To the most experienced meditators it is still commonplace
that, as one person put it, the moment our bodies are stilled, our thoughts
start to do the walking… We wander about in
daydreams, down memory lane, planning, hoping, worrying; internally we are
still filled with perpetual noise and movement, the mad whirl of disconnected
thoughts. I know we keep
returning to this subject of distractions, but it can be a worry for meditators
and sometimes lead to a sense of defeat.
I think there are two basic things to say. The first is that our noisy minds, our
distractions, are normal, utterly predictable, inevitable, and they are not our
enemy. Neither will the distractions
ever completely disappear in meditation, so that one day we can guarantee to be
floating around in blissful uninterrupted serenity. When one woman asked Fr John Main how long it
would be before she was undistracted, he replied, Oh, the first 30 years are the worst. We introduce the mantra into our silence to be
a stable, neutral focal point, the free alternative to any and all distraction,
something to return to – usually over and over again.
What matters then is that we greet these thoughts, memories, anxieties,
images, whatever they are, gently and simply as they appear, honour them by noting
them -- and turn back to the mantra. (Another
classic saying about this is that while you can’t stop the birds flying
overhead, you can stop them making nests in your hair.) So this is what we do for the whole time of
our prayer. It is always gentle, no
irritation or impatience, no recrimination… indeed, the thought, “I’m just not
getting it right… I’ll never be any good at this”, is itself a distraction
which we receive, note gently -- and return to the mantra.
The second basic issue is about time.
This is the harder one for me. The
distractions, if we permit them, always seduce us away from the present
moment. After all, that is how our minds
have been trained and formed. We live in
linear time, that is to say, we think about what happened – that is memory; or
we think about what might happen, quite often with anxiety – that is planning,
or fearing the future… Or we may dwell (abide is the biblical word) in the
present moment – and that is attention.
Prayer, and particularly contemplative prayer, is a matter of
attention. It lives and breathes where
God’s Spirit is present, attending to us in the present moment. I am
with you always… said Jesus. Abide in
me, and I in you…
Now it will always be difficult, as a matter of personal discipline, to
learn to live, to attend, to abide in
the present. Of course we do have to
remember the past and learn from it. We
are silly, even dangerous if we don’t. And
of course we must arrange prudently for the future, as we can. In a way, those are disciplines also. In Greek, all of that is chronos (χρονος), the linear passage of time and events that never
ends. The river of time. But not in prayer. Prayer is being present, now, the heart,
timid perhaps, saying Yes to God and Yes to the way things are… because, for
one thing, there is no help for us, no saving help for our world, in the
denying or concealing of reality. That
meeting, then, in Greek, is kairos (καιρος), the special moment, the time when deep speaks to deep, as the Psalmist put
it, when with the help of our discipline and our mantra we are for the moment
blessedly still and silent, chronos
steps back and kairos takes over -- and
the Spirit can bring new things to birth in us and in our world.
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