Tag Archives: cloud of unknowing

Meditating in Tongues

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Even though I believe that The Gift of Speaking in Tongues as the Pentecostals practice it is a malpracticed theology that is closer to group hypnosis and the madness of crowds than it is of any true spiritual event, we often take on a useful variation on the concept which takes us farther away from daily distractions and closer to a place of meditation and the contemplative life.

Think about how many times in you life you quote lines of scripture using the archaic language of the King James Bible:

thy kingdom come, thy will be done….

Or in school, reading:

Life’s but a walking shadow,
a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more;

it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
signifying nothing.

Most people outside of Quaker circles no longer use variations on thee, thy, and thou in daily conversation. Yet by using those words in the language of spirituality, we place ourselves in a different emotional state – more reflective than using you and your. How easy it is to change our mental state by changing the pronouns we use or to add -eth onto the end of verbs:

He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock.
that shadows the dry thirsty land;
he hideth my life in the in the depths of his love,
and covers me there with his hand,
and covers me there with his hand.

In talking to my friend Rev. D-Frazz about teaching religious ideas to non-religious people, this idea of speaking in tongues came to me, but not in the way the Bible speaks of it.

The Pentacost story speaks of the Holy Spirit falling upon men as if tongues of fire and by this visitation they all began to speak to each other in other languages, as the spirit enabled them. Not everyone could so speak, and some could instead hear.

This is the point at which my Pentecostal friends seem to stop reading and comprehending. It’s what happened next that is the making of the story:

At this same time, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven were there in Jerusalem. When they heard this enormous sound (of the visitation,) the crowd came together and they were utterly amazed, because each person heard the sound in their own language. There was no incoherent babbling in ancient Sumerian, what they heard was in their own words. They asked the question of the day:

How is it that each one of us hears them in our own native language?

And so it is with our meditations.

The story above is a lead-in to teaching us about the Ministry of the Word to all nations and all peoples by coming to them and speaking in a language that they can understand. Using a language of both words and actions. Oh a second level it is also the story of how we can use language to speak within ourselves in a tongue understood by the heart.

The perfect example of this is the mantra. Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ is the most familiar of the Buddhist mantras and is a series of seven syllables used in a spiritual practice of repetition. By removing focus from the outer world and focusing on the meaning of the syllables (rather than parroting the sounds) the practice leads to focus and inner peace. And even though the phrase is universal, probably only a small percentage of its users can speak or read Sanscrit.

A couple of decades back, Gregorian Chant was all the rage as the album Chant by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos was marketed as a $15 answer to finding peace and serenity.  But this is something contemplatives had known all along.

Again, by moving the conversation away from our daily home tongue into a now dead language (Latin), the focus became not so much on what we were saying, but how it was being said. By taking away the challenges  of “trying to form a sentence” in a prayerful moment, the prayer comes through the cadence of the sounds of the chant, and through the body vibrations of sounding the Om mantra, deep within our diaphragm. In that moment of simple movement of sound through the air, we catch a glimpse of the definition of prayer being “the breath within the breath.” It exists also as the silence beyond all silence, and as a simple hum.

How does this relate to non-religious or non-spiritual people? The same way that hymn singing does: when beginning a contemplative practice, any particular belief (or non-belief) is not a requirement. The must-have lists includes things like patience and persistance, a desire to self-learn within a great silence, and to work through what an early anonymous writer called The Cloud of Unknowing. Some form of spiritual enlightenment is the goal of such a practice. When you get there, please send me back a post card.

 Practices vary greatly. My own includes the use of a single “sacred word,” same as is taught in the tradition of Contemplative (Centering) prayer. Some friends us visualizations or guided meditations in a yoga practice, and some recite rosaries or concentrate on plainsong. In each of these examples, the practice demands our moving away from the everyday words that we use and moving toward the words that we understand. The deeper knowledge of that which we seek then enables us to better respond to those around us, to see beyond words for words’ sake, and to hear instead the voice of the universe all around,

in our own native language that we can understand.

Keep the faith!

 

 

Zen Garden

 

Russian Polyphonic Chant

Plainsong

 

Sacred Harp

The American Song Book

 

 

 

 

How to Pray (When it can’t be fixed, put right, or healed)

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Even though I have seen miraculous healing in my travels, I do not believe in miracle healers. At least not on this side of heaven. There’s even a school in South Carolina where  you can go to now to learn to be a faith healer.

I don’t believe – in the unseen parts of the gospels – that Jesus took any sort of a how-to course in healing the blind or raising the dead. He seems to have worked from a place of simple assurance with words like:

“Your faith has set you free.”

So what to do when someone is in a very bad way, with a situation that cannot be put right, or won’t ever heal as we know it? What about folks who live in a place of a horrible natural disaster, or who were in the wrong place at the wrong time when some madness broke loose?

