Tag Archives: contemplation

Find your contemplation where you can

I have enjoyed getting to know spiritual direction students and teachers over the past semester. My cohort is a diverse, sincere bunch of people that always remind me of God’s goodness and humanity’s capacity for compassion and hope.

There is only one thing about my new group of friends that is funny. Many of them remind me a lot of the old SNL skits about NPR.

Sometimes that NPR voice is such a wonder, like on my favorite WHYY voice, Jennifer Lynn. Other times the special character of that voice makes me wonder if the sincerity of it is just another act of branding. With everything on ZOOM now, a lot of us now have ring lights and new microphones. And I think a lot of us have started to wonder how to act on screen, including how to sound.

What does the voice mean, now?  My spiritual direction teachers and many of their students seem to have learned to speak with an NPR voice. Is that a thing, or is it just me? I know I’ve been tagged with a “Mr. Rogers” voice, so maybe I learned it a long time ago.

Voice command

Our voice is a powerful instrument. We had four children before the oldest turned 4. I developed their attention to my voice as a high priority, especially my command voice: “Do not step off that curb!” and “Let go of your brother’s neck, now!” Since we were often in a church meeting, I could turn the command volume down very low, “Give me that marker!”

Humanity continues to prove it is hell-bent on emulating the perceived power of God  through its own control and manipulation. This is kind of a leap, but I think the medium of radio does its control and manipulation via voice command. As my children tell me I did, I think NPR commands with an iron fist in a velvet glove. By this time, many of us fans can seem very empathetic and nonthreatening while advancing the same old domination.

I bring this up because my teachers, and most of the authors they suggest, basically move with Eurocentric, privileged assumptions that leak out as “best practices” for spiritual formation and direction. There is usually a candle. There is often Taize music (from France) or classical music (based in Europe), there is aloneness and silence, which, in themselves, are often hard-to-find luxuries. There is often a call to “let go,” which is hard to do if your are barely hanging on. There are often calls to “submit” or “surrender” since they are in charge and conquering something by nature. And when they speak it could be right out of NPR.

I have spent decades perfecting all the spiritual practices practices that come with the dominant culture – and to a good end. I think my teachers last semester were great. Candles, Taize, silence in solitude, and submission are all elemental to my spiritual practice.

reaching for the edge of contemplation

There is another side

I also have enjoyed the luxury of getting to know other ways to contemplate contributed by the nondominant cultures around me. Fortunately for me, my parents came from the U.S. underclass and felt blessed to have clawed themselves into the lower middle class. So when I brought classical music home from college as the first to attend one, it did not go over well. I was called on to let go of the pride of thinking I was better than someone else, rather than called on to let go of the assumption I was better than most of the world, like most world-dominating Americans assume.

Many people from nondominant cultures are invited into contemplation by Eurocentric people and the “hospitality offered may be more stifling than respiting, more harm than blessing…The ways that marginalized groups answer the question of who God is needs to be contemplated in a more authentic way than the ‘average’ contemporary expression of spirituality might expect” (Ruth Takiko West*). So true. Besides, members of the so-called “dominant culture” are also very diverse, so forcing them into learning the Eurocentric practices as if they are “best practices” could be a mistake. Leaders need a lot of intentional introspection if they hope to alleviate the problem of merely dominating instead of liberating. The image of God does not just reside in people such as oneself.

Your culture is fine, as is mine. But Jesus is transcultural, even though he comes from a culture, in a gender, and is born into a family system. He experienced the dominant culture providing some kind of general order. But he insisted on enacting the liberative, reconciling work of the Spirit by giving preference to the poorer or more distant, as well as those yet to be included.

The ever-accepting Savior calls us into a mutually accepting relationship with Him and everyone else. Jesus is the Spirit in a body, the body of Christ is the Spirit making all of us into family: the body of Christ. This works out in all cultures. One does not need to look outside of one’s culture or outside of oneself to meet God. Henri Nouwen said, “Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that declares we are loved. Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence” (see Spiritual Direction).

The presence of the Spirit transcends and infuses culture

We don’t need to act one way or another to develop intimacy with God, and though Jesus came one way, the Spirit of God with which he graced us is as multifaceted as the Creator. If God speaks to you in an NPR voice, wonderful; it is a sweet voice. But it can be a dominating voice, especially when white teachers unwittingly erase other sounds by making it prescriptive.

