Posts Tagged ‘Mind’
Thinking with the Heart – Br. Jim Woodrum
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Br. Jim Woodrum
Romans 8:26-27
God be in my head and in my understanding;
God be in my eyes and in my looking:
God be in my mouth and in my speaking;
God be in my heart and in my thinking;
God be at my end and at my departing.
The prayer in which I opened with is one that comes from the Sarum Primer. The word Sarum derives from Sarisburgianum, which is the Latin word for the English city of Salisbury.[i] A Primer is a condensed version of the liturgies of hours, prepared for lay persons. This prayer was one that might be prayed by the common people in and around Salisbury Cathedral in the 13th and 14th centuries. In his edition of compiled prayers from the Sarum Rites, Paul Stratman explains that a characteristic of Sarum prayers is that “they have a certain precision to the choice of words. This precision and clarity are what makes the Sarum prayers meaningful and beautiful.”[ii]
We can all appreciate the beautiful poetry of this prayer—five petitions beginning with the head and ending at our departing—a metaphor for bodily death. You may know that we Brothers will sometimes sing hymn number 694—a musical setting of this prayer—at Compline. Its theme has an overall “contemplative” feel—an invitation for God to permeate the whole of our being, including passing from the temporal into the eternal. I am struck by the word choices: head/understanding, eyes/looking, mouth/speaking, end/departing. These all directly correlate to one another. However, the fourth petition seems to be an anomaly: God be in my heart and in my thinking. Read More
Test the Spirits – Br. Keith Nelson
1 John 3:18—4:6
“You don’t have to believe everything you think.”
It’s a phrase that seems to appear everywhere these days, from bumper stickers to headline articles in the Huffington Post and Psychology Today. It captures, in a brief and memorable phrase, some real wisdom about the nature of the mind. The mind is capable of being held hostage, by seemingly demanding and imperious thoughts and feelings, all day long. “What the hell is his problem?…I need to buy milk!…I love her so much I would die without her…That is the cutest puppy I’ve ever seen!… Why am I so worthless?” The mind is also capable of gentle, inner observation, quiet equipoise, and spacious non-judgment, capacities which can open a space of sanity and healthy detachment in our experience of self. Through the development of an inner, witnessing presence, we can begin to see the truth in that phrase: “I don’t have to believe everything I think.” We can forgive ourselves for the negative thoughts that arise and we can avoid the ego’s swift, smug self-congratulation for positive thoughts that all too quickly dissolve. We can actively engage our thoughts in prayer with a certain level of objectivity, as in the Ignatian spiritual practice called the examen of conscience – also sometimes called “examen of consciousness.” We can cultivate our inner muscle of release or self-emptying of thoughts through even older forms of contemplative prayer. We can begin to find in our thoughts essential clues to our integration and our salvation. We can lay claim to the thoughts that tell our true story. Read More
The Eye is the Lamp of the Body – Br. Keith Nelson
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Luke 11.33-36
The short story writer Flannery O’Connor enjoyed a loyal but circumscribed following of readers during her lifetime. The life and career of this brilliant young woman, a devout Roman Catholic who spent much of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia, ended in 1964 when she was just 39 years old. Since then, her work has increasingly gained the literary recognition it deserves. Her stories weave together penetrating insight, acerbic humor, irony, and subtle allegory. Unlikely prophets abound and God’s grace lurks in absurd encounters.They are stories that deliver a visceral shock of self-knowledge for the reader with “eyes to see and ears to hear.” All of this of course, should sound like familiar terrain to us followers of a certain story-teller from ancient Galilee. In a talk given to a group of young writers, O’Connor offered the following words about the art of short story writing:
When you write, your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see, and they will not be a substitute for seeing. For the writer of fiction, everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it. It involves judgment. Judgment is something that begins in the act of vision, and when it does not, or when it becomes separated from vision, then a confusion exists in the mind which transfers itself to the story.[i] Read More