Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Spiritual Practices: Mindfulness.

Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote a wonderful little book that gave us a way of talking about being present, open and available to the present moment; indeed, he went so far as to describe the “present moment” as a sacrament – Christ is mediated through the ordinary and the everyday.  De Caussade’s was an invitation to “self-surrender”, a surrendering to Divine action, and a surrendering to God who is everywhere. But, perhaps more than that it’s a “letting go” in order to discover God’s will in the present moment. It’s a present-moment opening (ongoing) to God. We can’t encounter God or find healing in the past, nor in the future; it can only happen in this present moment.  

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“…In his book Meditation for Beginners, Jack Kornfield [a Buddhist practitioner] defines mindfulness as ‘a caring and respectful attention’. Being mindful means stepping outside yourself, or at least temporarily putting to the side the central role you’re playing in your own drama, so as to be present and available to whatever it is [that is being brought to your attention]. 

Mindfulness is a key principal of Buddhism and has been adopted into many healing therapies. Mindfulness is about being in the moment and keeping your focus in the now. Eckhart Tolle encapsulates principles of mindfulness in his The Power of Now books. In Practicing the Power of Now, Tolle describes one of the benefits of quieting your thoughts as being the discovery of “grace, ease, and lightness.” 

Bringing your attention to the present, to what’s happening around you now, rather than what you worry or fear might happen at some undetermined future point, helps close what Tolle calls “the anxiety gap”. Tolle writes of how the anxiety gap emerges as a result of the mental distance created between where you are bodily versus where your mind is in the abstract, and describes this as “the origin of fear”.

Adopting a real-time focus and developing awareness to catch yourself when you get swept up in the possibilities and potentials that relate to either something that’s already happened (dwelling in the past) or something that may or may not come to be (obsessing over future possibilities) helps you focus on the one thing in life completely within you power to control: the present moment…” 

- Kelly Surtees, excerpted from her article Alive to the Spirit.  

 

Love in the Shadows: A Celebration of Love

Ben Myers, across “the ditch” from me, offers “Eleven Thesis on Love”, love being a theme woven through many posts on this blog over the last 18-months or so.

So much amongst Myer’s theses resonates, not least as I reflect on my time yesterday with a wonderful life-formed group of people; people naming and celebrating love, the transformative, healing and life-giving power of love. The word itself was used many times, but more especially and importantly, it was en-fleshed in stories, in the actions of one dear person that we’d gathered around – drawn indeed by her love and loving.

We gathered to celebrate the depths and richness of love, maybe too the cruciform nature of love – the pain and suffering of love precisely because we are daily invited to make the choice to love. 

Yesterday we celebrated a dear friend, sister, daughter, wife, and mother. We celebrated her capacity to love and to allowing love to stretch and deepen her. And, importantly, in the background we celebrated a love shared; we celebrated a marriage, a family, and a God who is love. 

Below are some quotes from Myer’s post. In each, Ben, more eloquently than I, gives voice to so much of what I feel about love, and indeed the importance of love. “But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.” (1 Cor. 13:13 / The Message). 

From Ben: 

“…Love is not desire, even though it appropriates desire the way a flame appropriates dry wood. To love is to desire the desire of another. Which means: love is kenosis, love is loss, love is the purgation of desire… 

…The widespread sentimentalisation of romantic love in our society is a casual defacement of the Holy. Our pop songs and romantic comedies and breezy one-night stands are the moral equivalent of scribbling your lover's name beside the toilet in a public restroom. Except that it is God's Name – for "God is love" (1 John 4:16). 

The experience of falling in love is the emotional shock produced by a sudden reorientation of personal attention. But such an experience is not yet love. To sustain that attention over time, even at great cost, is what it means to love…

Love is mostly failure. If we understood ourselves, we would repent of our loves as one repents of the most appalling crime. Love is so entangled with selfish desire that we cannot even clearly tell the difference; nothing but the day of judgment will distinguish wheat from chaff. God's judgment does for me what I cannot do for myself: it separates one thing, love, from everything else that I am and everything else that I have done. What I need, all I need, is judgment. I live in desperate hope towards God's judgment, which is also God's mercy – the only kind of mercy worth the name…”

You can read his complete post here.  

Centering Prayer

Back in 2006 the Contemplative Network invited subscribers to their Contemplative Life Program to share their experiences thus far. I was struck by a letter by Sr. Karen Williamson. I’m not sure why; it was just the focus of my few quite moments early one morning recently, with a coffee in my hand. Centering prayer (meditation) feels like a needful and “green edge” in my life. Perhaps one day I – like Sr. Williamson – will be able to say I’ve meditated daily for 33-years… but “baby-steps” meantime. 

