The heavens above southern California opened up and saturated the earth last night. It was as if overnight the hills above my home had been injected with celestial steroids (celestial but natural, of course). On my morning hike, everything was greener, fuller, emerging, growing. Business was booming. The hills were singing with new life returning me to my senses—listening to the birdsong, feeling the cool breeze, looking more consciously at the blue sky above and the multicolored valley below—consciously and gratefully taking it all in.
That Lent means springtime makes this last week leading up to Triduum and Easter a prime time for more conscious contemplative engagement. Contemplative spirituality is fittingly a sensuous spirituality. Stated simply, the contemplative person
looks so as to behold,
listens so as to hear,
smells so as to draw in,
touches so as to feel, and
tastes so as to savor.
As I get older the truths that graciously reveal themselves to me are almost always simple ones. The deepening realization that the significant life or the spiritual life is the intentional life. It’s not to say there aren’t holy accidents. But mainly the sages of old and the awakened men and women in our midst today are those who live the most intentionally. The enlightened are not recognized by their blinding haloes but by the fact that they do not wait for trauma or tragedy to wake them up to the gratuitousness of life and the incomprehensible surprise of living. Rather they knowingly weave into the fabric of their daily lives simple ways to wake up or stay awake to the blessedness of being, to the glimpses of grace, to the sheer wonder or exquisite pain of it all. About this decision and way of living, Thoreau used the word “deliberately.” The three hallmark words from the document on liturgy from the Second Vatican Council, you have heard me say over and over again, are words whose implications go well beyond how to worship. They are words of life; words for living that in turn make all of life a liturgy. Those three words are: “fully, actively, and consciously,” the hallmarks of grateful, participative engagement.
In light of this, I offer a simple practice or movement of contemplative engagement that I have used and taught over the years. It is meant to increase our awareness, awaken our hearts, open our senses, and evoke intentional responsiveness. It is a way of entering fully into what Jean-Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment.” My experience is that it is an enlivening habit of the heart and over time has an accumulative effect. Although this conscious way of being engaged with life appears in real time as one fluid motion, in reality it is comprised of a series of moves, each one being a practice unto itself. Each miniature practice gently urges us toward the next. In order to explain it, let me briefly parse these interconnected practices or moments within the flow of the whole movement. In a sensuous spirituality, any of the five senses apply. I will use the sense of sight to illuminate the practice.
STOP!
Remember the wisdom of the enlightened mentioned above. Making the conscious decision to stop (as opposed to waiting until something unfortunate happens to stop us) is by necessity the most crucial part of the practice. The rest of the practice is an extension of this first deliberate decision to pause, to be still. Although not the reason for the practice, I would suggest that making a regular habit of stopping enables us to deal with those unsolicited and unwanted moments in life that stop us short. Take some time this week to stop, be silent, and be still.
LOOK!
(again it could be Listen! Taste! Smell! Touch!) The stopping is to enable us to participate in and enter into more fully a given reality. As opposed to something catching our eye, whether beautiful or horrible or unusual, contemplative seeing or engagement entails “being on the look out for.” Again, what is significant here is the intentionality and consciousness that leads to a more specific type of looking.
NOTICE!
If asked, “What is your (spiritual) practice,” one could do a lot worse than to answer, “My practice is noticing.” David Ignatow’s poem “Each Stone” expresses this well.
Each stone its shape
each shape its weight
each weight its value
in my garden as I dig them up
for Spring planting,
and I say, lifting one at a time,
There is joy here
in being able to handle
so many meaningful
differences.
The contemplative is the man or woman who looks for, notices, sees, and enjoys the unrepeatable miracle of each moment, each person, each place, each stone, and appreciates and celebrates (rather than fears and avoids) so many meaningful differences. Equally important is the insight of the poet Mary Oliver who writes, “If you notice anything, / it leads you to notice / more/ and more.” When I encourage people toward “radical amazement” by practicing “oohing and aahing,” they almost always come back to me and say, “The more I do this, the more I realize how much there is to ooh and aah about.” Precisely! Noticing makes possible our next “movement.”
BEHOLD!
