Blog Posts

My Book

10/9/2015

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you already know that I have struggled off and on with depression for the past ten years or more. When I began blogging after leaving my university teaching job, I noticed that I always got very positive responses from readers when I wrote about that topic. Evidently, there are a lot of people out there who are dealing with this disease, and my thoughts on the subject were helpful to some of them.

For that reason, I decided to write a book on faith, spirituality, and depression. When The Sacred Feet Publishing Imprint--a project of the Jones Educational Foundation, which also oversees the Slate Branch Ashram--expressed an interest in publishing such a book, I sifted out my depression-related blog posts from Elephant Journal, Progressive Christianity and Recovering Yogi and dunked them into the boiling pot of my thoughts the way you might dunk a string into a pot of sugar water, and the book built itself around them like rock candy around the string.

If you have "Liked" Open to the Divine on Facebook, you will be getting notices of upcoming promotional events, such as combined book signings and kirtans in New York and Philadelphia. (And if you haven't, why haven't you?) In the meantime, you can learn more about the book here.

0 Comments

Suffering, Grace and Euthanasia

10/8/2014

0 Comments

The American Life League has circulated a meme with this text:

Suffering is a grace-filled opportunity to participate in the passion of Jesus Christ. Euthanasia selfishly steals that opportunity.

This statement is jam-packed with problems. First of all, the use of the word “steals” implies that euthanasia is generally, or even always, something the living inflict upon the dying without their knowledge or consent. Grandma’s looking a little peaky; let’s put her out of her misery.

I have seen articles citing studies showing that many patients in Belgium and the Netherlands are euthanised without their knowledge or consent, and I am not prepared to comment on that except by quoting Augustine: abusus non tollit usum--abuse does not cancel out right use. Many things that are right, good and fitting are abused, and they are still right, good and fitting. A thing ought not to be outlawed because some people may abuse it. Denying the mentally competent a choice because some might take advantage of the incompetent is monstrously patronizing at best.

Secondly, end-of-life care has come a long way since the days of Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, and the choice between suffering and suicide is largely a false dilemma. Palliative care has gotten so good that people simply do not need to die in pain the way they used to (except in very rare cases.) I do not mean to imply that the loss of control and the ever-increasing restrictions and dependency attendant on degenerative diseases are not suffering; they are, of course, and there’s nothing we can do about that, for the most part. But we are far better at controlling pain than we used to be.

But the most troubling aspect of this meme for me as a Christian is the way is abuses the Catholic notion of “offering up” our suffering, debasing the idea for the faithful and misrepresenting it to those outside.

Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. –Colossians 1:24

The practice is, in itself, empowering—or can be. When suffering is inevitable, “offering it up” for God to use for redemptive purposes turns us from passive sufferers to active spiritual strivers. It gives us the option of putting our pain to spiritual use rather than simply enduring it.

The obvious question, of course, is whether such offering-up is of any value when suffering is inevitable anyway. A story from India tells of a man pouring grain from a high tower to allow the wind to blow away the chaff while the kernels fell to the ground.[i] When the wind picked up to the point where it was blowing away the whole grains, the man decided that he would offer that grain to God. If you’re going to lose something anyway, offering it up seems pretty meaningless. But is the alternative—suffering unnecessarily for the sake of being able to offer up one’s suffering--any more tenable? Does palliative care “steal” spiritual opportunity, too?

However we answer these question, these choices—whether or not to endure suffering for redemptive purposes, whether or not loss of control is endurable even in the absence of pain, whether or not to avail ourselves of palliative care—are choices that only the afflicted can make. As a Dutch blogger[ii] who suffers from a degenerative disease of the nervous system put it,

If you personally believe that euthanasia shouldn’t be done then don’t use that option. You’re free to do with your life as you wish and live it according to your views. But you cannot use those religious views to advocate for legislation that would force someone to go through something they don’t want to. Some have very good reasons to say “Please, no more.”

[i] Swami Tyagananda told this story at the Boston Vedanta Center.

[ii] http://www.realsceptic.com/2014/02/12/suffering-euthanasia-passion-jesus-christ/#comment-27106

0 Comments

"Spiritual But Not Religious"

10/8/2014

2 Comments

“Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” declares the LORD. –Jeremiah 23:1

* * *

“Mrs. Lincoln, the theatre is really a fine institution, and I hate seeing you allow that one thing to deprive you of the broad spectrum of culture and entertainment the theatre offers.”

True? Absolutely. Fair? Possibly.

Helpful? No. Unkind? Definitely.

