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Spiritual Formation
Typical Questions About The Contemplative Life
by
Carl McColman(For information about the author see below.)
"Just as humankind shall be in unending bliss,
fulfilling the joy of God... so humankind has been,
in the foresight and intention of God,
known and loved from without beginning."
Click on the following highlighted questions for an answer.
How can I be sure God loves me?
How can I stop from getting so distracted during prayer?
Many contradictory images of the Sacred exist in our culture, presenting many possible faces of God to the world. I used to work in downtown Atlanta, and every morning during my commute, I would go through the "Five Points" subway station and always pass a colorful assortment of evangelists. Some, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, stand there silently, holding up their Watchtower magazines in the hope that you'll be interested. Others carry signs or wear placards, filled with homespun theology in hand lettering. And then there are the screamers. Sometimes with an open Bible in their hands, at other times with nothing more than an accusing finger pointed at the passersby, the screaming evangelists holler at the people on the sidewalk about hell and damnation and the certainty of the wrath of God. And even though no one seems to notice, I always wonder what kind of subconscious imprinting we are all getting about the idea that God is wrathful and enraged.
It's not just the sidewalk preachers. Televangelists, authors, pastors, revival leaders, and many other figures in our world seem to emphasize God's fury and anger. Especially in the south where the combination of poverty and conservative evangelicalism has created a grim world here and a more grim world to come, the possibility of God as unloving seems all too real.
Of course, the wrathful God is by no means the only image of God we have. Jesus spoke lovingly of God as 'daddy,' the adoring parent who yearns to give good things to his children. Julian of Norwich rounded out that image by proclaiming the motherhood of the Sacred in a book filled with poetic insights into the nature of Divine love. The New Testament author who wrote the Letters of John said it most simply: "God is Love." (I John 4).
In all honesty, I'm not convinced that we can be sure that God loves us, simply because doubt and fear seem to be as much a part of life as is believing and hope. But I am convinced that we can choose which image of God, and which theology -- in other words, which way of talking about God -- seems the most true and right to us. To choose the wrathful and angry God is to choose a world where obedience and placating are the supreme virtues, where the job of human beings is to be docile and submissive. Unfortunately, such a choice not only is psychologically crippling to individuals, but it also creates the kind of world where the abuse of power can take place, whether the abuser is a despotic political leader, a money-hungry pastor, or a controlling parent. I find it hard to believe that a good God would want to relate to us in such a life-diminishing way.
The other choice is to believe in the primacy of Divine love, despite the haranguings of conservative religion and despite the fears and anxieties that sometimes overwhelm life. To choose belief in a loving God is to choose a world where intimacy and celebration are the supreme virtues, where the purpose of human life is to live fully, creatively, and compassionately. This choice is psychologically liberating, for belief in a loving God enables us to celebrate our ability to make wise choices (even if God does not "let us off the hook" when we make poor choices -- another sign of love, incidentally). Furthermore, if God loves me and you, then God loves all people, which means that a loving God is a God who takes a radical stand for peacemaking, nonviolence, social and economic justice, and dignity for all persons, regardless of race, gender, creed, or sexual orientation.
So how can I be sure God loves me? Choose to believe in Divine love, and you will soon be overwhelmed by the evidence of it in your life. You'll see the love of God in the sunrise and the sunset, in the eyes of babies and old people and homeless people and loved ones, in the playfulness of children and pets and the seriousness of people everywhere trying to make a better world. Say "I believe in the love of God" today, and every day, and soon the day will come when you wonder how you ever could have doubted.
Last of all... the surest way to find the love of God is to choose to love God. Give your heart to the source of love and light at the center of all things. Give your ability to love to the silent presence who watches you and accepts you no matter how "good" or "bad" you are. Open yourself up to the mystery of existence that extends before birth and beyond death. Relationships, after all, are mutual matters, and to the extent I open myself up to love God, to that same extent I open myself to receive Divine love. As Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me." What goes for the eye goes for the heart.
The heart with which I love God is the heart with which God loves me.
Anyone who has explored contemplative prayer or any other practice of intentional silence knows -- or will soon know -- about distractions. In the spirituality of silence, a distraction is any thought or image that enters consciousness, as a way of subtly (or not-so-subtly) distracting a person away from the silent meditative state, and back into the "surface drama" of the ego.
Distractions are frustrating. Here I am, trying to center my body and calm my mind and open up my heart and soul to the loving presence of God. And like having a picnic spoiled by ants, so nothing seems to be worse than having my silent time spoiled by all of my unruly thoughts!
