Spirit Journal - July 2018 -

Preview

In this issue, we announce the start of registration for this year’s Annual Fall Workshop, coming up on November 3, and provide a look at the themes Cynthia Bourgeault will be exploring that day.

We also provide information about a number of other upcoming events and retreats in the Chicago area and around the region, including two that are scheduled for mid-July: a “level two” Enneagram worshop in St. Charles and Advanced/Post-Intensive Retreats in Benet Lake, Wisconsin. This month’s Insights come from Wendell Berry, Henry David Thoreau, Sharon Salzberg and the Rig Veda.

Alan Krema offers a reflection on the topic of Opening Race Into a Question of Belonging, based on an “On Being” podcast that discussed the ideas of John Powell. This issue also includes the fourth chapter of Phil Jackson’s Spirit in the Wild – a ongoing reflection on Phil’s solo wilderness journey in the High Sierras last year.

Please let us know what you think about Spirit Journal – and start your side of the conversation – by emailing the editor at the address provided at the end of the newsletter. We look forward to hearing from you!

Early Bird Registration Starts Now for Our Seventh Annual One-Day Fall Workshop November 3 in Lisle!

This Year’s Fall Workshop Features Cynthia Bourgeault. Her Focus: How Wisdom Work Can Help Extend and Deepen Our Transformation in Centering Prayer

Registration for our seventh annual fall workshop is now open. Sign up now to take advantage of Early Bird pricing. You may register online or download and print this mail-in form.

This year’s Fall Workshop will bring renowned author and teacher Cynthia Bourgeault to Benedictine University in Lisle to offer a full day of wisdom teachings. The Workshop will explore Christian Wisdom as Prophecy: An ongoing conversation between Centering Prayer and Wisdom tradition.

The Wisdom tradition as taught by Cynthia references practices learned and developed over many centuries that include recognition and utilization of our entire being and not simply rational thought. Wisdom teaches that perception and awareness are unitive experiences, not merely thought processes.

Centering Prayer is a core element of the Wisdom tradition — it teaches us to release the thinking mind’s dominance over us. Thought will grip on to fear and cling to imagined desiring. The Wisdom tradition offers effective means to help us release our thoughts, so that we can simply rest in the presence of the divine nature dwelling in each of us. Wisdom practices cultivate an openness to presence, gradually enabling deeper levels of contemplation in centering prayer.

The Wisdom tradition also helps develop deeper awareness and higher levels of being outside of meditation time. During daily activity we engage practices to continually return to the awareness of our whole being, again releasing the dominance of the rational mind. These practices help develop a more constant contemplative approach to life when one isn’t meditating.

This is the Wisdom tradition’s link to the Welcoming Prayer. We will explore wisdom work as a training program that helps a person achieve and maintain the attitude Thomas Keating calls “welcoming receptivity,” which invites God to proceed with the process of transformation.

Looking ahead in a prophetic way, following our experiences with our whole being, we look to engage our oneness with all of humanity. Wisdom can help us move from an individual experience of the divine nature within, to an experience that we are all in union with each other and can communally experience our common divine nature embedded within us.

About Cynthia Bourgeault

The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader.

Cynthia divides her time between solitude at her seaside hermitage in Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom path. She has been a long-time advocate of the meditative practice of Centering Prayer and has worked closely with Thomas Keating. For more information about Cynthia’s ideas and her many books, visit her website.

Upcoming Events, Retreats, and Conferences

Here are some additional upcoming contemplative activities that may be of interest:

Ongoing Centering Prayer “11^th Step” Programs in Northfield and Chicago

In AA 12-step programs, the 11^th step is making a personal effort to get in touch with a Higher Power, however one understands it. Increasingly, people in 12-Step programs are deepening their relationships with their Higher Power using the method of Centering Prayer.

Here in the Chicago area, two Centering Prayer-based 11^th step groups have formed. One meets on Sundays, 4:30-5:15, at 319 Waukegan Road in Northfield. For more information, please contact Leonette Kaluzny – leonettekaluzny@aol.com.

Another Centering Prayer 11^th step program meets on Fridays at 6:45pm in conference room “C” on the 7th floor of the Community First Medical Center, 5645 W. Addison Street, Chicago. For further information on this program, please contact Philip Lo Dolce — stuffer1@ameritech.net.

