Changed by Silence - 2

There are many methods to enable the process of stopping the flow of uncontrolled thoughts and enable some amount of mental silence. Each has its advantages and limitations. I will not even try to list them.

Whichever process or methods a person chooses to use, there are a variety of challenges. To start, you must turn-off and turn away from all of the visual, musical, verbal, and other media that are omni-present as background stimulation and distraction. It is the first step to interior silence because all of those external distractions are designed to intrude and interrupt your thoughts. For persons who have grown to need multiple sources of stimulation, choosing to turn-off and turn away is a radical, counter-cultural act. It probably will be hard to do. Your natural resistance to change will urge you to quit, to return to the familiar. Making a commitment to a trial period, like silent prayer for five minutes a day for two weeks, may be a good strategy.

Without the external noise, you will become aware of whatever inner thoughts, feelings and images you have. If this is your first time to focus on interior experiences, you might be surprised by the amount, loudness and persistence of all of the thoughts. This is what the Buddhists call “monkey mind.” Picture a group of monkeys swinging around in the trees, making all kinds of noise, and doing nothing in particular. That is what all of those thoughts are doing – often circling around, not accomplishing anything, chattering away.

In Arm Chair Mystic: Easing into Contemplative Prayer, Mark E. Thibodeaux offers some very good advice about dealing with monkey mind distractions:

My anxiety, distress, guilt and anger about the distractions are far more detrimental to my prayer than the distractions themselves. The most effective way to diminish the distractions, then, is not to worry about them at all. (p. 120) 

If you are looking for an easy-to-read, simple and clear guide to moving into silent prayer, I highly recommend this book.

As you become more experienced with silence in your interior landscape, and the surface chatter quiets down, deeper thoughts and feelings begin to emerge. These appear from under the surface because there is now the interior space for them to emerge. These thoughts and feelings present a different challenge, often involving remembering and re-experiencing unresolved, and often deeply painful, memories or fears. They are different than the chattering, and the content may become so powerful that it needs separate attention through specific therapeutic or spiritual work outside of the prayer time. It may be important to explore this material outside of your time of prayer.

I have been scanning through my journals from the last 12 years, and have realized how significant writing in a journal has been in exploring my own interior landscape. It has allow me to move into silent prayer in various ways. Writing all of the chatter in my mind onto paper honors it, while allowing me to leave it behind. Writing also allows me to work through the dark material, the emerging memories or fears, and lets me decide what I want to take to therapy or my spiritual director for further exploration. And there are many times when writing in my journal is itself a form of prayer.

Enough for now – I hope to continue this later. 

Availability and Vulnerability

(Here is another article from the No Chocolate in Lent? blog that I wrote in March.  I am working on a follow up on my Changed by Silence response to Sarah Coakley's article in Christian Century, but it is not yet ready from prime time)  

There are two simple words at the center of the Rule of Life for the Northumbria Community – availability and vulnerability. Since discovering that Rule several years ago, I have tried to live my own life with availability and vulnerability.

Let me backtrack. Many years ago, David found a prayer book developed by the Northumbria Community in England. The Northumbria Community is a geographically dispersed community that has its home on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.  It is shaped by a spirituality based in the history and experience of the Celts. What holds that community together is their Rule of Life, summarized by the values of availability and vulnerability. As Richard Foster states in the introduction of Celtic Daily Prayer:

These are vows that extend both vertically and horizontally: available to God, available to others; vulnerable to God, vulnerable to others.

While I make no claim to be a member of the community, nor have I ever visited there, I have tried to adopt those values into my life, with their challenge and hope. I continually find myself returning to them over and over again, because they seem to be at the core of my struggles to live a life centered on God. This year, I will consciously bring those challenges of availability and vulnerability into this week between Palm Sunday and Easter.

Holy Week was a time when Jesus was fully available to those who needed him, while becoming totally vulnerable to the fear and cruelty of those who controlled the religious and government institutions. In his acts of availability, such as washing the disciple’s feet, Jesus turns around the expectations of his friends by caring for them. In his interactions with those in power, he refuses to return violence for violence, hatred for hatred. During this week, we recall his betrayal by one of his disciples, beatings by soldiers, abandonment by his friends, crucifixion by an oppressive state, and death.

So, in continuing on my Lenten discipline of what if it’s all true, what can I hope to learn from Jesus' tragic, and ultimately triumphant, journey? I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But if I can find a way to stay available and vulnerable to reliving his story, I hope to be able embrace those values more fully in the power of resurrection and Easter. 

Changed by Silence

(This post was originally published at No Chocolate in Lent? blog on April 4, 2011.  I will note sadly that I have not been able to delve more deeply into the material in the intervening two months, but I hope to get back to it soon.)

During a young adult retreat session, one person asked me about the point of meditation and being internally silent. I would paraphrase the question as “What’s the point of turning off my thoughts when I have so much I need to get done?” At the time I found myself inarticulate, fumbling for an answer, knowing that the question is very important.

