The sleep doctors use the same principle for treating insomnia. The bed, they say, should only be used for sleeping.  No reading, watching television.  This conditions the body to sleep in bed rather than lay awake.  We are environmentally embedded beings, space-sensitive creatures.

So if you’ve got inoransia, try making and maintaining a place for your praying self to dwell.

Mine is a corner in my office at home.  Got a nice chair from Ikea, an end table from my parents home, a little rug from Kashmir, a few candles, a picture of my honey, and my favorite icon, “Not Made with Human Hands“.    Facing a window looking out at some nearby trees with four– count ‘em four–bird feeders attached to the window.

We forget that prayer is a bodily function.  We pray with our praying brains in our praying bodies to a God who delights to inhabit human flesh.

You probably have what used to be called an “entertainment center” in your home. You have invested a chunk of change is this space. Now that it’s a multi-media center, you have to manage it.  (Man, you should see the set up my son has.  He gets a call on his mobile phone and it shows up on his television screen, which is connected to his computer network.  I just sit there in stupified wonder, trying to imagine what it would be like to truly inhabit the New Millennium as he does.)

Certain kinds of praying–especially the ones that calm your over-active alarm system–take time.  This time probably won’t come out of your work time, or your time to eat, dress, and perform essential acts of personal hygiene.  It will come out of your media time.

To overcome inoransia, you may have to give your praying body a fighting chance.  All that media is so powerful because it is perfectly adapted to your dopamine-reward system. Your brain is fine tuned to tune in–to see the flashing images, respond to the cascade of new sensory data.  Media is reality on steroids.

Which is to say, if you’ve got money to maintain a media center, invest in a praying space to give your  praying self a little room to move.

This is a function of our love affair with rationalism that goes all the way back to Descartes, the father of the modern era whose first principle was “I think, therefore I am.”  Whatever that great philosopher meant by that, it came to mean what we moderns tend to assume: that our thinking self is our deepest-truest self.

But the Spirit has been leading us out of that for the past hundred years or so (and long before that) when the winds of Pentecost began to blow again.

The mystics of old engaged different capacities of the brain for prayer.  Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits (the Jesus freaks of the Catholic Church), taught his followers to engage Scripture with the imagination: to place one’s self in the unfolding scene of a text to see what happens.

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing urged a wordless praying through the discipline of not paying attention to the normal mental chatter that runs like a gaggle of four year olds at a birthday party through Chucky Cheese.  Over time this practice quiets the part of the brain that enhances our perception of separteness from others and the world in which we are immersed, the world of which we are patently a part, but sometimes forget.  This wordless prayer leads to a sense of deep calm and connection.

Any new-to-us ways, of course, we distrust–the default setting of the brain set on survival mode.  It’s the reason we distrust strangers. It’s also the reason the Bible reminds that when we provide hospitality to strangers we may be entertaining angels unaware.

A blogger from Texas was put off by my use of the term “mystic” in the title of the book.  I know exactly why, and I’m sympathetic.  But he came up with a good solution: place a piece of tape over the word if it bothers you, but try some of the practices taught in the book, if you’re praying brain isn’t satisfied with it’s current praying.

There are new-to-you realms of prayer that engage capacities of your praying brain with which you’ve not yet learned to love the Lord.

It’s taken the whole church, not just your little familiar wing of the church, over the whole lifetime of the church, to explore these realms.

The wisdom is buried in plain sight in the Bible, covered over by our limited experience, which serves as a set of blinders.

And it’s buried deep in the history and experience of the church, about which most of us, myself included, know previous little.

The same might be said of our knowing God.  We know so little of Him, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus knew so little of their fellow traveler because “their eyes were holden.”

But isn’t that exciting? Whatever it is you know of God, it is such a small sliver.  There’s so much more to be known.  And so much more of you to be engaged in the knowing.

I’m shocked by my own prejudices, and how easily they latch onto my faith.

Like demons.

The book is largely the product of  a slow motion flip in my experience of prayer that began near the time of my father’s death in 1999.    My normal daily devotions had run completely out of steam.  In desperation, I turned to some new-to-me forms of praying, beginning with the use of–horrors!– a “prayer book.”

Enter my first prejudice.  Having grown up in and then out of the Episcopal church of the 1950’s, I knew that prayer books were part of an old time religion that I left behind for a flashy new spontaneous, charismatic, revivalist form of Christianity.  Prayer books were for people who didn’t have the Spirit to help them pray.

