Faith Venture

Whom do we converse with in our constant inner chatter?

People in the self-help industry or people in the self-esteem industry push the idea of “positive self-talk” on us. We should continually tell ourselves how great we are and push against times when we berate ourselves.

They have the conversation partner all wrong.

The author of the stories of Brother Lawrence, the beloved 17th Century contemplative, said in his first series of conversations that Brother Lawrence said, “That we should establish ourselves in a sense of GOD’S Presence, by continually conversing with Him. That it was a shameful thing to quit His conversation, to think of trifles and fooleries.”

The book can still be purchased—The Practice of the Presence of God. It is the story of a man who took seriously that admonition of the Apostle Paul to “pray without ceasing.”

Focusing our thoughts on ourselves may temporarily make us feel better, but that is a fleeting experience. Focusing our thoughts on God has the more permanent secondary result of making us feel better about ourselves without trying.

Once I proposed leading a prayer class. My idea was to teach and practice prayer. The class just wanted some information about types of prayer. If I asked them to sit still and pray, they found it intolerable.

That is a bit like the feeling I had reading Ryan Holiday’s latest book Stillness Is The Key. Holiday is a talented writer who found his niche writing about the Stoics. He also has amassed many influential friends who have helped promote the book.

Maybe all the hype raised my expectations given my 50+ years of pursuing stillness (or, non-pursuing as the Zen Buddhists might practice). But I found the book not up to my expectations.

He divides the idea of stillness describing body, mind, and spirit. Each has nine aspects of its nature. Then he pulls together examples from famous sports, political, and thinking/literary lives.

It is a book about stillness. If you wish to know the benefits of stillness, this is a good, short read. If you wish for tips to help you get to stillness, then this is not the book.

Perhaps he has added a bit this idea from Herbert Simon, a researcher and thinker and Nobel Prize winning economist and cognitive psychologist, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Sometimes we read too much and focus and think too little. Not to mention pray.

Hermas (an early Christian document) You have become old in spirit and are already dying, and have no strength anymore. You have become enervated by the affairs of daily life and fallen into lethargy just like old men who, once they have given up all hope of regaining strength, expect nothing but to fall asleep. But if you repent, you will become quite new again.

I wrote a couple of days ago about numbing the soul. As often happens, afterwards I ran across this teaching from The Shepherd of Hermas. What an analogy for what happens when we let the world intrude into our soul, our spirit.

But we have a choice.

We can choose a different direction for our lives, our thinking, our outlook, our focus. The ancient Christian word is repent. In the simple terms I prefer, it means we were going down one path and decided to change and choose another path.

When we follow that pithy advice of the Last Crusader in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, “choose wisely”, we choose the path that gives us life. Not that life of someday in heaven that some mistakenly think, but life starting now. We will “become quite new again.”

If you have made that choice, you understand. If you have not, try it. It literally does change our lives.

I was scanning notes and recent reading to get an idea to expand upon when I spotted a page in my notebook (paper written with a pen, yes, you can still do that) “intelligence hub.” I couldn’t get that phrase to leave.

The idea behind this intelligence hub is that it is a software application that resides on some sort of computing device connected to all the sources of data in a factory. It doesn’t care about running the machines or the processes. It has an insatiable need to connect to every sensor and every device that through wires or radio waves can send some kind of digital data.

Of course, no one would buy that app if that were all that it did. Who would care about an ever-growing database that just sucked up resources to file that data.

People buy is (the creators hope) for…intelligence. It sorts the data, thinks about the data, finds patterns and anomalies in the data, and displays the results in ways that help humans make better decisions to operate the factory better.

What does that little discursion into the world of industrial technology have to do with spiritual discipline?

I ran into someone in a store in my small town once whom I had not seen for a while. “I haven’t seen you around church for a while.” “We left the church. We weren’t getting fed.”

So, were they (as an example for all of us) like that database just collecting data from teaching and reading? And they just looked for sources of compatible data to feed the database?

Maybe we should look at ourselves as spiritual/intelligence hubs. We connect to multiple sources of information—God, teachers, thinkers, writers, nature. But we don’t stop there. We process what we learn. Then, as Andy Stanley likes to say, we make better decisions and live better lives.

“Choose your poison.” (I don’t know—a line in a movie I saw once.

What do you use to numb your soul, your spirit?

Excess alcohol, sex, drugs? These days it could be getting lost in other people’s lives through social media.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus observed, “Most of us would be seized with fear if our bodies went numb, and we would do everything possible to avoid it, yet we take no interest at all in the numbing of our souls.”

This is where forming regular habits of spiritual practice help us.

Practicing simplicity, shedding those practices we gravitate toward in order to numb our souls, is a start.

Service and meeting with other seekers connect us to outside ourselves bringing a sense of being alive.

This is the area that Jesus took most interest in. He healed many physical ailments, but he was always concerned with the state of our hearts. We should also daily check our status. Then do something about it.

Not what you can justify.

Humans are unique in the development of a prefrontal cortex in the brain. That is the “thinking” region. We can and have developed logical thinking. That reasoning and thinking ability have enabled us as a species to adapt, grow, and thrive.

And also at times look at our situation and wonder how we’ve survived.

But also, it is a powerful tool of delusion.

“I didn’t start that fight; I was only responding.”

“It wasn’t my fault. [The devil] (or Ahmad, or Susie, or Josh…) made me do it.”

“I did that because [our tribe] are always being picked on.”

We can that justifying our actions and thoughts. Not the theological version of justification where God’s grace treats us “just as if” we had not sinned.

No, this justification attempts to explain away our sin by ignoring the underlying motives and denying our role in a situation.

When we do what is just, we don’t have to worry about justification.

