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
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.
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