Finding a prayer book was another matter though.  The Daily Office that priests use is pretty hard to find.  So I was intrigued to discover The Divine Hours, a from of the daily office for the rest of us, compiled by Phyllis Tickle, then the religion editor of Publishers Weekly.

I probably picked up for possible purchase, then returned to its shelf, a copy of The Divine Hours at Borders (the original located here in Ann Arbor) on three or four separate visits.   Phyllis Tickle was an Episcopalian.  I had never heard of her.  Plus, she was a journalist.   None of this endeared the book to me.  Owing to my pre-judgments.  I couldn’t be that hard up.

Eventually, need got the better of me, and I bought a copy and started to use it. In time, I found myself slipping into a deep river of prayer that has been flowing since the time of Abraham.  The Divine Hours became for me a portal into a new way of praying.

Next up, a book on my father’s book shelf by Anthony Bloom, an Orthodox bishop, titled humbly, Beginning to Pray.   I was clearing out my father’s apartment after his death, sorting through his books.   Decided to keep this one, despite the fact I’d never heard of Anthony Bloom and didn’t expect an Orthodox bishop to make much of contribution to my praying.   More blinding prejudice

But reading this little gem, confirmed the validity of some strange happenings in my praying having to do with silence–happenings which might otherwise have evaporated unnoticed, where it not for Bloom’s deep wisdom.

In time, I stumbled into The Jesus Prayer, a staple of the Eastern Orthodox praying tradition.  A meditative, repetitive prayer that tripped all my Eastern Religion prejudice alerts.

Somewhere in there, I got interested in nature again.  Got turned on to the woods and birds and trees and such.  Started to experience and then to anticipate finding God winking at me through his creation. In ever so subtle ways, easy to ignore, like God himself.  This direction too  is suspect, because as we all know it’s a step toward pantheism.  New age stuff.  The  neo-pagan spirituality of environmental whackos and other suspect groups.

But something happens when you hit 50 or thereabouts, or it least it did in my case.   You grow a little less cautious.

You have the advantage by then of having to have faced a few of your religious prejudices.  You realize that religion, like any other human enterprise, is  a breeding ground for prejudice, in fact.  Yes, even your rarified and purified form of religion.

And you realize that behind the door of many a bias, God waits.  So you learn to distrust your unexamined first impressions, even the ones that have been hanging around you for decades.

One of my favorite lines from the gospels is “and their eyes were holden” (Luke 24: 16, KJV) in the account of the two on the road to Emmaus.  Jesus had slipped onto their path but they were not able to recognize him.  Their eyes were holden.  Held. Restrained. Bound.

By grief yes. But also, it is likely, by garden variety prejudice. The first eye-witnesses were women, hysterical women whose testimony wasn’t valid in most courts.

And so it has been and ever shall be.  We are, all of us, prejudiced against God.  He is is the ultimate Other, whom we distrust, like all the other others.  So we miss him in the poor, and in the stranger, and in each other, much of the time.

But John Wimber used to say, “You can’t get more of God if you’re not willing to eat from dirty spoons.”

That is to say, God will knock on the door of our prejudice–if only to rattle our cage.   Because it is a cage of our own constructing.

And this, my friends, is partly why so many of us who pride ourselves in being part of the awakened, the vibrant, the personal-relationship-with-Jesus gang, are dry as a bone inside and lurch from church to church like so many zombies looking for jolt.

Yes, dry as a very old piece of Melba Toast.

Dry as a throat in the middle of the night, goading us to get up and stumble into the bathroom for a cup of water.

It wasn’t the first time for any of the three. Moses was instructed to take his shoes off, standing before the burning bush.  God was manifesting his presence there.

Elijah met God at the mouth of a cave in a mountain.  A howling wind got his attention, then an earthquake, then a fire, than a period of intense silence. Finally a still small voice–the voice of God.

Jesus stood in a river, praying. Suddenly the a rift opened in the sky and a bird alighted on him, then a voice from the sky spoke to him. Some thought it thundered.

Neither Jesus, Moses, nor Elijah were pantheists.  They learned the lesson of Genesis, chapter one.  The earth is the Lord’s.  The greater and lesser lights are not deities to be worshiped.  The earth is a temple for his glory to inhabit, so God rested in his temple (not built by human hands) on the seventh day.