I found her letter encouraging and hopeful. Reading it was moment of consolation, and maybe it be so for you too? 

Here’s an excerpt from her short letter:  

“…Centering Prayer is not new to me; I have been meditating daily for 33 years, but through the Contemplative Life Program I have recommitted to doing it twice a day for at least 30 minutes each time. 

Centering Prayer has been the doorway through which I have awakened to the Presence of God at the heart of all being. I’m the type that tends to go mountain- climbing over molehills; CP has helped me to move from being “anxious and troubled about many things” to staying my mind on the “one thing needful”. 

Through the dark valleys and desert places, it has been a sustaining and strengthening practice that has helped me to grow. The effects of CP overflow into daily life with a sense of resting in God even in the midst of activity. 

In my work as a counselor and spiritual director, CP has helped me to become more aware of the needs and the beauty of each unique self, which is sometimes buried beneath layers of fear, guilt, or resentment, and of the Presence and action of God, loving us into wholeness and divine union. 

… God has been teaching me for years to “give thanks in everything”. I have found Welcoming Prayer to be a wonderful tool for countering the resistance of the false self and accepting life as it is, knowing that God is working through all for our healing and growth. What a relief it is to let go of the strain of trying to manipulate life to meet our needs, and instead to relax into the goodness of God underlying all creation..." 

Sr. Jeanne-Marie (Karen) Williamson, 

For more information visit Contemplative Outreach’s website here. Sr. Williamson’s letter can be found in full in the January-June 2006 Contemplative Outreach Newsletter, p. 7 (can be found (PDF) online here)

The Value of Silence, and Ignatian Spirituality

Nomad’s January 2011 podcast is a little different because as Tim says: 

“…Rather than simply an interview you’ll hear me reflecting my daily experiences of a five-day silent retreat before discussing it with our interviewee Ruth Holegate. 

The BBC documentaries The Monastery and The Big Silence really impacted Hannah and me (follow the links to check them out on YouTube). We’ve had a fair amount of teaching and encouragement in the spiritual disciplines, but silence had never been mentioned. We then saw Ruth Holgate speak on the subject at Greenbelt and we both felt a prompting to give it a go. So we signed up for a five-day silent retreat at the Jesuit Spirituality Centre Loyola Hall. We were slightly anxious that we couldn’t really afford it, but then lo-and-behold we got a tax rebate that paid for it exactly! 

It was a remarkable five days. To our surprise neither of us found the silence itself especially challenging (apart from the one hour corporate silence in the evenings!). Instead the challenge came from what God was doing in us as a result of us committing ourselves to finding him in the silence…”

It’s a fascinating episode, not least for the many references to Ignatian spirituality. Tim’s self-reflections are honest and insightful, and having done a couple of silent retreats over the years, there were a number of insights and experiences I related too. I recommend it. 

You’ll find the podcast here.

A Contemplative in the Uncharted Desert of the Heart

“…The contemplative is [not] the [person] who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply [he/she] who has risked [their] mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a clamp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist…” 

Thomas Merton, in a letter to Dom Francis Decroix, 21^st August 1967. Published in Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 5, edited by Robert E. Daggy. 

The contemplative must explore the uncharted desert area of the human heart, what Merton describes as the “arid, rocky, dark land of the soul.” Ultimately this desert-way is what Nouwen calls “the way of the heart”. It is a profoundly difficult path, one which takes us on a healing and transformative journey into our dark interior; a journey to the source and centre of who we most truly are, and out of which – by means of the Spirit – we will become freer, more fully alive, and more authentically human in our imaging of God. It’s a journey through which we reconnect with what is most true about each of us: we are created to image God. In this journey the projections and the veneer of our lives are done away with and there is a reconnection between who we most truly are and how we are. Our disordered desires and longings are ordered. We find what we are looking for. We have all created a “false-self” from the sense of “lack”, woundedness and inadequacy that we all feel and from which we need to be set free (for more on this “false self”, I’d recommend the enneagram as a helpful tool, and especially those enneagram books / resources that highlight the pathological, unhealthy, wounded or shadow characteristics of each type. 

One the contemplative path we move from unconsciousness to consciousness. 

‘Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self… My false and private self is the one who wants [to hide from God; too dwell in the darkness] to exist outside the radius of God’s will and love – outside of reality and life [a reality that more often than not lies at the heart of our feelings of “lostness” or being a “lost thing”]. And such a self cannot help being an illusion… For most people in the world, there is no greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin [the life of self inversion and self-gratification] … Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in [re]discovering God. If I find God, I will find myself; and if I find my true self, I will find God…” Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (London: Burns and Oats, 1960), p. 9. 

