Is this even possible?

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Feast of Saint James, Apostle

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Is this even possible?

My friend Laura works at imagining what God is saying to her, but she does not have to labor at hearing God without that added task of imagining. I think of her. Athletes of all ages and skillsets practice and then let go to just do what comes naturally. I think of them. Poets, composers and painters testify to the ease with which their greatest work “came to them, came through them.”

And then there are the writers of the Bible, in this special case St. Paul, who with poetry of his own transcends the normal wisdom of humanity to lift us up into the stars with the word of God:

Brothers and sisters:

We hold this treasure in earthen vessels,

that the surpassing power may be of God and not from us.

We are afflicted in every way, but not constrained;

perplexed, but not driven to despair;

persecuted, but not abandoned;

struck down, but not destroyed;

always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus,

so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.

For we who live are constantly being given up to death

for the sake of Jesus,

so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

So death is at work in us, but life in you.

These experiences rise above “thinking.” We are done to, rather than doing. I’m caught up by the way Richard Rohr describes centering prayer, emphasizing the letting go:

Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that the situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so it can recognize inherent dignity. That takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses. 

We have to work at it and develop practices whereby we recognize our compulsive and repetitive patterns. In doing so, we allow ourselves to be freed from the need to “take control of the situation”—as if we ever really could anyway! 

It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we mistake for thinking. Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing our inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. That is why all forms of meditation and contemplation teach a way of quieting this compulsively driven and unconsciously programmed mind. 

The Desert Fathers and Mothers wisely called this process “the shedding of thoughts.” We don’t fight, repress, deny, identify with, or even judge them, but merely shed them. We are so much more than our thoughts about things, and we will feel this more as an unlearning than a learning of any new content. 

When we meditate consistently, a sense of our autonomy and private self-importance—what we think of as our “self”—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial “I,” the self that we likely think of as our only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of our mind. 

Take some time with these words. That mostly doesn’t mean “thinking” about them, as Fr. Rohr points out, but it might mean another kind of exercise. Perhaps God wants to “sweat” out your old ways of judging and analyzing, and you can neither judge nor analyze how he does it. In fact, I am sure he wants to do exactly that with me. I want to sit awhile in God’s sauna and smell the sweet cedar, knowing when I come out the world will be fresh and new.

 (2 Corinthians 4, Psalm 126, John 15, Matthew 20)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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