Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 5

Last morning here. What a rich experience this has been. Not the retreat envisioned, but . . . that’s life and part of God’s gift.

Barbara’s usually the quiet one. I’m more effusive. But in this time of life her spirits seem to follow the arc of the sun—lower in the winter, brighter (much brighter!) in the summer, and as it happened we came to the Hermitages the day after summer solstice. Silence has not been as much of the experience as expected.

Is that disappointing? A little. Maybe like a novice anchorite whose east wall has a big hole. Seems a little silly to complain about the sun.

Instruction for Centering Prayer or mindfulness meditation usually gets around to the concept of emptiness as a place we ultimately discover in prayer and contemplation. Over time I’m coming to want to name the experience fullness rather than emptiness, though I think it’s basically part of the unity (like winter and summer solstice?). Both emptiness and fullness describe openness to More. More room for anything—for our bright or dark selves, for other selves, for the big ol’ kingdom of God.

We leave in few hours and will go to Boone to visit, one last time, Barbara’s grandmother’s house, which will be torn down one day soon. Barbara used to come here every other summer from El Paso as a child—a magical journey from the brown hot desert to the cool green mountains.

The windows are boarded up now and we’ll stop to buy a flashlight in order find our way from room to room, from downstairs to up and back. And Barbara will say goodbye.

And then we drive to Albemarle to a wedding. Room. Enough Room. Gracious God in you we find room. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 4

The past two nights we’ve closed our day in St. Anthony’s Chapel with the charisms of sacred space, light, silence, and music. We go in around 9:30, light four candles, read an opening prayer, listen to 20 minutes of music, close with a single prayer, blow out the candles and walk back to Thomas Merton under the stars.

Wednesday night we heard the first five pieces of Rachmaninov’s Vespers; last night we heard the first 5 songs from the album Music for Compline—a collection of Byrd and Tallis chanted by the group Stile Antico.

Gawd, what glory. Both these works share the virtue of being relatively simple, gorgeous, and conceived and performed by singularly talented people. Beauty is surely a means of grace. And bringing to the hearing a contemplative mind and heart amplifies the experience as much as a sound system.

Worship surely doesn’t need always to be so charged with felt grace, but it sure is energizing when it is.

God of realms, thank you, thank you, thank you for all ways we encounter you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 3

St. Anthony's Chapel

At 21 on and a trip to England, attending Evensong at York Minster turned out to be a pearl of great price in my spiritual journey. What impulse had driven the construction of such a building, I wondered? What longing had inspired such music—its composition and its singing? What force had sustained the keeping of both building and liturgy for 8 centuries? Maybe, from my point of view that night, it was the God beyond the image of the God I had stopped trusting.

Kneeling (a 21 year old skeptic kneeling!) and hearing that stunningly gorgeous music, hearing those near perfect voices and trying to connect them to those impossibly young faces filled my heart and mind with yearning and sadness and joy and a suddenly vast sense of sacred possibility.

I still sense untapped possibility when I hear simple, achingly beautiful music. And lately I’ve been wondering if we can’t experience something very like it in our local most assuredly non-cathedral spaces. I’ve been collecting recordings of chant (and what a lot of it there is) and listening, discerning, wondering how to be with it in morning, noon or night prayer.

What a gift to be at the Hermitages—what a wonderfully designed chapel for prayer and listening. Barbara and I have been experimenting with a mix of spoken prayer, silence, and recorded music in the morning, at noon and just before bed.

There’s obviously something ‘mechanical’ about plugging in a sound system and docking an iPod to it. And yet sitting in the chapel while experiencing simple sacred music is wholly glorious. This music endures because it opens us to God. It’s a joy to hear (a joy to sing too, but that’s another matter). To paraphrase Urban Holmes, music like this has the ability to bring our souls relatively unencumbered to a place where we encounter God.

Attention deepens what it regards. And realizing there’s something regarding us on the other side is powerful stuff.

God of left brain right brain whole body every body, give us wisdom to hear you and to know you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 2

One of the great spiritual hopes is that our spirituality will actually transform us. For four years now I’ve been doing insight meditation each morning and one of the promises this practice makes is that it will ‘train’ us to be present in the world in a richer way.

