I’ve been musing to myself this week about what happens in my daily sit. Like a collection of pocket lint, these musings have been telling me something about what I carry with me each day.
I practice every day not to get good at meditation or wear the costume of a contemplative. I come to practice to practice. To practice showing up vulnerably before the ever abiding God, as I am, even when I can’t imagine the fullness of who that is.
I begin by stapling my attention to an intention to apprentice itself to the eternal silence presencing itself to me behind the presenting thoughts.
One of the treasures of silent meditation or prayer is how silence can hold all that life throws at it. Behind the noise and clammer of war songs, filtered beauty contests, strung out anxiety…are the arms of silence. Holding it all…in all of its absurdity. We pitch in, we try to help out by directing the traffic of our wayward thoughts. And we fall into the trap of thinking we can fix our fixed attention through more thinking, more effort.
It is detachment to intentionally fall silent before external inputs, to bow to the mystery of God that lays behind the facade of fixed attention.
Thoughts are the Ned Flanders of this type prayer. They spring right into view when we least want their neighborliness. Kindness and rudeness hold no sway, these thoughts keep intruding. We practice letting the thoughts drift through without inviting them in for tea. There they are, there they go, or there they stay.
We come to place of leaving detachment behind, and what is, is.
In this word or wordlessness, our practice becomes a continual awareness of God’s presence. Sometimes it’s as inarticulate as watercolors. Other times its brazen as graffiti. The word try starts to sound funny cause the Gift is already opened, we are neither lost nor found in the desert of silence. And there is no traffic to direct in the desert.
We are at play in God’s silence and we ring bells to remind ourselves of this.
photo by Contemplify
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