Illuminated Life

by Joan Chittister

  Openness is not gentility in the social arena. It is not polite listening to people with whom we inherently disagree. It is not political or civil or “nice.” It is not even simple hospitality. It is the munificent abandonment of the mind to new ideas, to new possibilities. Without an essential posture of openness, contemplation is not possible. God comes in every voice, behind every face, in every memory, deep in every struggle. To close off any of them is to close off the possibility of becoming new again ourselves.

  To be a contemplative it is necessary to throw open the arms of our lives, to take in daily one experience, one person, one new idea with which we have no familiarity and ask what it is saying to us about us. Then God, the Ultimate Reality, the Life beyond life can come to us in deep, in rending, new ways.

  rayer

  Abba Poemen said: “The nature of water is yielding, and that of a stone is hard. Yet if you hang a bottle filled with water above the stone so that the water drips drop by drop, it will wear a hole in the stone. In the same way the word of God is tender, and our heart is hard. So when people hear the word of God frequently, their hearts are opened to the fear of God.”

  THERE IS ONLY ONE THING WRONG with the traditional definition of prayer: it misrepresents God. “Prayer,” the old teaching said, was “the raising of our hearts and minds to God.” As if God were some regal, distant judge outside ourselves. But science—with its new perception that matter and spirit are of a piece, sometimes particles, sometimes energy—suggests that God is not on a cloud somewhere, imperious and suspecting. God is the very Energy that animates us. God is not male humanity writ large. God is the Spirit that leads us and drives us on. God is the voice within us calling us to Life. God is the Reality trying to come to fullness within us, both individually and together. It is to that cosmic God, that personal, inner, enkindling God, that we pray.

  Prayer is a long, slow process. First, it indicates to us how far we really are from the mind of God. When the ideas are foreign to us, when the process itself is boring or meaningless, when the quiet sitting in the presence of God in the self is a waste of time, then we have not yet begun to pray. But little by little, one gospel, one word, one moment of silence at a time, we come to know ourselves and the barriers we put between ourselves and the God who is trying to consume us.

  The contemplative does not pray in order to coax satisfaction out of the universe. God is life, not a vending machine full of trifles to fit the whims of the human race. God is the end of life, the fulfillment of life, the essence of life, the coming of life. The contemplative prays in order to be open to what is, rather than to reshape the world to their own lesser designs.

  The contemplative does not pray to appease a divine wrath or flatter a divine ego. The contemplative prays in order, eventually, to fall into the presence of God, to learn to live in the presence of God, to absorb the presence of God within. The contemplative prays until wordlessness takes over and presence is more palpable than words, more filling than ideas. One prayer at a time, the hard heart melts away, the satiated heart comes newly alive, the mind goes blank with enlightenment.

  The contemplative is the one among us in whom prayer, deep reflection on the presence and activity of God in the self and the world, has come little by little to extinguish the illusions of autonomy and the enthronement of the self that make little kingdoms of us all. The contemplative goes beyond the self, and all its delusions, to Life itself. One prayer at a time, contemplatives allow the heart of God to beat in the heart they call their own.

  The contemplative is the seeker who can go down into the self, down the tunnel of emptiness, and, finding nothing but God in the center of life, call that Everything. Most of all, the contemplative is the one who, looking at the world, sees nothing but the presence and activity of God everywhere, in everyone. How can this be possible? Because to be a contemplative, prayer is the key to the dialogue and, eventually, to the Silence that is Everything.

  uest

  Abba Poemen said to Abba Joseph: “Tell me how I can become a monastic.” And Abba Joseph replied, “If you want to find rest here, and hereafter, say in every occasion, ‘Who am I?'”

  WHO IS THERE ANYWHERE in the world who is not looking for something: for approval, for money, for a home, for a career, for success, for security, for happiness? We are, by nature, spiritual foragers, seekers after grails. We look constantly for laurels and trophies cast in the crystal of time or the stardust of eternity. We are all on a quest for something. The distinguishing questions are two: For what am I seeking, and who am I as a result of the search?

  Some people search for shadows on a wall and end in disillusionment. Others search for achievements cast in stone and, when the monuments to themselves crumble and fail to satisfy, end in discontent. Still more search from place to place at a frantic pace, tasting this, discarding that, demanding this, rejecting that till the very fury of the hunt exhausts their hearts and sears their souls. They are dabblers in life, connoisseurs of the superficial and the dissembling. Who they are as a result of the search, other than earnest wanderers, even they do not know.

  Religion—and spirituality—have their own kind of dilettantes, seekers who go from master to master, from system to system, from pious consolation to pious consolation, from spiritual posturings to spiritual escapes, but who never really appreciate the process, let alone the end of the journey. They seek but they never, ever find a home for the heart that lasts beyond the seeking. Religion—and spirituality—become bromides meant to ease a present pain or fill the current emptiness, rather than to take us below the urge of the seeking to find the source. We make religion our excuse for not finding God.