I am afraid I have played a similar role with people who identify as “Spiritual, but Not Religious.” I hear them say that religion is all rules, dogmas, abusiveness and authoritarianism, because that is what their experience has taught them. When I tell them that my experience is of acceptance, support, fellowship, intellectual stimulation, music and the arts, opportunities for service, and a story huge and awesome enough for my while life to fit inside it, I’m not trying to invalidate their experience, emotions or choices—but I’m afraid that’s what they hear.

They see anti-gay bigotry; I saw my parish sponsor the first AIDS hospice in its rural Pennsylvania county. They see judgmentalism toward unwed mothers; I attended a church that ran a free daycare center. They see priests who prey on altar boys; I see nuns who nurse the sick and care for the poorest of the poor. They see the blow-dried peddlers of the “prosperity gospel;” I see faith-based coalitions demonstrating for living wage and gun-control laws.

I want to say to the SBNRs that their experience is not of religion per se, but of religion distorted and perverted. But many of them are so raw, so armored and defended around their choices—choices they made, in many cases, against fierce opposition from family and religious community—that they cannot hear that. If I suggest they aren’t looking at the big picture, they hear me telling them they’re wrong. They carry a soft, painful wound, and they have so hardened around it that the mere utterance of a word can put them on high alert.

So just to be clear, here’s what I mean by “religion.”

1) I mean what the word itself literally means: “that which ties together.” Whatever ties your whole life together is your religion. For Scrooge, it was money; for Capt. Ahab, it was the pursuit of the white whale. For the Dalai Lama, it is kindness.

2) I mean a disciplined practice. Religion is what shows up for work when spirituality calls in sick. It is motions to go through when inspiration fails. It is the “working the Steps” that enables Twelve Steppers to “fake it till they make it.” It is ethical and moral codes of conduct.

Any relationship takes work; if I only behaved like a married person when the spirit moved me, I wouldn’t stay married for long. And as a person who has struggled on and off with depression, I cannot overstate the importance of getting my sorry butt to church on Sunday and to the meditation cushion on the other days, even when those are the last things I feel like doing. That’s what keeps the channels open; when spiritual inspiration comes home, I want it to find the fridge stocked and the lights on.

3) I mean community, whether a Buddhist sangha, a Catholic parish, a Jewish congregation, a Quaker meeting, a Kabbalist circle, a book group or a Twelve Step room—or any other collection of humans who are there to support you on your path: to pray with you, listen to you, or talk you down when you want to use.

4) I mean service. Sponsoring other Friends of Bill, canvassing for internal hiring at the Philly airport, cooking and serving meals for the homeless, listening to people who are hurting.

5) Finally, I mean reverence. Most often, this takes the form of devotion to one’s chosen form of the divine, but it can also mean saluting the Buddhas of one’s lineage, cultivating a relationship with one’s Higher Power, or contemplating the wonders of nature. It also includes prayer, aspirations (such as Buddhism’s “May all beings awaken and be free,”) or “holding someone in the Light,” Quaker style.

If I had to put it into a single sentence, I’d say that religion is a set of tools to support spirituality. If you call yourself “spiritual” and you have these things, you are “religious” to me. If you don’t have them, then I plainly don’t understand what you mean by “spiritual.”

I used to urge my Wiccan friends to quit wasting emotional energy on trying to get people to stop using the word “witch” in ways they don’t like, call themselves “Wiccans” already, save their strength for better things and move on. And though nobody’s asked for it, that’s still my prescription. But I realize that what’s sauce to them as goose is also sauce to me as gander, so here’s what I’m prepared to do: 1) stop telling people that the thing that hurt them isn’t religion but something else; 2) start calling what I mean by religion “Following a Spiritual Path,” or something—whatever it takes to keep that wall from going up between me and my fellow humans; 3) save my strength for better things—like ministering to the hurting from their own point of view rather than trying to get them to understand mine—and 4) move on.

I’m going to agree to let the “R-word” go, even though I believe lots of people are misunderstanding it and using it wrong. Because although I am powerfully drawn to the magnetic north of setting people straight, I know what True North really is: helping the wounded to heal—and if their wounds were dealt by people claiming to profess what I profess, then their claim on my forbearance is even greater.

And to the players, predators and hate-mongers who are poisoning the well of religion, I say, with the prophet Jeremiah, “’Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!’” declares the LORD.”

2 Comments

"I Found My Butt Advertising a Meet-up"

9/15/2014

2 Comments

A friend of mine (I’ll call her M) is an aerialist, and often complains that, because she does her performing in the air, while most of us with cameras are on the ground, pictures of her in action (of which there are many) end up being “pictures of my butt.”

As a professional acrobat, M is, as you might expect, fit, strong, supple, athletic and attractive. When she posted on Facebook about having found a Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer’s Meetup website that featured a picture of her in the air on its front page—or, as she put it, “I found my butt advertising a sci-fi/fantasy writer’s meet-up,”—one of our mutual friends commented, “Is your butt sci-fi or fantasy?”

