A Meditation on Psalm 63

"O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you." Psalm 63:1


Psalm 63:1 has become a bit of a mantra for me. I say it silently each morning as I quiet my thoughts before I begin my Centering Prayer, and I find that I return to it throughout the day. I don't always repeat the full verse; sometimes "O God, you are my God" is all I need to re-focus my thoughts.

Several months ago, I realized that as I focused on the words, I would hear "O God, you are my God" as "O God, you are *my* God." I know this may seem minor, but as I considered what it means that I was emphasizing the word "my," I determined there may be a better way than subconsciously putting the focus on my own thoughts or feelings of God.

I realized the better way to hear the phrase was: "O God, you are my God." As in, God IS my God, not God is MY God. God -- who is so intimately present to each of us every second, who created each of us in God's image, who is "being" itself and yet who exists so completely other and separate from anything we can think or project on that Being -- that God is my God.

I've also come to see that if God is my God, then nothing else can be. Of course I would have said this, but it struck me that if I truly, in the depths of my being believe "O God, you are my God," then I need to be consciously aware that:

My loved-ones are not my god.

My roles of daughter, sister, friend, wife, and mother are not my god.

My hopes and dreams and wants and wishes are not my god.

My religion is not my god.

My nation is not my god.

My political views are not my god.

My identity not my god.

My social status is not my god.

My physical appearance is not my god.

My reputation is not my god.

My thoughts are not my god.

My earthly possessions are not my god.

My ideas are not my god.

My opinions are not my god.

My self-worth is not my god.

My life is not my god.

Only God is my God.

I've even begun to insert these sentiments into my mantra when I feel myself identifying too deeply with a thought or emotion that distracts me from a better way to handle everyday situations. For example, I will try to pause and think, "God, YOU are my God. The results of this effort are not my God. You are my God." Or "God, YOU are my God. This person's approval or esteem is not my God. You are my God." Sometimes just the act of stating both who should be my focus, along with who-or-what should not be, is enough to help me navigate frustrating situations with grace.

It has only been a few months, and I'm not perfect at remembering every time, but I'm thankful this is becoming a practice for me. God is my God. Everything thing else is simply part of life, to either be enjoyed or endured.

It really is as simple and beautiful as that.

All I have to do is keep practicing.




Note: for more resources and information on Centering Prayer, I encourage you to check out the  Contemplative Outreach website and/or listen to some of Thomas Keating's work on Audible. Another resource I've discovered recently is Gravity Center, which lists several wonderful resources and offers some excellent videos on contemplation. 

Like Nothing

I've been learning silence for over five months now. I am working to overcome the constant temptation to fill my life with the consumption or production of noise. I find I more often leave my iPod or the television off, instead of leaving one or the other on for background sound. I've taken intermittent breaks from social media. I've hardly written. I've been practicing centering prayer. I've been sitting with process. I've been letting go. So much letting go.

Richard Rohr says that even though he regularly attempts to do so, trying to talk about the letting go we do in silence and presence seems impossible because it "feels like nothing." I have to agree with him. It's like the feeling of a sigh. It's like nothing and everything. It's inexplicable and yet I want so desperately to explain it because maybe then I would have a better understanding of it.

I've only scratched the surface of what silence can teach me. I'm still unmooring, letting go of things that hinder my process. I am still on the threshold between "before" and "after," but just barely. I know what the before was like, but I'm not yet in the after. Actually, I'm not even sure there is an after. All I can sense is a before and a now.

Before I started sitting with silence, my life was all reaction. It was frantic tending of squeaky wheels or dogged avoidance of things that overwhelmed. It was ill-thought responses born from a fear of missing opportunities, not meeting expectations, or leaving things unsaid. Before this experience with stillness and silence, time meant scarcity and urgency and finitude. Before, I constantly measured myself against other people's standards and absorbed their "you should"s as judgement on my life and my performance and my self. I spent time worrying why things that worked for other people didn't seem to work for me and wondering what might be wrong with me that I couldn't keep it together or make people like what I thought or get them to agree with me. Life felt like conflict and striving and opposition much of the time.