  Indeed, there are people aplenty who use religion itself as a way to get the power they seek, the attention they crave, the comfort they need—and most of us are among them at one time or another. But they are not the contemplatives of the world.

  Contemplatives do not take life as an obstacle to insight, going from taste to taste until the taste buds of the soul go dry. Contemplatives do not wander from church to church, from guru to guru trying to find a formula outside of themselves to fill up what is missing inside themselves. Contemplatives do not need to go anywhere at all to find where God waits to meet them on the road of the self. The contemplative simply stands in place and in the standing answers the question “Who am I” with the answer “I am the one who waits for the God within.” I am, in other words, the one who pursues the center of life. I am the one who goes behind every system to the source. I am the one who is in search of the Light that is distant from my darkened soul and alien to my restless mind and extraneous to my scattered heart. I am the one who realizes that the distance between God and me is me.

  To lead a contemplative life requires that we watch what we're seeking—and why we're seeking it. Even good can become noise in the heart when we do it, not because it's right, but because it will in turn do something for us: Bring us status. Make us feel good. Give us security. Require little of our own lives.

  God is more consuming, more fulfilling than all those things. The grail we seek is God alone. But talking about God is not the same as searching for God, all the simple saints, all the fallen hierarchs to the point. To be a contemplative we must seek God in the right places: within the sanctuary of the centered self.

  e-creation

  Once two brothers went to visit an old monastic. It was not the old man's habit to eat every day. When he saw the brothers, however, he welcomed them with joy and said: “Fasting has its own reward, but if you eat for the sake of love you satisfy two commandments, for you give up your own will and also fulfill the commandment to refresh others.”

  IT'S NOT SOMETHING that most of us like to admit, but the truth is that “fasting,” any disciplinary or dour approach to life—relentless concentration on work, duty, responsibilities, business, productivity—has its own rewards. However difficult the work itself may seem to those who watch us do it, there is something secretly very satisf
ying about the ardor of doing it. Giving up Spartan routines to visit old relatives or play with children, to write personal mail or take the dog for a walk, to go fishing or have a picnic supper on the shore makes the hardy and virtuous cringe at the very thought of it. We are serious people, too absorbed by important things for those things. We are too “busy” to be human.

  So, we drone on through life, wearing our sensitivities to a frazzle. We go from day to day drowning our mind in more of the same instead of letting it run free in new fields of thought or new kinds of experience or new moments of beauty. We just keep doing the same things over and over again. Worst of all, we consider ourselves spiritually noble for doing them. Virtue becomes the blinders of our soul. We never see the God who is everywhere because we never look anyplace but where we've looked before.

  Re-creation, holy leisure, is the mainstay of the contemplative soul, and the theology of Sabbath is its cornerstone. “On the seventh day,” scripture says, “God rested.” With that single image, that one line of Holy Writ, reflection, re-creation of the creative spirit, transcendence, the right to be bigger than what we do, is sanctified. To refuse to rest, to play, to run loose for awhile on the assumptions that work is holier, worthier of God, more useful to humankind than refreshment, strikes at the very root of contemplation.

  Life is about more than work. Work is useless, even destructive, if its purpose goes awry. What will keep work pristine if not the contemplative eye for truth and the contemplative compass for everything God called good? Recreation is the act of stretching the soul. When we stop the race to nowhere, when we get off the carousel of productivity long enough to finally recognize that it is going in a circle, we reclaim a piece of our own humanity.

  The purpose of recreation is to create a Sabbath of the soul. We need time to evaluate what we have done in the past. Like God, we must ask if what we spend our lives doing is really “good” for anyone. For me? For the people who will come after me? For the world in which I live right now?

  We must assess the impact of our daily work on the lives of those around us. We must ask ourselves whether what we are doing with our lives and the way we are doing it is really worth the expenditure of a life, either our own or the lives of those with whom we come in contact. Only Sabbath, only re-creation gives me the chance to step back and think, to open up and be made new, to walk through life with eyes up and heart open, to expand the human parts of my human experience.

  Life is not meant to be dismal. Life is not an endurance test. Life is life, if we make it that. How do we know for sure that life is meant to be an excursion into joy? Because there is simply too much to enjoy: fishing water in a back bay, the view from a mountaintop, wild berries on the hill, a street dance in the neighborhood, a good book, the parish bazaar, the city culture, the family reunion.

  Religious traditions that refuse to enjoy life, reject life. But religion that rejects life is no religion at all. It fails to connect the sacred now with the sacred beyond. To be a contemplative we must bring ourselves to life so that all of life can mediate God to us.

  ilence

  One of the elders said, “Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul, unless it is clear of alien thoughts, is not able to pray to God in contemplation.”

