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Thursday, August 07, 2003

 
A brief note on Meditation to add to the comments that follow.

Today is Thursday, the day the John Paul has proposed for meditating on the Luminous Mysteries. For non-Catholics, I should explain that the Rosary, as most Catholics know it, tradtionally has 15 mysteries. The first five are the Joyful Mysteries (the Annunciation, the Visitation with Elizabeth, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Finding in the Temple.) There are Sorrowful Mysteries (including the Crucifixion), and Glorious Ones (starting with the Resurrection). This system of 15 is actually a reduction from an older system of 150. The whole thing was designed as a way to teach illiterates the essentials of the Gospel, but every Catholic is expected to pray it regularly. It unites Catholics at all levels.

As Peggy Noonan commented when the Pope restored five mysteries and gave them the name "the Mysteries of Light," he filled what seemed to be an obvious gap between Christ as a child and Christ's Death and Resurection. The Bible, of course, leaves us in the dark about the 18 years between the incident when Mary and Joseph had to look for the 12-year-old Jesus and found him teaching in the Temple, and when his public career began at age 30. But the traditional Rosary made an even greater leap.


A valued Protestant friend--my best friend, in fact, a Mennonite minister--echoed that observation by saying that the ancient Creeds seem to make the same jump. What he pointed to was the complete absence of references to Christ's teaching.

Now, the Pope is not going to change the Creeds. The Apostle's Creed has no history or known author, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which Catholics recite at every Sunday Mass, was written by two Councils. And he cannot really "change" the Rosary, as it is a custom. He can only propose.

But my Protestant friend's observation, and John Paul's proposal, point to a very important matter of Christian worship.

John Paul's restored Mysteries also make no mention of Christ's teachings. They begin where Scripture resumes its account of Christ's earthly life, with his first miracle, the changing of the water into wine at the wedding in Cana. They are all about incidents in Christ's life and His actions in the Church, as the traditional 15 have been.

I certainly cannot claim any authority other than my own for this formulation, but, as I have stumbled through life, it has seemed to me, more and more, that "What Would Jesus Do?" is the wrong question. "What DID Jesus Do?"--that's the important one.

Given our desire for clear answers, it is easy to look on Jesus's teachings as the end point of His ministry here on earth, as the aspect of His life to which we should pay greatest attention. His life illustratees his teachings, in this understanding. Certainly Protestantism, with its preference for interpreting Scripture according to the sense of the clearest words, tends to prefer this interpretation.

And yet even the infallible word of God iin Scripture is expressed in human language, and is therefore limited in its ability to grasp the essence of God. There are many sections of Scripture that are difficult to understand, and it seems to me, now, that the clear ones should be interpreted by them, and no the other way around. Ultimately, we must understand that all our understanding is dependent on God's revelation.

But Jesus, the Word Incarnate, is the perfect revelation of God, and of Man.

His teachings, in this understanding, point us to "the Man, Jesus Christ." Thus, we can contemplate, as we should, what "Judge not, lest ye be judged" might mean. We should hold it in our hearts and pray for deeper understanding. But our understanding is limited. That is why that troublesome "would" appears in the famed WWJD question.

Where can we find understanding? In Jesus Himself. And so the Church proposes that we should always keep in view the actual life of Jesus as He lived it here among us. And so John Paul II has restored to the Rosary Five Luminous Mysteries which will help us focus on that Most Holy Person.

NOT WISHING TO LEAVE A NEGATIVE IMPRESSION OF MY BEST FRIEND: He made one comment that has stayed with me. When you meet someone who is really "on fire for Jesus," as the fundamentalists say, what he most often is most excited about is some aspect of the personality of Jesus. That catches it exactly: our understanding is limited, but what we understand we must be passionate about. It all points to Jesus.



Monday, August 04, 2003

 
Keep Your Minds On Things Which Are Above.

This week’s Time magazine brings a long cover story on meditation, the Eastern kind. It reminded me of a lesson I learned long ago, and must relearn every day.

The Eastern kind of meditation has been popular, of course, since the 1960’s and before, and at first sight it has some attraction for a Christian, with its emphasis on the other wordly and withdrawal from the demands of this life. Any Christian can heartily endorse the concept that there is more to reality than the shallow experiences offered by a purely materialist consumer culture. But Christian meditation is not Eastern meditation, and in many ways it is diametrically opposite.

A distinction must surely be made between certain forms of Eastern physical exercise and the religion that goes along with them. I used to teach Japanese misfits who had been sent to the United States because of their own failure in the highly regimented Japanese educational system. To the strain of learning a new language was added the weight of shame at having embarrassed their families, and they felt all of it heavily. (These were perhaps the students I have known best, and that is pretty much the way they themselves described their own situations, lest anyone thinks I am being culturally insensitive.) They used to stand in the hall during break and help each other with relaxation and stretching exercises that are probably based on the same general ideas as basic yoga exercises. Those seem to have an obvious benefit divorced from their religious origin, as the Japanese themselves try to divorce them.