Healing Gardens 2018 Programs Include Introductory Centering Prayer Workshops and Enneagram Workshops

Healing Gardens at Stonehill Farm invites you to enjoy two acres of perennial gardens in a quiet wooded setting in St. Charles. A growing list of contemplative activities take place at Healing Gardens, including the following:

Level Two Enneagram Workshop, Saturday July 14, 8:45am – 3:30pm

Introductory Centering Prayer Workshop, Saturday August 4, 8:45am – 3:00pm

Silent Saturday, August 18, 9:00am – noon

For more information and registration, please visit the Healing Gardens website.

July 15-22: Advanced/Post-Intensive Retreats, Benet Lake, Wisconsin

Contemplative Outreach of Southeast Wisconsin offers this year’s eight-day retreat July 15-22 at St. Benedict’s Abbey and Retreat Center in Benet Lake, Wisconsin.

The retreats, guided by Kathryn Ann Kobelinski, SSND and Ann Koerner, CSA, will immerse participants in the practice of Centering Prayer as taught by Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. These Advanced/Post Intensive retreats allow participants to come together for Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina and meal times. They provide an atmosphere of silence, solitude and community.

For further information, please contact Sr. Kathryn Ann at 414-282-7310 or kkobelinski@ssndcp.org. To register, use this mail-in form.

In Kansas City: A Retreat with Ilia Delio on Christianity as a Planetary Faith: Engaging Teilhard’s Vision, July 20-21

This will be the inaugural retreat sponsored by the Omega Center, founded by Ilia Delio OSF, a Franciscan Sister, respected academic and theologian, and author of seventeen books. She is an internationally sought-after presenter, speaking on the intersection of Science and Religion, with particular interests in evolution, ecology, and artificial intelligence. With a focus on Teilhard de Chardin’s pioneering vision, the retreat will explore such questions as: Is Christianity old and tired or does it have an inner power to transform the world? What does an evolutionary Christianity mean for the planet today? Brie Stoner and Matthew Wright will also be featured speakers. Click here for further information and registration.

Midwest Wisdom Schools in Dubuque Iowa in August and October

If you are longing to go deeper in your Centering Prayer practice, and perhaps yearning for a community of like-hearted seekers, you are invited to participate in one or more Wisdom Schools being offered next year at the Shalom Spirituality Center in Dubuque:

August 6-9, 2018 Surrendering Into Presence (Centering Prayer and Non-duality)

Oct 15-18, 2018 Placing Our Mind in Our Heart (Introductory Level Wisdom School, Part A)

These Wisdom schools are led by Beth O’Brien, Benedictine oblate and Founder of Contemplative Presence. A long-time Centering Prayer practitioner, Beth has been a direct student of Cynthia Bourgeault. In 2014, she received Cynthia’s blessing to teach and carry forth the Wisdom lineage. Beth led a one-day workshop on Mary Magdalene that was part of Contemplative Outreach – Chicago’s Living Wisdom Series earlier in 2017. For more information & registration, please visit the Contemplative Presence website.

Opening Race Into a Question of Belonging

by Alan Krema

Last month, Krista Tippet talked with John Powell on her wonderful NPR program and podcast, “On Being.” John Powell is the director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and professor of Law, African American, and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The conversation, which you can listen to here, inspired Alan Krema to write the following reflection. Alan is the coordinator of Contemplative Outreach Chicago.

After listening to Krista Tippet interview John Powell with the theme of “Opening the Question of Race to the Question of Belonging,” I was struck by how many of John Powell’s ideas and articulations were very similar to the fruits of the Spirit that we experience in the work of a steady and continual centering prayer practice.

Powell’s starting point is that race is like gravity – felt and experienced by all but understood by few.

Similarly, we all share in a basic core of goodness and the love and sustenance of a divine nature, but few of us come to know that we live in this reality, or perhaps many of us spend too little time in conscious awareness that we exist in this sacred domain. There is so much to our reality that is hidden and unspoken, and only in the work of opening ourselves through the regular practice of contemplation, do we come to experience a reality larger than the one our mind can know by itself.

