Mindfulness Practice and Christian Living
by Mary Jo Meadow (with permission)
Resources for Ecumenical Spirituality
Good morning. I am here to tell you how mindfulness practice also well supports Christian living. I will speak of some effects of this practice in Christian terminology. I have not worked with military personnel, but I have brought the practice to prisons--so I have taught in a combat zone.
I teach mindfulness primarily as a spiritual practice. Since 1989, I have been leading a ten-day mindfulness retreat as a way to implement the teachings of Christian saint and mystic John of the Cross. We teach across the USA, and in Canada, Europe, and Australia. Although one of our leaders is a Catholic priest, clergy in many denominations and a full spectrum of lay people attend the retreat. A brief explanation of it is on page three of the buff-colored RES flyers you have been offered. In case there are Jewish religious leaders here, I want to mention that a teacher in California offers the practice in a Jewish setting.
Misconceptions I want first to dispel a few misconceptions that some Christians have about meditation. It is not dangerous. Probably you would not be here if you believed that it opens your mind to the devil or can let in all sorts of evil forces. However, some Christians do. The truth is that meditation strengthens your mind greatly. It makes it increasingly impervious to any alien content--both that which comes from outside us as well as that which our minds harbor within themselves. Meditation is not mind control; it helps keep you from being controlled by the disturbing thoughts and emotions of the mind. The practice is also not self-hypnosis. Rather than imposing certain beliefs on our minds, as hypnosis does, the practice opens our minds to clearly see the truth of our own beings and lives as they are.
Some people accept traditional Christian forms of meditation, but are doubtful about methods derived from Eastern traditions. Many men and women in contemplative religious orders meditate using Eastern methods or methods based on Eastern forms. Many attend our retreats. For Catholics, the documents of Vatican II urged Christians not only to respect the ancient traditions that predated Christianity, but also to use from them whatever helps develop Christian spiritual life. Mindfulness practice has proved itself to do that.
Self-knowledge We start with morality and self-knowledge. Mindfulness practice almost forces greater care with our conduct. The practice draws up into conscious awareness whatever is out of harmony in our lives, bringing an inescapable self-knowledge. People often feel very intense remorse on recalling past bad behavior; this brings a resolve to abandon whatever action triggered the remorse. People find themselves wanting to apologize to others whom they have hurt.
The practice can dredge up long forgotten things that are buried deep in memory. Because of the way it brings such self-awareness, some others and I also offer it as an eleventh step method for people working twelve step programs. One 12-stepper told me that it brought up everything he drank to get away from. Seeing such buried emotions and motives makes proper self-management much easier.
John of the Cross assumed that meditators want to live a moral life. He taught that we need very deep self-knowledge to do this completely. He knew that meditating would bring us beyond just simple awareness of our outward conduct to a much more penetrating knowledge of self. As our meditation practice deepens, we start seeing patterns in our lives--ways that we set ourselves up for certain outcomes, ways that our upbringing and previous choices have bent us in the direction we are going. It reveals patterns of emotions and thought that keep us locked into unhelpful ways of living. One of my students said that it gives us an owner’s manual for understanding our functioning.
John said that such self-knowledge is also necessary to know God. He didn’t say that it is one way to know God; he said we go to knowledge of God through knowledge of self. Our minds are clinging to these remnants of our earlier lives--and this, John taught, is a barrier to knowing God. Anything to which the mind clings other than God is a worship that keeps us from God; it is a form of idolatry. So John said we have to see our clinging all the way to the very depths of our beings. As meditative work progresses, we see that our problem is not only habits and actions of behavior. We also cling to unhelpful opinions, memories, and emotional reactions.
Long ago St. Augustine said that our hearts are made for God and will be restless until they rest in God. When we experience the emptiness, hunger, yearning that only God can satisfy, we often grasp at what can never satisfy us. We then find that this “solution” only causes more trouble and suffering. John said we inflict much suffering on ourselves when we desire anything more than God.
Relinquishing John of the Cross said that we have to be very empty of all these things to know God. The emptier we are, the more room there is for God. So we have to let go of all objects of clinging. We cannot force this by will power. Anyone who has tried to abandon a bad habit knows this. Doing the practice leads us to seeing in a way that helps our minds relinquish these objects of clinging. We just make ourselves present to be worked on, and it is done in us. We surrender ourselves to the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. This helps us to come to the place where we live now, not ourselves, but Christ lives in us. Our part is to remain present to the purification being wrought in us--and the practice is a method for staying present.
We also come to see ourselves differently. As we more deeply know ourselves, we increasingly realize that we are not separate from everything else. I have often told people that the words “the mystical body of the Christ” were just a beautiful notion until I actually experienced it in mindfulness practice. Increasingly, we see not only the connections within ourselves, but also our relatedness and oneness with everything that ordinary vision sees as outside of ourselves. We experience being the body of the Christ.