This is  a tough prayer – one of the most difficult you can utter since you know deep down that praying “cure my friend” most likely won’t happen. It’s difficult to keep praying along the lines of “do what it is your will to do” and not wander away into thoughts of “WHY – Lord – why do bad things happen to good people?”

This is difficult for us  because the armature of prayer is in the surrender.

The power comes from a realization that we are facing in such times, a situation that we cannot control, that our friends cannot control, and rather than worry and stress, we release the fear. We turn loose of the trepidation. We let go of all the questions about “why did this happen?” The answer becomes insignificant while in the midst of the battle. Instead,

We simply … pray.

In this prayer, I’ve left two large parenthetical sections blank into which you can insert the specifics of what (or who) you are praying for, and why.  The goal here is not to find the near-impossible miracle of turning all things right, but instead of finding the everyday miracle of seeking the presence of the Maker to stand with us, and give us ALL the strength and courage to face tough times ahead.

A Prayer…..

Christ Jesus,

We would like to stay close to you.

And to entrust to you those
who are going through suffering,
and trusting us.

We pray for the victims of
(                                                       ).

We pray for those who are close to us
and living with
(                                                        ).

And ask for them all,
your presence,
full of compassion.

- Amen

 

Keep the faith!

 

Bilbo’s Last Song At The Gray Havens

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In one of my last meetings with Dr. Clark Wang, we were talking about his preparations to venture off to the other side of the country to have a double bone marrow transplant for his rapidly advancing Lymphoma. It was a long trip for someone not in pristine health, and the chances of returning to the South were not high.

Many months before, he had begun a courageous and most-public pre-planning for his funeral, investigating Green funeral processes that do not add chemicals to the environment, physically, and represents the most direct interpretation of “From dust you are and to dust you shall return,” spiritually. He spoke and wrote with amazing candor on the topic and taught me much about how our physical death can be an easy moment of transition for our bodies to return to the earth, and not do any harm to the earth while doing so.

We first met through a Blood Cancers survivors (and care givers) support group at Duke University Hospital where we were both oncology patients. We spent December of 2009 in a special class offered by the Medical Hypnosis Society of North Carolina, on self-hypnosis for Cancer Patients. The goal of that class is to use simple-to-learn self-hypnosis techniques for many side effects of the cancer treatment process: chronic pain management, skin issues (at the time I had uncontrollable itching on my arms due to one of my post-treatment drugs), and a lot of general survival stress. With a cancer diagnosis, and subsequent treatment, Life changes. We use every tool at hand to fight the good fight.

Even alternative treatments like Hypnosis.

December of 2009 wasn’t a great month for either of us. He was in the midst of increasing problems with his latest remitting of the cancer. I was only able to locomote by way of a wheelchair. It didn’t really slow either of us down.

As he moved deeper into the spiritual depth of his Life (a difficult and tumultuous time for one who is trained to be a person of numbers, a scientist), we talked about what it would be like to take that final launch. I mentioned Tolkein’s poem Bilbo’s Song at the Gray Havens,  and even though he was familiar with The Hobbit and the Return of the King trilogy, he hadn’t read this poem.

In the story, as Bilbo has finished all that he was to accomplish in Middle Earth, he boards the boat in which he sails off quite literally in the sunset, in a beautiful setting that gleams with familiar Nordic mythology. And this, as he sailed away from all that had burdened him, and aged him, and laid heavy on his heart – this song is what he composed.

I am glad to have had the time to share it with my friend Clark. I’m glad for our times together, even as they tested the deepest parts of my soul with hard-hitting dialogue that pulls no punches. A dialogue that only two friends – and two comrades at arms – can have.

Bilbo’s Last Song At the Gray Havens
by J.R.R. Tolkein

Day is ended, dim my eyes,
but journey long before me lies.
Farewell, friends! I hear the call.
The ship’s beside the stony wall.
Foam is white and waves are grey;
beyond the sunset leads my way.
Foam is salt, the wind is free;
I hear the rising of the Sea.

Farewell, friends! The sails are set,
the wind is east, the moorings fret.
Shadows long before me lie,
beneath the ever-bending sky,
but islands lie behind the Sun
that I shall raise ere all is done;
lands there are to west of West,
where night is quiet and sleep is rest.

Guided by the Lonely Star,
beyond the utmost harbour-bar,
I’ll find the heavens fair and free,
and beaches of the Starlit Sea.
Ship, my ship! I seek the West,
and fields and mountains ever blest.
Farewell to Middle-earth at last.
I see the Star above my mast!

