Fostering the spiritual awakening

People all around us are waking up to the pursuit of a life marked by interior integrity and intention, expressing itself in authentic happiness and compassion toward others.  If you're reading this, I count you among them. Unfortunately, many who wake up to a long-dormant and neglected spirituality often turn to the church only to find many churches either caught up in turmoil or given over to materialism.  Christians fight among themselves, with other congregations or denominations, and with the world. One awakened soul recently told me about her visits to local congregations: "The churches I visited seem angry, even hateful toward those who don't agree with them."

Those that aren't fighting seem caught up in peddling their goods and services like sophisticated religious Wall Marts or like a proliferating retail franchise. I man told me that visiting one such congregation he felt more like a resource to be exploited for the sake of the cause or institution rather than a human being simply seeking God and needing direction in the life of prayer and interior transformation.

Too often those awakening to the spiritual life turn elsewhere.  Christianity seems largely irrelevant, and its practices and doctrines feel more like barriers to their pursuit of God than aids for the journey.

And yet the Christian tradition is rich with resources to guide the awakening. Too long hidden, these resources are making a comeback.  Kept for centuries by faithful monks and mystics, they are now entering the mainstream, supporting urban people with the grace needed to cultivate a holiness and humanness on this ragged edge of the modern world.

My goal on this site is to help mainstream the hidden gifts of the saints who've found in Jesus and Christian spirituality a door into their hearts and guide to the vast, uncharted eternal realm within.

To do this, I need your help.

1. What is stirring within you?

2. What questions rumble around in your head?

3. What do you long for, hunger for?

4. What are you afraid of?

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.

The Simple Prayer of the Most Important People

The most important people today are probably not those we think of first. Kallistos Ware tells of St. Barsansuphios of Gaza (sixth century) who says that in his time there were three persons whose prayers likely held everything together. Because of their spiritual intention, the sun rises each day, evil is held in check, and life goes on. He even mentions their names. John, he says, is one of them. And Elias too. The third, he says, lives in the province of Jerusalem. It could be anyone—a priest, a farmer in the fields, a mother tending her hearth and her children. But it may well be Barsansuphios himself, who was trying to keep himself clear about his spiritual vocation, but humility kept him from saying so.

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, Ware says, “the world is upheld by the prayer of hidden saints—Christian and, I believe, also non-Christian.”

Awakening to the spiritual life and the vocation of prayer in the midst of daily life is not, as I’ve said before, a cul de sac or private party. Just as a butterfly fanning its wings in Tokyo affects weather patterns in New York, our spiritual intention, our life of prayer, has enormous social and political consequences no matter how hidden our life may be.

Thomas Merton once said:

“I wonder if there are twenty people alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty people who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, page 203)

Who can say what good is happening in this world because of your hidden life of simple, and sometimes bumbling, prayer?

Intention

When you awaken spiritually, you awaken to the power of intention. My friend, Jim Brannan, a savvy pilot and trainer of some of the world’s top pilots, knows this. After our writer’s group last Wednesday he sent me an email that helped me see it more clearly too.

“So where’s the answer?” he wrote. “I believe it’s in your statement, ‘To live a life wholly devoted to God in the midst of this distracting world requires a determination that is not only fierce, but that’s intentional and examined.’ As you say, ‘unexamined life is not worth living.’ To live the life you’re describing requires the power of intention, the power of intentional prayer, focused purposeful prayer. It is praying with expectation, it’s taking God up on his promises.”

Jim’s a pilot. I’m glad he knows the power of intention. He’s not only responsible for those he ferries through the skies, but he’s responsible for training the women and men who vault hundreds of thousands of us every day into the dizzying and dangerous heights.

“An intentional spiritual life,” he says, “means knowing how to live in the presence of God, focusing our attention, sustaining our awareness, checking in with God when our blood pressure goes up, or our anxiety increases. It means being aware of our inner lives in the midst of distraction. It’s living consciously in the Presence.”

The 14th century English mystic we know only as the one who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing—one of the most influential works of Christian devotion—says much the same thing. Those who awaken the power of intention focus their lives around an irrepressible Force for good in the world (chapters 37 and 38).

What’s even better, these lives are not just good, they’re generally happy and pleasant to be around.

In the state we’re in today, we could use a few more of them.