Thursday, October 25, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
Hail St. Hildegard!
Today is the first feast day for Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century female mystic, composer, and philosopher, since Benedict XVI canonized her in the spring. Thanks be to God for the gift of Hildegard's visions, the beauty of her visions and illuminations, and the fire of her devotion.
O, You who are ever
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
luminous, wonderful,
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.
giving life to all life,
moving all creatures,
root of all things,
washing them clean,
wiping out their mistakes,
healing their wounds,
You are our true life,
luminous, wonderful,
awakening the heart
from its ancient sleep.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
The Purpose-Absent Life
Ten years ago, Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in California gave us all a reason to live. That fateful year, he published The Purpose-Driven Life. Written as a 40-day exploration of the meaning of existence (the tagline on the cover asks, "What on Earth am I here for?"), Warren strung together hundreds of Bible verses to declare that each person has a five-fold calling to worship, discipleship, fellowship, ministry and mission. Conveniently, the individual's telos matches the same five-fold reason for the Christian community that Warren previously argued in The Purpose-Driven Church. We were made to be churchmen and churchwomen.
Apparently America was drowning in nihilism in the period following the attacks of September 11, because Warren's book sold over 30 million copies through the next several years. It became, according to Publisher's Weekly, the "best-selling nonfiction hardback book in history."
I've never read Warren's book. Given a general lack of existential angst, not even a twinge, I never summoned the need to pick it up. Besides, I have a good bit of history hearing Southern Baptist preachers quote the Bible and explain God's will for my life. I imagine I already have the gist without requiring access to an ink-and-paper materialization of the oft-heard message.
I don't mean to mock The Purpose-Driven Life, even with the slightly snarky tone. At least that's my defense. But all banter aside, Warren obviously intend to have a profoundly positive impact well beyond his Sunday-morning crowd. Given the book's reception, it's fair to say he has. And if anyone hasn't thought too hard about the meaning of life, it's always helpful to read a book that begins with the words "It's not about you."
Okay, so I did just now read tidbits of PDL. On Google Books.
Typically, we require some reason(s) to get up in the morning, to endure the struggles of living, and to refuse the pit of worry. Some seem genuinely satisfied with the answering of personal wants - life is about getting for yourself what you can while you can. Others turn toward the support of family as building the self's sense of identity. For others, identity is formed in civil engagement. The majority of human beings also see religious commitment, to one degree or another, as a necessary component of personal purpose. I am here to live according to the dictates of Allah, the example of Jesus, or the odyssey of Brahman.
The need for purpose is built fundamentally on the human capacity for self-awareness or, to put it another way, in the fact that we are selves. Animals do not ruminate on the meaning of life because they almost entirely lack the sense of the self and even those that may do so (i.e., dolphins) probably are still quite limited in this cognitive ability compared to us. Because of the sense of the self, we not only experience the world but we experience ourselves experiencing the world. We are fully aware of our limitations, our frailties, our range of emotional and physiological responses to various stimuli, and ultimately our mortality. The burden of our awareness imposes upon us the search for a key that allows us to accept, explain, and perhaps even enhance the self-referential experiencing that is the person.
Therefore, on average, we search for some principle or philosophy, some adequate ground that orients and justifies our attitudes and actions. We look for a reasonable Why, or at least one reasonable enough that we can utilize in our self-conception. In typical religious convention, we are to act a certain way because God wills it, or God made us to be a certain type of person, or it would be against the love and goodness of God to act differently.
It is surprising, then, that an eminently religious person would ever abandon Why. But that is exactly what Meister Eckhart does in his mystical spirituality as he preaches it to his fellow monastics. As a non-dualist thinker, Eckhart denies the fundamental reality of the self, and indeed of all created things, postulating instead that all is but "nothing" that emanates from, and yet resides within, God as the ineffable One. The spiritual life does not consist of enhancing, improving, or modulating the self. Rather, it is a forgetting of the self in realizing the truth of God at the center.