Such realization helps us let go of emotional bad health--deep-seated grudges and resentments, self-pity, discontent, and the like. It opens us to realize that--just as the unhealed places within us are behind our own problematic thought and behavior--the same is true of other people. We come to have compassion for both others and ourselves because we see the suffering that each of us harbors within.
John also said that we have to let go of ideas about how God is because these are just thoughts in our minds. John called them “the back of God” and said we are not to be content with that, but must long to see God’s face. His bottom line is that any thought or image or idea about God that you have is not God. If you hold onto it, it will stand in the way of really getting to God as God is. If we truly want to know God, we must let go of everything that we think we know. Jesus once chided the Pharisees for holding that they knew. So, John taught that we must empty out all our notions about God to be able to see behind them.
Loving attention John of the Cross taught that two things are necessary to know God: loving attention to God and self-denial. We have talked some about self-denial--about giving up harmful behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. But what did John mean by loving attention to God? Because he held that thinking a lot about God is not the way to know God, we know he didn’t mean thinking. He even said that thinking is a barrier. He advised us to “just learn to abide…with a loving, alert attentiveness to God and pay no heed to the imagination.” That is, don’t go off into paying attention to the creations of your own mind.
In mindfulness practice, we maintain our attention on what we can have of God in any given minute--which is only the experience that God sends us to live in that minute. So we observe our experiences of mind and body without making anything of them, without adding anything to them, or embellishing them in any way in our minds. When we do this, John said, “God will feed you with heavenly refreshment since you do not apply your faculties…but detach them from everything in the simple loving attentiveness.”
Mindfulness meditation is a powerful way to practice this attentiveness to God that John prescribed. When we rest content with mindfully watching our experiences of body and mind, we are paying loving attentiveness to the healing work of the Holy Spirit in our beings. We are also practicing self-denial, letting go of thinking and trying to control our experience, participating in the “emptying out” of the Christ, being willing to be the seed that falls into the ground and dies to bear greater fruit. We are living the Paschal mystery of willingly dying so we can rise to new life. We are waiting for the bridegroom with our lamps lit and full of oil. We will not be sleeping when the time of our visitation comes if we remain in mindful awareness.
Prayer A word about prayer. We often hog the floor when we have a conversation with God. The prayer of some Christians boils down to reciting formally worded prayers. For those with a more developed sense of intimacy in prayer, prayer may be telling God the news, thanking or praising God, or asking God for some kind of assistance. Both groups often see prayer and meditation as two different activities.
Not seeing meditation as prayer creates unnecessary conflict. Some people have told me that they would love to meditate, but they do not have enough time to do both it and prayer. Realizing that meditation is prayer would help them. Meditation is prayer in two major ways: as a conversation with God and as an act of surrendering oneself to God. In John’s language, meditation is the practice of loving attention to God and self-denial.
For conversation, you must listen as well as speak. When faced with one who knows more than you do and has more to offer than you have, you profit most by choosing the silence of listening instead of getting in your own words. How much more true this is of prayer! Contemplatives have long said that a much higher kind of prayer is listening. How much better off we are, they say, when we become still to know God.
Meditation teaches us how to become very still and to listen. It guides us in letting go of the noisy busyness of our mind-chatter, of craving particular experiences in prayer, of wanting to be in charge of our conversation with God. It teaches how to simply be there, listening. Thus, meditation is very intimate prayer, the most deep and humble way we can choose to relate to God.
In this listening prayer, we keep our minds attentive to what we are given, and we learn from it. We learn about ourselves, we learn about our lives and relationships, and we learn about God. We cannot do this if we are talking all the time. Meditation gives God the floor and is thus the deepest form of prayer that we can practice.
In summary:
- Mindfulness meditation is deep prayer.
- It fosters morality, care about proper conduct.
- It brings the deep self-knowledge we need to know God.
- It develops non-judgmental compassion for others and ourselves.
- It heals our brokenness and flaws.
- It empties us of clinging to make room for God.
In these ways, mindfulness meditation fosters Christian living.
In closing, I want to say a few words about our Silence and Awareness retreat. It is traditional mindfulness practice across the day, taught with reference to Christian understandings. I give full meditation instructions, so the retreat works well for beginners as well as advanced practitioners. The evening talks integrate the teachings of John of the Cross with the meditation practice. Our priest leader offers Eucharist daily as an option for those who want it, and all are welcome to attend. Many do, but some choose to meditate during Eucharist time. We offer a question and answer session to answer theoretical questions. Deep silence is observed during the retreat; retreatants do not interact with each other. There is a time for talking and sharing before departure.
