‘I’m singing this note ‘cause it fits in well with the chords I’m playing’ – The Who
You may have noticed I’ve been posting a lot of poetry lately. I have no idea whether this is being received positively or not, but for what it’s worth, I thought I might explain why my posts have taken this surprising turn.
It has to do with my spiritual journey. Those who know me know that for the past few years, I have been delving more deeply into what Brother Lawrence called ‘the practice of the presence of God.’ It began with John Eldredge’s Pause App, where I found the value of stopping throughout the day to re-center and rest in the presence of God. As time went on, I found myself increasingly drawn to silence, stillness, and solitude. I began checking out Lectio 365, which drew me more deeply into the books and writings of the 24-7 Prayer movement, where I began to create a ‘rule of life’ to govern the way I approached prayer in particular and life in general. Then, last year, I enrolled in an 18 month program at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation designed to deepen both my spiritual life and leadership in the church.
In the course of this journey, I have discovered that the clearest path to the presence of God involves shutting down my discursive mind, that part of myself that is always thinking, always bouncing from one subject to another, rambling about in search of answers to both complex and not so complex problems. I have lived most of my life this way. I suppose there are some deep psychological reasons why this is so, things I don’t need to get into right now. But this way of being has both upsides and downsides. On the one hand, I enjoy being a thinker, a guy who reads books and knows things. On the other hand, a mind always in motion, one that seldom rests, can be damaging to one’s soul. It can prevent the soul from connecting with the God who dwells both in and around us, who invites us into the awareness of our union with him.
And so, I have learned the infinite value of Silence. Stillness. Solitude. The emptying of my mind to simply rest in the presence of God. Of entering into what an anonymous 14th century Christian mystic termed, ‘the cloud of unknowing.’ I liken that cloud to an experience I once had atop Mount Cadillac in Acadia National Park in Maine. My wife Megen and I had driven to the top, only to find ourselves enveloped in a dense fog. Our dog Phoenix took the drive with us, and as we walked around, Megen took her a short distance away to, well, do what dogs have to do after long car rides. Suddenly, the fog became so dense I could not see anything, Megen and Phoenix included. It was just me and the cloud, nothing or no one else in sight, for what seemed an eternity (in realty it was probably less than a minute or two). I was concerned that I couldn’t see them at first, but slowly I began to rest and trust that they would reemerge from the cloud. I began to sense their presence even when I could not see them. And soon enough, there they were.
I’ve been learning to rest in the cloud with God. To know he is there even when I sense nothing. To rest in his presence. Sometimes, it is nothing more than that. But sometimes, he emerges from the cloud, and I experience his presence even more deeply. It’s not like I hear words or see visions. It’s more like what Mother Teresa once said when asked by a TV reporter (I think it was Tom Brokaw) about how she spoke with God in prayer. ‘I don’t say anything,’ she said, ‘I just listen.’ The reporter then asked, ‘Well, what does God say to you then?’ To which the beautiful nun replied, ‘He doesn’t say anything. He just listens.’
If you don’t understand what that means, I don’t know if I can explain it to you. All I can do is encourage you to try it out for yourself and see what happens. I trust you will find it wonderful.
In any event, my spiritual practices have taken me into such spaces, where all else fades away and I simply rest in the presence of God. It doesn’t happen every time. Spiritual practice doesn’t work like that. To borrow a phrase from Henri Nouwen, often, ‘as soon as I decide to stay in my solitude, confusing ideas, disturbing images, wild fantasies, and weird associations jump about in my mind like monkeys in a banana tree.’ I’m still learning, and I suppose that I will always battle my discursive mind.
But sometimes…
I’ll enter a time of silence, or take a walk in the woods, or contemplate an experience of sacred memory (and all memory is sacred), or practice Lectio Divina, or engage in some other practice, and fall into a state I can only call grace. And sometimes, the felt presence of God emerges from the fog in ways my discursive mind cannot possibly explain.
And somehow, for reasons I cannot fully explain, I have discovered that when I leave such space, poems emerge. I don’t know where they come from. They just come. They seem to emerge from the cloud, from my experience of God’s presence. Perhaps it is that when a person touches their Creator, they cannot help but create.
The poet Jane Hirshfield says, ‘one reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn’t know was in you, or in the world…poetry is the release of something previously unknown into the visible.’ Yeah. I think it’s something like that. Somehow, when I emerge from the cloud, I do so having discovered something, something I didn’t know existed, a thought, a feeling, a part of who I most deeply am. And when I go to journal about the experience, words emerge in a form that leaves my discursive mind behind, that is, in the form of poetry that just flows from the deepest recesses of my soul. I don’t think much as I write the words that emerge. Again, they just come, making visible something I previously had not known to exist, something that was always there.
I honestly don’t know if my poems are good or bad. I suspect that discriminating poetry aficionados scoff, snicker, or worse, at my paltry attempts. I honestly don’t care. The only thing that matters is that my poems are real to me. They reflect the deepest parts of myself, the parts that reflect my truest self, the parts that are most in touch with God, the parts I want to reflect more genuinely in the whole of my life.
They are my heart’s prayers.
So, whenever one appears on this blog, I invite you to make of them what you will. I hope that at least some of them have been, or will be, meaningful to you. And that perhaps they will inspire you to seek God’s presence as well, and discover, well, whatever it is that God wishes you to discover.
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent
