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[ Back to index of July articles ] BEARINGS: By Martin L. Smith
Unfortunately, some who recommend meditation fuel suspicions that prayer is motivated by escapism. 'Contemplative' practices may be recommended as a soothing remedy for stress, and there is a romantic streak in certain circles that idealizes retreats as opportunities to enter a special devotional realm uncontaminated by the harsh realities of the everyday, and safe from the conflicts of politics. Fortunately for us, there are others who take a different line, prophetic spiritual guides who insist that spirituality leads us into the core of our real stress, not away from it, and that it is intrinsically political. The political realm is the sphere where it is very hard to know who is telling the truth, and to be a politically responsible human being is to engage with the hard work of discernment - a suitable theme indeed for an election year like this one. Prophetic, biblical faith drives home the fact that human beings are masters of deception and self-deception, and that God insists we learn to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, sincerity and trickery, service and exploitation, and fulfill this painful, painstaking, never-ending task of shaping society through the truth. Jesus' practice of withdrawing for prayer is in seamless continuity with his prophetic mission to unmask the hypocrisy of those who were in leadership in society, the blind guides who were leading the people towards the precipice of destruction. Prayer deals with those politics and the politics of our own souls. It is not just 'them' - that's the biggest lie of them all, and the commonest. It is ourselves; we are adept at self deception. Our motives are not obvious and they are seldom pure. To pray is to embark on the arduous task of learning with Christ to tell the difference between the truth of our own hearts indwelt by the Spirit, and the lies we tell ourselves to avoid facing who we are and what we are called to be and to do. The scriptures speak of Satan disguising himself as an angel of light, a mythic way of referring to the political dynamic of camouflage and deception that permeates all human societies and our own individual hearts which are miniature versions of society. It is simplistic to 'pray for guidance,' as if God will simply put a message into our heads about who to be and what to do, saving us from the trouble of doing the work of discernment. Praying is the work of 'discernment of spirits,' the work of paying attention to our impulses and dreams and fears, listening to them long enough and unfolding them painstakingly enough for us to recognize what is genuine and what is phony. Take discontentment: we have these feelings of dissatisfaction, voices that murmur "Surely, this can't be all there is? There must be more to this relationship, this job, this life than this?" We can smother these feelings or we can listen to them. We can risk sitting with them with God, and take the risk of asking what they mean. We don't know what they mean, and we can't look it up in a book. Prayer is taking the risk of finding a meaning that we hadn't bargained for and might not necessarily welcome at first. We might be surprised to discover through sitting in prayer that our inarticulate dissatisfaction is nothing less than the Spirit praying within us, subverting the status quo, prodding us to hunger and thirst for fullness of life, getting us to extricate ourselves from compromise and shallowness. Our discontent is divine discontent, passion breaking through. Or we might find out that our feelings of discontentment are the whining of the ego. When the sense of entitlement has been unmasked, we can go on to ask God about what it means to discover contentment with what we are given, the start of a journey of repentance that involves not only the practice of gratitude and acceptance but also the readiness of discover the depths that are hidden beneath the surface of ordinary things. Martin L. Smith is a well-known spiritual writer and priest. He is on the staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [ Back to index of July articles ]
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Sometimes
you hear people accusing those who take spirituality seriously of 'navel-gazing'
- unhealthy introspection that replaces a vigorous engagement with 'real
life.' It is a term of abuse that goes back almost 1,500 years, coined
to ridicule early pioneers of mysticism in the Christian east who discovered
that certain physical postures of repose help us to persevere in a focused,
centered state of attention.