Now, the time I spend in silence each day feels like taking a long, indulgent breath. Now, I've realized that I don't have to react to everything because it is okay to step back to formulate a response. Often I find that a response is not even necessary. Time, now, seems like an abundant gift stretching in both directions in a beautiful excess of eternity. I'm not even sure I believe in "missed opportunities" anymore; I believe in what happens. Now, I realize that it is impossible to control the way others respond or how they feel about me or if they ever agree with me. I have to follow my path because it is right for me. I can allow others to follow their path. I don't have to be in conflict or striving or opposition, because I can look for what there is to learn in the now.

I am acutely aware of how my own opinions, indignation, and expectations hinder my ability to love, understand, and be compassionate. I am realizing we are all in process. I can see that it is all grace, and that no one needs grace more than I do. Of course, awareness and realization are just the beginning and I am a long way from practicing any of this perfectly.

And yet, all of that is internal. I can't possibly prove any of it. To anyone else, it probably looks like nothing.




"With grace I am led to see that the only person I can judge, with God's help, is myself. I slowly come to understand that part of what is keeping my community from being all that it can be is my own lack of love, my own carelessness with God's love and the love and struggles of [others]. Seeing us in process and being able to value our incompleteness has been for me a great means of grace." - Macrina Wiederkehr

Unmoored

I am a word person. There are words I love simply for how they look in written form. There are others I love for how they sound, and still others I love for what they mean or who they remind me of. Sometimes I think about situations for much longer than necessary, for the sole purpose of figuring out a single word to describe how I feel about or perceive it.

I am also a writer. Not the kind who is gifted with words crying out to become books or columns or academic papers. No, I'm the kind of writer who uses writing as a way to work through things in her head, regardless of how many people may or may not read it. For as long as I can remember, when I have things I need to process, I write them out.

But I'm currently finding elusive both words and the ability to write things out.

I want to write more about Silence, and maybe I will at some point. Right now, however, I feel too fragile to try to put words around where it is taking me. I can't even seem to write about it privately without feeling a sense of betrayal, as though I need to only hold the experience and let it be what it is without analyzing or searching for explanation.

And when it comes to trying to share any of this with people I know, words may as well not exist. There is almost no one who seems safe enough for me to attempt an explanation of what is going on or how vulnerable and exposed I am. I feel disconnected from just about everyone at present.

By habit, I was contemplating this experience and attempting to come up with a word for it. Maybe I can’t write about all the details or explain myself out loud, but if I could at least identify a single word to encompass it all, I’d be able to put this phenomenon into that word and hold that word in the midst of what is unfolding.

 

Unmoored.

That’s the word I kept coming back to every time, even though I wasn't entirely sure what it meant. Sure, I knew it was a nautical term and I had an impression of its meaning, but had never looked it up in the dictionary. In my mind I associated “unmoored” with “adrift,” but "adrift" didn't entirely fit. So I looked it up.

un·moor  [uhn-moor]

1. to loose from moorings or anchorage.

2. to bring to the state of riding with a single anchor after being moored by two or more.

That's all I have at this point. I’m not even going to attempt to explain how entirely accurate the definition is for what I’m experiencing. Perhaps someday I will have more words and be able to write a beautiful reflection on my unmooring season. Maybe, but not today.

Inexplicable

This is a short reflection on some of the words I've encountered and have been sitting with as I explore what silence means for me this year. I use "sitting with" because stating I'm "learning" or "understanding" could give the impression that I have a better grasp on any of this than I actually do. The following may not seem to scream "silence," but it's there.