  SILENCE IS THE LOST ART in a society made of noise. Radios wake us up, and timers on TVs turn off the day-full of programs long after we have gone to sleep at night. We have music in cars and elevators and office waiting rooms. We have surround-sound that follows us from the living room to the kitchen to the upstairs bath. We have public address hookups in every office building and large, loud, screaming sound systems mounted on street corners. We exercise with earphones on and tape recorders strapped to our belts. We lie on beaches with our ears cabled to portable CD players. We surround ourselves and immerse ourselves in clatter. Racket and jingle, masking as music and news and sitcoms, have become the sound barriers of the soul in this society. They protect us from listening to ourselves.

  What the contemplative knows that modern society has forgotten, it seems, is that the real material of spiritual development is not in books. It is in the subject matter of the self. It is in the things we think about, in the messages we give ourselves constantly, in the civil war of the human soul that we wage daily. But until we are quiet and listen, we can never, ever know what is really going on—even in ourselves. Especially in ourselves.

  Silence frightens us because it is silence that brings us face to face with ourselves. Silence is a very perilous part of life. It tells us what we're obsessing about. It reminds us of what we have not resolved within ourselves. It shows to us the underside of ourselves, from which there is no escape, which no amount of cosmetics can hide, that no amount of money or titles or power can possibly cure. Silence leaves us with only ourselves for company.

  Silence is, in other words, life's greatest teacher. It shows us what we have yet to become, and how much we lack to become it. “Wherever I am,” the poet Mark Strand writes, “I am what's missing.”

  Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice can fill us.

  A day without silence is a day without the presence of the self. The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper, not a storm. Silence not only gives us the God who is Stillness but, just as importantly, teaches the public self of us what to speak.

  ime

  A brother came to see Abba Theodore and started to talk and inquire about things which he himself had not tried yet. The old man said to him: “You have not found a boat or put your gear into it, and you haven't even sailed, but you seem to have arrived in the city already. Well, do your work first; then you will come to the point you are talking about now.”

  ONE OF THE OBSESSIVE CONCERNS of contemporary society is speed. Everything we produce we produce to go faster than the ones before it. Planes go faster than the speed of sound, though no one cares. Cars are sold for their capacity to go from zero to sixty miles an hour in seconds, as if anyone ever needed to. Computer upgrades costing hundreds of dollars are downloaded every day to take milliseconds off the operating speeds of the versions before them. To be valuable now, everything must go faster, start up more quickly, work at speeds measured in numbers no mind can calculate. We want instant oatmeal, electronic ticketing, accelerated educational programs, weekend college courses, and world news in thirty seconds or less. We are “a people on the move.” We want results. We are not a people who believe in process anymore, much as we love to talk about it.

  But the spiritual life, the desert monastics knew, does not operate in high gear at high speed. The spiritual life—contemplation—is a slow, slow uncovering of the mechanics of the soul and the even slower process of putting it all back together again, of coming to see what we never saw before—God everywhere and, most of all, in us.

  Ironically enough, in our haste, our generation has lost a sense of the value of time. Speed has not saved us time. It has simply enabled us to fill it with twice as much work as we used to do. The faster we go, the more we leave ourselves behind. We do not stop for sunsets anymore. We take pictures of them, instead, and then never take time to look at the pictures again.

  But there are some things that cannot be hurried. We cannot hurry the process of grief, for instance. We cannot rush the project of growth. We cannot speed the effects of hurt. We cannot hasten the coming of love. We must not attempt to flit through the search for God and then, failing in the enterprise of a lifetime, call it fruitless. Each of those things comes in
stages. Each of them takes soul-work.

  Time, the contemplative knows, is given not for the sake of perfection but for the sake of discovery. There is a great deal to be discovered in life before we are finally able to break ourselves open to the God within and around us out of whom all life flows. What we learn in the course of a lifetime, the contemplative comes to realize, is life-changing:

  We must learn that no institution is God. Nothing that symbolizes God is God and cannot be absolutized.

  We must learn that we are not God. The world was not made for our amusement; it was made for our growth. And grow we must, painful as the growing may be.

  We must learn that the God who is not contained in any institution and who is the very breath we breathe, is in us waiting for us to come to that realization. We must stop looking for God in things. God is here.

  Finally, we must learn that time is the gift of realization, not the death of all our dreams. Whatever is happening, whatever stage in which we find ourselves, is the stuff of God. And the more we have of it, the more we have of God in the now.

  To be a contemplative we must begin to see time, not as a commodity, but as a sacrament revealing God to us in the here and now. Always.

  nderstanding

  Some disciples came to see Abba Poemen and said to him: “Tell us, when we see brothers dozing during the sacred office, should we pinch them so they will stay awake?” And the old man said to them: “Actually, if I saw a brother sleeping, I would put his head on my knees and let him rest.”