Collect of the Day: Feast of St. Michael and All Angels
Each Monday morning Daniel B. Clendenin publishes an essay givng us opportunities to anticipate the lectionary readings for the coming Sunday. Next Sunday, October 4, will be the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (also the Feast of St. Francis), and many of us will hear these appointed readings (Revised Common Lectionary, Year B):
Job 1:1, 2:1–10 or Genesis 2:18–24
Psalm 26 or Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1–4, 2:5–12
Mark 10:2–16
Susan, on another list, recently posted this remarkable quotation taken from Robert Sardello’s Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness:
Each of us has an ever-faithful companion–presence. Something that is always with us. Something that helps us to live with inner integrity and depth, to see through the outer coverings of others and of the world to their purpose and core being, and to get over placing ourselves at the center of everything. This companion-presence is Silence. It never goes away. We go away from it, become distracted and forgetful, and lose the manners needed to nurture companionship with it. We go away from Silence into the world of noise as if into a vast buzzing of insects, pushed to exist within the permanent irritation of dissonance. [...] Silence is palpable. [...]What if, to some degree, the “subjective” experience of God is also subjectively stated? …What one names “God,” for example, another may call “Silence.” Certainly, in my devotions the lines between what I “know” of God/Silence often dissolve.
In Open Mind, Open Heart, Fr. Thomas Keating discusses five kinds of thoughts that may come to us during our practice of Centering Prayer:
At one time or another in our contemplative practice many of us have experienced what Fr. Keating calls “the consequences of traumatic emotional experiences.” While such experiences often occur in childhood, we may also encounter them in domestic arguments, the undoings of marriages, the death and suffering of loved ones, the horrors of the battlefield, and our encounters with poverty and injustice here and in the Third World. We live in a violent society; our movies, newspapers, and television shows constantly barrage us with scenes of pain, despair, and great unhappiness. Our personal lives have often carry the wounds of psychic damage. In Centering Prayer it would be unusual not to have violent images, feelings, thoughts, and memories intrude into our movement toward “unworded” contemplative prayer. When that happens, Fr. Keating gives us this exceptionally helpful advice:
When you feel restless, agitated, or pained by some emotional experience, you can’t spend the time better than by waiting it out. The temptation is great when you are suffering from a distressing emotion to try to push it away. However, by allowing your attention to move gently toward the emotion and by sinking into it, as though you were getting into a nice jacuzzi, you are embracing God in the feeling. Don’t think, just feel the emotion.
If you were blind and then got your sight back, even the ugliest things would be appreciated. Suppose you had no emotions and suddenly experienced one; even a disagreeable emotion would be thrilling. Actually, no emotion is really distressing; it is only the false self that interprets it as distressing. Emotional swings are gradually dissolved by the complete acceptance of them. To put this into practice, you must first recognize and identify the emotion: “Yes, I am angry, I am panicky, terrified, restless.”
Every feeling has some good. Since God is the ground of everything, we know that even the feeling of guilt, in a certain sense, is God. If you can embrace the painful feeling, whatever it is, as if it were God, you are uniting yourself with God, because anything that has reality has God as its foundation. “Letting go” is not a simple term; it is quite subtle and has important nuances-depending on what you are intending to let go of. When a thought is not disturbing, letting go means paying no attention to it. When a thought is disturbing, it won’t go away so easily, so you have to let it go in some other way. One way you can let it go is to sink into it and identify with it, out of love for God. This may not be possible at first, but try it and see what happens. The principal discipline of contemplative prayer is letting go.
To sum up what I have said on this fifth kind of thought, contemplative prayer is part of a reality that is bigger than itself. It is part of the whole process of integration, which requires opening to God at the level ofthe unconscious. This releases a dynamic that will be peaceful at times, and at other times heavily laden with thoughts and emotion. Both experiences are part of the same process of integration and healing. Each kind of experience, therefore, should be accepted with the same peace, gratitude, and confidence in God. Both are necessary to complete the process of transformation.
If you are suffering from a barrage of thoughts from the unconscious, you don’t have to articulate the sacred word clearly in your imagination or keep repeating it in a frantic effort to stabilize your mind. You should think it as easily as you think any thought that comes to mind spontaneously.
Do not resist any thought, do not hang on to any thought, do not react emotionally to any thought. This is the proper response to all five kinds of thoughts that come down the stream of consciousness.