In "Sermon Thirteen (b)" as listed in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, the Dominican preacher advises us to become "free of nothing" - that is, detached from the notion that what is not God (or more properly, the ground of "God") is independently real. He frequently extols detachment in his sermons, naming it as the chief virtue. Why this, instead of one of the traditional theological virtues, like love or faith or hope? Because, for Eckhart, the rest essentially falls into place when we look beyond the self and the world and live from the natural ground of existence, the inner truth of what we are. "Therefore, if you must be perfect, you must be rid of not." To have a reason for our actions, whether a more self-centered desire to avoid hellfire or a more altruistic hope of spreading virtue, is to miss the summum bonum of letting go. Step outside yourself and God comes in to fill the void that is nothing. So Eckhart claims:
This should not be interpreted as some antinomian counsel - that you should do whatever "feels good" to you and defend it by claiming it is "natural." These are instructions meant for someone willing to let go of himself or herself, of being Susan or Carl. "Where creature stops, God begins to be." And God cannot be anything like the grasping, demanding self that wills pleasure at the cost of another's pain. Like any genuine mystic, Eckhart elsewhere teaches the cultivation of the virtues as a prerequisite to any deeper spiritual journey. Nevertheless, he sees the end result of diving into God as All in All as the refusal to distinguish between the needs of what is experienced as Self or Friend to Self and what is experienced as Other:
One goal of spiritual development, then, is a naturalness to the moral life that requires no justification, no argument, no assessment in terms of cost and benefit. Compassionate and charitable action simply flow and, for the most part, cannot be otherwise. Eckhart acknowledges that this naturalness is not achieved perfectly in this life, but he insists that it is available. In the end, we can abandon purpose and simply be. When we do so, all manner of persons and things we meet will benefit from the divine reality we actualize. As Eckhart summarizes this concept in Sermon Sixteen:
You can't make this a bestseller, but Eckhart recommends reaching toward God until we end up "Living Without a Why," as one scholar summarized this message. Or, shall we say, when we embrace The Purpose-Absent Life.
Apparently America was drowning in nihilism in the period following the attacks of September 11, because Warren's book sold over 30 million copies through the next several years. It became, according to Publisher's Weekly, the "best-selling nonfiction hardback book in history."
I've never read Warren's book. Given a general lack of existential angst, not even a twinge, I never summoned the need to pick it up. Besides, I have a good bit of history hearing Southern Baptist preachers quote the Bible and explain God's will for my life. I imagine I already have the gist without requiring access to an ink-and-paper materialization of the oft-heard message.
I don't mean to mock The Purpose-Driven Life, even with the slightly snarky tone. At least that's my defense. But all banter aside, Warren obviously intend to have a profoundly positive impact well beyond his Sunday-morning crowd. Given the book's reception, it's fair to say he has. And if anyone hasn't thought too hard about the meaning of life, it's always helpful to read a book that begins with the words "It's not about you."
Okay, so I did just now read tidbits of PDL. On Google Books.
Typically, we require some reason(s) to get up in the morning, to endure the struggles of living, and to refuse the pit of worry. Some seem genuinely satisfied with the answering of personal wants - life is about getting for yourself what you can while you can. Others turn toward the support of family as building the self's sense of identity. For others, identity is formed in civil engagement. The majority of human beings also see religious commitment, to one degree or another, as a necessary component of personal purpose. I am here to live according to the dictates of Allah, the example of Jesus, or the odyssey of Brahman.
The need for purpose is built fundamentally on the human capacity for self-awareness or, to put it another way, in the fact that we are selves. Animals do not ruminate on the meaning of life because they almost entirely lack the sense of the self and even those that may do so (i.e., dolphins) probably are still quite limited in this cognitive ability compared to us. Because of the sense of the self, we not only experience the world but we experience ourselves experiencing the world. We are fully aware of our limitations, our frailties, our range of emotional and physiological responses to various stimuli, and ultimately our mortality. The burden of our awareness imposes upon us the search for a key that allows us to accept, explain, and perhaps even enhance the self-referential experiencing that is the person.