The rich experience of Black Americans, even those who understand Taize, Thomas Merton, and such, is often run over by the soft tones of people in charge, even though they have a rich tradition of their own that might be even better. James Cone writes, “The spirituals were a ritualization of God in song. They are not documents for philosophy; they are material for worship and praise for the One who had continued to be present with black humanity despite European insanity” (in The Spirituals and the Blues). Solitude in silence is to be treasured but contemplation is bigger. It is purpose, intention and deep consideration. As such it comes in many forms in as many cultures. Takiko West describes the Black experience in community where contemplation is exercised in the singing and the hearing of songs like the spirituals:

The presence of God is evidenced by the movement of the Spirit that causes one to jump to their feet, hands thrown up in the air when the soloist hits that one note and sustains it as if he/she needed to make sure the sound would reach heaven. It is within that moment that there is communal solidarity around the awareness of God’s grace.*

Cone writes, “The certain fact is always that God is present with them and trouble will not have the last word.”

I’ve had the privilege of being invited into this kind of contemplation in cultures other than my own all over the world. I have a feel for NPR’s more Eurocentric contemplation and I have also been blessed by Aretha Franklin’s. In the following video from Franklin’s 1972 live album, Amazing Grace, she manages to lead the moment of contemplation in a setting of a live recording. In it she bridges the societal divides, as she was so good at, by taking a Carol King song and combining it with a familiar gospel tune, in a South LA church. The album is in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Aretha Franklin demonstrates how the nondominant find their place in the culture and how they keep a hold of their dignity and affirm their identity as the beloved.  The contemplative scene she leads is just as useful as the singular, quiet, secure-that-your-body-will-be-there-when-you-get-back-to-it, Eurocentric contemplation. We don’t need to choose. There is one body, one faith, one Lord. No one is excluded.

* From her essay in Kaleidescope: Broadening the Palette in the Art of Spiritual Direction. Ineda P. Adesanya, editor.

Contemplation: Be still. Become aware.

When things were not working out for you, did a well-meaning person ever counsel you to “Walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor 5:7)? That’s a popular snippet of the Bible which people use as an encouraging piece of self-talk: “Settle down. God is not done with you yet.” If you take their counsel, you might develop a new conviction: “I am moving ahead, hoping for the best. I am walking by faith, not by sight.” That is good.

the way of contemplation

I think there is something even more immediate that scripture is teaching. I have learned it through the prayer of contemplation. “Walk by faith, not by sight” is also about becoming aware of the unseen things God is doing in the present moment. It is not just looking ahead, it should also be looking in. “I am walking by the Light of the World, not just by the light of day, by faith, not sight.”

Prayer amounts to faithing. Just call walking by faith “faithing.” Faith is an action not an idea; it is relating, not just thinking about principles. And prayer is the basic place we faith. Prayer is how we develop the sense of being guided by the Holy Spirit of God and learn to see and react with more than just our physical senses. God is with us, right now; prayer helps us be with God right now.

When I say “contemplative prayer” you might think of mindfulness techniques that people are teaching to jr. highers to help them settle down. That’s a beginning, but that’s not the prayer of contemplation. The prayer of contemplation includes the techniques for reducing anxiety, but it is more. Contemplative prayer, and any spiritual discipline, disposes us to allow something to take place. The main thing that happens is love. If you find something else in the silence, you might be in the wrong place. Contemplation makes us available for relating to God. We don’t always pray in order to get God to do something for us; contemplative prayer is not about making something happen, necessarily. We are making ourselves available for communion with God. We are becoming open to experience Love, heart to Heart.

It is like this: A gardener does not actually grow plants. She practices skills that facilitate growth that is beyond her control. Prayer is like that. A sailor does not produce the necessary wind to move the boat. He appropriates the gift of wind by exercising skills that can get him home. Prayer is like that.

The basic skill of contemplative prayer that facilitates growth and appropriates gifts is inner silence. There are two practices that are very important to exercising this skill: stillness and awareness.

Stillness

When we attempt to be silent, we need to consider how to face the inner noise with which we struggle. Sometimes we do noisy things when we pray, too, of course; we are embodied spirits, after all. But at the center of us is the silent place where God is simply giving himself to us and we are communing spirit to Spirit. We long to carry this silence with us in the midst of the noisy world and be content that we are in Christ and Christ is in us. We want to feel at home. One of the early teachers of the church said, that in this center, we are constantly being called home, away from the noise that is around us to the joys that are silent. He said, “Why do we rush about looking for God who is here at home with us, if all we want is to be with him?”

