From the Ground on Which I Sit

This is a prayer-log entry of mine from December 2008, a moment during the Advent season when I was having difficulty being consistent with my twice-a-day practice of centering prayer, a method of apophatic (formless) contemplative prayer. At the time, I was also meeting with a spiritual director who had gently suggested that I not totally abandon daily cataphatic prayer -- a way of praying that incorporates form, words, images, thoughts. With her suggestion in mind, I took up reading Scripture in the mornings -- passages designated for that particular day of the liturgical year -- and engaging in an informal lectio divina.

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December 3, 2008: After waking – Gospel of the day: Mt. 15: 29-37 (Jesus' healing of the mute, lame and blind, and the feeding of the 4000 with 7 loaves and a few fish).

Lord, I am reminded that I need to come and sit with You in the silence (“he ordered the crowd to sit down on the ground”) for healing and nourishment. I have known this to be true in the past and it’s no less true today. Help me to hold this in my awareness.

As I write this there is this double awareness in me: during mental [cataphatic] prayer, I internally speak to God as if there is a Great Invisible Listening Person there, even as I am aware that God (at least God "the Father") is not really a person. On other levels I know that God is the formless All-in-all, boundless and ineffable, always still and eternally flowing, the river of being and consciousness, mystical love-flood, inside of time and beyond time, immanent and transcendent. And yet because I am a limited human who senses, thinks, and relates, I need to find a way to open up to this boundless infinitude – I need to be able to speak to it, be naked before it, to be in relationship with it, respond to it. Although “it” is not the right word, either, of course – "it" feels diminishing, objectifying – and God is not really an “it.” A Person, a subject, has greater depth and dimension than an it, and so this is what I must do: speak to You, the Great Hearer, without embarrassment, with openness and with honesty, humble, just being myself, whoever I am in the moment – and in the end realizing that there is nothing I can do to diminish You anyway, however I am perceiving You, receiving You. You, the Source of existence and depth dimension to all that is, the shimmering Mystery, the Silence, the Emptiness and the Fullness, can “act” as a Person for me too, a "someone" that a limited human can dialogue with, be in relationship with.

I guess I fear squeezing You into a small box framed by my own projections and wishes. I still have fears that I am fooling myself … or just “playing,” whispering in my head with an invisible friend. And yet I know You have poured countless graces into my life. I have felt Your presence, tasted Your sweetness, bathed in Your mercy. Strengthen my memory, Lord, when I start to waver and second-guess blessings such as these. Just keep me talking to You, opening up to You, waiting for You, resting in silence with You. Let me be with You in words and noise and emotion and activity, and bring me back to You in the silence that under-girds all thought and emotion and feeling. Feed me from the ground on which I sit.

Okay. Another thought I have from today’s Scripture : when we allow the Lord to touch us or to bless what we believe are our meager portions, we are healed, and the nourishment can increase so that we actually end up having “left overs,” overflowing bounty that becomes food for others. When we bring ourselves to the Lord in all our woundedness, trusting (even as we greatly doubt!) that we receive what we need, a hidden, subtle expansion occurs. When we least expect it, in a widely needful moment, we might find ourselves healed and sustained beyond what we initially thought was possible.

(An important caveat: Need is different from wanting or yearning. Need is a naked cry for mercy, the abandonment of any illusion about one's ability to change a situation, that interior poverty often difficult to fully perceive or express, a surrendering within one's weakness and sense of hopelessness, standing and trembling wide-eyed at fears and impossibilities as they begin to devour us...)

At the moment I feel “mute” in terms of my own writing. And writing is what I suspect I’m called to do in this world (though I still feel presumptuous saying that!)  So now I am lifting my muteness and muddiness up to the Lord, simply by bringing these concerns to conscious expression while sitting at my computer and holding in my mind that in some way, Divinity is listening. 

I will wait for whatever the Lord brings in terms of healing and nourishment. Wait without expectation for any particular result, nugget of knowledge, feeling, or sensible consolation, but trusting, even within my doubt, that I receive what I most need. 

--from my December 2008 prayer-log