Barbara and I hiked yesterday afternoon. I had spent time last week planning a couple of hikes for us to take—this one, Roan High Knob in Tennessee, was the one I wanted to do most. High country (6,000 ft), grassy balds, long views, thousands of rhododendrons in bloom

The rhododendrons were certainly gorgeous, but the trail took us only through spruce and fir forest. Rich, ferny, mossy and moist. Lovely but close like a tunnel. None of the long, open, and longed for views. Some of the trail was actually asphalted. At one point a road bisected it, and a Dodge van was parked nearby with its engine and AC running for the benefit of the person inside. The temperature outside was in the 60s (the van was still running when we came back an hour later).

I also was stewing. The weight of disappointment was compressing my spirits. This was not what I had imagined, what I wanted, what I needed.

Still, in the spirit of ‘Presence’ I turned my attention back to the path as it was, breathing more consciously, smiling, and moving my feet forward on the alpine asphalt trail. For a minute and a half.

I still couldn’t believe our rotten luck. This was NOT how it was supposed to be. So I smiled and breathed and leaned into the moment again. And again in a moment was looping between regret and complaint, frustration and resentment. Remembering Jesus’ comment about a certain entrenched demon: ‘This one only comes out by fasting,’ which I took to mean ‘not without a lot of work,’ I said, Okay.

I’ll work. I’ll be honest about what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling. And I’ll be kind in the process.

There is a lot of ‘I’ in an account like this. There was a lot of ‘I’ in the frustration and disappointment impinging on an otherwise glorious hike. That was the sticky place and the arena for a good piece of work, gently plodding work with its rather proletarian ‘notice, welcome, let be, and be with’ over and over. It was also inspiring.

Continuing this simple cycle opened up that compressed and tight sense of self (at one point I also saw that I had somehow been able to blame Barbara for our bad luck because she had been impatient to park in the first parking lot we saw—as if that had anything to do with our having a wooded instead of an open hike).

All this stewing, however, gradually—and thoroughly—dropped away. Not repressed or glossed over but observed and heard. I did mostly miss half the hike by focusing inward. But only half. The return trip was stunning.

God of moist forest path and open grassy balds, I am profoundly grateful that ‘close’ or ‘open’ all paths are in you. Amen.

Thomas Merton Hermitage, Day 1

Barbara with her novel

A lot of expectations for one week. Major inspiration. Deep rest. Some sense of how best to begin a Christian mindfulness blog. Discovering the best pace for silence, speech, walking, sitting, eating, rocking on the porch, playing around with recorded chant as part of morning, noon, and night prayer.

Bless the sun for waking me up at six. The little cluster of hermitages at Valle Crucis is anchored by it’s svelte chapel, St. Anthony’s, facing east like tradition invites. What a gift to stroll outside to see this little speck of the world coming to light. Two or three birds sing. A windchime answers. Trees near our hermitage porch sway as the morning begins to breathe.

When good strong tea is brewed it is also a gift to sit down to read of the other kind of awakening, “Although the experience is special, it does not happen to a special person. It happens to any of us when the conditions of letting go and opening the heart are present, when we can sense the world in a radically new way” (Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry).

Gracious God, a season of busy-ness has stretched us thin, a vision of a quiet mountain retreat has enticed us, a good night’s sleep has refreshed us. The day awaits. We are here. You are here. Amen.

Serendipity

Welcome to the Table

When we MAKE ROOM in our hearts and minds for every thought and every feeling, it helps create a sacred space to welcome others to the table.

To read these posts in order, view from the bottom up.

Watering the Plant

When we really start paying attention, we see that we actually don’t see very well. Our minds seem so apt to condense or abbreviate and then to hypothesize and extrapolate. It’s a lot like taking vacation pictures of fascinating cities or sweeping landscapes and then getting home and realizing how little of the reality we actually managed to capture.

It’s impossible to corral a glorious complexity in a snapshot, but a certain part of our brains seem wired to do just this. To see and to size up. To move expediently through a day, thinking, Ah, this is this, and that is that, and I’m so pleased to have it settled.

