New eBook: The Journey of the Magi

I've turned the popular meditations offered during the Twelve Days of Christmas as twelve ways to deepen and enrich your life of prayer into a free, downloadable eBook.  Click here to download the eBook. This brief and suggestive series of meditations involves you in the deeper journey of living prayer drawn from the ancient Christian tradition shared by both the Christian East and West.  Best, or course, during Christmas, but helpful at anytime you need to strengthen your practice.  Here are pointers to the twelve ways:

1. Awareness
2. Awakening
3. Companionship
4. Wonder
5. Walking
6. Desert
7. Words
8. Humility
9. Darkness
10. Perseverance
11. Fire
12. Return

Prayer of the Heart, Step Three: "Being"

Step one, "Letting go." Step two, "Watching." Now, step three: "Being." You're opening more fully now to God, moving past distractions, even beginning to see your false self. What I mean is that you're beginning to become aware that you are not your thoughts. Sitting and watching them in the light of Christ helps you realize that the part of you that sees your thoughts is not the true you. It cannot be. The mere fact that you can observe your thoughts means that there is a you that is someone other than the thoughts that rumble round inside your head.

This would be liberating (and one day will be). But for now, you're still haunted and sometimes feels hunted by your thoughts. You can't yet move beyond them to the union with God that is pure rest---the highest or deepest form of prayer.

Don't worry. Don't hurry.

Practice steps one and two, and gradually your mind will learn that it doesn't always have to be "on." As you sit prayerfully before God, calling on the Name of Jesus, inviting the Holy Spirit to guide you deeper into this interior landscape, your mind will learn to trust that you have no intention of obliterating your mind or being irresponsible to the demands and obligations of your active life.

Instead, your mind will learn that it too functions better when it lives more fully in union with God. Your mind will begin to taste the fruit of prayer, and it's own God-given brilliance will shine more fully than when it knew only duty and obligation, the grinding and groaning way it used to go about its work.

Step three is a reward for your deep, inner work to disentangle yourself from illusion and falsehood. And because it is reward, no mortal can instruct you here. In fact, I can't tell you what to do as you journey into this final step---the place of divine encounter. St. John Climacus, like all the teachers of interior prayer, mention this stage only in a veiled way---cautiously, hesitantly.

This is real wisdom.

You could easily get hooked on getting here, achieving the reward, engineering certain outcomes, winning a gold star, and standing in front of your class: "Best at Prayer." No, no, no. Step three is a gift of the mystery of God's grace, the kiss of the Holy Spirit who alone can consummate the union of your life with God's.

Here's the only advice I can give you about this final of three steps:

Bind yourself to one and two, and leave three to God alone. Three will surely come to you, but it's way you'll never own.

Step three is "Being" in the strictest sense.  Or perhaps better, it is "Nothing" at all.

Prayer of the Heart, Step Two: "Watching"

You've spent some time now just Letting Go. Perhaps 5-10 minutes. You are still, your body relaxed, your breathing natural, not forced. The Jesus Prayer is riding on your gentle breath. In---"Jesus." Out---"Mercy." Or some other simple prayer that doesn't arouse the mind. Now move on into the second step or stage. The ancients (St. John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, Dionysius, and others) called the first stage by various names, but they all agree that it is essentially the work of "letting go," or "purgation." The second step then is "illuminative." You simply observe or watch your inner landscape by the light of Christ.

So practice now a presence-of-mind. St. Romuald says, "Watch your thoughts like a good fisherman watches for fish." Simply observe your thoughts and feelings without identifying with them. Let them pass through your mind, one by one. Your breath remains effortless. Return to the Jesus Prayer when distracted. If you become dull or bored, refocus your attention. If you become scattered, relax, let go of what pulls at you.

It's as if you've entered a movie theater. You're alone. The projectionist is playing your thoughts and feelings on the screen of your mind.

• Take a seat half way up the rows of seats.
• Sit down with your popcorn, and simply watch.
• You'll find yourself sucked into the drama on the screen and before you know it you're no longer in your seat but plastered on the screen itself trying to get into the drama.
• When you do, simply peel yourself off the screen and walk calmly back to your seat, sit down, pick up your popcorn again and watch.
• When it happens again (and it will)---when you get pulled back in, identified with your thoughts or feelings---walk back to your seat, sit, watch. Again and again without frustration or judgment.

You'll notice what's played on the screen is quite random. One moment you see something you did yesterday. At another, an image comes from childhood. Then a car door opens on the street outside, and suddenly your mind's wondering who's there; you feel excited, interested. You want to stop praying and look. This is normal. With this practice you'll realize how you've spent your whole life with very little distance between your true self and your thoughts; you've nearly always simply gone wherever they've told you to go. This exercise begins to set you free.  You realize you are not your thoughts, nor do you have to follow them slavishly.

Your goal is God. God alone. God is not your thoughts---even lovely thoughts about God.

In this exercise, you're moving past all that's not God so that you may rest in God, knowing God, touching eternity. This is what you seek.

Next post, step three---"Being".

Head Trip: How to Bring Your Thoughts Down to Earth

You can't not think. But thinking can run you ragged. In this brief video I talk a bit about the avalanche of thoughts that came at me pretty fast and furious the other day, and I invite you to practice drawing the mind down into the heart, bringing your thoughts to rest (even briefly) before Christ within you.

Such a practice moves you toward St. Paul's counsel that we are to bring every thought captive to Christ and that we learn to pray without ceasing.

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.