Food and contemplation

A chilly spring morning finds me trying to pray, to reflect on what Ron Rolheiser has to say about prayer, and finally to try to understand what he means by saying that living contemplatively means that our lives are not trivial, unimportant, or anonymous.

When I think of the ordinary tasks of the day, I turn to my love of food and the way I enjoy Lidia's Italian cooking show on TV because she is so natural and well grounded, just as food (even shopping) keeps us grounded. I think of her as I cook and I value the time I spend in the kitchen, with the ordinary, everyday details that make up a life, from chopping to cleaning up the sink.

To work with food, to read about it (no wonder there are so many cookbooks and magazines devoted to recipes, so many restaurant reviews) is so fundamentally human; somehow doing so connects us with the earth, with creation, and with others around the world who are also chopping, cooking, eating, savoring the flavors that nature so bountifully provides.

I used to think of cooking as a creative thing, and it is; now I see it mainly as a spiritual act that reminds us how earth-bound attention to the present really is.  The life of prayer and contemplation is not vague and abstract and other-worldly; it is rooted in the goodness of everyday, in the creation of which we are a part.

To cook and to eat what we prepare is in a sense to be in communion with Mother Earth and with God's creation. This realization is itself a prayer and a reminder of how the little, ordinary things of daily life are holy, are universal and timeless; and that our humble daily tasks, which may seem tiresome or boring, are important reminders of how important everything we do is and how important every moment is.

So our lives, even if spent doing ordinary things at home, are far from unimportant, trivial, or anonymous--if we see them mindfully.

The challenge of change

Living with major changes is never easy, and the older I get, the more of a challenge it is to have established practices upset or schedules altered.

The past month, along with the world in upheaval now that Trump is trying to run the White House, has seen the shocking death of a friend, 55, who hid her terminal cancer from everyone.  She emailed us in early January and by the end of the month was gone. We had relied on her for advice, legal and otherwise.

Soon thereafter, our long-time family physician announced his retirement, effective almost at once. More turmoil. The YMCA near me, where I have been exercising and meeting friends, is being torn down and replaced, in two years, by something grandiose, taking away from hundreds of locals a familiar "second home."   How can I adjust to all this change?

One constant in this cycle of turmoil and change are the daily email meditations from Richard Rohr, the recent ones reminding me of the importance of contemplation.  After years of reading and practicing this, it is still a challenge, but the advice of Rohr, along with that of Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and other spiritual masters, helps me understand the importance of gazing at something I like, paying such rapt attention to the reality of the present that I can stop analyzing and judging; I can stop thinking.

To take in an entire scene or object (a tree, for example), whether attractive or not, without labeling it good or bad, is a pure and positive act that stops time, as it were, for fifteen minutes or so as I breathe deeply and relax my body as well as my mind.

For me, this silent period of calm contemplation is prayerful, but it doesn't ask for anything or require established beliefs. It implies gratitude for the chance to step back from our thinking selves and just look at what is real in front of us, but the free flow of consciousness need not include intentional gratitude.

If I don't take time to do this--and it is not as easy as it sounds--I will be jerked around by distracting information, noise, fears and worries, caught up in the turbulence of the world around me, ready to shout, "Stop, world!  I want to get off!"

As for the political madness and mayhem, my other remedy is to turn to satire (Andy Borowitz and others) and comedy to gain some detachment from the anger I tend to feel, as I remind myself of the growing resistance movements that are afoot.  The world, then, begins to look less bleak.

Seeing the Trees

Whenever I can, I drive a mile or so from my home to a lakeside park to enjoy the beauty not only of the large lake but of the giant cypress trees, hung with Spanish moss. Looking at the water through the cluster of these trees is always memorable because I am taken out of myself.

The trees are home in the spring to nesting egrets, large white birds who are wise to choose such a lofty perch.  In April, they can be noisy. On my recent visits to the lake, all is quiet except for occasional boats.

This spot has become for me a prayerful place, a place to see the reality of the present.  "Most people don't see things as they are," Richard Rohr writes, "because they see things as they are."  And this is not seeing at all.

It is looking with the small self, the ego. To see and observe trees, in this case, and the serenity of the lakeside park is to move beyond myself, to follow Rohr's line of contemplative reflection, and to grasp a larger reality since my life is not just about me in isolation. It's about me in relationship with nature and others. It has to do with love.

Can I say I love trees? Perhaps. I care about them and appreciate their beauty, especially the strong oaks that spread out their branches or the camphor tree in my back yard that has grown in twenty years from a sapling to a huge, powerful presence.  I am in awe of many old trees and love to look at them in their varying shapes and sizes, with or without leaves. Many are ancient (who knows how old?) and have withstood blights and human civilization.  They endure, silently feeding a hidden world of creatures.

