. . . Contemplative prayer is intrinsically connected with the theology of reconciliation . . . The cardinal point of this theology is that reconciliation is first and foremost the work of God, and we human beings are but agents of that reconciliation. For us to be faithful and effective agents of God’s reconciliation we must take care to be in contact with God. Contemplative prayer seems especially suited to that. In contemplative prayer we find ourselves not taking the initiating or active role, but rather find ourselves waiting on God to speak to us. Such a role reminds us that we are but vehicles for God’s reconciling action. We must be conformed to God if we are to be God’s agents, "ambassadors for Christ’s sake." (2 Cor 5:20) The waiting on God creates within us the stillness wherein we become capable of hearing God speak to us. Otherwise God’s word to us runs the risk of being crowded out by our many words.

This waiting on God has other functions within a spirituality of reconciliation. The work of reconciliation takes great patience. When working with individuals, we must be prepared to hear the victim’s story over and over again. Victims often need to tell that story of trauma, pain, and loss so many times in order to gain new perspective on it. Those involved in the work of reconciliation are called to accompany victims in that quest. For the most part that involves listening attentively and waiting until the telling of the story takes an unexpected turn. In situations of social reconciliation, patience is needed because the repair to a society takes a long time; it usually takes more than a generation before some measure of reconciliation is achieved. Again, this takes patience on the part of those involved in the reconciliation process.

This waiting which is cultivated in contemplative prayer has yet another function as well. Anyone who has practiced contemplative prayer knows that our waiting on God to speak is not rewarded every time with a word. Sometime the waiting ends in waiting. One ends up experiencing, as it were, the absence of God. But experiencing this absence is of great value for the work of reconciliation. I have encountered on many occasions stories of those who have been tortured. One of the purposes of torture in its modern usage is to make the victim feel utterly alone. A refrain from torturers frequently recounted by victims is: "Scream as loud as you want. No one can hear you." I have encountered especially many people of deep faith who have said they always had believed that God would be with them, no matter what happened. But at the worst moments of torture, God was not there. All they experienced was a profound absence. Our waiting without hearing a word from God in contemplative prayer allows us, in some analogous fashion, to experience that troubling absence which victims can experience.

But the contemplative mode has other functions in a spirituality of reconciliation. Besides learning to wait on God, a contemplative posture makes it possible for us to contemplate our own wounds, to gaze upon them in unblinking fashion. We tend to want to avert our eyes from our wounds. Re-viewing our wounds reminds us of the pain of the past; it calls once again to our attention our weakness, our incompleteness, literally our vulnerability. But as has already been noted, not to attend to our wounds makes us susceptible to blocking the way for reconciliation rather than facilitating it. Moreover, we can continue to learn from our wounds, as difficult as that may be. Encounters with new situations can bring with them new perspectives not only on the process of reconciliation, but also to the roles our own wounds can play in making reconciliation possible. Growing in the discipline of contemplation allows us to grow also in understanding the potential healing powers that our wound can have for others.

A third benefit of contemplation is that it can increase our capacity to imagine peace, the "new creation" of which Paul speaks in Second Corinthians (5:17). In working to overcome violence, peace is more than the cessation of conflict. It is, rather a new state of being often quite different from what we had expected it to be. In seeking reconciliation, individuals and societies frequently imagine peace to be the status quo ante, a return to things as they were before the violence occurred. But of course we can never go back to that previous state. To be able to do so would mean that we would be able to undo and forget the harm that has been done to us. That harm’s occurrence has irrevocably changed us and our potential future. It is seared in our memory. To extirpate utterly that memory would be to do harm to us once again. It would in effect be saying that what happened was not as important as we have made it out to be (thereby trivializing the event), or that we are not as significant as we have made ourselves out to be (thereby trivializing the victim). The key here to dealing with the harm of the past is not forgetting it, but remembering it in a different way, so that we regain some future and are not held hostage to the past. Contemplation provides us a way into the future by imagining things differently, moving beyond trying to create a symmetry between the future and the past. We can return here again to John 20: the glorified body of Jesus is not simply the resuscitation of his earthly body, nor is it utterly different. There is continuity with the past, but also wonderful new perspectives as well. So too will be the "new creation" toward which reconciliation beckons us.

Contemplation, then, is a key practice of the spirituality of reconciliation. It attunes us in a special way to God. It attunes us also to ourselves as agents of reconciliation. And it attunes us to that new creation to which we are called.