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.