Do one thing

Your thoughts distract you. They lure you out of yourself and render you spiritually passive. If you don't stand at the center---your core or heart---and choose which thought to follow and why, you'll find yourself pulled in many directions at once. You'll continue to live a life that's driven by unceasing multitasking, unable to live the focused, meaningful, happy life you seek. It's the same with tasks. Do you scan your email inbox while you're talking on the phone---giving neither task the attention each deserves or requires? Do you jot notes on your to-do list while you're talking with a colleague or friend---your mind flitting to and fro, largely unconscious of what's going on right before you?

Do one thing. Choose to give full attention to a thought, task, or person. Practice watchfulness. Move toward monotasking. Ask yourself, "Am I here, now, present to what is before me?"

When you find you're not, when you become aware that you're multitasking again, simply breathe. Then follow your breath down into your heart.

When you breath---and are aware of your breathing---you come back to the present. And if you join a little prayer to your breath, you become conscious of God again. God is always near you. In fact, God is within you waiting to meet you and guide you.

Breathe and pray, and you're on your way from unceasing multitasking to the unceasing prayer which is the flame of the life you're made for (1 Thessalonians 5.17).

Prayer as Choice

Enter the stillness of interior prayer--in a crowded room or in the silence of your prayer place. Be present here and now. Present to each breath, the name and mercy of Jesus attached to each inhalation, each exhalation. To each thought that passes through the mind; present and poised so that you follow your breath and prayer rather than each maverick thought.

This practice may be new for you. A steady stream of thoughts pass through your mind. They urge you to follow wherever they, undisciplined and self-centered, want to take you. They don't care that you want to go somewhere else, do something else. They don't care that you're trying to pray and meet with God.

You might never before have realized that you have a choice when presented with this stream of thoughts. You have a choice to follow them or not. In fact, it is imperative that you choose, for choosing means that you are living from the center, your true heart, where Christ reigns within you.

Our calamitous century and the fire of prayer

I'm a few pages into a book that looks very promising.  My friend, historian, Steve Varvis, suggested it.  And it's highly regarded. Barbara Tuchman's a Pulitzer prize winner, and in her book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, she hands us a tale that does what historians do best--she helps us live better today in light of the past.  Superbly and beautifully written, the book follows the life of a single 14th century knight, Enguerrand Coucy VII: ("the most experienced and skillful of all the knights of France") and through him shows us what the 14th century was made of.

Tuchman initially wrote to learn "the effects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded history--that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348-50, which killed an estimated one third of the population living between India and Iceland."  But researching the period she found that more than this single and lethal disaster, the 14th century was itself a disaster--it "suffered so many strange and great perils and adversities that its disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more than the four horsemen of St. John's vision, which had now become seven--plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrections, and schism in the Church."

Here's a paragraph that really arouses my interest:

"Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest of the period itself--a violent, tormented, bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant--was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of similar disarray.  If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before."

She wrote those words in the mid-1970s.

The book ought to enjoy a resurgence of interest today.  Especially among us who are assaulted by the fear tactics of political and religious ideologues telling us the sky's falling on top of us.  The Swiss historian, de Sismondi called the 14th century "a bad time for humanity."

The 21st century could very well be as calamitous as the 14th.  But humanity survived that "bad time" well enough to have forgotten it entirely.  What's more, suffering produces spiritual fire.  In England alone, the 14th century produced some of the greatest spiritual teachers our history knows--Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and the anonymous monk who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing.

If that was true then, it's likely the Holy Spirit's up to the same mischief today.  In fact, I'll bet on it.

Avoiding the Pitfalls of Mass-Market Spirituality

In a recent New York Times editorial, Ross Douthat says:

"By making mysticism more democratic, we’ve also made it more bourgeois, more comfortable, and more dilettantish. It’s become something we pursue as a complement to an upwardly mobile existence, rather than a radical alternative to the ladder of success. Going to yoga classes isn’t the same thing as becoming a yogi; spending a week in a retreat center doesn’t make me Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux. Our kind of mysticism is more likely to be a pleasant hobby than a transformative vocation.

"What’s more, it’s possible that our horizons have become too broad, and that real spiritual breakthroughs require a kind of narrowing — the decision to pick a path and stick with it, rather than hopscotching around in search of a synthesis that “works for me.”

Douthat addresses two of the chief themes of this blog and website:

1. There's a real need to make spiritual practice accessible to ordinary people

2. These practices are best resourced from deep within a tradition

But he also issues a warning:

• Spiritual awakening and transformation takes work; in out-dated language---"discipline," even "renunciation"---or language more current, "muscle," "perseverance," or "guts."

Without such work, whatever spiritual awakening we think we're pursuing just might turn out to be little more than a fad.

Prayer: a few choice words

We've entered a turbulent century, but it's not the first time in history people have faced such difficulty. The 14th century (see this excellent book on the subject) was every bit as challenging and yet it produced some of the most enduring spiritual teaching in history. In this brief video I explore the gifts of the 14th century English Christians who excelled at interior prayer--in particular, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

A few choice words are mighty expressions of genuine prayer. Learn to utter simple words and awaken a profound experience of prayer in the midst of your active life.