But the closer we look, the more we see we’ve left out. Of course, we have to leave things out; there’s no way to take it all in, to hold it all. But we don’t have to be blind or smug about it. We don’t have to go through life as if this really was this and that really was that, blind to an habitual practice of drive-by presumption. The book Curtis and Betsy will teach starting this Sunday, Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs, names in its title, Everything Belongs, a more evolved way of seeing and living. We can’t contain it all, but it all still belongs. shorthand

In meditation, by not excluding or repressing our thoughts and feelings, we are practicing a way of experiencing everything belonging. Moving through the day, in that same habit of mind, when we begin to notice that we’re seeing and sizing up or referring to something seen, sized up, and filed away long, long ago, it’s nice also to find ourselves remembering, everything belongs, without repressing or compressing; maybe we can take a little more in; maybe we can say ‘snapshot’ or ‘shorthand’ in the middle of the day like we often ‘thinking’ during meditation. Maybe laugh a little at our hardworking executive reality compactor. Maybe even celebrate that a snapshot can also serve to remind us to reengage the rich complexity beyond the picture, that shorthand exists to remind us of what we’ve condensed in the hurry of life.

It can be a real gift to ourselves to become convinced how much more there is to see. How much more there is to see in things we’ve already seen. More to see about people we already know. More to hear in conversations we suppose we’ve already had. More surprise, more delight, more appreciation. It can be a real gift to the people around us, too, as we become less certain, more curious, less settled, more amenable, less life-proof, more permeable.

Biologist Edward Wilson estimates that by the turn of the next century we humans will have caused the extinction of half of all species living today. We are in the Anthropocene age—human impact staggering enough to have its own name beginning to be attached to a geological age. It seems obvious that as a species we just don’t get that everything belongs. Serbs don’t belong in Kosovo. Sunni’s don’t belong in Anbar Province. People of color can’t yet fully belong in Jackson County.

Spending a little time every day in a space where everything can belong can be a big deal. It’s a thin place where the heart of creation touches the chaos of creation. For Christians it’s a place where we experience the Kingdom of God as now and not yet, as latent and yet breaking into our own neighborhood. But no pressure!

Really. Nothing to be frenetic about. Gestation time is what it is. We can’t make a tomato plant grow faster by tugging on its stem. But we can water it, enrich its soil. I heard a long time ago that we can’t speed up the work of God, though apparently, we can slow it down, like we’re stunting the gracious unfolding of life for other species on earth. We know there are many, many implications for us here and now for an active, engaged life of advocacy and action; and if we believe it’s true that to effect change we have to be the change we envision, then meditation becomes very attractive as one of the ways we engage the ‘being’ part of ‘doing.’ Watering the plant. Marinating in core reality of the love and wisdom of God. With every inbreath and every outbreath, neither repressing nor indulging our thoughts and feelings, allowing each to gently dissolve, coming back again and again and again to a gracious, spacious place.

I’ve made some strong statements about meditation this week. And they need testing. I hope we all become a little more curious and a little more confidant that the sacred mystery of silence is not just for mystics and adepts but for distracted, frenetic, lethargic, depressed, sanguine, courageous, cautious, type A to type Z ordinary people like us. Curious and competent enough to practice a little most days. To see how it works. To make our own discoveries, develop our own rhythms, to sit and be blessed.

Beginning at the three chimes and the singing bowl, sit comfortably with healthy posture, breathe normally, giving about 25% of your attention to the outbreath, letting whatever arises arise. Be observant, neither repressing nor indulging what comes to mind. When you find yourself thinking about something, with each outbreath simply and gently let it go by saying inwardly, ‘Thinking.’ Keep breathing, return again and again to being mindful with honesty and compassion.

At the end of ten minutes, you’ll hear again the three chimes, and the singing bowl will sing again, and I will close with a prayer.

Spaciousness

I have three mountain metaphors this morning: a mountain river, a long mountain hike, and the mountain itself. Most of you know the story about me trying to pull my friend Rick out of a fast moving mountain river. I jumped to a rock in the middle of the river, grabbed the edge of the rock, and flung the rest of myself out for Rick to grab. He was a big guy and pulled me right into the river with him. Fifty feet beyond we could see the river drop away and disappear over a waterfall. After an intense moment of panic something singular happened in my head. I was in the middle of an intense kind of calm. If this had been measured on a dial one might picture a needle moving back down from panic to peace, but it rounded the other way, through panic to peace. It reminds me of a Kierkegaard quote I’ve since heard: “Singleness of heart is to will one thing.” I was so busy willing one thing, simply to seize the best option to survive, there was no room for anything else. Time slowed down. Everything came into sharp focus. My whole being was saying, God, whatever, whatever the possibilities are, I’m wide open. That moment of sharp focus has been a benchmark for clarity, for being here now, for paying attention ever since. And this morning I want to use that moment as a way to think about another quality we discover and cultivate in meditation, spaciousness.

