Distractions: For Gold is Tested in Fire

As most of you know by now, Michelle of Quantum Theology and I have been engaged in a guest blogging adventure, exploring the book Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird.  All of the posts are linked in the relevant page header, and I urge you to take a look at them.  (It seems that we have garnered a number of readers despite few comments, which tells me that people are perhaps intrigued, but speechless in response.  Well, the series is on silence before God, so perhaps the dearth of comments is appropriate!)  Michelle's final post appears below, to be followed, we hope, by one from the author.

Michelle has been given to quoting Evagrius, a fourth century desert father, quite a bit in recent posts, so in order to illustrate this post, I went looking for one of his female counterparts. Herewith, an icon of Syncletica:

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Michelle writes:

I went to visit my spiritual director last week at the retreat center where he lives, dragging the tattered shreds of my prayer behind me.  I half hoped that the external silence of the place might bring a bit of relief from the "oh, look, there's a chicken" (or more likely, "hey, did you remember to put the recycling out?") quality my prayer has had for the last while.  At least (barring fire alarms) the only distractions there are in my head, not knocking at my door and flying into my inbox -- which reduces their number if not the overall decibel level. 

I had to admit that I find it consoling to know I'm not the only one who has ever struggled with distraction in prayer, and I've been seeking advice in my library (as well as from my ever patient Jesuit director): Evagrius, Teresa of Avila - and Benedictine hermit Gabriel Bunge.  (I looked up "distractions" in Bunge's index to find "see also Demons" - which promptly started me giving physical shape to my distractions: think large mosquitos and huge blaring plasma screen TVs with tentacles), and of course, Laird's Into the Silent Land. My frank director began by quoting Sirach at me:  when you come to serve the LORD, prepare yourself for trials (Sirach 2:1).  Laird, in The Riddles of Distraction (chapter 5), makes the same point.  Distractions are not to be bemoaned, but welcomed as an "education by ordeal."

Laird (and the rest of the advisors in my library) are clear:  It's not a matter of whether there will distractions in prayer -- there will be; it's how you meet them.  Will you let them put you off prayer, or will you and the clamoring hordes instead deal with each other? 

There's more than a bit of a paradox here (which Laird readily acknowledges).  The distractions teach, but to learn from them you must ignore them.  Despite Bunge's (and Evagrius and the other desert eremites) characterization of distractions as demons, I find giving them physical and psychological shape to be unhelpful.  They become more real, more troublesome.  Far more helpful has been the frame that Laird gives, to look through them to the vastness in which we are settled. 

This morning as I drove back from giving a talk in rural California, I was struck by the vast plain laid out before me.  Green fields spread out all around me; the shape of the land was not obscured by trees and underbrush.  In the distance, hills rose abruptly, leaving me with the paradoxical sense of incredible spaciousness and being cupped gently in God's hands.  There were thousands of bugs swarming around; my windshield was covered in the bodies of the unfortunates who tried to cross I-5 and instead intersected my path.  But despite my awareness of the collisions and the smears they left on the glass, my experience of that vastness was not impeded. 

I'd love to say that this dawn-fueled insight has led to less distracted prayer, but at least for the moment, the swarms remain.  Still, I sense a subtle shift in what I can see of the landscape, and in comparison with that vastness, there is little that can truly compete, or take my attention away.  So perhaps, I have learned something in the trials.

Into the Silent Land: The Healing Balm of Silence

My final post in the blogging exchange in which Michelle and I have explored  the book Into the Silent Land is up.

Michelle's will appear here in the next few days and then, we hope, author Marty Laird will weigh in. 

I'm personally hoping that, among other things, he might address the question of context.  As I wrote my previous post, I noticed that in her book When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor says that, "The polyvalence of silence is what makes it so intriguing.  Context is everything."

Now that I've spent months pouring over Into the Silent Land, and many more months than that listening to God's silence, I find myself in disagreement with her.  Context may surprise or perplex us, but God's silence seems to have a quality that transcends all context.

Perhaps we'll get some answers from the Silence Expert.  Or more questions, which would do as well.

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All of our posts are linked in the tab above.

A Deep Color of Green . . . Yes, I Went to the Movies

OK, I admit it.  I am insanely jealous.

I would like to be as beautiful and tall and slim as Julia Roberts.  I would like to have that long hair of hers with its brilliant highlights.  I would like to have the same flowing and varied wardrobe that she managed to jam into her duffle bag so that I, too, could wear a different outfit each day for a year and look elegant and exotic every moment.

I would like to be as beautiful as Elizabeth Gilbert.  I would like to have had a successful career as a travel writer so that I would have years of experience in negotiating new environments.  I would like to have someone hand me a $200,000 advance so that I could make use of the aforesaid experience by traveling the world for a year, and I would like said travels to result in a bestseller of epic proportions.  

I would like to sit in a lotus position and meditate on my deck in Bali.

And I would like for everyone to believe that, as a consequence of all of the above, I am a deeply spiritual person, full of the wisdom gleaned from learning (preferably on Bali, but India will do) that "God is in me." Or something like that.

But . . . alas. 

I am short and round, my clothes come from local and chain stores and are decidedly humdrum, I am stymied in much of my work, and I pray erratically and ineffectively in various locales in the middle of North America.

I am, in fact, on a Great Spiritual Journey, as are we all.  But it takes place mostly in my home and neighborhood, and is not going so well.  I look at my beautiful and gifted friends with whom I went to the movies and I think, I cannot even manage the most basic of conversations in the lobby of a theatre.

I was intolerably bored by the movie, which did not help my conversational efforts.  I won't even say what I think of the book.

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A couple of weeks ago, my son and I went to see Winter's Bone.  A magnificently filmed movie, limited entirely in its geography to the Ozarks and in its characters to a small interrelated group of folks largely doomed by poverty and drugs, it follows the story of  a young woman's efforts to seek justice in the face of intractable kin loyalties and to hold together the little family for which she is entirely responsible in the aftermath of her father's disappearance.

Winter's Bone is the story Elizabeth Gilbert wishes, or perhaps believes, she has lived.  A story of unflinching courage and willingness to tackle impossible odds.  A journey of love and generosity reflected in determined sacrifice and tenacity.

I was mesmerized.

Never mind what I said about Elizabeth Gilbert and Julia Roberts.  What I want are the guts and selflessness of Ree Dolly.