Dear Folks,
Since Sunday several people have asked me about how to access “the deep.” What works for me is keeping a journal, recording my dreams, walking several times over the course of each day, studying the Bible with small groups, consistently asking “What do you hear in the text? What strikes you?” and trusting that Spirit is speaking. Most of my listening/prayer happens while I am walking; the movement is an embodied practice that heals me. I read a lot, too.
I have recently finished Joy Unspeakable, Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, by Barbara A. Holmes. Deep within the experience of the Black Church is contemplative practice—individual meditation work, unanswerable existential questions that are invited to linger, personal heartbeats offering counterpoint to the gifts of trained musicians, silence—all of which Holmes believes conjure the power of spirited worship. For all of its performative wonder, Holmes locates the reality of the Black Church as an invisible, spiritual idea, “virtual space created by the worship practices of the congregation.”
For Holmes, the work of the church is to offer a multi-layered response to suffering. The legacy of contemplative practices is a “survival modality.” And community is not an artificial construct, but an “organic system of memory and responsibility.”
Recalling an experience of her great-grandfather, Holmes wonders if lying in a field with a weapon, “unsure whether you can prevail or whether you will be captured and burned alive or hanged, counts as a contemplative moment(?)… For that matter, in our own era, what use is contemplation to a community besieged by drugs, violence, and materialism? When survival is the goal, can contemplative practices help?” And then she provides her answer: “My own family’s stories have convinced me that contemplation can occur anywhere; stained glass windows and desert retreats are not necessary. In fact, duress may facilitate the turn inward, the centering down that Howard Thurman identifies.” And continuing, “the antidote to a life that is perilous and difficult is the continuing manifestation of ‘gifts’ deemed to open conduits to the spirit realm and a belief in the manifest goodness of God’s creation.”
I am especially drawn to Holmes experiences of where she finds “church.” It is around the kitchen table, where older women pass on their wisdom, as they tell funny and sometimes scandalous stories, and “just enough food” becomes plenty to share, and everyone is welcome to bring their gifts and their hunger… On the front porch, where silence and reflection are modeled as a counterpoint to a busy morning/afternoon and reading of scripture and literature and discussing “where it lands inside you” is offered as a way to make sense of society’s narrative… In the noise and complexity of work life and family life as it intersects “ordered worship” which is conceived as self-consciously different… In the herbal remedies, dietary instructions, and laying on of hands that respond to physical and emotional illnesses…
Some thoughts about the embodied locus of contemplation:
“There is in every person an inward sea, and in that sea is an island, and on that island is an altar, and standing guard before that altar is ‘the angel with the flaming sword.’ Nothing can get by that angel to be placed upon that altar unless is has the mark of your inner authority. Nothing passes… unless it be a part of the ‘fluid area of your consent.’ This is your crucial link with the Eternal.” (Howard Thurman) This island is inviolable, a safe space to encounter God. External oppression may defeat the body and even the mind, but the spirit cannot be breached without consent. If you are locked in a windowless room with no access to the outside, are you a prisoner? Or is a portal always open, an inner door shaped exactly like your hope?
Fear not, says the Holy One. Let your nets out into the deep.
Love,
David