A Sacred Primer: The Essential Guide to Quiet Time and Prayer will be published in a new edition this September. For this month’s newsletter, I wanted to share one of the chapters with you. It is a chapter called Encouraging a Spiritual Attitude. Here is the chapter:
Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.
–Ludwig van Beethoven
Most of us cannot just bop right into a major change that requires making time for a new activity, setting a different schedule, and committing to integrate something into our regular and ordinary life that we might have associated in the past only with people who can commit full time to their spiritual life. “I don’t have time to breathe as it is…and I’m considering establishing a spiritual discipline in my daily life?” we probably say to ourselves. “Whatever am I thinking?”
Indeed, whatever am I thinking?
This, I’ve discovered as I’ve worked over the years to establish, with sometimes more and sometimes less success, my own consistent spiritual practice, is a central question. Whatever am I thinking?
I’m not talking here about positive versus negative thinking, though I certainly know the difference in the quality of my life when I choose positive over negative. I’m not talking about self-talk to help manage myself more successfully, though that kind of thinking, too, is very valuable. I’m not talking about thinking as problem solving or thinking as idea-creation. I have learned that I must examine the very fabric of my thinking, almost the background against which I think, to see what assumptions, beliefs, and understandings determine what I do or don’t do on a daily basis. I have needed to make explicit and clear to myself what, otherwise, would be the unexamined givens that determine the shape of my days.
I have done this kind of examined thinking, more often than I would like to admit, as an aftermath of failure and disappointment. But the questioning has produced some valuable results, no matter what spurred me to ask, “Whatever am I thinking?” I have learned, over the years, that certain things I think promote my ability to include sacred quiet time and prayer in my life; and I try to keep these distinctions conscious and present. I consider that these ways of thinking make up my spiritual attitude.
The Power of Attitude to Alter our Lives
Having moved to Texas from New York City, I still find myself, years after adopting the state as home, noticing things Texan. When it is time for the annual weeks of rodeo in our area, any business that can possibly do so advertises with a western flair. I was amused to see a few days ago a portable marketing sign in front of a shoe store which read, “Wear cowboy boots. It gives you an attitude.”
We have all experienced the power of a new attitude to alter the context–and the actions–of our lives. This attitude, as we are more and more informed by it, becomes a way of thinking, a way of noticing, and a way of paying attention that spills out to everything around us. Perhaps you reclaimed your personal power after giving it away for a long time to someone more dominating and controlling. In this case, you changed your attitude about your own value and possibility. Perhaps you started saving money, budgeting, and planning for retirement after being a spendthrift or after procrastinating for many years. In this case, you changed your attitude about your own fiscal responsibility. Perhaps, after years of thinking you would always be inept, you decided you could learn to surf the net, connect your far-flung family by e-mail, or order books through your computer. In so doing, you adopted a new attitude about technology.
How would I go about describing an attitude that can lead to a fully realized, satisfying spiritual life? What makes up that attitude? I can think of at least four things:
· Acknowledging the existence of an inner life.
· Desiring that the inner life and the outer life be aligned, and being willing to work toward this harmony.
· Choosing a method of inquiry about things spiritual that allows for new, unexpected possibilities.
· Giving committed time and attention to the spiritual dimension of life.
A Spiritual Attitude: Acknowledging the Existence of an Inner Life
When I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, I lived a second, alternative life. This life spun itself out every night from six o’clock to six thirty while I washed the supper dishes and listened to Guy Lombardo and his band on the radio playing their “sweetest music this side of heaven.” I wasn’t standing alone at a scratched-up kitchen sink in a church parsonage in Rossville, Georgia. I didn’t have to ride my bicycle three blocks further to reach the grocery store where a five-pound bag of sugar was ten cents cheaper. I didn’t have to wear oxfords that laced instead of penny loafers.
Instead, washing dishes and listening to Lombardo’s music, I was deep in a rich inner world. A world where my parents were able to buy me a dozen matching outfits at one time, red and white striped top with red skirt, blue and white top with blue skirt, yellow with yellow…everything to my heart’s content. Then they gave me a little convertible car to go with the great clothes. I rivaled even Nancy Drew; the star of the latest book Mrs. Miller had saved for me at the public library.
Ah, the great divide. Between an imaginary world that gave me so much pleasure and the much starker realities of my daily life.
Somewhere along the way I started to distrust that rich, creative inner part of myself and committed everything to making good in my outer life. But the inner self was always there, neglected to be sure, but waiting. It took some shocking trauma, a lot of days of feeling dry and shriveled, and a full measure of discontent to push me to reconnect with the only part of myself that was truly vital: the inner life, which includes the imagination, but which is so much more. The spiritual life.
This spiritual life is not a “fenced-off devotional patch rather difficult to cultivate and needing to be sheltered from the outside world.” To the contrary, the spiritual life is the core of who we are. It is Life with a capital L. It is that part of us that knows infinity. That loves. That longs for connection. That is unsatisfied without purpose and meaning. That is moved by ritual. That is timeless. That recognizes a Reality larger than and different from human reality. That feels a part of a larger scheme of things. That experiences awe, wonder, miracle, which we may call God, Sacred, Holy, Divine. Our spiritual life is Life at the depth. Our depths.
I don’t know of anyone who has described this inner life better than the theologian, mystic, poet, and philosopher Dr. Howard Thurman. Here is what he says about the inner life:
As a person, each of us lives a private life; there is a world within where for us the great issues of our lives are determined. It is here that at long last the yea and nay of our living is defined, declared. It is private. It is cut off from the immediate involvement in what surrounds us… Here, with the smell of life upon us, we come into the Presence of God.
If we look at why many people have only brief bird-on-the-wing brushes with this inner life, I suspect we would have to start with experiences we had in formal religious settings. For many of us, something went wrong there.
One thing that went wrong was fear. I can recall the clammy cold in my chest when the preacher talked about bad people being left behind at the day of the judgment. In the world where I grew up, God was dangerous. Watching you. Taking your name. You never knew when, in a minute, you might be wiped out. God was not someone to love. God was someone to fear. Many others have similar stories.
Perhaps it’s even worse, though, for those of us who had neither good nor bad experiences. We sleepwalked through religious ceremonies, passed notes to entertain ourselves through sermons, daydreamed as the chorus droned. Our depths were never touched. Our spirits were not lifted. We marked time. So we don’t even have the energy of resistance.
Perhaps the place to start, then, in acknowledging an inner life is to distinguish this inner life from formal religious activities. They are not, of course, mutually exclusive, yet they are distinct. Today religion is alive in many places and in the hearts of many people, as a yeasty, birthing, uniting sacred activity. Hearing the Psalms read, eating the bread and drinking the wine, repeating prayers that have seeded faith and knowing for hundreds of generations: these rituals speak to millions of people every week, guide their lives in meaningful ways, provide genuine succor and wisdom and rest. I know that, as I developed a daily spiritual practice, I found myself returning to worship with others and to be a part of an organized tradition, finding anchor and community that today hold and enrich my life.
But rituals carry power only when those participating in them feel a connection to the Holy. Religious activities and this sacred connection are not synonymous. Millions of others every week perform these rituals only as a duty, a habit, a badge (or perhaps as a talisman)–or know about the rituals but never desire to partake in them at all. Public communal religion, then, is not the same as having direct experiences of God as part of your inner being.
To cultivate a spiritual attitude, acknowledge that you do have an inner life that is personal, that is present wherever you are present. This inner life is distinct from external religious participation, though it may certainly include it. Your inner life is the place where the very yea and nay of your life is sourced and determined. This makes the critical distinction between inner and outer life.
A Spiritual Attitude: Desiring Harmony Between our Inner and Outer Lives
Once I sat on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and watched a shrimp boat with its high riggings and poles move toward the open ocean. There was a moment when the architectural lines of the boat and the natural line of the horizon met in such a beautiful configuration that I could feel the visual fit between the two. I experienced a deep resonance that lasted minutes. “Ah,” I said when I finally understood, “what I am seeing is harmony.”
Paul Winter, the composer and musician, found a most unexpected source of harmony when he recorded the sounds of a humpback whale, a timber wolf, and an African fish eagle for his album Common Ground. After he taped the animals in the wild, he discovered in the studio that the sound of the eagle, the sound of the whale, and the sound of the wolf, while at different intervals on the scale, were all in the same key, the key of D flat. Winter tells this story on the cover of the album and comments that once a teacher told him the sound of the earth itself was D flat. Harmony…in more places than we may ever know.
When we turn to talk about harmony as a component of a spiritual attitude, we are talking about congruence, a fit, a pleasing agreement between our inner and outer lives. No one has described this desired harmony better, I think, than Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Writing the book, Gift from the Sea, while she was at the shore with her sister, Lindbergh had the opportunity to contrast her busy, complex life as the mother of five children and the wife of a world-recognized man with the quietness and calm of days spent on an isolated beach. During this time by the sea, she becomes clear about her deepest desires:
But I want first of all–in fact, as an end to these other desires–to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact–to borrow from the language of the saints–to live “in grace” as much of the time as possible….By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony. I am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, ‘May the outward and inward man be at one.’ I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.
The inner spiritual harmony that Lindbergh is talking about occurs when the part of us that is eternal–the soul, the spirit, the being–aligns with the source of all being. This source we may call God, the Eternal, Reality, a Higher Power, the Holy Other, the Divine, Love, or something else. But whatever the name, the human finite spirit can and does connect to Spiritus Creator.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh worked to achieve the harmony between inner and outer life that she desired. She asserts:
But there are techniques of living too; there are even techniques in the search for grace. And techniques can be cultivated. I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others.
A lovely friend of mine was, as a young girl, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s secretary. She has given me a clue about what environments, modes of life and rules of conduct Lindbergh might have employed to work toward the harmony of her inner and outer life.
On most days, my friend Wren tells me, this busy woman, in spite of the tremendous demands of her life, made the time to go away from the house to a small building on the top of a rise nearby. Wren says her most vivid picture of Lindbergh, even now, more than five decades later, is seeing her set off across the yard toward this retreat site day after day, a basket, containing books, writing materials, sprigs of flowers, and whatever else she might want for this solitary quiet time, swinging on her arm. When Anne Lindbergh returned, dinner conversation that night would often contain references to things read, ideas gleaned, thoughts stirred up in the time of solitude. There is no question in my friend’s mind that Anne Morrow Lindbergh actively sought the inner and outer harmony she so desired.
But many of us, even while deeply desiring such a life of congruence between our inner and outer lives, would have to say with Charles Lamb, the English essayist of the 1800s, “Sentimentally, I am disposed to harmony; but organically I am incapable of a tune.” At least, however, we can cultivate an attitude that recognizes the possibility of inner and outer harmony, a correspondence and fit with the Eternal that results in a sense of purpose and meaning to life in our everyday world, even if we know that at the present we are far from achieving this desired condition.
A Spiritual Attitude: Inquiring with Openness
The spiritual life will never be centered on rock-hard, incontrovertible proof that convinces all people at all times, with nary a doubt. But then neither are mathematics or physics or medicine or even what are called the hard sciences centered on rock-hard, incontrovertible proof. These disciplines with all their theorems and physical laws and scientific methods never provide the last word and are always open to new breakthroughs, shifts in ways of seeing, new understandings of the universe, leaps of logic, and discoveries not to be imagined, even as late as last week. How much more so the serendipitous insights, the intuitive knowing, the can’t-be-proved certainties that we experience when we examine our personal, private spiritual lives?
I was fascinated a number of years ago when I read a personal letter Albert Einstein wrote to a friend. Einstein told his friend about how thinking happens. He said that thinking occurs as a result of–and these are Einstein’s words–“a bold leap, a speculative leap, a constructive groping.” This leap, he explained, is not based on logic but on guesses and hunches.