Note: There are two editions (and many printings) of Open Mind, Open Heart. The first was published in 1986; the second (The so-called 20th Anniversary Edition) in 2008. Although they are basically the same, in the 2008 edition, Fr. Keating has rearranged and revised the text in a catechetical (question and answer) fashion. The quotation cited in this posting may be found on page 98-99 in the 1986 edition; on pages 102-104 in the 2008 edition.
Images: Michelle Forsyth, Trauma, 2002. Cotton thread on cotton, 4 x 5 inches ; Sunday, July 9, 2006, 2006. Watercolor on Fabriano SP watercolor paper, 18 x 27 inches.
There is a set of paperback books on my shelf that has attracted my attention for years. It’s a four volume edition of the Philokalia. Last night, reading in and around the first volume containing St. Hesychios’ “On Watchfulness and Holiness,” I found myself underlining this passage:
Each hour of the day we should note and weigh our actions and in the evening we should do what we can to free ourselves from the burden of them by means of repentance—if that is, we wish, with Christ’s help, to overcome wickedness. (124)
Each day at 5:00 p.m. in Evening Prayers, this prayerbook asks June and me to maintain a period of “silence for meditation.” We don’t observe an overly long silence (admittedly, sometimes it’s short), but most of the time we allow a minute or so to go by in which hear only the ticking of the clock or our own heartbeats. During that silence we reflect on what has happened during the day.
As the day passes, I know we are aware, more or less, of how things have gone. Nevertheless, the evening silence for meditation is an especially good time for summing up and reflecting on the day’s thoughts and actions. This “summing up” allows us to explore and examine the more subtle forms of egotism to which we are constantly inclined. In contemplative language, our review of these egoistic activities alerts us as to how we have been constructing what Thomas Merton, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating call our “false selves.”
Each of us knows how to construct a bogus, phony, cooked-up, and specious self; that is, we are experts in creating identifies intended to deceive others—and ourselves!–as to who we really are. I, for example, am given to suggest to you that I’m a fairly decent practicing Christian. Writing these sentences is right now a movement in that direction. For example, I like to read. But lots of times I know I am tempted to read so that I can quote other Christians, a temptation which professional academics find especially fetching. My false self is especially prone to the production of such presentations. I like to associate myself with famous Christians; it helps to suggest that I’m a pretty good Christian. In other words, surely you will recognize me by the company I keep. Just take a look.
Homo curvatus in se. Here’s how it works. Although I don’t usually say so emphaticly, I’m personally and often quite secretively convinced that my thinking is generally a little better than your thinking; my politics slightly more on target than yours; my spiritual life, especially when seen in the right light, is at least a tad better than most others. And, of course, my use of silence more productive than yours.
Homo curvatus in se among us humans is insideous. Dangerous. If left unchecked, it marginalizes others, struts our own egos, and eventually discounts as little or nothing what—or better yet, w
ho!– is our True Self: the Lord Jesus Christ.
Heading in one direction by the dynamics of homo curvatus in se, we desperately need to go in another direction. Curving, arching, and habitually swerving toward one’s self, we need to aim ourselves—minds, hearts, strength, and soul–toward someone other than ourselves: each one’s True Self, the Lord Jesus Christ.
God in his grace gives us our True Self in Christ. In prayer we turn from our false selves and meet the Center of our lives, the True Self. Whenever we review our day and discover where repentance is necessay, we are going in the right direction.
God’s gift of a good prayerbook works wonders in this redirectioning. Here’s how it works. Just before we get ready to pray the Psalms for the day, my prayerbook suggests that I observe “silence for meditation.” That where and when I sit quietly for a while to review the day. This extended review invariably reveals numerous occasions when I sinned against family members, neighbors, strangers, and God. I didn’t do what I should have done, and I did what I should not have done. And all in the interest of promoting my false self, my egotistical, self-protective self.
After the “silence for meditation” June and I offer this prayer, echoing images from Psalm 141:
Let in incense of our repentant prayer ascend before you, O Lord, and let your loving kindness descend upon us, that with purified minds we may sing your praises with the Church on earth and the whole heavenly host, and may glorify you forever and ever.
Last Saturday (during the Week of Pentecost 15) during Morning Prayer many of us read Chapter 8 of I Kings: it’s the story of Solomon’s dedication of the new constructed Temple. At one point, the story’s narrator says,
And when the priests came out of the holy place, a cloud filled the house of the Lord, so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of the Lord. Then Solomon said,The Lord has said that he would dwell in thick darkness.
I have built you an exalted house, a place for you to dwell in forever.
