Meditation

The Editors 3-20-2023
Kayije Kagame plays as Rama in the film ‘Saint Omer.’ She is a Black woman with box braids wearing a creased linen olive-green v-neck dress. She sits in the pews of a court with a crowd of people blurred in the background.

From Saint Omer

Humanizing the Harrowing

The French film Saint Omer follows the trial of a Senegalese woman accused of murdering her child. The docudrama is a condemnation of the criminal legal system, and a reminder that no one is the totality of the worst thing they’ve done.
Les Films du Losange

Julia Alvarez 5-25-2021
Many paint colors are swirled together.

Illustration by Jon Han

OFTEN, WITH MEDITATION, I’m reminded of many people’s reaction to poetry. “I don’t get it,” they say, a little embarrassed to be admitting this to a writer and a former English teacher.

The first thing I think is: You must have had a really lousy teacher who taught you that poetry is something you “get”—a message you extract for a good grade. Poetry-phobes might feel a bit more relaxed when I tell them that’s not how poetry works. Often, with my favorite poems, I never fully get them. All I know is that reading and rereading them, the mystery stirs inside me again. In her lovely poem “Self-Portrait with Religion and Poetry,” Kate Daniels describes what happens to her when she deeply connects with a work of art:

... I lie down in the silence
of my mind and touch the world all over.
Clouds fly through me. Trees break the sky
above a frozen lake, and a footprint
startles its crust of snow.

Then I can type another page, or nurse
my hungry infant. I can take from the cupboard
the bread and the wine, the eggplant and garlic
my hands will transform into sustenance.

J. Dana Trent 3-24-2020

Our breath is our life source, God within us, all day, every day.

J. Dana Trent 12-12-2018

Andraz Lazic / Unsplash

Practicing silence can be counter-intuitive among progressive Jesus-followers who want to usurp the Trump-supporting, fear-mongering, Fox News version of Christianity. We’re emboldened to speak up and out, responding to next oppressive policy, the next breaking story, the next call to use our privilege to work on behalf of those who have little or none. But we risk something in this cycle: the development of a savior complex that loses touch with God’s direction of our call because we are too busy working to hear it.

Annika Greco 3-09-2017

Scripture is rife with paradox. Live by the Spirit but be firmly anchored in the Word. Seek justice but love mercy. Love sacrificially but maintain healthy boundaries. Be gracious with people but hold to the standard of holiness.

Dhanya Addanki 2-01-2017

Image via JP Keenan/ Sojourners 

Deeply tied to Singh’s spirit are his thoughts about justice and equality. They are not only ideals of the Sikh faith and intertwined in his spiritual practice, but a natural state of being for Singh — especially since he started his Captain America performance art.

 

the Web Editors 9-26-2016

Image via wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock.com

The number of student suspensions for the 2016-2017 school year at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore, Md., as well as the number of student suspensions at the school for the 2015-2016 school year, is zero. This downward trend began when the elementary school incorporated a focus on meditation into its day-to-day routine. Instead of being punished for disruptions or misbehavior, students are sent to the “Mindful Moment Room” where they meditate and do breathing exercises.

Image via /Shutterstock.com

Thank God for the internet.

If you believe in God, that is. For a time, Mike McHargue did, and then he didn’t, and now he does again.

But it’s on the internet where McHargue — better known as “Science Mike” to listeners of “The Liturgists” and “ Ask Science Mike” podcasts — found community when he was questioning his Southern Baptist upbringing and then the atheism he had adopted. And it’s on the internet where he’s forged a community with others like him who can’t comfortably wear either label: Christian or atheist.

Jim Wallis 1-04-2016
Paranamir / Shutterstock

Paranamir / Shutterstock

I DIDN'T KNOW much about sepsis until it hit me out of the blue the Friday before Thanksgiving. After working late Thursday night, I woke up the next morning shivering and shaking, with my teeth rattling and full of pain; my left leg was swollen and fire-engine red.

I was immediately sent to the hospital and told frightening things about how dangerous a septic cellulitis infection can be. The ailment is random and can strike people of all ages; bacteria gets under the skin and spreads, and if it goes into the bloodstream, things can get dangerous indeed.