Distractions can take many forms. Often they show up as worries or "shoulds" ("Gee, I better remember to send Mom her birthday card" or "Why am I sitting her meditating when I should be out there running? Gosh, I need to lose weight!"). Another common distraction is the excited thought, especially when something wonderful is going on in your life ("Oh, I didn't think that cute guy I met at the food co-op would ever call, but he did last night -- now what will I wear when I go out with him?"). And of course, distractions don't have to be particularly dramatic or significant, they can be as humdrum and normal as thinking about your laundry or your dirty dishes.
When distractions plague our silent time, often we feel tempted to resist them, as if by sheer dint of will we can stop our brain from thinking. Alas, that only increases their power. Like Br'er Rabbit fighting the Tar Baby, the more we resist our thoughts and imagination during contemplation, the more enmeshed in the ego mind we become. Even though they seem to spoil our silence and our time alone in meditation, our distractions will not go away through willful resistance. The most useful way to deal with distractions is to accept them, befriend them, and then gently let them go.
Do not fight your mind doing what comes naturally. Simply allow thoughts and images to rise in your mind.... And then dissipate, returning you into the deeper silence. Remember, the purpose behind contemplative prayer is to rest in the presence of the loving Divine, not to prove anything to anyone. God loves a busy mind as much as God loves a still, calm mind. The important thing is to be there, sharing your mind with the mind of God. Your mind is not perfect, and so your prayer will never be perfect either. Learning to love the messy imperfection of prayer can help us practice the art of loving the messy imperfection of life.
- Befriend the distractions. Do not make them "wrong." Trust your ego, your surface mind, to be part of you and therefore your ally, not your enemy. When you are filled with distracting thoughts during silent prayer, it does not mean that you are "lazy" or "undisciplined." It may mean that you need to get more sleep, or you need to share a thorny problem with your therapist, or simply that you need to take care of a chore you've been putting off. Trust your ego to share important information with you, don't urn contemplation into a struggle between the "silent" you and the "talkative" you.
- Let them go. The best way to do this is to have a notepad and pencil handy. That way you can make an agreement with yourself, that if you should happen to think of something so important that it must be documented, you have the means to do it. Then you can quickly make a note to yourself, and resume your breathing and sitting in silent, relaxed attentiveness. Of course, having the paper and pencil handy usually is all it takes for you to recognize that most of your distractions can simply be gently laid aside in your mind, with no repercussions whatsoever. Contemplative prayer actually helps the mind to function more efficiently, so a meditative state makes you less forgetful--all the more reason to let go of distractions, trusting your mind to remember what needs to be remembered.
One of the Spanish Carmelites -- I can't remember if it was Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross -- once said that if a person is distracted 100 times during prayer, that's 100 opportunities to show God our love by turning away from the distraction and back to the presence of the Divine. Remember this, and be gentle with yourself as you pray.
One of the most common obstacles to developing a daily practice of contemplative prayer is the simple reality that most of us face: we're too busy. Career, family, church or other spiritual community, and various other commitments keep us on the go -- sometimes eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. This constant rush rush rush is in itself a spiritual problem -- we're too busy doing to allow time for living -- but one of the most obvious ways in which the busy-ness manifests as a problem is that it prevents us from praying, or meditating, or journaling, or any other healthy spiritual practice. Just as we eat too fast, not chewing our food properly and suffering from indigestion, so if we pray at all, we pray on the run and suffer from the spiritual indigestion of a sense of not being centered -- in God, or in life.
How do we reverse this trend? How do we dig ourselves out from this hole that the hectic pace of postmodern living keeps us trapped in? How do we find time for the silence of contemplative prayer? Naturally, I cannot come up with a magic formula that will help every person become fully-fledged contemplatives -- but I do have an idea that has proved useful for me, and I hope you will find it useful as well. The idea is what I call guerilla silence.
Guerilla silence means the practice of taking stolen moments, odd moments during the day, and consecrating them to God. If life seems to be too busy to take even ten minutes for contemplative practice, we in all likelihood can still find a minute here (at a traffic light) or two minutes there (while on hold on the telephone) -- not perfect situations for deep, disciplined meditation, but perfectly useful times to remind ourselves that silence -- the silence where we encounter the Sacred -- is not something outside of ourselves, but truly something that wells up from deep within ourselves.
Here's an exercise to try to "massage" your busy day, so that moments of silence can creep in:
Of course, there's still the issue of the poorly chewed food. Guerilla silence is a transitional strategy for developing a discipline of contemplative prayer. The sad truth is that when we're "too busy" to pray, what we're not willing to admit to ourselves that prayer has not yet become a high priority in our lives. Often, a life too busy to pray may have time tied up in watching silly television shows, or flipping aimlessly through catalogs, or some other activity which might be let go of -- once we feel truly, deeply drawn to the silence. Guerilla silence is a way to "get to know" silence, to discover the treasures of Divine love that wait for each of us there.
