On the Spiritual Life
With the tradition of making New Year's resolutions to break, I thought this as good a time as any to get all this off my chest. It should also be noted that I am in a much better position to give you a leg up as to what not to do in regards to my aforetitled subject, (I have I think mentioned that I am a screw-up) but there is a long tradition among Christian writers of holding forth on matters of which one knows nothing about, and my unhallowed hands will not soil it.
I was once asked what my key to the Spiritual life was. My first answer, "If all else fails, sin" was, apparently, not what my interlocutor had in mind. (I suppose she had more in mind how I got it right, on the rare occaisions I opened myself up to grace, rather than where I generally ended up when left to my own devices.) So my second answer was "repetition", and that is still my answer.
The story is told of a monk who planted a tree on the top of a mountain and sent his disciple to care for it. "Water it until it blooms." Every day, the young man filled a cup with water, climbed the mountain and poured the water on the spindly little sapling, and returned to his monastery. For three years this process continued with little result. Then one day he filled his cup as always, but upon climbing the mountain, found not a sapling, but a blooming tree, small yes, but a tree.
The moral. At first glance one might say perseverance, and it's a good answer, but there is something more to it, the value of a system. If you were to perform the same action at the same time every day for long enough, the world would simply have to change, you would simply have to change. That is, assuming the action was good. I posit that a person praying the same prayer at the same time every day for as long as it took could alter the course of human life as we know it. Let it also be noted that a regimented approach to prayer is not legalism. Legalism emerges when the time that you pray becomes more important than what you pray, or to whom you pray, but this method, if you will, is more than just doing the same thing over and over.
There is another perspective of viewing repetition. Consider the Mass. Every day, at altars all over the world, Christ is sacramentally present in the sacrifice of the Eucharist, but this is not understood as a repetition of an event, but a single eternal act continually superimposing itself on temporal reality. It is repetitive because it is eternal. Apply this idea to our discussion. Rather than making the spiritual life an act of repeated prayer, the task is to encapsulate our existence in a single unending oratio, to pray with out ceasing. But I do not mean a great, continuous dialogue, but rather a shift in perception, to view each prayer, each word, as an eternity to itself, to live our faith in the present moment. It is not saying the same thing over again, but spanning that singularity over a month, a year, or a lifetime.
That perspective has two immediate results. First, the great easing of our burden. I am not able to keep from sinning all day. I can, I think, keep from sinning for the next moment. Put positively, I can do the next right thing. Ten minutes from know, who knows, but the next right thing is possible. Rather than seeing the big picture, years of struggle for holiness, there is one single moment of being holy, over and over again.
The second is less obvious, and more difficult to obtain. The great problem of sin is remembering it. It is not easy to have faith in God's forgiveness when sin is so fresh on our minds. With learning the holiness of the moment, there must come the turning from the past, to make each moment new. Jesus admonished us not to worry about tomorrow, but we must learn not to worry about yesterday.
This is my New Year's resolution. To live in the present moment, seeing only enough of the past to avoid it's mistakes, and only enough of the future to do the next right thing. I hope to make this year an experiment in repition. I intend to change the world.
"forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."
I was once asked what my key to the Spiritual life was. My first answer, "If all else fails, sin" was, apparently, not what my interlocutor had in mind. (I suppose she had more in mind how I got it right, on the rare occaisions I opened myself up to grace, rather than where I generally ended up when left to my own devices.) So my second answer was "repetition", and that is still my answer.
The story is told of a monk who planted a tree on the top of a mountain and sent his disciple to care for it. "Water it until it blooms." Every day, the young man filled a cup with water, climbed the mountain and poured the water on the spindly little sapling, and returned to his monastery. For three years this process continued with little result. Then one day he filled his cup as always, but upon climbing the mountain, found not a sapling, but a blooming tree, small yes, but a tree.
The moral. At first glance one might say perseverance, and it's a good answer, but there is something more to it, the value of a system. If you were to perform the same action at the same time every day for long enough, the world would simply have to change, you would simply have to change. That is, assuming the action was good. I posit that a person praying the same prayer at the same time every day for as long as it took could alter the course of human life as we know it. Let it also be noted that a regimented approach to prayer is not legalism. Legalism emerges when the time that you pray becomes more important than what you pray, or to whom you pray, but this method, if you will, is more than just doing the same thing over and over.
There is another perspective of viewing repetition. Consider the Mass. Every day, at altars all over the world, Christ is sacramentally present in the sacrifice of the Eucharist, but this is not understood as a repetition of an event, but a single eternal act continually superimposing itself on temporal reality. It is repetitive because it is eternal. Apply this idea to our discussion. Rather than making the spiritual life an act of repeated prayer, the task is to encapsulate our existence in a single unending oratio, to pray with out ceasing. But I do not mean a great, continuous dialogue, but rather a shift in perception, to view each prayer, each word, as an eternity to itself, to live our faith in the present moment. It is not saying the same thing over again, but spanning that singularity over a month, a year, or a lifetime.
That perspective has two immediate results. First, the great easing of our burden. I am not able to keep from sinning all day. I can, I think, keep from sinning for the next moment. Put positively, I can do the next right thing. Ten minutes from know, who knows, but the next right thing is possible. Rather than seeing the big picture, years of struggle for holiness, there is one single moment of being holy, over and over again.
The second is less obvious, and more difficult to obtain. The great problem of sin is remembering it. It is not easy to have faith in God's forgiveness when sin is so fresh on our minds. With learning the holiness of the moment, there must come the turning from the past, to make each moment new. Jesus admonished us not to worry about tomorrow, but we must learn not to worry about yesterday.
This is my New Year's resolution. To live in the present moment, seeing only enough of the past to avoid it's mistakes, and only enough of the future to do the next right thing. I hope to make this year an experiment in repition. I intend to change the world.
"forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,
I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."
posted by Brother Makarias | 7:10 AM
2 Comments:
excellent sir
thank you for the reminder about the repetition of prayer. i desperately needed those words today. many thanks.
"forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."
amen, brother... and happy new year.
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