Putting playfulness back into life

Here's another of the films I used among my ministry students recently, but so timely and appropriate for any of us who feel the stress and strain of daily life today.

To avoid clergy burnout--and the burnout any of us can feel when we are working too hard and with too few margins--we need to challenge so many of the assumptions we hold dear . . . the ways that drive us in our families, work settings, and religious communities.

Jean Vanier says, "Life is about relationship and fun, not winning medals."  But too many of us seem to be out to win gold--at great expense to our bodies and relationships.

What does it mean to infuse life with more playfulness--a playfulness inspired by the great spiritual vision of Jesus?  

And what will it take for us to change our lives and our communities?

What must we give up? (a great Lenten question!)

And who are the people who can teach us the way? (see the video for a surprising answer; it's not those most of us look to for answers)

2014 Central California Prayer of the Heart Conference

The prayer of the heart unites us with the GOD who delights in the splendor of the material world.  In this often violent and fractured world, beauty often seems scarce.  But wherever GOD is, there is beauty.  And wherever beauty is, GOD is there.

Join us for this conference exploring art, nature, and daily experience as ways to open our hearts to GOD. 

A handful of local people practice different forms of art--from pottery to poetry, nature films to musical forms.  They will offer short, curated presentations, each inviting us to engage our own daily experience, finding the beauty around us as a way to open our hearts to the presence of GOD.   

For more information--schedule, presenters, and online or snail mail registration instructions click HERE.  Space is limited and we expect a sold-out conference, so please register soon.  

Seriously, this is not a gimmick to get you on board early!

Why I’m a slacker when it comes to mindfulness

Despite the rage over mindfulness these days, I confess I’m a slacker.

Sure, I’m all for the focus meditative practices bring into my life.  I practice at least twenty minutes of meditation once a day.  Sometimes more.  I have for years.  Meditation centers me, pulls me away from the continual lure of distraction, and helps me train my mind not to follow every thought wherever it wants to take me.  Through meditation the cage full of monkeys in my mind grows calm and still—or more calm and more still than it otherwise would be.  

Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME

What’s more, meditation involves me in more than mental health exercises that balance the brain and free my body from many of the stresses of the modern age.  Through meditation, I draw my renegade mind down into my heart and become more fully integrated as a human being—rooted in a non-grasping experience of the love of God who gives me a deep sense of belonging, meaning, and empowerment.  I wouldn’t likely know all this without this kind of praying.

That said, while I practice what many call mindfulness, and I’m grateful for its growing popularity and the broadening of its practice, there are at least two reasons I’m slow to jump on the bandwagon.

1.  The term for me is a turn off and, therefore, unhelpful.  

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be full of my mind.  I’ve had enough already of all that goes on inside it.  I want less of my mind not more.  And mindfulness conjures up in my head visions of an oversized brain.  Of course, Jon Kabat-Zinn and others will tell me I’m mistaken, and I maybe am.  They’ll tell me that mindfulness isn’t about thinking.  I get that.  But mindfulness is a word like playfulness and joyfulness, awfulness and hatefulness.  It is the state of being as full of mind as I might be full of hatred.  

And I don’t want to be full of my mind.  

To be fully and authentically and robustly human, I want my mind to find its proper place within me.  And I don’t think that place is to fully dominate the rest of me.  

Now of course, I know that’s not what mindfulness practitioners are after.  But words matter, and frankly, the word just doesn’t help me to get where mindfulness is supposed to take me.

I’d rather experience the presence of mind.  That is, I’d like to cultivate a mind that’s more present to my body and my heart (or soul)—a mind that knows and values its place within the larger household of my being.  

So, when I become still and silent, I’m neither filling myself with my mind nor am I emptying it.  To help my mind become present to the rest of me and to God, I pray this prayer that I’ve drawn from the ancient Christian tradition and recrafted for today:

I still my lips that my mind may seek;

I still my mind that my heart may seek;

I still my heart and hide inside the Deep Silence,

'till What I seek finds me.

Following this prayer, I just sit and bring my full self to full attention before God.  Click HERE for an example of this kind of meditative practice.

In this way, my body, mind, and heart are drawn together in a unity of surrender and presence before God, and I avoid privileging any one of those parts.  I mean no disrespect for those who practice mindfulness and who draw their practices from other religious traditions, but for me the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ honors the fullness of my humanity—all of me and not only one part.

Someone will say I’m splitting hairs over words.  But hey, if mindfulness is a useful word for you and helps you find the balanced humanity we're made for, more power to you.  But for me, and for a number of others I suspect, it’s a word that doesn’t carry me where I need to go.  

2.  There are benefits that come to a wandering mind.

While there are many benefits that come from mindfulness training—focus, clarity, release from the relentless machinations of the mind’s thinking function, and an increased ability to be present here and now—there's a downside to all this.  Current research on mindfulness training shows us that there are real benefits that come from a mind that isn’t so taut, so disciplined, so focused on one thing . . . or no-thing.  

This doesn’t mean that we want to celebrate distraction.  No, distraction’s an epidemic today.  And if mindfulness can help heal us of the disease, I’m all for it.  But studies show that a mind that is too focused may not have the necessary freedom to wander down the interior paths that can lead us to insight, discovery, and creativity.  

