Step Two

Tags

mind, Peace, period of silence, stillness, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, turning inward, vision

Well, I feel as if I made a start yesterday. It was a small step, a toe in what seems like an ocean of tasks before I sense a concomitant clearing of mind and vision, but it was a start. With a desire to accept whatever hardship accompanies this day, I look to those whose words first energized me yesterday (see yesterday’s post).

There are many wise people recommending a period of silence in each of our days and many modes of prayer that can lead us there. In my notes from yesterday, however, there was a sentence that focused in a slightly different direction from most but engaged me quite strongly, partially because the hoped for state was not silence but stillness — a related but not matching outcome. It said simply:

If your mind is still, you can sense the peace that emanates from the earth.

As I consider this, I reflect on the appropriateness of the thought for today when it would have seemed highly inappropriate yesterday. Today peace abounds outside. The sun is shining. There is no wind, no snow or sleet or rain. (We had examples of each of those conditions yesterday.) I am confident that stepping outside to experience the light, to breathe in the fresh air, to feel the earth under my feet, to bow to the steadiness and longevity of the trees and the fragile strength of flowers who are still alive after the storms…all of this leads me to stillness. And I am renewed with confidence in this day because, you see, stillness comes from the inside, regardless of outer events.

You may think I’m contradicting myself in comparing yesterday and today as regards the source of peace and how it comes to us. I would agree but the value of assessing both experiences is the conviction that, while silence is more easily achieved when there is no noise or disturbance around (not an easy place to find sometimes), stillness does not depend on any outer circumstance but comes simply by turning inward and taking a breath. While we cannot always control noise vs. silence, we can move to stillness as long as we live, literally until our last breath.

Love Is (Still and Always) the Answer

Tags

heart, love, love God, love your neighbor as yourself, Mark, mind, Moses, neighbor, soul, strength, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, truth

From the mouth of Moses to the gospel of Mark the Scriptures repeat the same message about how we are to live. We hear it today, not in a long diatribe but rather a brief directive about love. When asked what is the first and greatest commandment, we can all likely reply – at least with the short form of “Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” The deep impact of what that effort calls out from us, however, is in the almost staccato list of capacities that follows. We are to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength. In other words: Give it all you’ve got!

What occurred to me as I typed those last two sentences was that if we are to give ourselves so completely in loving God, what can be left for our neighbor whom we are supposed to love as ourselves? But that, it seems, is the mystery, the wonderful truth of this life of loving. In the love of God, everything gets transformed so that there is always enough love to go around – for ourselves and the neighbors everywhere who have become our other selves. Love begets love wherever it is found. That’s just the way it is. And it’s up to us to prove it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Heart of It All

Tags

Antoine de St. Exupery, consciousness, heart, invisible, judgment, Little Prince, love, mind, one, sacred heart of Jesus, see, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

How fitting for those gathered in this tiny town in Maine that we should be celebrating today the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. As we endeavor to move in prayer and practice from a stance of oneness, we are frequently reminded to “put the mind in the heart” and act from there. No judgment, no self-identification, just the love that flows out of a consciousness that we are all one. While not an easy goal, it is the simplest of practices – just breathing into the sense that the heart is central to our living and its steady beating is our lifeline to love.

For me, the Little Prince said it best. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” (Antoine de St. Exupery)

 

 

 

 

 

Of Mouse and Me

Tags

automatic pilot, consciousness, lesson, mind, multi-task, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I was reminded again this week of how easy it is for me to walk through my days on automatic pilot and how quickly I fall out of consciousness while doing a task. Let me explain. On Tuesday my cursor disappeared from my computer screen. (I have a touchpad which I have been using for over three years.) No matter what we (I and my tech companion in the office who saves me all the time) tried, nothing would bring back that little arrow that makes things happen and allows me even the smallest success in communication. When I finally had time to visit the “Geek Squad” it took two experts to figure out that a mouse – a computer mouse, that is – might get me back up and running. Voila! It worked. Having breathed a large sigh of relief, I went back to my office and happily started to type again. Each time I needed to move the cursor for an edit or another function, I found my index finger circling around on the touchpad until I woke up to the fact that I needed the mouse to accomplish the move. My mind was on the text I was typing and the two tasks of hitting the keys and using the cursor were secondary and tertiary, just like so many other activities that I do automatically.