Therefore, on average, we search for some principle or philosophy, some adequate ground that orients and justifies our attitudes and actions. We look for a reasonable Why, or at least one reasonable enough that we can utilize in our self-conception. In typical religious convention, we are to act a certain way because God wills it, or God made us to be a certain type of person, or it would be against the love and goodness of God to act differently.
It is surprising, then, that an eminently religious person would ever abandon Why. But that is exactly what Meister Eckhart does in his mystical spirituality as he preaches it to his fellow monastics. As a non-dualist thinker, Eckhart denies the fundamental reality of the self, and indeed of all created things, postulating instead that all is but "nothing" that emanates from, and yet resides within, God as the ineffable One. The spiritual life does not consist of enhancing, improving, or modulating the self. Rather, it is a forgetting of the self in realizing the truth of God at the center.
In "Sermon Thirteen (b)" as listed in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, the Dominican preacher advises us to become "free of nothing" - that is, detached from the notion that what is not God (or more properly, the ground of "God") is independently real. He frequently extols detachment in his sermons, naming it as the chief virtue. Why this, instead of one of the traditional theological virtues, like love or faith or hope? Because, for Eckhart, the rest essentially falls into place when we look beyond the self and the world and live from the natural ground of existence, the inner truth of what we are. "Therefore, if you must be perfect, you must be rid of not." To have a reason for our actions, whether a more self-centered desire to avoid hellfire or a more altruistic hope of spreading virtue, is to miss the summum bonum of letting go. Step outside yourself and God comes in to fill the void that is nothing. So Eckhart claims:
Out of this inmost ground, all your works should be wrought without Why. I say truly, as long as you do works for the sake of heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without, you are at fault. It may pass muster, but it is not the best. Indeed, if a man thinks he will get more of God by meditation, by devotion, by ecstasies, or by special infusion of grace than by the fireside or in the stable - that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak round His head and shoving Him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a special way gets the way and misses God, who lies hidden in it...If a man asked life for a thousand years, "Why do you live?" if it could answer it would only say, "I live because I live." That is because life lives from its own ground, and gushes forth from its own. Therefore it lives without Why, because it lives for itself. And so, if you were to ask a genuine man who acted from his own ground, "Why do you act?" if he were to answer properly he would simply say, "I act because I act."
This should not be interpreted as some antinomian counsel - that you should do whatever "feels good" to you and defend it by claiming it is "natural." These are instructions meant for someone willing to let go of himself or herself, of being Susan or Carl. "Where creature stops, God begins to be." And God cannot be anything like the grasping, demanding self that wills pleasure at the cost of another's pain. Like any genuine mystic, Eckhart elsewhere teaches the cultivation of the virtues as a prerequisite to any deeper spiritual journey. Nevertheless, he sees the end result of diving into God as All in All as the refusal to distinguish between the needs of what is experienced as Self or Friend to Self and what is experienced as Other:
Whoever would exist in the nakedness of this nature, free from all mediation, must have left behind all distinction of person, so that he is as well disposed to a man who is across the sea, whom he never set eyes on, as to the man who is with him and who is his close friend. As long as your favor your own person more than the man you have never seen, you are assuredly not right and you have never for a single instant looked into this simple ground.
One goal of spiritual development, then, is a naturalness to the moral life that requires no justification, no argument, no assessment in terms of cost and benefit. Compassionate and charitable action simply flow and, for the most part, cannot be otherwise. Eckhart acknowledges that this naturalness is not achieved perfectly in this life, but he insists that it is available. In the end, we can abandon purpose and simply be. When we do so, all manner of persons and things we meet will benefit from the divine reality we actualize. As Eckhart summarizes this concept in Sermon Sixteen:
He who has abandoned self and all things, who seeks not his own in any thing, and does all he does without Why and in love, that man being dead to all the world is alive in God and God in Him.
You can't make this a bestseller, but Eckhart recommends reaching toward God until we end up "Living Without a Why," as one scholar summarized this message. Or, shall we say, when we embrace The Purpose-Absent Life.
