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June 22, 2008 Meister Eckhart said that
“When we speak of divine matters, we have to stammer, because we are forced to
express our experiences in words.” This week has been a stressful
week for me. You see, I haven’t done
this for years (and I regret that some of you remember that sorry
attempt). I have a good idea of what I
want to relate to you, but organizing it and making it interesting is a
daunting task. Getting someone to
understand what is going on in my head is always just a bit difficult. I am a third grade
teacher. Teaching in school is
easier than doing this. For one thing I
don’t have to work so hard to organize my thoughts because the textbook
companies have done it for me. And I am
not so worried about impressing my audience…they’re not my peers. One of the teaching tools
we use is called “Active Listening”.
I would like to share it with you. The first point is
“Sit still”. Now, this is a major task for most third graders. At least beyond one minute. You can’t listen
if you are moving, wiggling, poking someone else or playing with your shoes. Or
mining for boogers. The second is to
“Put your hands in your lap.” Put
everything away. Lay your pencils
down. Don’t pick up your crayons. Close your book. Lay your pencils down. Put
that away. Can I have that. Put your hands in your lap. The third
requirement for Active Listening is to put your “Eyes on the speaker”. Don’t look at Kierra. Don’t watch Danan. Don’t look out in the hall. Everyone’s eyes here! The fourth is to use
your ears to “Listen”. You are here to
learn. That is our priority. One of the best ways to learn is to
listen. Not talk. Not fuss. The fifth thing you
need to do is “Concentrate”. Pay
attention. Randy! Pay attention! This is only a start for
coming to a place where you can know God.
We have a lot of stuff in the way of getting where we want to be. Why is it so hard to connect with our God. “Be still and know that I
am God.” Let’s start with the first word
of the directive the Psalmist gives us from Yahweh. Be. God said His
Name is Yahweh. The best we can tell
this is Hebrew for “I am”. I…am. ‘Am’ is the same verb as ‘be’; from the
Websters “to have an objective existence: have
reality or actuality”. It is a
verb. I = am. God didn’t just say “I”. That would have been using a noun only. It would have indicated substance. God instead used a verb. I = am.
Am, is, be. A verb. Implying more that just existence. It gives the sense of action. God is not a thing. A noun.
You can’t place God, touch God, hold God. God is spirit. In Hebrew it is the word ruach. The
same word for wind. The Bible tells us that we are created in God’s
likeness. We also “am, be”, thus
‘being’…human being. Be-ing. We are also spirit. We are a verb, not a noun. When Jim Pierce’s family voiced their
thoughts about Jim, how did they communicate it? They told the wonderful things that Jim
did. Action, verb. Now, the word still. Be still. Is that hard?
Oh, yes. When I first attempted,
in earnest with devotion, to be still and know God, was when I was a college
student. I worked hard to be still. To quiet my mind. I tried everything. When I managed to get my mind quiet…I fell
asleep. “The spirit is will but the
flesh is weak.” Some suggested that I
not try to stop thinking but view my thoughts as suggestions from the
Lord. My but God had lots and lots of
suggestions. They never stopped. Why is this?
What is the mind that we have so very little control over it? I want to direct your thinking to the creation story
in Genesis. It says that the Lord placed
Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden,
where they had communion with God. They
were intimate with God. They worked with
Him in the garden. It says that God
forbid them to eat of one tree, the tree of The Knowledge of Good and
Evil. Hmmm. You know…they ate the fruit of it. Now what was that knowledge of good and evil. Our best indication is that their immediate
response was to notice their nakedness and decide that it was bad. It shamed them. They noticed that they were individual. Other.
Now that seems to have become their and our primary condition. We believe we are Other. To such a great effect that the next story
told in Genesis is that Cain was so convinced of his Otherness, of good and
evil, that he was motivated to kill his only brother, Abel. From heaven to hell in less than a
chapter. That is the human condition. Out minds are so focused on perceived
good and evil that we are able to do
very little else with our minds. It
starts when we are very little. We have,
at early ages, no ability to think logically.
