God in prayer

From Fr. Donald Haggerty’s Contemplative Provocations via Contemplative Day Book:

The question whether God is experienced in prayer may seem unanswerable. How do we know? Is there some way to measure within the experience itself? Perhaps not, but there is the traditional test of fruitful prayer, observable in the urge to self-giving when prayer is concluded. Generosity toward others upon leaving prayer, a soul turned humbly and charitably toward others, a tendency to self-effacement, these are among the reliable signs of graces given during prayer. If a soul has loved God during a time of prayer, the same love requires becoming a servant to the needs of others outside of prayer.

The eye of the storm

Bernadette Roberts (emphasis mine):

So the storms, crises, and sufferings of life are a way of finding the Eye. When everything is going our way, we do not see the eye, and we feel no need to find it. But when everything is going against us, then we find the eye. So the avoidance of suffering and the desire to have everything go our own way runs contrary to the whole movement of our journey; it is all a wrong view. With the right view, however, one should be able to come to the state of oneness* in six or seven years—years not merely of suffering, but years of enlightenment, for right suffering is the essence of enlightenment.

Loving what is

HT Bree

 
It strikes me that "loving what is" is one way to view Matthew 22:37 ... "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind."

C. S. Lewis on the devotional life

Source

Practice

This post from Same Old Zen on renunciation has a Buddhist slant, but it speaks to the same "life here" vs "life with God" theme from my post yesterday. Highlights for me:

We walk the path, we know the benefits, and yet we still feel like we're missing out. We want to be be Buddhists, not BUDDHISTS.

In other words, we want to practice hard enough to realize awakening, but not so hard that we can't get trashed on weekends. We want to meditate long enough to take Instagram photos. But not so long that we get bored, or tired, or miss our favorite TV shows.

WE WANT TO HAVE OUR CAKE, AND EAT IT TOO. BUT THAT'S NOT HOW BUDDHISM WORKS.

Our path is one of renunciation. If I wanted to describe it simply, I'd say we work to stop doing the things that cause suffering for ourselves and others. ... This is the exact opposite of what our egos want us to do. Our minds are veritable cesspools of desire, and the wish to accumulate more. So we must practice. We must practice renunciation.

One way to do this is through seated meditation. ... The more we practice, the more we create a sort of container for ourselves. ...

Eventually, we become skilled enough that we can take our renunciation practice off the cushion ... we realize that we're not really losing anything by devoting ourselves to Buddhist practice. Rather, we're gaining the ability to provide peace and contentment to both ourselves and others.

The first and great commandment

Interesting quote from Bernadette Roberts' What Is Self? that I found on one of my regular reads (here and here; emphasis mine):

I saw that to follow Christ meant to have his same interior experiences and to follow the inner, not the outer, movement of his life. ... Christ’s first commandment to love God above all things is the sole key to his interior life and his experience of God. As beginners we aim for love by the practice of virtue through self-discipline, but later the practice of virtue arises automatically out of love and is not a matter of self-discipline or curbing the ego-self. So I realized the priority of coming to Christ’s own intense love of the Father; everything else, including love of neighbor, was seen as secondary.

Somehow realizing this priority is, I think, the essence of the contemplative and how he differs from a non-contemplative. The latter strives to do two things at once: to be of service to God and to this world at the same time. This is why he travels more slowly toward union with God. Though he sees no dichotomy between God and involvement in human affairs, his whole struggle is centered on bringing them together.

The contemplative, on the other hand, is sooner able to get things together because he is acutely aware of this dichotomy from the outset. Thus he follows the first commandment until it leads automatically and perforce to into the second.

This quote suggests to me that if I'm struggling with trying to figure out how to best be of service to this world, then the best tack to take is primarily one of loving God.

Somatic spirituality

This is FASCINATING ... it's Stephen Porges (father of the Polyvagal theory) on the intersection of his theory and how contemplation works (emphasis mine):

In the early 90’s, I went to India to study yogis and learned some interesting things from them. Many of their practices are designed to trigger the older vagal shutdown response that drives the faint or freeze reflex.

The idea is that through training, you can begin going into these immobilizing states normally linked with faint and freeze, but more aware and less frightened. In my own model, the older evolutionary part of the vagus —with is circuits in the back-facing dorsal side of the brainstem—is a very powerful system of calming that enables the deepest forms of connectedness and intimacy. But it can only be consciously recruited for social life when our bodies are in safe states. That’s where the newer vagus literally is your shield. It’s the protector that says, “It’s OK now to explore this and go there.”

Yogis who hold their breath, like deep-sea divers, are in a sense saying, “If I can master this biological shutdown reflex by controlling my breath, I can now visit these powerful physiological states.” When we visit these states without fear, it’s a type of “self‑intimacy,” the ability to go deep inside oneself and feel secure that it’s not going to be life‑threatening.

If we think of religion as a human practice of group connectedness, we see why even the structures that were used for religious worship enabled people to experience their body without being hypervigilant. In massive churches, they have large organs that play very low sounds. The extremely low notes from these organs produce in the listener a natural response that dips us into the older vagal state. When this happens in an internal state of safety and connection, it evokes a sense not of fear but of awe.

Invoking this state of awe offers one type of self-intimacy, of going into that deep part of our body in safety and awareness. These practices are exercises that simultaneously stimulate the newer part of the vagus, based in the ventral vagal complex, which function to promote social engagement behaviors. If we survey various religions, the Sufis use dance, the Buddhists chant, and the Muslims and Jews use posture and vocal prayers. These are all vagal triggers that promote self-intimacy, but they are framed in contexts that promote social engagement, it’s not only bodies moving, it’s bodies moving in a social context. This socially engaged movement helps stimulate both parts of the vagal system, evoking a deep state of connection of the kind that fosters not just awe but also empathy and love.

Oh, the implications!

Seeing

If you haven't seen it, put Netflix's The Little Prince on your to-do list. It's quite the lovely adaptation/extension of the book.

Awareness

Today's message from The Assisi Institute:

An essential truth is this: the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our awareness. If our awareness is fixated on fear, anger, illusory perceptions, and other forms of darkness, our experience of life will be steeped in suffering. On the other hand, if our awareness is permeated with the energy of truth, beauty, and goodness, our lives will be meaningful, joyful, and positively generative. ... Remember that we become what we focus on, what we absorb into our spirits, and what we ingest into our souls.

Vocation

Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”

What a great and timely message from Parker Palmer via Richard Rohr this week!