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Abhishiktananda on Bridging Religious Worlds
"It is precisely the fact of being a bridge that makes this uncomfortable situation worthwhile. The world, at every level, needs such bridges. The danger of this life as 'bridge' is that we run the risk of not belonging to either side; whereas, however harrowing it may be, our duty is to belong wholly to both sides. This is only possible in the mystery of God."
Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux), Catholic monk and Hindu sannyasi
Qtd. in Harry Oldmeadow, A Christian Pilgrim in India
Saturday, August 04, 2012
Taking the Natives Seriously
The New Yorker has an article available online reviewing the new book When God Talks Back by cultural anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann. Her writing is the latest offering from one of the secular elite who investigates a distinctive society not by getting on a plane but by getting into a car and aiming for a nearby steeple (given the design of "contemporary" churches, take that as a figure of speech). In a journey similar to The Unlikely Disciple, Luhrmann becomes a particpant-observer in churches belonging to the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a neo-charismatic denomination which typifies the expressive and pragmatic brand of Evangelicalism that now dominates the field.
Luhrmann steps into a world of heightened spiritual intimacy, where God is routinely a conversation partner and benefactor. Whatever the cause-and-effect relationship, the casual character of Vineyard worship fits perfectly with the cozy perception of God as a deeply personal Love experienced primarily through emotion and intuition. As may be expected, the reviewer notes how Luhrmann waffles between sarcastic critique of Vineyard spirituality - which wholly lacks detachment and analytical rigor - and attraction generated by the sheer centripetal force of immersion. They believe; deeply, powerfully, passionately. Luhrmann herself keeps a prayer journal and ponders what God may say to her in response.
The reviewer self-consciously writes as a secularist for secularists. Even if it is no longer kosher to dismiss the claimed supernatural experiences of the Vineyard adherents as merely hallucinations or delusions, thereby explicitly identifying these individuals as "crazy," any "scientific" assertion by which such phenomena are explained will do. These people who claim visions and such, after all, are not like us, and we would never, ever want to be anything like them.
I find myself torn, in that part of me (the larger part?) resonates with the obvious (and easy) criticism of a superficial spiritualism that sees God and Satan alternately hiding behind the nearest bush...or text message, or TV commercial, or song on the radio, etc. Surely, genuine spiritual development is not well served by the "hyperactive agency detection," as it has been called, which finds God's hand in every cookie jar of my life so that I may be constantly tested, sifted, prodded, guided, or pushed. I agree with Luhrmann that much of the theology expressed by Vineyard members sounds like the thought processes of children.
And yet. If grace means anything as both theological teaching and lived reality, then all the intellectual deficiencies in the world that elitists may find to criticize, whether secular elites like Luhrmann or religious ones like me, will not imperil genuine, transformative encounter with the Divine. In the end, the truth shines through even if encrusted by multiple layers of imagination and wishful thinking. I find it telling that the reviewer can share this anecdote from Luhrmann's book and leave it without comment:
Luhrmann steps into a world of heightened spiritual intimacy, where God is routinely a conversation partner and benefactor. Whatever the cause-and-effect relationship, the casual character of Vineyard worship fits perfectly with the cozy perception of God as a deeply personal Love experienced primarily through emotion and intuition. As may be expected, the reviewer notes how Luhrmann waffles between sarcastic critique of Vineyard spirituality - which wholly lacks detachment and analytical rigor - and attraction generated by the sheer centripetal force of immersion. They believe; deeply, powerfully, passionately. Luhrmann herself keeps a prayer journal and ponders what God may say to her in response.
The reviewer self-consciously writes as a secularist for secularists. Even if it is no longer kosher to dismiss the claimed supernatural experiences of the Vineyard adherents as merely hallucinations or delusions, thereby explicitly identifying these individuals as "crazy," any "scientific" assertion by which such phenomena are explained will do. These people who claim visions and such, after all, are not like us, and we would never, ever want to be anything like them.