I had actually typed “Definitely fantasy,” and was about to click the Comment button, when the thought set in: “Wait a minute; I’m ordained now. I can’t say things like that any more.” And I left the comment unmade.[1]

Opinion is divided on this little incident. My wife says I did right in not posting the comment--which, she maintains, would have been unbecoming in a clergyman. My seminary students, on the other hand, mostly disagreed; they were not seeking ordination, they said, in order to live a life in which they may not make innocently flirty comments to their friends.

So I’ve given this a lot of thought. I haven’t definitively solved the problem, but I have begun to form a set of guidelines around what is appropriate for people committed to a spiritual path--clergy or lay--to say to people. It’s a work-in-progress, so I welcome comments and suggestions.

1) Social media are difficult to control

Someone once told me that getting pictures off the Internet is like getting pee out of a swimming pool. It seems reasonable to me to broaden that advice to include comments.

M the aerialist and I are friends; we worked at the same theme park for several years. She knows from watching me perform that I am a floozy for a laugh and will not scruple to “speak more in a minute than (I) will stand to in a month”[2] if it will entertain an audience. I had no apprehension that M would be in any way creeped out or offended by my comment. So my hesitancy had nothing to do with the fear of committing an actual impropriety; rather, it had to do with creating what is sometimes called the appearance of impropriety.

When comments can be seen by all sorts and conditions of people who may be anything from friends-of-friends to total strangers, or from fellow Christians to outright enemies of the faith, there may be no way of preserving the context and spirit in which a comment is made, or controlling how others understand it. If something we say could be misconstrued as it makes its way around the intertubes, let’s consider not saying it if it could, after it gets away from us, “bring the way of truth into disrepute” (2 Peter 2:2)—even if we meant it only in fun.

2) For teachers, clarity of role is important.

When the conversation in my high school Christian Ed. class turned to upcoming movies, I mentioned that I was looking forward to the new Noah film with Russell Crowe, Anthony Hopkins, Jennifer Connelly and Emma Watson. Now, at the mention of Ms. Watson, I suddenly had the full attention of all the young men in the class. This made me feel old, of course—we’re talking about little Hermione, here—but had I felt at liberty to speak openly, I might have admitted that yes, Ms. Watson—whose father I could be by a wide margin--is gorgeous, smart and a class act; a very attractive young woman. But right there in Sunday School, it just seemed skeevy, so I bit my lip.

Self-disclosure can be a powerful tool for teachers, counselors, chaplains, and many other kinds of caregivers—but it must be handled with extreme care. Some of the most memorable classes I experienced as a student, and sermons as a congregant, were those in which the leader stepped out from behind the leadership role and spoke from the heart about his or her own feelings and experiences. But self-disclosure should always be for the benefit of those to whom the disclosure is made. If, instead of illuminating the topic at hand by exposing the leader’s vulnerable humanity, the self-disclosure hijacks attention away from the topic and onto oneself, it may be best not to self-disclose. Everything leaders do should be for the building up of those in their charge, and those who lead need to have the leadership role always before their eyes—especially when deciding whether or not to step out from behind it. “My brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers, because we know that we teachers will be judged more strictly.” (James 3:1)

3) Authority figures

Years ago, an adult Christian education classmate of mine had had an administrative job in a parish. When she returned from a lunchtime shopping trip with a bag of her purchases, her employer—the parish rector—asked her what she had bought. On learning that one of the items was a swimsuit, the priest asked her “jokingly” if she would model the item for him.

Never, never, never, never, never.[3]

When one person is in a position of authority over another, remarks of a sexual or otherwise personal nature are never appropriate. The unequal footing may make it difficult for the victim to self-defend, and, in the case of moral authorities like clergy, may even make her feel guilty for trying to do so.

In relationships such as teachers to students, clergy or other religious or spiritual leaders to their congregations or disciples, employers to employees, managers to managed, law enforcement to civilians, or any other relationship with a built-in power disparity, the powerful are absolutely obliged to respect the boundaries and dignity of those for whom they are responsible. In the case cited above, there was a double inequality in play: rector-to-parishioner and employer-to-employee—so this priest is doubly culpable. With authority comes responsibility, and the obligation to model servant-leadership.

Jesus called them to him and said,“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28)

4) No hate speech of any kind is ever OK, for any reason.

Race, creed, color, socio-economic status, sexual orientation or gender identity—no one has the right to harass or belittle others for any of these things. Unfortunately, many people expect the churches--due to the headlines-grabbing behavior of some of the most rigid and judgmental among us--to do exactly that. Therefore, we must be all the more careful not to give anyone a reason to tar us with the same brush as those who claim to hate in the name of Christ.

