Prayer of the Heart, Step One: "Letting Go"

Find a quiet place and sit down (or lie down) and spend a dozen or more minutes with God. Not the kind of prayer when you talk at God (there's place for that). But the prayer that listens deeply. Yields. Is simply present to God. Being with the Mystery. Communion. What do you do?

Begin this way . . . step one of three.

Sit (or lie) still. Alert. Become aware of your body. Find places of tension with you. (I carry my tension in my jaw and cheeks. My gut too.) Find the tension and release it gently. Let your body, settle into a natural stillness. Now let your breath fall into a natural rhythm. Don't control it. Let it comes to a natural in and out rhythm, as if you were sleeping.  Feel the life in your body.  The Orthodox Fathers searched inwardly until they could feel their heart beating. Tough. But most beginners can feel a sense of aliveness in their hands.

You seek God alone. But your body is a vessel for the Holy Spirit. The fullness of God dwells in your body, scandalous as that may be. The Incarnation teaches us to honor the body; so does Christian thought and practice. If you're going to meet God, you will meet God by becoming more aware of your body, letting your body be that vessel of encounter. If you're not in your body, you'll not meet God. You'll be everywhere else but the one place God's come to meet you.

Sit still. Sit straight. Breathe. Relax. And as you do you may begin to gently let a prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) rise and fall with your breath. In . . . "Jesus." Out . . . "Mercy." Or something similar.

Don't fret if your thoughts drag you away. They'll try. When they do, simply and undramatically return to your senses---follow your breath into your body, and corral the mind with a simple prayer.  Classically, this is the purgative or cleansing step.  With each breath, confess your tension.  Confess the difficulty you have getting still.  Confess the thoughts, ideas, images that want to lead you anywhere but here.  Confess your need for God.  Let go. Release.  Unburden.

Begin with 10 minutes and work up to 25 minutes. Once or twice a day.

Step two next post.

Prayer: Freeing your ego from mass insanity around you

When I talk about the spiritual life and your practice of prayer, I may come off as a bit hard on the ego---that precious little one within us. I suppose I do so because I find we’re so ignorant of its tyranny. We’ve all been around families whose little children are unruly, unmanageable, and frankly, rude, because they’ve not learned as you’ve said so well, to submit “to that which it understands to be for the good of the whole being.” Little children need to be loved and welcomed with space to grow, but they if they are never disciplined they become unhealthy. So too with the ego.

So, I probably exaggerate a bit much, but all with the purpose of bringing the ego back into its place—like helping a two year old know she’s loved but is not the center of the universe. Salvation is about this kind of wholeness. And people who practice interior prayer---deep inner union with Christ---will find their ego reordered and redeemed by Christ within.

They become agents of healing in a world tyrannized by the mass insanity of collective egos run amok.

The ego and the spiritual life

In recent posts I've explored the role of the ego in your spiritual life generally, and prayer particularly. Rob added an important comment/correction that I think will help you: "I wanted to say that I think the ego is getting a bit of a bad press here," he comments. "My understanding is that the ego, in its Freudian sense, is that part of us which tries to mediate the demands of the id (unbridled instinct) and the superego (constricting legalism), as well as the pressures of the real world, to attempt to attain and sustain the health of the whole being." Rob, you're exactly right in your analysis, and in your warning and plea.

The ego is not bad (I do think I’ve said this). It must not be eradicated. Rather, it’s to be healed, restored, returned to its proper function. The ego, as I understand it, is a God-given faculty within us . . . part of the image of God. But because of the Fall (whatever that is), it’s not healthy. It does not properly mediate between the Id and Superego, but too often is nearly completely identified with them.

This is central to our problem as human beings, to our spiritual practice, to the union with God that is the mystery we are all intended to experience. I think sin is to a large extent this deep and “original” (that is, at the core of our being) misidentification of ourselves with our unhealthy egos. I’ve a hunch St. Paul might identify this wounded, broken ego with the “flesh” in his writings—”flesh” that is not to be discarded or abused or despised, but healed by it’s gathering into Jesus Christ. The Incarnation informs us here too.

A dumb prayer that heals the deepest part of you

When you pray, check your ego.  A product of Enlightenment rationalism and individualism, it's got a hankering for the novel, unique, and so-called “authentic."  It wearies easily of praying the same thing because, frankly, it's not much interested in obedience to anything besides itself.

The ego wants to be your god, but it doesn't want you to know that.  In fact, it likes that you're trying to be spiritual, to seek God, to practice the life of prayer.  So long as you're trying, it can still boss you around.  It can swell with pride when you're good, and knock you around when you're bad.  All this only feeds the ego.

The perennial wisdom tradition in all spiritual traditions knows that humble, dogged obedience in the same direction bears the fruit of a holy life.

Modernity is quite ignorant of all that, and my ego, at least, is pretty well infected with its disease.

That's why I pray the Jesus Prayer over and over again.  It's a dumb prayer.  It's aim is to silence my ego who can't stand its simplicity or my dogged obedience to drawing my mind down into my heart.  When my ego is brought into submission to my heart, the Center, it stands dumb before Christ.

I still can't figure out why it resists its healing.

The authenticity that matters

I continue in this conversation about the use of repetitive prayers.  When Jesus commended the particular prayer known as the Lord's Prayer, did he mean for us to repeat the words as they are or to use them as a guide for our own improvising? Modern, Western culture prizes a heightened individualism—or I should say, an untethered individualism.  We who've drunk deep of its intoxicating brew will need to turn more toward the tradition rather than away from it.  Praying with firm connections to our spiritual heritage doesn’t mean a mere rote and empty repetition of prayers like the Lord's Prayer.  Rather it means, as in jazz, that we learn our scales so well that we can then improvise properly and freely when given a chord chart or lead sheet.

The Lord's Prayer (like the Jesus Prayer) is a lead sheet, as are the Psalms. From a prayer like this we can playfully  and confidently improvise.

Too many of us modern people want to improvise in prayer like jazz musician, Miles Davis, plays the horn but without the long, hard apprenticeship in the tradition.  That would be as silly as a teenager picking up a horn, stepping onto the stage and thinking she can imitate Miles Davis.

The saints and mystics would all tell us that there is power in the words, as-they-are (like scales to Miles Davis, they are non-negotiable).  So take up the words of the Lord's Prayer or Jesus Prayer.  Pray them over and over until they play in the heart, until the heart is alive with them, beating out the rhythm of the words, and the mind is no longer thinking them.   Only then will you approach the only kind authenticity that matters.

Continued next post...