I find myself torn, in that part of me (the larger part?) resonates with the obvious (and easy) criticism of a superficial spiritualism that sees God and Satan alternately hiding behind the nearest bush...or text message, or TV commercial, or song on the radio, etc. Surely, genuine spiritual development is not well served by the "hyperactive agency detection," as it has been called, which finds God's hand in every cookie jar of my life so that I may be constantly tested, sifted, prodded, guided, or pushed. I agree with Luhrmann that much of the theology expressed by Vineyard members sounds like the thought processes of children.
And yet. If grace means anything as both theological teaching and lived reality, then all the intellectual deficiencies in the world that elitists may find to criticize, whether secular elites like Luhrmann or religious ones like me, will not imperil genuine, transformative encounter with the Divine. In the end, the truth shines through even if encrusted by multiple layers of imagination and wishful thinking. I find it telling that the reviewer can share this anecdote from Luhrmann's book and leave it without comment:
Sarah, a member of the Palo Alto congregation, told Luhrmann that one morning, when she had finished her prayers, she went on sitting in her prayer chair and let her mind wander. She kept seeing a picture with boats in it. Then the phone rang. It was the pastor. She asked him why he was calling. “And he said, ‘I don’t know. I just felt like I was supposed to call you.’ And it clicked then, that the picture I had seen wasn’t a distraction from my prayers but was connected to my prayers, I told him about this picture that I’d gotten. And he told me . . . that several people had gotten the same picture, and that it was about Jesus with his hands on the wheel of a ship.”Now that is interesting. I don't know if God wanted to tell everyone that Jesus' hands are at the wheel. That's a bit of pastor-talk (which I know very well how to do) which may or may not be relevant to the image received - a statement that is supposed to be reassuring in spite of its vagueness. But this story is but another signpost that, whatever tendencies among these Evangelicals are fair game for critique, our fascinating human elaborations upon the Reality we encounter are not the whole story. If the reviewer takes the "natives" seriously, as Luhrmann tried to do, then perhaps she may find that, amidst the clutter of reflective mirrors, there sits a window opening onto the image of the Other. If a group of suburban, middle-class, Evangelical Americans saw boats together because of prayer, what else lies before our vision if we dare take a look?
Monday, May 28, 2012
Quit of God
Meister Eckhart is what one may call a "nondual" thinker, to use the trendy expression. The fundamental nature of reality, for him, is God without remainder. The fundamental nature of the human being is God gone forth from Himself:
(Taken from Sermon 87, "Poverty of Spirit," as rendered in James S. Cutsinger, Not of this World: A Treasury of Christian Mysticism, pp. 250f.)
Eckhart writes on more than one occasion about his distinction between "God" experienced as a separate being and God or "Godhead" (Gottheit) as Being, period. Here, in one of his most famous sermons, Eckhart sets out to explain true "poverty of spirit" as he sees it. Such is not the external poverty that comes with dispossession. Nor, in the effort to be a spiritual person, is it the directing of one's will to follow the will of God. Rather, true poverty means to experience nothingness in place of will and of knowledge. It is the breakthrough to a kind of passivity in which one is grounded in one's true nature, when "a man's existence is in God's very being." This radical (to the root) end of the contemplative journey makes one even rid of "God," by which he means an incommensurate entity.
It is not enough to leave space for the will of God to act within one's self, for such a move confines perception within the sphere of separation between human being here and God there. "Therefore I pray God that He may quit me of 'God', for unconditioned Being is above 'God' and all distinctions."
This is not a solipsistic monism that quotes a simplistic mantra, such as "All is One," and concludes that one may equally choose between carousing and pillaging or chanting and fasting. Knowledge and love flow equally for the happiness of the temporal beings who are the First Cause birthing Itself. Moreover, Scripture remains a means of realizing this knowledge and Christ remains the ethical example of self-denial. But in place of legalisms, reward-punishment systems, or appeals to sentiment, Eckhart envisions a "naturalness" to the rightly-ordered life when the self realizes union with the Ground. He presents a Christian version of what the Taoists call wu-wei or "non-action." The long and difficult journey of detachment and poverty of spirit results in a gentle acquiescence to God being Godself in you.
