The Quiet Place

On a regular basis, a good many of us find it difficult to place ourselves both physically and spiritually in a "quiet place” where by desire and desert solitude we can simply “be” in the presence of God. I know that we're told that we can do so even in a busy airport where in some corner, amid all the announcements and distractions, we can enter an oxymoronic "terminal tranquility." But most of us beginning contemplatives naturally prefer the stillness of a garden, a room part, an empty chapel to the hurley-burley of a chair in WalMart. Somewhere deep inside of us there’s a nagging realization that Tom Merton has a good part of it right with this comment, made late in his life:

This will give us some idea of the proper preparation that the contemplative life requires. A life that is quiet, lived in the country, in touch with the rhythm of nature and the seasons. A life in which there is manual work, the exercise of arts and skills, not in a spirit of dilettantism, but with genuine reference to the needs of one's existence. The cultivation of the land, the care of farm animals, gardening. A broad and serious literary culture, music, art, again not in the spirit of Time and Life-(a chatty introduction to Titian, Prexiteles, and Jackson Pollock)-but a genuine and creative appreciation of the way poems, pictures, etc., are made. A life in which there is such a thing as serious conversation, and little or no TV. These things are mentioned not with the insistence that only life in the country can prepare a [person] for contemplation, but to show the type of exercise that is needed. (The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. ed. William H. Shannon. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, 131)

Speaking for myself, I don’t really have a country life, my days cultivating the land; nor do I spend my hours in a “broad and serious literary culture” even though I’m a retired English professor. I wake up, sit in centering prayer for a while, have breakfast with June, do the traditional prayer office with her, and then try to make some headway in accomplishing the day’s obligations. Today, for example, I’ve got to “clean out” the debris (logs, old torn-away decks, hunks of styrofoam, and so on) from the lake cove. Jackson Lake is feed by three rivers; and when the rains come long and hard, upstream trash comes pouring into the lake. Since we live on the east side in a cove, the westerly winds blow the stuff up against the shore line. Right now it’s awful. So this week, my neighbors and I will load up a Georgia Power trash barge , and five or six times we’ll transport the head-high piles of river junk five miles down to the dam where we’ll unload it for recycling. That work will take four or five us three or four days. Some contemplative life, eh?

The good side of everything is that I get to work outside, away from the incessant noise of the TV. And while the lake trash sometimes smells awful (rotting leaves in the water), I do get to feel the sun’s warmth inbetween the showers, hear the screams of a hawk now and then, and see the rhododendrons in full bloom.

I take encouragement that Merton concludes his environmental remarks concerning the contemplative life when he says, “These things [“the exercise of arts and skills”] are mentioned not with the insistence that only life in the country can prepare a [person] for contemplation, but to show the type of exercise that is needed.” Well, I suppose, like you, I too am getting “the type of exercise that is needed.” You do your office work, mow the grass, and feed the kids. I know that Merton himself was also frequently frustrated by his lack of time for solitude and quiet. After all, his monastery was nothing less than a huge bread factory, and he often complained about its noise and commercial preoccupations. The grind of the tractors in the fields were particularly bothersome (as were the roar of the bombers flying over from Fort Campbell.) All of which is to say that none of us has a so-called perfect place, neither inside or outside ourselves, wherein we may be always fully at rest in God. That will come only in death and life thereafter. But we should all take encouragement by the desire we have within us. That desire comes by the prompting of Holy Spirit. Keeping our eyes and ears open for beauty and loveliness, we can practice pausing often—and sometimes for quite a while—to enter the Quiet we seek. For me, sometimes the beginning of a contemplative turn comes just sitting to catch my breath. I know the same goes for you too.

There is in the heart "the peace of God that passeth all understanding," a quietness and confidence which is the source of all strength, a sweet peace, which nothing can offend, a deep rest which the world can neither give nortake away. There is in the center of the soul a chamber of peace where God dwells, and where, if we will only enter and hush every other sound, we will hear His still small voice. (The Fire of Silence and Stillness: An Anthology of Quotations for theSpiritual Journey. Ed, Paul Harris. Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois. 1995) , 15.

The Interior Air

Thirty-three years George Maloney published his little book, Inward Stillness (Denville, NJ: Dimension, 1976); from my dog-eared copy I share this lightly edited (for more inclusive language) notice:

Silence is the interior air that the spirit of man needs in order to grow spiritually. Such silence leads us into the inner recess and there his Heavenly Father will recompense him (Matt.6:6). This recompensing comes to us in the healing of psychic disturbances, the chaotic meaninglessness of so many past experiences that hang like dried skeletons within our memories, the anxieties that force man into an isolation of deadly loneliness. We become consoled, loved by God in an experience that is beyond concepts. We know that we know God loves us! This being-loved-by-God experience at the deepest level of our consciousness restores our strength, pushes us to new self-giving and creativity. (30)

This is what happens during morning and evening prayer, within centering prayer, during the open intervals of our day, while awakening to night's dark silence, and when pausing long in the slow, quiet reading of Scripture. During such times we open ourselves to the mind of Christ. During such times, we breathe deeply "the interior air."

Image: Samantha Lamb, Breathing Deeply

Praying Selflessly

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together reminds us that we practice selfless prayer when we pray the psalms:

The psalms teach us to pray as a fellowship. The Body of Christ is praying, and as an individual one acknowledges that his prayer is only a minute fragment of the whole prayer of the Church. He learns to pray the prayer of the Body of Christ. And that lifts him above his personal concerns and allows him to pray selflessly.