Another person suggested that it is like pushing the reset button, clearing out the garbage and starting over. That analogy does capture one aspect. A constant stream of thoughts keeps us stuck in one place, limiting our ability to see alternative perspectives or opposing ideas. So by letting go of old thoughts, new ideas and perspectives can emerge. The image is a garden choked with weeds; once the weeds are cleared out and the soil is loosened up, new plants can grow and flourish.

But there is something left of out by that explanation when the spiritual dimension is considered: God. How do the ways we pray crowd out God rather than open up to God? Using that garden metaphor, what might grow up in the soil if we kept cleaning out the weeds? If our prayers are full of our words, chattering on about our concerns, hopes, fears or thanksgiving – all important and valid topics of prayer, I will hasten to add – do we allow God to reach out to us? Changing metaphors, when do we let down the wall of words or open a door in that wall to let God sit with us, be with us, listening for what God may have to say?

Sarah Coakley describes how she was changed by the silence, in her article Prayer as Crucible, in the March 22 issue of Christian Century. Professor Coakley has an impressive resume as an academic and theologian, but risks an intimate glimpse into her spiritual life by explaining she continues to be radically changed by silent prayer. Since there is a strong taboo in the Anglican/Episcopal churches against talking about our individual spiritual life and experiences, much less by an academic theologian, her revelations are powerful. Her experiment in her 20’s with Transcendental Meditation (TM) meant

a seismic shift of seemingly unspeakable proportions began to afflict me. Whatever was going on here was not only "transcendental" but severely real. Clearly I was going to have to make some metaphysical choices, and fast. 

While ancient Christian forms of meditation and silent prayer were yet to be rediscovered, she turned away from TM and stayed within a Christian perspective. She describes the experience of an

extraordinary sense of spiritual and epistemic expansion—of being taken by the hand into a new world of glorious technicolor, in which all one's desires were newly magnetized toward God, all beauty sharpened and intensified. Yet simultaneously all poverty, deprivation and injustice were equally and painfully impressed with new force on my consciousness.

And

Lest this seem like a claim to some special supernatural encounter, I hasten to add that the daily practice of silence itself was usually more like the tedious quotidian discipline of brushing one's teeth than anything else. It was the effects outside prayer . . . that were initially hard to quantify and yet palpably transforming of all my previous theological assumptions. 

So, I would like to thank Professor Coakley for articulating what I could not on that Sunday morning. However, I am hesitant to recommend her article because her use of the technical language of her academic field makes it a challenge for even a partially trained person like me. I will continue to read, mark, and inwardly digest my copy, and will report back if anything articulate emerges.

Prayer, Walking, and Labyrinths

(This essay first appeared at the No Chocolate in Lent blog I managed for the Middleham and St. Peter's Parish on March 31, 2011. I have revised it slightly with experiences that occurred since the original posting.)

During the recent Middleham and St. Peter’s young adult and family retreat, I introduced to the adults the spiritual practice of walking prayer. It is a practice I use regularly since I have great difficulty in sitting in one place and meditating. But if I am able to move, to walk while also quieting my thoughts, I find it easier to reduce the constant chatter for longer periods of time. It is even better if I can walk in a labyrinth.

Every month I try to go to the Cathedral Crossroads at the National Cathedral on the last Tuesday evening of the month. Among other activities, they spread out two canvas labyrinths, one in each transept, to allow for prayer through walking. There is always a musician, often a harp and Native American flute player, providing soft music that echoes the length of the nave. Everyone walks in their socks, to protect the canvas pattern from wear and dirt.

Every time is a different experience. Sometimes it is crowded, so we need to share the paths and figure out how to get around each other. Sometimes I am alone, or there are only one or two other persons. At the end of the evening, everyone still in the Cathedral is invited to join in the service of Compline, a corporate closing for the day.

Sometimes, as I walk, I become calmer, less anxious, more able to get on with life when I am done. Letting go of my thoughts helps to let go of negative feelings accumulated over the day. Sometimes, new perspectives or insights will emerge from the quietness. Occasionally I sense a presence that might be the Holy Spirit. Even those all to frequent times when I feel like I didn’t get much out of the walking, I know I need to do it anyway. I cannot predict or control what will happen, but I need to show up and walk if anything is going to happen. That is true of all spiritual practices.

If you have never tried it, my only advice is to ignore whatever anyone says you are supposed to do. Just start walking at whatever pace feels right, and see what happens. Oh, and do try to stay on the path, though I have seen persons make their own path. Many people, like my Mom, never could figure out why anyone would want to do it, though she was willing to try it once. Each person is different.

David and I have been building a garden around a simple five circuit labyrinth in our yard, combining my interests of gardening with labyrinths. The photo on the left is from last May shows the grass paths that run among the flower beds.  Each week you can read about what is blooming and see pictures at Labyrinth by the Bay. If you are ever in the neighborhood, please feel free to stop by and walk the paths with a view of the Bay.

More information about labyrinths can be found at the Grace Cathedral, where the current awareness of use of labyrinths was started by Dr. Lauren Artress. I attended a workshop by Dr. Artress during the recent Spiritual Director's International conference, and her approach is direct and simple.

The Labyrinth Society has a worldwide labyrinth locator, so when you are far from home, you can find a place to walk a labyrinth.