When my son was only slightly bigger than a pudgy football, we took a camping trip to the glaciated hill country of southwestern Wisconsin. If you wanted to step into that scenery in your mind’s eye, you’d have to shake your usual images of Wisconsin out of your head. In place of dairy barns, and cow pastures, you’d have to picture something that looked more like the foothills of the Rockies complete with postcard-pretty look-outs, and expansive valleys below. But instead of scrub oaks, sage, and cactus on a sunbaked dirt backdrop, picture a lavish outpouring of orange Indian paint brushes, yellow buttercups, and purple cone flowers, pinned like jewelry, on a lush coat of rain-soaked green extravagance. Hikers, in that area, are almost always rewarded for their efforts with stunning scenic overlooks worthy of the Scottish Highlands.
Months before that trip, Lisa’s maternity leave ran out. At six months, John Harry had to switch from breast milk to formula. That meant that I suddenly became more than just an obstacle on the way to the breast. You might say that I became the breast. And by “breast” I mean the formula mixing, bottle toting, shoulder-covered-in puke, cuddling parent.
So, on that vacation, Annalise and her off-work-physician-in-training-mom, would sleep, while I schlepped John Harry outdoors in the morning to slake his hunger with a Coleman stove-warmed bottle of Enfamil. The way he guzzled it, you’d think it was bacon flavored! Fully sated after his morning feeding, burping gave way to sleeping. An oceanic warmth that started off resting on my chest, was soon resting in my chest. With each synchronized breath, it seemed that our co-mingled, exhaled warmth began to fill—first the valley—then the hills that bound that valley—then beyond. Soon my son and I felt the whole world gently coming to rest within us, as we rested in it. On that morning, seemed like “I didn’t need no coffee in my cup” (Van Morrison).
Natural Therapy
During graduate school I kept noticing that a lot of what psychotherapy is up to mirrors processes that take place every day in the natural order. Which is to say, there’s a kind of natural psychotherapy knit into the fundamental structures of life. For example, the mirroring that goes on in a counselor’s office mimics a process that naturally takes place in good parenting where the child can come to know themselves more clearly in relationship to someone who accepts them with unconditional positive regard (see Carl Rogers’ writings on psychotherapy). When heart speaks to heart in the counseling collaboration, a therapist can find herself delivering an interpretation, or a story that provides a healing dose of meaning that feels form-fitted and just-in-time for the client. According to the psychiatrist, Josef Goldbrunner, a good sermon, inspiring book, or heartfelt talk functions in much the same way.
Natural Contemplation.
Just like the natural therapy that’s knit into reality, there’s a natural mysticism available to each and every one of us. How else could it be when the Ground and Horizon of all reality is Love itself? John Harry and I stumbled into that reality all those years ago on a camping trip. If experiences of intimacy with God are always and everywhere available, why didn’t I grow up hearing about this? I’ve got a theory about the “why” of that.
Elitism as a Barrier to the Contemplative Life
In the final book of The Chronicles of Narnia series, C.S. Lewis highlighted the human tendency to act as though mysticism is the sole property of an elite few. That tendency makes sense to me. To open the sails of my soul to the daily possibility of mystical union is to open myself to the prospect of being blown in directions not entirely of my own making. The reward of a worldview in which a precious few attain union with the Sacred is a kind of safe, but decidedly unmagical sovereignty. The cost of leaving intimacy with God to an elite few? Nothing less than the surrender of a golden ticket for one-hell-of-an ongoing adventure where “grace gives way to the next grace” (John 1). You can never quite predict where a life full of that kind of adventure might take you!
A Hack for Contemplative Practice on the Go
In large measure, the technique for finding your way to a daily mysticism is not a technique at all. It’s the simple realization that mysticism is nothing more than intimacy with that Presence that pulses within you…through you…and around you. That means that every mother’s child has access to mystical experience. The only technique really involved is to figure out how to slow down and lean into those moments where warmth, beauty, kindness, integrity, and curiosity are in the air…and in your heart.
Dialogue
You heard about how John Harry and I enjoyed a warm oceanic experience together. A little later that morning, I recognized and named that experience, “intimacy with God.” Whether or not you put religious language to it, can you think of a time you had an experience similar to that? If so, share and discuss that experience with someone worthy of that level of depth. Otherwise, just step back into the experience in your heart: seeing it, smelling it, hearing it, tasting it, and feeling it again. You might write a journal entry. See if a new awareness arises out of it.
If you are having a hard time coming up with an example, just brainstorm with a partner, or on a piece of paper potential times that might qualify as one of these experiences. Be sure to err on the side of accepting it as sacred.
The great Twentieth Century Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, referred to our Wisconsin experience, and others like it, as examples of “anonymous experiences of God.” He believed that by making the unconscious experience of God conscious, we root ourselves more fully in that experience. Do you agree with him? If so, why do you agree? If not, why not?
Look down into the next day or two, and see if you can locate a moment where you will be able to open yourself to a deeper experience of kindness, warmth, beauty, integrity, or curiosity. Set an intention to enter that moment with an openness to the Sacred.
If this way of contemplative practice appeals to you, look up “The Daily Examen” in the online publication, IgnatianSpirituality.com. It was written by my longtime spiritual director, David Flemming, S.J. Like him, the reflection is thorough, practical, and approachable. See what you think. For people of my spiritual tradition, Lent is just over a month and a half away.
This is exquisite, Tom
Thank you, Tom for this. Very much needed as we chart our way through the future.