I recall an old revival song that had a title something like this: “Gimme that old time religion.” It’s a traditional gospel song that goes back to the late 19th century. The song originally evolved within the work songs and spirituals of African Americans, but when it reached the white community it exploded in popularity among turn-of-the-century Protestant churches. Its simplicity focusing on themes of community, simple faith, and perseverance appealed to people in times of great stress and uncertainty. I sympathize with the spirit of this song, but the “old time religion” that I mostly yearn for goes far, far back and then spans the centuries….even to our own times. It too can also be characterized by a certain vocabulary of a few seemingly very simple words like silence, meditation, poverty, detachment, humility, fasting, etc., etc. These are not exactly the “in” words in contemporary spirituality. Either they are neglected as “optional” or diluted of significance. When ancient traditions are adapted into modern mass culture they inevitably lose their profound existential weight. And finally, even continual use of such words in certain circles without confronting the mystery of the depths they point to will always erode the significance of all such language. They simply become “merit badges” for spiritual scouts, markers of accomplishment and achievement. So here I am singing to myself, “Gimme that old time religion,” the old time religion of Abba Moses, of Abba Joseph, of Abba John the Dwarf, etc. Let us reflect a little bit on what the language of this old time religion points to.
- These simple words are not a collection of names for some disparate practices. They are actually interconnected, both on a superficial level and in a deeply profound way; but just by looking at the names of each practice they will seem separate and individualized compartments of activity. However, when we get into the real meaning and significance of any one of them, we begin to understand at least a little bit that all these deceptively simple words point to one great practice which can be mysteriously called a “no-practice.” Here let me bring up one of the best of the old Desert Father stories:
“Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him: ‘Abba, as much as I’m able, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and as much as I’m able, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the elder stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him: ‘If you want, you can become all fire.’”
We will need to return to this remarkable episode, but here we see that the good old monk, Lot, is a diligent, experienced practitioner; but he sees his spiritual journey as practically enveloped in a to-do list. and of course he feels something is not right….maybe something is missing and there is one more thing to add…maybe more effort….etc. Abba Joseph does not explain or counsel him; rather he points to that which both transcends and unifies all his practices and brings about an unspeakable realization. Let me cautiously suggest that what Abba Joseph is teaching is what the tradition begins to call continual or unceasing prayer (borrowing language from the New Testament like 1 Thess 5: 17)…..the contemplative life in its essence.
- Important to note what unceasing prayer is not: Definitely it is not continual verbalizing about God or to God. Vocal prayer, psalmody, chant, etc. are all good and have a serious role in a contemplative life, but there is something much more to this life as Abba Joseph pointed out.
And then there is a still more subtle mistake: trying to always keep the thought of God in your mind. For some sincere seekers this is what is key. There is a well-known argument between Merton and Fr. William McNamara, the Carmelite hermit who founded a new group of “modern” hermits.” Merton and McNamara had a serious disagreement over the definition and practical application of this notion of continual prayer. McNamara had heard that Merton was teaching his novices that people seeking a life of deep prayer should not exhaust themselves by trying to actively “think about God all the time.” He argued that a forced, continuous mental focus on God is futile, mentally exhausting, and ultimately acts as an obstacle to true contemplation. McNamara wrote to Merton complaining about this teaching. He claimed that Merton’s advice directly contradicted the historical words of the old monastic masters, who explicitly stated that the ultimate goal of everyone, whether monk or layperson, was to achieve continual prayer. Merton replied that McNamara was confusing a mental exercise with a state of being, the difference between a state of awareness as opposed to active thought. Continual prayer is not about forcing the intellect to constantly think about God. Instead, it is a deep, underlying awareness of the Divine Presence as it slowly becomes integrated into all our reality and our whole life. Furthermore, Merton pointed out that another key teaching of the desert masters was that the highest form of prayer is achieved when you are so entirely consumed by the reality of God that you do not even know you are praying.
So, continual prayer is not some unceasing loop of verbiage, of concepts, of thoughts ….. Succinctly put: Prayer in the deepest sense is not what you do; prayer is who you are. But it begins with an imperceptible awakening to a simple, faint awareness of the Divine Presence…like having very quiet music in the background of all you do, wherever you are….whether washing dishes, writing an email, taking a walk, shopping at Walmart, sitting silently in an empty church,,,, You become “Woke” in the deepest sense! Remember, this is not “thinking about God”; your rational mind may be focused on a whole bunch of all kinds of things. But behind it all there is this barely audible “music”…. And of course meditation of whatever kind can be an awakening to this awareness whatever name you give it. Remember, it will seem like Nothing…because the awareness of the Divine Presence is not a “something” in your mind, not like any of your thoughts or feelings.
Merton’s suggestion to a group of active religious is helpful here: Start where you are….in other words drop anchor in the real, who you are and your situation, not some fantasy version…the prayerful awareness that you do sense….deepen what you already have, even if but a grain of reality….and you will eventually awaken to the realization that you had it All from the very beginning!