To pray selflessly means that we practice a letting-go of many seemingly important personal needs. In the psalms we let the egocentric desires of the self recede into the background and eventually learn to let them go entirely. We enter the lives of other people, especially the poor. As we practice letting go of ourselves, we learn learn that our emptiness is filled with the suffering of others and the active Presence of God. We enter the place and space where "no things" weigh us down and we are lifted up with and for the world in Christ's Body to God the Father. This is the work of a lifetime, but it may surely begin and continue whenever we enter God's gift of the psalms.

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Image: Dean Mitchell, Rowena

On Thursday, The National Day of Prayer, June and I stopped by Faith Lutheran Church’s twelve-hour (9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.) Prayer Vigil. While in prayer for about a half-hour at noon, in addition to there were several readings: one from Wendell Berry, two from Pastor Luckey, and this one by Jim Wallis:

This world of ours is not working. Even while we cling to the illusion that everything is all right, we know in our hearts that it is not. In our society the gap between the rich and the poor is larger than any time in our whole history. The threats to our environment seem to grow every day and the middle classes are afflicted with an anxiety, a loneliness and a fear that we know too well.

On a world scale, the poor are dying in enormous numbers now -- forty thousand children each and every day. The world is gasping for breath, pleading for mercy for us to stop. The credo of the affluent comes to us from bumper stickers which read, "I shop, therefore, I am." This is a faith statement, a theological affirmation of a culture that is in danger of losing its own soul. Now we are on the edge of war in the Middle East. We face a horrible catastrophe to protect our access to cheap oil. The President says the oil symbolizes our way of life, but it is really our national addiction to an over consumption that is killing the poor, killing the earth and denying us our own humanity. The questions we must ask are "Where have we gone wrong and how do we find the resources to move into a different future?" Where do we turn?

I was a seminary student in Chicago many years ago. We decided to try an experiment. We made a study of every single reference in the whole Bible to the poor, to God's love for the poor, to God being the deliverer of the oppressed. We found thousands of verses on the subject. The Bible is full of the poor.

In the Hebrew scriptures, for example, it is the second most prominent theme. The first is idolatry and the two are most often connected. In the New Testament, we find that one of every sixteen verses is about poor people; in the gospels, one of every ten; in Luke, one of every seven. We find the poor everywhere in the Bible.

One member of our group was a very zealous young seminary student and he thought he would try something just to see what might happen. He took an old Bible and a pair of scissors. He cut every single reference to the poor out of the Bible. It took him a very long time.

When he was through, the Bible was very different, because when he came to Amos and read the words, "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream," he just cut it out. When he got to Isaiah and heard the prophet say, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to bring the homeless poor into your home, to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free?" he just cut it right out. All those Psalms that see God as a deliverer of the oppressed, they disappeared.

In the gospels, he came to Mary's wonderful song where she says, "The mighty will be put down from their thrones, the lowly exalted, the poor filled with good things and the rich sent empty away." Of course, you can guess what happened to that. In Matthew 25, the section about the least of these, that was gone. Luke 4, Jesus' very first sermon, what I call his Nazareth manifesto, where he said, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to poor people" -- that was gone, too. "Blessed are the poor," that was gone.

So much of the Bible was cut out; so much so that when he was through, that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn't hold together. I held it in my hand and it was falling apart. It was a Bible full of holes. I would often take that Bible out with me to preach. I would hold it high in the air above American congregations and say, "Brothers and sister, this is the American Bible, full of holes from all we have cut out." We might as well have taken that pair of scissors and just cut out all that we have ignored for such a long time. In America the Bible that we read is full of holes.

In the silence after this reading, I can assure you that some of us were praying for the poor. We were asking God to help us respect, feed, clothe, educate, and house the poor--the beloved of God.

Why we pray the psalms

We pray the psalms for many reasons. Here is an important one: we pray the psalms to express our solidarity with people who are suffering and in pain. As privileged “first-world” people, most of us have little personal experience with genuine poverty or communal misery. Our first-world culture urges us to purchase happiness, and so we buy memberships into book clubs, golf clubs, health clubs, camera and country clubs, associations and organizations of all sorts to make sure we’re on the road to satisfaction and pleasure. Life is a cruise.

The psalms point us in another direction so that we learn the preoccupations of God. In The Promise of Paradox Parker Palmer reminds us that we may bend our lives into God’s beloved poor:

It is the suffering already present in the world which we can either ignore or identify with. If pain were not real, if it were not the lot of so many, the way of the cross would be pathological. But in our world with its hungry and homeless and hopeless, it is pathological to live as if pain did not exist. The way of the cross means letting pain carve one's life into a channel through which the healing stream of the spirit can flow to a world in need.

The psalms, so often written by people “down under,” help us create and form an alliance with those who suffer affliction, anguish, discomfort, and hardship. In the psalms we hear the voices of alcoholics (it's much like going to an AA meeting), drug addicts, prisoners orphans, and widows. In the psalms we sing the songs of the unemployed, the tormented, the disfigured, and the mentally ill. These are the songs of those immigrants trapped in homelessness. These are the whisperings of the poor and suffering.

When we pray, say, sing, or chant the psalms we are taken away from our self-preoccupations and in solidarity join hands with the dispossessed, discouraged, and discomforted.

We pray the psalms because often it's a first step toward action. Here, like the Samaritan Jesus called “good,” we allow ourselves to look down into life’s ditches and find the wounded, bruised, and bleeding. In the psalms we take our eyes off the highway signs promoting self-success and find ourselves climbing down the highways' shoulder banks where most of the world’s people live, work, love, and die.

Yes, the psalms often express our personal emotional feelings. But they also articulate the distress of our brothers and sisters in the third-world, those who live across the tracks, and those who are largely unseen by most of us. In the psalms we listen for their voices, learn to sing their sobbings and lamentations, and eventually embrace, as best with the Spirit's help, their pain and suffering. We pray the psalms to enter the mind of Christ.

Image: Finding Grace