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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