How far we have fallen from a spirit-infused understanding of the world around us!  How we have reduced nature to a depository of natural resources–a Super Wal-Mart in which we live and move and have our consumer being.

Sure, we may take a hike from time to time.  But most of our time “in nature” is driving through it with the windows up and the AC on, listening to a CD playing digitized music with a techno-beat.

Our expectation of meeting God in the outdoor cathedral is at an all time low, as if the experience of  Moses, Elijah, and Jesus inspired us only a little.

So we spend less time outdoors than ever, hunt and fish less than ever, go camping less than ever, visit our national parks less than ever.   We wonder less in the wilderness and wonder why believers seem to have more fun assailing each other for dangerous thinking than meeting God in the outdoor cathedral.

There are places a person can go to meet God.  Places.  One can go where the people of God are worshipping God and meet him there.  (A young man told me recently that since he was baptized a few weeks ago he finds himself “vibrating and shaking” off and on during worship.)

One can go into the outdoor cathedral to meet God there.  As Moses did. As Elijah did. As Saul of Tarsus did on the road to Damascus, the Risen Jesus outshining the noon day sun. As Peter did on the rooftop in Joppa, where the sky opened and a vision of creatures played out in nature-color.  As Jesus did, seeking “wild places” to meet with Abba, Father, World Creator.

The fact that this makes us nervous because some New Agers (who are often broken-hearted children of the church) enjoy nature’s charms and stumble into pantheism is irrelevant.

The man was a Hebrew, a man of YHWH. Versed in the commands of YHWH regarding worship–that he was to worship none other than YHWH, a jealous God.   So his talking to the moon wasn’t worship of the moon. But it was a prayer in which the moon was addressed. His rambling rap is memorialized in Psalm 148.

Surely you’ve heard or read this Psalm, maybe a thousand times.  Mostly, we skim-hear the Bible, like speed reading.  We wouldn’t say this because it doesn’t sound right but we think the man is doing something cute.  And it’s a cuteness we don’t feel inclined to imitate.    Do you want to be known as the man or the woman who talks to the moon when you pray? But there it is.  Every time we read this Psalm with even an ounce of participation, we become the man who talks to the moon when he prays.

As though we are to feel personally connected to the creation.  As though we are fellows with the creation.  Fellow created things before the Creator.

As though we are to be in creation, aware of creation and God simultaneously–and with reverence and wonder.

Is the creation valuable in itself because of it’s relationship to God?  Or is it of value simply as a function of its usefulness to us?

Let’s say you were digging around in the dirt somewhere in Israel.  You stumbled on the archeological find of the century: some artifact known to belong to Jesus of Nazareth.

How would you feel about that thing knowing it to be his?  Excited, thrilled, inspired, reverential.  All of these and more.

What if everything is that?  His.  Wouldn’t that, shouldn’t that, heighten our sensitivity?

You say, that would be exhausting.

Maybe.  But what if the Spirit fully intends to wake us up to this?

What if this is meant to be a staple of the joy of being human–and our dullness is a dullness to the joy of being human?

Is this part of what Paul meant when he referred to the weight of glory? As if we would stagger around like drunks if we could see the world as it is.

What I see in many souls who care passionately about the environment is something that leans in the direction of God. Something over which the Spirit hovers.  It grieves my heart when my fellow believers–and thankfully, it’s a small if vocal minority–seem to have a chip on their shoulder regarding these people.  Rather than seeing what the Father is doing in them, it seems that some of us prefer to judge them harshly–to treat them as the despised other that groups need to feel good about themselves.

But forget that. Let that remain a mere rabbit trail or hobby horse of mine.

Instead, imagine yourself being in the presence of the man who talked to the moon.  What did he see that we don’t see?  What did he feel that we don’t feel?  Why are we invited to inhabit these strange words of his?

Have you noticed that when you’re out to eat and order a Coke, the wait staff will often says, “Is Pepsi OK?”  That’s because they’ve been trained to make it clear that Coke and Pepsi are separate brands.  In trademark law, the owner of a brand has a responsibility to enforce the brand’s identity.  If someone is selling a different product under the name of your brand, you can lose the trademark to that product if you don’t take legal action to enforce the trademark.

Yes this branding metaphor has roots in a consumer culture.  In such a culture trademarks are important. Samsung can’t make and sell something called an iPhone.

