Laurence Freeman, OSB - Director of the World Community for Christian Meditation

Today’s post is a treat. Kathleen Weller, director of Peace River Spirituality Center in Naples, Florida is a godly woman with a true heart for prayer and simply being still before God. With her permission I have been allowed to repost this recent post from her blog, The Celtic Monk. I found it a much needed reminder that the path through crisis in her words is ” through the very heart of God–seeking, abiding, cleaving there.” Enjoy the post.

Have you ever met one of your heroes? I’m not talking about someone who saved your life, or won the game, but someone who you’ve admired from afar. Maybe it’s an author or a public figure who you’ve grown to respect more than simply admire. Who are these people who loom large in your life?
 
Laurence Freeman (above) has been a hero of mine for some time. Over the past three years, I’ve read everythng he’s written on Christian meditation and have listened to CD’s of talks he’s given around the world. He was chosen as the spiritual guide for WCCM, after the death of its founder,Fr.John Main. While in Cork at the pre- conference retreat of WCCM, I had the opportunity to listen to six presentations by Laurence and the photo above was taken by a Canadian participant as I was talking to him following one of the sessions.
 

Freeman’s topic was living in times of crisis. Looking around the world, he named the crises in their many forms: economic, social, personal, spiritual. Crises affect individual lives, families, communities [including the Church] and nations. While his hope was that Christians would be doing more than cursing the darkness along with everyone else. But Freeman voiced his fear that along with people of no faith, believers too have lost their way. Too many have naively believed that like for other dilemmas we’ve acted as though we can just Google an answer and it will come… or we can read the latest book by a guru, or just keep our heads down until the crisis passes. It’s unfortunate that we’re only slowly coming to realize that our past coping skills are useless in a worldwide crisis that even experts are loathe to predeict how long, how much worse or how to get out. The best thoughts, plans, experiences, have not helped us to crawl from the havoc. And they never will.
 

In times of trouble, in times of uncertainty, in times of small personal crisis as well as worldwide crises the scope of which has beset us over the last few years, our hope is found in the same place, in the same person, in the same way. Hope, like peace is God’s gift and the way to the other side of trial is through the very heart of God–seeking, abiding, cleaving there.
 

Most of us have found ways to adjust to the fragility of the economy, our smaller portion of all we’d become accustomed to and the lowering what we see on the horizon for our future. But coping is no way to live the abundant life. Coping is not the same as living in hope, peace or joy. Do you know how to access the place where these treasures reside in the heart of God? Is it your practice to spend time there? Are these golden lights part of your daily expereince?
 

While the lectures, writings and insights of Freeman have been important to me… they’ve never been an end in themselves. Freeman’s work relentlessly points beyond himself to the One Who is, Who was, and is to come. He writes and speaks to help others (now around the world) learn how to find the One who holds eternal treasures.
 

Crises come to all of us and our loving God desires to help us meet even the ones we’re likely to think we can handle on our own. May you find your way to the heart of God this week. I’ll see you there. BLESSINGS AND JOY, Kathleen Bronagh Weller, THE CELTIC MONK

I haven’t posted much lately. In fact, I think I had a record stretch of about 10 days without posting. That’s not a record I would like to break. I made numerous false starts at posts and the words just would not come. Sermons were even harder. I opted not to post rather than contrive content. I try not to write unless my heart is in it and it truly feels inspired. That is a waste of my time and yours. A friend of mine suggested that perhaps I was out of words and noted the tremendous amount of content I have produced throughout the year. She said, “May be it’s a time for listening.” Those words resonated deeply within me.
 
I have been living in a season of producing. I won’t bore you with the numbers of posts, sermons, talks, videos, ezine articles, etc. that I have cranked out in the last few months. Suffice it to say, it’s been voluminous now that I reflect on it. I think God is calling me into a season of listening. I have dominated too much of the conversation, so I am growing anemic on what to share. So what do I mean by a ‘season of listening?’
 

Mini-Sabbaths

I am going to spend some blocks of three or four hours where I wander and pray with the emphasis being on predominantly listening. Since moving here two years ago, I have never really establish an outdoor sit spot where I go for prayer and observation. This has always been one of my anchor points with God. I need to reestablish a place and a pattern for my half day personal Sabbaths.
 

