Centering Prayer & Contemplative Prayer

• Cynthia Bourgeault's site

• Centering Prayer & Inner Awakening—Cynthia Bourgeault

• Intimacy with God—Fr. Thomas Keating

• Invitation to Love—Fr. Thomas Keating

• Dark Night of the Soul—St. John of the Cross (free pdf)

Christ

• The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault

On Faith

An introduction

I was raised Catholic, with several caveats. My father was likely already an atheist by the time I was born, but it took him until I was about 14 to acknowledge it. My mother is spiritual and has an inclination towards Christ coupled with a distrust of the church. Yet they deemed it proper I have some moral and theological structure in my youth and so for a time we attended mass on the military base where we lived. I recall these services somewhat fondly but I'm sure I've erased the boredom.

Around this time, 1st-3rd grade, I was also attending a private baptist elementary school. This was not out of a matter of conviction on my parents part, it was simply the best school they could afford for me and the public option was quite rough. (I got choked on my first day of kindergarten there! A tale for another time.) I enjoyed God class—yes that was it's name. I enjoyed Sunday school. And I'd say my prayers most nights. 

This habit of praying stuck with me as we moved. My only regular church attendance occurred during that 1st-3rd grade period and in my head it culminates at my First Holy Communion. I cannot say I prayed nightly, I honestly don't remember if I prayed much during this period but I certainly had a habit in place by 7th grade when I returned to the U.S. 

My family was no longer interested in mass, but either through some working of the Holy Spirit or a desire to hang out with a girl I had a crush on, I decided to get confirmed in 8th grade. I greatly enjoyed catechism and it was during this time I first felt an inkling of my call to the priesthood. 

Alas, a little tradcath was terminally uncouth in 2005 and so shortly into my 9th grade experience I'd realized I was queer, started kissing a boy, listening to the dead kennedys, and shopping at hot topic. The anarcho-vegetarian phase followed shortly thereafter and by my senior year I'd leapfrogged the fedora atheists into full post-modern denial of the possibility of Faith. 

Even in this something still was at work. A vague interest in meditation and Daoism, some psychedelic experimentation, I knew in my heart there was more at work than I could sense. 

It was around this time I first encountered Plato and Nietzsche. While I'd prefer not to recount my juvenile forays into both their work, by college I was hooked and pursued continental philosophy with a sincere and deep passion. Alas education in philosophy is not what it once was. While I got solid experience in the ancients, Nietzsche, the empiricists, Machiavelli, and Thucydides, I also flirted around with Derrida, the lesser posties et. al. without a solid grounding in Kant, Heidegger...I digress. The point being I got the skill set but was missing some of the foundations. And so for a time after graduation I tried to identify the critical missing elements in my understanding. 

Why? Because there was still a deep hole inside of me. One that philosophy—in all its stunning and glorious aporia—had only briefly covered over. An intellectual salve that ultimately deepened the wound. This concluded, rather spectacularly, with a simultaneous pursuit of Theravadic meditation and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. 

I will save the depth of the experience for another essay, but it cracked my noggin wide open. 

My meditation practice strengthened as my attachments to long held conceptions of 'what must be' or 'the way things are' were annihilated in the face of direct experience. Ultimately, after several years of stop and start effort, something flipped in my head. In stunning clarity not only the possibility but the necessity of God's existence was inflicted upon me. I felt a call in my heart, loud and clear, "Go Worship." 

I hadn't liked the Buddhist temples I'd been to for a variety of reasons that should not reflect ill upon them. With the concerns about "God" suddenly removed, I thought I'd try to return to my roots. A brief pilgrimage brought me into the arms of the Episcopalians and it is here you presently find me.

I write this only so you may know where the rest comes from.

In Peace,
Fly

Love & Materialism

A dear friend told me when I was just starting out in Buddhism that Love is a fundamental force. At the time this sounded like some absolute woo nonsense, but I held this friend in high regard and knew them to be talented in logic and insight. I'd ponder often what this could mean, we'd discuss it. They would use analogies to quantum fields, the possibility of a field of consciousness, and a field of love. Anyone who has played with new age magicks and attempts to port spiritual technology into the lingo of tech knows it's plenty fun and can sometimes feel quite profound. I was no closer to understanding, though, what Love is.   

First Stirrings

When I was about 6 or 7 I had a dream. I was an elderly man sitting with my wife in a cottage. We were both dressed like eastern European serfs. Something called my attention outside—I can't quite recall, and it was never truly definite. A flash, a sound, a sense of destiny, necessity—my wife and I stepped outside and on the horizon a mushroom cloud spread wide. I recall the quality of the tone specifically, a 70's ish film grain with washed out but prominent darks and dramatic reds and yellows. I saw the wave of fire rushing towards us in this coloring. It was beautiful. I held my wife's hand. And closed my eyes.

There was no pain when it passed over us. But I died. I did not wake up. Outside of time there was a sense of perception in a warm darkness. Later, hours? seconds? years? it was outside of time. Later I awoke. I continued to have this dream, very rarely but nearly identically, for years. It was so rare, and the sense of peace I encountered so complete in that warm darkness, that it truly felt like a gift. 

Later, I became terrified of nothing. 

There is no perception of an end. It cannot be. And so, when I contemplated an eternity of never having been I felt sick. I wondered why "I" was so privileged to be the set of atoms in time actually experiencing being myself. As opposed to all the atoms that compose me that would not experience. I spent years with this fear lurking and hedonism as a distraction.

Collected Prayers

Grace

Thank you Lord for these thy gifts I receive. For the plants and animals of the Earth. The hands that work the fields, those that bring your gifts and prepare them, and my wealth to afford them. Thank you most of all Lord for the company I share these gifts with. Amen.