The current popularity of contemplative prayer is not accidental. A twenty-first-century understanding of the human condition has made us suspicious of words and the understanding we craft out of words. Theology generally offers us words that purport to give us a more precise and certain understanding of God, but the mystic has always known that our relationship to God transcends words and the kind of understanding that words produce. The theology of the mystic has always been about understanding our communion with the mystery that is God in order to fall evermore deeply in love with the Divine. That is the ultimate purpose of contemplative prayer, and the purpose of this book is to offer a philosophy and theology of contemplative prayer in the twenty-first century.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, modern thinkers came to believe that our notion of truth should be objective, certain, and precise. Mathematics became the model for how truth should be conceptualized, and we sought to eliminate ideas that were vague, ambiguous, or contradictory. This inevitably led to our belief that the truth of the Gospel must be conceptualized in the same way, and much of modern theology saw the defense of the Gospel in these terms as its task. The teachings of Jesus, however, are often vague, ambiguous, and even contradictory. Fortunately, a twenty-first century understanding of the human condition has debunked the modern notion of truth, showing it to be truncated at best. Truth, at least as we have access to it, is very different from what our early modern ancestors imagined. This is especially good news since the truth of the Gospel was never compatible with modernity's notion of truth as objective, certain, and precise. Consequently, we are…