Happy Thanksgiving

A Prayer for Veterans Day

We ask for blessings on all those who have served their country in the armed forces.

We ask for healing for the veterans who have been wounded, in body and soul, in conflicts around the globe.

We pray especially for the young men and women, in the thousands, 

who are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan with injured bodies and traumatized spirits.

Bring solace to them, O Lord; may we pray for them when they cannot pray.

Have mercy on all the veterans from World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bring peace to their hearts and peace to the regions they fought in.

Bless all the soldiers who served in non-combative posts.

May their calling to service continue in their lives in many positive ways.

Give us all the creative vision to see a world which, grown weary with fighting,

Moves to affirming the life of all and so moves beyond war.

Hear our prayer, O Spirit of Peace, hear our prayer.

Psychic Numbing in the Information Age

“Bombarding the Senses” 

[an excerpt from the book-length essay, Compassion, by Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison] --

One of the most tragic events of our time is that we know more than ever before about the pains and sufferings of the world and yet are less and less able to respond to them. Radio, television, and newspapers allow us to follow from day to day—even from hour to hour—what is happening in the world. We hear about terrorism, armed conflicts and wars, assassinations, earthquakes, droughts and floods, famines and epidemics, concentration camps and torture chambers, and countless other forms of human suffering close to home or far away. Not only do we hear about them but also we are daily presented with pictures of starving babies, dying soldiers, burning houses, flooded villages, and wrecked cars. The news seems to have become an almost ceaseless litany of human suffering. The question is, do these highly sophisticated forms of communication and this increasing amount of information lead to a deeper solidarity and a greater compassion? It is very doubtful.

Can we really expect a compassionate response from the millions of individuals who read the paper during breakfast, listen to the radio on the way to work, and watch television after returning home tired from their work in offices or factories? Can we reasonably expect compassion from the many isolated individuals who are constantly being reminded in the privacy of their homes or cars of the vast extent of human suffering?

There appears to be a general assumption that it is good for people to be exposed to the pain and suffering of the world. Not only do newspapers and news broadcasts seem to act on this assumption but also most organizations whose main concern is to help suffering people. Charitable institutions often send letters describing the miserable conditions in different parts of the world and enclose photographs of people whose humanity is hardly recognizable. In so doing, they hope to motivate the receiver to send money for relief projects.

We might ask, however, whether mass communication, directed to millions of people who experience themselves as small, insignificant, powerless individuals does not in fact do more harm than good. When there is no community that can mediate between world needs and personal responses, the burden of the world can only be a crushing burden. When the pains of the world are presented to people who are already overwhelmed by the problems in their small circle of family or friends, how can we hope for a creative response? What we can expect is the opposite of compassion: numbness and anger.

Massive exposure to human misery often leads to psychic numbness. Our minds cannot tolerate being constantly reminded of things which interfere with what we are doing at the moment. When we have to open our store in the morning, go about our business, prepare our classes, to talk to our fellow workers, we cannot be filled with the collective misery of the world. If we let the full content of newscasts enter into our innermost selves, we would become so overwhelmed by the absurdities of existence that we would become paralyzed. If we try to absorb all that is reported by the paper, radio, or television and all that bombards us on computers and cell phones, we would never get any work done. Our continued effectiveness requires a mental filtering system by which we can moderate the impact of the daily news.

But there is more. Exposure to human misery on a mass scale can lead not only to psychic numbness but also to hostility. This might seem strange, but when we look more closely at the human response to disturbing information, we realize that confrontation with human pain often creates anger instead of care, irritation instead of sympathy, and even fury instead of compassion. Human suffering, which comes to us in a way and on a scale that makes identification practically impossible, frequently evokes strong negative feelings. Often, some of the lowest human drives are brought into the open by a confrontation with miserable-looking people. In the most horrendous way, this was the case in the Nazi, Vietnamese, and Chilean concentration camps, where torture and cruelty seemed easier the worse the prisoners looked. When we are no longer able to recognize suffering persons as fellow human beings, their pain evokes more pain and disgust than compassion. It is therefore no wonder that the diary of Anne Frank did more for the understanding of human misery than many of the films showing long lines of hungry faces, dark buildings with ominous chimneys, and heaps of naked, emaciated human corpses. Anne Frank we can understand; piles of human flesh only make us sick.

How can we account for this psychic numbness and anger? Numbness and anger are the reactions of the person who says, “When I can’t do anything about it anyhow, why do you bother me with it!” Confronted with human pain and at the same time reminded of our powerlessness, we feel offended to the very core of our being and fall back on our defenses of numbness and anger. If compassion means entering into solidarity with human beings who are suffering, then the increasing presentation of human suffering by the news media does not serve to evoke compassion. Those who know most about what goes on in the world – those who devote much attention to computers, newspapers, radio, and television – are not necessarily the most compassionate people.

Responding compassionately to what the media present to us is made even more difficult by its “neutrality.” The evening news offers a good example. Whatever the news correspondent announces – war, murder, floods, the weather, and the football scores – is reported with the same ritualized tone of voice and facial expression. Moreover, there is an almost liturgical order to the litany of events: first the great news items about national and international conflicts, then the more homey accidents, then the stock market and the weather, then a short word of “wisdom,” and finally something light or funny. All of this is regularly interrupted by smiling people urging us to buy products of dubious necessity. The whole “service” is so distant and aloof that the most obvious response is to invest no more energy in it that in brushing your teeth before going to bed.

