There is a story about
Mahatma Gandhi that fits my
experience the past several weeks. A mother brought her young son to
Gandhi because she knew he was a loving, helpful man, and because
her son looked up to him. "I've tried to tell my son," she told
Gandhi, "that he eats too much sugar. It's not good for him. Can you
please tell him not to eat so much sugar?" He thought for a moment
and told her, "Bring him back in two weeks, and I will have an
answer for him." The mother was a bit surprised. Why would waiting a
couple weeks make a difference for something so simple. But she did
what he asked, and brought him back. Gandhi's response was the same:
"Bring him back in two weeks, and I will have an answer for him."
Again, she brought him back, and again he asked for two more weeks.
Finally, on the fourth try, Gandhi stooped down to address the boy.
"You should stop eating so much sugar. It's not good for you."
What?! Now the mother was a bit angry. "Why couldn't you have told
him that the first time we came to you?!" "Because," said Gandhi, "I
needed time myself to stop eating so much sugar. It was harder than
I thought. I couldn't ask your son to do something I'm not willing
to do myself."
The last couple weeks I've spoken to you about the importance to the
Christian life of a certain form of prayer. In popular parlances,
it's most often called "meditation." Today, it's increasingly
referred to as "Mindfulness." In Christian circles, I've most often
heard it talked about as "Contemplation." Whatever we call it, it's
a form of prayer that uses silence and attempts to calm the mind by
stemming the normal flow of thinking. And I think it's become a lost
art in the Christian tradition that we very much need to retrieve.
But I feel a bit like Gandhi with that boy. Because even though I've
been becoming more convinced of its necessity for a healthy
Christian life, I've struggled a to fall into a regular practice
myself. I was not raised with contemplative practice at all. It was
never taught to me in Sunday School or Confirmation. We didn't even
have anything on it in seminary. It's been absent to my life of
faith, until about three years ago, when I first started reading
Franciscan priest and teacher
Richard Rohr. Here's
his most recent book, in fact, titled
Silent
Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation. Finding God
in contemplation. Through Rohr -- and also Sr. Nancy Brousseau, who
leads our synod's education center, and who led our Church Council
on an experience of this type of prayer -- I've been learning about
the great mystics who listened to God in prayer and became great
leaders and saints. But an important part of the message has been
that it's not just for mystics and saints. It's for everyone. (We'll
follow up on this point next week, in fact, as we read in the
Pentecost story about God's Spirit being poured out on
all
people.)
Contemplation is a form of prayer that has been passed on in the
Christian tradition for everyone to practice, even though often
times it was only in the monasteries. Since the Reformation, it even
went somewhat dormant in the monasteries. It's just been in the last
fifty years or so that it's made a revival there, too. The best
place to
learn contemplative prayer, in fact, is generally
at your local monastery. I took my first class on contemplative
prayer at the
Transformation
Center at old Nazareth College on Gull Road.
But my practice has remained spotty. So, like Gandhi, I've been
reluctant to ask you all to do something that I'm not willing to do
myself. It's been in recent weeks that my own motivation to practice
received a big boost to rededicate myself to faithful practice of
contemplation. It came through an unexpected source -- the book I've
plugged the last two weeks, titled
10%
Happier, by ABC news anchor
Dan Harris.
It's basically his personal account of being ushered into the
benefits of meditation pretty much kicking and screaming. He's
unreligious himself and so resisted all the way, because meditation
is usually connected with religious practice. But increasingly he
relented because it did help him a great deal. It began when he had
a horrifying moment of experiencing a panic attack while on the air
for
Good Morning America about ten years ago -- in front
of 5 million viewers. He knew that if he wanted to keep his career,
he needed to make sure that it never happened again. So he takes the
reader through a fascinating story, both into the world of TV news
and the personal benefits of meditation -- all with great humor and
wit. His account of enduring a
10-day silent retreat is
hilarious. He hated most of it, yet it was also one of the most
profound experiences of his life.
What has helped me is to see the Christian practice of contemplation
in light of a more general human practice of what we might consider
mental or spiritual hygiene. Harris writes, for example:
On my travels to various Buddhist seminars, I had
started to hear mentions of scientific research into meditation.
