Zen Christianity – Zazen & Centering prayer

For the first in this series of posts which will begin to explain what I mean by ‘Zen Christianity’ – I want to start by looking at the practice of Zazen which sits at the heart of Zen. It is this practice which gives Zen its very identity, and sets it apart from other sects or schools of Buddhism.

It is this practice which means that Zen is not actually a religion, nor even a way confined to a particular religious group.Zazen literally means ‘seated meditation’ and refers to the core of the Zen way, the primacy of stillness meditation. Of course different Zen schools vary in their ways of teaching Zazen, but at its most basic, most fundamental, the practice is of sitting still and disengaging with conscious thought.

Meditation is a discipline common to a variety of religious traditions, and you will find practitioners of various kinds of meditation in all of the Abrahamic traditions, as well as the various streams running out of Hinduism and many others besides.

Fr Thomas Keating

In relatively recent years the Zazen practice has been well incorporated in to Christianity by means of the Centering Prayer movement, developed by the Trappist monk Thomas Keating and others.

But while the popularity of Zazen may have spurred on the Centering Prayer movement, the practice itself is developed out of Medieval Christian practice as outlined in the spiritual classic ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’. Indeed it is apparently true that Centering prayer was originally called ‘Contemplative Prayer according to the Cloud of Unknowing’ – not quite as catchy.

Put simply and in practical terms, Centering Prayer is a form of meditation which uses a ‘sacred word’ to still the mind. The word is repeated partly in order to simply help the mind keep from engaging in thought. If it is not needed, the word is put aside, but when thoughts begin to encroach again, the word is repeated again until it is no longer needed. I am not aware of many people who have no need of a word.

The difference then, between this and other forms of meditation is simple, a mantra or other form of concentrating meditation seeks to fill the mind, to exclude thoughts by focusing on one particular idea. A similar practice is used for those beginning or learning Zazen.

Centering Prayer is Zen like in its aim of stilling the mind, of disengaging with thoughts altogether, the focus is simply upon gently repeating the word.

When thoughts come, as they continue to do, you simply do not engage. No matter how worthy the thought, your meditation time is not the time for that thought, it is time for meditation.

There are a number of ways that we engage with thoughts, and they basically fall into three categories. You can retain thoughts. Alternatively you can resist thoughts. And very often you can resent thoughts. All of these happen very naturally – but with Centering Prayer the idea is to do none of them.

Retain no thought – so don’t enter in to it. Resist no thought, do not try and rid your mind of anything which enters it, and resent no thought, don’t bother wasting your time getting cross about a thought which has entered your head unbidden.

By simply repeating a sacred word, you have the opportunity to do none of these things.

So much for the fundamental practice, but what is the point of this kind of meditation?

With Zazen one is essentially aiming to achieve a realisation of a greater reality, which exists beyond thought. With Centering Prayer the same is basically true – the difference is primarily how as individual practitioners we understand that reality.

For my own practice, I take as a starting point the idea that there is an ultimate ‘divine reality’ underlying all things, which is most essentially Love. I appreciate this is not a given, but it is an element of faith on my part. I believe it wholeheartedly (and sometimes doubt it almost as sincerely) and it is that which  serves as a foundation for my understanding of the universe and the human condition. I further believe or understand that this divine reality, this ultimate love, which we may know as God, is there to be engaged with. It is there to be loved, and to love. But I acknowledge that as soon as I begin to use words, images or concepts,then my expression of love, and my understanding of God is immediately limited. That is not to say a limited engagement is not to be wished for, but I would rather see it as a way marker than a destination.

Chapter three of The Cloud of Unknowing begins like this: “This is what you are to do. Lift your heart up to the Lord with a gentle stirring of love, desiring him for his own sake and not for his gifts.” It goes on to explain the method of using one word, or one syllable to express this love. This explains the basis of Centering prayer: to express love for, and live in the love of, God without limiting that by imposing words upon it.

Meister Eckhart taught that ‘God is a word, a word unspoken’. By this he meant that while God is ultimately or eventually knowable – God cannot be known fully by any word or concept which we can yet humanly articulate.

By engaging in a Centering Prayer type meditation, we draw closer to the point where we can engage with the unspoken nature of the word that is God. We set aside for a time our human understanding with all of its inadequacy, and go towards the light of love.

Hazelnuts, ego, and death

Millionaire mystic and sometime pseudo-science salesman Deepak Chopra recently described enlightenment as: ‘getting rid of the person that never was’.

There’s something in what he says I think. If one were to become what Chopra calls enlightened, it would surely be through a process of self-unrealisation, whereby one realises that the self you know – is not what you think it is.