In order to reconnect with our deepest and truest self, we must unblock and find healing for all the hidden and largely unconscious (i.e. we’re not aware of them) emotional, spiritual and psychological wounds we have accumulated throughout our lives and out of which we act. This unconsciousness profoundly affects our relation to ourselves, to others, and our behaviour. In this sense we are all prodigal’s and "older brothers" in equal measure. 

Thomas Keating reflecting on the human condition (the universal “lack” or “flaw” common to all of us), oftentimes in Christian circles named as “original sin” says, “The term original sin is a way of describing the universal experience of coming to full reflective self-consciousness without the certitude of personal union with God. This gives rise to our intimate sense of incompletion, [lostness], dividedness, isolation, and guilt… this is because I am born in selfishness. I am born self-centered. And this is original sin…”

But, “… The conscious resolution to change our values and behaviour is not enough to alter the unconscious value systems of the false self and the behaviour they engender. Only the passive purification of contemplative prayer can effect this profound healing…” Anna A. Terruwe MD & Conrad Baars MD, Psychic Wholeness and Healing, p.191).

The human person is a complex entity and therefore, change, healing and growth take time. It takes time to uncover the emotional and psychological woundedness and all the things that are driving us to find fulfilment in all the wrong places.

Contemplative prayer and through it, the healing of the unconscious, is an important means to our becoming more fully human, more alive, and more fully and authentically who God created us to be.  

Questing: Deepening ‘Flirtations’ with the Divine

“…Surveys show religious people are happier than the secular. Why is this? Is it — as an atheist friend quipped – that "ignorance is bliss?" Not long ago, that's what I would have concluded. Like many people of my ilk — cerebral East Coaster, highly skeptical and, yes, latte drinking — I reflexively viewed the religious as less sophisticated. And, if I'm brutally honest here, somehow less intelligent, or at least more narrow-minded. I don't feel that way anymore…” 

Eric Weiner, author of Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine. 

You can read the rest of Weiner’s short reflection here. Hat Tip to Ian Mobsby @ Moot (here – for Ian’s useful reflection).

 

A Wounded Prophet, Arthur, and the Visionary-Prophetic.

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him [Jesus], for they said, “He is out of his mind.” Mark 20-22. 

Mike Riddell over on The Insatiable Moon blog recently featured a fascinating essay, The Wounded Prophet, by Sally Clay. When I read the title I must say I thought of Henri Nouwen, specifically the biography with the very similar title A Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri JM. Nouwen by Michael Ford. Nouwen suffered from debilitating depression (see also the excellent Henri Nouwen: A Spirituality of Imperfection (pub. 2006) by Wil Hernandez). You might also think of Nouwen’s own title The Wounded Healer. Think too of John the Baptist! Picture him in a contemporary urban Western context! 

Anyway, Sally Clay’s essay is well worth a read, and if you’ve had the opportunity to see my favourite movie of 2010 The Insatiable Moon then Clay’s essay will likely bring to mind some of the central themes of that movie, especially as they coalesce around the themes in Clay’s essay. Indeed, reflect on Arthur’s role as a “wounded prophet” (that's Arthur up there on the left). 

Here’s some excerpts from Clay’s essay: 

…I found psychology presented as part of a spiritual process, a psychology of the heart (Freemantle, 1975; Govinda, 1969; Trungpa, 1972). Finally I could admit openly that my experiences were, and always had been, a spiritual journey -- not sick, shameful, or evil. I was already a worthwhile person, right from the start, and there was a way to work with my own mind to transform fearful mental states to peaceful ones… 

…If mental illness is a disease of the mind, what is the nature of the mind? If altered states have value, what is there to recover from? What is our model of wellness? Is it true, as some say, that spiritual realization is the highest aspiration of the human race? If it is, should not that be our model of wellness? How do we recover to that state of wellness? Is recovery for a mental patient something different from the wellness of any other person?

Why do people in mania consistently experience an urgent call to save the world, and call themselves messiah or savior? Is this merely grandiose, or do such people truly hear a call to help others?

We know that people called schizophrenic hear voices. But why do they listen to them? Why in this culture are some forms of mental illness so excruciatingly painful and so interminable? Is illness the reason, or is there a tragic misunderstanding of global proportions? Who is ill -- is it the visionary or is it the society itself? 

… Until recent times, altered states of the kind I have described were an integral -- and integrated -- part of human experience. Among the ways they were incorporated into society were the shamanistic/healing way, the contemplative/teaching way, and the prophetic/leadership way. It is only recently that altered states have been medicalized and stigmatized. It is only recently that powerful drugs have been used to suppress the altered states that once produced our prophets and our saints.