It sounded promising, so I checked it out. What I found blew my
mind. Meditation, once part of the counterculture, had now fully
entered the scientific mainstream. It had been subjected to
thousands of studies, suggesting an almost laughably long list of
health benefits, including salutary effects on the following:
major depression, drug addiction, binge eating, smoking cessation,
stress among cancer patients, loneliness among senior citizens,
ADHD, asthma, psoriasis, irritable bowel syndrome.
Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels
of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers
more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently
mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to
animals and bend spoons with your mind. (pp. 167-68)
A frustration, though, of this practice is that it's hard to put in
a book. It's one of those practices that's best passed on person to
person. As Dan Harris became interested in trying meditation, he was
frustrated by not being able to find it in a book, which is partly
why he was motivated to write his book. The appendix is worth the
price for its basic instructions of how to practice meditation --
though he, too, admits that it is best to learn
with
someone who knows the practice. But here's just another brief
snippet about why it's important:
Meditation is the best tool I know for neutralizing the
voice in the head. As discussed, the ego is often a hatchery of
judgments, desires, assumptions, and diabolical plans. The act of
simply feeling the breath breaks the habits of a lifetime. For
those short snatches of time when you're focused on the rise and
fall of the abdomen or the cool air entering and exiting the
nostrils, the ego is muzzled. You are not thinking, you are being
mindful -- an innate but underused ability we all have, which
allows us to be aware without judging.
When you repeatedly go through the cycle of feeling the breath,
losing your focus, and hauling yourself back, you are building
your mindfulness muscle the way dumbbell curls build your biceps.
Once this muscle is just a little bit developed, you can start to
see all the thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that carom
through your skull for what they really are: quantum squirts of
energy without any concrete reality of their own.
Imagine how massively useful this can be. Normally, for example,
when someone cuts you off in traffic or in line at Starbucks, you
automatically think, I'm [mad]. Instantaneously, you
actually become [mad]. Mindfulness allows you to slow
that process down. Sometimes, of course, you're right to be [mad].
The question is whether you are going to react mindlessly to that
anger or respond thoughtfully. Mindfulness provides space between
impulse and action, so you're not a slave to whatever neurotic
obsession pops into your head. (pp. 230-31)
Sound helpful? Let's finish up with at least a hint of why I think
this is so important to our Christian practice. Richard Rohr has a
chapter in this little book on contemplative prayer called "The Path
to Non-Dual Thinking." What's dual thinking? Our normal thinking of
judging everything in pairs, the basic one being good and bad, but
also pairs like pain and pleasure, suffering and joy. The voice in
our heads, as Harris calls it, is constantly judging everything
along some line of good and bad. Non-dual thinking, as Rohr calls
it, is not to think away good and bad but to be aware of it in less
judgmental ways
because you are aware of the
oneness
of everything.
If the Gospel readings from John in recent weeks have sound mystical
to you, let me suggest it is because of our usual dual thinking.
When we are on the path to non-dual thinking, these passages
actually begin to make more sense. And the bottom line of it all
comes in the closing words to today's reading. Jesus ends his
farewell to the disciples praying to his Father that "they may be
one, just as we are one." Oneness. That's the antidote to the
dangers of dual thinking, our normal thinking. Our most immediate
reaction
to judging something bad is to expel it, often with any force we can
muster. Through Contemplation, we learn the practice of
responding
instead of
reacting. We learn to hold off our normal
reaction of trying to violently expel the bad, and instead respond
with love. That doesn't mean there aren't bad things that need to be
resisted. There are! And we are called to resist them. But with a
response of love, not a reaction of anger and force.
Why? Because, first of all, in love we are aware of our
own
badness, our own sin. As Luther taught at his most mystical moment,
we are all saints and sinners at the same time. We learn to see the
oneness of everything, the good and the bad together. And so,
second, we learn that the only ultimate way for the bad to be healed
is love. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, You can't drive out
darkness with darkness; only with light. You can't drive out hate
with hate; only with love. Contemplative prayer is about
interrupting the dual thinking and reacting, so that we might
instead respond with love.