Here we will turn to our Zen friends for some help, a Chan story from the great Tang era in China(via the Japanese Zen tradition):
A young, new monk named Kyosho asked Master Gensha, “Master, how do I enter the Great Way?” Gensha paused, then said, “Do you hear that mountain stream off in the distance?” Kyosho replied, “Yes! I hear it.” To which the master responded, “Enter the Great Way from there.” Being inquisitive Kyosho then asked, “Master, if I wasn’t able to hear the mountain stream, what would you have said to me?” “I would have said, ‘Enter the Great Way from there.’”
Indeed! And the Christian contemplative will intuitively get the point of this story. He/she knows well that any place, any circumstance, any problem, any state of mind can be a profound opening, an unconcealing of the Divine Presence and a barely discernable unfolding of a quiet, subtle awareness within all our activities and practices. The Christian contemplative will know by experience what the Psalmist sang:
From Psalm 139:
“Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,’
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.”
Or as the Sufis put it: “Wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.”
- Again lets turn to our Zen friends for help in our understanding. Recall from the last posting that Zen inscription on the gate of the Rinzai Zen monastery: No door leads to the Great Path. And the Zen poem:
“The Great Way has no gate,
A thousand roads enter it.
When one passes through this gateless gate,
He freely walks between heaven and earth.”
There is no barrier or gate or door keeping you from enlightenment except the conceptual boundaries and constructs in your own mind. How often your efforts are simply trying to open or penetrate something that was never closed to begin with. Such is the insight of Zen, and so is a similar problem/solution in Christian contemplative prayer. Our Christian tradition is very good at finding or creating various locked doors, gates, obstacles, hurdles that one has to somehow overcome….for some adherents this is the point of all those practices I mentioned above. But consider this from the New Testament:
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8, 38-39
Paul’s emphatic statement is revisited in a new way by Augustine when he says that God is closer to me than I am to my own self. There is no gate to open, no door to unlock, no obstacle to remove to the Total and Absolute Divine Presence. Christ said in the Gospel of John, “I am the door….I am the gate…” Note, he did not say that there is some door between him and you, some gate to open (you have to read and reflect on Merton’s incredible little reflection in the Asian Journal, “The Three Doors”). There are some voices in our tradition that would make of all those spiritual practices mentioned above into various gates to pure continual prayer, but that is a misreading of our actual situation. We do not need to be like the women hurrying to the tomb of Jesus early that first Easter morning and wondering how they will move that boulder blocking their ability to minister to the remains of Jesus. Jesus is not there. The Divine Reality is not behind some boulder. There is no boulder. Sadly, for too many Prayer is too often an effort to unroll some imagined boulder, to find some key to unlock some door, to find the right gate.
- Recall from the previous posting the Chan hermit, Guang Kuan. It was interesting and noteworthy to see how his Buddhist practice and his life are integrated. “Everything is practice.” And the purpose of practice is a certain kind of transformation in how we see ourselves and our world. The Christian contemplative life should follow a similar path, whether in a monastery or as a hermit or even as a city dweller. There’s plenty of Desert Father stories to support that position.
Recall also how Guang, in good Buddhist fashion, unmasks and dismisses that pervasive dualism of action/stillness. This dualism really bugs the Catholic contemplative path. In the post-Vatican II Church many Catholic religious and priests rebelled against a sterile, superficial prayer regime imposed on them since formation and simply dropped the notion of a prayer life and opted for action “in the name of the Gospel.” The common motto was “my action is my prayer.” This is true and false at the same time!
To get a better handle on this lets now go back to an early Buddhist analysis and deconstruction of eight key dualisms, four pairs: gain, loss; pleasure, pain; fame, blame; status, disgrace….or sometimes it can be put in different words. In the early Buddhist sutras these are known as the Eight Worldly Winds. The self-centered mind is trapped in the conditioning that these dualities produce and this warps the flow of our life. For example, the constant pursuit of status, of grasping to be “somebody,” chasing or trying to maintain standing forces us to waste energy managing an identity that exists only inside other people’s minds. Buddhism is about liberation, in some instances a very methodical liberation. So is Christianity, but in a different way and which includes seemingly a lot more….we won’t be getting into all that here. But note how the Gospels and the New Testament totally flip these dualities upside down and inside out: gain=loss, loss=gain….the first are last and the last are first, etc. These dualities are eviscerated of any meaning they might have in their usual functioning in society and in our self-centered minds.
Now in contemplative prayer there are these two other prominent and problematic dualities: the previously mentioned action/stillness, and sacred/secular. With regard to the first, we can follow Guang when he points out that the two poles are constructs of our mind. In “overcoming” or transcending this duality, we do not chose one pole over the other; rather we become aware that authentic action flows out of this inner stillness and the stillness is expressed in authentic action. (Gandhi was a beautiful example of such at every level of human activity including even the political.) At the deepest level, action and “stillness” are one and the same, but if we affirm this at some superficial level we destroy the authentic reality of both.
