"Be Still!"

Seattle waterfront. (crg)

Our mothers’ admonition to us as children is the first step of contemplation.

During my prayers the morning I write this, it occurred to me that, if we are still enough, we can sense the world breathe.

Doesn’t matter if we are under trees or skyscrapers, raining skies or starry nights. We can see or hear or feel the world breathe, and that breath is the breath of God.

God is not on a faraway planet, but within this planet, offering the breath of life to all creatures, to all creation. And to you, specifically and particularly.

Meditation aligns our breathing with God’s breathing.

To allow that, we need truly “free time.” Scholar comes from the Latin “schola” which means free time, or leisure time for learning. Free time allows us to become “scholars” of the spiritual.

Free time means letting go of all claims on us—in the words of the Lord’s Prayer, released from debts, trespasses, and sins, as well as those indebted to us, trespass our space and time, and sin against us. Also, we are free of obligations, expectations, and the day’s agenda. It requires an act of the imagination to do this, to offer the welcoming, existential prayer “thy kingdom come” and to believe Jesus’ words “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” and “this day you will be with me in Paradise.”

“It is because this kingdom is established and is present within us that we can be made free of the limitations of language and thought,” in the words of Benedictine monk John Main in his 1980 book, Word into Silence. He explains of most Westerners,

We tend either to be alert or relaxed; rarely are the two states combined in most of us. But in meditation we come to experience ourselves as at one and the same time totally relaxed and totally alert. This stillness is not the stillness of sleep but rather of totally awakened concentration. [p 8]

I can’t find what translation of Romans 5:2 that Main is using, but I love the turn of phrase, “we have been allowed to enter the sphere of God’s grace.” [pp. 2-3] (I did an internet search for this translation and only found this wording in interpretations of “we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.” NRSV)

The “sphere of God’s grace” releases us into free time. It forgives the past, and, in a sense, “forgives” the future. It allows a truly existential moment to bask in God’s presence, which is not other-worldly but here and now. We are Adam and Eve naked in the garden. We are Jesus, children being about our “Father’s/Mother’s business” in the Temple and beyond. Holy Spirit inspires us, overcoming divisions and dualities with unity and harmony.

As such we know ourselves, even as we yet puzzle over knowledge of God.

“Monks are essentially people whose first priority is practice rather than theory,” Main writes, “Such a monasticism…will be an inclusive rather than an exclusive movement in the Church. It will know that the experience has only to be really lived to be communicated. … It is the silence of monks that is their true eloquence.” [xi]

Be still, and attend to God breathing in your world and in your life.

Please check out the follow-up posts, “Listen Up!” and “Be Careful!”

I will again be co-leading a 5-day contemplative retreat: April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama, through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is open to the public.

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Vacation & Vocation

A neighbor's peaceful pathway.

Very early one morning I saw a woman doing a walking meditation, such as Buddhists do, pausing after each step taken, perhaps pondering a koan. As I drew closer, I realized the “koan” she concentrated on so intently was, in truth, an iPad. 

Running through the park, I approached a young man sitting in the lotus position, his face downturned in meditation. As I passed by, however, I saw his thumbs busily texting.

On each occasion, the only hope of my original fantasy was that they were tweeting or texting their spiritual directors or gurus!

We all know of such impulses to check tweets, messages, e-mails, and news media! C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind, in which Screwtape advises Wormwood, his tempter in training, to put into his ward’s head the impulse to take a break just as he’s about to discover something important to his spiritual progress, thus distracting him.

One dictionary defines vocation as “an impulse to perform a certain function.” Vacation is defined as freedom from such an impulse, a letting go of our compulsions to do things we have always done, a release from doing things the way we have always done them. Thus vacation invites play.

I’ve known too many people, including clergy, who brag about never or rarely taking a vacation. In my view, vacation is a vital balance to vocation, as necessary to one’s work as sleep and nutrition and compensation.

Some of us get away from our work by going away, but others of us get away from our work by going within: inside ourselves, listening to that inner voice that is the root of the word “vocation.”

I’ve been reading a lot about the spiritualities of the desert: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The desert is an excellent place to listen for God’s voice, our own voice, the voice of a lover or friend or calling. Distractions are diminished, silence surrounds, we may breathe easier, we may breathe.

In deserts, Moses heard God’s voice, Miriam danced, Elijah listened for “a voice of a gentle stillness,” Naomi accepted Ruth’s vow, Jesus pondered his vocation and found lonely places to pray, Amma Theodora identified acedia (spiritual lethargy), Muhammad received his divine mission. 

Progressive Christians have our wilderness too. We are letting go of religious compulsions to rediscover the God of the desert (metaphorically).

Writing of desert spirituality in Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton concluded that “without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings…the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the clichés of the inner life and can defend themselves with infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation [108-9].”

Perhaps vacation from religious compulsion is also our vocation.

This post appeared on this blog on July 11, 2012.

Your donations are this blog’s only means of support. Please follow this link to make your gift: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2012 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.