This is true even when people outside the church engage in behavior that could reasonably be considered immoral. As Paul reminds us, it is simply not for us to judge them.

I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world. But actually, I wrote to you not to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God judges. (1 Corinthians 5:9-13)

That’s my list so far. What do you think?

________________________________
[1] I should explain that, while my “home tradition” is the Episcopal Church, I am, by ordination, an Interfaith Minister, not an Episcopal priest or deacon.
[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, Act 11, Sc. 4
[3] Shakespeare, William. King Lear, Act V, Sc. 3

2 Comments

Me and My Shadow

3/21/2013

1 Comment

Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the state: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged. George Eliot, Adam Bede

While a visitor in a church other than my own, I had a strong negative reaction to one of the lay ministers—some confluence of mannerisms and appearance just grated on my nerves to the point where I couldn’t stop watching this person, in the same way that one will continually pester a cold sore.

It being apparently a good morning, I was able to self-transcend enough to notice not only the irritating object, but also my own irritation. Isn’t that interesting, I thought; now why should I respond so negatively to this person?

Trying to run my thought process to ground, I began to catalog all the things about the person that annoyed me, and ask myself why I was so annoyed at each one. This strategy backfired. In no time, I had gone from being conscious of an irritant within my field of awareness to being entirely subsumed by irritation: I had absolutely nothing on my mind but how much this person annoyed me, and a laundry list of self-justifying reasons for being annoyed.

Then I remembered something that Martin Laird pointed out in his book, Into the Silent Land: when Satan was tempting Jesus in the wilderness, Jesus didn’t debate with him; he didn’t allow himself to be hooked. Instead, he simply met each temptation with an appropriate quotation from scripture. “It is written…,” he said, then shut up, never giving the tempter the time of day.

(I’ll interrupt myself here to share the only thing I ever learned in my brief career as a vacuum cleaner salesman: “once you have stated your case, the next person to talk loses.” When you are arguing with someone—a sales clerk or petty official, say—make your point and then absolutely clam up. It’s difficult, but often works; the tension produced by the silence just becomes too much, and your adversary will begin to babble in order to break it. Then you win.)

So I tried Jesus’ stratagem; abandoning my bogus self-examination about why this person rubbed me the wrong way, I simply told myself what God told Samuel in 1 Kings: “You see not as God sees, but as mortals see; for you look at outward appearances, but God looks on the heart.” I had to repeat this a few times over the course of the service, but it worked: I set aside my involuntary response and put my attention where it was supposed to be.

(The fact that this person turned out, in later conversation, to actually be a jerk is immaterial. I suppose. It’s not as though obsessing about the offending mannerisms was doing any good. And anyway, maybe being a jerk is just one more layer of appearances between me and the heart that God looks on.)

Fifty years before Jung opened his practice, George Eliot put her finger on the problem: “unacknowledged agents” in our minds do stuff without our awareness or consent.

Now Jung attributed much of this stuff to what he called “the Shadow”—those aspects of our personalities which we reject and repress, and which undermine and sabotage us in a bid for self-expression. And Jung believed that, in banishing the unwanted aspects of ourselves into the unconscious, we cut ourselves off from our creativity and self-realization. Jungian psychologist and Episcopal priest John Sanford likened the Shadow to Jesus’ “treasure hidden in the field” (Matthew 13:44). Make friends with your Shadow, the pop-psyche mavens tell us--and why not? If some repressed aspect of my personality is forcing me to read political blogs all night instead of going to bed so I won’t be irascible toward my children the next day, I’m willing to take that as a sign that some fundamental change in my life is called for.

But sometimes the Shadow just needs to pipe down. The Desert Fathers externalized their troublesome inner promptings as demons, and oriented much of their lives and practice toward silencing them—and surely not every vicious or self-destructive drive is potentially redeeming. Sometimes evil thoughts are just evil.

Martha Graham counseled Agnes DeMille to keep open to the urges that motivate her. Well and good; the forest is dark, but full of diamonds. But how do we distinguish between motivating urges that are potentially liberating, and those that are just plain bad? Or at any rate unhelpful? (“All things are lawful to me,” said Paul, “but not all things are useful.”) How can we tell the gifts of the Shadow from the Trojan Horse of the ego?

One thing I have heard before, but have only recently realized in my own experience, is that turning the attention from the object of one’s feelings toward the feelings themselves is a great disclosing tablet. When our whole field of awareness is filled up with the object, there is no room for awareness of self—the very reason, I suspect, that most of us “nurse our wrath to keep it warm” toward at least one person or situation: we don’t want to become self-aware on that score.