Journaling on the Word

My scripture reading is going to shift more towards lectio divina, which is a prayerful way of listening to God through the scriptures. I will journal my observations/interactions with God. This tends to make me more mindfully present to God in general.
 

Centering Prayer

Centering prayer is an old tradition of listening to God that is very contemplative. I am not going to commit to a daily discipline of centering at this time, but will be leaning on God through it with some frequency. Few things ground me more deeply in God than centering prayer.
 

Does this mean I will be posting less?

I don’t think so. In fact, seasons of listening are often times great times of inspiration. Ironically, I may find myself posting more. We will see.

 
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If you don’t have time to do it right now, when will you have time to fix it later?

This quote, remembered from long ago, surfaced in my mind as I walked away from my car Friday morning. The car, parked in front of a stranger’s house, sat waiting with an empty tank for me while I trudged back home on foot. I wasn’t far, may be a mile and a half, but more than I had planned on walking. This is what happens when you get so over extended that you keep putting off getting gas because you “haven’t got the time now.” How ironic that it happened the morning I had set aside for working on drafts of my “time to change” mini-course on time management to help people get their lives back in balance. Knowing better and doing better aren’t always one and the same thing.
 
I was determined not to be undone by my stupidity though. When I got home I found an empty house. Our other car and my wife were gone and not responding to phone calls. So, I strapped a gas can to the handle bars of my bike and headed back to the car. The whole way, I praised God. Isn’t that what we are suppose to do? Praise him in all things? Well, I decided running out of gas qualified as one of those “things”. I praised God for the beauty of the weather. I praised God for the health of my body and the opportunity to walk and ride on a beautiful day. I praised God that it wasn’t far, that I had a bike and that I had a gas can with enough gas in it to get me to service station. It didn’t take long for me to find myself once again behind the wheel of my car, the tank full, air conditioner blowing and the bike tied in the trunk. Praise God.
 
So, how does a guy researching and writing about time management manage to run out of gas? It’s easy. He failed to practice what he preached when a surge of unexpected activity came his way. This past week became a crunch week despite my very best efforts at planning. Sometimes a crunch is unavoidable. I only get concerned if I start living from one crunch into the next, so that it becomes a life cycle. God never intended for us to just go non-stop. Having a Sabbath is a commandment and for good reason, without it you will find yourself out of gas, not unlike my car. You will implode mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually if you don’t give yourself pause from time to time. You will also fail to honor God. I didn’t necessarily implode. In fact, I think I handled the whole self-imposed mess fairly well. Nevertheless, the whole inconvenience could have been avoid if I had been living just a wee bit slower.
 
I had the presence of mind to take some corrective measures. I ditched some productivity goals I had for the day and instead took my son out of school and out to lunch. This morning (Saturday), I snuck in a half hour of yoga and later in the afternoon snuck in a short jaunt into the woods. I found a nice tree and sat beneath it just breathing for about a half an hour. I almost fell asleep. The soothing sound of wind in the trees along with the joy of solitude was incredibly restorative. In order to make time for this respite I had to scrap a few goals for the weekend or at least push them back. I don’t regret it at all. I needed the time with God. The Lord is so good and kind when we will just give Him a little time. My moments in the woods were precious and put everything else into perspective. When I first sat down I actually had a hard time resting. My internal momentum was still rather cranked up. By the time I left I was un-cranked. I was carrying a new found peace. Actually, I was allowing an old and familiar peace to breath inside of me once again.
 
As for my goals: I was going to launch my mini-course on Monday, but realized that frantically pulling it off would be antithetical and a bit hypocritical to the whole point of the course. I have opted instead to hold off and launch it on September 15th. This will give me time to both do it right and not forfeit being a human being because I am too busy being a human doing.
 
Lastly, don’t forget to listen in on my conversation with Laurie Beth Jones about growth barriers. That will be Monday, August 30th, 10:30 a.m. C.S.T. Here is the link for it. You can click on it to listen during the show or go there now and set up an automatic reminder.

Click here for the Laurie Beth Jones Show with John Arnold, discussing barriers to growth.
 