The mystic or contemplative is one who not only looks and notices but one who practices a different way of seeing. This seeing is called beholding. The mystic holds within herself the being or essence of that which is beheld and in turn allows herself to “be held” by it. In this sense, all beholding is interactive and participative as is all true liturgy. Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Dianne Ackerman, who identifies herself as an “earth ecstatic” writes, “There is a form of beholding that is a kind of prayer.” Contemplative seeing is never merely observation but rather an encounter, a holy communion. This is true whether we behold our partner, a child, a redwood tree, the blessed sacrament in the tabernacle or the blessed sacrament holding the sign at the freeway entrance, a hummingbird, a tsunami on TV, or an uprising on the streets in Damascus.
BE SUSCEPTIBLE!
Another way of talking about contemplative seeing as a participative event is by noting that the act of beholding invites from us a certain susceptibility, a sacred vulnerability and openness. To truly behold something or someone means to forfeit any sense of superiority over that which we are beholding and instead summons us to a daring mutuality whereby we don’t merely “look at” or “look on” but rather allow ourselves to be grasped, taken in, and acted upon by the “Other” whatever or whomever the other is. The poet William Stafford used to rise early in the morning to write a poem each day. He described sitting in front of that blank page as being “susceptible to now.” This is the inner movement of vulnerability that all true mystics must make.
BE MOVED!
Whether the “interaction” evokes wonder, awe, and reverence or horror, anger, and deep sympathy, what enables the response is the willingness to be moved by whatever we behold. This is why beholding even the smallest thing is an act of intercommunion with everything. This is why radical amazement and compassion are kin in a spirituality with integrity since the person who truly sees and appreciates the wonderful is more likely to be the one who truly sees and appreciates the dreadful. The openness and vulnerability to willingly be moved indicates that a soft or moist heart is at the core of any contemplative practice or spirituality. This practice softens the human heart.
APPRECIATE!
Beholding, being willing to be acted upon and moved, is the gateway to appreciation. To appreciate means to be aware of the value, significance, or magnitude of something. It also means to increase in value or worth. In this regard, the more we engage in this practice the more we realize that contemplative living simultaneously draws us into the “divinity of just what is” while imparting a spiritual suggestiveness that there is more here than meets the eye. Perhaps the best and most universal word we can find to describe the appreciation toward which beholding leads us is awe, which Rabbi Heschel maintains, even more than faith, is the chief characteristic of a religious attitude toward life.
BE RESPONSIVE or ACT ACCORDINGLY!
You will notice that I did not mention above that appreciate also means to be thankful. This is because if we could freeze frame the “moment” of appreciation in this practice we would see that it is too simplistic to suggest beholding something “good” results in gratefulness whereas beholding something “bad” results in a negative response. In his book The Dark Night of the Soul, the late psychiatrist, spiritual guide, and author Gerald May writes, “I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course there are many events in human history that can only be labeled as evil, but from the standpoint of inner individual experience the distinction has become blurred for me.” He goes on to say that “I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, which I thought was a bad thing. But the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I’d ever been, and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful, but it resulted in a complete cure, which I decided was good. I later found out it may also have caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant.”
There is no stock response to what we behold and what acts on us. Each moment is unique. True seeing, deep listening, or savoring that is attuned to the Spirit of God and the impulse of grace will evoke from us the fitting response which, by way of example, might be anything from awe, gratefulness, joy, laughter, song, delight, hope, horror, disgust, righteous rage, sorrow, lament, sympathy, compassion, or protest.
Whatever fosters real noticing, whatever invites us more deeply into life, whatever makes us linger longer, or truly taste and savor, whatever makes us breathe more deeply, smell more fully, touch more thoughtfully and feel more intensely, whatever summons us to behold and allows us to be broken open and moved by the mystery of creation or oneself or another will go a long ways toward cultivating men and women who are people of wonder and awe as well as deep sympathy and compassionate action.♦
+be blessing,
djm
NB! I write about this practice in my dissertation: Radical Amazement and Deep Sympathy: A Mystical-Prophetic Approach to Pastoral Theology and Care Inspired by the Works of Abraham Joshua Heschel, p 466ff, in relationship to a pastoral care oriented toward cultivating and supporting contemplative engagement.