Is Mindfulness The Same As Contemplation and Silence?

Luke 4

Modern science, medicine and management have discovered mindfulness, the utilitarian recruitment of, in particular, eastern meditation and philosophy. It is sold to us as a means to relieve stress, discover balance, be present in the now and be more productive at work, a better parent or partner, or whatever you choose really. I have even heard military people trumpet its value for improving soldiers ability in the field (read their ability to kill others.)

I will not deny mindfulness has its benefits but it is not meditation and contemplation. Unlike mindfulness as we are 'sold' it, meditation and contemplation does not necessarily lead to less stress, more balance, a comfortable place in the world or more production or being a better parent. Contemplation and meditation is an encounter with the deep, the unimaginable, the unknowable and the unnameable. They bring us out of our duality (this and that) into a confronting unity with that which we cannot name.

 

Contemplation and meditation are disturbing, or should be if we detach ourselves from our devices of denial and avoidance. They should raise in us questions about who we are, what we are doing, the why in what we do, the truth in what we do or are asked to do, and to bring us to the possibility of not doing what we have been expected to do.

 

In my chat with the youngsters (and others) in the first session of a 3 day silent retreat, I warn them, amongst other things, that there is every possibility they will be disturbed by thoughts they thought they had dealt with, nightmares will awake them sweating and trembling and they will encounter feelings and emotions they have thought long since discarded. It is interesting in discussion to discover, after the first day, most think I am talking twaddle and comment how wonderful it is. Sometime during the second or perhaps third day they come up to me and say you were right, and recount an experience they had overnight or that came upon them during the day. As we work through these experiences, they discover something of the incredible depth unearthed by silence and stillness.

 

Jesus goes into the desert, not as a tourist to marvel at what he would see there, but as a means to a deep encounter with himself. The desert is the wild place, the place where we encounter ourselves, our motivations, our hidden self for the very first time. We have in our gospel today the description of three such experiences for Jesus, perhaps the culmination of all the thoughts, emotions, and fears he encountered over the forty days.

 

I can only imagine how difficult 40 days of silence alone with your self would be like. Having done a number of 6+ days in silence and knowing how challenging that can be, 40 days would dig very deep into the deepest recesses of your soul and, for Jesus, dredge and unlearn all he had learnt as a Jewish boy growing up in a devout family in an ordinary neighbourhood of Nazareth.

 

The key to this experience for Jesus is the understanding that a human being is one, a unit, an indivisible unit which can not be separated into its parts and maintain its integrity. The dictionary definition of indivisibility is something that is “not divisible; not separable into parts; incapable of being divided”.

 

Our modern world seeks to divide and separate us as human beings. This is done by roles (work, family etc.), materialism (haves and have nots), progress (first world, third world), gender, race, psychological profiling and more. We are divided by what is right and what is legal, what we know and what we don’t know, what we need and what we want. When we finish dividing ourselves up there is little left that we can call a person.

 

Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, writes: “There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit one-self to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralises our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

 

Jesus in the wilderness answers the devils ‘If then….’ with a single word – indivisibility. I am indivisible from that which is found at my centre – God. God is my beginning and my end. I can find no meaning or purpose in life if I become disconnected from God. If I divide myself into a God person and an ego driven self then I cease to be a fully alive person, and become just another one of the mob of individuals, thinking they are independent but moving en masse in the same direction as every body else.

 

We can not reduce this story to individual temptations. It is greater than that. This is about the sin the of not seeing our essential nature, that we are one with God in our creation and our being and to divide ourselves up in search of earthly and material wealth, success and fame leaves us depleted.

 

We can not reduce this story to a one of ‘the Devil made me do it”, or in this case, ‘the devil nearly made me do it.’ It happens when we divide ourselves off from God and turn God into another object to be possessed and used. Jesus encounters the possible of becoming separated from God, not from an external encounter but as a result of meditation and contemplation uncovering the hidden depths of his psyche. Silence and solitude disturb and tempt us to self medicate by moving us to avoid the gnawing that never ceases.

 

Jesus doesn’t and sets the pattern for himself, his disciples and for us.

 

Mindfulness is part of the happiness project. Contemplation and meditation is part of a revolutionary disturbance focussed on becoming fully human and fully alive. It is about restoring the unity and indivisibility we sacrifice when we seek happiness at all costs. Jesus was aware of the present, conscious of those he was with, only because he remained one with that which empowered him from before he was born.