- Take a few quiet moments -- perhaps early in the morning, or just before bed. Sit with pen and paper, and say a short prayer, consecrating these moments to the Divine.
- Think of three or four common times during the day when you are waiting -- stuck in traffic, waiting for a bus, waiting for the microwave to stop, or whatever. Write down when those moments occur in your life.
- Write an affirmation. Use the following one, or come up with one in your own words. You may wish to make several copies of this affirmation, one for the dashboard of your car, one for your bathroom mirror, etc. "I allow the times during the day when I am waiting, or interrupted, or on hold, to be given to God -- in silence, in openness, and in trust."
- Every morning, read the affirmation to yourself, and remind yourself of the times during the day when you will likely have a few "stolen moments" to give to the silence. At the end of each day, read the affirmation again, and review the day, celebrating the times you allowed silence to enter into your busy schedule.
The good news is this: if we take the time to practice guerilla silence during those stolen and odd moments of the day, it's amazing how quickly our lives open up -- and we find that the ten or twenty minutes for disciplined silence is really available to us, after all.
I can only provide a personal answer to this question. Spiritual formation, as a concept, is Christian in origin. My training in Christian spiritual formation came primarily through the Shalem Institute in Washington, DC, which is an ecumenical Christian center. However, the founder of Shalem, Tilden Edwards, studied with a Tibetan Buddhist contemplative, Tarthang Tulku. Meanwhile, despite my involvement in the spiritual formation community, my faith journey has taken me to an expansive, interfaith approach to spirituality, mysticism, and contemplation.
So to answer this question, I need to present two convictions I hold deeply, which may on the surface seem contradictory:
1. To enter the spiritual life, a person needs to deeply plumb the depths of his or her chosen path, with integrity and fidelity and healthy/appropriate obedience;
2. Sooner or later, a mature spiritual life requires openness, good-will, dialogue, and a spirit of learning and appreciation between members/adherents of different traditions.
I know for some people this balance between commitment to one faith tradition and openness to others may raise deep and disturbing theological questions. I do not try to reconcile all the theological and philosophical differences between the different faiths I explore. Rather, I seek to approach those differences with a "judge not" openness, trusting that God will lead me to recognize spiritually valuable lessons and practices wherever I may find them.
I see no contradiction between loving Christ and participating in other traditions, as long as those traditions do not ask me to renounce my allegiance to Christ or to participate in any unjust or unloving behavior. I would suppose the same thing is true if your primary spiritual allegiance is to Buddha, or the Goddess, or Allah, or Yahweh. Learning the wisdom of other paths does not attack your commitment to your primary path -- no matter what others may think.
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So back to the question at hand. May non-Christians explore the process of Spiritual Formation? The answer is yes. Spiritual Formation is for anyone who wishes to enter into a deepening, love-centered relationship with the Holy. So I've written these pages as a gift to all people, Christian and non-Christian alike. For Christians, it will have the familiarity of their home path. For non-Christians, I hope these pages will speak to Divine love in a way that is useful and applicable to spirituality in a universal and inclusive way -- and I hope non-Christians will appreciate learning about a beautiful aspect of Christianity.
I offer this introduction to Spiritual Formation with no attempt to "water it down" or to make it less Christian. It's a Christian process, arising out of the beauty of two thousand years of mystical and contemplative tradition. Many people have been wounded by Christianity, and those persons may find the Christ-language in this web-site threatening. I am sorry, and I wish healing for all who have been abused by unloving Christians. Watering down this introduction to Spiritual Formation would not necessarily help persons wounded by Christianity find what they really need, which is a way to connect to Divine healing that works for them -- whether that connection is Christian or not.
In my experience of Jesus Christ, he is the son of the God of Love, not the God of wrath or exclusivity. It is in such a spirit of love that I offer this specifically Christian process to all who are able to discern the love within -- whether their home path is Christianity, or some other tradition devoted to the heart of Divine Love.
All are welcome here.
Author's note:
These questions and answers, originally written in the mid 1990s, represent a brief introduction to mystical spirituality from a specifically Christian perspective. In the years since I wrote this material, both my personal spiritual journey, as well as my writing ministry, have moved toward a more inclusive, interfaith model of mysticism. However, I am pleased to keep this work available on the web, not only for Christians but also for anyone who wishes to learn more about this particular form of mystical practice.Click here for information about the author.
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