Dawning

This past week The Burkhart Center began the New Year with the first installment in our six-week webcast-replay series on Authentic Transformation with Richard Rohr. We had the good fortune of having a healthy crowd, so much so that we needed to move to a larger room – always a wonderful problem to have. We organized this event at the request of someone in the community who contacted us because they had heard we had offered Richard Rohr webcasts in the past and were wondering when we might do that again. Within the span of a week a second person not affiliated with The Center nor First Community Church had contacted us asking the same question.

I don’t know how many other people spend their lives aware of recognizing patterns. I’m sure many do, though we don’t often hear them speak of it. I’ve noticed this behavior in myself, though I realize it only began at a point in my life when I was able to slow down and was no longer distracted with the busyness of a full time job, where I had the opportunity to pay attention and notice.

At the birth of our first child, I took three months of maternity leave to try to get him and our family on a firm footing. Little did I know then how much that experience would change me and the course of my life. Not just the parenting, which provides an opportunity to change any of us, but what the luxury of this maternity time (which shouldn’t be a luxury) afforded me. Time to notice. Time to think. Time to ponder. Time to wonder. Time to pay attention… even to the tiniest things.

Contemplation is anything that allows space for “what is”
to make itself known to us in whatever way that might be.

It started with noticing the tree outside the kitchen window where I stood to bathe our son. How over days and weeks, the evergreen branches changed, in color, in texture – how they sprouted bright green shoots and how buds turned into pinecones, everyday, noticing – not just his coos and folds – but the wider world around us, and our place in it, if only but a small view.

I noticed the tulips in our neighbor’s yard. How when I left in the morning, their petals would be tightly closed, their heads bowed as if in prayer, yet by noonday the petals had opened and by late afternoon their heads had turned to follow and face the sun, only to do it all over again the next day.

I never noticed this before, yet I’m quite sure tulips and evergreen trees had been going about their business in this way right in front of me all along.

At our gathering Thursday night, David Hett, the Spiritual Director of The Burkhart Center who is leading the discussions in the Transformation Series, asked participants if we had a Contemplative Practice in our lives or if there was anything that might serve as one in the future. In my small group I shared that this reminded me of something Karen Armstrong, a former nun, religious historian and author of several books on religion including The Case for God and Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life, had written in her memoir, The Spiral Staircase. She describes realizing, after the fact, that her research and work for her doctoral thesis was a contemplative practice: sitting quietly, alone, reading, studying, pondering what she had read, what it meant, how it fit, what she thought of it, wrestling with it, and writing down those thoughts.

I realize it only began at a point in my life when I was able to slow down…
where I had the opportunity to pay attention and notice.

An example from my own life was at a time when, as one who was reared very fundamentalist and now that I was a mother and we were attending a Presbyterian church (USA), I was struggling with the idea of infant baptism. This led to a lot of thinking while on long walks. At the time I had never heard of contemplative walking nor walking meditation, but like Karen Armstrong, after the fact, I realize this walking was a spiritual practice. It was somewhat of a running conversation in my head of important issues, or questions that matter, or things I was struggling with, of what I believe and why, and how it all fits together and that this was part of my own spiritual journey in shifting from my former self and beliefs to where I am now. A turning, a metanoia*, if you will.

For me, Contemplation, it turns out, is not sitting on a pillow while trying very hard to think of nothing as I gather so many people presume meditation or mindfulness or contemplation or spiritual practice must be. Instead, Contemplation is anything that allows space for “what is” to make itself known to us in whatever way that might be. It’s paying attention to patterns and noticing – it’s how things dawn on us as insights or epiphanies or a deep sense of knowing. This is gnosis*. It’s how with the time and the space for reflection, and perhaps a dose of nature, we see with new eyes what has been right in front of us all along.

The Irish have a word, Caol Ait, it refers to thin spaces where the distance between the human and the Divine is gossamer thin, where, for a moment, the veil is lifted and we see what is, as if for the first time.

* Metanoia: is the Greek word so often translated as “repent” in English translations of the Bible. It more closely means: “To turn and go in a new direction, to change one’s mind.”

* Gnosis: is Greek for knowledge. In Gnosticism or Mysticism it signifies a knowledge or insight into humanity’s true nature as Divine. This is often described as the “Divine spark” or as Richard Rohr calls it: Original Blessing.