Contemplative Confrontation

Wisdom from Dr. Barbara Holmes

A phrase recently caught my attention while reading the words of Dr. Barbara Holmes: Contemplative Confrontation. She uses the phrase in her book Joy Unspeakable five times, most often when referencing social justice movements. She writes that contemplative confrontation reminds us that “grief is not always expressed through quiet retreat or silent tears.”¹

It was Dr. Holmes who first pointed out to me that looking at contemplation through too narrow of a lens can minimize its impact and possibility. To put it clearly, I learned contemplation from primarily white, straight, cisgender men, which also meant I learned to think of contemplation as a more solitary, quiet encounter or practice. A practice more focused on retreat than confrontation. Because when one’s identity isn’t at risk of harm, erasure, or elimination, it’s easier to ignore the balance contemplation demands of us.

Experiences from the margins remind us that balancing contemplation must include “inward solitude and reflection and outward response to the situations in which we find ourselves present and awake.”² This is contemplative confrontation. It reminds us that justice and liberation are tied up in the wholeness of contemplative practice, which includes the confrontation of ourselves and the confrontation of our world.

Contemplative confrontation acknowledges that the sanctuary of practice exists in both our inner and outer lives. It leads us to recognize our own role in issues of injustice and harm, and demands better of ourselves and the world around us. In many ways, contemplative confrontation is another way of saying “action and contemplation,” another way of demanding we stop severing the two. Contemplation is, after all, an embodied practice, a way of living life together.

To be a contemplative in the Christian tradition means to be concerned with the plight of my neighbor, the injustice and harm being done to those unlike me, and to be clear about where I stand on such things. Because if we claim unity, if we claim to be one when we sit in the silence together, we cannot forget each other when we step back out into the world.

“There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence in the meaning and significance of life. Such courage is an underground river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one’s experience, keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.” –Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 52

1. Holmes, Barbara. Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, p. 157

2. Taylor-Stinson, Therese. Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Stories of Contemplation and Justice.