Prayer: Entering the Interior Landscape

To live a life of prayer means live with as much awe and wonder and curiosity toward the vast inner landscape within you  as any scientist looks the earth or sky.  It means you live with as much respect and honor toward the beauty within you as any artist shows toward a desert landscape or jagged seacoast. John O'Donahue's a praying poet you ought to know.

The Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue was beloved for his book Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. In one of his last interviews before his death in 2008, he articulated a Celtic imagination about how the material and the spiritual, the visible and the invisible worlds intertwine in human experience.

Here's a link to this remarkable interview on the audio program Speaking of Faith (which you also ought to get to know)

Stop dreaming, start living

I admit it.  I've got a thing for old things.  Old is certainly not always better, but I've not found much wisdom yet in the new.  So, when I'm looking for wisdom to help me in the spiritual life I mostly look to the past.  The past holds wisdom that's been tested by time. Here's a little tidbit that helps me awaken to real life from the dream of the illusions that want all my attention:

"Human life is a mostly a dream.  In our dreams we look without seeing, we listen without hearing, we taste and touch without tasting or touching, we speak without saying anything, we walk without moving.  The mind invents realities that are entirely imaginary."  Philo of Alexandria (50 BCE-20 CE)

It's awfully easy to look without seeing the person right in front of me.  To listen to the sound of traffic or the song of the bird in the tree outside my widow, but not really hear.  To taste and touch . . . and miss it all.  And of course, to utter something that has no life behind the words because I'm not really in my words.

I might as well be dreaming, because I'm not really living.

Changing that's not hard; but it means no longer allowing my thoughts to render the rest of me unconscious.

The Richness of Christian Meditation

To enhance your spiritual life and to learn how to pray more deeply, here's an audio resource for Christians who want to drink from the richness of the Christian meditation tradition or for those who want to understand how Christian practice meditation. From Publisher's Weekly:

James Finley PhD, a spiritual counselor who studied with Thomas Merton, presents a clear introduction to meditating as a Christian. He situates meditation—by which he principally means "a form of prayerful reflection, using thoughts and images"—in a historic tradition of Christian spiritual practice.

The book's first seven chapters examine some major themes of Christian meditation, e.g. "entering the mind of Christ" and "hearing the Lord's voice." Finley is to be commended especially for the way he interweaves theology and practice, as in his examination of the role of the body in Christian meditation. Through meditation, we learn to inhabit our bodies better, he observes, and gain insight into the true meaning of the Incarnation—the Word becoming flesh.

Another section that deserves special mention is the treatment of "Trinitarian mysticism." Many Christian titles aimed at a broad market skip over the complicated doctrine of the Trinity, but Finley suggests that meditating on the triune nature of the Christian God is crucial. These heady discussions are rounded out by concluding chapters—a revision of portions of Finley's 2000 title The Contemplative Heart—that are full of practical instruction. The evangelical market may find this title a bit too New Agey, but many other Christian readers will delight in it.

Find the audio collection here.

Ordinariness is a better path to God

To lighten you up and guard you from the possibility of a spiritual seriousness that can lead to pride, I introduce you to a writer I'd like you to know---Thomas Merton. In his book of meditations on the committed spiritual life he writes:

"It is often more perfect to do what is simpy normal and human than to try to act like an angel when God does not will it. That is, when there is no neeed for it, except in the stubborn passion of our own impatience with ourselves.

"It is not practical, it is not honest, it is not Christian to fly from 'every desire' and 'every pleasure' that is not explicitly pious.

"For others who are human enough to be ascetics without losing any of their humanity, it is all right to risk things that seem inhuman. For one as deficient and self-conscious as I am, the ordinary ways are safer. They are not just an evasion to be tolerated; they are a more perfect way" (p. 21)

Merton had his eyes on monks who get too serious. His words are a helpful reminder to us non-monks.  While we might not often try to be angels, we may try to be more than we are.  The perfect way is the path of humble embrace of the pleasure of our humanness.

Avoid gravity

Advent and Christmas are spiritually intense and sobering seasons. They ought to be. We are awakening to God as if from a dead sleep or from a drunken stupor. We awaken to the light, but doing so means we must face the darkness within and around us. Some on this path can become overly serious. Others, aware of the spiritual depth present before them, slide into a hot critique of the material excesses of the holidays. A few get grumpy because we ate too much and exercised too little. Before I return to some guidance on entering more fully the interior, spiritual life through the Jesus Prayer, I invite you during this Epiphany season to:

• Do something, otherwise worthless, that brings you pleasure today,
• As you do, become aware of the muscle tension in your face and jaw,
• While you give yourself to something pleasurable, feel yourself smile,
• And if your smile tilts toward laughter, let go and give yourself to a good chuckle.

Remember this: G.K. Chesterton said, "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."  But devil fell by sheer force of gravity.