As long as you become quit of "God."
Back in the Womb from which I came, I had no "God" and merely was, myself. I did not will or desire anything, for I was pure being, a knower of myself by Divine Truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else. And what I wanted I was, and what I was I wanted; and thus I existed untrammeled by "God" or anything else. But when I parted from my free will and received my created being, then I had a "God." For before there were creatures, God was not "God", but rather He was what He was.
(Taken from Sermon 87, "Poverty of Spirit," as rendered in James S. Cutsinger, Not of this World: A Treasury of Christian Mysticism, pp. 250f.)
Eckhart writes on more than one occasion about his distinction between "God" experienced as a separate being and God or "Godhead" (Gottheit) as Being, period. Here, in one of his most famous sermons, Eckhart sets out to explain true "poverty of spirit" as he sees it. Such is not the external poverty that comes with dispossession. Nor, in the effort to be a spiritual person, is it the directing of one's will to follow the will of God. Rather, true poverty means to experience nothingness in place of will and of knowledge. It is the breakthrough to a kind of passivity in which one is grounded in one's true nature, when "a man's existence is in God's very being." This radical (to the root) end of the contemplative journey makes one even rid of "God," by which he means an incommensurate entity.
It is not enough to leave space for the will of God to act within one's self, for such a move confines perception within the sphere of separation between human being here and God there. "Therefore I pray God that He may quit me of 'God', for unconditioned Being is above 'God' and all distinctions."
This is not a solipsistic monism that quotes a simplistic mantra, such as "All is One," and concludes that one may equally choose between carousing and pillaging or chanting and fasting. Knowledge and love flow equally for the happiness of the temporal beings who are the First Cause birthing Itself. Moreover, Scripture remains a means of realizing this knowledge and Christ remains the ethical example of self-denial. But in place of legalisms, reward-punishment systems, or appeals to sentiment, Eckhart envisions a "naturalness" to the rightly-ordered life when the self realizes union with the Ground. He presents a Christian version of what the Taoists call wu-wei or "non-action." The long and difficult journey of detachment and poverty of spirit results in a gentle acquiescence to God being Godself in you.
As long as you become quit of "God."
Saturday, March 31, 2012
On Not Hitting the Delete Button
Last week, I attended this year's General Assembly for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina. Each CBFNC gathering includes worship services (always concluding with Communion), fellowship opportunities, and a panoply of workshop sessions. For the second year in a row I co-facilitated a workshop on youth ministry. I always look forward to these annual "family reunions" as a time to catch up with ministry colleagues and to gauge the sorts of conversations and ideas that are circulating within our small segment of the Church.
Baptists are, all things considered, a very exoteric thread in the Christian tapestry. We are typically known for reading the Bible "literally" or, for those of us with non-fundamentalist theological proclivities, at least earnestly and with due regard for historical-critical exegesis. Baptists seek to live out an active faith through robust evangelism and mission efforts. We are certainly not regarded as experts in contemplative spirituality or mystical theology. Most of us wouldn't want to be, anyways.
So it's fascinating for me, and truly a delight, to watch my fellow Baptists discover the contemplative life and then seek to share that with their peers. More and more this tradition is plumbing depths that heretofore had been all but forgotten or ignored. The few of us who venture into this far country are frequently tripping over ourselves. I offer the following observations in awareness of that fact and in full recognition of my own status as a novice.
The last workshop I attended this year was something of an advertisement for contemplative spirituality. It was promoted as a venue for learning how to practice "the other side of prayer," that is, to shut up and listen. The facilitator was an associate pastor who discovered contemplative spirituality several years ago and who has participated in a multi-year spiritual formation program as a result. This program included training in the method of Centering Prayer as developed by Benedictine monks Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington.