I am certainly not used to lying in a hospital with intravenous antibiotics being pumped into me day and night. Fortunately, thanks to my overall good health, I responded quickly to the antibiotics, resulting in a full recovery. I’ve often visited others in hospitals and been an advocate for patients in bureaucratic health-care systems, and this unexpected visit reminded me why that is so important. It is easy to feel alone in those systems and to lose your voice. I have always been impressed by nurses, who so often bring life, laughter, and even love to health systems that so easily block out such things, and some of my nurses were the delight of my lockdown hospital time.

I grew close to my roommate in the hospital, a man who, like me, is married to an English woman, and who was clearly suffering from cardiac issues. The lack of privacy through flimsy curtains forced me to overhear a doctor telling him that he had two choices: a heart surgery that the doctor thought the man wouldn’t survive, or hospice care with only six months or less to live.

Decisions about life and death often suddenly fill these hospital rooms. My leg infection quickly shrank in comparison, and being present to my roommate and his wife became very important. Friends coming by to talk to my roommate brought tears, stories, smiles, and fears.

TWO WEEKS BEFORE entering the hospital, I had gone on a much-needed personal retreat—not to lead but just to listen, learn, and be quiet. The topics of the seminar were “character” and “gratitude.” The former was intriguing, as the subject of character always is to me. But I found the latter theme, gratitude, to be profoundly challenging—and restful at the same time. Gratitude is hard. It is especially hard for those of us who see their vocation as changing the world—seeing what is wrong and trying to make it right. We see the unjust things and want to make them just, the broken things and want to help heal them; we see the bad and want the good. It can be exhausting.

Melissa Otterbein 10-19-2015

Image via Melissa Otterbein

These moments of wonder, beauty, and human connection — the simplicity of walking one foot in front of the other each day, open to conversation and observation of the time and space around you — are the elements of pilgrimage for which I am most grateful. As cliche as it sounds some 500 kilometers later, I really do feel like my pilgrimage is just beginning.

I believe pilgrimage, like God, is all around us and within us. And whether we are on this path for the first time or the 199th, there is still something here for us. Maybe not a revelation, but a noticing, a paying attention, a shifting our gaze from ourselves to the sky or the children’s laughter at the park.

If we approached this day as pilgrimage, a wandering toward creation, toward God, toward each other, toward the Earth and sky and stars, how might we see the world?

Jay Michaelson 6-05-2015
Photo via Luna Vandoorne / Shutterstock.com

Photo via Luna Vandoorne / Shutterstock.com

Lama Surya Das, the “Buddha from Brooklyn,” is one of the handful of Westerners who have been teaching meditation for decades. And yet, he says we’re doing it wrong.

“So many people seem to be moving narcissistically — conditioned by our culture, doubtless — into self-centered happiness-seeking and quietism, not to mention the use of mindfulness for mere effectiveness,” he said. True meditation, he said, generates wisdom and compassion, which may be very disquieting, at least in the short term.

Jarrod McKenna 2-20-2015
A cross made of ash. Image courtesy Ansis Klucis/shutterstock.com

A cross made of ash. Image courtesy Ansis Klucis/shutterstock.com

I love today’s Lenten reflection by the Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Grey on the first verse of the Lord’s Prayer.

Some of my favorite quotes:

“Praying this each day calls us to orientate our intention away from ourselves and remember that we are not the centre of the universe. Instead it reminds us of our rightful place, alongside all our brothers and sister in adoration of our great God.”

“This prayer is a call to action. It makes a demand of us. How are we as God’s people going to make God’s name holy? This is a call to action to make known the beauty of God. The justice and perfection of God. And the majesty of God’s name in a world that wants to ignore it.”

“It’s a call for our lives to mirror the same beauty and holiness of God. To truly live up to our vocation as image bearers of our glorious God.”

“We are part of the family. So let’s do the family business of bringing light to the world.”

Watch Dr. Jaqueline Grey speak on the Lord's Prayer below.

 
Christian Piatt 2-05-2015
Following Jesus. Image courtesy wizdata1/shutterstock.com

Following Jesus. Image courtesy wizdata1/shutterstock.com

First, the good news: After four months of preparation, I have officially started my year-long quest to more seriously understand what it means to follow Jesus — AKA “My Jesus Project.”

And now the bad news: After today, I still have 363 days left of this. Turns out, Jesus stuff is hard.

It’s not even that I’ve done anything that’s hard, in particular. I mean, the 30-day fast from solid food isn’t until next month, and I still have time to figure out how I’m ever going to feed 5,000. I haven’t even been crucified or put in jail or anything. So far, my main tasks have been to set up my prayer shrine for my daily meditations, to study one of the gospels daily, and to be particularly mindful of my own body and of the humanity of others I come into contact with.

