The value of a quiet mind before God
March 23, 2006
Reading: Psalm 131:1-3
“My heart is not proud, O LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore.â€
Bonus Reading: 1 Peter 3:4
This article, adapted from Christianity Today, talks about one person’s experience with contemplative prayer. A sometimes controversial topic in modern practice, it is a tool, that, when properly focused on the living presence of our Lord, is very valuable in developing our interior lives before God, as it affords us the opportunity to (1) hide the Scripture in our hearts and (2) clear our mind to focus on the presence of God, and not our own agendas. It is one of the tools we learn about in our Spiritual Disciplines class, and when I came across the piece in Christianity Today, I thought I might share it with you. This is a very ancient practice, and one that is centered in our tradition.
May the God of all peace grant us each quietness of mind to hear Him speak to us in our devotions and prayers.
Grace and peace,
Chip+
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An author who leads spiritual retreats several times each year once told me that not a single person who has followed his regimen for a silent retreat has failed to hear from God. Intrigued and a bit skeptical, I signed up for one of his retreats, this one extending over five days. Every attendee met for an hour each day with our host, who would give us assignments in meditation and spiritual work. We also met together for daily worship, during which time only the author talked. Beyond this, we were free to spend our time as we wished, with only one requirement: two hours of prayer per day.
I doubt I had devoted more than 30 minutes to prayer at any one session in my life. The first day I wandered to the edge of a meadow and sat down with my back against a tree. I had brought along my assignment for the day and a notebook in which to record my thoughts. How long will I stay awake? I wondered.
To my great fortune, a herd of 147 elk (I had plenty of time to count them) wandered into the very field where I was sitting. To see one elk is exciting; to watch 147 elk in their natural habitat is enthralling. But I soon learned that to watch 147 elk for two hours is, to put it mildly, boring. They lowered their heads and chewed grass. They raised their heads in unison and looked at a raspy crow. They lowered their heads again and chewed grass. For two hours, nothing else happened. No mountain lions attacked; no bulls charged each other. All the elk bent over and chewed grass.
After a while, the very placidity of the scene began to affect me. The elk had not noticed my presence, and I simply melded into their environment, taking on their rhythms. I no longer thought about the work I had left at home, the deadlines facing me, the reading that I had been assigned. My body relaxed. In the leaden silence, my mind fell quiet.
“The quieter the mind,” wrote Meister Eckhart, “the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is.” An elk does not have to work at having a quiet mind; it feels content standing in a field all day with its fellow elk, chewing grass. A lover does not have to work at attending to the beloved. I prayed for, and in a fleeting moment received, that kind of absorbed attention to God.
I never saw the elk again, even though every afternoon I searched the fields and forest for them. During the next few days, I said many words to God and also sat silent in his presence. I made lists, and many things came to mind that would not have come to mind had I not been sitting in a field for hours at a time. The week became a kind of spiritual checkup that pointed out paths for further growth. I heard no audible voice, yet at the end of the week I had to agree with our host: I had heard from God.
I’ve become more convinced than ever that God finds ways to communicate with those who truly seek him, especially when we lower the volume of the surrounding static. I remember reading the account of a spiritual seeker who interrupted a busy life to spend a few days in a monastery. “I hope your stay is a blessed one,” said the monk who showed the visitor to his cell. “If you need anything, let us know, and we’ll teach you how to live without it.”
We learn to pray by praying, and two concentrated hours a day taught me much. To begin, I need to think more about God than about myself when I am praying. Even the Lord’s Prayer centers first on what God wants from us. “Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done”—God wants us to desire these things, to orient our lives around them. To make Him and His Kingdom our own priorities.
How often do I come to God not with consumer requests, but simply with a desire to spend time with him, to discern what he wants from me and not vice versa? When I did that in the elk meadow, I mysteriously found that the answer to my prayers for guidance was around me all along. Nothing changed but my receptors; through prayer, I opened them to God. “For all things sing you,” wrote the poet Rilke, “at times we just hear them more clearly.”
Some have called meditative prayer a useless act, because we do it not for the sake of getting something, but spontaneously, as uselessly as a child at play. After an extended time with God, however, my urgent requests, which had once seemed so significant, took on a new light, owing to the time I spent in contemplation with God. I began to ask for them for God’s sake, not my own. Though my needs may drive me to prayer, it is there I come face to face with my greatest need: an encounter with God himself. [Rector’s note: emphasis mine]
–Adapted from “For God’s Sake–What 147 elk taught me about prayer†by Philip Yancey
Ballast
March 9, 2006
“Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us.†— Hebrews 12:1
A former commander of the Imperial Russian Navy said that he went to London during World War I for training. There he learned how to fly one of three dirigibles his government had bought from England.
But first he had to learn to fly a simple, un-powered balloon. He recalled getting into the gondola and seeing all four sides covered with ballast—sandbags adding weight to keep the craft on the ground. To ascend, the crew dropped this dead weight until the huge balloon slowly and silently lifted off the ground. The more sand they dropped, the higher the balloon climbed.
The Russian then applied this to his relationship with the Lord: “Now that I’m a Christian,†he said, “I understand that when God begins to clean up my heart, I get closer and closer to Him.” The meaning for us should be obvious. When we drop the dead weight the world and the flesh have on board, our craft quietly gains altitude. It’s for us to identify where it is in our lives, then, make the decision to drop it.
St. Paul tells us what this dead weight is in Galatians 5: “Now the doings (practices) of the flesh are clear (obvious): they are immorality, impurity, indecency, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger (ill temper), selfishness, divisions (dissensions), party spirit (factions, sects with peculiar opinions, heresies), envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.†His last statement tells us what happens if we don’t drop these spiritual sandbags: “I warn you beforehand, just as I did previously, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.†Clearly, if we are to rise in the Kingdom, we must drop our dead weight—habits from lives not regenerated by Him.
Hebrews 12:1 and 1 John 2:15 express that same spiritual truth. Carrying this world’s weight hampers our fellowship with the Lord and keeps our hearts from rising in love for Him. Not surprisingly, St. John wrote that we cannot love the world and love God at the same time. Kyrie Eleison!
Selfish attitudes, besetting sins, and worldly cares keep us from getting off the ground spiritually. But when we lay them aside, we experience the uplifting joy of fellowship with the Father. Lent is an excellent time to determine this by the ancient practice of examen—testing ourselves for dead weight preventing our ascent.
May God show us our ballast and empower us to flight instead of remaining earthbound.
For your meditation time: Our attitude determines our altitude.
By Grace,
Chip+