So, I decided to take the ideas expressed in this interview and translate or correlate them with the teachings of centering prayer, which we all have heard expressed in various ways, particularly in Thomas Keating’s Spiritual Journey talks. There is often, in our Contemplative Outreach circles, discussion of how the practice of meditation can lead us to a life of action needed to address the social issues of our time. As described in the interview, coming to understand the larger realities is really the key question we need to face. The details of action, based on our calling to attend to the divine presence and action within, will arise from our work and attentiveness.

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In contemplative practice and awareness, “opening” is a key word. Similar to kenosis, or emptying, opening means that we expand our sensation, awareness, and interaction until they become more than our mind, with its limited categories, can hold.. When John Powell talks about “opening” the question of race to one of belonging, we have two poles of a paradox that must be held in our awareness without clinging to one side or the other in judgment.

We generally think of race in our culture as something we notice and distinguish about other humans, which sets them apart from us. It implies a point of view. In our cultural upbringing we learn to cling tightly to a belonging, like family and ancestry, or nationality, by which we distinguish ourselves and create boundaries. In contemplative practice we train ourselves to see the infinite and to release, at least, the grasping attachment we have to our narrow psychological and personal self.

In contrast to race being a category of difference, we can think of race in a larger space. We are not the offspring only of our parents, but also of their parents. We have four grandparents and eight great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, and 32 great-great-great grandparents, who lived perhaps 300 years ago. It is not a great leap of understanding to see that we have arisen from an infinite (on the human life scale) variety and background of ancestors. This is supported by DNA studies which now show us that we all exhibit a complex racial mix of global proportion. Some of us even have Neanderthal DNA! We all belong to the human race.

Belonging is the element of human identity that is one of our greatest yearnings. On the one hand, we cling to the belongings that we learned as children and which define us and give us meaning. Our families, our culture, our politics and religion. However, in contemplative practice we learn to belong in a deep and meaningful way to a reality, transcendent and higher in being than our ego-focused clutching will normally allow us to go. We often call this belonging to God, but it comes in small steps of interactions with our environment.

We belong, not to American exceptionalism or individualism, but to a higher reality, which transforms our activity into Some Thing by which we experience love.

According to John Powell, social justice is about caring for others and seeing that we are connected to others and other life forms. Justice is to give this caring a voice. This relates to social justice but also to the sense of spirituality and our experience of religion.

The fruits of the contemplative experience, when applied to our life as a work or a discipline lead us to a sense of connectedness as we see all human beings arising from the same ground – the same source. We are all sourced from the infinite and are loved and held in this space in which we find ourselves.

According to John Powell, race is deeply relational. Another fruit of a practice of contemplation is that as the false self sheds its dominance over us, we realize that the ways in which we clung tightly to a separate self yields to a relational story. Our work in Christian meditation places us in a realm of personal humility, and intimacy. We come to know ourselves in relation to (not separate from) those with whom we have energetic relationships like family and friends. Then we come to sense our relationship to the larger spheres of energy in our life – how we experience our identity and our sense of belonging.

Powell also says that being white is traditionally thought of culturally as being not black. However, reality teaches us that race is a genetic continuum and not a huge divide. Whiteness is in blackness and blackness in whiteness. The difficulty of language is that we have a very hard time talking about things that are embedded in our unconscious. Powell describes the science that shows how so much of our connection to the idea of race is unconscious. What we are enculturated to in our development sits in the unconscious realm, especially when the articulation of it is very difficult, for whatever reason.

This sounds so familiar to those of us in the centering prayer practice. We sit in silence because only then does the subconscious arise to a place where we can see it and allow it to pass, in our personal “opening” to the divine presence and action within.

Another way John Powell talks about race in North America is by virtue of the historical time scale and our founding on the principles of the enlightenment. Our culture is based on the rise of individualism in western Europe about 700 years ago. Our culture embeds in us a sense of American exceptionalism: a notion that we are free and separate individuals. This notion requires of us to repress and deny that so many of us were not free in our country. And we especially need to repress the idea that our freedom is bought with the slavery and oppression of others.

