The downward and inward move of God in the Incarnation of Christ brings an end to any religion that would make prayer into a mere head-trip. The Incarnation is an invitation to touch God, taste God, love God. It is first-hand and personal experience of the God who is ultimate reality, and it is the experience of this Reality in our bodies, on this earth.
This radical embodiment of God in Jesus makes all bodies, indeed, all matter—the earth included—sacred.
The fact is, it’s in the midst of daily life that you’ll meet God or you’re not likely to meet God at all—not really. Sure, you can think nice thoughts about God, and there’s a part of you that’ll congratulate itself on how religious or spiritual these ideas about God might make you feel, but thinking God is very different from loving God. Loving God is a genuine experience that cannot be thought. It’s the difference between reading about love and being in love.
Once you’ve tasted love yourself, no amount of second hand experience through reading can substitute for the real thing.
Prayer, as I offering it here, is living with a nearly continuous sense of the Sacred no matter what you’re doing or where you are. Prayer is life. But so much of the time, what passes for prayer is actually an abstraction of life, and it’s not the kind of prayer God wants for you. The kind of prayer that’s religious and therefore somewhat separate from ordinary life. That kind of prayer is what people do before a meal, but not while they’re eating. It’s what they do when they’re doing something particularly pious, but not while they’re doing the dishes or writing an email, shuttling kids to school or sitting in a doctor's office, talking with a friend or making love. Too bad. Such a view of prayer keeps them from so much of God. True prayer is, as I’ve said before, as natural as breathing, as earthy as talking a walk.
Okay, so everybody's talking about The Busy Trap, and opinion piece published in the New York Times last weekend. It went viral. Struck a chord. People resonate with it. We don't want to be busy. But as Rachel Dodes in the Wall Street Journal says about "The Busy Trap," we don't have the foggiest idea what to do about it. Busyness is a distinctly modern epidemic. Untethered to the wisdom of the spiritual traditions, modern people haven't the foggiest idea how to get free. But the contemplative traditions teach us that idleness is a sacred path, while busyness is, well, stupidity, and frankly, may be the height of laziness.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.
All this reminds me of a book I read years ago by Catholic philosopher, Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It's a sustained meditation on classical, medieval, and modern culture. Here's a link to a helpful introduction to his thinking.
So, pray . . .
Idly.
Silently.
Uselessly.
Contemplatively.
Leisurely.
St. Seraphim of Sarov once said, "Acquire inner peace and thousands around you will find their salvation." You're not just saving yourself, but helping to pull all the world to safely along with you.
In the past, I've suggested a few important books on contemplative prayer, including: John Main's Word Into Silence (which I reviewed here), and
Cyprian Consiglio's Prayer in the Cave of the Heart (reviewed here),
Here's another I'm reading now. Fr. Laurence Freeman is a Benedictine monk and the director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, following the path set out by John Main (above). And he'll be in Fresno this coming February 8-10, 2013, as part of our annual Prayer of the Heart Conference!
I strongly urge you to read this extended meditation on the person of Jesus as the one who prays within us. Freeman extricates Jesus from centuries of doctrinal debate that's left us with very little of the Jesus who seeks a genuine relationship with us at the core of our beings, that is spiritually. It's this relationship that we're most hungry for--not an idea to be debated, nor an ideology to be defended, but a living presence to be befriended with more than our brains.
This book does what my teaching on my site aims to do: