We live in a culture that is uncomfortable and perhaps even hostile toward spaciousness. This crisis is apparent everywhere you look. It seems that no matter where you are there is an ever-present stream of pictures and sound. You find television screens in restaurants, waiting rooms in doctor’s offices, on airplanes, and on all sorts of screens that people carry with them, phones, tablets, and computers. I recently stopped to fill up my car with gas only to discover a television broadcasting on a mini screen embedded in the gas pump! Even in quiet spaces like libraries or studies, the constant blinking of modems reminds you that internet pictures and sound are only a tap away. There is no need to stay in the quiet, no need to remain in the company of your thoughts, no moment that is not open to diverting yourself from yourself or from the shy, hidden, silent mystery that is waiting in humble emptiness to welcome those who might have the courage to remain.
The most dangerous aspect of this contemporary hostility to silence and space is that it not only invades our physical outer world but is also woven into our inner worlds shaping our responses, our desires, and our attitudes toward life. We are a culture that prizes productivity, efficiency, and people who are strong and stable enough to rise above any emotions that emerge from life’s gifts and trials. The problem with this is that while there is a dimension of will that is important in all our loving, love itself is vulnerable. It is vulnerable to loss, vulnerable to worry, vulnerable to longing, and even when love gives us our sweetest gifts, if we really try to receive these gifts fully, we will find ourselves less productive, less efficient.
I find I am even tempted to use spiritual practices as a means of efficiency, a way to secure myself, a way to handle and control life. I read about meditation and think that I have found the key to achieving a state of centered calmness. I read about centering prayer, asceticism, journaling, and praying the Psalms and find myself wanting to use these tools of prayer to become what I envision, to become a person who is centered, balanced, nurturing, and calm. Inevitably, problems erupt in my relationships that leave me feeling confused, hurt, anxious, and unable to find the centered, balanced, calm, and nurturing self I so want to be. Instead, I am filled with vulnerability, with longing, with desire, and with feelings of inadequacy and incompleteness. I have so much trouble welcoming the truth of my own complexity.
The problem I don’t want to admit is that the tools of prayer offered in and by spiritual traditions are not tools for efficiency. Rather, these practices are practices of surrender, ways to learn trust, pathways for abandoning all forms of efficiency and productivity, ways of life that will open our hearts to receiving the sweetness and terror of the gift of our true selves, rooted, created, and loved by and for God.
Prayer cultivates spaciousness and spaciousness is open and free. Spaciousness is not a place of control and power. It is the place where gifts are encountered and received. Spaciousness requires time and emptiness and a willingness to surrender. Merton opens his book, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, with a parable. It is a story about the living and the dead, about a dead body and vultures. The vultures circle and descend devouring the carcass of a dead animal and there is a mutual benefit to this dance. Merton compares many spiritual seekers to these birds of prey but then says that Zen is not about this dance of victor over vanquished.
Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the “nothing,” the “no-body” that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.
Zen and the Birds of Appetite
Thomas Merton
I am not convinced I understand completely what Merton is trying to communicate through this parable but it does speak to me about temptations in my own spiritual life, temptations to quickly move through moments of mystery to analysis, from vulnerability to control, from being known to possessing knowledge, from life given as gift of the Spirit, to life lived as a scavenging bird of prey.
When I look back over my life, I can see that the experiences that have most fully shaped me, the experiences that have filled me with wonder and shaped my way forward, are not experiences I earned, deserved, merited or found through efforts of discipline and training. They are experiences that came to me as gift simply because I was willing to enter the journey. If we are willing to enter the places and practices of prayer, we cultivate spaciousness. Through this spaciousness, we learn to surrender in trust to God. We learn how to wait, hope, and live in anticipation of the fulfillment of all of God’s promises.
For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.
Isaiah 30:15
