Overflow

“God does not reserve such a lofty vocation to certain souls only; on the contrary, He is willing that all should embrace it. But He finds few who permit Him to work such sublime things for them.” - St. John of the Cross

Contemplation is a whole lot simpler than most people think it is.

Contemplation is a whole lot harder than most people think it is.

People are incredulous, suspicious even, if you tell them that the deepest form of prayer requires no words or actions. No kneeling, no rosaries, no recitations.

Contemplation is about presence. Being totally present in the here and now. Presence is the foundation of every spiritual practice. If you say a rosary or attend mass or receive eucharist, it does no good if you have your mind off elsewhere, compiling your to-do list or replaying old conversations. You have to show up in mind, heart, and body and be present.

That’s what contemplative prayer is. It’s very simple to do:

Offer your presence to Christ
Sit, not thinking about anything in particular.
When you realize you’ve become distracted, gently come back to being present.*
Repeat until the time is up.

That’s it. That’s all you do. Which is to say that you don’t do anything at all. You just sit there. All transformation comes from Christ.

Contemplation has somehow gotten tainted with New Age-y metaphors and language. Contemplation is not New Age. Contemplation is hard core old-school back-to-basics prayer.
Contemplation is not a relaxation technique. Contemplation will not raise you to a higher plane of spiritual awareness. It will not connect you with all beings. It will not help you transcend anything. And it will not, surprisingly, get you any closer to God. He’s as close to you as He can be already. Contemplation will help you learn to get out of your own way and pay attention.

Advertisers, publicists, and image consultants spend billions every year developing clever ways to get our attention. They do this because they understand that our attention is a precious commodity that only we can give. And they hope that if they can get our attention, they can transform the way we think and behave. And extensive studies show that they are justified in spending those billions. Our attention is a commodity worth a lot of money to the secular world.

So why not offer some of the same to God? It is the only thing we can really give Her that She wants. We pay out our attention to hundreds of profane things every day. Why not spend twenty minutes paying attention to the divine?

*A number of different techniques have been developed for doing this. All of them very simple.

I didn’t really write this for you, my blog readers. Especially not for you, my buddhist friends to whom this is a Catholic flavor of old hat. This is really getting my thoughts down, my elevator speech so to speak, for a contemplative practice group I want to organize in my parish. Hey, that’s why I call this Overflow. But any comments or corrections or coaching would be welcome.

“As Jesus and His disciples were on their way, He came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to Him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what He said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to Him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” The Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:38-42 NIV)

This was yesterday’s gospel reading. Usually this precedes a homily where we are admonished to spend more time sitting at the feet of Jesus and less time being busy and worried with preparations and stuff.

But we’re always too hard on Martha, I think. Somebody has to prepare the food and provide the hospitality. Not everyone can just sit still. It is just as holy to give one’s self in service as it is to sit in the presence of God. I think Marthas’ problems started when she started getting resentful and feeling sorry for herself. Instead of service, her labors became an obligation she resented. When the ego steps in and takes charge, things go down hill fast.

It was the growing resentment, I think, that Jesus was talking about. She had lost the “one thing” that was needed. I can identify with Martha. I can understand feeling like I’m cooped up in the kitchen while others get to sit at the feet of Jesus. The difference between Martha and Mary was a state of heart.

So during the homily yesterday, whilst I was being admonished to spend more time being like Mary and less like Martha, I was composing a list of ways to sit like Mary and work like Martha at the same time. To rest without sitting. Pray without kneeling.

Wash the sippy cups.
Read “green eggs and ham” aloud for the fifteen thousandth time.
Shadow box with your four year old son.
Feed mashed carrots and sweet peas to the baby.
Hold somebody.
Take your two year old to the potty.
Change a diaper.
Sing “itsy bitsy spider.”
Talk your child through the process of putting on socks. (instead of doing it for him)
Pet the dog.
Make formula.
Fold laundry.
Pick up toys.
Mow the lawn.
Take the kids to the pool.

Moments of holiness abound in my mundane life. I just need to wake up and see them as such. Sometimes I do.

My Derrida/Pema Chodron reading of late is making me wonder about the role of mystery in my life.

My religion is full of paradoxes and mysteries, which I at first ignored as undecideables, then regarded as “problems” that could be “solved” with the right amount of prayer and wisdom. But just maybe they are the means by which I can travel beyond the limits of my own reasoning faculties to a truth more profound, a “peace which surpasses all understanding.” Maybe they can help me complete the picture, which really means to accept the picture as-is, as incomplete, unpicturable.

Jacques Derrida purposefully subverted binary opposites to blow up centuries-old mental models, but suggested no new mental models of his own to replace them. And that pissed off his fellow philosophers no end. He was a deconstructionist, a metaphysical demolitions expert. Pema Chodron, for her part, insists that I embrace both sides of my own binary opposites. Both point beyond the binary to deeper truths, to narrow paths where Binary Thinking is just too clumsy to fit.