By opening to what arises, by seeing things clearly, by treating ourselves kindly, by fostering a sense of welcome on each inbreath and a gentle sense of release each outbreath, we are cultivating a sense of spaciousness in our minds and lives. By allowing room for all our thoughts, feelings, and experiences we’re coming gradually to realize there actually is room for all our thoughts and feelings and experience. We’re moving little by little from a sense of things feeling tight to things feeling more open, from feeling stuffy to better ventilated. And to experience life as more spacious is to experience life a more workable.

Which is one of the ways I felt going toward that waterfall. I had no illusions there was any guarantee everything would be fine, just a deep sense that I was ready to participate wholeheartedly in the process, that if there was a way through, I was completely amenable to finding it.

We don’t, thank God, often find ourselves in rushing mountain rivers sweeping toward unknown waterfalls. But we certainly find ourselves often swept up in the formidable currents of thoughts, reactions, feelings, and actions.

Carl Jung said that with most of our very strong (and in this context strongly unpleasant) interior experience, it’s like hiking up into the Alps during a thunderstorm: if you keep going you eventually pass out of the storm. It may well still be thundering and raining in the valley, but you’re experience the storm from a different place. The Buddhists have a saying (very similar in geography), A lot happens on a mountain. There are snakes and foxes and Carolina Chickadees, maybe a bear or two, numerous springs, countless trees, maybe part of it is sunny, another draped in cloud, there are paths in some places, laurel hells in others, but it’s all one mountain.

It's good to remember a lot happens on mountain. In one way of looking at it, we are the mountain. Not just the part where the strong feelings or thoughts are being focused. Spacious is a word to describe our experience of this reality. It’s not the same thing as going to our happy place. Instead it’s this: enlarging our awareness to encompass our reality. It’s not gimmicky of forced: it’s learning to inhabit the truth that everything belongs. Obviously this has to do with God, and ways we experience God as gracious Presence, Spirit, Mystery, Wisdom. It also has to do with grooves in the brain: a practiced perspective.

It’s not that we’re not present to the storm; it’s that we are also present to everything else. And being present to the whole instead of the most strident part invites the most generous sense of spaciousness, openness, expanded possibility.

A quick note. I’ve been emphasizing the part of our practice that has to do with not repressing the icky stuff. Everything also applies to not indulging the enticing stuff. Our brighter thoughts and moods and fantasies can become unhelpfully strident in their own way, can become compulsive, obsessive. We can get fixated on fun, too. You know that curious line from a collect we pray in the evening, God…shield the joyous.

Spaciousness grows steadily from working honestly and gently with our thoughts and feelings. Practicing how at the same moment to be neither repressive nor indulgent grooves the brain. At any point in our day, in any overwhelming current, we have the potential in the time it takes to breathe in and to breathe out to remember that a lot happens on a mountain. To experience that life is often more workable than life often feels.

Beginning at the three chimes and the singing bowl, sit comfortably with healthy posture, breathe normally, giving about 25% of your attention to the outbreath, letting whatever arises arise. Be observant, neither repressing nor indulging what comes to mind. When you find yourself thinking about something, with each outbreath simply and gently let it go by saying inwardly, ‘Thinking.’ Keep breathing, return again and again to being mindful with honesty and compassion.

At the end of ten minutes, you’ll hear again the three chimes, and the singing bowl will sing again, and I will close with a prayer.

Wholeness

Yesterday we explored how mindfulness meditation relates to a Christian understanding of holiness. Mindfulness meditation also dovetails wonderfully with what Urban Holmes calls Anglican sensibility.