I stopped to think about driving, which is now made easier by automatic transmission – and soon to leave the driver out of the equation almost totally! I began to list so many things that I do in a day that allow me to multi-task and wondered whether I am served or not by the ease I find in daily living now. If I take an elevator instead of walking up stairs, I rob myself of the consciousness of putting one foot in front of the other and recognizing the actual as well as the symbolic value of that exercise. (While I can still do it, I plan to continue!) Washing dishes gives me the opportunity to be present to my task that starting the dishwasher does not – although loading the dishwasher and putting away the clean dishes can be conscious practices as well.

All of this comes back, of course, to the desire to go through life more consciously, which is also to say, more appreciatively. Sadly (maybe), my touchpad came back to life of its own accord yesterday (?) so that opportunity for increased consciousness has disappeared. I will hope to remember it, however, and keep the mouse handy in case my touchpad takes another vacation to teach me a lesson!

 

 

 

 

 

O God of All

Tags

frightening, God of All, hear, hearts, Macrina Wiederkehr, mind, prayer, seven sacred pauses, souls, spirit, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, truth

I heard an urgency in the voice of Macrina Wiederkehr this morning in a prayer she wrote to the God of All. Take it with you today as a plea for what we need to stay the course of courage in this fragile world.

All peoples, all nations, all seasons, all years, all hours and days — You, who have invited us to love, hear our cry! Listen to our prayer. Make our spirits free, our hearts open, our minds healthy, our souls awake. Then we will be able to love as You have asked: with all our hearts, all our minds, all our souls. The all is frightening, yet in our deepest moments of truth we know that this is what we desire. O God of all, hear us. (Seven Sacred Pauses, p.104)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slow Down; Wake Up!

Tags

Book of Hours, Entering the Silence, God, grace, mind, scattered, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, Thomas Merton, thoughts

My mind feels this morning like oil on a frying pan that has heated enough to be jumping around like the Mexican jumping beans of my childhood. The thoughts are going as fast as the ticker tape headlines across the bottom of a television screen and, because of their speed, are gone before I can latch onto their meaning at all! So I open Thomas Merton’s Book of Hours for Thursday and find this description of me:

My mind is scattered among things, not because of my work, but because I am not detached and I do not attend first of all to God. On the other hand, I do not attend to Him because I am so absorbed in all these objects and events. I have to wait on His grace. But how stubborn and slow my nature is. And how I keep confusing myself and complicating things for myself by useless twisting and turning. What I need most of all is the grace to really accept God as He gives Himself to me in every situation. (Entering the Silence, p.199)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cycles

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activity, centering prayer, cyclic life, dancer, divine dance, eternal, flow, hearts, list, Lord, mind, Quaker, schedule, taize, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, waltz, work week

Today is Monday, the traditional beginning of the work week for most people. For me it is always a time to “gear up” and make a list (or add to my already long one) of the things I hope to accomplish in the week ahead. Then there is the “long term list” of events that will be taking place in this season of spring into summer…As I began that litany in my mind, I realized again how cyclic life is for me and how much better I respond to it if I hold the schedule lightly so it flows like a dance rather than a race. Let me explain.

My work as the program director for the Sophia Center has a few on-going offerings: centering prayer every two weeks on Wednesdays, Taizé on the fourth Sunday of the month (but not next Sunday because of Memorial Day which is the unofficial beginning of summer), etc. Then there are the individual events or series which we have found to be less successful in the summer if just judged by the numbers, when life slows down a little and vacations punctuate the weeks.

At the same time that we are slowing to a waltz at Sophia, the rhythm at the Spiritual Center where I live is picking up as the temperature rises. Only open from May to October, the Center is blooming with the flowers and activity here goes forward like a well-oiled machine: spring cleaning, mowing the lawn, planning menus and shopping…all in preparation to welcome friends new and old who come to renew their commitment to spiritual practice or, occasionally, just to relax.

I am grateful for this alternation of levels of activity as it allows me to focus on the most important work of all: attention to the people who enter the dance at any point in the on-going music of my life. Yesterday as I was working in the kitchen for the first of my “on-duty” weekends serving workshop participants at home, one of the Quaker melodies from last week ran through my mind consistently – a perfect reminder to be open to any encounter. Ye have no time but the present time (3X), therefore prize your time, for your soul’s sake, I sang. This morning it was another tune that carried me to coffee. Mind that which is eternal, which gathers your hearts together up to the Lord, and lets you see that ye are written in one another’s hearts.

Presence to the moment while also conscious of the flow of eternal time is a rare achievement in this world of ours but as our world turns and we allow the turning, we begin to notice the patterns. It is then that gratitude enters, for the opportunity to partner with the Divine Dancer who leads us so seamlessly that we cannot get lost.