One evening I was at a motel desk with a friend, trying to get in touch with a mutual friend who was staying there and whom we had arranged to meet. Her room phone wasn’t working, and we were trying to get the desk clerk to somehow get a message to her—which, being more afraid of his employers than he was sympathetic to us, he refused to do. As we pressed him—OK, as I became angry--he became rude and dismissive.

Back in the car, my friend asked me why I so furious at this subaltern. As one reiterating the self-evident, I said, “Because he was rude to me!” “So what?” my friend asked.

And I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Later, upon reflection, I realized that if someone is rude to me, it constitutes an implicit statement about my relative worth—and that at some level, I take that statement at face value. This person is, by being rude to me, implying that I deserve no better, which some part of me already believes, so in order to distract myself from that externally validated self-assessment, I become furious at the rude person.

Lesson 5 in A Course in Miracles says “I am never upset for the reason I think.” The ego does a bang-up job of directing the attention outward in order to avert the inward gaze. Maybe the key to discerning between the (potentially) liberating drives of the Shadow and the cramping, self-protective machinations of the ego lies somewhere in there. Maybe if we have the keenness to discern and the courage to follow our redemptive inner promptings, we will find ourselves happier and more self-aware--whereas getting caught up in ego chatter invariably makes us more miserable and more aware of other people, other things.

Maybe these internal agents need to start carrying ID.

This post originally appeared at Little Teaboys Everywhere.

1 Comment

Two Less-Familiar Rosaries

8/21/2012

3 Comments

Those of you who follow this blog have already figured out that I love chaplets–prayer beads like the Dominican, Franciscan and Anglican Rosaries. (I also love malas–prayer beads used by Hindu and Buddhist devotees for chanting mantras.)

My older daughter just took up lacrosse this past spring, and if you’ve ever seen girls’ lacrosse, you know about “cradling”–the constant side-to-side twisting of the stick the player must do in order to keep control of the ball, women’s sticks not having the deep pockets that men’s sticks do. I think of the prayers associated with each bead as a similar thing–a sort of mental “cradling” that keeps the ball in the air, as it were–keeps me focused and allows my spiritual faculties to work unhindered (or, to be honest, a little less hindered) by my chattering mind.

I also use the familiar Dominican Rosary (what most people mean by “the Rosary”) and the similar, but less familiar Franciscan Crown Rosary as aids to intercessory prayer, about which you can read more here. I also use the even less familiar, but wonderfully uplifting Holy Spirit Chaplet[i] for that same purpose, and for the many people who are strangers to this devotion, here’s how it works.

The rosary consists of a medal of the Holy Spirit. three small preparatory beads, and six sets of two large beads each, enclosing five sets of seven small beads. Like the Dominican and Franciscan Crown rosaries, each set of beads is associated with a "mystery" to be contemplated whilst reciting the prayers: 1) Jesus is Conceived by the Holy Spirit, 2) The Holy Spirit Descends Upon Jesus at Baptism, 3) The Holy Spirit Drives Jesus into the Wilderness, 4) The Holy Spirit Empowers the Church at Pentecost, and 5) The Holy Spirit Dwells in the Souls of the Righteous.

The traditional way of praying this chaplet is a little complicated; as I am prone to do, I’ve simplified it. (In fact, in some places I’ve outright changed it; you can learn the traditional method here if you wish.)

ON THE HOLY SPIRIT MEDAL

            Almighty God, to You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from You no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love You, and worthily magnify Your holy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (Collect for Purity, Book of Common Prayer. I begin all my Christian chaplet devotions–with one exception, about which more below–with this prayer.)

ON THE THREE PREPARATORY SMALL BEADS

            Breathe in me, Holy Spirit, that all my thoughts may be holy;
   Act in me, Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy;
            Draw my heart, Holy Spirit, that I may only love what is holy;
            Strengthen me, Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy;
            Guard me, Holy Spirit, that I always may be holy. (St. Augustine)

ON THE FIRST OF EACH OF THE FIVE SETS OF TWO LARGE BEADS

            Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name;
            Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as in heaven.
            Give us today our daily bread,
   and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
   Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil. Amen.

ON THE SECOND OF EACH OF THE FIVE SETS OF TWO LARGE BEADS

            Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you;
            Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
   Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen

ON EACH OF THE SEVEN SMALL BEADS BETWEEN THE SETS OF TWO LARGE BEADS

            Glory to God, Transcendent Majesty, Incarnate Word, and Indwelling Spirit,
            As it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever. Amen. (Traditionally, this is the familiar “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit," etc. I prefer this version because it is not only more gender-neutral, but also more beautiful and, because it is longer, it allows more time to “hold in the light” each person for whom I am praying. It also just makes the whole exercise a little less like falling down the stairs.)

