Prayer of the Heart, Step One: "Letting Go"

Find a quiet place and sit down (or lie down) and spend a dozen or more minutes with God. Not the kind of prayer when you talk at God (there's place for that). But the prayer that listens deeply. Yields. Is simply present to God. Being with the Mystery. Communion. What do you do?

Begin this way . . . step one of three.

Sit (or lie) still. Alert. Become aware of your body. Find places of tension with you. (I carry my tension in my jaw and cheeks. My gut too.) Find the tension and release it gently. Let your body, settle into a natural stillness. Now let your breath fall into a natural rhythm. Don't control it. Let it comes to a natural in and out rhythm, as if you were sleeping.  Feel the life in your body.  The Orthodox Fathers searched inwardly until they could feel their heart beating. Tough. But most beginners can feel a sense of aliveness in their hands.

You seek God alone. But your body is a vessel for the Holy Spirit. The fullness of God dwells in your body, scandalous as that may be. The Incarnation teaches us to honor the body; so does Christian thought and practice. If you're going to meet God, you will meet God by becoming more aware of your body, letting your body be that vessel of encounter. If you're not in your body, you'll not meet God. You'll be everywhere else but the one place God's come to meet you.

Sit still. Sit straight. Breathe. Relax. And as you do you may begin to gently let a prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) rise and fall with your breath. In . . . "Jesus." Out . . . "Mercy." Or something similar.

Don't fret if your thoughts drag you away. They'll try. When they do, simply and undramatically return to your senses---follow your breath into your body, and corral the mind with a simple prayer.  Classically, this is the purgative or cleansing step.  With each breath, confess your tension.  Confess the difficulty you have getting still.  Confess the thoughts, ideas, images that want to lead you anywhere but here.  Confess your need for God.  Let go. Release.  Unburden.

Begin with 10 minutes and work up to 25 minutes. Once or twice a day.

Step two next post.

Stop dreaming, start living

I admit it.  I've got a thing for old things.  Old is certainly not always better, but I've not found much wisdom yet in the new.  So, when I'm looking for wisdom to help me in the spiritual life I mostly look to the past.  The past holds wisdom that's been tested by time. Here's a little tidbit that helps me awaken to real life from the dream of the illusions that want all my attention:

"Human life is a mostly a dream.  In our dreams we look without seeing, we listen without hearing, we taste and touch without tasting or touching, we speak without saying anything, we walk without moving.  The mind invents realities that are entirely imaginary."  Philo of Alexandria (50 BCE-20 CE)

It's awfully easy to look without seeing the person right in front of me.  To listen to the sound of traffic or the song of the bird in the tree outside my widow, but not really hear.  To taste and touch . . . and miss it all.  And of course, to utter something that has no life behind the words because I'm not really in my words.

I might as well be dreaming, because I'm not really living.

Changing that's not hard; but it means no longer allowing my thoughts to render the rest of me unconscious.

Awaken to Advent through this simple spiritual practice

Awakening to the spiritual life after a long, raucous, and wandering path, a life full of many mistakes and painful episodes, a North African named Augustine lamented his spiritual dullness.  Augustine, later acknowledged as a doctor and saint in the truest sense of the word (doctor as healer; saint as holy one), points us toward the only place any of us can really meet God:

"Late have I loved You, Beauty, at once so ancient and so new!  Late have I come to love You!  You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.  You were with me, but I was not with You."

As the world turns toward the mystery that is Christmas . . . God with us . . . you are awakening.  You are awakening to the God who is as near to you as the beating of your heart.

Here's a simple practice to move you from living all in-your-head, or "in the world outside," and instead into relationship with that "Beauty, at once so ancient and so new":

Quiet yourself, even for a moment before your computer.  Gently follow your breath (click here for suggestions on breathing) and the Breath/Holy Spirit will guide you from "the world outside" yourself and into the inner realm.  Gently repeat, "Come, Oh come, Emmanuel," and let the words ride on your breath.  The breath is the narrow gate into the heart, and the heart is the cradle of Christ, God-With-Us.