In a series of talks with Fr. Thomas Keating, Fr. Richard Rohr speaks of how our ego or "false self" is what causes us to define ourselves in terms of what we dislike or what we are against. This "contrariness," as Julian of Norwich terms it, closes us off from experiencing deeper levels of faith and life, "because it’s always defining itself in terms of analysis, critique, judgment, labeling, or positioning, and this game of positioning is a mind game." Rohr says this mind game is "entirely an inner system that makes [us] feel important," but actually leads us into conflict with ourselves and others. It is necessary to let go of our false self in order to be who we truly are, but he explains that letting go of how we've learned to define ourselves can be incredibly distressing:

It’s all about letting go... It’s not about controlling or achieving or promoting or attaining…  it feels like dying in the first instance, because you've spent so much time living out of this mind and this ego that you think is you.... It will feel, in the first instance, like losing and like dying…these “little dyings” that have to become an art form and that you have to go through once, twice, several significant times to know, as the poet said, “What did I ever lose by dying?”

As I'm sitting with these words and others from Keating and Merton, what I'm experiencing does seem, at the risk of sounding a bit dramatic, "like losing and like dying."

In the midst of that, however, I think I might also be just beginning to catch infinitesimal glimpses that I am someone aside from all the ways I've previously defined myself - aside from what I do or don't do, what I like or dislike, how others approve of or disapprove of me - and apart from any labels or judgement that could be applied to me by myself or others.

I don't know how else to explain or define any of this. I know that it feels quite humbling and somewhat lonely.

And yet, inexplicably, also like becoming known.

OneWord 2014: Silence

"We work out our salvation in silence and in hope. Silence is the strength of our interior life....Without this silence, our virtues are sound only, only an outward noise, a manifestation of nothing..." - Thomas Merton


What words do I use to explain why "silence" is my word for 2014? I've been trying for weeks to write this post, but I realize I must rely heavily on the wisdom of others to communicate why I chose Silence this year.

Merton and other contemplatives like Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr write of silence as the place within each of us where we discard our false-selves and the external props we often depend on to "prove" ourselves or our faith. By embracing and fully experiencing our inner silence, we learn to be who we truly are. I've been re-reading portions of Thomas Merton's No Man is an Island, and keep returning to this excerpt:

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. 

We cannot experience this making "peace with ourselves" or "quiet expression of our inner life," without becoming well-acquainted with our interior silence.

I often feel a compulsion to react to what is going on around me and to fill silence with outward noise. Yet I've realized in the past weeks that I need to withdraw from the impulse to react, so I can explore the true motivations for my reactions. When I am filling space with my own noise, I am not making room for what God may be trying to speak to me in silence, nor what I may need to hear from others speaking out of the silence of their interior life.

Practicing silence doesn't mean always being silent, but it does mean honoring my own silence and the silence of others by not giving in to the discomfort that seeks to fill it without purpose. Practicing silence is one way in which I can learn to detach myself from a desire for others to hear and understand me, in order that I will hear myself and others more clearly and with understanding.

I'm not going to preemptively limit this experience by trying to create a detailed plan. I intend to explore more deeply the practice of contemplative prayer and I may attend some religious services where silence is practiced in community. I hope to go on a spiritual retreat that cultivates silence if I can, but I'm not making that a requirement. I am open to the possibility (read: probability) that my year with silence will be nothing like I'm envisioning right now.

Here is a final excerpt from Merton that I've been meditating on and which influenced me to choose Silence for 2014:

If we fill our lives with silence, then we live in hope, and Christ lives in us and gives our virtues much substance. Then, when the time comes, we confess Him openly before men, and our confession has much meaning because it is rooted in deep silence. It awakens the silence of Christ in the hearts of those who hear us, so that they themselves fall silent and begin to wonder and to listen. For they have begun to discover their true selves. If our life is poured out in useless words we will never hear anything in the depths of our hearts, where Christ lives and speaks in silence. 

I want to fill my life with silence, so that when I speak I am not pouring out useless words, but rather speaking hope to the silence in the hearts of those who hear.