In the traditional version, one recites the Apostles’ Creed and the Our Father on the last two large beads, but I prefer to maintain the Our Father/Hail Mary pattern.

One other chaplet I am fond of is the Adoration of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament Chaplet. This one, as it turns out, I actually pray in the traditional manner–but not in the traditional circumstances.

This simple chaplet consists of a medal of the Blessed Sacrament[i] and thirty-three beads, one for each year of Jesus earthly life. It is traditionally prayed during Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, when the consecrated communion bread is exposed to view in a vessel call a monstrance, and the faithful pray in the presence of Christ in this form.

As Eucharistic Adoration is not part of my tradition, I most often pray this chaplet when, for whatever reason, I find myself in a Roman Catholic church rather than and Episcopal one. Since I, as a non-Catholic, am forbidden to receive Communion in a Catholic church, the chaplet gives me something to do while the other worshippers are communing. (I find this far more edifying than my former practice of sitting there and being resentful.) Here’s how the devotion works:

ON THE BLESSED SACRAMENT MEDAL

Oh, my Jesus, as I cannot now receive You in Holy Communion, come spiritually into my heart and make it Your own forever.

ON THE BEADS:

Lord Jesus, ever present in the holy sacrament of the altar, have mercy on us, and on the whole world.

For reasons that I will write about later, I have found myself becoming ever more dependent on structured devotions like chaplets, and the more I practice them, the more satisfying they become. If you find it difficult to sit in utter silence during your contemplative prayer time, you may find rosary practice as fruitful as I have.

[i] Not to be confused with the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit Chaplet, which is different.
[i] The Eucharist, or Holy Communion

3 Comments

The Fires of the Senses

6/19/2012

16 Comments

God is the offering, the One Who offers, and the fire that consumes. ~Bhagavad Gita 4:24a

I was walking through Center City Philadelphia on my way to a panel discussion on Creating Sacred Music. As I was feeling neither particularly sacred nor particularly musical, I cast about for a way to get into the right frame of mind.

Looking at all the colorful sights of the city, I remembered how, when my children were babies, everything I saw, heard, smelled or tasted would remind me of them. “Clare would like those flowers,” I’d think; street buskers would make me wish Sophie were with me; foods brought one or the other kid to mind, depending on their taste.

What if I could broadcast my experience directly into their minds, I thought, so they could experience my walk vicariously? Then I realized that we are called upon, in the Bhagavad Gita, to do more or less exactly that—with God as the audience of our sensory input:

Some yogis perfectly worship the demigods by offering different sacrifices to them, and some of them offer sacrifices in the fire of the Supreme Brahman.

Some [the unadulterated brahmacaris] sacrifice the hearing process and the senses in the fire of mental control, and others [the regulated householders] sacrifice the objects of the senses in the fire of the senses.

Others, who are interested in achieving self-realization through control of the mind and senses, offer the functions of all the senses, and of the life breath, as oblations into the fire of the controlled mind. (Bhagavad Gita 4:24-27; emphasis added[i])

As I walked along, I mentally transmitted all the sights and sounds to Jesus, as though He were looking out through my eyes and hearing through my ears. As I walked along, exercising this “control of the mind and senses” by offering “the objects of the senses” into the fires of perception, I not only felt extremely close to the Lord, but I found my usual way of seeing people–a highly judgmental and evaluative way in which I am subject and everyone else is object–giving way to a compassionate mode of seeing as Christ sees.

Icon of St. Teresa of Avila by Robert Lentz, OFM

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,” wrote St. Teresa of Avila:

No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks about doing good. Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world. 

Shiva and Shakti

Tantra takes the relation of the senses to their objects even a step further, making the act of perceiving reflect the divine union of Shiva (the divine masculine and pure consciousness) and Shakti (the divine feminine and pure energy.)

A faculty and its object are like the primordial couple. The relationship of the eye to what is seen is the relationship of Shiva to his shakti. The ear and music, the eye and art, the tongue and flavour, all senses and their sensations are a participation in the eternal embrace.[ii]

I have written before about how the body–and in particular the senses–can be made the locus of divine service simply by an act of will by which we use them on God’s behalf. This act sanctifies both the senses and their objects, bringing us a greater awareness of the divine presence within and without, and preparing us to “be an instrument of [God’s] peace.” Going a step further, St. Teresa found such a dedicating of the senses to be a way toward divine union, in which Christ–the “bridegroom” of her Carmelite soul–entered into her and lived His risen life through her:

I was reflecting upon how arduous a life this is…I said to myself, “Lord, give me some means by which I may put up with this life.” He replied, “Think, daughter, of how after it is finished you will not be able to serve me in ways you can now. Eat for Me and sleep for Me, and let everything you do be for Me, as though you no longer lived but I; for this is what St. Paul was speaking of.”[iii] (1 Cor. 10:31)

[i] Bhagavad Gita As It Is, translated by Srila Pradhupada
[ii] Dupuche, John, Towards a Christian Tantra
[iii] St. Teresa of Avila, Spiritual Testimonies. The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Vol. 1. Translated and edited by Kavanaugh and Rodriguez.

