meditative prayer

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I don’t think most of the prayers in my life have made it past my halo.  Most of my prayers have been mere chatter or desperate petitions for God to undo some bit of foolishness that I had trotted out.  And I’m not for sure what prayer is about, even now; but I know it is helpful, if for nothing else than a meditative effect.  “Chatter” prayer is simple, you merely trot out the usual verbiage, the usual “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken).  But meditative prayer is a challenge for me.  It is so hard to quieten the mind, to follow the biblical admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Shakespeare grasped the importance of the meditative dimension of prayer.  In Hamlet, King Claudius kneels in prayer and laments:

My words fly up; my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

 

 

 

Mary Karr and prayer

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Mary Karr has written three best selling memoirs—-Cherry, The Liars Club, Lit.  She has also written several books of poetry.  Her writings chronicle a very difficult life in a small East Texas town in the 1960’s.  Her parents were conflicted….to say the least…and she soon turned to drugs and alcohol.  Her last memoir, Lit, summarizes again her upbringing as well as her marital woes, difficulties in raising her son, and her continued descent into alcohol and drugs.  Her writing was the only thing that kept her going.  She finally “bottomed out”, as they say, and ended up in a rehab and in a 12-step group.  Recovery was very difficult for her and one of the most difficult parts of it was learning to pray.  Her sponsor told her prayer was a necessary part of the process but, having been raised in a very irreligious, even atheistic, home prayer was difficult.  As she began to pray, she prayed angrily and disrespectfully to God.  But she was honest.  She learned that she had to kneel to pray.  That too was hard.  But slowly she relented and began to pray fervently and today prayer is an essential part of her life.  She became a Catholic  One thing she learned to do, upon instruction, was to “pray the alphabet.”  This meant going down the alphabet and finding some to correspond with each letter to give things to God for.

I now “pray the alphabet” myself.  This has a meditative dimension for me, helping me to focus and helping me to meditate.  Another thing that has helped me immensely is to realize that there is not a corporally-existing deity “out there” who is listening avidly to my prayer, waiting to heed to be beck and call.  I don’t know where the prayers go but I do believe they make a difference.  I just don’t know how and I don’t need to know.  I know that spiritual leaders over the centuries have advocated prayer.  If people like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart….not to mention the “upper echelon” of teachers such as Jesus…then it is important to pray.  One important dimension is that it offers good energy to others and to our world.  (See Peter Begsa re quantum physics and prayer.)  And, also check out this link for an interview of Mary Karr and her struggles with prayer, the church, and spirituality as a whole:   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/175809 .

do fish see water?

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Adrienne Rich once noted, “Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.”  In a post yesterday re a heart composed of “impenetrable stuff”, I used the psycho-analytical term of “introjections”— material that we have imbibed from the culture into which we were born and raised.  These introjections…all of which are “assumed” to be sacrosanct…comprise a template through which we view the world.  These early introjections evolve into essentially verbal chatter, or “self-talk”, which in turn tends to become almost autonomous, carrying us through our day to day life.  If this “self-talk” happens to be consistent with the world at large, or at least consistent with our little corner of the world at large, then we will function adequately and perhaps even better than that.  If, on the other hand, we have imbibed from an abusive family or from a toxic religious environment or if neuro-chemistry has dealt us an unfortunate hand,  the resulting “self-talk” can lead to maladaptive behavior patterns.

But asking someone to look at his/her “assumptions/introjections/self-talk”, is like asking a fish to see water.

“penetrable stuff”

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Hamlet, here speaking to his mother:

Leave wringing of your hands. Peace! sit you down,
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff;(40)
If damned custom have not braz’d it so
That it be proof and bulwark against sense.

Hamlet felt he could not communicate with his mother, that she was unreachable, because her heart was not made of  “penetrable stuff”.  He then explained why, blaming “damned custom” for having “braz’d” (or, “bronzed”)  her heart so that it be “proof and bulwark against sense” (or feeling).  Hamlet lamented that his mother had been so enculturated with the thought-forms and ideologies of the historical moment that there was nothing else there, there was not any “feeling” which is necessary if there is to be any communication.

“Damned custom” insulates us from feeling, from our bodies, and thus from experience.  In fact, it is “proof and bulwark against” feeling.  “Damned custom” is an internalized world view, an “introject” (if I might borrow a term from psychoanalysis) which serves a useful purpose in that it allows us to function in the “real” world.  The problem lies only in failing to mature at some point and realizing…and feeling…that there is another dimension to life that is being missed.

If I might make a bit of a leap, let me quote e e cummings:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

Or, a further leap, to the words of Jesus:

“What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

 

death of the ego

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The hero is strangely close

To those who died young.

Permanence doesn’t interest him.

His dawn is his lifetime.

Daily he takes himself off

And enters the changed constellation

Of his everlasting risk.

(Ranier Rilke, Duino Elegies)

Rilke was writing of the loss of ego consciousness with the line, “Daily he takes himself off.”  And when the ego is “taken off” one can take a leap of faith into the unknown, into the “changed constellation of his everlasting risk.”  Karl Jung taught that the crucifixion was a metaphor for this death of the ego.

But the ego dies a hard death.  It fights for preservation and wins with most people.  However, I should qualify use of the term, “death”.  The ego must not be destroyed as that would lead to insanity.  What is taught by these and other spiritual teachers is that the ego needs to lose its primacy in our lives and this “loss of primacy” often feels like a death or crucifixion.