But that is not all there is to this kind of thing, and the spiritual dimension should be carefully considered. Alexis de Toqueville commented somewhere that it was easy to see that health might become a religion in the United States, and that was in the 1830's. We all know people who have become unbalanced in their dedication to lifting weights and other Western forms of exercise, which lend themselves readily to raw idolatry of the flesh. So too must beneficial exercises from other cultures be weighed against spiritual temptations they contain. Each culture, as the Holy Father reminded us in "Faith and Reason," has its wisdom and its spiritual lessons, but, he emphasized, the fullest revelation of Truth is in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What is true in other cultures will point to Him; what leads away from Him is false.

There is no question I myself have a mystical bent, though I am a mystic almost devoid of anything like mystical experiences. No floating, no visions, no voices that I can recall, and my basic attitude toward life’s difficulties can be annoyingly analytic and cold. But thanks to an unhappy childhood and some wonderful Baptist Bible teachers, I have long been aware that the world we see is not all there is. Indeed, what we see exists within the larger sphere of all God’s creation, including the angels and other spiritual beings. Far more wonderfully, as Christians, we dwell within Christ, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” My experiences made me ache for something more; the Baptist teachers showed me that the Word of God points clearly to a world much larger than this mortal coil.

Indeed, when I was received into the Roman Church, it seemed to me and to others that She was getting Herself someone primed for a rich mystical life.

In the years prior to my conversion, I had been floundering in a more broadly Evangelical milieu which heavily emphasized moral discussion over worship and I had gone searching for much deeper experiences. I rediscovered the glorious 19th Century hymns which had fed me as a teenager, but, when I went back to purely Baptist churches, I sensed that they lacked something. During this time, and for reasons that I absolutely cannot remember, I picked up a copy of something known as the Liturgy of the Hours, and in so doing, I knew that I was really headed to Rome.

When I finally found my way home, the priests around me all assumed that my spiritual practices meant I was destined for the priesthood. That was a charitable and natural assumption on their part, but I knew and still know, as Clint Eastwood, “That’s not going to happen.” It also turned out that I had some other lessons to learn.


Let us look again at the Time magazine cover story: it offers an explanation of “how it works.”

“Works.” Now there is a loaded word. I first heard a detailed explanation of Transcendental Meditation at my high school in the early 1970’s. I went to a slightly “advanced” Episcopalian prep school, and so all the most stylish trends sweeping the nation first made their way into then remote Central Florida through my high school. The priests, while all liberal politically, were also all doctrinally orthodox, and my introduction to the liturgy there most certainly counts as an important part of what Catholics call my “preparation” for Catholicism. Yet the administration also had a hard time saying “no” to anything, on the usual grounds of tolerance and open-mindedness, and so my Intro to Psych class and several others found themselves in the audio-visual room getting a bald-faced pitch for the system of the notorious Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The speaker was a salesman, nothing more and nothing less, and he cast the entire “spiritual” system in terms of the “benefits” usually associated with the very American tradition of self-help: happiness, emotional control, and greater productivity. The Time cover story, while vaguely skeptical, differed very little from that presentation I heard nearly 30 years ago.

Another moment of revelation, many years later: I cater to make extra money, and for years, several of my coworkers were Buddhist monks. It was a good way for them to make extra money and still be available for their duties at their monastery, which was located in a rich, toney neighborhood. (They did not wear saffron robes at work, naturally, but tuxedos, as did the rest of us. The shaved heads were noticeable.) One night, we were in one of those new-style, huge suburban homes—a “space waster,” as a teen-aged friend has described them. The family had a very small, adorable toddler, a young girl. One of the monks was managing the party that night. As the child scampered around underfoot while we set up, he commented that she must have led a good previous life. Being born rich was, in Buddhism, a sign of blessing, a reward for past deeds. I said, “oh, really?” but I was thinking, “I know a Jewish carpenter who said the exact opposite.”

I have been exposed to Eastern spirituality in the same way that all Americans have been, and watched the behavior of Hollywood’s many public supporters of the Dalai Lama. And I listened as my friends openly proselytized at work.

If I had to boil down everything I have heard about Eastern mysticism into one concern, it would be “self”: self-fulfillment, self-control, self-improvement.

And then there is the object of Eastern meditation, which is often expressed in terms of clearing your mind, concentrating on the void, experiencing nothingness.

How very different from Christian meditation, which must serve the ends laid down by Christ in the two greatest commandments: to love God with all our being, and to love others as ourselves.
First and foremost, the point of any truly Christian form of meditation is not to separate ourselves from everything and experience nothingness. The point is to separate ourselves from the irrelevant and to be filled with love, to experience the other. The other we are to experience is the “man, Jesus Christ.”

It is good to remember, always, the end of the Christian life: to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. We are all broken and imperfect images, even the holiest saint, but we meet Him in the His Word, in our fellow Christians, in the Liturgy. Bit by bit, step by step, we “become as he is.”

When we think of the life of Christ here on earth, what is the one word that comes to mind? Sacrifice. And so Christian meditation differs from Eastern meditation not only in its object, but in its result. After a serious encounter with Christ, we do not withdraw from others; we seek to give, as Christ gave Himself in the ultimate sacrifice. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas encouraged contemplatives to welcome the call from seclusion to the active life, understandable though the desire to stay might be.