Martin Laird, a teacher from Villanova who wrote a book called Into the Silent Lands, tells a story about a prisoner who was accustomed to cutting himself or burning himself so that his inner pain would be in a different place: on the outside of him. This suffering man had come upon some people whose mission was to teach prisoners to pray and turn their prison cells into monastic cells. The prisoner learned from them, and after several weeks of meditating twice a day he said, “I just want you to know that after only four weeks of meditating half an hour in the morning and night, the pain is not so bad, and for the first time in my life, I can see a tiny spark of something within myself I can like.” That is the home we are talking about.

contemplation in Rittenhouse
Stillness in Rittenhouse Square

Awareness

Our sense of separation from God is often a matter of our broken perception. We can’t feel God. We have an idea of what we should feel and we don’t feel it. Contemplative prayer is the place we let go of our perceptions and become aware of God with us, as the scripture guides us:

  •  My soul, wait in silence for God only, for my hope is from Him (Psalm 62:5).
  • I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you (Jesus in John 14:20).
  • I have been crucified with Christ and yet I am alive; yet it is no longer I, but Christ living in me (Galatians 3:20).

From the perspective of our everyday life on planet earth, we are separate from God. But from the perspective of our inner awareness, we see Christ with us. When we pray, we are not merely becoming aware of our thoughts and feelings (although that is good!), we are learning to be aware of God and to be with God who is with us.

It is like this: A man was taking his dog to a field where the animal could run and he ran into another man walking four dogs. They got to the open field and let their dogs go so they could enjoy running around in a big free space. But one the dogs was off to the side running is relatively tight circles and did not join in with the other dogs. The man asked his new friend, “What’s with your dog?” The man answered. “Before I got this dog, he had spent years living in a cage. He was used to getting all his exercise, just as you see. He has the field, but he is trained for the cage.” I did not see this dog do this personally, so I can’t prove to you that dogs do this, but I do know myself and many of you. We have the wide open field of grace and freedom to romp in but we run in the contours of our former cage. The prayer of contemplation is retraining our hearts to roam the wide open spaces of eternity freely.

  • My heart is like a bird that has escaped from the snare of the fowler (Psalm 123:7).

Our minds tend to run in the obsessive tight circles of our mental cage. We believe we are separate from God, and we were. So now we need to become aware of something else. I heard something shocking from a friend not long ago. When he was a child his father sang a little ditty that he thought was funny: “Charlie Wilkins is no good. Let’s chop him up like so much wood.” I know this little boy as an old man and you can still see that putrid song playing in his head. Just like that, we may believe we are condemned by God. So now we need to learn freedom. Prayer is the training ground.

When we think about things, we have a cage of thoughts that guide us. Contemplative prayer helps us go beyond that cage and enter into the wide-open fields of silence where we don’t merely think about things, we commune with God. We concentrate attention in our heart to the place of knowing, the place of awareness that is not full of the cacophony of our mind and surroundings but is full of the Spirit of God. It seems like we are just sitting there doing nothing when we pray this way, and that is exactly right and exactly good. In that nothing of ourselves and our surroundings we enter the silent land of our true being with God.

This post tells you more about how to practice contemplative prayer. But we don’t need perfect techniques to pray as much as we need to access the skills that are built into our beings by our loving Father. Be silent and turn your heart to God whether you think you know what you are doing or not. Take a step of walking by faith, not by sight. You’ll have a good time with God.

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The contemplative prayer of imagination: Resist and restore

What if you want to use Lent to get out of your head and into your heart? What if you want to explore the depths of your life: mind, heart, soul, strength and have a meaningful life that resists the forces that try to consume it? Last Saturday during our retreat, one of the answers was: learn to pray — and learn to use your imagination. Life in Christ is bigger than such an “answer” of course. But developing a spiritual life is the key to meaning, key to surviving.

Morton Kelsey offered a checklist for venturing inward. It is a good one, since it does not skip to “what I can do on my own,” but attends to our context and community, which are so crucial. To venture inward: 1) attend to the regular disciplines of your community (cell, Sunday meeting, team), 2) keep a spiritual journal, 3) talk about your inner life, 4) receive spiritual direction (could be formal or friendship), 5) learn to become quiet, 6) unleash your imagination.

peering into the inner life

Be quiet. Contemplation is the core prayer

Prayer takes many forms. In every form it is communing with God, relating Spirit to spirit. We intercede and move God. We worship and praise God. We confess and reconcile with God. We have conversations that are full of complaining and questioning. But until we learn to be quiet and find out what is on the other side of silence, our prayer is a bit superficial and missing the deep experiences of connection we crave. The core prayer we need to learn might be summed up with the word contemplation: the basic yearning of our hearts turned to seeking, our innate spiritual capacity stepping toward connection.