 

More “loss”

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Renunciation -- is a piercing Virtue --
The letting go
A Presence -- for an Expectation --

Emily Dickinson was a very complicated and very troubled woman.  But as she wrestled with her demons, she found words available as a solace and skillfully articulated her anguish.

In the above poem, she was wrestling with loss and risking a descent into madness.  “Renunciation” was the term she chose for rejecting the “common sense” world she lived and breathed in—a “presence”.  This “presence” can be thought of as her egoic consciousness (see Eckhart Tolle), a bit of fiction she had subscribed to which plugged her into that “common sense” world.  Norman O. Brown once noted, “The ego is a veil we spin to hide the void.”  Emily’s “veil” was precarious at best.

In another one of her poems she described this loss of egoic consciousness as “a funeral in my brain.”  And then she concluded the poem with the lines:

And then a plank in reason, broke,
And I dropped down and down–
And hit a world at every plunge,
And finished knowing–then—

Note that she “hit a world at every plunge.”  So, even though the demons of madness were besetting her, she found a world at every step and then “finished knowing—then.  Her ego survived the descent.

losing god

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Donovan in the 1960’s made famous a zen koan:  First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.  This is a pithy note about object loss, one important step in the road to emotional and spiritual maturity.  The mountain first exists as a concept, then the mountain is lost, and then it is again.  The experience of “mountain” is transformed in this process—the concept becomes infused with emotion…one might even say with spirit.  Now this idea can be applied to any notion, including even one’s very identity or conception of self.  But, I want to apply it to “God.”  Therefore, to make a long story short, I am saying, “First there is a god, then there is no god, then there is.”  One first learns “god” as a concept but at some point in one’s life it is important that the conception becomes spiritual.  But this must entail a period of “loss”.  Now for some people, this “loss” is dramatic such as with the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.  For most of us this loss is much less dramatic, often appearing as an identity crisis, a period of doubt and confusion, even depression and despair.  But the experience can deepen our faith, taking it into the domain of the “spirit of the law” rather than the domain of the “letter of the law.”

 

If one never undergoes this loss of god, his/her religious expression will merely be whatever he/she happens to have been indoctrinated with.  And even though this indoctrination might be with a very noble ideal or spiritual leader, it will still merely be an idea and one will merit the description “ideologue” or, even better, “fundamentalist.”  Fundamentalists are in love with ideas, mistaking words and ideas for the “thing in itself.”  The “thing in itself” always lies just beyond our reach as words and ideas cannot be wrapped around it.  Or, to borrow a Buddhist line quoted last week, “The finger pointing to the moon must not be mistaken for the moon itself.”

prayer

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I pray daily now.  One could even say that I follow the biblical admonishment and “Pray without ceasing.”  But this “praying without ceasing” is not what I used to think it was.  I do not go around compulsively praying.  My prayer is more of an attitude of prayer, of simple acknowledgement of God’s presence and an expression of gratitude for the blessings and beauty of life.  I like the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” and this might describe what I mean by prayer.  “Mindfulness” is just paying attention from time to time at what is going on in one’s life, in one’s day to day experience.  For example, in recent weeks it has meant being “mindful” at the beauty of a yellow warbler cavorting in the underbrush on the shores of the lake, or a mockingbird sipping water from a birdbath, or a Great Blue Heron gently and elegantly patrolling his station on the lake.  It has meant being “mindful” of the first taste of coffee in the morning, or savoring a fine glass of wine, or spending time with friends—and certainly with my lovely wife.

 

Prayer has a meditative dimension.  It facilitates focus, the reining-in of a mind that is prone to wonder, of a mind that is often consumed with idle chatter.  The Bible admonishes, “Be still and know that I am God.”  The “being still” is often difficult but spiritual wisdom tells us that it is only in primordial stillness that we can acknowledge our Source.  Gerard Manley Hopkins noted:

 

ELECTED Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

 

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:       

 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

 

 

licensed parents?

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Someone once said, “We rattle the world for our babies.”  That poet recognized the collective effort in bringing babies into the world and implied that these “gifts” belong to all of us, not just to the individual parents. That is not, of course, to disregard the obvious—that children are the charge of their individual parents, at least in most cultures.  It is to recognize that we have a collective responsibility to make the world an hospitable place in which these precious “coins” can take root and begin to explore the world.

I am appalled how what wretched circumstances so many babies are born into.  And I’m talking about our culture, not just third world, undeveloped countries.  Sometimes in exasperation I exclaim, “We need to license parents!”  There are people who are wholly unprepared to become parents but there is nothing to stop them and as a result young children are born into and raised in horrible circumstances.  What is the solution?   I don’t really know.  I am pleased with the creation of pre-school programs decades ago.  These programs represent some effort offering a ray of hope for some of these children..

 

orhan pamuk

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Pamuk is a Turkish author who was born in 1952 and has published multiple novels which are available in English.  I’ve read two of them, The Museum of Innocence,  and Istanbul.  Of the two, Museum is my favorite.  He eloquently captures the angst that has characterized Turkish culture the past 100 years as they deal with the issue of Westernization forced upon them by Attaturk.  Museum is a love story but I did not value it so much for that as for his ability to capture the pulse of his country as it wrestled with new values and liberties.  There was, however, a pervasive sadness that came across which probably always accompanies a culture that has had its religion and value-system brought into question.

I recently spent about 27 hours in Istanbul and found it a lovely city.  I loved its tavernas—–a popular beer Effes and the historic raki.  And its people were wonderful.  Also, tulips were abounding at that point, in late April.  They were spectacular.  Here is one picture I captured of the tulips.