One

Lately I´ve been reading Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening by Cynthia Bourgeault, which focuses on the contemplative tradition in Christianity and its relevance for our current day and individual lives. Centering prayer is essentially the practice of surrending thoughts and sitting quietly in the moment, seeking God´s presence and relinquishing thoughts gently as they come to you. It is helpful to have a single word to bring you back to your practice when you notice yourself thinking (which happens very often at first). I´ve been experimenting with this method as part of my larger attempt to spend more time with the Divine and from a real need to center myself daily in my deeper identity and in God´s being before I head out into the chaos of living here and doing what I do.

I´ve also been in the practice of going to yoga every Monday and Wednesday morning from 6:40 to about 7:40 for some prework exercise, wakefulness, and meditation. Today as I laid down for the final part of the yoga practice, savasana (a short meditation and stillness), I started counting my breaths (one, two, one, two) as I tried to quiet down. I quickly grabbed onto "one" as my meditative word, and had a little something of a realization (which is, ironically, not actually the point of centering prayer as a specific meditative discipline, but whatever) that what I want to tell you about.

As I breathed in and out, letting thoughts go and returning to the word when necessary (often), the word swelled and became something much bigger and more meaningful than I expected. As I tried to relax, my mind slipped to more peaceful settings I have known. Specific mountaintops at Philmont, the shade of specific trees at Shawnee Mission Park, etc. filled my mind, and it all seemed like a quick round the world flight (in my mind. I had no illusions about actually be transported. And I might seem a little weird to be saying all this, but come on, I´m not that weird). As I noticed myself thinking, again and again I came back to my word "one," and some kind of sense was made of everything when those very visions in my head collided into a mess of formless color and beauty.

Whether or not the lesson was meant to be this literal (or even a lesson at all), I felt as if I saw the oneness of my life and this world. Where I am now is not as beautiful or peaceful or easy as where I have been at other times, but it is absolutely one with them in some fundamental, ineffable ways. The implications of this are, of course, big - calling me to a deeper presence in my current situation, a stronger rootedness in the oneness of my being, of God, of this world - rather than some kind of overwhelming attachment to a particular home or group of people. In saying all of this, of course, I´ve not only fallen far short of explaining anything like the actual reality, I´ve also changed it a little bit. But what does T.S. Eliot say?

"Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. "

(Four Quartets, East Coker, V, l. 3-18)

Perhaps he is one of the few who has conquered by "strength and submission" that which simultaneously evokes and evades description, but I am not. Hope some of this has made at least a little sense, though. Much love to you all.