Therefore, the question is, how can we see the suffering in our world and be moved to compassion as Jesus was moved when he saw a great crowd of people without food (Mt 14:14)? This question has become very urgent at a time when we see so much and are moved by so little.

--Henri Nouwen, Donald McNeill, and Douglas Morrison, Compassion. New York: Doubleday -- Image Books, 2005 (Original copyright: 1982). p 50 - 53.

Embodied Spaciousness: Autumn Retreat at Prince of Peace Abbey

During the final three days of October 2010, New Mexico Contemplative Outreach coordinator and retreat leader Susan Rush invited the forty-four of us gathered at Prince of Peace Abbey to step more deeply into a level of awareness that could be described as “embodied spaciousness.” As Susan explained, there is a way in which the combination of contemplative silence and responsive wakefulness can “morph into presence,” an open-hearted condition in which we "put on the mind of Christ" and welcome our bodies into the "homeland of God." While Centering Prayer is primarily a practice of letting go and consenting to God’s presence and action within, Susan maintains that outside of the periods of prayer we can also “partner with God” -- that is, actively cooperate with the Divine -- to bring about a "fuller yes and a deeper surrendering" to Presence. As co-creators with God, our greatest call is to “be who we are,” to embrace our own particular, unique way of living the contemplative presence. Teachers of spiritual and meditative disciplines are rightly criticized when they encourage the cultivation of disembodied or dissociated states of consciousness that split Spirit off from body and/or mind. But for today's contemplative Christianity, Susan pointed out, spirituality is neither body-denying nor body-indulging, but incarnational: fully human and fully divine. Spirit, body, and mind, interwoven and fully present in this homeland of God, on earth as it is in heaven.

The retreat offered many opportunities to rest, awaken, commune, and “pray with God.” In between our periods of Centering Prayer, Susan gave a few contemplative pointers – brief quotes and accessible teachings from the likes of John Cassian, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, among others. She also taught us some wonderful chants. Chants – brief repeated prayers set to simple melodies – bring in the resonance of tones and voices, and the hum in the heart is delightfully grounding and liberating. (I have heard it said that chanting is like praying twice.) The meals in silence, along with the option to attend the Abbey’s daily Mass and the monastic prayers of the hours, helped to create a rhythm of prayer, silence, song, and movement that was both restful and invigorating.

One level of reflection that I especially appreciated was the contemplative awareness walk that Susan invited us to do mid-way through the retreat on our own. I – and many of you as well, I'm sure – enjoy walks in nature during silent retreats, and there is a kind of relaxed alertness and clarity that can emerge after repeated periods of contemplative prayer that allows one to slow down, sink in, and savor the simple beauty of each moment. Here is where I recognize the truth in Fr, Keating’s assertion that “God is giving himself to you in every cup of water, in every sorrow and in every joy.” As a preface to our contemplative awareness walk, Susan noted the three levels of contemplation as described in Keating’s book The Word Made Flesh: 1) The ability to see God in all things, 2) The ability to see all things as God’s gift, and 3) The ability to see God giving God’s self in all things. With this in mind, Susan encouraged us to walk with a deeply receptive attitude, not actively looking for any particular thing, but rather allowing ourselves to be drawn to something along our path. To let God find us through all things.

This had already begun for me at the silent breakfast earlier that morning, when I noticed small tasty details of the moment – Evie M's “Be Present” T-shirt, Kathy A's drinking coffee out of a mug that said “Best Dad” (these are the monks’ mugs? I chuckled to myself), the cranberries in the cookies, the giggles induced by the loudness of me scootching my chair, and Marlene R's salting and peppering of her cantaloupe. God’s spicy sweetness.

Later that afternoon, on my walk, divinity beckons to me through the rich abundance of the living and dying things that populate autumn in southern California. A trail carpeted with dead leaves and chips of bark, with new grasses poking through. Spiderwebs glinting in the sun. Flies and gnats hovering near my ears, as if I am a flower full of the nectar they crave. Sand -- frisky dirt? -- sparkling beside the plain wooden crosses that mark the graves of past Benedictine monks. Life and death all tangled up together, birth and loss and resurrection singing out a wild and holy harmony.

The day has been warm, but a hint of crispness arises as the shadows deepen in the crevices of the hills. I think of the trajectory of my life, of various energies and agendas that have been dying away even as new yearnings sprout and flower. A brisk breeze is blowing, causing the trees to bow and bend, making the leaves tremble and shimmer. There is that wonderful line from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem: Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind. I linger in the crackling of wind-blown leaves and the shining radiance of the ocean in the distance. Cosmic applause, I say to myself. And divine ovation. God beholding God in all things.

Then I sit for a time inside the little gazebo along the Abbey path known as the Way of the Cross. An editor and writer by profession, I cannot help but be drawn to the various graffiti carvings in the wooden beams. Wow: retreat graffiti? I wonder. God in all things? But it is true: next to “Terry was here” and “Tim loves Debbie forever” is etched the divine anthem: I AM. 

--Written for an upcoming edition of CONSD News, the newsletter of Contemplative Outreach of North San Diego