It was when the facilitator was explaining an aspect of Centering Prayer that I realized, as far as my understanding goes, that what he was sharing with his audience was misleading. He rightly noted that a goal of Centering Prayer, and of most contemplative practice, is to still the mind and realize an awareness (and, in Christian terms, a communion with God) that persists before and beyond our thoughts (defined broadly to include discursive reasoning, images and feelings). He pointed out how our minds are normally a torrent of thoughts coming and going as we focus on our worries, our reactions, our plans and our dreams. He drew a whirling spiral in the rough form of a tornado. The facilitator then claimed that, in practicing prayer as listening, we must erase our thoughts. He would erase part of his facsimile tornado from the markerboard with each example he gave.
Again, I appreciate that I am just a beginner myself and I have no history with retreats or other formal training opportunities. However, both my readings and my own experience tell me that actively trying to "erase" thoughts during contemplative prayer is a dead-end exercise. Why is that? Most of the time, forcing a thought to disappear only encourages another to appear. If our goal is realizing awareness apart from thoughts, a well-intended exertion actually pulls us in the opposite direction. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote, "The harder you try not to think of anything, the more aroused your mind will become and you will think even more." Also, when we try to make ourselves erase our thoughts we typically add to our thoughts in the midst of that process because we start judging ourselves for having these thoughts that keep arising. "If only I could be better at this! I'm supposed to be listening to God right now," we might say as we mentally kick ourselves.
The beginner is quite flabbergasted, of course. This starts to look like an impossible goal - to reach beyond our thoughts without really trying, so it seems. But that is just how teachers of Centering Prayer (and other contemplative disciplines) would have it be. In her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault instructs her readers that, when a thought appears, you "let the thought go" (23). Lest this be misconstrued as a kind of work we must do with our thoughts, Cynthia later writes, "The goal in Centering Prayer is not to stop the thoughts, but simply to develop a detached attitude toward them" (39). Thoughts should neither be resisted, retained, nor reacted to (40). They are noticed as they appear and disappear. If anything, the idea is to refrain from work or exertion - the kind we normally fall into in our day-to-day engagement with our thoughts. Once one arises in the mind, we typically entertain it, stew on it, develop it, connect with others, and on we go. But in contemplative practice, as Evagrius of Ponticus advised his monastic peers, we observe our thoughts as they rise and fall.
Cynthia cites the favored illustration of Thomas Keating in which the contemplative imagines himself as a scuba diver in the water who watches the undersides of boats as they pass by along the surface. The diver does not swim upward to see the rest of each boat or climb into them; he only notices them come and go.
The problem with trying to resist and eliminate thoughts is that it keeps us playing the game in which we identify ourselves with our thoughts. One thing contemplative spirituality offers is a practice for us to discover the deeper ground of our being within the being of God. In other words, we get to experience firsthand a theological anthropology that reveals the everyday, constructed self to be a very shallow pool which we mistake for the ocean. We do this partly because we claim ownership of our thoughts. But sitting in silence before God, we cannot help but come to a conclusion that is startling, at least at first. These thoughts aren't arising because I choose them to be! They are happening to me.
So who am I? I am not my lusts, my worries, my discomforts, my joys, my memories, and so on. At least, I am not them when I refrain from identifying with them and placing my awareness in them. I am not, fundamentally, what Jesuit writer Martin Laird calls the "paste-up job" of the self (Into the Silent Land, 66). "Stillness reveals that [I am] the silent, vast awareness in which the video is playing" (16). There in the center of that stillness is God as well, waiting for me to discover my true self in and through Him.
Baptists are, all things considered, a very exoteric thread in the Christian tapestry. We are typically known for reading the Bible "literally" or, for those of us with non-fundamentalist theological proclivities, at least earnestly and with due regard for historical-critical exegesis. Baptists seek to live out an active faith through robust evangelism and mission efforts. We are certainly not regarded as experts in contemplative spirituality or mystical theology. Most of us wouldn't want to be, anyways.
So it's fascinating for me, and truly a delight, to watch my fellow Baptists discover the contemplative life and then seek to share that with their peers. More and more this tradition is plumbing depths that heretofore had been all but forgotten or ignored. The few of us who venture into this far country are frequently tripping over ourselves. I offer the following observations in awareness of that fact and in full recognition of my own status as a novice.