A week ago last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article called Breathing In Verses Spacing Out: Is Mindfulness Always Best?  “Mindfulness could have unwanted side effects,” writes Dan Hurley.  New studies in mindfulness show that “raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations could prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies.”  

What this means practically is that the practice of meditation or contemplation—my mind present to the rest of me (that is, in my body and in my little part of the world rather than following my thoughts wherever they wish to carry me)—meditative practice can create an inner space that’s free enough from the relentless distractions of our modern world so that I can allow my mind to graze freely like a horse in an open pasture.  Contemplative practices like “mindfulness”, tether the mind, or fence it in, so that it doesn’t wander too far afield.  But if the mind is too tightly corralled the mind doesn’t have the freedom to discover new things.

So, yes, let's practice the presence of mind—focusing our awareness on the here and now—so that we can heal ourselves of the relentless distractions that pull and claw at us.  And then let us let go and let the mind wander with freedom so that our creativity can flourish and we can stumble upon those epiphanies (or let them come to us) that make life interesting.

Something’s different now: Hunger Games, religion, and the need to listen more deeply

I showed Hunger Games: Catching Fire last Sunday in church.  Well, not the whole thing.  Just the trailer.  I also showed part of the trailer for the forthcoming film, Divergent.

And someone walked out.  

Maybe she had to go to the ladies’ room.  Who knows?  But she never came back. And since she was a visitor, I can’t ask her.  And if she was offended by my apparent embracing of violence or pop-culture, she didn’t stay around long enough to learn what I intended by exposing us to the deep human yearning these artistic expressions reveal to us.

Like other forms of art, movies are a window to our souls—all the beauty and ugliness, all the tenderness and cruelty, all the longing and the numbness are revealed on the silver screen.

I think we need to see it, feel it, listen to it. 

But I’m afraid so much of religion isn’t interested in this kind of listening.  For all its talk of matters of the soul, too much of contemporary religion—and the Christianity that is my spiritual home—is terribly thin, superficial . . . in Saint Paul’s words, “holding to the form of religion but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3.5).

We need religion to listen more deeply to what our culture is telling us, what our artists are showing us—about wealth and greed; about violence and the aching poverty and sense of powerlessness that fuels a lot of it in America and around the world; about the dehumanizing forces too few of us are willing to question and resist; about the longing of long marginalized people who just don’t want to take it anymore; about the feeling that so many people have that we’re living inside a dystopian world that few of us feel we have any real power to change.

I invited religious people to listen more deeply last Sunday—both to some current expressions of an art form I think is trying to get our attention, and to the story of Jesus who came to bring hope to those “living in the land of darkness and under the shadow of death” (Matthew and Isaiah)—and one person walked out.

But no one else did.  And that gives me hope that something’s different now.  Maybe we’re waking up.

Then again, maybe no one else was really listening to the challenge the Bible and culture were placing before us.  Maybe everyone else was asleep.

But I don’t think so.  Gawd, I hope not.  Not if we're to truly come alive.

January 5, The Twelfth Way: Return

Part of the Series The Twelve Days of Christmas as Twelve Ways to Deepen Your Connection with God.

Photo by SurriyaMubarka

You've come at last to the full mystery of Christmas.  "Divinity became humanity that humanity might become divinity," said St. Anthanasius in the East and St. Augustine in the West.  God in Christ and Christ in us, the full presence of Divinity (Colossians 1.27).  Your heart is now the home of God, and God the home within your heart.  Before this mystery your mind stands dumb; reason cannot think its way across this chasm this mystery presents to your rational mind; reason cannot bring you home.  Only love can. 

Love will carry you into the intimate union you were made for.  When you love, you cannot be anywhere else but present here and how.  Up till now you've lived far, are away--always somewhere else, distant from God and from your true self, not present to the Presence.  But that's changed now.

You've come all this way to Bethlehem only to realie that what you sought in this far away land was not far away at after all.  It was in you, but you were outside yourself.  You were conscious of everything else but absent to the one thing that really matters.  Now you're different--you've entered your inmost self and found the sacred center, the place you can enter wherever you are and whenever you want.  You're more present now to the Presence.  This is the essence of prayer.

So you needn't stay on this mountain.  You can return to writing emails and going to meetings, changing diapers and washing dishes.  Go ahead, paint a wall, argue a case before a jury, teach third graders, walk in the woods.  But as you do, take another approach (the Magi returned home by a different way, Matthew 2.12).  

Be present. 

When you are, everything changes.  When you're present, you're no longer anxiously looking everywhere else for happiness for fulfillment.  You're no longer resisting this moment, even if it's awful; it's awful largely because you want to be somewhere else.  When you're present, no longer haunted by the past or obsessing about the future, it's very hard to be unhappy.  When you're present, you're as near as you can be to God--who's as close as your next breath, near as the beating of your heart.  When you're present, God is present in the world through you, and a new compassion, justice, and love breaks into this world in your happiness, inching us all nearer the wholeness and harmony of God's heaven and earth made one. 

Today and tomorrow, when I get knocked around or confused or sucked too long into the past or future, I'll return to the present--the face before me, the task at my fingertips, the breath filling my lungs.  And in this moment I'll return to the happiness of Christmas: God in Christ and Christ in me.