 

A challenge for us this Lent could be to take the time to contemplate our inner self and to reconnect with God, the ground of our being; to be brave enough to look at those ideas, emotions, decisions which have caused us to become divided and to take steps, gently and carefully, to remain connected and whole, God’s person in a challenging world. 

What A Waste of Time

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." Eden had just spent three days on a silent retreat. No technology. No needless talking.  Early to bed, early to rise. Spiritual direction. Group sesions three times a day. And more.

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." Eden is a typical 14 year old, bright, intelligent and very, very active. Always doing something. The biggest challenge for her was to stop doing. To stop being in a hurry. To let go of the expectation to achieve, get a result, to have something to show for her weekend out. 

It took two days of reading her book and writing in her diary, feverishly, before she arrived at the place of 'no thing doing'. Sort of. It wasn't easy to put down her book or pen and do nothing. Writing a diary is good. So is reading. But if they are a distraction from the inner journey, from the the silence and solitude of stillness, then some time apart from them is appropriate. It was in this time Eden came to appreciate the value of wasting time.

It is not easy. She almost went a little stir crazy. The preconditioned desire to be active, the implanted should of a consumerist technological society, refused to go without a fight. She became agitated and a little stressed as she remained firm in her efforts to do no thing. It did become easier. And it was good.

"It was a waste of time, but I will do it again." We live in a technological world, not so much in a mechanical sense, but in the reduction of all of life to one of endless outcomes, usefulness and instrumentality. We are in a hurry to do something useful, to achieve a result and to get the best out of everything and everyone. Life has been objectified and if it isn't useful it is deemed to be useless.

We have reduced education to the busyness of learning skills to cope with a fast changing world and to ensure we get a good paying job so we can travel, buy houses and cars and be comfortable. There is little time for reflective learning, touching the inner journey or just sitting with ourselves. What a waste of time.

We have reduced spirituality to a private practice that helps us be calm, relaxed, successful and stress free. It has been seperated from the transcendent and reduced to another pragmatic tool for sale in a consumerist society. Forget about any sense of soulful community. What a waste of time. This is all about me.

Work is about the bottom line, for both self and the employer. How to pay the bills, maintain the life style and make more. Profits, shateholders and the minimisation of responsibility to state and its citizens through the avoidance of taxes, and more, appear to rule. People lose out to the God of money. Why put people first? What a waste of time.

We have reduced the human being to a biomechanical entity which can be adjusted, improved, reinvented, supercharged and reduced to a little more than sum of its mechanical parts. Brains can be changed, mindsets reset, intelligence expanded, where does it stop? When will we cease to be human and what does it mean to be human anyway? Does being human mean living with limitations and borders? What happens when we fiddle with humanness to such an extent that we become a new creature, something other than human? Is being a human enough? What a waste of time.

Eden has begun to see that wasting time is good, neccessary and appropriate. You discover yourself, or at least make a start on the inner journey. You begin to discover unity with others and creation. You begin to discover the transcendent and your proper place in the world. You discover your centre, without which you can not engage with, or resist, the technological world in which we live.

Busyness prevents us from wasting time. Our busyness is manufactured by a technological consumer society which needs us to consume both goods and time in pursuit of being more than human. Having more, being more, doing more in some way helps us to go beyond our limitations and borders. We seek to become more than we already are. Somehow we need to leave behind ourselves in search for more, more what, we are not sure, for we have not made the time to discover who we are.

And that's the learning for Eden and the new contemplatives. We are human. We need no more. We need to become what we already are, not seek to become something else. Only through the inner journey of letting go of the shoulds found in our over hyped world and staying connected to our true self do we become fully human. It is a movement of the soul, of depth, and not of spirit which is a movement of flight. It is a slow, rythmical journey of sufering and joy, not of safety and happiness as promised by the television ads, personal well-being gurus and technological breakthroughs.

Less is more. And it is a waste of time. But I, too, will do it again. Now.

RedShoes & Thomas Merton

At the recent 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA a pair of Red Shoes from Down Under made a lot of noise and played, as all clowns do when they get the chance. And the conference was an ideal place to do that.

When the Red Shoes returned home they are often asked where they went and, when told ‘A conference on Thomas Merton’, the usual response is a blank look and, "Who?"