16 Comments

A Forest of Defilements

5/23/2012

2 Comments

Neither by matted hair, nor by lineage,
Nor by birth does one become a Noble One;
He in whom is the realization of Truth,
Who has attained to the holy stages,
He is the real Noble One.
Of what avail is thy matted hair?
Of what avail is thy antelope hide?
Within you there is a forest of defilements.
You deal only with outside. The Buddha (Dhammapada 26:11-12)

As a professed member of the Third Order of St. Francis–a religious order in the Episcopal Church–I attempt to live a Franciscan life with a Rule and under vows, but in the world rather than in community. When it was my turn to act as Convener of the local fellowship, I read an item in the job description that surprised me: be on the watch for Tertiaries who seem to make a point of wearing a lot of brown. The idea is that a person who dresses like that may be trying to mimic the brown habits of the First Order Friars, and the Third Order is very firm that we are not “First Order Light,” or a haven for friar-wannabes, but a fully independent Franciscan Order in our own right.

The irony is that I’ve worn a lot of brown for years and years, both by preference and as a part of my Franciscan Simplicity. (Sometimes I mix it up with tan or beige or--when I'm feeling really risqué–olive or rust.) Because life in the world has a lot more variables than communal life, our Rule spells things out much less explicitly than the Friars’ Rule does. It consists of 9 “Principles” that we address in our lives, each in our own way, and write into a personal Rule which we re-write each year as our lives evolve and renew at our yearly Renewal of Vows. One of the Principles is Simplicity, which I address in a number of ways: buying fresh ingredients and cooking them in preference to warming up prepared foods, tolerating a certain number of weeds in our lawn rather than killing them with chemicals, and dressing in a simple way—plain, solid earth tones, made in America of natural fibers whenever possible, and keeping designs, prints advertising/commemorative devices to a minimum.

I buy clothing very seldom; some years, I don’t buy any at all, and I have at least one sweatshirt from my undergrad days. And lately, as items began to need replacing, I found myself replacing them by ordering from a catalog that caters to Amish, Mennonite, Hutterite, and Conservative Quakers customers. Plain unbleached collarless shirts, tough, plain American-made pants in black and khaki, suspenders, simple vests (including an Amish vest with hook-and-eye fastenings) and a Pike Mennonite hat for church and other dress occasions. I also went through my closet and trunk and gave away bags of clothing I either no longer wore, that hadn’t fit in years, or that were not sufficiently plain. I also got rid of all but 2 of my neckties. People began to ask me if I were an Anabaptist.

I simply felt a strong urge to be plain, not by default, but by design. I wanted to do it on purpose, and for a reason. Like the Franciscan Friar who told me that the habit “forces him to be a nice guy,” or the nun who said she had always been a woman of prayer, but before she became a nun people didn’t stop her in the street with prayer requests because they couldn’t tell, I wanted to make a statement with my dress, to make it sort of sacrament–which the Prayerbook defines as “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

But that’s where the Buddha is a step ahead of me, because no matter how (literally) black-and-white I may be on the outside, I know how much more murky things are within. And though there a plenty of warnings in the Bible about overvaluing externals, such things seem to sting a little more when you hear them from a source other than your own.

2 Comments

The Lamp of Tenderness

3/3/2012

68 Comments

I have always had heart trouble–by which I mean that I have always lived primarily in my head. In meditation, it is always much more natural for me to put my awareness in the ajna chakra between the eyebrows that in my chest area. When I chant the bija mantra “Yam” into the anahata chakra, I become aware of the heart center through the tingling of the sound vibrations, but maintaining awareness of a spinning green light, or any other attempt to be “aware of the presence of God in my heart” has always felt artificial and contrived. No matter how many times I mentally repeat the Jesus Prayer while going through my day, I keep “hearing” it in my head, not in my heart.

But I discovered this passage in Abdul Baha’s Prayers and Meditations, concerning those people with discernment to see the divine majesty everywhere:

Surely the lamp of Thy love is burning in their hearts, and the light of Thy tenderness is lit within their breasts.

This passage leapt out at me, demanding my attention, so I treated it as a subject for lectio divina, or "holy reading" meditation, repeating it slowly and deliberately in silence as thought it were mantra or a Centering Prayer “prayer-word.” I found it very focusing. Certainly, the image of a burning lamp in my heart was much easier to hold in awareness than an abstract “heart center” (even one with a rotating wheel of green light in it) and a flame much more concrete than an abstraction like “love.”

