The door is too easily ignored

After a brief pause to address a few reader comments, this post follows up on God meets us in the most surprising places: Those monks and mystics worth their salt in any age also faced the daily, ordinary life of cleaning bathrooms, preparing food, working in the field, facing people they’d rather not face, and falling asleep in prayer.  I’ve often wished we had more from them about living alert to God in the midst of it all.  But I’ve come to appreciate their reserve.

“If you’re going to watch me,” they seem to say, “then watch me at prayer.  Follow me in prayer and you’ll have light to guide you in your daily life.  Your path will be made known to you.  But you must not hurry.”

Start then wherever you are.  Wake up to this moment, this place.  Beware of the impulse to find a teacher, a guru, a conference, or some sacred place that will launch you into the ecstasy you seek.  If you don’t find it here, where you are, you’ll likely not find it at all.  Follow those impulses and you’ll spend your life always looking elsewhere when the door you’re looking for is as obvious as the nose on your face . . . and just as easily ignored.

The early desert fathers and mothers cherished a little saying that kept them centered in the only place God comes to meet us.  Here.  Now.

“An elder said: If you see a young monk by his own will climbing up into heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground, because what he is doing is not good for him.” (Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 96)

If you’re going to be found by God, you’ll be found on the particular ground where you spend your time each day.

God meets us in the most surprising places

Much of the spiritual writing we’ve inherited comes from monks and mystics.  Their vision for the spiritual life may inspire you, but it can also leave you with the nagging impression that you’ll probably never find your way into enough open, quiet space to let God find you. You have a hard enough time finding yourself in the midst of the busy, demanding, active life that is yours.  You’re lucky if you can squeeze out a handful of minutes each day to return to the center through prayer and meditation.  Because you cannot withdraw and live a life of prayer, much monastic teaching and most mystic intimacy with God seems beyond your reach, written for someone who doesn’t share your kind of life.

None of those who write anything worthwhile about the spiritual life intend this.  They know that the most humbling and ordinary tasks of daily life matter.  They do not intend to leave any of us with the impression that the real spiritual life is lived in some airy-fairy place of bliss.  No, God meets us in the most surprising of places . . . where we live and work and play each day.

In Jesus, God came among us bodily.  God made matter holy.  God blessed and celebrated ordinary life.  God hidden, incognito, tucked away in the most surprising of places.  God growing in the womb of a teenager.  God born in a peasant’s stable.  God crying, nursing, needing someone to change his shorts.

Those who were looking elsewhere for God’s grand entrance missed God’s humble coming.

Finding God is a matter of waking up

God is as desperate for you as you are for God.  It may even be possible to say that God is as incomplete without you as you are without God. So why is meeting up so difficult?  Why can’t you find what you’re looking for if what you seek is seeking you?

Familiarity doesn't necessarily breed contempt for God, but it does breed contempt for the only place God can be found--here, now.  Jesus says, the kingdom of God is within you--near as the beating of your heart, close as your next breath.  The place where you meet God is so terribly ordinary that you'll be tempted to look elsewhere.

Finding God is a matter of waking up to the fact that you don't need to go anywhere to find God.  The journey is within.

That doesn’t make it easy, but at least you know where to look, and you'll have taken the first step into your own spiritual awakening.

What if God is searching for you?

We often talk about our search for God, and for good reason.  Every human heart seeks after God.  Our hearts, whether our minds acknowledge the fact or not, yearn to experience God in the midst of daily life—whether changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, teaching third graders, or walking in the woods.  We were made to burn with a holy and playful fire.  Each of us possesses the capacity to live intentional, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world. But all of us live with some measure of hurry and worry, fragmentation and frustration that distracts us and gnaws at us.  Many of us want to pray but don’t know how.  Others may know something of prayer, but find our practice unfulfilling.  If we’re honest, a good deal of our praying doesn’t taste much better than a mouthful of dirt.

So we search restlessly and longingly and find little of what we’re searching for.

But what if God is searching for us?  What if God is more desperate to find us than we are to find God?

Jesus says that God is like a shepherd who leaves the rest of his flock to search diligently for a single lost sheep.  God is like a woman who’s lost a precious coin and then upends the furniture in her house in order to track it down again.  God is like a father who waits, waits, waits for his prodigal child’s return, and celebrates with extravagant joy when we wake up and come home.

You don't have to serve your thoughts

Here is the third in a series relating our thoughts to the practice of unceasing prayer, the intentional awareness of God in each moment.  It follows two other posts, The daily thought parade, and Unceasing prayer is no pious exaggeration.

So, standing there, water splashing down upon my head, baptizing me anew, I tried a little experiment.  I gathered all these thoughts down into my heart.  I made my heart a sanctuary and invited my mind to come to full attention before Jesus Christ.  From that center, the chapel of my heart—where that ruffian horde of preoccupations and distractions were no longer in charge—I simply gave myself to the moment.  I reveled in the clean smell of lavender soap, the holiness of nakedness, the too-easily-missed glory of thousands of little beads of water, reflecting the morning’s light, running in golden rivulets down the glass door of my shower stall.  It was prayer.  I was ecstatic, alive to the goodness of God, to God above all, and to myself, fully present to it all.

The command to “pray without ceasing” is not an exaggeration or an experience only for monks and mountain mystics.  All of us think without ceasing . . . no exceptions.  The mind never shuts off.  And if that’s true, we can pray without ceasing.  For at heart, prayer helps us to take charge of our thoughts.  Prayer helps us resist being defined by our thoughts.  Prayer helps us stay put in the present, in real life, alert to the seductions of those thoughts that want to carry us away into illusion, fantasy, and anxiety.  Alert to God, we draw those ruffians down into the chapel of the heart where they swear their allegiance to Jesus Christ, and then, put in their rightful place, re-ordered and realigned, our thoughts can do what they are meant to do: help us live life rather than fret over it.

Thinking is as routine as breathing.  Spiritual awareness awakens you to the fact that you don’t have to follow your thoughts where they want to lead.