The last workshop I attended this year was something of an advertisement for contemplative spirituality. It was promoted as a venue for learning how to practice "the other side of prayer," that is, to shut up and listen. The facilitator was an associate pastor who discovered contemplative spirituality several years ago and who has participated in a multi-year spiritual formation program as a result. This program included training in the method of Centering Prayer as developed by Benedictine monks Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington.
It was when the facilitator was explaining an aspect of Centering Prayer that I realized, as far as my understanding goes, that what he was sharing with his audience was misleading. He rightly noted that a goal of Centering Prayer, and of most contemplative practice, is to still the mind and realize an awareness (and, in Christian terms, a communion with God) that persists before and beyond our thoughts (defined broadly to include discursive reasoning, images and feelings). He pointed out how our minds are normally a torrent of thoughts coming and going as we focus on our worries, our reactions, our plans and our dreams. He drew a whirling spiral in the rough form of a tornado. The facilitator then claimed that, in practicing prayer as listening, we must erase our thoughts. He would erase part of his facsimile tornado from the markerboard with each example he gave.
Again, I appreciate that I am just a beginner myself and I have no history with retreats or other formal training opportunities. However, both my readings and my own experience tell me that actively trying to "erase" thoughts during contemplative prayer is a dead-end exercise. Why is that? Most of the time, forcing a thought to disappear only encourages another to appear. If our goal is realizing awareness apart from thoughts, a well-intended exertion actually pulls us in the opposite direction. As St. Teresa of Avila wrote, "The harder you try not to think of anything, the more aroused your mind will become and you will think even more." Also, when we try to make ourselves erase our thoughts we typically add to our thoughts in the midst of that process because we start judging ourselves for having these thoughts that keep arising. "If only I could be better at this! I'm supposed to be listening to God right now," we might say as we mentally kick ourselves.
The beginner is quite flabbergasted, of course. This starts to look like an impossible goal - to reach beyond our thoughts without really trying, so it seems. But that is just how teachers of Centering Prayer (and other contemplative disciplines) would have it be. In her book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault instructs her readers that, when a thought appears, you "let the thought go" (23). Lest this be misconstrued as a kind of work we must do with our thoughts, Cynthia later writes, "The goal in Centering Prayer is not to stop the thoughts, but simply to develop a detached attitude toward them" (39). Thoughts should neither be resisted, retained, nor reacted to (40). They are noticed as they appear and disappear. If anything, the idea is to refrain from work or exertion - the kind we normally fall into in our day-to-day engagement with our thoughts. Once one arises in the mind, we typically entertain it, stew on it, develop it, connect with others, and on we go. But in contemplative practice, as Evagrius of Ponticus advised his monastic peers, we observe our thoughts as they rise and fall.
Cynthia cites the favored illustration of Thomas Keating in which the contemplative imagines himself as a scuba diver in the water who watches the undersides of boats as they pass by along the surface. The diver does not swim upward to see the rest of each boat or climb into them; he only notices them come and go.
The problem with trying to resist and eliminate thoughts is that it keeps us playing the game in which we identify ourselves with our thoughts. One thing contemplative spirituality offers is a practice for us to discover the deeper ground of our being within the being of God. In other words, we get to experience firsthand a theological anthropology that reveals the everyday, constructed self to be a very shallow pool which we mistake for the ocean. We do this partly because we claim ownership of our thoughts. But sitting in silence before God, we cannot help but come to a conclusion that is startling, at least at first. These thoughts aren't arising because I choose them to be! They are happening to me.
So who am I? I am not my lusts, my worries, my discomforts, my joys, my memories, and so on. At least, I am not them when I refrain from identifying with them and placing my awareness in them. I am not, fundamentally, what Jesuit writer Martin Laird calls the "paste-up job" of the self (Into the Silent Land, 66). "Stillness reveals that [I am] the silent, vast awareness in which the video is playing" (16). There in the center of that stillness is God as well, waiting for me to discover my true self in and through Him.