Is this a legitimate metaphor to use when talking about communicating the gospel?  I think so.  We are called to communicate the gospel in the language of the culture in which we find ourselves.   We may pretend that we don’t like being in a consumer culture–even as we consume more than any other people in the world or the history of the planet. But here we are, all of us profoundly affected by this consumer culture.

Brand = Name = Reputation

And there is a concern in Scripture that corresponds to the consumer culture concern for trademark.   A person’s most precious possession is his or her name.  God goes to great lengths to protect the integrity of his Name.  Using his name in vain is, in the language of our culture “trademark infringement.”

A name is something that often precedes a person.  You live you life and gain a reputation, and people who don’t know you personally have heard of you.  They know your reputation.  Your name precedes you.   They are inclined to receive you or not, based on your name.

Like it or not, Christianity has a name in our culture–a reputation that precedes it before people engage it personally.  And this reputation powerfully affects whether people are inclined or disinclined to receive it.

Why shouldn’t it be so?  Jesus himself said, “Ye shall judge them by their fruits.”   Isn’t it fair to judge a religion by the reputation that those who carry the name Christian have?   We certainly judge other religions by that standard.

Who Establishes the Brand Identity in the Public Sphere?

So what is the most powerful force in American Christianity over the last thirty years?  Evangelical Christianity, hands down. All the sociological surveys indicate that it is so.  Politicians cater to it and it pays when they do. This means the evangelical Christians have a powerful impact on the reputation of Christianity in this place.

As insiders, we can believe all the good things about this movement that we want to.  We would be justified in doing so.  The warmth of the people, the concern for missions, the good deeds that go unnoticed all over the world, the money given to good causes, the volunteer hours for good deeds.  It’s all there and it’s real.   But alongside all that is another public face that powerfully affects our reputation in this place.  His reputation too.

For decades evangelicals were known for avoiding involvement in the public square. They didn’t vote as much as other groups.  It wasn’t cool to be involved in politics.  Then something shifted in the 1970’s.  A number of very high profile evangelical and fundamentalist leaders decided to get involved in the public square.

What was the name of the first multi-denominational organization devoted to this?  The Moral Majority, named by a political operative named Paul Weyrich.

Is this how Christians are to be known in the public square? As the Moral Majority?  Wouldn’t it be great if we were known as moral people? But is it wise or biblical or representative of the Spirit of Jesus that we should call ourselves, “The Moral Majority”?   Especially when President Nixon used the term “The Silent Majority” to refer to all those who supported his policies, while he was busy breaking the law.  That was the cultural precursor to the term, “Moral Majority.”

What if instead of calling ourselves, The Moral Majority, we called ourselves, The Friends of Sinners, or The Broken Majority?

The Moral Majority waxed and waned and was replaced by another organizition: the Christian Coalition.  But the Christian Coalition was a politically conservative organization made up of Christians.  Is that the reputation of Jesus we want to promote?  Jesus the Conservative? Jesus the Liberal?  Jesus the Libertarian?  Jesus the Socialist?  Jesus the Facist?  Jesus the Republican? Jesus the Democrat?

This organization waxed and waned and was replaced by Focus on the Family–founded by Dr. James Dobson as a resource for marriage relationships and parent-child relationships, etc.  But over time it became increasingly political, and when the Christian Coalition tanked, it formed a political arm called The Family Research Council, another politically conservative organization made up of Christians.   Against abortion, gay marriage, gun control, the science behind global warming–the usual hodgepodge, some good, some bad, some debatable, depending on your point of view.

While this was happening over the course of ten, twenty, now thirty years, most pastors in evangelical churches–myself included for too long–didn’t notice how powerful the cultural impact was becoming.  We were like the frog in the pan of water that rises slowly to a boil. We were convinced of the dangers of a secularity that wasn’t as tolerant as it claimed to be.  We felt marginalized by a residual disdain for faith in some institutions–the secular university for example.  We felt like a minority group within society, even as we were becoming something very close to a majority.   And we were and still are concerned about abortion on demand through six months of pregnancy and with a broadly defined “health” exception well into the ninth month, right up to birth, as the  law of the land–the most libertarian approach to abortion in the world, perhaps, the least legal protection for unborn life, less legal protection than many European nations.

