Interior Silence and The Battlefield of the Mind

AUM

"Give us the discipline that springs from abstinence in outward things with inward fasting, so that we in heart and soul may dwell with thee." --Hymn 152 (1982) "Kind Maker of the world"

I don't know why, but when we sang this last night at the Ash Wednesday service all I could think of was equating "inward fasting" with "interior silence". One of my heroes is the Bible teacher Joyce Meyer. One of her earliest teachings, and one of her best-sellers of all time, is The Battlefield of the Mind. You can watch some of her teaching on it here:

How many times are you walking down the street humming some insidious earworm of a song you hated in 7th grade and now you can't get it out of your head only to later remember it was playing in the drugstore when you were buying aspirin to get rid of the headache you no doubt got from all of the stimuli bombarding you in your daily walking modern life. We are BOMBARded with stimuli at every turn through each of our senses!

While I don't require total sensory deprivation to concentrate, I can't read or write if there is any music going on anywhere near me. Not even classical music. Not even classical music I don't know. My brain is wired so it picks up every single nuance of the notes and the performance, the words, how it's being sung, the way the composition is put together, and it's all directly attached to my spirit and my emotions. Talking I can ignore but music I can't.

If we were truly living in Olden Times we could clear our heads walking about in the fields or on the road taking the mile walk to the corner store, but in these modren times we have to find a way to get a bit of calm, a bit of silence, a bit of inward peace ... but even if we ARE blessed with a second behind a closed door, our mind is screaming at us, not listening to the glorious rhapsody of nature, tweeting birds, the sweet rustle of the breeze in the trees, but an entire running inner dialogue of judgments imposed upon us, judgments we heap on ourselves, honey-do lists, needs of our loved ones, dreams for ourselves, accusations of wasting time because we're taking a second to find some peace (, children banging on the other side of the door and screaming, "what are you DOING in there!") ...

There is a meditation practice that I know is older than dirt but the Christian Monastic tradition calls it "interior silence". When I was at the monastery it was the hardest thing for me to learn. I was guided by a monk to use the rosary as a prayer tool. The prayers on the rosary are all known by heart (the "Our Father", the "Glory Be", the "Hair Mary" mereh), and instead of using any of the traditional meditation tools (contemplating the sorrowful or glorious Mysteries, for example), he encouraged me to let my mind wander, to let God place images of my troubles or my friends or enemies in my head and to keep them in mind as I was "making a run around the rosary". I still use this technique when my mind is in turmoil and it always calms all my racing thoughts. I don't know why people are afraid that the rosary is some HUGE task or some dire commitment ... it only takes about 20 minutes.

When I left the Romans and went all Pentecostal I didn't think it appropriate to ask Mary to pray for me, so I said the first bit, because it's a Bible quote, and changed the last bit to read, "Hail Mary, full of Grace the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Jesus, son of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen." Silly, I know, but at least it got me back to the meditative process which I had given up when I left Rome.

It's always kinda killed me that certain Christianists think that "meditation" or reciting a "mantra", because it's considered to be of Eastern Philosophy, is intrinsically "evil", and that meditation concentrates and builds on the unhealthy idea of "self" which ?necessarily? pushes out the "idea" of God so that we replace God in our hearts with our own self or selfishness. The verse is actually, "Love your neighbor AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF," and, as Ru Paul sez, "If you can't love yourself then how the HELL you gonna love somebody else!" Another reason often given is that evil spirits will talk to us if we empty our minds and sway us against the Gospel of Christ. Srsly? Is their faith and their walk with God really that tenuous that if they calm their mind to "nothingness" that Satan is going to start talking to them? Then again, some of these people are the same ones who think my same-sex marriage is threatening their own marriage, so they must always be walking on broken glass.

Go with me on this bit but trust me: my Old Testament Hebrew is questionable at best and is only "book learnin'". I took classes with a rabbi scholar teaching the Torah to people with no Hebrew once upon a time and he told us MANY interesting things ... one was a radical translation of the beginning of Genesis and it goes a little something like this:

Hindus believe that during these moments, as creation began, this hovering and fluttering over the emptiness by God's Holy Spirit records the sound of "AUM" and this hum is a record of the eternal sound of God, the form of this first and original vibration manifesting as sound. "AUM" (or "OM") is the reflection of the absolute reality, God's first moments of manifestation, God presenting God's self to us in this creative process. They believe that getting ourselves back to God, getting our being back in alignment with God, is as easy as exhaling this word "AUM" and, with the exhalation, we release all of our cares and troubles with that breath in this sound, thereby connecting us back to God's very vibration, which then allows us to inhale a clean gulp of God's Spirit to rejuvenate each cell of our body. It also gives us the opportunity to give thanks, not to take for granted something SO vital to our lives, breathing, hello, which brings an added layer of blessing to the practice. That's why it kills me when people say yoga is not about God. Yoga isn't just striking poses and postures. Yoga is a "practice". It's ALL about God and all "yoga" means, from the Sanskrit, is "joining" or "making a union" and the word is sometimes interpreted as a Hindu discipline aimed at training the consciousness for a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquillity. We must TRAIN our thoughts and train our minds to be at peace.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers, third century Egyptian monks, cultivated the notion of Hesychasm, a word from the Greek for "stillness, rest, quiet, silence". In the 14th century, a meditation, or mantra, was devised to help maintain interior silence, called The Jesus Prayer, or The Prayer of The Heart: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." When I learned the meaning of the Sanskrit word, Mantra, it helped my understanding of interior silence a great deal ... it simply means "an instrument of thought" and, because I'm so meeYOOsical, I thought, "Well, if my thoughts are playing ME, then I'm going to use my OWN instrument to play my THOUGHTS" and I started using pieces of scripture and positive affirmations as a Mantra, to bring the torrent of my thoughts in to submission.

Whichever tools you can use, taking a Bible verse and reciting it over and over, concentrating on your breathing, in and out slowly, taking three minutes to thank God for silly things like waking up this morning, having a job, having some food in your house, having friends, being able to go to the bathroom, being able to go to the bathroom by yourself ... silly little things ... then perhaps we can be on our way to achieving that "discipline that springs from abstinence ... with inward fasting, so that we in heart and soul may dwell with [God]."

thanks for sharing, i'm sure, your auntie dasch xoxo