Freud classified the psyche as having three ‘theoretical constructs’ – id, ego, and super ego. While the id, or the instinctual part of the psyche hasn’t gone on to become famous, and the super ego is not exactly a rockstar either, the ‘ego’ has become a very popular term. It has the X factor.

Ego has been transplanted into a million-billion conversations, which are basically about ‘big headedness’ or perhaps an overinflated sense of self-importance.

But ego is more than that, in psychoanalytical terms it actually relates to the sense of self, which intervenes between the instinct and the environment – it is, you might say, what classifies each of us as separate entities.

What Chopra is actually saying, I think, is that enlightenment is the realisation that we are in fact ‘all one’. We aren’t confined by the ‘boundaries’ of the ego, or the understanding of self. 

Julian of Norwich, standard-bearer for medieval contemplatives everywhere, had a famous vision.

“And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness, it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”

The confines of ego-bound self-understanding have to be stripped away if we are ever to become aware that we are given being, only, as Julian puts it ‘through the love of God’. We have, in words familiar to Bible readers, to put the self to death.

By putting the self to death, Christians believe we can ‘become one’ with God, this makes sense if you think about it in the sense of what Julian talks about – everything has being through the love of God, but we separate, quite literally, ourselves by constructing a self. And it must die.

I’ve really got to find a way
Of taking care of him for good
I know he’d kill me if he could
So I’ll nail him to the wood

Killing my old man
You may not understand
He’s a terrible man
Got to make a stand
And kill the old man

(Bob Hartman)

On the other hand – is this ‘mystical one-ness’ a load of mumbo-jumbo, please have your say…

The need for silence

“If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.

“Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any living thing.”

Thomas Merton; Seeds of Contemplation (Burns and Oates, 1957) p 44.

Brilliant post about meditation and mysticism

There is a really good article about meditation and mysticism over at Carl McColman’s blog.

It  runs through the importance of mysticism to any expression of Christian faith – at a time when some (most?) elements of the church have yet to wake up to the fact that we ignore the idea of mystical union and the massively important and useful surrounding practises of meditation and contemplation at our very real peril.

For some reason blind eyes continue to be turned towards the ongoing decline in adherence to Christian belief throughout the Western world.

And instead we model a religion which, to many (in the words of this article): “seems to be little more than a highly-funded, complexly-organized campaign against abortion, homosexuality, and extra-marital sex.”

Yes this article is mainly about Catholicism, but it directly relates to Christianity as practised across the board these days.

Mysticism is treated with suspicion. Interfaith dialogue is considered at best niche, at worst distinctly dodgy. The idea that our Christian practise”consists not so much in being good as in becoming God…” is anathema to many or most of us. Shame shame shame.

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he/she will not exist” (Karl Rahner).

Great article, go read. Note: Carl McColman’s blog is basically always interesting, well worth bookmarking it, subscribing to the feed or whatever you do while you’re there.

three interesting blog posts

Here are three interesting posts, the latter two being podcasts related to the topic of new monasticism, and specifically the launch of a new book on the subject – and the first being an excellent article by Carl McColman, who is a blogger and writer on spirituality and mysticism, whom I thoroughly reccomend you check out.

His latest post on being and doing is a particularly good read.

Go here for Ben Edson’s new monasticism podcast.

Go here for the Moot community’s new monasticism podcast.

Saint of the day – John of the Cross

Catholic Online do a really good ‘saint of the day’ thing, which is a good source of inspiration at times. Today we’re on St John of the Cross, who was a fascinating character.

Here’s an excerpt of what they say about him:

After John joined the Carmelite order, Saint Teresa of Avila asked him to help her reform movement. John supported her belief that the order should return to its life of prayer. But many Carmelites felt threatened by this reform, and some members of John’s own order kidnapped him. He was locked in a cell six feet by ten feet and beaten three times a week by the monks. There was only one tiny window high up near the ceiling. Yet in that unbearable dark, cold, and desolation, his love and faith were like fire and light. He had nothing left but God — and God brought John his greatest joys in that tiny cell.

After nine months, John escaped by unscrewing the lock on his door and creeping past the guard. Taking only the mystical poetry he had written in his cell, he climbed out a window using a rope made of stirps of blankets. With no idea where he was, he followed a dog to civilization. He hid from pursuers in a convent infirmary where he read his poetry to the nuns. From then on his life was devoted to sharing and explaining his experience of God’s love.

His life of poverty and persecution could have produced a bitter cynic. Instead it gave birth to a compassionate mystic, who lived by the beliefs that “Who has ever seen people persuaded to love God by harshness?” and “Where there is no love, put love — and you will find love.”

I believe his life and teachings are an inspiration to all regardless of faith or lack of.