And there were very shrewd politicians who took advantage of us.  Richard Nixon being the first, but not the last.  He even snookered Billy Graham, our chief spokesperson.

The Religious Right

And we became allied with that movement called “The Religious Right.”  By we, in this context, I mean mainly white, suburban evangelicals.  Talk about a branding problem!  By an unfortunate coincidence when the brain hears “right” it doesn’t just think, the opposite of “left.”  It thinks the opposite of “wrong.”  Put this together with the first evangelical-fundamentalist political organization of note, The Moral Majority.  Is it any wonder we gained a reputation as self-righteous, as people who proclaim themselves to be righteous?

And slowly but surely we began to lose effectiveness in the one thing we were commanded by our true founder to do: preach good news to every nook and cranny of creation, including the one we find ourselves in.  People on the outside of our faith stayed away in droves.  Yes, we gathered our own into larger and larger churches.  Along with them came people who didn’t mind the reputation that we had gained in the wider culture, or were willing to ignore it. But many others bothered by the reputation that preceded us in their perceptions of us wouldn’t be caught dead in an evangelical church. And not because they are disinterested in Jesus of Nazareth, whose reputation, remarkably remains pretty good as soon you make the obvious point that the founder isn’t always well represented by the followers.

Colorado Springs, We Have a Problem!

Now we’ve got a problem and a big one: a branding problem.   And we have a problem in our own communities, because perfectly devoted and wonderful believers also happen to be politically conservative, rather than politically liberal if forced to choose between those labels. They are conservative for many different reasons–a distrust of big government, a belief that we need to reemphasize personal responsibility, etc.

How do pastors say, “The Religious Right” doesn’t represent all Christians, without sounding like they want to replace the Religious Right with the Religious Left?  Especially when many evangelical Christians have been socialized not to consider that there might be a difference between Christian and conservative or between Christian and liberal?  That this might be a very complex combination of identities, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not.   Pastors who object to the identification of Christianity with the Religious Right are branded by many conservative believers as liberal, outsiders, bad people, traitors.    So we tend to keep our concerns to ourselves.

The fog is lifting, but it’s still a real mess, and pastors don’t like messes.  But there’s a lot at stake: the name of Jesus for starters.  And we will answer to him for how we face this problem, which we cannot do by minimizing it.

Jesus had rumination in mind (I think) when he told his disciples not to worry beforehand what they were to say when dragged before councils and kings.  He knew, perhaps by personal experience with his own brain, that the neurological alarm system is powerful and it can stimulate the frontal lobe to think in circles, like a dog chasing its tail, to no end.

Overthinking, a counselor called it when I was driven by a mild depression to get some help with my brain.   Overthinking!  As soon as he uttered the word it was as if a disease had been named.  Oh, what a relief!  Maybe it’s not just me.  Maybe something’s wrong that can be fixed!

The diagnosis helped my praying brain, that’s for sure.  I began to recognize the symptoms of overthinking and realized that much of what I took for prayer was rumination.  No wonder I had to use all my willpower to pray!  I was occupying the mental landscape of pious anxiety much of the time, thinking this was the “labor” of prayer.  No, it was the curse of rumination.

Silence was the cure for my ruminating brain.  Be still, and know that I am God.

It took me a while, but in time, I learned to value silence inside the cranial cavity.  It begins by teaching yourself to ignore the swirling thoughts rather than egg them on.  To let them run ahead rather than chase after them.

It proceeds by meditating on Scripture, not just reading it.   Taking a word or a phrase and returning your focus to that world or phrase as your jittery brain bounces from thought to thought.  In time, the thoughts do slow down.  They become less persistent and insistent, like voices from the side of the swimming pool when your head is under water.

“For God alone my soul in silence waits.”  (Ps. 62:6)   Silence.  As if there’s something out there more valuable than my thoughts.  Oh, freedom! Let me listen for that silence!

Young pastor teach your soul to wait in silence.  Begin by craving a little silence.  In the din of your thoughts, seek it out, behind them, beneath them, beyond them.

Practice this daily. Begin with a minute. Build up to ten minutes.  Take months if necessary.  Be satisfied with a whiff of silence heard, a moment of stillness in the brain between thoughts.  Renee Descartes was wrong.  I think, therefore I am, he said.  Close, but no cigar.  I am, because He is.  I am, because You are.  I am more than my thoughts. There’s a me beyond them, as important as they are. There’s a You, beyond them to be known with and without them, so wonderful is He.  There is an irreducible Us, within which I am embedded.