You touch eternity.  You brush up against heaven.  Now you know heaven's not up or out or somewhere other than where you are, nor is it waiting for you when you die.

It is in.

It is now.

It is here.

Return to this moment, over and over again

The spiritual life is a life of no illusions. Meet God here in the daily realities of this life, this place, the person or task or thing before you now. Meet God here or you'll not meet God anywhere. There's something deeply false and unspiritual in the temptation to want something else, be someone else, or go somewhere other that where you are now. Some people mistakenly think that spirituality is a flight into a different realm, a rejection of the world and ordinary things. There is no other world or place than this one. And if the incarnation of God in Jesus means anything at all (and I think it does), then this world, this place, the faces before us, the streets we walk, the chores we perform, these bodies of ours are all sacred. The truth is, matter matters. And an intentional spiritual life means you live fully awake to the wonder and sacredness of it all. A true spirituality is a united, undivided self--mind, heart, and body. I'm saddened when I realize how must of my life I've spent elsewhere. Elsewhere is always fantasy, illusion, unreality. I've spent too much of my life simply "in my head" and not really in my body, not truly present. It's little wonder, then, that true love has so often escaped me--except for those moments when I found myself drawn into the exquisite pleasure of the present, intensely awake to things like the allure of a rose's fragrant scent, the wonder of a child's innocent view of the world, the glory of a drop of dew trembling precariously on a leaf and looking as if it may burst at any moment.

The narrow gate into the spiritual life you seek stands before you . . . here, now . . . through practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, and the Jesus Prayer.  Many, Jesus said, will take the wide and easy road, undisciplined and nearly always pulled out of the present by the unruly thoughts in their heads. But there's nothing there for you but pain and disappointment.

• Enter through the narrow gate, walk the uncommon path.

• Plop down on the grass (or plunge into the icy, invigorating cold of a snowy field) and see and feel the world from as near the earth as you can get.

• Return to the moment over and over again and you will feel the spirit of life rising in your bones, the fire of the Spirit dancing within you saying, "Yes, Yes! More of that."

This beautiful photo comes compliments of Petra Oldeman Photography, the Netherlands.

Moving toward unceasing communion with God

One reader explores her own awakening and longing to live in full communion with God.  She's begun a solid practice and the practice of this interior prayer is carrying her deeper into this communion.  She knows the beauty of simply sitting in God's presence, just being.  But she wonders,  "Is it possible for that peace to always be there?" I offer this as an answer . . .

That peace is always there. Jesus assures us that the kingdom, the reign or realm of God, is both coming and already among us. What's more, it is within us. So is it always there, within us and among us.  The trick is to create such a well-worn path by our practice of prayer that we can quickly find the narrow gate to that inner world of eternity no matter where we are or what we're doing.

We will not always (or perhaps often) live in the bliss of that peace. We live a mixed life (both active and contemplative) and will find ourselves tilting one way or another during the day. But we carry the peace of God within us.

Imagine your heart as a little shrine in the midst of the city, often overlooked by the traffic on the street or sidewalk, mostly ignored by the busy and important people in offices and restaurants around it. But it is always there and you can enter it whenever you wish.

There are times you'll forget it and the narrow gate at its entrance will become overgrown and hidden. But when you awaken again and return to your practice, you can push through the ivy on the gate and clear the path again.

It's no use berating yourselves for forgetting the little shrine that's always so near, or fearing that you'll get too busy to enter it. You will. But you can always return. In fact, every distraction is another opportunity for you to return. And you'll find God always smiling, arms outstretched when you walk back through that gate and down the path.

The wonder of all this is that this shrine isn't out the door and down the street.  It's as near as the beating of your heart.  The peace of God is enshrined in your heart and goes with you wherever you may go.