Here is what I think is particularly useful in inquiring about things spiritual: Einstein said that this leap (a leap that happens in all genuine thinking, scientific and otherwise) is not open to inspection by others and indeed is perhaps little understood by the originators themselves. “There is,” Einstein said, “no logical path to these elementary laws; only intuition, supported by being sympathetically in touch with experience.”
And, the great scientist told his friend, there are two motivations that support genuine thinking: the motivation of wonder and the motivation of passion for comprehension. But, Einstein added, conditions exist. A person who does genuine thinking tolerates ambiguities and keeps unresolved problems and polarities long before the mind’s eye.
As we inquire about the experiences we call spiritual, then, wonder and a passion to see clearly are approaches that will be very useful. I looked up “wonder” in the American Heritage Dictionary and saw that the word is associated with awe, surprise, astonishment–and puzzlement or doubt. We engage with spiritual matters in a manner that includes our being available for surprises and astonishing answers, at the same time that we do not filter out our questions and doubts.
And our exploration is ignited by a passion to comprehend, a passion to make sense of our experiences. We try to be comfortable with discomfort. We pray in spite of ambiguities. At some point in this inquiry, we make Einstein’s bold leap of understanding or insight which leads us to those truths and fundamental principles by which we make decisions and choices about our spiritual lives.
We also come to accept that what we can know about our spiritual life–even with our genuine thinking–is only a small part of the whole. Einstein, again:
To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms–this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness….There is, after all, something eternal that lies beyond reach of the hand of fate and of all human delusions.
The humility of recognizing our own “dull faculties” in light of the “highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty” is at the heart of the kind of thinking, the kind of inquiry, that is compatible with increased connection with our spiritual life.
A Spiritual Attitude: Willing to Give Attention
Having an attitude that supports the spiritual life means displaying a willingness to give attention, to be one-minded, to commit “the very nerve center of one’s consent” to the source of meaning and purpose in our lives. Cultivating a spiritual attitude means that we desire an ingathering of all the phases of our being into the space of this Divine Presence.
Any Scout leader who has ever shown a Girl Scout how to start a fire using a magnifying glass, any artist who has ever collected fragments of colored glass to make a mosaic, any gardener who has harvested the last fall offerings of tomatoes, squash, and cabbage to make a thick soup, knows about ingathering.
It is a drawing together of the bits and pieces of inner and outer experiences and holding them in a center of committed attention. Such a focus is very powerful, we all know, whether in our spiritual life or in some other area, like a work project. Hermann Hesse, the German novelist, is said to have once remarked that when he started focusing on the content of his next book, even if only in his thoughts, that attention worked like a magic circle to draw in everything he would need for the book from all kinds of sources.
The same is true for our spiritual lives.
We ingather all parts of our inner and outer worlds to make sense of them in light of what we want to receive from Life–and give to Life. We are willing to pay attention to matters of the soul. Through this focus, we draw a magic circle into which come those things that give purpose and meaning to our lives. We continue this attention-giving day after day, living our spiritual attitude.
The key word in talking about this aspect of the spiritual attitude is willingness–willingness to give attention, willingness to be one-minded. We often start with only the intention. Sometimes it takes years for that intention to transform into consistent, daily practice. For a long time after I decided to start a daily spiritual practice, that practice was likely to show up more times than not as something I hadn’t done. I often felt discouraged; but then I heard someone say that everyone is always a beginner in matters of the Spirit. After that conversation, if I skipped my spiritual practice, I would just start over the next day, a beginner again, willing to give attention, to be as one-minded as I could possibly be.
Your spiritual life, then, is not defined by how totally you give attention or how one-minded you manage to be when you first begin, but by your willingness to give attention to God.
Barry Lopez is a writer who inquires with openness, sees harmony, pays attention, and acknowledges the inner life. In his book Arctic Light, Lopez recalls walking across the frozen tundra in the Arctic and seeing tiny birds resting on the ground. He felt such a connection to Life at the moment of seeing the birds that he spontaneously folded his hands into a prayer position and made a deep bow. Recognition. Connection. Gratitude. Love. A simple spontaneous gesture of bowing to the birds. A profound demonstration of living life with a spiritual attitude.