But just that is hard work.

Yesterday was day one, beginning my first month in which I’m exploring “Jesus the Radical,” with Christian Anarchist Mark Van Steenwyk as my mentor. He’s started off easy on me, recommending the mindfulness exercise, and to take more public transportation. Hey, one out of two ain’t bad; I’ve got 26 days left in the month to work on the public transport thing. But though I got my prayers and gospel study done, and I was successful in getting my kids to school without yelling at them even once … or at least no more than twice. But in addition to taking my car everywhere so far, I’m behind in my pledge to walk 1,000 miles in a year. Although that only works out to about 3 miles a day, I’m already just under four miles for two days.

Oh, and Mark has warned me that he has some much more challenging things in mind for me this month, and that he was just breaking me in, getting me used to the shallow end before tossing me in for the sharks, complete with chum underwear.

 
Juliet Vedral 1-13-2015
Morning on the lake. Image courtesy kosmos111/shutterstock.com

Morning on the lake. Image courtesy kosmos111/shutterstock.com

Like many of my peers that weekend, I went into the retreat with some trepidation. Silence for 20 hours? What would we do? I had experienced long periods of informal silence during my 19 months of unemployment and had experienced the richness of God’s presence during that time. But that was different — I could escape the silence any time I went to a yoga class or turned on Spotify. Twenty hours of silence felt daunting.

Even more daunting? Twenty hours alone with just me and God. Sure, God had shown up and been with me during those long months of being alone, but this was different. Would I do it wrong? More importantly, what would happen? What would it be like to be alone with God without any distraction for that length of time?

Well, it felt like gazing into someone’s eyes for hours and hours and not having anything to pull you away. Which is exactly why, after that experience, I now actively seek out opportunities for silence.

Amy Vossen Vukelic 12-09-2014
Snowdrops peek through the snow. Image courtesy ArtOfLightPro/shutterstock.com

Snowdrops peek through the snow. Image courtesy ArtOfLightPro/shutterstock.com

I currently serve as Pastoral Associate at a Catholic parish in Buffalo, NY, where our pastor decided to hold monthly Prayer Hours for Peace in response to the violent outbreaks in Syria, the uprising in Ferguson over Michael Brown’s death, ISIS, gang violence — to name a few.

Our November Prayer Hour for Peace offered four rounds of Scripture passages and ten-minute reflection and prayer time, followed with an excerpt from a Pax Christi USA prayer called “Just for Today.”

I read this excerpt aloud:

“Just for today, I will believe that world peace is possible. I will remember that hope is the most important gift I can give my world.”  

The next Scripture verse was from Psalm 122:6-8.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: May those who love you be secure. May there be peace within your walls and security within your citadels. For the sake of my family and friends, I will say, Peace be within you.”

For the next ten minutes, I inhaled “belief….possible” and exhaled “hope most important gift.” Physically, my body relaxed, and I watched my hope flow out into my immediate surroundings.

Liz Schmitt 3-20-2014
Baby sloth, Vilainecrevette / Shutterstock.com

Baby sloth, Vilainecrevette / Shutterstock.com

Sloth. It’s not just a strange, adorable animal we love to watch in videos. It’s also one of the “Seven Deadly Sins,” and one that I find hanging around in my daily life.

I didn’t think about sloth in particular when I chose my Lenten practices for this year, but it turns out to be the very beast (sorry) I’m trying to walk away from.

To be clear, I’m a pretty active person. I walk to work, run long distance, and I’m also very social. But the fact is, every night I look forward to getting home and enjoying what I tell myself I’ve earned: as much time on the couch watching TV and eating as I want. It’s relaxing, I figure, and takes no mental or physical energy.

This is the proverbial sloth in the room.

Yes, unwinding is good, but here’s the problem: I’m not really getting any rest from this. Sure, I’m lounging, and my brain takes a rest if I’m watching something inane; but as a Christian, rest means something different than it does for other people. Rest means Sabbath. Sabbath is the day of the week that we hold sacred, the day when we rest from our usual work and worries, the day that we give back to God and use to worship God. So ironically, my approach to getting the sloth out of my life is to bring the Sabbath into it, at the end of each day.

