Lost in Translation?

I am sorry it has been such a long wait for this new blog post.  I have been working on writing an article for journal, which is now being reviewed by the publisher.  I hope to return to more regular essays for the future.

One of my spiritual directees, a man who is aware of my particular interest in the distinctive aspects of male spirituality, recently gave me a copy of The One Year Devotions for Men by Stuart Briscoe.  The book encourages the daily reading of several bible verses with the author reflecting in depth on some aspect.

While I enjoy receiving books as gifts, I admit they get a thorough analysis before I decide to invest in reading them.  I was trained as a librarian after all!  So, I read the introduction, randomly read a few of the reflections to see if I could determine Briscoe's theological perspective, then turned to the scripture and topical indexes.  I tried looking up one of my favorite Psalms, Psalm 62, which I often read before walking labyrinths.

Turning to Briscoe's selection for April 16th, titled Waiting Quietly, I noted what seemed a curious translation of the first verse, "I wait quietly before God, for my salvation comes from him."  It seemed to turn around the focus of the verse.  Continuing on, he describes the difficulty of a "man" waiting for "his wife" to shop, and the impatience the man experiences.  Already alerted by the unequal language of a 'man" and "his wife," I was still surprised when his main point is that "God works at his own pace" to "wait before him as you wait for him" and "don't be impatient." 

So I compared it with two versions Psalm 62, verse 1, I use regularly, either from the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) or the Book of Psalms by Robert Alter.  The BCP translates the first verse as "For God alone my soul in silence waits from him comes my salvation," and Alter renders it as "Only in God is my being quiet, from him is my rescue."  So putting them alongside each other:

• I wait quietly before God for my salvation comes from him (New Living Translation)
• For God alone my soul in silence waits from him comes my salvation (Book of Common Prayer)
• Only in God is my being quiet, from him is my rescue (Alter)

The translation used by Briscoe, the New Living Translation (NLT) totally omits the exclusivity clearly conveyed by my familiar translations, either as "for God alone" or "Only in God."  My preferred versions also refer to either "soul" or "being," a concept that is omitted by the NLT version. Instead there is entirely new locational adverb of "before."  I could go on about the many ways I have problems with the translation used by Briscoe, but my point is not about the translation.  I certainly am not a Hebrew scholar, and don't know what problems the original source could have caused. 

I am disturbed by how Briscoe launched from the verse to write a mini-sermon on "waiting for his answers to arrive."  While I do struggle with patience when I have to wait for something, I have never seen this Psalm concerned with the waiting, and nothing at all about getting answers.  To do that seems a distortion and a distraction.

After reading this Psalm before walking a labyrinth, I repeat the phrase "For God alone my soul in silence waits" as a kind of mantra during the walk. When distracting thoughts arise, I affirm my intention to be focused on God, for God, and my desire to be silent, letting go of those things crowding my head. I pray for silence as a way to open myself to God.  I yearn for a sense of God, who usually speaks only when I am quiet.  The struggle is not one of waiting, but it is that of being able to be aware of God, to be trusting.  Or as I noted in the last entry, becoming Vulnerable and Available to God.

I have no desire to read anymore of the New Living Translation of the Bible based upon this experience.  I also don't expect to regularly use the book because of it's heavy use of Evangelical themes such as God's judgement.  When I looked up "doubt" in the topic index, each of the 8 reflections treat doubt as something to be relinquished or overcome.  There is no recognition that doubt can be a path into deeper understanding and faith.  I had hoped for something else. 

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. 

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.