Yogi Berra, the philosopher of baseball (and a pretty good catcher and coach), said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

I played a lot of tennis while in high school. Being inquisitive and a reader, I found a book that was sort of a Zen and the Art of Archery (I read that one, too) for tennis. It didn’t teach the differences of hitting a serve versus ground strokes or even the different grips for hard court versus grass courts versus clay courts. It was more of a mental/spiritual approach of stilling the mind, focus on the ball, letting the body hit the ball.

I’m a terrible golfer. But to be any good takes more practice than I had time for. Or cared to find time for. But, when I’m playing with a beginner and they are getting worked up over stance and swing and stuff, I will gently say, there are a thousand things they teach you about the golf swing. Forget them. Look up at where you want the ball to go. Look down and focus only on the ball. Hit the ball.

Assuming the coach had practiced the player hitting the baseball over and over, the best coaching I’ve heard during a kid’s game to a hitter—see the ball, hit the ball.

Spiritual practices (disciplines) can be like that. Thinking about them, following some set of rules about them, that all gets in the way of the practice.

When you sit down to pray…pray. Talk and listen. Don’t make it complicated thinking about all the varieties of prayer. Talk and listen. Or, listen and talk.

Study is reading, pausing, thinking. Looking up words you don’t know. Considering new points of view. The more you read, the easier to get into the flow of study.

Meditation need not be complicated either. That is because in whatever tradition you are trying it—saying on of the mantras (sounds) from Yoga (Om, or Ram, and so on), or a Zen koan (the sound of one hand clapping…), or repeating the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner)—these are designed for you to focus the mind, listen to your breath, find stillness.

The more you try, the harder it is.

All of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

Back when I truly discovered psychology and read everything I could find that Carl Jung wrote, I came across this story of a client.

A man came to Jung with problems. He was full of anxiety and was driven to succeed, but everyone was driven away from him. Jung advised solitude and stillness. “Go to your office at home, close the door, and sit with yourself for an hour a day,” he prescribed.

Next session, Jung asked how he did. The man replied that he could not sit still. He got up and played on his violin. Then looked at books in his library. He could not sit still. [Note, he didn’t have today’s problem of a smart phone and social media.]

Jung noted that the man couldn’t even bear to be with himself. He said, no, you don’t understand. You don’t do anything. You sit with yourself, quietly, and listen.

Pascal wrote in the 16th century. Jung in the 20th. The famous David of the Hebrew Bible wrote 3,000 years ago of the need for stillness in his songs.

Yet, today, how long can you go without checking Facebook or Instagram? How long can you sit and pray? Let alone meditate? Do you need an app even to spend 5 minutes of quiet time almost alone?

Quiet time alone at least once every day will cure many problems. Maybe you’ll really hear yourself. Maybe you’ll really hear God.

During the French Resistance against the Nazis, a leader of the resistance was captured. One dawn as the firing squad sounds greeted him, guards took him to the commander.

“Tell us where the leader is and we will set you free. Otherwise, you are next in front of the firing squad,” he said.

The man thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders, and told them that if they would go to such-and-such graveyard behind one exactly detailed gravestone, they would find the leader of the French Resistance hiding. They left him back in his cell. They returned a short time later and set him free.

He had made up that entire story. But that is exactly where the leader was.

This is a story by Sartre, if I remember correctly. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (al-ber cam-oo) were leading French intellectuals before and after the war. Exponents of a philosophy called existentialism, they wrestled with the sometimes conflicting issues of freedom and justice. I was reminded of this recently by an essay on Big Think blog.

Such was my reading when I was at university. I started graduate school to further read in this, then chucked it all and went back to a career in technology.

What is freedom?

Some very vocal people have the opinion that requiring the wearing of masks to stop the spread of a nasty virus is an infringement of their freedom. People who have wrestled with this problem of freedom intellectually and with their lives would think that opinion taking the concept far too lightly.

Spiritual thinkers, writers, practitioners for millennia have pondered the same problems of freedom. The Apostle Paul wrote his ideas in the letter to the Galatians. Essentially living a life with the spirit is living free.

It’s not an accident of nature like the existentialists imagined. It’s not adolescent rebellion against being told what to do. It is being filled with the spirit and building practices to maintain that filling of spirit that gives us a life of freedom. Try it.

[I’m not putting down the political and activist versions of trying to be free. I just believe it really must start within or it eventually becomes another form of authoritarianism. That was the eventual dispute between Sartre and Camus.]

Last weekend I was doodling in my notebook and I jotted “gratitude” and “generosity.” Then I paused. And looked. Do these ideas, these attitudes, these ways of living, go together?

Yesterday I thought about generosity adopting a thought from Henri Nouwen’s With Open Hands. Today, I thought of Nouwen again. This time Adam: God’s Beloved.

In the final year before his death in 1996, Henri Nouwen began to write an account of the death of his friend Adam, a severely handicapped young man from the L’Arche Daybreak Community. In the story of Adam he found a way to describe his own understanding of the Gospel message. Adam could not speak or even move without assistance. Gripped by frequent seizures, he spent his life in obscurity. And yet, for Nouwen, he became “my friend, my teacher, and my guide.” It was Adam who led Nouwen to a new understanding of his faith and what it means to be Beloved of God.

It is not a long book. It is not filled with theological jargon, as if Nouwen ever wrote that way. It’s a story.

As I read it, I sensed Nouwen’s gratitude for the gifts that Adam gave him. Here was a famous professor and author living in a community of severely handicapped people. Nouwen moved in. Was introduced to Adam. Adam messed himself. Nouwen asks what to do. The leader said, help him clean up. You are his caregiver. Famous professor to caregiver caring for every little thing.

And yet I read the gratitude Nouwen felt for what Adam gave him.

Can I be grateful for what someone shows me from the most unexpected place? Could I be so generous of my time and energy as to help an Adam?

It’s a challenge for us all to consider.