Not surprisingly, it is also recently that society has fallen into a spiritual crisis of unprecedented proportions. In case you had not noticed, we no longer have any shamans or prophets. There may be those who go by those names, but somehow the mental experience that shapes such people is missing. This lack is sorely felt. We are lost now, lost on a global scale. Our world has lost its meaning, and our religions have lost their authority.

Not surprisingly, millions of people today are seeking to reach an altered state in the only way that they know how -- through the use of mind -- altering drugs. We may try with all our might to get rid of the drugs, but as long as we are human, we will not get rid of the need for altered states…”

You can read Sally Clay’s full essay here. I highly recommend it as a meditation written around the core question: what does it mean to be human, to be truly human…?

The Importance of Love and Rightly Ordered Desire & Longing

A recent issue of Vineyard USA’s magazine Cutting Edge features and interview with Jamie Smith (i.e. James K A. Smith) around themes in his excellent book Desiring The Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation and Thinking In Tongues: Pentecostal Contributions to Christian Philosophy. 

Here's a few excerpts. You can read the full interview here (PDF). 

“…Jamie Smith / JS: What defines me is not primarily what I think, or even what I believe in terms of the propositions to which I give assent. What defines me is what I love, what I long for, what I desire. It’s located in the affective core of my person. 

To get that point is not a matter of “getting with it” in a postmodern culture. It’s not, “Oh, well, this is the new way of thinking about being human.” It’s actually just that a postmodern critique of modernism has been an opportunity for the Church to remember what we used to know. We can go back to appreciating a more holistic and affective picture of the human person. 

…Caleb Maskell / CM: So this idea – that we’re chiefly defined as human beings by an account of the things that we love – is an older idea than the idea that we’re defined by our beliefs? It’s not just some newfangled postmodern innovation? 

JS: Right. But nothing is wrong with believing. Believing is good. It’s just that believing is actually the articulation of what we love. It is a kind of understanding we have of God that can’t always be fully articulated. That’s why you can articulate what Christians believe, and it’s not wrong. But this sense that what really defines us is what we love; what we long for; what we desire. That picture of the human being as lover is an ancient picture. I think Saint Augustine is one of the people who articulates so powerfully that we are made for love. The question isn’t whether you love; it’s what you love. 

But I also think it’s a deeply biblical idea. In Colossians chapter 3, when Paul writes to the Colossian Christians and exhorts them to put on Christ, it is putting on love. Paul says, “Clothe yourselves in compassion.” Immediately after that, he starts talking about the practices of worship: singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, being devoted to the word and engaging in prayer… 

“…Too much of our evangelism has been informed by picturing human beings as “thinking things.” So when someone sees that bumper sticker, “Jesus is the answer,” they might think, “But what’s the question?” But if you look at it from Augustine’s paradigm of human being as lover, people aren’t looking for answers to questions. They’re not looking to solve an intellectual puzzle. They want to love. They’re looking for love, and they’re looking to love. What we bring to them is the Lover of their souls who alone can satisfy that longing. 

But this means that you must recognize and build on the fact that so many things people do in contemporary culture is a manifestation of their longing, of their desire. Christianity is not fundamentally the answer to a set of intellectual questions that people have; Christianity is the love story that finally let’s people make sense of their desire…”

For more on the importance of "desire" and "longng" you may appreciate an 'introductory' article (PDF) that mapped out some of the themes that I think are important.

 

Thomas Merton and the True and False Self – Final Part (2 of 2)

Following on from the last two posts, here and here, we now conclude with the final selection of quotes from Michael Casey’s outstanding essay in the May 2011 issue of Tjurunga (An Australasian Benedictine Review). It’s titled: From Being to Consciousness: The Journey to Spiritual Awareness and was originally given as a conference to the Contemplative Awareness in Life and Love meeting on May 10^th 2011: 

“The inner self is not an ideal self, especially not an imaginary, perfect creature fabricated to measure up to our compulsive need for greatness, [popularity, to be attractive, to be wanted etc]. On the contrary, the real “I” is just simply ourself and nothing more. Nothing more, nothing less. Our self as we are in the eyes of God, to use Christian terms. Our self in all our uniqueness, dignity, littleness and effable greatness …[Our] real and “homely” self, nothing more, without glory, without self-aggrandisement, without self-righteous and without self-concern.” (Merton, “The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (1) CSQ 18 (1983), p. 9). 

…Merton goes on to elaborate the notion that sin is, in essence, the dereliction of the true self in favour of its imposter. 