Let There Be Light

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autonomy, communion, connectedness, Constance Fitzgerald, contemplative, creation, David Bohm, Genesis, implicate order, mind, radical individualism, reality, spirit, sub-atomic particles, symbiotic selves, synergistic community, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, unbroken wholeness

I found a startling juxtaposition this morning in the first lectionary text – the beginning of the first creation story in Genesis 1:1-19 – and a section of one of our readings under consideration today here at our contemplative “boot camp” experience. The first of this duo is the lyrical description of God’s splendid work of bringing into being the glorious creation that becomes our home. The second is, in part, a recounting of what scientists have discovered over the last quarter-century about the communication between sub-atomic particles which scientist David Bohm explains as “a deeper and more complex level of reality than we experience, an ‘implicate order or unbroken wholeness’ from which all our perceived reality derives…”

One would hope that these amazing discoveries, the fruit of evolution from the beginning of which Genesis speaks this morning, (although only of the first three “days” of the creation), would be the result of a concomitant evolution of both human mind and spirit. “Not so,” writes Constance Fitzgerald, a well-known theologian. In strong critique of our inability or unwillingness to respond to the task of becoming in this glorious home that has been entrusted to us, Fitzgerald says the following,

Our ability to embody our communion with every human person on the earth and our unassailable connectedness with everything living is limited because we have not yet become these symbiotic “selves.” We continue to privilege our personal autonomy and are unable to make the transition from radical individualism to a genuine synergistic community, even though we know intellectually we are inseparable and physically connected to every living being in the universe. Yet the future of the entire earth community is riding on whether we can find a way beyond the limits of our present evolutionary trajectory.  (Constance Fitzgerald, From Impasse to Prophetic Hope, 37-38)

There is much work to be done and the time is now, it seems, if we are to pay attention to what we have seen as possible in the coherence of the natural world. Let us think on these things!

Take a Deep Breath

Tags

busyness, deep breath, heart, listen, Luke, mind, Pharisees, Sabbath, slowing down, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

One of the things I am most grateful for about the process of the 3-day meeting that I am attending is the schedule. We gather from 9AM to 4PM with a 20-minute break in the morning and the same in the afternoon, as well as an hour for the noon-day meal. There is little possibility that we will complete our agenda but, as our charge has a goal of total completion in mid-2017, we are not anxious about the progress. Since most of us were experiencing some level of jetlag yesterday (perhaps continuing today) and because the mental energy expended is considerable, this schedule seems a wise way to proceed. I have had a number of conversations already about the busyness of our “normal lives” and how difficult it is to find “time off” on a regular basis.

This morning at the beginning of chapter 6 of Luke’s gospel, we find the disciples of Jesus walking through a field on the Sabbath. Because they are hungry, they begin to pick the grain and are immediately criticized by the Pharisees (Where did they come from??) for breaking a Sabbath law about such a “work” task. Jesus responds with the example of David entering the temple and taking the bread reserved for the priests to speak to the necessity of doing what is necessary when circumstances warrant it. The goal of Sabbath rest was and is always to take time to remember God, giving thanks for our lives, and to connect with the deepest part of ourselves. That can take many forms, some of which might be a necessary letting go of perfection because of lack of time or ability to complete a task. Other times we may be called to do something out of the ordinary, perhaps what seems selfish, in order to get out of our minds and into our hearts – taking care of our “being” which is in need of rest.

In a multicultural society such as ours in the United States it is impossible to designate a “Sabbath Day” – or even a common hour – so we need to make a personal decision about how we will achieve such a time of renewal on a regular basis. Today is a good day to wake up to the possibility – and the necessity – of slowing down enough to hear God’s call to us. It starts with a deep breath…

The Greatest Law

Tags

heart, Jesus, love, love God, love our neighbors as ourselves, Mark, mind, soul, strength, ten commandments, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

When someone asks, as the scribe asked Jesus in this morning’s gospel (MK 12:28-34), What is the first of all the commandments? it’s a safe bet that most people who have any religious background will give the same answer. And we know that the one is really two: love of God and love of neighbor as ourselves. Jesus was quick to answer with the imperative from Deuteronomy that he had learned in his youth: Hear, O Israel! The Lord, our Lord, is One (or Lord alone!) What follows tells us how to love God: with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. Pondering that directive would logically lead us to the next: Love your neighbor as yourself. If we’re spending ourselves in love of God with all of those faculties, everything else must flow from that activity, it seems. In other words, we must become the love of God manifest in the world. If that is true, there is no doubt that all of our intention and function would be an impulse of love – of ourselves and everyone else in God. It would all be seamless – no distinction or separation. And that, for thousands of years now, has been God’s desire for us.