Something else that has plagued me for years is my tendency to sublimate and somaticize difficult emotions. When my mom was dying, I had suffered from fainting spells; before leaving home and fiancée for graduate school halfway across the country, I endured shortness of breath. My tendency to live in my head has pushed my body into advocating for my heart, demanding attention for my emotional challenges. Through the practice of yoga and, perhaps, through meditating on this image from this passage, I hope to be finally be able to allow, as the Eastern Orthodox contemplatives put it, the “mind to descend into the heart.”

68 Comments

Techno, Chianti and the Praise of God

1/20/2012

11 Comments

Hallelujah! Praise God in his holy temple;
praise him in the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts;
praise him for his excellent greatness.
Praise him with the blast of the ram’s horn;
Praise him with lyre and harp.
Praise him with timbrel and dance;
Praise him with strings and pipe.
Praise him with resounding cymbals;
Praise him with loud-clanging cymbals.
Let everything that has breath
Praise the Lord. Hallelujah!

(Psalm 150, Book of Common Prayer translation)

There is a classic formula for Christian prayer whose acronym in ACTS: Adoration, Confession,
Thanksgiving, Supplication. (Some versions include a separate category for Intercession, which
Is otherwise included as part of Supplication–or as I prefer to call it, Petition.)

I have never really understood the need for Adoration. “Why does God need our praise?” I
wondered. Surely such a thing is superfluous. Which, of course, only illustrates how easy it is
(for me) to know something without bringing (my) knowledge to bear.

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised. (Ps. 145:3)

Earlier this week, while preparing for intercessory prayer with the Franciscan Crown Rosary (a
practice I wrote about in my last entry) I decided that my usual modes of address at the
beginning of a prayer were becoming more than a little pat. So I cast around for some other ways
to address the Eternal: All-Pervading Energy, Ground of Being, Source of the Universe, Fountain
of All Being…there were many more, but I can’t remember them now because I very quickly
entered an exalted state as my efforts to put God’s reality into words brought me a fresh, vivid
sense of the unfathomable vastness of that reality. Praising God–which any meaningful form of
address to the Divine will almost necessarily be–brought home to me the hitherto purely
intellectual knowledge that “in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

Here’s an example: I used to require students–non-music-majors–to attend a live musical
performance and describe what they heard. Most often, whet I got instead of descriptions were
labels: heavy metal, techno and the like. When I’d insist on actual descriptions of musical
parameters like volume, rhythm, melody and timbre, they’d object that, as non-music-majors,
they weren’t able to talk about music in that way. This, I maintained, is untrue; you needn’t have
access to specialized jargon–just use your own words.

Over Thanksgiving break, my wife’s godfather opened two bottle of red wine and removed the labels, offering each for sampling and our estimate of what they were. “That tastes like a Chianti,” I said of the first. My wife, who’d been listening to me bitch about my student’s papers all morning, shouted from the next room, “That’s not a description–that’s a label!” “I don’t speak wine!” I rejoined. “You tell your students they don’t need to speak music,” she answered.

She had me there, so I applied myself to describing what I tasted without recourse to jargon.

“Well…on top, it kind of tastes like flowers.”

Holy Moly, I thought: Distinct floral notes!
.
“But underneath, I can taste herbs.”

Hey—would that be “herbal undertones”?

Two remarkable things were happening as I tried to describe what I tasted: 1) I paid closer
attention to what I was drinking, and 2) the argot of professional wine critics began to make
sense for the first time. Phrases that had previously washed over me like some foreign language
suddenly yielded up their meaning as I verified their accuracy by experience.

That’s what praising God does: sharpens our attention to the Divine, and elucidates the
descriptions used by those who have gone before us. "The old words of grace are worn smooth
as poker chips,” wrote novelist Walker Percy, “and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a
poker chip after it has been cashed in." Groping for our own words restores the texture of the
time-honored ones.

I used to wonder why we should praise God, because I had forgotten a cardinal rule of prayer, as expressed by C.S. Lewis: “It doesn't change God- it changes me.” The more we dwell on God, the more surely we come to share in the Divine nature. “What we think,” said the Buddha, “we become.” And surely this is why Paul exhorted the Christians at Phillipi, saying:

…whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things. (Phillippians 4:8)

11 Comments

<<Previous

Forward>>

My Book

Suffering, Grace and Euthanasia

"Spiritual But Not Religious"

"I Found My Butt Advertising a Meet-up"

Me and My Shadow

Two Less-Familiar Rosaries

The Fires of the Senses

A Forest of Defilements

The Lamp of Tenderness

Techno, Chianti and the Praise of God

Categories

Archives

Author