I’m waxing philosophical, I know.  But I’m not kidding.

Are you ruminating often, such that when you place a moist finger on your forehead you hear a little sizzle sound?  Maybe you too are over-thinking.

Get some help.  Talk to someone who understands how to lead the ruminating brain out of it’s bovine existence.  Unless you enjoy the misery.

[FOR COMMENTS: What have you leaned about rumination and overcoming it?  How do you experience it?  Is it just me, or is this a serious challenge in pastoral ministry?]

With all the bristling in, among, and between these camps, no wonder the non-combatants–those poor souls who don’t have a dog in this fight–have kept their distance from these words.

But what if there is another approach? An approach that goes beyond the modernist and the literalist. An approach that doesn’t replace what these have to offer so much as takes a step beyond where they bring us. For lack of a better word, let’s call it actualist: an actualist reading of the words. A reading that invites us to shift perspective from the outside to the inside, of the words that is. Where his words abide in us and we abide in his words. Where we lay down the fools errand of mastery (you search the Scriptures thinking that by them you have eternal life) and we enter the words themselves, or let them enter us (yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.)

This morning it happened. I’m doing my morning prayers from The Divine Hours and the words of Jesus meet me there. I like the NIV better than the Jerusalem Bible so I’ll quote it in NIV: “While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. When the teachers of the Law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’” (Mark 2: 15-16)

I stop dead in my tracks. Stop in my time tracks that is, where this happened 2,000 years ago and I’m at a bi-millennial remove. And slowly, like something coming into focus, only the focus mechanism isn’t concerned about a three-dimensional, so much as a fourth-dimensional distance, I’m there. Or rather, I’m present to the thing happening. I’m where the words came from, that is. Which is the actual thing itself. Jesus, with his disciples at table along with many followers who were tax collectors and sinners. Still.

Yesterday, I got my first New Scientist magazine, the August 16-22 2008 issue. And I read a little article titled, “For your brain, it’s as good as being there.” It’s a study of the reading brain. When you read about something happening in a book, the part of the brain that registers actual experience while you are in it fires. Did you catch that? You actually taste something disgusting like quinine and your brain registers the disgust in a certain part of the brain. Then you read a story about something disgusting and your brain registers the disgust in the same place that it actually happened with the quinine on your tongue. As though the reading produces the actual experience of the thing itself.

Things happen out in the world. But our experience of things happening out in the world happens in that part of the “out in the world” called our brains, where only we can experience it. And perhaps God, whose Spirit alone, we understand, knows the mind of God and ours with equal clarity.

This morning, that’s what was happening. Through the power of the words, as I slipped into them, or let them slip into me, having moved beyond the task of either deconstructing or defending them, a task many others have already lent many long hours and lifetimes of labor to; the part of me that experiences what I’m part of happening, actually experienced what the words were inviting me into: Jesus, with his disciples at table with many tax collectors and sinners who were also followers. I hope you were able to follow that sentence, because it was something, actually something, as it was happening. Experiencing the actual tension around that table. My own because it was begging so many questions. And the tension from those who thought it was so awful. And the yearning, want-to-lean-closer-if-possible of the sinner followers. Knowing that to have dinner with him meant the willingness to sit at the table with them (whether “them” were the disciples or the many tax collectors and sinners following.)

And now I’m wondering, are these words inviting me into a kind of camera with a lens that is able to focus through the distance of time, so as to effectively remove it’s distance?

Or back to an earlier metaphor: I would like, more and more, to leave the battlefield of the combatants behind and enter these words or let them enter me and see what they and I will actually do with each other.

Can anyone help me explain what I actually said?

Close your eyes and spend a minute or less or more simply paying attention to how your body feels. Not with a view toward fixing how it feels, per se, but simply to notice it in detail. You can do this somewhat systematically by imagining the spiral slice of a honey baked ham–that spiral thing moving from the top of your head downward toward your feet. Simply noting how your head feels–the burning sensation on your ears, maybe, the tension in your jaw, that very minor itch on your nose, then your neck, shoulders, back…well, you get the idea.