Red Shoes could say he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask, "so who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago al. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and begun working at St Clements Stafford. Somewhere somebody suggested I ought to read Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I discovered Nouwen first.

I had some difficulty finding something of Mertons, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous with over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, probably qualifying him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start. I picked up the first of his journals (7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I encountered was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century into which I was born and lived in for some 13 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive, he has been spared the ignominy of being portrayed as asaint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry at it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. Yet he was obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

His humanity attracted me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait) into the Trappist life, followed by a period in which his own personal awareness deepened through contemplation and solitude. In the 1950's, and continuing until his death, he engaged with the world outside the monastery walls on issues such as social justice, anti-war, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue.

His forays into writing, becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that saw him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with Eastern and other religions at a time when ecumenism and interfaith dialogue was rare could be seen, and was, as foolishness.

So ‘who was Thomas Merton”? He was and is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense, showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion.

Merton challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.
‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.”

Time Out to Tune Up!

When Jesus Realised that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, he with drew again to the mountain by himself – John 6:15

Sometime ago somebody said to me, ‘The good things you do can stop you from doing the best thing you should be doing.” At the time I smiled and thought little about it. Over the years though, the truth of that statement has begun to become clearer for me.

The danger in our lives is that we can get so involved in the stuff of life, the stuff we enjoy doing and the stuff we think we have to do that we lose sight of the thing we ought to be doing. We are busy, fully engaged with others, providing solutions, achieving stuff, finishing our studies, getting married, raising kids and so forth, that we forget what we set out to do in life. Like the old adage ‘ we are so busy fighting off the crocodiles we forgot all we went out to do was drain the pool!

The even bigger danger is that we become so engrossed in what’s coming at us from all sides, we have little or no space to reflect on any of this and after a while don’t even bother to bother about making the space to look at our lives from a different angle. We give up and spend the rest of our life distracted from our original purpose and only realise it when it is almost too late.

Jesus faced this dilemma every day. Every where he went people were coming at him, people who needed help, people for healing, people who wanted answers; religious leaders and politicians who were asking the hard questions and those slow learning disciples who had to be taught the basics about the spiritual life. If he went to get a drink at the village well people asked hard questions, if he went to a wedding he was put in charge of the wine, if he went to dinner the more eccentric guests did things like anoint his feet with oil and more. Just going across the lake gathered a large and needy crowd.

And it wasn’t that people came to him, he Jesus the incarnated Christ felt for them. He had compassion – a deep desire to do something for them – and he often acted on that compassion. He healed people, drove out demons, challenged social injustices and simply was available 24/7 to others out of this sense of identification, of being human just like those who came to him. Something had to be done, and often, he did something.

Yet he knew that his humanness, his humanity, was not all there was to his identity. He was the Christ, the Messiah, and there was more to his life than solving people’s material need for healing, belonging and security. He knew that innately to some degree, to what degree we do not know exactly, but we do know he spent much time exploring and defining his place in the world and his Fathers kingdom.

The first part of John 6:15 “When Jesus realised that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king’, speaks of that human pressure to do what is expected of you by others. To be responsible and step up to the mark that those around you deem important. Jesus faces here again the type of temptation he did in the desert after his baptism. The temptation to be seen as the king of the world, the one who is being lauded as the saviour of others, if he goes with them now he will grab his 15 minutes of fame and become a popular icon. But is that the best thing?

Each of us struggles daily with this temptation at some level. We are manipulated by how it feels when we find a sense of belonging in a group or in a family, by the kind words others say about us, the way others come to us to unburden their problems and seek our counsel, or simply by success at work, school or play. We can suddenly find ourselves caught up and off on the wrong track doing the good stuff but not the best.

At the same time we can be rocked off our feet by the negative that comes and takes us away from the best. In the last week we have seen the death of a 14 year old girl, the 4th in one Victorian high school, who has committed suicide because of bullying, the negative input from those around her. This extreme example of how easy and devastating it is to soak in how the world sees us and to allow that to define our identity highlights the importance of maintaining space to reaffirm our place in this world.

Jesus sees the crowd coming or perhaps, not so much sees them coming but discerns the mood, the intention, the desire of the crowd and withdraws. The last 8 words of John 6:15, ‘He withdrew again to the mountains by himself’ provide us with some clues.

