Thursday, April 7, 2016

Wandering into Wonder



Wandering into Wonder
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
April 7, 2016

This morning, a participant in our chanted Morning Prayer said to me after we had finished the service, “Whew! During the General Thanksgiving my mind started wandering.  I suddenly was thinking about whether I would need to take off my sweater later today as the weather warms.  Why do our minds wander so?  What’s that all about?”
All I could say is that my mind often wanders too, and that it is just part of how we seem to be hard-wired: we have an overabundance of attention and occasionally it lets off steam by wandering while waking, like dreams while we are asleep.   

The interesting thing here is that many spiritual disciplines and mystic traditions find in the wandering mind a possible access point to the unseen.   Many meditative practices include instructions for what to do when your mind wanders as you are doing a spiritual exercise, whether repeating a mantra, a name of God, or a short prayer, or focusing on a visual point like a candle or flower, or repeating a question.  At that point, the spiritual directors say, recollect your thought, note what distracted you as a possible hint to what is going on inside, put this aside, and then, without beating up on yourself, get back on task. 

Some practices aim at harnessing the overabundance of attention that produces mental wandering.   In praying with bead chaplets, we have usually specific instructions to occupy our minds with one thing while our lips say and our bodies do another.  In the Anglican Prayer Chaplet, we say the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”) on each bead as we direct our thoughts to specific prayer intentions (usually, people we are praying for).  In the Marian Rosary, we say the “Our Father” and the “Hail Mary” for each group of beads or bead while picturing in our mind one of the “Mysteries” of the faith, whether Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful, or Glorious.  Orthodox knotted prayer rope devotions follow the same plan:  pray one thing while picturing in your mind something else.  The idea in all of these practices is to create a space in the mind and in the heart that is blank and open.  And into that space we hope that the Spirit flows.

Those who criticize the use of fixed prayers or repeated prayers as “meaningless repetition” or “mindless robotic practice” miss this point.  We say repeated prayers not mistakenly hoping “like the pagans” that somehow “by the repetition of it, God might finally hear” (Matt 6:7).  Rather, we seek to open up our own hearts so that we might better hear God.  That’s why most of these practices also include reflection on scriptural passages or scenes.  Like walking the Labyrinth, such devotions seek to relax us so that our wanderings of mind may open us to actual wonder.

Grace and Peace, 
Fr. Tony+  

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