"Bask in the Stillness"---Psalm 4

Here's a summons into the Beauty within you. It comes from Psalm 4---Nan Merrill's translation of the Psalms called, Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness. Cynthia Bourgeault PhD has called Merrill "the Rumi of the Christian faith."

If you seek a biblical collection of prayers to sustain you on your inner journey, her Psalms is a faithful partner.

"You know that the Beloved dwells with all who are filled with love; Love hears when our hearts cry out. Though you may feel angry, do not give in to fear; Commune with the Heart of your heart as you rest; be in silence. Bask in the stillness. Face your fears with forgiveness, and trust in Love."

A dumb prayer that heals the deepest part of you

When you pray, check your ego.  A product of Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, it's got a hankering for the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic."  It wearies easily of praying the same thing because, frankly, it's not much interested in obedience to anything besides itself.

The ego wants to be your god, but it doesn't want you to know that.  In fact, it likes that you're trying to be spiritual, to seek God, to practice the life of prayer.  So long as you're trying, it can still boss you around.  It can swell with pride when you're good, and knock you around when you're bad.  All this only feeds the ego.

The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.

Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.

That's why I pray the Jesus Prayer over and over again.  It's a dumb prayer.  It's aim is to silence my ego who can't stand its simplicity or my dogged obedience to drawing my mind down into my heart.  When my ego is brought into submission to my heart, the Center, it stands dumb before Christ.

I still can't figure out why it resists its healing.

The authenticity that matters

I continue in this conversation about the use of repetitive prayers.  When Jesus commended the particular prayer known as the Lord's Prayer, did he mean for us to repeat the words as they are or to use them as a guide for our own improvising? Modern, Western culture prizes a heightened individualism—or I should say, an untethered individualism.  We who've drunk deep of its intoxicating brew will need to turn more toward the tradition rather than away from it.  Praying with firm connections to our spiritual heritage doesn’t mean a mere rote and empty repetition of prayers like the Lord's Prayer.  Rather it means, as in jazz, that we learn our scales so well that we can then improvise properly and freely when given a chord chart or lead sheet.

The Lord's Prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) is a lead sheet, as are the Psalms. From a prayer like this we can playfully  and confidently improvise.

Too many of us modern people want to improvise in prayer like jazz musician, Miles Davis, plays the horn but without the long, hard apprenticeship in the tradition.  That would be as silly as a teenager picking up a horn, stepping onto the stage and thinking she can imitate Miles Davis.

The saints and mystics would all tell us that there is power in the words, as-they-are (like scales to Miles Davis, they are non-negotiable).  So take up the words of the Lord's Prayer or Jesus Prayer.  Pray them over and over until they play in the heart, until the heart is alive with them, beating out the rhythm of the words, and the mind is no longer thinking them.   Only then will you approach the only kind authenticity that matters.

Continued next post...

Carry at least this one Name upon your lips

C.S. Lewis once wrote a piece called “Festooning ready made prayers.” He understood the temptation of free improvisation and the poverty of the unfettered individualism it springs from.  He urged believers to follow more closely those prayers that are good representatives of the faith, tested by age.

So, to turn from whatever poverty in prayer leaves you hungry for God, consider:

1. Rethinking your stance toward what is rote.
2. Re-evaluating history and the gifts of the tradition (the Bible and historic practices).
3. Becoming suspicious of the mind’s desire to always be in control, always thinking, always demanding to know and understand (which is a form of control).
4. Suspend rational thought for awhile.  Has it really gotten you where you want to be in terms of intimacy with God?
5. Take the Holy Name of Jesus upon your lips and let it move down into your heart. Rest in the Name. Let your meditation (rote repetition) on the Name, keep you coming back to the one thought that really matters: the Name of Jesus.
6. When your thoughts assail you (like: “This is dumb; it’s just rote repetition”), come back to the Name and interrogate the thought: “Why should I believe you?”. Dwell instead in the presence of God.
7. Set apart some sacred time in a quite place.  Let your body settle into stillness.
8. Sit of lie still while remaining alert.
9. Watch your thoughts but don’t follow them or judge them good or bad, pleasurable or frustrating.
10. Return over and over to the Name.

This may not seem like prayer because we often think prayer is more like chattering at God.  But silence is the true language of God (click on 1 Kings 19.11-12; Psalm 4.4; Isaiah 50.4; Habakkuk 2.20; Mark 9.7).  When you're least conscious of your own thoughts about God, yourself, and the world---when you're naked of illusion, when there's no false self you have to feed, when you're dead to all but love---you are nearest to God, and nearest your true self made in God's image.

Avoiding rote and empty words

About contemplative prayer, Joe asks: "How do those of us for whom the ancient practices are so foreign, connect with the sense of awe and intimacy you advocate? I can see that while the Jesus Prayer can focus us, I'm concerned that it might just as easily become nothing but more than a rote and empty old habit." Joe asks an important question and offers a helpful caution. We don't want rote and empty old habits; Jesus does warn against vain repetition (Matthew 6.7).  Here's my take on this---

When Jesus taught us to pray, and warned us against "heaping up empty words," he nevertheless taught us to pray by rote (Matthew 6.9ff): “Our Father, who art in heaven…”

And if we look at the Bible’s many prayers, so many of them are essentially a recitation of the tradition (cf. Mary’s response to the angel in Luke 1.38: “Here I am, servant of the Lord, let it be with me according to your word,” compare also the disciples' response to persecution in Acts 4.23ff: they pray Psalm 2, verbatim, then improvise on it).

The Bible, and biblical prayer, celebrates rote repetition and is highly suspicious of the forms of free prayer we in the West consider “authentic.” They’d consider it vain. Any improvising the believer does in prayer is done based upon the memorized text from the tradition.

The problem is that those of us raised in modern, western, enlightened civilization think rote repetition is a bad thing. We’re hung up on so-called "free thought". There's no such thing as free thought. We all improvise on some “text”.

Listen to the prayers that spill from our lips; they do not cohere very closely to the Bible, but rather to Western values–mostly for security, safety, and abundance. There are a few precious exceptions of course, but these praying persons have drunk deep of sacred texts.

Next post, how repetitive praying can move us toward silence, the language of God...