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Pastor Peter Bastien, in Footnotes:
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Dear Friends in Christ,
Sigmund Freud once said, "I learned to restrain speculative tendencies and to look at the same things
again and again until they themselves begin to speak." I'm somewhat dubious about how successful Freud was at this-from the
vantage point of 2004, Freud's psychoanalytic theories seem highly speculative. It did strike me, however, that Freud's comment
applies nicely to what people are trying to accomplish when they engage in the form of prayer known as meditation (which happens
to be my favorite form of prayer).
Meditation (which is different from contemplation—maybe that will be another newsletter article)
is really an attempt to "be with." We do not talk to God or pump him for favors, we simply want to be with God in the factualness
of our life at the moment and to let God speak to us in the "thingness" of our life. It is to be quiet rather than to speak.
Early in the morning, I sit quietly at the sliding doors in our family room and watch the new day arise over our back fence.
Sometimes I meditate walking—in the woods is a favorite, but I can pray walking home from church or through the streets
of D.C. I meditate a lot at the National Gallery of Art. The trick is to calm the fevered, always speculating, brain and just
to look, allowing things to speak.
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Now, my brain is pretty fevered and I'm probably not much more successful than Freud was at restraining
it, but the project is important even if only partially successful. Life is incredibly rich and complex and we miss so much
if we reduce everything to intellectual formulae. This is why poetry and music are so important—and very like prayer,
very like meditation. They access life on a different level. I read the Tao de Ching (religiously) because it is dedicated
to throwing a monkey wrench—a whole bunch of monkey wrenches-into my aggressive, Western habit of trying to think everything
into submission. It encourages a whole different way of knowing our world-holistically, passively, non-anxiously. I'm not
about to give up being a Western anxious thinker—I couldn't even if I wanted to, and I don't want to—but I'm glad
for the rebuff. I need to be reminded that my way of constructing the world is only a tiny piece of the possibility out there.
We've been studying philosophy in adult forum as I write this and studying philosophy always helps
me to see how little we actually can know. According to Socrates, this is the whole point in studying philosophy—it
always brings us to the verge of the universe where all is mystery. And in the face of mystery we release our fevered brains
into the joy of wonder and awe. This is the deepest and most fulfilling kind of prayer. It is a foretaste of the beatific
vision. God is not beyond life, the factuality of life, its concreteness. God is the deepest reality in all the realities.
God is the wonder of this moment. God is not somewhere else or some other time. God is the fullness of every now. In meditation
we let "now" be full of God
Yours in Christ,
— Pastor Bastien
Taken from Footnotes, February 2004
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To read other newsletter letters, select a link below!
(Please be patient as we pull these from our files to go on-line)
CTS
is a Reconciling in Christ Congregation and
a
member of the Washington Metropolitan Synod of the ELCA
(Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America).
We
are located in Montgomery Village (Gaithersburg) Maryland
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