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First, specificity. When you take time to vividly imagine what your prayer would look like answered and lift that image with all its details upto God you tend to be far more specific in what you pray.  For example, I had an extremely unruly Sunday School class of Junior High kids once. (Okay, may be more than just once)  I was about to give up on the class and it was about the time that I happened listened to the Richard Foster tape.  I decided to go in early to class one Sunday and take time to pray for each child before they arrived.  I walked around our table and stood behind each empty chair and prayed for the child who would be sitting in it.  I visualized them engaged, helping, curious and enjoying the class.  I prayed for each one of them and then for the class as a whole.  I pictured how they interacted.  Imagined the excitement in their voices.  My class was a very different class from that point forward.  I can’t explain how it changed things. I just know it did.  At some level, it changed me and I am sure I brought a completely different spirit to the class.

Second, extended prayer.  When you slow down to visualize prayer you spend more time praying.  A prayer of  ”God please heal Margie’s broken hip.” becomes several minutes of picturing Margie standing straight and tall, happy, free of pain, and delightfully mobile.  I find myself more engaged and actively concerned for the person when I do this.

Third, a growing ability to focus. Between the fast pace of media, constantly interrupting cell phones, and an incessant habit of multi-tasking, many people are finding themselves having a growing difficult focusing in prayer.  If that is you, then you will very likely struggle at first with visualizing your prayers.  However, with practice your ability to focus will grow.  You will even see an increased focus in your prayers that are not marked by visualization.

Fourth, greater efficacy. Why?  How?  I don’t know, but prayers that I slow down to actively visualize seem to be more obviously answered.  May be I’m just watching with greater frequency because I have a picture in my  head that I am waiting to see in reality or may because the intent of my prayer is so much clearer God is more response.  I can’t really explain it and you don’t have to take my word for it.  Try it for yourself and draw your own conclusion.  So far, though greater efficacy seems to go hand-in-hand with visualizing my prayer.

How to Start.

Select something to focus on in prayer.  Picture the person or situation you are praying for as it is now as vividly as you can.  Start with a mental image and then one by one layer in all of your other senses.  Next, picture how things are changing into how you would hope that they would be.  Once again, make the picture as complete and concrete as you possibly can.  Hold this in image in your mind and lift it up as your prayer to God.  It is really that simple and that difficult.

Here is one last thought for you to consider if for some reason you are hesitant to take time to envision your prayers.  Many of the revelatory experiences that people have of God in the Bible are dreams and visions.  God speaks to people through images that he places in their minds.  Doesn’t it just make sense that we might want to communicate back with Him in that same way.  God gave us amazing creative minds.  Let us use the fullness of our minds to connect with God in prayer.

In recent posts, I have encouraged you to thinking on, ponder or dwell on specific things as Paul did in the letter to the Phillippians.  I even suggested specific practical practices.  I want you to realize though that to “dwell on something” doesn’t mean that you have to sit for hours motionless thinking about it. In fact, it may profit you more to repetitively come back to focused attention in bits and pieces, that’s how we internalize life lessons for the long haul.

I was thinking about this in terms of my daughter Ruth recently. She had to memorize a list of squares, fractions, and decimals for a quiz.  She did pretty well, but now the class is retaking the quiz and she realizes that she hasn’t really internalize the information.  She just shoved them in her short term memory hopper and that hopper has a big leak in it.  Now we are going back and having to re-learn.  

This practice of cram and release is common faith development issues.   We “learn” but don’t commit to applying ourselves for a season. We are excited and inspired for a short bit and then move on to something else. That’s a great way to accumulate information, but not a good way to experience transformation. As people we tend to be a bit thick.  We need repetition and practice for something to become a part of our character.  This is where meditating or dwelling with something in repeated moments of attention over a lengthy period of time comes in handy. Living with and living out lessons over time is how we grow from knowledge to understanding. This is how you gain maturity.  You can’t cram it.  If you try to cram it, when a test of maturity arises you will fail.

So let me illustrate from my own life. Recently, I was practicing what I posted regarding dwelling on good people by reflecting on the life of one of my favorite figures of faith, George Washington Carver. (see also, Evicting Annoying Person From My Head) I would love to grow into the richness of faith that he had. The morning I reflected on him listed his characteristics I admire and activities he regularly did. That reflection got my mind out of a funk. I refocused my mind in a faith enhancing way. That’s great, but if I really want more, if I really want to have a faith as deep and rich as Carver, then I am going to have to sustain attention and application around what I learned. In a way, you could say that I need to meditate with my life for a month.

This kind of activity is what Paul was getting at when he told the Phillippians, “Brethren join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us.” (Phillippians 3:17) and “The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.” (Phillippians 4:9)

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