Spiritual Listening

Psalm 46:10 - "Be still and know that I am God."

It is not enough to know God through the written word; we must also experience God as the Living Word in our hearts. If God knows all shouldn't we spend more time listening and less time talking in prayer? I was introduced to a form of contemplative prayer many years ago in which I would meditate on a central idea or phrase from a biblical passage for several months. This is a powerful form of prayer in that layers of meaning continue to unfold and deepen as we re-visit an idea repeatedly over time.

One of my first experiences with this kind of prayer focused on the above phrase from David's 46th Psalm. In this approach to prayer, one doesn't so much think about the meaning of a phrase as much as one opens up to the revelation of its meaning through the Holy Spirit. There is a specific attitude one must cultivate to attain this prayerful mindset. It is an attitude characterized by openness, receptivity and patient anticipation. This is not an intellectual exercise of deciphering meaning from Bible verse through clever deductions or interpretations. It is a surrender to the Revelatory Power of the Holy Spirit. By emptying out the voices in our own heads that typically dominate the "airwaves", we open ourselves to a deeper truth. "In the beginning was the Word" - God's first call to us is an invitation to listen! Later, the Living Word is revealed as Jesus the Christ. We are instructed to 'hear the Word and abide by it.' One can not happen without the other. We must first hear the Word deep within our hearts and souls for it to become alive in us.

How do we listen to God? We stop listening to ourselves! The mind will keep us occupied with fodder and filler for as long as we choose to listen to it. The Revelation of the Word happens when we stop talking and start listening. Spiritual listening is an act of faith and surrender. In the same way we are called to love God with the entirety of our being, we also must learn to listen with the fullness of our being. Before the fruit of love - compassionate service - can be harvested, the seeds must be firmly planted through listening. Listening is the internal, passive side of love that eventually grows into action.

Nature abhors a vacuum and a mind without focus will drift and attach to stimulus impulsively and compulsively. A prayer focus allows the mind to continually anchor itself on the island of prayer. Whenever my mind wanders during these month-long prayer sessions, it naturally seeks a return to the island. Like a seabird on a reconnaissance flight, the mind will return to its home-base time and again. The mind needs an anchor or it will wander aimlessly into troubled waters. In a world with endless noise and temptation, a prayer-anchor is essential for staying on course- ' the narrow path of righteousness.'

Gently, without the force of will, spiritual listening develops into a way of being. "Be still and know...." I carried that with me for six months and longer. Over time, my mind slowed and quieted around this central idea. I began to hear something beyond and behind the din of everyday life. God spoke! The Word became flesh. I felt the Living Word inside me and understood then how I could be the Living Temple. And I was saved {from the trappings of my own mind}.

SCHIZOMERICA

MATTHEW 12:25 “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and no town or house divided against itself will stand.”

The most severe forms of mental illness - Schizophrenia, Multiple Personality Disorder and Bi-polar Disorders - all have certain things in common: they are characterized by fragmented, split-off “selves” working in divergent and opposing directions. The internal tension caused by such processes are extreme and lead to some severe form of implosion or explosion. One can easily imagine the destructive force of such a condition if it were physiological in nature. Here, one leg would try to go forward as the other pulled backwards. The eyes would crisscross and never focus together. The index finger and thumb, instead of joining harmoniously to perform tasks, would pull away from each other as if a magnetic field stood between them. Such deep-rooted incongruence takes a heavy toll on the psyche of an individual. It cannot be endured for very long. Implosion, in the form of suicide, catatonia and the like is one possibility. Explosion, in the form of violent behavior, is another. One or the other is inevitable in order to relieve the smoldering internal tension.

Under ideal conditions, there is one, whole integrated self in which all the component “parts” work together toward a common goal - i.e.., survival, happiness, health, etc...

If an individual’s psyche can be frayed and torn apart by polarizing psychological processes, it stands to reason that the “collective psyche” or mental health of a nation can be similarly weakened. Diversity of opinion, freedom of expression are healthy aspects of American culture. I’m not referring to that here. I’m talking about something insidious and dark - a people divided against itself. I believe we may have been at such a crossroads at the time of our Civil War. We were facing a core identity question then that had to be resolved one way or the other. We could not continue as both a ‘slave state’ at home and the ‘harbinger of freedom’ to the rest of the world. We could not purport democratic values of equality and human dignity while perpetuating the evil of slave labor. Something had to give and it did in the form of Explosion!

Today, as a Christian nation once again trying to restore our soul, we are implored to aspire to Christ’s example in all things - to ask the question, “What would Jesus want us to be”? Yet as an imperial military power and an impersonal capitalist machine, we often find ourselves at odds with Christian principles. This internal conflict tears at the fabric of our national mental health. In the same way that geological forces can cause such underlying tension in the earth that it cracks and quakes, our cultural inconsistencies and duplicities cause chasms and rifts in our psyche. There are so many examples of this that I’ll name just a prominent few: The gospel command to ‘heal and serve the poor‘ simply doesn’t align with the Darwinian creed, ‘every man for himself’; the gospel command to ‘love our neighbors‘ cannot co-exist with cultural attitudes and policies that promote ‘fear of those who are different’; hailing the rights of the “unborn” while ignoring the rights and the needs of the “already- born” is the kind of hypocrisy Jesus railed against. Such polarizing forces within our collective psyche serve to weaken our national sanity until the dueling tensions between our fragmented “selves” reaches its breaking point. When this happens to an individual, we call it a psychotic episode or “breakdown”. The person is being torn apart at their soul-level. I believe we’re close to that breaking point as a nation. The tension between our private lives, which the majority of us describe as faith-based and God-centered, and our public lives, whereby the prevailing notions are the amoral creeds of ‘might is right‘ and ‘greed is good’, is about to tear us asunder. We cannot serve two masters.

When the Roman Empire fell, in large measure, it fell under the weight of its own contradictions and hypocrisy. On the one hand, it aspired to be a great “civilization” with parliamentary democratic processes, judicial systems , rule of law and even civil rights. On the other hand, it was very much married to Barbaric culture in which, for sport, Christians were fed to lions, gladiators fought to the death and dissent was crushed with unmitigated, brutal police force. Rome couldn’t figure out what kind of empire it really wanted to be. In the end, I believe, this caused its demise. We are facing a similar question as a nation and as an empire. Who do we want to be? Do we abandon Jesus and his ideals because they are inconvenient and impractical in a materialistic world? Or do we embrace him more fully and challenge ourselves to be ‘his people on earth’?

Are we to be, in the truest sense of the word, a Christian nation or an A-bomb-in-nation?