(Anglican sensibility) is the ability to apprehend or incorporate into our awareness the totality of an experience in all depth and breadth. Sensibility refers to the capacity to be sensitive and to accept what our senses tell us, even when that is not what fits into our neat categories. It implies an openness to experience, even when the meaning of that experience is ambiguous, incongruous and obscure (What Is Anglicanism, p 3).

Anglicanism, when it’s truest to itself, takes in the whole, doesn’t exclude what it doesn’t agree with, what it doesn’t understand, or even what’s incomprehensible. The human brain is a good Anglican brain. We take in what our senses tell us—and our reactions to what our senses tell us. But our brains have more capacity than our minds have attention. So a whole lot is stored somewhere—we know more than we know or than we want to know. Many packets of data remain unconscious or semi-conscious because part of the mind has evolved to exclude what is not felt to be immediately useful or beneficial. It doesn’t take long, as we go through life, to realize the mind’s processes have a few kinks.

One of the words we use for excluding life’s data, data which is nevertheless present somewhere in our brains anyway, is repression. And once we come to a certain point in our experience of the limitations of repression, we find one of life’s great adventures is learning how to smooth out the kinks, to get things flowing better. What at one time didn’t seem useful may now be essential. What once was unpleasant (and therefore stuffed) may now have become pathological, may be blocking the flow from our hearts to our heads, from our souls to our lives. Meditation in this light is heart/mind/soul therapy.

When we sit for awhile and are aware and permeable to what arises in us, being non-repressive, we become companions to our own lives, witnesses of our own stories. It’s never a straightforward narrative. It’s more like a book the dog chewed up. But it’s our book. And every scrap we recover fits somewhere. And that’s the point. That’s the beautiful thing. Our job is not to put the book back together, which is completely beyond us anyway. Our job is to notice and cherish the scraps, a task that is actually quite doable. Carl Jung said of soul-work, half of it is just paying attention: the soul so appreciates attention paid to it. It’s a good day when consciousness finally comes around to realizing there’s way more life in integration than in repression. The book Curtis and Betsy will begin teaching Sunday, Richard’s Rohr’s Everything Belongs, is about this very thing, everything belonging.

Learning to work with our various scraps is within our ability. It’s one of the wonders of mindfulness meditation. It’s part of what we’re practicing: noticing and appreciating the scraps, the bits. Whatever arises belongs. This is good honest work, and for most of us it’s ultimately not that difficult; it’s mainly a matter of effort; it’s the part we contribute to the process of integration—which is way of describing wholeness, which is another word for salvation, which is another way of talking about what God wants for us. We Christians are pretty clear about not being able to save ourselves. And we also celebrate the abiding mystery that when we seek, we find, when we knock on the door it opens. That’s the balance between effort and grace. We show up, God shows up—or more profoundly, we discover God Is Already There. If the scraps begin to fit together, when even one scrap reveals the theme of a much bigger chunk, that’s grace, that’s epiphany, that’s the God part. The Buddhists call this Wisdom Mind, and for us Wisdom, Sophia, is another way to describe how we experience God, a powerful way Jesus incarnated God. In meditating we don’t summon God or achieve unitive vision. Nevertheless, in some measure, both come; and we not only glimpse God and rest in the Presence, but we also glimpse our own scraps fitting—and fitting together with everybody else’s scraps, with all the scraps in the great wide world.

But we don’t strain for epiphanies, which is counterproductive. Neither is mindfulness meditation about controlling our heart rate or lowering our blood pressure—though it might and other kinds of meditation do this and are recommended. Mindfulness or insight meditation is about getting in the habit of seeing clearly, welcoming what we see, and treating it all with unlimited friendliness.

It is the experience of those who practice this way that as we cultivate the habit of mindfulness and gentleness in our interior lives, it inevitably effects the whole of our lives. We see more clearly, follow more nearly, love more dearly, which is nothing more nor less that everybody’s and anybody’s part in work that transforms the world.

Beginning at the three chimes and the singing bowl, sit comfortably with healthy posture, breathe normally, giving about 25% of your attention to the outbreath, letting whatever arises arise. Be observant, neither repressing nor indulging what comes to mind. When you find yourself thinking about something, with each outbreath simply and gently let it go by saying inwardly, ‘Thinking.’ Keep breathing, return again and again to being mindful with honesty and compassion.