The mysteries of my own religion seem to similarly embrace paradox and deconstruct binary opposites. The Trinity is a paradox about individuality and unity, separation and togetherness. The armiture of the Eucahrist (and several other of our sacraments) is a semiotic paradox about symbols and what is symbolized by them. Christ himself is happily rife with paradoxes that blow away binary opposites – life/death, king/servant, strength/weakness. Boom boom boom. He explodes them all. And while we cling to our binary thinking, preferring one part of each of the binary pairs to the other, we’ll never get it.

Maybe our religious mysteries are like signposts along well-traveled spiritual roads that say “Reason is useless beyond this point. Park it here and continue on foot” or “Abandon Binary Thinking, all who enter here.”

Binary Thinking, Binary opposites. Make linear combinations of these binary opposites and you have classifications and taxonomies, ontological artifacts that we pass off as reality. Feed these binary opposites and ontological artifacts into the twin engines of reason and the scientific method and you can churn out theories and laws and mental models. Which give rise to technologies. Which ultimately have led us to wireless phones and SUVs and reality TV.

Not that Binary Thinking isn’t useful to us. Western Mind has produced some pretty awesome things using binary thinking and all that it gives rise to. Wonderful tools those mental models. They are what lift our species above the others despite our many physiological disadvantages. We can use models in our minds to learn lessons that would take generations of lower species to learn through natural selection. (But they have the advantage of numbers and no individual egos, so maybe that’s why the race between us and microbes is kind of a dead heat right now, but I digress.)

What makes all these mental models work is that you start with a few “truths” you agree on “for sake of argument”. Meaning that you don’t worry about whether they are actually true (whatever that means), but whether they give rise to a mental model that effectively matches empirical observations about what’s being modeled.

It was in college studying maths that I first understood (or “saw through”) the idea of “for sake of argument.” My road to spiritual awakening ramped on somewhere around the time I realized that all these axioms and postulates I had accepted as immutable truths were essentially chosen. Axiomatics. “Truth” chosen for a purpose. “For sake of argument.”

I explored the idea of belief systems and the utility of accepting spiritual “truths” based on their utility. Applying axiomatics to my own salvation. These mental models and belief systems were ultimately unsatisfying. Was I to always be trapped in a Postmodern mien? Was all truth just something we agree is true, in various relative contexts, “for sake of argument?”

“For sake of argument” is just about right at this point in my life. I can accept that all mental constructs are both true and not true. Or that we must hold them up as true for a certain purpose, but must keep in mind their limited nature. We must be in the mental models and out of them at the same time. Be aware of both sides of the veil.

And I must be willing to venture beyond them, abondoning them at the signposts of mystery, continuing on foot to places that “surpass all understanding.” Thanks to Derrida and Pema Chodron, I think I am a little more willing to go by foot.

“Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” – J.D. Salinger

I agree with Salinger in that I want the courage to be an absolute nobody. But as to being nobody or somebody, I think I’ll stick to the old neither clinging nor aversion thing. I’m not ashamed of wanting attention. More like it amuses me. Me? Famous? Yeah right. Be careful what you wish for, buddy.

Yes, my ego wants to be Somebody. My ego likes applause and praise and raves, but I don’t count that against him. That’s just the way he is, the old fool. But I want the courage and the presence to see it all as the comfortable fiction that it is.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you–Nobody–too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise–you know!

– Emily Dickinson

I have a complicated relationship with my fame daydreams. I imagine most people do. I scoff a bit when I see celebrities on TV talking about the downside of fame. “Pshaw,” I say, “let’s trade problems then!” Sometimes I wonder if my attitudes about fame and modesty are not tainted with sour grapes, much like Ms. Dickinson’s poem above. But today I saw something about fame that made me feel really sad.

I never, ever watch morning TV, so it’s been years since I’ve seen Katie Couric’s face. If it weren’t for the coffee bar where I read and pray while I sip my coffee, I’d never see morning TV. For some reason in the last week, they’ve been tuning in the Today show instead of CNN’s morning show. Since the last time I saw her, (it’s been maybe years) someone stretched her face.

I have always really respected Katie Couric. She’s adorably cute, but sharp, smart and substantial. I admired her for rising above her role as the designated “cute one” and refusing to lob softballs at her interviewees. She brings a lot of integrity and, dare I say it, journalism, back to TV news.

And that’s why her face struck me so. Somewhere along the line, intergrity and substance wasn’t enough. Someone, maybe Katie herself, robbed her face of the well-earned character of her years. She deserves to look middle-aged on TV, dammit! She’s earned it. She doesn’t have to be “the cute one” anymore. She shouldn’t have had to…

Well somebody must have convinced her that she had to. And that indeed must be the downside of beauty and fame. Not so much the beauty and fame itself, but the clinging and avoidance that comes with the inability to accept their utter impermanence.

And so today I breathe in the insecurity that makes us cling to youth and send out in my breath the confidence and comfort and acceptance that are its antidote. We all could use some of that, huh?