 

What Inspires Me? Alleluias in the Minor Keys

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Stave One:

What inspires me? I fell upon doing a series of Advent meditations on “Veni Veni Emmanuel” this year after listening to my friend, Sandra Julian’s Christmas album. Especially “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence,” which is one of those songs in which the Angels hide their faces, sing Alleluias, all in a minor key.

I cannot sing this song at Eucharist and not weep with that mix of “Wow!” and “Oh. Ok.”

(You can find a copy of Sandra’s album XXX in the iTunes Store. Click there to hear samples of the songs.

Stave Two:

This is a version of the song by my friend Cynthia Clawson from her album The Hymnsinger. I liked this version because it reminded me of the recitation in the middle of the Gaither song, “When All God’s Singers Get Home,” because she presents the song as if the Angels are harmonic, not in unison.

Of course, seeing her perform is 60% of the joy of Cynthia’s work because she involves her entire body and soul in her work. This woman could sing the phone book and bring all the saints into the room with her!

Stave Three

Finally – this instrumental version for pipe organ and English Horn is my favorite of all. This is very much what I hear on occasion when this comes up at church during communion: the congregation goes through the verses of the song, and then depending on the size of the crowd, the organist extemporizes a “meditation” on the hymn tune until everyone is served and seated.

I call it a “meditation” when I sit down and attempt this at a piano – the organist at church calls it “Traveling Music.” I have also heard him on many occasions to the same meditative, almost prayerful maze through the melody on the organ, as the closing moments of silence in a late-night sung Compline (the last service of the day, in the American Episcopal church.) One minister described this as “letting the music flow over you” for those few moments before gathering up scarves and hats, book bags and canes, and wandering back out into the cool winter of a late Sunday night in a college town.

I sit in those moments, eyes closed, and feel the plaintive sound of Alleluia! Alleluia! from the Cherubim and Seraphim: they say Alleluia, and yet… even in the shouting of great joy, we hear the foreshadowing of great sorrow.

That moment for me is as if looking into an icon of Mother and Child, the baby reaching up to his mom, and Mary looking down at her newborn kid with a look of such sadness it is as if she knows what will become of him… of them… over the years. Mary – the mother of Jesus – the Western Christian’s prime example of the line “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.”

The End of it All:

Let all mortal flesh keep silence, 
and with fear and trembling stand;
Ponder nothing earthly minded, 
For with blessing is His hand,
Christ our God to earth descendeth, 
Our full homage to demand.

King of Kings, Yet born of Mary, 
As of old on earth He stood,
Lord of Lords, in human vesture, 
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful 
his own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven 
spreads it's vanguard on the way,
As Light of Light descendeth 
from the realms of endless day.
That the powers of hell may vanish 
as the darkness clears away.

At His feet the six-winged seraph, 
Cherubim, with sleepless eye,
Veil their faces to His presence 
as with ceaseless voice they cry:
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Lord Most High!


Lyrics: Liturgy of St. James (4th C.) Translated from the Greek by Gerard Moultrie (1864)
Hymn Tune: Picardy (a French carol melody)

Keep the faith!

- Alleluia!

Centering Prayer: the “Sacred Word”

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For those of you who are familiar with the practice of Centering Prayer  as a contemplative practice, I got this very interesting quote today that is from a 14th Century book called The Cloud of Unknowing: The Classic of Medieval Mysticism.  I admit that I never read this book in my travels because the translation is heavy-handed even for me to read.

This quote speaks to the choice of the Sacred Word, which we choose in our Centering Prayer practice, that helps guide us away from thoughts and restlessness and back into a receptive state of prayer:

“…to gather all of your desire into one simple word choose a simple word and leave the faculties at peace.”

I other words, to pull us back into our prayerful mind and away [if we can] from that restless “monkey mind” it’s best to choose a simple word, not distracting in itself.

I’ve had two in my life (for some reason I’ve never divulged them) and the idea is to find one that is comfortable and live with it, and never switch words mid-prayer (because then you’re off in this whole mental conversation about work choice, word changing, I wonder who else uses that one, is it to silly to use… and on and on and on until your time is up and you’ve spend no time praying and your whole time thinking of a word that is supposed to help you pray! :)

Examples are words like… peace, Jesus, Abba, Amma, Amen, Mary, etc., All simple words that keep you in the right mode but don’t get distracting like “Joshu’a Fit the Battle of Jericho” etc which would then have me humming and singing, not praying.

Prayer, as difficult and exhausting as it can be to do, is at its root about simplicity and our quiet, kind conversations with our Maker.

Prayer is not a shopping list of Give-Me’s

Prayer is not a blind recitation of memorized phrases that become shallow with years worth of performances.

It’s simply our Honest, laying it all out there conversations, and our most intimate relationship, with God.

 - Amen