Having worked your way to your feet, now simply take another minute or less to simply pay attention to whatever your emotional background state is right now, as you are presenting yourself. I don’t know about you, but my emotions tend to be felt roughly between my head and my lower gut. Somewhere in there, it either feels calm and peaceful, or anxious feeling, or fearful, or happy, glad, sad, you get the idea. At first, it may be nothing in particular that you can identify as an emotion, so you just attend to whatever it is, not to fix it, or adjust it, or change it, but just to notice.

Having noticed your emotions for what they happen to be, now take a minute or less to consider what you’ve been thinking about most recently….like just before you started this little exercise, what was your mind mulling over? Again, don’t dive back into your thoughts so much as simply try to remember what it is you were thinking about. As in, “Oh, I was thinking about getting the lawnmower fixed, whether it’s something I could do myself or if I need to take it in to the repair shop…..” Don’t get lost in there, just take note.

Now you’re done. That’s a snapshot of the you that you are right now, which you may now realize is present to God. “Therefor I urge you in view of God’s mercy to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your act of spiritual worship.” In view of God’s mercy, here I am as I am.

That’s it. Should take a couple of minutes. Do it once a day, maybe as you lay down on your bed before doing your little night prayers. Before evaluating whether or not it’s worthwhile, do it for maybe a month, every day, or every day you remember to do it. At first it may seem fairly non-descript, a kind of neutral thing to do. No big shakes. Now and again, even early on you’ll notice–hey, this is relaxing. You’ll find yourself getting a little better at it.

What’s happening in your brain while you’re doing this? Your brain will be strengthening, actually strengthening neural pathways, that is the connections between certain nerves and not others in the brain, and some of these neural pathways will connect portions of your brain that need better connections in order for your brain to better calm itself. Your brain has been designed or adapted to do that for you, to relax, to calm itself. And this lets that happen better.

When a person is depressed, they can peek inside the person’s brain with brain imaging equipment and see that the thinking part of the brain is relatively over-active and the emotional part of the brain is relatively under-active. Those two parts of the brain are working too independently of each other. So it helps depressed people to get the emotional part of the brain firing a little more and there are ways to do that.

It it turns out there are three major parts of the brain: the brain stem (which handles basic body functions and the fight-flight alarm system); the limbic system (which handles the more complex emotional states); and cerebral cortex, which is, you know, more cerebral–the planning, thinking, analyzing part of the brain, that sets us your brain apart from the bird-brain. Apparently, it helps when these three parts of the brain have good nerve pathways connecting them to each other. Sort of like the line in the psalm that goes “unite my heart that I may fear your Name” as in, “get me connected inside so I can be a whole person, integrated and not separated within myself before you.” When the connections are firing, apparently, the brain is better at calming itself when needed and this little exercise helps it to do that.

Anyway, try it, you might like it. Over time, it might help your praying brain want to pray more.

This morning, psalm 24, Robert Alter translation.  “The Lord’s is the earth and its fullness/The world and the dwellers within it/For he on the seas did found it/and on the torrents set it firm.”

To meditate is to stand with or within the grinding of one’s thoughts, peering beyond them to these other thoughts, the thoughts expressed in the words of the psalm.  It’s like being a child in a house full of conflict, tension, boredom, and looking out the window at the world, determined to take it in as it is out there.  The child peers outside intently, focusing attention out there, and as the attention of the child is sustained–noticing the trees, the sky, the flora, whatever it is that is there–something lovely happens: the grinding receeds, and if attention is sustained for a time, even, in blessed moments stops altogether.

This is what the mystics call ecstasy, I think.  The standing from within one’s self outside of one’s self.  It’s something we can do.  It’s something our brains crave to do, and will if we let them.

“The Lord’s is the earth and it’s fullness” for example.  The only thing that one’s  “I” is called to do with this is notice it, is to attend to it, is to pay it some mind with the mind.  Like an artist is called to take in a scene, notice it in its details and its overall effect, its parts and its whole, so as to comprehend the scene.  There is an “out there” out there.

“The world and the dwellers therein”  Noticing this, that I am part of a “we,” the dwellers within the world, the earth and it’s fullness which begins as the Lord’s.  Attending to that, the noise inside finds its proper and infinitely smaller proportion.

And so you go on peering out the window of your soul, with your thoughts attending to the thoughts of another, conveyed through the words of the psalm. In much the same way that work at its best absorbs us, and can be a kind of ecstasy allowing us to stand for blessed moments within ourselves of course, but using our selves for something other than simply noticing the noise we make inside.