[“…Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self… my false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside of life. And such a life cannot help be an illusion. We are not very good at recognising illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves – the ones we are born with and which feed the roots of sin…” (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961), p. 34.)] 

“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and thirst for experiences, for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures… like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface … I am hollow and the structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake… [They have reduced themselves to a life lived within the limits of their five senses… but it is not the bodies fault. It is the fault of the person [themself], who consents to the illusion, who finds security in self-deception and will not answer the secret voice of God calling [them] to take a risk and venture by faith outside the reassuring and protective limits of his five senses…” (New Seeds, pp. 27-28)] (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, (New Directions, 1961), pp. 34-35).     

“…A contemplative is one who has transcended divisions to reach a unity beyond division … [their] mission is to be a complete and whole [person], with an instinctive and generous need to further the same wholeness in others, and in all of [humanity]…” (Merton, “The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation Prospects and Conclusions (VIII),” CSQ 19(1984), pp. 340-41).

…It is only the true self that is capable of genuine relationships with other selves, because the true self is not threatened by the differences in others; contemplative experience authenticates person identity and makes it somewhat independent of the external assessment of others…”

Karl Rahner on Mysticism.

Michael Casey OCSO has written an outstanding essay in the May 2011 issue of Tjurunga (An Australasian Benedictine Review). It’s titled: From Being to Consciousness: The Journey to Spiritual Awareness and was originally given as a conference to the Contemplative Awareness in Life and Love meeting on May 10^th 2011. The conference has been written around the following section headings, headings (if you know the work of the people being talked about) which will give you some sense of the ground that Casey covers: 

Friedrich Schleiermacher and “Feeling”.

(a)   “Religion as essentially contemplative”.

(b)   Religion is not activity but receptivity.

(c)   The outward expression of religion is necessarily imperfect.   

(d)   Outward forms of religion are necessary.

Karl Rahner on Mysticism.

Thomas Merton on True and False Self.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and “Flow”.

Reflection. 

I want to offer a few quotes (in three separate posts – this one, and two others) from his sections on Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton: 

“…Rahner’s position…puts at the heart of Christian living a personal experience of God which then serves as the basis by which the doctrinal and moral teaching of the Church are received and, as it were, authenticated… 

…Relatively few accept a religious faith in its entirety. Most prefer to nourish themselves with a smorgasbord. In such a pluralist situation we could, accordingly, divide the population into four loose and overlapping groups: 

(a)   Post-Christians who claim to have had no spiritual experience and are no longer attached to any religious group;

(b)   Those who have strong inner experience and strong attachment to a religious group.

(c)   Those who have weak inner experience but strong attachment to a religious group.

(d)   Those who have strong inner experience and weak attachment to a religious group. 

…Any radical awareness of one’s own nature almost inevitably leads to an awareness of what is beyond one’s nature, the reality to which believers give the name of God. “The experience of self is the condition which makes it possible to experience God” [Rahner]. Whoever responds in integrity to this invitation to pass beyond self into some experience of transcendent reality already has an obscure experience of God… 

…Rahner perceives an increasing discontinuity and even divergence between the values absorbed from ambient society and those which follow from spiritual (or) mystical experience. This conflict is not at the level of a clash of civilisations or cultures, but it is interior. Person’s have to make a choice concerning what they believe concerning the nature of the self – whether they accept what they have learned from “the world” or what their experience teaches them… 

…to follow the interior promptings of the spirit requires the renunciation of the beliefs, values and practices of “the world”. This is why any serious religious tradition demands some renunciation of its adherents. Comfort cannot exist without challenge. 

The monastic tradition… sees this necessary renunciation passing through three phases. At the time of conversion the person renounces a worldly way of life in favour of a spiritual [for more on this theme see this post featuring Philip Sheldrake – Paul] or monastic lifestyle. The second renunciation is the ongoing work of negating instinctual tendencies (apatheia) to reach the point of “purity of heart”: having a heart that is undivided or free from inconsistencies. The third phase may be present from the beginning but assumes more importance later one; this is the willingness to let go of all temporal reality and allow oneself to be drawn into the mystery of God… [To preference] “A passion for the unseen” [Abba Paphnutius]. There is a fourth phase of renunciation that is merely implicit in this tradition; this is death which, in Rahner’s view, is the decisive moment in which we make the choice for God and allow ourselves to be drawn fully into the divine reality.

The contemplative life is not produced by personal effort. It is not a product one can acquire by effort or by any other means. Rather, it is given in nature and actualised under grace by free choice. The choice is not so much a selection made between alternative objects as a decision to act from a deep, inner self, and to give a lower priority to the priorities of the superficial self that is generated by our interactions with the world around us…”  

Continued here.