Of course, anyone with the simplest notion of an inner look at their being knows that we are not free. The narrow, individualistic idea of freedom is the teaching of the false-self system. Psychologically, it is difficult to engage with these repressed realities. We can only consent in faith to the workings of the spirit and open to, or allow the divine nature within us to process, a more connected, humble, and spacious sense of being.

Finally, Powell describes how we need a new consciousness of belonging. The language of belonging is related to the basic human condition and we need to expand how we experience community. We are all in relationship to each other, either a good relationship or a bad relationship. Our language tends to be binary and dualistic. Our culture uses the language of individuality derived from the enlightenment to understand the problem and issue of connectedness and union. Belonging doesn’t work from an “individual” perspective. We need a new language formed from a new consciousness to address the issues that face us.

People are longing for community and we don’t have enough confidence in love – hate and anger are generally perceived to be the more powerful motives. From a contemplative perspective, we often language the teaching of the method of centering prayer as an individual activity. This only takes us as far as the recognition of the false self system, which is created from our sense of separation and isolation, a psychological result of modern individualism. Perhaps we can now begin to articulate our sensation and experience of union and communion (in Powell’s term – belonging) which are the fruits of the Spirit, allowed to enter our hearts through the work and discipline of our meditation practice.

I encourage you to give a listen to this podcast and let me know your comments and feedback.

Blessings….

Spirit in the Wild Chapter 4 – Silence, Solitude, Solidarity, Stillness, and Simplicity

by Phil Jackson

Last year, Phil Jackson (until 2016 the coordinator of Contemplative Outreach – Chicago) went on a two-week solo backpacking trip in the High Sierras of California. It was a spiritual journey as well as a physical challenge, and it became a surprisingly intense experience. Phil has now documented his journey in writing. If you want to start at the beginning, go to the March issue of Spirit Journal. Here is Chapter 4:

“Realize ourselves as part of nature,” says Trappist author Thomas Merton[1]. Human nature—our ability to be our natural selves—emerges clearly in a natural setting. After a few days in a simple routine of repeated tasks: eat; walk; sleep, this glorious planet brings us unavoidably to a contemplative state.

Thomas Keating wrote about the “Unfolding of Centering Prayer” in the December 2017 Contemplative Outreach newsletter. Contemplation continually develops, he wrote, through at least five qualities: Silence, Solitude, Solidarity, Stillness, and Simplicity. These same qualities are present in solo backpacking. We move along this path at home in Centering Prayer, but in larger, perhaps more complete ways in backpacking in the wild.

The Silence in the wild is complete and unending. Birdsong, wind, rushing water and the echo of our footsteps, all being natural, gently punctuate the sound of silence rather than break it. Nothing from the outside distracts us from our simple focus and existence, and soon our interior is silent, in solidarity with our present day and our surroundings. As Keating says about Centering Prayer, in the solitude we “disregard the endless conversation we have with ourselves and rest in the experience of God’s presence.” We leave behind so much, we die to those needs, to our daily life; but this is a happy death because those needs, newly recognized as “unneeded needs,” are replaced with the abundance of all of creation. We die to those identities we have at home: our job; our social standing; our church. The hardest to die to for me was as a father, which gives me the greatest contentment, but in the wilderness, other than a wallet-sized family photo, I have no contact with them. With such a death from our identity and possessions comes rebirth, like the proverbial mustard seed growing to an enormous new creation. The silence moves us, as Keating says, first “into solitude then into stillness . . .the habitat of contemplative prayer. (There, with) the inflowing of God into our souls” we are still, in contemplation, “the natural state of human consciousness, of which the Garden of Eden in Genesis is a symbol.” How much closer to the Garden of Eden—this symbol of contemplation and natural consciousness– can we get than when we are “alone” in pristine wilderness?

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Also found in this pristine wilderness is a natural solidarity. In coming across fellow travelers or service people, there is a natural and immediate connection, a willing assistance in this enormous but common space. Not only that, but nature itself seems to welcome me in solidarity, from the coyote I encountered the first night, the streams seeming to offer themselves to me for cool, fresh drink, blueberries seemingly growing for their simple pleasure of having someone taste them nature tells me I belong. One morning I found of a deer footprint within an arms-reach of my head. It apparently came while I slept to inspect me (did it wonder what that snoring sound was?). I’m ashamed to say that I had to be almost stepped on to realize that nature is in solidarity with me, rather than realizing first that I could be in solidarity with nature.