With regard to the second duality, sacred/secular, it can be a real crippler in the Christian tradition, separating life into “sacred” space and “sacred” prayer time, and “secular” space and secular time, all an artificial division. As in the case of all such dualities, the solution is not to choose one pole in preference to the other or even dropping one pole completely. Rather, as Guang points out, it is transforming the way we perceive this distinction. When I was a seminary student in Berkeley in the ‘80s, I lived near one of the main drags of the town, Shattuck Ave. Someone to whom I casually mentioned one day that I had to go shopping for some food, whimsically responded, “Ah, the sacrament of Shattuck Ave,” and laughed. It hit me like a ton of bricks….what a marvelous phrase…the realization that when I was walking down Shattuck Ave. I was participating in Divine Activity, that Shattuck Ave was a ground of encounter and Presence and Liberation.
- First stop: we return to the story of Abba Lot and Abba Joseph. This story evokes and connects us to several Biblical episodes: the Burning Bush in Exodus, the Transfiguration in the Gospels, and the “tongues of fire” on that first Pentecost in Acts. Later tradition and the reflection of the Christian community develops all this into a theological vision called theosis, the notion that humans are called to participate in the divine nature of God. What this means for us today is an ongoing and developing story. But for certain, all prayer, whether vocal, mantric, liturgical, meditative, deeply silent, no matter what, all of it is an acknowledgement and a deepening awareness of this participation.
Next stop: Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time, and a devout Catholic. When Pascal died in 1662, at the age of 39, they found sewn in his clothes a piece of parchment, near his heart, with some writing on it:
Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr.
From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight, Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr.
FIRE.
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
Next stop: Meister Eckhart, late 13th Century German Dominican, theologian, philosopher, mystic: “You should completely sink away from your you-ness and flow into his his-ness and your you and his his shall become one ‘our’ so totally that with him you eternally comprehend his unbecoming isness and his unnamed Nothingness.”
“Thou shat know him, (God), without image, without semblance and without means…but, for me to know God thus, with nothing between, i must be all but he, he all but me-I say God must be very I, I very God, so consummately one that this he and this I are one ‘is’, in this is-ness working one work eternally; but as long as this he and this I…. are not one single here, one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he…God’s is-ness is my is-ness, neither more nor less.”
In the experience of awakening to the Divine Reality, we at the same time awaken to who we really our, our true self. And to borrow from our Sufi friends, only God can say, “I am”; only God truly Is….who I am can only be found and known “in God”; my -isness is possible only within God’s isness. It seems with language like that we have reached the limits of what we can say within the Christian tradition. However, if we turn to the Gospel of John, especially the final discourse of Jesus, new and transcendent horizons open up. An example: During the Last Supper, the disciple Philip asks Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father.” It is interesting to see how the disciple’s request is on one level and the reply on a completely different level and this kind of dynamic pervades the whole discourse and all the Gospels (and our prayer life!). Jesus answers Philip: “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” (John 14:20)
- Ultimately there is only One Prayer and only One Who Prays: There really is only one Prayer; it is the prayer of Jesus to the one whom he calls “my Father.” And all our praying, participates in this Prayer; all our prayers are within this one Prayer; in fact, who we truly are, our very existence and all of creation, is within this Prayer. Whatever be the nature of our own feeble prayer, whether it be a rosary, chanting, lectio, meditation, liturgy, deep wordless silence, or maybe just an inarticulate cry for help….whatever, it is all within the Prayer of Christ to the One called “Father.” It is Jesus praying within us. And when we cannot pray, when the pain is too much, when the darkness is too dark, when chaos, confusion, failure and discouragement overwhelm us, when no prayer seems possible except maybe that cry, let Jesus pray within you. Abide in His Prayer, never mind what you can or cannot “do.” Let Jesus pray in you. And remember that even he cried out: ”My God, my God, why have you abandoned me!”
Whatever be the circumstances, true contemplative prayer begins and grows when we accept and surrender to a state of receptive, wordless waiting in silence, emptiness, and spiritual poverty; these are the conditions for a true awakening….certainly not in producing thoughts ane feelings and getting lost in the storms of elation and dejection that the Eight Worldly Winds produce. And as this abiding in the gift of silence and emptiness grows we may find that everything we touch turns into prayer (as Merton put it). Our Tradition calls this unceasing prayer.
Let me conclude with another one of my favorite Desert Father stories:
Some brothers came to Abba Anthony, and said to him, “Speak a word, that we may be saved?” The elder said to them, “You have heard the Scriptures. That should be good enough.” But they said, “We want to hear from you too, Father.” Then the elder said to them, “The Gospel says, ‘if anyone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.’” (Matt. 5.39) They said, “We cannot do that.” The elder said, “If you cannot offer the other cheek, at least allow one cheek to be struck.” “We cannot do that either,” they said. So he said, “If you are not able to do that, do not return evil for evil,” and they said, “We cannot do this.” So the elder said to his disciple, “Make a little porridge for they are feeble. If you cannot do this, and will not do that, what can I do for you? What you need is prayer.”