I have just read an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books about two new studies of trees, one by a German, one by a British academic. The review prompts me to want to know more about the inner life of trees.  Especially the oaks described by Fiona Stafford (The Long, Long Life of Trees):

"No other tree is so self-possessed, so evidently at one with the world," she writes in the review I quote by Thomas Pakenham.  "The solid, craggy trunk of a mature oak spreads out, as if with open arms, to create a vast hemisphere of thick, clotted leaves."

Do trees have a way of communicating to one another?  Peter Wohlleben indicates they do: in fact, he finds a subtle underground network among the trees he has studied; they send vital information to one another. If a certain tree is threatened by a certain insect, it will send a message prompting other trees to release a chemical that repels the harmful insect. Amazing.

I am glad to know that these authors care about how trees live and die and relate to the rest of the ecosystem--and who, at the same time, look at them with the wonder and awe that I do when I look at the giant cypresses towering over the lake.

Maybe part of my appreciation comes from seeing how often I have taken these trees for granted.  I look at them now with deep gratitude and really see them.

The election: detachment

I know I am one of many millions who have experienced shock, disbelief, grief and anger since the election of Trump.  I could be angry at the media and the pollsters for misleading us or at the voters who chose radical change over continuity or at the crazy system which allowed Clinton to receive the popular vote but lose the election. But anger leads to more hatred.

I know that I must detach from the news, from the emotional upset that comes each time I revisit the election results. For me, the path has to be contemplative.

It was only when I turned off the TV news and absorbed the beauty of the moment, feeling a unity between myself and nature (specifically a tree outside the window), that I felt at peace, absorbed for a while in the now. Later, I used music with the same effect.

My wise wife, Lynn, reminded me that "God writes straight with crooked lines," her way of saying that eventually some good will come out of the new order. It's up to us to work in our own garden to make that happen.

As I pray for Trump and the country, I pray that each of us can find an inner peace that moves us forward.

Paying Attention to Light

I advise my writing students to begin by observing: Look closely at someone or something and describe it. Sounds easier than it is.  Paying attention is rarely simple, but it's essential if we are to be in the here and now.

I've been paying attention to the light that, even on hot summer afternoons, floods the room where I work.  Thanks to shady trees and a southerly exposure, the light is diffused, its glare softened. I enjoy looking at it as it pours through the window over my desk, cooling the room. 

Or so it seems.  I have never, until now, put it into words. Light is, after all, a silent presence, and that's the whole point: an encounter with silence and stillness.

I ask myself, Why do I enjoy looking at light?  Maybe the answer has to do with memories, half remembered, of afternoons elsewhere, in hotel rooms when we were on vacation and after a busy morning, a brief siesta was called for. Or maybe it reminds me of certain paintings, especially Vermeer's, where a lady quietly reads by a window in a room filled with natural light.  Thanks to Vermeer, the light is as important as the lady or the room.

I am drawn to light. I can identify with medieval folk in Gothic cathedrals as they felt the power of colored light from the stained glass windows, suggesting a divine presence, as if the barrier between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, had been bridged and they felt, in that lofty space, a bit of eternity.

I think about light because I know the value of contemplation and find too little time for it. Richard Rohr recently wrote that most of our thinking is unstable, a series of self-centered reactions and preferences, of judging and labeling things or worrying, none of which has anything to do with being fully in the present moment.

I need time alone each day--even just ten minutes--so that I can calmly watch everything as it comes and goes, even something as fundamental as light. I need a place in the day when my mind can be still and let things float by, without analysis or judgment or feeling.

Silence and emptiness, when we make room for them in our busy lives, are open to infinite horizons and transcendence in a way that nothing else is, Rohr says.

Time spent gazing out the window, looking at the light, may seem to some busy people time wasted, but it is the overactive, busy mind that is wasting an essential opportunity for something essential to every day: the freedom of contemplation.

Silence Revisited

For nearly twenty years, I have been investigating the power of silence, a topic that first struck me when teaching the later poetry of T. S. Eliot.  I then discovered all the many things Thomas Merton had to say about silence as contemplative prayer.  In several articles on Merton and silence, I tried to define the broader implications of silence as something more than the absence of sound.

Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.

Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions.  Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within.  This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.

Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis.  The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.

But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more:  a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.

Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen.  Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.

Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.

I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968.  I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.

As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."

I never heard so much silence

"I never heard so much silence," says a young woman who comes with a camera to a poor, dying village somewhere in Brazil.

This is the reaction I had while watching her interact with the villagers in the remarkable film "Found Memories," which proved to be an ideal source of reflection on the day after Ash Wednesday, when I was looking for a way to increase my experience of contemplation and silence.

Just watching the scenes, filmed in real life, slowly unfold, without music or narration or artificial light: the scenes are lit like paintings as shutters open to let in the sun or as old people walk around with kerosene lamps. The pace is slow, thank God.

As we watch an old woman bake bread, go the coffee shop in the tiny village, then to the church, nothing much seems to happen--except the big things: life, old age, death, love and memory. And the need to bake bread.

It is impossible to analyze this quiet Brazilian film; it has to be experienced. For me, it was an ideal companion in the beginning of Lent.