP: Yeah. Although this was more about meditation, I remember once saying to my colleague Anne Monius that I think reading is how I meditate. And she said, you obviously know nothing about meditation!

JCS: Ouch.

SP: Yeah, exactly.

JCS: Wow. Following that, how does contemplation or contemplative practice intersect with the research you do?

SP: Well, I’ve always been interested in reading and writing as contemplative practices. I wrote my dissertation on a writer named Marguerite d’Oingt, a late 13th–early 14th century Christian writer from France who writes about her experiences of God. She went up Guigo’s ladder—reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation—by paying attention to a verse of Scripture that she heard read aloud in church, because she doesn’t, like most medieval people, have access to many books. But she has that experience, that contemplative experience of God’s presence that Guigo says can happen to you at the top of the ladder of monks. She describes her experience as being written on by God: God writes on her heart, and she thinks that she’ll die or go crazy if she can’t get this writing out of her body. So, she becomes a writer and turns Guigo’s ladder into a kind of wheel that allows her to return again and again to that experience by meditating on her writing.

That intrigued me a lot because I was interested in how women became writers in a time when they really weren’t supposed to be writing. Marguerite was unusually learned and wrote in three languages. I was fascinated by how, in defending themselves as writers, women often spent a lot more time writing about the practice of writing and how it worked for them. I was very interested in the spirituality of writing and how writing could be a contemplative practice. I’ve been working more recently on less explicitly religious texts like the work of Virginia Woolf. I’m interested in the contemplative practices that undergird her life. Reading and writing are definitely the two that really anchor her. She leaves a note to her husband when she ends her life saying, “I can’t read, I can’t write anymore.” These are really core practices for her. And even though she’s not an adherent of any religion, certainly these ancient religious reading practices come to her through her culture and down through her family in various ways. That’s been really fascinating to me.

I think reading is one of the most reliable contemplative practices we have. And so, I’m interested in how, in this internet age, we might lose the practice of reading or lose dimensions of it. If that were to happen, what else will we lose? It seems to me that there’s a whole understanding of being human that we could potentially lose. Right now, I’m working on Teresa of Ávila, who takes contemplation as her subject matter. I’m interested in the way her attention to contemplation shapes her understanding of what human beings are and how the way she writes about contemplation becomes a testimony against dehumanization in a century of serious dehumanization, the 16th century. I’m interested in all the ways contemplation manifests itself and the ways in which it shapes our understanding of who we are. There are a lot of medieval Christian mystical writers who say things like, contemplation is what we’re made for, it’s why we are. And that’s fascinating to me.

JCS: Wow. Are you following that question about the kind of changing of reading practices in the internet age through your research at all, or is that just something that’s kind of in the back of your mind when you’re thinking?

SP: Yeah, that’s a good question. A lot of people have written about it already. I think it’s going to be a question that’s always be around the edges of my work. I have a friend who’s a young adult novelist, and she teaches creative writing. She once assigned a book to her class called, I Capture the Castle, and her students just loved it. When she asked them why they loved that book so much, they said it’s because when they were reading it, they forget to check their phones. And she said, well, how often do you usually check your phone when you’re reading? And they said, after every sentence. That’s a real rewiring of the brain, I think. And so, what are the effects of that if we lose the capacity to read a big, long book, as I think so many of us feel is harder and harder to do. And what else will we lose along with that? What parts of our humanity are tied up in that and tied up in these contemplative practices? That’s a lot of what interests me in my research. Whether I’m writing about Woolf or Teresa of Ávila or whoever, it always comes back to contemplation as a dimension of our humanity. It’s one of the possibilities our humanity holds. So, ultimately, what interests me is the relationship of contemplation and the fullness of our humanity.

I’m interested in all the ways contemplation manifests itself and the ways in which it shapes our understanding of who we are. There are a lot of medieval Christian mystical writers who say things like, contemplation is what we’re made for, it’s why we are. And that’s fascinating to me.

JCS: Thank you, that’s a really cool focus for your research. So, are there other scholars or work in contemplative studies that you’re particularly excited about?

SP: I’m interested in any work that takes contemplation out of the dichotomy of action versus contemplation. Because the contemplative seems so essential to human actions like art making, study, friendship, the offering of genuine presence to one another, love. 

Any work that shows the relationship to our humanity and the things that contemplation makes possible is the work that interests me. I think about Barbara Holmes’s work, Joy Unspeakable, on the contemplative practices of the Black church or Doug Christie’s work, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind, on the relationship between the contemplative and the crisis that we’re in ecologically.

JCS: That’s great. And on that note, do you have any books that you would recommend for people? You’ve already mentioned a few primary texts that might be relevant.

SP: I’m an old Chicago person, so I tend to think in primary text. But I’m interested in writers who write as a way to cultivate a contemplative attention in the reader. Woolf, certainly, is one of those writers. When I read a novel by Virginia Woolf, she’s so attentive to the inner lives of her characters that when I stop reading and look up from my book, at least for a few moments, I am more attentive to the inner life of people around me. It cultivates a kind of reverence in me for all that I can’t know about everyone, all that’s hidden in us, furled up inside of us, as Woolf says. I also just read for a class, the haiku and travel narratives of a Buddhist writer, Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. I’ve read that book a lot over the years in various classes, but it is such a great, contemplative book because you begin by traveling along with him through his prose. And then he kind of gets to a moment where prose just won’t capture it, and he has to write a poem. And so, it’s poetry, prose, poetry, prose, poetry, prose, poetry as you go along, and I’m interested in how a writer does that, how a writer makes you stop and experience a moment for a moment, to experience in something even like a temporary enlightenment for a moment the way that he does. 

I teach a class on contemplative prayer in Christianity, in which we read six books, and then we read them again. Those six books have shifted and changed over the years, but in the coming semester, we’ll read Evagrius Ponticus’sChapters on Prayer; The Cloud of Unknowing; Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle; Simone Weil’s Waiting for God; Howard Thurman’s Disciplines of the Spirit; and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I find all of these books really helpful for thinking about contemplation.

JCS: That’s such a fascinating structure for our class, especially talking about how hard it is to get students to read.

SP: Yeah. I would teach classes and students would say to me, you’re always talking about lectio divina and prayerfulness, and then you assign all these books which we have to race through! In this class, I assign relatively short books that we can read twice. And the idea is to see how differently the book sounds once you’ve read the other books but also the way your life could shape how you read it. And usually that was pretty artificial because it’s just the thirteen weeks of the semester, so not that much changes. But when I taught it in the spring semester of 2020, we read the six books, and then the whole world closed down, and then we read them again on zoom.

JCS: What a fortuitous division to finish them right before that.

SP: Yes, when we returned from spring break, we really were in a different world. We read the six books once together in a classroom and once with the students sitting in their childhood bedrooms with cats crawling everywhere. And all of us struggling with what covid meant for our communities.

JCS: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for talking with us.

SP: Thank you!