Via negativa contemplation

There are two intertwining roads in contemplative prayer; one is often emphasized more by one group than another. First, there is the via negativa, the apophatic way, (the word means “other than speaking,” or “denial”). This way stresses how God is best known by negation, elimination, forgetting, unknowing, without images and symbols, and in darkness. God is other than humanity. God is “not this, not that.”

On this way all images, thoughts, symbols, etc. must be eliminated, because, as St. John of the Cross points out, “all the being of creatures compared with the infinite being of God is nothing. Nothing which could possibly be imagined or comprehended in this life can be a proximate means of union with God.” We enter this nothingness to meet God.

Learning to be quiet needs to travel on this way, since we need to turn away from our self-controlled, world-controlled existence to meet God. In prayer, we need to deal with the distractions that inhibit our solitude.

Via affirmativa contemplation

The other road is the via affirmativa, the kataphatic way, (the word means “much speaking,” or “affirmation”). This way underscores how we can find God in all people, in all experiences, in all things.

It emphasizes a definite similarity between God and creatures. We are made in God’s image, male and female. The world is an expression of God’s character. As Paul taught the Athenians:  “In God we live and move and have our being.” God can be reached by creatures, images, and symbols, because the Lord is manifested in creation and salvation history. The incarnation of God in Christ forces us to take our own experiences as relevant, symbolic and part of an ongoing story of salvation. We are God’s workmanship and Jesus not only symbolizes this blessing, He remains with us to bring about its fullness.

The goal of contemplation is love

All humans are made to seek. We are lonely for God. So very few are spirituality-free. In most Hindu and Buddhist practices, people are taught that the universe is, ultimately, impersonal mind (as in “may the force be with you”). Jesus-followers see the universe as lover. God is so interested in the created world that s/he became incarnate, so interested in humans that Jesus died for us. God enables us to be companions and fellow workers by meeting us Spirit to spirit. The context of our meeting is love; the ultimate goal of meditation is love, even when it is apophatic.

Our communion with God in prayer is, in itself, resistance to the forces that attempt to usurp God’s proper place in the world and on our lives. If you are alone in solitude with God, that relationship has an impact, even if you don’t take much action as a result. It is likely we will take action, however,  since our contemplation regularly gives us our direction and stokes our courage to act. Contemplation allows us to fight evil that arises in us and outside us. We each do this in our own way, but in similar fashion. One’s experience of the world of the Spirit depends on their psychology, which can be understood and developed, and on their world view, which can change. So contemplation is unique to each one who practices, but is unified in the One who meets each of us where we are beginning today.

The kataphatic prayer of imagination

On Saturday, we offered two suggestions for praying in a more “kataphatic” way, making full use of symbols, dreams and the art of imagination.  One way to experience inner meaning is meditating on your inner experiences: coming to silence, going back into the images of your dreams and fantasies, first consciously, then allowing them to go as they will. We noted that most of our spiritual guidance comes from our conscious experience, which is the tip of the iceberg of us. We were trying to learn more about how to receive direction from our inner experience of what is normally unconscious. Many people avoid this territory because it seems vast and dark. But we are not to be absorbed into it, we are to encounter love in it. We have a basic direction for our contemplation – Jesus describes God as the loving father of a returning prodigal. It is clear who is the object of our prayer and who we are.

 

God’s character

So our conscious minds can lead us and our unconscious, our dreams can lead us. When people describe the unconscious experience it is as varied as they are. But for everyone, using our imaginations to explore our inner depths starts with two simple things: 1) one must be convinced that thinking and feeling in images is important, 2) one must spend enough time to break away from the concerns of the waking realm. We explored this path in two ways last Saturday. I thought you might like some of the teaching to encourage your journey through Lent.

Ignatius and praying the Bible. 

Try Ignatius of Loyola‘s approach to praying the Bible through imagination and entering into a deeper connection with God as a result.

Matthew 19:13-15 – Jesus and the children

Allow twenty to thirty minutes for the exercise.