At the end of ten minutes, you’ll hear again the three chimes, and the singing bowl will sing again, and I will close with a prayer.

Holiness

Ten minutes of teaching, ten minutes of practice over a week or so is not a lot of time. But many of us learned to swim or to ride a bicycle in that time. Well, we learned enough to strike out on our own and keep going and get better. We had places to go, to explore. We wanted to be certified for the deep end. I think that’s still true when it comes to life, interior life and just plain life, we want to go farther and deeper.

So where are we going, what are we exploring? Pema Chodron, whose book, When Things Fall Apart is kind of my mindfulness meditation bible, reminds us that we don’t meditate to become better at meditation, but we meditate to become better at living. It may not seem obvious at first, but what she says correlates with the idea of holiness, which has become a terribly churchy word tending to mean, behaving ourselves so God won’t get mad at us, or living in this world in a pure kind of way so we don’t get our Sunday clothes dirty. But the heart of holiness has more to do with availability than purity. God speaks at night to the young Samuel who doesn’t recognize his voice. And his mentor Eli says, It’s God calling you, Samuel. And the next time you hear God, say, Keep talking; I’m listening. Isaiah hears God asking, Whom shall I send? And Isaiah says, Here I am, Lord, send me. That’s what holiness is, being available to the voice and purpose of God

It’s a simple idea—and reality—and it’s an endlessly rich, wonderful, scary, empowering way to live. First, there’s the hearing part. Lots of voices in the world and in our own heads. How do we recognize God’s voice, that place in us where Deep calls to Deep? Second, there’s the availability part. Somehow in the world as it is, God’s purposes are always unfolding. Our receptivity, our availability is part of that.

We don’t meditate to become better at meditating but to become better at life. We don’t work with holiness so God will think better of us or love us more. God already loves and accepts us more than we’ll ever fathom. Holiness is the adventure of discovering that God’s purposes and our deepest purposes always connect.

In sitting still, letting what arises arise, paying attention to what does arise, neither repressing nor indulging, sitting with honesty and compassion we learn a lot about voices from the shallow end and the deep end of the pool, we learn a lot about our own desires and resistances, we learn a lot about the nature and gifts of God which reside in us and coexist and overlap with us and ache to unfold into the world.

We also see what a muddle it all can seem much of the time. How often we just splash around in the shallow end—even as we’re also aware of our desire to go farther and deeper. Have any of us have NOT been frustrated by the disparity between the desire for deeper life and the too common experience of superficial life? Seeing this, being gently honest about it, is basic to mindfulness. And most of us in one way or another have been mindful of this tension (though maybe not gently mindful) a million times. This disparity can be painful; it can feel harsh. So, right here as we’re thinking about it, it’s a good time to remember how important compassion is, a truckload of compassion for ourselves, our convoluted, precious-to-God selves. Those very selves parts of which can long for meaning, get stuck in superficialities, and be a real nag about the whole thing. In practicing, there’s a place for all that, in the breathing in and the breathing out we can see our hopes and our stuckness and our frustration with ourselves again and again, all of it, and we can remember that compassion is as essential as honesty, and we can embrace our scarred and weary hearts. This is the same thing as remembering to effectively remember the tender mercies of God. To remember what the bible says: “You humans--as dysfunctional as you are—know how to love your kids. Imagine how complete God’s love is for you.” It gets to be a habit—being persistently honest and thoroughly compassionate.

This is why meditation has to do with holiness, why it affects the way we live our lives. We’re getting in the habit of being honest with ourselves; we’re getting used to getting closer to some of the troubling stuff honesty brings to light. At the same time we’re also experiencing the deep springs of lovingkindness that well up in us like living water. And all the while we’re getting into the habit of noticing the overlap between our deepest purposes and God’s.

Beginning at the three chimes and the singing bowl, sit comfortably with healthy posture, breathe normally, giving about 25% of your attention to the outbreath, letting whatever arises arise. Be observant, neither repressing nor indulging what comes to mind. When you find yourself thinking about something, with each outbreath simply and gently let it go by saying inwardly, ‘Thinking.’ Keep breathing, return again and again to being mindful with honesty and compassion.

At the end of ten minutes, you’ll hear again the three chimes, and the singing bowl will sing again, and I will close with a prayer.