But we have a very strong sense of right and wrong. When a little one is confronted with
something that he cannot understand, he struggles to understand it. It almost always comes down to deciding who
is right and who is wrong. If his
feelings are hurt, she either makes herself out to be wrong and evil or the
other person has to fit in that role.
With no ability to think logically and understand the situations, the
little one makes up a story
in his head to make things fit comfortably.
It is quite a mental struggle and the little one has to work it over and
over in his head. That is a pattern we
learn and use the rest of our lives. When something bad or hurtful happens to us we
figure out who was right and who was wrong.
Who is good and who is evil. Then we spend many, many hours going over and
over the story in our heads to make sense of it, to figure out what we did
right, what we did wrong, what we should have done, what we will do next
time. We analyze our behaviors and those
of the other folks forever. Am I right?
Or am I really strange? When I was a kid, my mom admitted that she didn’t want
me as a baby because I wasn’t a girl. She said that she wanted little to do with me
and sent me to my grandmother’s house at every opportunity. Needless to say, I felt really alien in my
own family and made up tons of reasons in my head. That became something that I analyzed for
decades and sought answers to from every quarter. Is it true, Greg? I built up this persona in my mind that I
chewed on whenever it was stimulated by the smallest thing. I carried it around with me like something
valuable and precious. I had lots and lots of times to add to those
childhood experiences.
We carry all this around
with us, in our heads, and it gets stimulated constantly and we become, or I
should say, I became pretty obsessive in my trying to figure our good and evil. Now where am I going with
this thought-line? Our minds are but a tool
that we use in our everyday lives. Not
much different than our hands. We use
them to decide what needs to be done and how to do it. But our minds are not us! They are a tool we have at our disposal. A very powerful tool. One that runs amuck. It isn’t who we
are. We can get some space between
ourselves and our thoughts and observe the mind at work. We can stop the mind in its activity. We can direct it. We can control it. But not without difficulty. Especially if we believe that the mind is who
we are. We are not the mind. We are the presence, the being, that observes
the mind. Meister Eckhart, a mystic,
prophet, feminist, preacher, theologian and declared heretic of the 12th
century wrote: One should love God
mindlessly, By this I mean that your
soul ought to be Without mind or mental activities
Or images or
representations. Bare your soul of all mind And stay there without
mind. There, where clinging to
things ends, Is where God begins to be. If a cask is to contain
wine, You must first pour out the
water. The csk must be bare and
empty. Therefore, if you wish to
receive divine joy and God, First pour out your
clinging to things. Everything that is to
receive must and ought to be empty. Brother Lawrence was a lay
brother amoung the barefooted Carmelites in I make it my business only
to persevere in His holy presence, wherein I keep myself by a simple attention
and a general fond regard to God, which I may call an actual presence of God,
or, to speak better, a habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul
with God, which often causes me joys and raptures inwardly and sometimes also
outwardly, so great that I am forced to use means to moderate them and prevent
their appearance to others. I know that fir the right
practice of it, the heart must be empty of all other things, because God will
possess the heart alone and as He cannot possess it alone without emptying it
of all besides, so neither can He act there, and do in it what He pleases,
unless it be left vacant to Him. Matthew Fox, a present day
heretic of the Catholic church, philosopher and theologian says: Silence is not, of course,
the absence of communication: it is more an attitude of being wholly present. This is what Jody Thatch,
Diane Bourgeois, Debbie and Bob Rockford have been trying to teach us with
spiritual disciplines. To still the mind
and come into God’s presence. One of the tricks I learned
from reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is to see thoughts as
rabbits running threw the mind. I don’t
watch them. I watch the rabbit hole, in
my mind’s eye, waiting for the next rabbit to run out. They seldom do. Let’s attempt to still the
mind…and know God. Be still and know that I am
God. Be still and know that I
am. Be still and know. Be still. Be. |
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