  1. As the passage is read for the first time, try to hear it as if it is fresh and new—as if you are hearing it for the first time. Read Mt. 19:13-15 slowly
  2. As the passage is read for the second time, enter in to the event Place yourself as a child in the scene as it is read. Read passage again in a slow, meditative manner
  3. Answer the following questions: How do you feel as you walked through the crowd? Are you warm? Do you feel a breeze? Can you feel the hand of your parent or adult as you walk toward Jesus? What do you hear? Birds? Animal sounds? The voice of Jesus? The disciples trying to send you away? What do you smell? Is it a dusty day? Can you smell the animals? The body odor of the crowd? What do you see? Can you see the legs of the people in front of you? Can you see Jesus? The other children?
  4. Go to Jesus and hear him tell the disciples that he wants to be with you
  5. Climb up in the lap of Jesus or sit beside him and let him embrace you
  6. Experience the deep love that is offered to you a. Let it wash over you and rest in the places that you are experiencing some type of emotional pain Let it be a balm to the rejection or abandonment that you have experienced Let it be to you the love that you desire, yet have never experienced to this extreme. Rest in that love for a while
  7. If you want to talk with Jesus, you may
  8. Otherwise, just sit and let Jesus embrace you.

Morton Kelsey and the prayer of waking dreams

Try Morton’s Kelsey’s explanation of imaging prayer.

In The Other Side of Silence (and elsewhere), Morton Kelsey pointed out that when we are still, images will appear naturally, as they do in our dreams. There is a vast, mostly unexplored territory in our unconscious, that impacts us deeply. It is a territory where God is much needed and very available. We can follow the revelations in our literal dreams or our waking dreams, listen to them, and find meaning in what they reveal about our deep places where God is relating to us Spirit to spirit. On the way to being quiet, we will need to dismiss many distractions. But we can recognize deeper images that arise from a place where we are communing with God.

A confusing world: War is a good practice topic for finding a third way

We’ve got to do better than Disney thinking in a disintegrating world. I know, I’ve been to Disney World.

Disney World is such a theological place! It recently set my head spinning again when I visited. Simba, Aladdin, Pooh, Peter Pan, etc. were all trying to teach me lessons — and everywhere, it was “Have a magical day!” which is like a liturgical response to everything for people from the Magic Kingdom. With Disney, the basic message is relentlessly, “Find the dream in you and follow it” and there is always a choir to tunefully follow up the message, like the famous song from Cinderella (below) that sums it up:

After the song, we all go ride the rides that give a little jolt of experience that proves the magic is real. A little magic, a large group of fellow-worshipers, a promise of more (if you buy a ticket) sounds like religion to a lot of people. It is, in a way. But it is religion that resembles what N.T. Wright calls present-day “gnosticism” more than it resembles the way of Jesus, as he warns:

Gnostic-like thinking says, “Whatever you need is in you, you just need to find it and unleash it.”

  • Some people go for that with gusto: “I believe I can fly!”
  • Many more wither under the responsibility of self-creation in an uncaring world.

We need the third way that is following Jesus, risen among us.

The world is confusing right now.

There is a lot to say about what is happening to the world and how people are making sense of it, and I hope we will say a lot, because Jesus is the ultimate meaning maker. It is an opportune time to see what is going on right now, since it is an election year and the beliefs of the masses get up to the surface and we get a chance to see them again — and  we get a chance to make sense of them (if the pundits don’t steer us completely). How do we keep discerning the way when there is so much shouting from either pole? A lot of people I’m talking to are quite confused, how about you?

I think we can keep our heads on and our love intact if we stay somewhere in the middle and keep moving toward Jesus. There is a third way. Jesus is not a stance or a platform, but he is the way and a destination. I often find myself trying to steer a middle course among the people of the world, and, unsurprisingly, between the poles I often see in the church. It is something like what Paul teaches when he says I must not be, “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Ephesians 4:14).

  • On the one extreme we have people who preach that “your dreams are a wish your heart makes,” just keep believing — and for many a traumatized person in Philadelphia, to do that would be a brave step out of the disaster they have experienced their whole life.
  • And then on the opposite extreme, we have people who can’t say the word “Disney” without an ironic inflection, who think a material “reality” is all there is so make the most of this mess and spend your efforts getting yours and loving your friends — for many people moving in to Philadelphia, to say such a thing might be an honest step away from the delusions in which they can no longer believe.