What then of my own experience?

I assumed when I was coming into the Catholic Church that I would simply get more and more diligent at keeping the Liturgy of the Hours. That is not what happened.

First, a word of explanation. The Liturgy of the Hours is the ancient cycle of Scripture recitation and prayer used by priests and others in religious life since the earliest days of the Church. The day is marked by hours when you pause to recite Scripture and pray. A further explanation of it follows this post.


(John Paul II has been offering meditations on the Psalms and readings from the Hours since the conclusion of the Jubilee Year, to encourage all Christians to take up the Liturgy of the Hours.)

I have only been able to do all the Hours every day for one two week period. Other than that, it has been hit or miss. Nonetheless, they have been a beloved companion for the last four years, and a great school of prayer.

If we are to restrict ourselves to the kinds of “benefits” promoted by Eastern meditation, self-help psychology, and other “New Age” programs, the Liturgy of the Hours were a help to me. I sometimes use the Italian version, for various reasons, and there is one Italian hymn that I love, for the 12:00 noon prayer. It runs: “Glorious and powerful Lord, who alters the rhythm of time, irradiates the morning with light, and lights the afternoon with fires. You quiet the contending sadness, you extinguish the flames of wrath, fill limbs with vigor, and grant peace to hearts.”

If there is one area where my failings are epic, it is in “organization.” That, indeed, is the reason I quit my last desk job and went into the service industry: to get skills in organizing. I can now unload large trucks and set up a formal seated dinner with dancing for 300 with a maximum of speed and a minimum of shouting. In three languages. But my private life improved only marginally.

The Hours gave me exactly a “rhythm of time” that had been lacking before, and a rhythm that had a point, a center. Combined with skills I acquired from managing, quite a few of my perennial problems came under control. But not all.

Yet there was little "wrong" with my life: I had interesting work, an easy if irregular schedule, and ample funds to live. Things needed correcting, but I somehow always landed on my feet and never felt the need to finally settle some unsettled problems, even though I could readily see what they were.

And, in my sinfulness, I found in the Hours and in reading on mysticism a temptation to withdrawal.

Thus, to others, it looked as if other areas of my life might drop off, and I would end up concentrating on them, a priest in the making. What was really happening was that some great contradictions in my life met in my prayers. Life does not stand still, and those contradictions manifested themselves. In some areas, they even became a crisis. Instead of a deepened familiarity with the Hours, I drifted away and became cold. When I began to realize where I had landed and I could see the crisis looming, the struggle to come back held other lessons.

How I learned those lessons, and what the lessons were, will be the subject of the next post, which will probably be up on Sunday, August 10.

Until then, blessings...

What is the Liturgy of the Hours?

You may have noticed, in the hands of priests or of members of religious communities, a small, fat book with a set of ribbons to mark places. That was probably the Liturgy of the Hours.

As with much that is most venerated in Christian life--such as teh Apostle's Creed--there is no real documented history to the Hours. It most probably arose out of Jewish liturgical practice, but the evidence is very far from conclusive. There is some evidence that it started as a lay practice.


It is known as the Liturgy of the Hours because it divides the day into parts. There are prayers for when you rise, 9:00 a.m., 12 noon, and 3:00 pm, the evening, and when you go to bed.

The two most important are Morning Prayer (in older terminology, lauds or matins) and Evening Prayer (vespers). They are considered extensions of the Mass, and are technically required for everyone in religious life. The whole system fell into disuse by the 19th Century. As with its closely related treasure, Gregorian Chant, it was revived then and its observance has grown, such that John Paull II has spent the last two years encouraging lay people to take it up, though, as usual with this Pope, most in the American Church has not apparently heard about that.

All but the first and last hour have three Psalms or sections of larger Psalms. Most of the hours have short readings from other sections of Scripture and some have prayers. One is dedicated entirely to reading.

Here is a brief outline of the day according the Liturgy of the Hours:

Invitatory (i.e., invitation to worship): A simple recitation of a Psalm usually Psalm 94 (95):" Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord Our God, Our Maker."

Office of Readings (to be said at any hour, usually privately): A hymn, three Pslams, a long reading from Scripture, a long reading from a Doctor of the Church,a Council, or some other edifying source.)


Morning Prayer (often communal): A hymn, three Pslams, a Scripture reading, the Benedictus (The Canticle of Zeccharias from Luke 1, "Blessed by the Lord God of Israel), intercessions, the Our Father, concluding prayer..

The Middle Hours (very brief):
9, 12, 3: a hymn, 3 Psalms, a very brief reading and a prayer.

Evening worship (often communal): a hymn, three psalms, a Scripture Reading, the Magnificat (the Canticle of Mary from Luke 1: "My sould doth magnify the Lord."), intercessions, the Our Father., concluding prayer.

Night Prayer (or "compline," before retiring): A hymn, one or two pslams, the Nunc Dimmittis (The Canticle of Simeon from the Presentation in the Temple in Luke 2:"Now, O Lord, Let your servant go in peace..."





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