ken wilson online

So it’s been a couple of weeks blogging. A few impressions. I’m more hopeful that this is valuable (to me) than I first thought. It does have the effect of keeping a journal, though I can’t say that it’s nearly as candid as a journal. But it does help me to be a little more attentive or mindful of my own life, and it has the effect helping me to focus on things I want to focus on. The categories feature, for example: I have to really think twice before committing to a category and ask whether it’s a passing enthusiasm or something I want to pay attention to over the next year, say.
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Experiment to blog on prayer continues, Monday morning. Meditating on Psalm 3. Lectio is different than studying a text or attempting to figure it out. It feels more like stupid thinking. That is a pondering the words, attentive to images or feelings that emerge from simply holding the word in one’s mind, if that makes sense. I think it requires learning first to be still and silent and ignoring most thoughts as distraction, which allows the brain to function at a different level, or one chooses to focus on a different level than the ordinary analytic thoughts one has when engaging a text. See, this is difficult to describe.

This morning, Psalm 3, vs. 1: Lord, many are my foes…..leads to an awareness of the raw or basic fact of foes. All of our ancestors were to some extent able to survive their foes long enough to mate successfully, at least. So there is something in me that is designed to guard, protect against, foes. This morning feeling the fact of that. In the polite company of civilization that basic human reality is submerged behind many layers, but it’s the raw human material. So, just being aware of that, like a band of early homosapiens surrounded by wolves, or other predators, including other humans. This brought an awareness that foes are simply a common experience of being human: my father fought in WW2, was surrounded by foes, as was his father in WW1, I just missed being drafted at the height of the Vietnam War.
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This is an experiment. That is making the occasional blog entry on prayer. That is the experience of praying. That is the attempt to do meditative reading of one book over an extended period of time, the book of psalms in particular. I will only continue the experiment only if it is helpful to me or at least not harmful. Otherwise it’s not sustainable. Can blogging function as a journal? Not sure. To be determined. Obviously not an anything goes journal, but selected entries. Enough of that.

Day 3 of mediating on psalms, as per what my friend Rick does, I think, and is described in Sacred Reading, by Michael Casey. Still reading that. Today, parking on “desire” in the second verse of the first psalm. Happy is the person who sustains a choice of negation–not pursuing the path of the wicked, the offenders, the scoffers. But instead attaches desire to the Lord’s teaching is the sense of the first two verses. Attaches desire. A raw word-experience. Came to me in prayer, John Lennon’s song (white album, i think): I want you. I want you so bad. I want you. I want you so bad, it’s driving me mad, driving me mad. That’s some kind primal of fixation, mediated by what, the amygdala, part of the emotion system in the brain, a deeper in structure of the brain–not the part we do math with, either. Lennon wrote that, I guess, about his desire for Yoko Ono. Which was so strong it was in the process of breaking up the Beatles, if I understand it right. What did he see in Yoko Ono? No one really knew. People around him didn’t see what he saw.

Desire. This morning, parking the brain’s awareness on desire, which I have known. Not for Yoko, obviously. Affixing that raw human energy-intention-feeling on the Lord’s teaching. I don’t know how that happens, but it does, or can. God grabs your attention-desire like Yoko Ono grabbed John Lennnon’s. This morning, mainly parked there with an awareness of that. Not fancy, I know. Lectio.

But obviously willing to try–just uncertain about the outcome, or rather the effect of the process. Blog on prayer that is. My own. A treacherous business. But. But, I found myself emailing what was then becoming a new friend, nearly every morning as a kind of prayer confessional or journal a couple of years back, for about 15 months. Circumstances aligning to allow said emailing to be done with candor and as little caution as I’m capable of mustering (mustering a little of something?). I found it profitable.

I’ve never been able to sustain journaling. Partly because the word itself annoys me. And I’m playing with this blogging thing and know that it will only be sustainable if I hit two or three birds with one blog, so to speak. So there it is. And here it is the first day of a new year and circumstances have aligned to draw my attention to a practice I’d like to sustain over the next year. Knowing myself, if I can keep my attention on it, by speaking of it, if only to myself, chances are, I will sustain it and that I think would be profitable. Or least I’m curious to see if and how it would be.

The circumstances aligning are these: good friend, Rick gave me Michael Casey’s book Sacred Reading (on what catholics call lectio divina–but which I’d rather not call lectio divina, being annoyed by latin for frivolous reasons.) Dang, it’s a good book so far and has whet my appetite for this practice I’ve dabbled in–one can hardly pray for 30 years without stumbling the practice no matter what it’s called. Casey, though, makes the case that to be done with greatest profit, do it daily more or less, and stick with an entire book of the Bible, chapter by chapter, section by section, until you’re done. Instead of flitting hither and yon through the Bible. Something about his writer makes me trust that he knows what he’s talking about and has practiced it for years. And that he’s more a pray-er than a writer using prayer as his next project. And happily, he can write about it well. That, plus I’ve bought The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter, a Jewish writer and Hebrew scholar whom I also trust. Two trusted writers, two new books, a new year, hey, sooner or later, believing in God one has to decide whether he can get through with a little nudge now and again, and I’m deciding this is one of those times–that I’m being led to try this practice beginning with psalms.

So I began today–or tried to, but then the neighbors called for help with the snow. How annoying. But after removing some for and them, I got back at it. Psalm 1. “Happy the man…” Parked with happy for a while and felt it. Then happy the man. What a hopeful few words–that happiness and a man might walk together. And more came–a good start.