It is surprising how often the church seems unconscious that they have another way, a third way, that is not for or against, with or without the present age.

Is there a way to relate to people in the middle of the turmoil?

Here we are in the middle of the polarization: Spirit-indwelled people, living in a tangible community, persistently telling the story of our resurrection with Jesus and our future as world-redeemers by his side. We have our work cut out for us if we want to have any conversation at all.

Let me try to demonstrate how to think in a way that isn’t at one of the poles or merely disagreeing with them, a third way Take one subject that makes Christians at odds with most structures: WAR.

  • The one side might just let people decide whether being a pacifist is “right for them.”
  • The other side might use all the power at hand to keep what is theirs, as long as they are safe and don’t have to do anything too dangerous.

What does a Jesus-follower do? I don’t think Christian peacemaking is the same thing as political pacifism, but since they always get lumped together, let’s just use the word. What is the third way in thinking about war? – and I mean what is thinking as a Spirit-indwelled person, not just a spirit trying to escape a body or a spiritless body trying to prolong life as long as possible?

To begin with: pacifist is not passive. Not being pacifist is being pacified.

That sums it up. Proactive peacemaking is a lifestyle, not a leisure-time activity. Loving others, including enemies, is a character trait, not an application of theory. I say (and I think Jesus does too) that if you are not “pacifist” you are pacified. You may think you have love in your heart and that’s enough, or you might think you are not required to address the subject of loving people at all, but those are just more ways to be under the sway of the powers Jesus came to upend. Being disembodied is not an option.

jesus in the middle is the third way

If you want life coursing through your body as you proactively make peace on earth with Jesus,  I think there are at least three important reasons to think about forging a third way that is moving toward Jesus rather than getting stuck bouncing between the prevailing poles of arguments looking to make you an adherent.

  1. There is only so much time.

We should make the most of our time. So many of us like the election cycle because it is a big overdose of arguing that lets us off the hook from deciding. As long as we can find a reason not to choose, we feel a strange lack of responsibility that we like. I was just with five-year-olds for a few days. They were adept at pretending they never did anything they feared might be construed as wrong. Ever. No lie was too big to get me to swallow in that cause. We’re all like that a little, I think. If we can avoid it, we will. But our minutes matter. The clock is ticking and the life Jesus offers is being wasted if we are not telling the truth we know.

Donald Trump said: “In the Middle East, we have people chopping the heads off Christians, we have people chopping the heads off many other people. … I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding.” There is no time to wish that away and no time to lose by merely avoiding. We need to choose Jesus.

2. Faith is public.

The idea of a public faith is heresy to most Eurocentric people. They think faith is private. We are taught in any number of ways to be autonomous beings responsible for ourselves. And we believe the law protects our private beliefs (until those beliefs go against the powers that write the laws, of course). So we are furious at poor people for not getting richer and furious at rich people for taking all the poor people’s money — people should fulfill their potential and no one should take away the possibility of that. Even when it doesn’t happen, the prevailing authorities can’t think of anything else to do but blame individuals for not being good enough, since they are sure the world is an economy run by an invisible hand and people get to do whatever is  in their heart.

Nothing in the life of Jesus or anyone else in the Bible, for sure, would imply that faith is anything but a life one lives in public, in view, unashamed, assuming one’s life matters as part of the whole. “Privacy” is the luxury of being complicit with some power that protects one’s capacity to go unnoticed. Meanwhile, Jesus is enduring a public execution. He tells his executioner that he will not use his power to participate in a war that might save him from the acts of evil he came to share and overcome. That is about as public example of pacifism as possible. There is another way.

 

3. Meditation without action is self absorption.

Orthodox Christians tried to root out gnosticism in the 200’s and 300’s, but the spirit of it was well-preserved in the meditation teaching of my cherished monks, I have to admit. By the 20th century, they realized that Buddhism, Sufism and all sorts of other religious people long to leave the body for complete union with God. These days, mindfulness and irreligious yoga instructors teach the out-of-the-body mindfulness without any spirit at all.

I appreciate the reality and the feelings of contemplative prayer. But I am mindful to meet Jesus in prayer, not just my own capacity for contemplation. Just because I am doing spiritual things doesn’t mean I am connecting to the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. What saves me from the self-absorption so popular these days is remembering Jesus in history and meeting the risen Lord in my own history: spirit to Spirit, heart to heart, mind to mind, strength to strength. From the peace I experience in prayer, I make peace.