Simplicity may be the most easily recognized feature of backpacking. When every ounce truly matters, almost everything is dropped; certainly, virtually all wants and even previous ideas of needs are left behind. I carry a shelter weighing 7 ounces, I bring the lightest way to keep warm and dry, enough fuel to boil one or two cups of water a day, something to keep dry, food that is light in weight. A pound of emergency gear is a luxury. The simplicity of possessions leads us to simple choices, simple packing and agile movement, both literally and metaphorically. Soon the choices simply integrate to allow our lives to work in a balanced dance. “Simplicity is . . .the peak sustained by a whole mountain of interconnected and interdependent parts, in which each acts according to its particular nature in complete harmony with every other part.” Backpacking in the wild, we not only see this metaphorical mountain that Keating describes, we have the literal example in our vision every moment: the simplicity in which mountains rest on their own bases, non-dually, a simple base supporting complex vicissitudes. In this environment we can let go of attachments to unnecessary needs and trust in God’s hand, as Keating shows us.

There are two additional qualities of the unfolding of Centering Prayer that Keating mentions, but they were not so clearly available in my solo hiking, for different reasons. Service, at least of other people is only available when one crosses other’s path, something less common than at home, or if we take on the role of serving those in the wilderness. Many hikers do in subsequent seasons by working in trail-maintenance, as Search and Rescue volunteers, or as the ubiquitous angels who magically show up with fruit, portable showers or various other “Trail Magic” so welcomed by hikers. Beyond serving other people though, service to the rest of creation is not to be overlooked, and everything from leave-it-better-than-you-found-it behavior to being a patron of our nation’s treasures can be considered Service in a way as well.

The final trait, Absolute Surrender to God is one I’m afraid I haven’t yet attained and can’t speak of. Certainly, one surrenders much in the wild, from possessions left behind to safety traded away, but perhaps only the wildly adventurous or the Holy Fools head out with the total acceptance and trust in God which Keating alludes to. For me, although I have an abiding trust in God as experienced in Nature, doing what’s needed to get home – my will—turned out in the end to be paramount. (Sorry, TK, I’m not there yet!)

I backpacked for most of two weeks, experiencing this ever-deepening blissful harmony with God, with Nature. Climbing major passes, fording streams, experiencing the thunder of waterfalls that I could put my hand in, and the peaceful sound and scents of flowering meadows. The trees my sentinels, the coyotes my brothers, the sun and stars my travelling partners.

One surprise I had was the weather, cooler than past years records and significantly more precipitation. Typically, there is one day of precipitation in all of September on the John Muir Trail. I had encountered four rainy days in two weeks, one episode of hail lasting two hours, and also particularly strong rain in unusual patterns. Like a novice black-jack player who believes a few poor hands means his luck is due to turn, I believed my rainy days would stop. In fact though, a wise gambler would know that a few bad hands may simply mean there is nothing good left in the deck.

With what should have been three or four days left returning on a beautiful, familiar route, a couple Rangers and other hikers told me of an approaching storm bringing of “just an inch or so of now”. “Don’t worry though, snow doesn’t stick for another month around here and by the time you get to the high passes in a couple days, it’ll all be blown away.” Wanting the Ranger’s words to be true without question, and believing I was “due” for some good weather, I headed out of a populated area within the boundary of Yosemite National Park and back into the Hoover Wilderness.

[1] Thomas Merton Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp 294-295

Insights

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground of our feet and learn to be at home.

– Wendell Berry

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

– Henry David Thoreau

We can travel a long way and do many things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home.

– Sharon Salzberg

So what are we to say about God? If you have fully grasped what you want to say, it isn’t God. If you have been able to comprehend it, you have comprehended something else instead of God.

– The Rig Veda

Your Turn

Please write in to comment on or add to any of the items in this month’s newsletter. Let us know if you are aware of an upcoming event you think others should know about, or send us an inspirational quote you’d like to share, or information about a book, website, podcast, or video you recommend. You are invited to contribute by emailing the newsletter editor at news@centeringprayerchicago.org.