This is a remarkable detail of the dedication story because it turns up-side-down and inside-out our usual thinking about God’s glory. Usually we imagine God’s glory as a great brightening Light, a kind of blinding whiteness that bursts radiantly from God’s presence. Here, however, the glory of God comes cloud-like, a foggy darkness so solid that the priests had to grope their way around, unsure about their whereabouts, unable to stand and do their work. In short, God’s glory is also an enveloping darkness.
Those who practice Centering Prayer know that teachers like Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington make it a point to recommend that we sit comfortably “with eyes closed” when introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence and action within.
To close one’s eyes is one way we allow God’s darkening glory to come upon us. Jesus himself recommended such environmental darkness for prayer when giving us guidelines, he recommended that we into our closet, shut the door, and pray to our Father who sees in secret (Matthew 6). As I have said elsewhere, inasmuch as first-century Jewish homes had no closets as we know them, it likely that Jesus is suggesting that go off somewhere alone, pull a prayer shawl over our heads or at least pull down our eyelids so that we enter a personal darkness to be with God–or better said, that God may be with us.
That is the experience of many when God meets them: Moses on Mt. Sinai, Paul when struck blind, Joseph in his dreams. The fourteenth-century classic on contemplative prayer is titled The Cloud of Unknowing. The anonymous author of that book tells us that it is when we enter a “cloud” and remove as many distractions as possible, even to the diminishment of following thoughts themselves, that God speaks His healing silence.
Yet even in darkness one may experience what appears to be simply darkness. A friend of mine recently told me about his contemplative practice this way:
Having a subjective “felt experience of God” would be nice, but I don’t really don’t look for that. Just sitting for twenty minutes or so and then listening to the healing silence that dwells behind all of the noise and chatter in the world is enough for me! Centering Prayer is a tool which quiets the mind and then allows a person to rest in silence for a short period of time every day. And for me that silence is not empty — but it’s alive and good and has something to do with eternity and with God. Perhaps we should not expect more than that.
In the closing of our eyes, in whatever darkness we enter, we always sit as the guests of God who comes as and when He wishes. Fr. Keating has somewhere noted that that he “continues to meet people who are very advanced in the spiritual journey who insist that they have never had the grace of contemplative prayer as a felt experience of God.” Certainly my own experience has been something of the kind. My “felt experiences” of God have been terribly (I use the word carefully) brief, sometimes awefully (again I use the word carefully) brief. More often in God’s silence I find myself almost always wrapped in some kind of pervasive Love, healed, cured of anxiety, dissipation, and worry. In my “unknowing,” without words in some strange way I am aware of God’s presence. At the same time, like those priests at the dedication of the temple, I sit gropingly, many times unsure as to where to stand and go. Nevertheless, as I raise my eyelids and look around (sometimes to see the difference between night and dawn), I realize God in his great dark glory has been with me.
Isn’t it so with you?
As some of you may know, Fr. Thomas Keating was hospitalized last week with a pulmonary embolism. On Saturday, September 12, he had a simple surgical procedure to ensure the clots do not move into his lungs. On Sunday evening, September 13, he returned to his home at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, and is resting and in good spirits.
Fr. Keating is the author of many book on the theology and practice of contemplative prayer.
Many Christians look forward to those times during the day when they can find a time of silence for sacred reading, morning and evening prayer, and some form of contemplative practice, perhaps Centering Prayer. It may require that they rise earlier in the morning than others or go to bed a little later than some. To turn their intentions into action they also find it helpful to mark in advance their daily calendar for such times. Along with making a list of daily things to be done (don’t forget to get eggs!), not a few find it helpful to write the word Prayer at the beginning and end of each day’s listing. All such habits help us keep time sacred, enter the Presence of God, listen to Our Lord, and respond to the Holy Spirit through the whole day–all twenty-four hours.
By the way, I found this observation earlier in the day while reading The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware:
It is common to regard contemplation as a rare and exalted gift, and so no doubt it is in its plenitude. Yet the seeds of a contemplative attitude exist in all of us. From this hour and moment I can start to walk through the world, conscious that it is God’s world, that he is near me in everything that I see and touch, in everyone whom I encounter. However spasmodically and incompletely I do this I have already set foot upon the contemplative path.
You can expect not a few words from Flannery O’Connor in the coming days, and I’ll begin this blog renewal with one now. While at Andalusia, I bought a Flannery O’Connor Perpetual Calendar; each day it gives the reader either a quotation (sometimes with a sketchy cartoon), usually something from her letters, her stories and novels, or from the talks she gave at various universities and assorted literary groups. On August 18, here’s what the calendar gave us:
Isn’t that so? Well, it must be; I’ve copied it into my chapbook.
