I had a conversation with a friend late last week about silence, spending time in quiet reflection with God, something he really struggled with, but his community was really encouraging him to get into.
He kinda had the attitude 'na it's not my thing, it's not how I connect with God' which is fine, as it may not be how everybody is naturally wired.
But it got me thinking about how much do we just do the stuff that's easy for us, how much do we stick it out with spiritual disciplines that we struggle with, how much do we just stick to what 'works best' for us.
I recognise that we all learn differently, we all grow differently, and we all experience God differently, but does that mean we shouldn't have to do the discipline stuff we find hard? I think not.
We can go too far in accommodating people and trying to make them feel comfortable, when sometimes we just need to kick them (and more importantly, ourselves) up the bum and make them persevere for a while with something they struggle with.
I think about this a lot in my own life too, how easy it is for me to avoid the stuff that I find hard but know is beneficial. If everything I do is fun and easy, it never challenges me to grow...
Friday, September 19, 2008
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2 comments:
Totally agree with you here.
Spending time alone in contemplation has been among the most spiritually rewarding experiences of my life. Yet, it's still hard to make the time to just sit there and do nothing. The mind becomes very perturbed when faced with the idea of doing nothing. It will make any excuse to get out of it:
"I'm bored."
"I'm tired."
"This won't work."
"Okay five minutes is long enough."
Apart from the natural tendency of the mind to wander like this, I think one of the main things holding people back from meditation/reflection/contemplation is a fear of what they may find out if they probe deeply enough and honestly enough. One may find out that the preconceived answers one has to certain questions no longer hold up under the illuminating light of conscious attention, and this can be a very scary thought to those so entrenched in belief.
It's true that everyone is following a different spiritual path, but if we're serious about the search, then we should be experimenting with every tool avaliable to us, and not stifling ourselves with the dead ends of dogma and blind faith. It is possible to use the honesty of reason as our primary compass and still maintain a highly charged spiritual aspect of our lives.
I like what you said about the consequences of only doing things that are fun and easy. What we should aim to look for in new experiences is something that will challenge the preconceived notions of who we are and what we're capable of. This holds true for both physical experiences and the experience of contemplation. Ask yourself the questions you think you're sure about. Try and find out what it is that you really don't know, what you're really unsure of, for it's only when you admit that something is not known to you that you have the opportunity to learn the truth. And the search for truth is really what the game is all about, isn't it?
joe, your point about people being afraid to probe into their inner thoughts reminded me of an article I read on drinking alone. Though the attitude to drinking was questionable, in a humorous way the article had some good points.
" Drinking alone, on the other hand, is a much more pure and forthright form of imbibing, and I say that because it focuses entirely on the simple act of putting alcohol into your bloodstream. It tosses aside all the half-hearted pretensions about merely using alcohol as a social tool. It gets down to what drinking is all about: getting loaded, and by doing that, getting down to the inner you. The inner joy, the inner madness, the subconscious you, the real you.
Now, there are those who abhor the very idea of spending a moment with themselves. Put them in a quiet room for five minutes and they’re picking up the phone or turning on the TV. “Deep down in his private heart, no man respects himself much,” Mark Twain was fond of saying, and he was dead right. Why should those people want to hang with their inner selves? That entity is, for all intents and purposes, a stranger, and worse, a stranger who knows all their deepest, darkest, most terrible secrets.
Which, ironically enough, is exactly why you have to hang with him, because sooner or later that bastard will turn on you. The longer you keep him locked up by himself, the weirder he’s going to get, and he will eventually manifest himself as a nervous breakdown or very self-destructive behavior. "
http://www.drunkard.com/issues/03_03/03-03_zen_drinking_alone.htm
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