Julie Polter 11-05-2013

THE DAYS shorten and the scriptures get wild and woolly and Advent begins. Meanwhile, the secular holiday season builds in a frenzy of car commercials (does anyone really get a car for Christmas?), sale flyers, and often-forced cheer. Here are a few books—memoirs, spiritual writings, and art—that can be interesting, grounding, and inspiring companions for a complicated time of year. (They also are much easier to wrap than a car.)

Life stories

Good God, Lousy World, and Me: The Improbable Journey of a Human Rights Activist from Unbelief to Faith, by Holly Burkhalter. Convergent Books. Decades in political and human rights work convinced Holly Burkhalter that there couldn’t be a loving God—until she became a believer at age 52.

Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write, edited by Marybeth Christie Redmond and Sarah W. Bartlett. Orbis. I was in prison, and you listened to my story. Moving works from inside a Vermont prison.

God on the Rocks: Distilling Religion, Savoring Faith, by Phil Madeira. Jericho Books. Nashville songwriter, producer, and musician Phil Madeira offers lyrical, wry observations on faith and life, from his evangelical roots to musing on a God who “knows she’s a mystery.”

Martin L. Smith 6-05-2013

(James Ketley / Shutterstock)

AS THE SEAONS after Pentecost unfolds, we might think that summer calls for a kind of “church lite” in which we shouldn’t expect much to happen. With the dramatic commemorations behind us, the scriptures seem miscellaneous. But this season has its own purpose of soaking in the Word. Just let go of dependence on drama.

Our month’s reading opens in 2 Kings 5 with the healing of Naaman, the distinguished Aramean general, told with a dry humor that Jesus appreciated, since he specifically mentions it (Luke 4:27) in his teaching about faith found outside the bounds of Israel. At first Naaman’s dignity is offended by Elisha not bothering even to meet him in person. His pride receives a further blow in the ludicrous banality of the prescription that Elisha’s assistant passes on: “Go, and wash in the Jordan seven times” (verse 10). Naaman’s fuming about the short shrift he got, and the humiliation of being prescribed a business of splashing in a local stream, are quite comic. Paddling in the Jordan indeed—a ditch in comparison to the storied rivers of Damascus! Smiling, we recognize the storyteller’s shrewd knowledge of psychology. The tale has a good ending. Finally getting off his high horse, Naaman allows his aide to persuade him to try the simple bathing routine. Over time his skin is healed and rejuvenated.

The church behaves like that shrewd aide when it invites us to trust in the power of hearing the scriptures again and again, however overfamiliar some of them seem, and others obscure.

Martin L. Smith 5-11-2013

(Banana Republic images / Shutterstock)

THE SAGA OF Elijah that we are following in 1 and 2 Kings culminates in a poignant parting as the prophet prepares to be taken up into heaven. His disciple, Elisha, makes a final all-or-nothing request: “Please let me inherit a double share of your spirit” (2 Kings 2:9). Elijah states a condition for the fulfillment of Elisha’s prayer: “You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not” (2:10). It is as if Elisha has to look unblinkingly into the reality of their separation. If he is to inherit the prophetic mantle and spirit of his teacher, he must claim the vocation in its entirety. He is now to be the prophet.

The story is an uncanny pointer to the truth that John the Evangelist highlights in Jesus’ last words to his disciples: “I tell you the truth: It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you ...” (16:7). John even echoes the “double spirit” theme in 14:12, when he has Jesus assure us that our prophetic endeavors will be more abundant and powerful than Jesus’ own!

The season following Pentecost helps us realize that we are the prophets now, vested with the mandate and endowed with the gifts for enacting the good news of liberation.

Cathleen Falsani 5-03-2013
Morning meditation, Vinogradov Illya / Shutterstock.com

Morning meditation, Vinogradov Illya / Shutterstock.com

Class began at dusk in a dimly lit studio facing Pacific Coast Highway as the yoga teacher appeared, adjusting the shawl draped around his shoulders, and took his seat on a quilted meditation pillow.

Because the sun was setting behind him, the teacher appeared in silhouette. I could only hear his voice as he guided us through the 90-minute Kundalini yoga class – a series of meditations, chanting, vigorous breathing exercises, and asanas (or postures).

“I want you to know that this is a safe place,” the teacher, Cole “Raahi” Jacobs, told us midway through class. “You can feel whatever you need to feel. You are safe here.”

I did. I was.

At the beginning of the year, I embarked on a two-month sabbatical to recover from a rough 2012. I needed to recharge, and resolved to rest, spend time with the people I love most, and find some kind of physical practice that would be restorative.