He withdrew so he could draw breath, to breathe in the truth about his identity and breathe out the overwhelming temptation to be a superstar, leading the people to victory as their king. Jesus, the man, found space to reflect on Christ the messiah, the Son of God, and redefine for himself his whole reason for being.

And this was not a knee jerk reaction to this situation, it was his discipline, for there are over 16 references in the four Gospels to Jesus taking time out.

It was his delight – he delighted in this time alone for quiet reflection and fought to have it even if, on many occasions as this passage attests to, it was fleeting and interrupted by others.

It was dialogue with himself and with his father and it allowed him to define and redefine who he really was. It was prayer and contemplation which reinforced his fidelity to the mission of God. This includes those moments when we find him wrestling and arguing with God in the last two times his prayer is recorded, in the Garden before his betrayal and on the Cross before his death.

It was this discipline of dialogue with himself, working through what he thought and believed, what he desired and needed and how he saw himself at his centre which allows him to stay the course, even when the option to avoid the messy outcome is available to him, it is his decision, he remains faithful to his and his fathers mission.

It was his discipline of dialoguing with his father, working through the relational dimension with the kingdom in the midst of the world, which allowed him to say no to what may very well have been good things so that he could focus on God’s plan, the best thing.

Jesus discipline gave him the freedom to cut through the good stuff he did, and could have spent the rest of his life in to old age doing, to do the best thing even though that best thing cost him his life.

The challenge for us as his brothers and sisters, God’s Children and co-heirs of the kingdom, is to find that discipline for ourselves and in dialogue with God and ourselves to discern the best from the good and stay with it, regardless of the cost.

Thomas Merton - Who Was He?

As some of you know I just returned from the 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA and the usual response when I say this is a blank look translated as "Who?"

I could say that he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask "so, who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago, before I was introduced to him. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and began working at St Clements Anglican Church Stafford in Brisbane Australia. Somewhere in a conversation somebody suggested I might be interested in reading Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I found Nouwen first and found him easy to read and very accessible.

I had some difficulty finding something on Thomas Merton, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous as there are over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, which probably qualifies him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start.

I picked up the first of his journals (there are 7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I found in there was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was real life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century in which I was born and lived in for some 45 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive (met several at the conference who were previously just names in Merton’s books), he has been spared the ignominy of being written as a perfect saint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry with it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. He was very human yet obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

It is his humanity and his spiritual journey that appealed to me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait it seems) into the Trappist life, which was followed by a period of a deepening of his own personal awareness through contemplation and solitude and then, beginning in the 1950's and continuing until his death, a period of engagement with the world outside the monastery walls including social justice, anti-war, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue and his enthusiasm for Zen (much of his letter writing occurred in this period and included his dialogue with leaders and influential writers across a range of causes, religions and spiritualities).

William H Shannon, in his excellent publication An Introduction – Thomas Merton, recognises the qualities I discovered (and it seems many others do everyday as his popularity in both secular and religious bookshops, reading lists and universities has not decreased) and denotes them as ‘Merton’s themes’. While they are overt themes Merton dealt with in his writing they also identify the underlying quality of Thomas the person reflected in his writing, focus and appeal. Those themes are: his humanness, his ability to articulate the human condition, reverence for people, bursting the bonds of cultural limitation and spiritual director for the masses

For me these themes are the marks of the clown, the essence of the Holy Fool in Christian tradition and Merton, in all that he did and said, is situated within that tradition. The simple act of leaving a promising writing and academic career and the ‘good life’ (Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander 279) to disappear into the desert of the Monastic life follows in the steps of the Desert Fathers, the Russian yurodive and other Christian mystics who’s foolishness challenged the society they left behind.

His forays into writing and becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that see him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with other religions at a time when ecumenism was not even a word of currency could be seen, and was by some at the time, as foolishness. His dialogue with Eastern and other religions and spiritualities was completely unconventional, particularly for a Trappist monk and hermit, and his involvement in the civil rights, peace and anti-war movements and his passion for non-violence set him apart. He reports that "I am told by a higher superior: 'It is not your place to write about nuclear war:that is for the bishops'". (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 296)

So how do we answer the question, ‘Who is Thomas Merton”? He is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense and showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion we have inhabited to fit in.

Merton never fitted in and challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.

‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.” Thomas Merton (Echoing Silence 183)