There are ways between the poles:

  • Keeping my eyes on my minutes rather than wasting hours on political redundancies and absurdities, as if they were as breathlessly important as the CNN would like us to believe.
  • Keeping my faith public rather than being driven into privacy or giving up on making a difference.
  • Keeping my spirituality looking to Jesus rather than just “spirituality” or just my own physical sensations.

Being actively on the way, connected to Jesus and his people, allows me to be a pacifist, to choose to love, to even risk the danger of brazenly escaping the clutches of the powers in their own backyard. They don’t have me pacified because I left reality for my dream and they don’t have me pacified because I gave up my need to be a personal alternative and to create an alternative society, the church. Jesus has me, right in the middle, making a peaceful way through, a third way.

The ABCs of the E Word — Devote

The D in the ABCs of evangelism is for devote. We can never face the task at hand and access the inner resources we need to do it unless we come to it from a place of deep devotion to prayer. Evangelism is first about prayer because it begins in God’s own heart.

There are two kinds of prayer that we can apply to our family business of redeeming the world and spreading the blessings of the kingdom of God.

The metaphor for the deepest kind is “as old as the hills:”

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
   which cannot be shaken but endures forever. Psalm 125:1

Martin Laird teaches about this deep devotion in his book Into the Silent Land. It is “mountain prayer”:

“Allow to arise whatever arises, without determining what is allowed to arise in awareness and what is not. Meet everything with a steady, silent gaze. What notices the mind game is free of the mind game.

            A mountain does not determine what sort of weather is happening but witnesses all the weather that comes and goes. The weather is our thoughts, changing moods, feelings, impressions, reactions, our character plotted out for us by the Enneagram or Myers-Briggs. All of these have their place. But they are only patterns of weather. There is a deeper core that is utterly free and vast and silent, that no thought or feeling has ever entered, yet every thought and feeling appears and disappears in it.”

Evangelism brings up our deepest spiritual distress, probably because it is the most profound spiritual act in which we engage. I’ve been calling it the “E word” because many of us can’t even say it because it brings up so many distressing thoughts and feelings. These are the weather, but we are the mountain. For some of us, the thought of evangelism is spiritual stormy weather, but we are the mountain in Jesus, nonetheless.

Paul speaks very eloquently, I think, about “being the mountain” when he speaks about bringing the message of Jesus to people:

“My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” 1 Corinthians 2:4-8 

I think, for many followers of Jesus, they mostly pray out of their weather and not as the mountain. We might still be practicing the prayer we learned as a child. Personally, I think God is fine with that. I think he loves children – I’m one of His.  Laird might call that level of devotion “surface,” in that it is more about our thoughts and feelings rather than about our deep spiritual awareness. He’s right, of course. But the more “surface” work of intercession, of pleading for people who need God is important work that everyone can do, even beginners in faith. I wouldn’t dismiss it as mere “weather.’ 

So to devote oneself to evangelism, try both weather prayer and mountain prayer. 

Try to get through your own stormy weather. 

Dare to talk to God about what troubles you about being part of his stubborn attempt to redeem creation. Let’s face it, a lot of us don’t like the assignment and don’t participate in it, even though we are very glad, ourselves, to have been welcomed into eternity. Some of us might not even like to pray because we might get a marching order and we don’t want to feel guilty for not obeying it. 

If we can get through that cloudburst of resistance, we might want to concentrate on who it is we would like to see come to know Jesus. Make a list. Listing is a risky business, of course, because it implies that we will someday see someone crossed off the list — better to have not made a list at all than to bear the shame of not completing the task, right? But intercession is about what God is going to do, not us. The benefit to us is that interceding softens our heart and directs our attention to where we need to be devoted. Praying for others often opens up our heart and broadens our horizons so we become more loving and imaginative partners for God. Besides, God loves to give gifts to his children, why wouldn’t he answer us if he has decided to partner with us? 

Better, I think to get to mountain prayer as soon as possible. 

As the mountain we receive our rest and confidence in the silence. When our ambitions and fears do not control us with their incessant dialogue, we demonstrate the mystery Paul was talking about and our inner prayer becomes impact. 

While contemplation is not, itself, purposeful, I think we carry people with us into our unshakeable Zion of the heart. The deepest intercession might be to let go of the many people we love and work for as we are being in Christ and see them held in the light of God’s love and truth.