The Prayer of Contemplation (“Still Prayer”): This is the most “heavenly” prayer in that it involves an earthly imitation of the way in which a saint relates to God in heaven. It uses no words (except as “prods” or “anchors”), makes no petition, has no expectations and no “purpose” except union with God. The word contemplation has an interesting etymology: it literally means “the place which has been set aside by the augur to make his observations.” (The augur, of course, was the Roman temple official who examined the entrails of animals to discover a sign of the favor or disfavor of the gods.) From its origins, to contemplate, then, is to watch for God. “Still Prayer” has been described variously by others as “waiting upon God”,
“listening for God”, “resting in the Lord”, “opening oneself to God”, etc.

Still Prayer is characterized by several elements:

1. It is passive: that is, its purpose is “presence”, not action. One “does nothing” in Still Prayer except to shear away one’s involvement with theworld, and to remove, as far as possible, any obstacles which may come between oneself and God.
2. It is accepting and undemanding: if one is truly engaged in Still Prayer, one is entirely willing to receive whatever it is God wishes to send, including only a sense of God’s “absence”, if that is His will.
3. It is impractical: it has no “useful” application to every-day life. It is not a means to anything else. It achieves nothing measurable or functional, except that it attempts to fulfill God’s original purpose for human beings: to be perfectly spiritually united to Him.
4. It is spiritual and mystical: it is based on a strong faith that heaven is our true “reality”, that a human being’s true home is the spiritual realm, and that our involvement and engagement with the world is temporary and transient. It is the fruit of a conviction that what we cannot see is more important to us than what we can see.
5. It is poetic: the only language a contemplative can use to describe this mode of prayer is poetic and symbolic rather than precise and scientific. It does not lend itself to intellectual analysis, since it operates in the suprarational realm. Most serious contemplatives make no effort to describe their indescribable experiences, and will usually only talk about insights or learnings which have come about as a result of their prayer. If they do speak of the experience itself, they will often use analogies to things like marriage, motherhood, light and darkness, warmth, music and song, etc., none of which actually describes the experience, but only gives hints about its general character.