We Ascend by Descending: Contemplation, Embodiment, and the Weight of Grace
New essay in Lily & Sparrow Journal
There are days when theology stops being something we think about and becomes something we can feel.
A few weeks into my first call as a priest, I found myself carrying a weight I hadn’t quite anticipated. It showed up in my body before I had words for it: pressure in my chest, tension across my shoulders, a persistent sense that I was somehow not enough for all that had been entrusted to me.
Then someone helped me notice where I was carrying it. My spiritual director pointed out that the very place where I felt my anxiety was also the place where I wore my stole, the visible sign of the yoke I had prayed to bear with humility and grace.
That small observation opened something up for me.
For those unfamiliar with contemplative practice, contemplation is not simply about sitting quietly or having an especially peaceful prayer time. At its heart, contemplation is a way of learning to become more present: to God, to ourselves, to other people, and to the world around us. It asks us to slow down enough to notice what is actually happening within and around us, and to become attentive to the presence of God already there. And that means contemplation is not an escape from the messiness of being human. In fact, I have come to believe that it is a deeper way of inhabiting it. The body, the ordinary, the difficult, the places where we are weak or unfinished: all of these can become places of encounter with God.
A few days after the conversation with my spiritual director, a sermon by my mentor and anam cara Vincent Pizzuto, gave me language for something I had just begun to see. He called Christian mysticism a “gritty mysticism,” one that is “spiritual precisely because it is material.”
That phrase has stayed with me. What might it mean to seek God not by escaping our lives, but by descending more deeply into them?
I wrote about that question in this new essay for Lily & Sparrow, the journal of the School for Contemplation & Discipleship. It is a reflection on the Incarnation, Paul’s thorn in the flesh, the weight of a priestly stole, and the strange grace of discovering that the places we most want to transcend may become the very places through which Christ meets us.
As you read, consider: Where in your ordinary, embodied life are you being invited to pay attention? What might God be asking you to notice there?
You can also see the full, beautiful issue of the Lily & Sparrow Fall 2026 Volume here
Perhaps you have your own version of the stole. Is there a place where you feel the weight of your life: in your shoulders, your chest, your stomach, your tired feet? Is it a responsibility you carry? A wound you wish would disappear? A part of yourself you would rather transcend?
What if contemplation begins there—Not by escaping the weight, but by becoming present to it. Not by becoming less human, but by discovering God already present in the astonishing, difficult, embodied reality of being human.
Remember, the way toward God is not always up. Perhaps, as Vincent reminded me and reminds us*, we ascend by descending.
Where in your ordinary, embodied life are you being invited to pay attention? What might God be asking you to notice there?
*(Go deeper into these teachings in the book Contemplating Christ)
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