Thoughts, from an Abbot

My one audience with the abbot. I'd been thinking about what to ask him for at least a day and a half of my retreat.

On Thanksgiving day, I went in asking Father Meletios about how to deal with sadness, suffering, and preoccupation with doing things 'right' - so that I could be less self-absorbed, and experience true thankfulness.

[paraphrased per my memory]:

The way we look at it, in the Orthodox Church, would be that you are having a problem with your mind. There is nothing actually causing you suffering right now: you are relatively comfortable, have a roof over your head, by all rights you should be happy. 

The reason you are suffering, then, must be that your thoughts are creating that. We are amazing creatures of habit; you'll find that your current problem will disappear as soon as a bigger one comes along, but once that bigger one is cleared up, you will dredge up the first problem. 

We all experience this. What you may want to try is what we monks learn to do: ignore the thoughts, and focus on what is around you, at hand, in the present. Increase your awareness of the love of Christ. You replace the thoughts with the voice of God, which is always experienced in the present, in whatever form. 

One thing you'll notice is the thoughts are never about the present, they only deal with the past or future. 

The other thing you'll notice is that thoughts are always about one of two things: desire or fear. And both of them hurt. 

One practice that helps is centering your experience on your heart. Not your emotions, mind you, which are your body's reactions to thoughts, but the heart itself, which is always in the present. It shifts your life experience from centering around your thoughts to centering on your heart, and what you'll find is that operating truly from this place of love, there are no words for that. This is Christ living in you. You can have no thoughts when you're in that experience. 

Now I know very few people who can do this constantly - the thoughts come up for us all. Maybe the Saints could live this way. But for the rest of us, even monks, dealing with thoughts this way is a constant practice.

Father Meletios Weber, Abbot of the Monastery of St. John of Shanghai & San Francisco

somehow, I agree with them both

all shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. 

Julian of Norwich

all, dear reader, is not going to be fine. Even If we all agreed with the saints and the prophets, all would not be fine. For we would still be mortal, partial, suffering poor creatures, not very intelligent and never the authors of our best hope.

Wendell Berry

.

Well when you put it that way...

the government should only be big enough to annihilate any country and (If necessary) every country, to spy on its citizens and on other governments, to keep big secrets, and to see to the health and happiness of large corporations. A government thus reduced will be almost too small to notice and will require almost no taxes and spend almost no money.

Wendell Berry,  from"The joy of sales resistance" in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community

impasse and dark night

Night in John of the Cross is the progressive purification and transformation of the human person through what we cherish or desire and through what gives us security and support. We are affected by darkness, therefore, where we are most deeply involved and committed, and in what we love and care for most. Love makes us vulnerable, and it is love itself and its development that precipitate darkness in oneself and in the 'other.'

from "Impasse and Dark Night" 

by Constance Fitzgerald, O.C.D., 

in Living With Apocalypse, Harper and Row, 1984.

Quotes on patience

Above all, trust the slow work of the spirit.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown,
something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability--
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you,
your ideas mature gradually--let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of your tomorrow.

Who can say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be?
Give yourself the benefit of believing that the Spirit is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of felling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Can you be patient unil the mud settles and the water is clear? 

Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?

Stephen Mitchell