When do we practice meditation?
Usually, when I ask that question of myself, I mean when do I consciously choose to sit on a cushion or a chair, quiet my busy mind, straighten my back, hands loosely held in my lap, and be mindful — that is, in the curious circuitry of meditation, empty my mind.
I do that at least once a week, with a group of friends in my community, led by a thoughtful teacher of meditation whose tradition, which she wears lightly, is that of Zen Buddhism. There are perhaps eighteen of us, and those gatherings — our sangha, some of us say — are precious to us.
I also meditate at home, in my apartment, and so far, by myself. I find that harder to do than in the comradeship of our sangha. It is part of age old wisdom in monastic traditions that only very experienced and highly trained monks are encouraged to go alone, say to live as a hermit in the desert rather than a monk in daily supportive contact with his brethern. So it comes as no surprise to me that solitary meditation is hard. I feel less motivated to be still, more inclined to indulge my restless energy, or to be more active, more devoted to tasks, often more in touch with other people, friends, colleagues and family.
Within my community, not wholly unlike a monastery, but without a common spiritual tradition and its life of prayer and song or chant, each of us has valued private space to which we are glad we can retreat, close the door, sleep safely, read, write, do whatever we enjoy doing alone. (Some even watch television now and then.)
And there is common space, equally treasured, a dining room to join others for meals and conversation, opportunities to see good films on Fridays and Saturdays, and to attend groups that nourish our diverse interests — our sangha, a group called "Searching for Meaning," that allows us to explore the feelings and thoughts that are with us, the crises in which we may be enmeshed, the care we find in companionship; or a memoir-writing group, an exploration of philosophical questions, a poetry-writing circle, an opportunity to hear and discuss the good and (more) the bad news of the day.
We are a diverse lot, our friendships are many. Our connectedness with one another form a social quilt that makes life in community valuable, very different from living on our own, or with only one other person, or with our grown children, or in a "facility," all of which, for most of us, are a lot less attractive for various reasons than life in this community. No wonder, then, it feels to so many of us a blessing. Why are there so few true communities in this culture, so few villages and neighborhoods in which we can feel comfortably ourselves and with others we know at the same time?
I've lost my thread. I was saying I am less likely to meditate when I am alone than when I am with my fellow meditators, my sangha. For another take on that subject, I recall the words of a great teacher of meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh, or They, as his students know him. About a half-century ago, in an early class he taught after leaving Vietnam, They said,
[I]f you can meditate an hour each day that's good, but it's nowhere near enough. You've got to practice meditation when you walk, stand, lie down, sit, work, while washing your hands, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, drinking tea, talking to friends, or whatever you are doing: "While washing the dishes, you might be thinking about the tea afterwards, and so try to get them out of the way as quickly as possible in order to sit and drink tea. But that means that you are incapable of living during the time you are washing the dishes. When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you're drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. When you're using the toilet, let that be the most important thing in your life. And so on. Chopping wood is meditation. Carrying water is meditation. Be mindful 24 hours a day, not just during the one hour you may allot for formal meditation or reading scripture and reciting prayers. Each act must be carried out in mindfulness. Each act is a rite, a ceremony. Raising a cup of tea to your mouth is a rite. Does the word "rite" seem too solemn? I use that word in order to jolt you into the reailization of the life-and-death matter of awareness.
They realized that to carry out that realization in practice — to be mindful every day and every hour, doing everything and nothing — is easier to say than to do. So he suggests what we do, or at least what we partly do, "try hard to reserve one day out of the week to devote entirely" to our practice of mindfulness. That was the ancient wisdom of most of the oldest spiritual traditions. Most of us, whether raised in religious traditions or not — we may be, as they say, "secular or ethnic Jews," "Christian non-conformists," "Christian agnostics," even "Christian athiests" — most of us have a practice.
When I first came to live and work in the extraordinary Norwegian healing community of Modum Bad — the baths at Modum — for its 19th century history had been as one of the great European spas — I offered a series of lectures and discussions on Shabat or Sabbath: the Jewish and then Christian practice of setting aside one whole day of the week, say from Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown, or normally and problematically shortened in Christian practice to Sunday and then to Sunday morning. My friend who was the director of the hospital at Modum Bad asked me why I chose a Jewish theme. After all, most Norwegians are historically Christian. I reminded him that Jesus was a Jew and a rabbi.
My interest in that series of talks was less the traditional Shabat or Sabbath than it was the spirit of Shabat in our lives, I wanted to explore Sabbath time.
We commonly know Sabbath as a day of rest corresponding to the Biblical seventh day of creation, in which "God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation." (Genesis 2:1-3) The Hebrew word translated as "rested" is shabat, sabbath.
To understand the reality of Sabbath more deeply, we must consider not only the character of that day and the meaning of shabat, but inquire into the nature of Sabbath time, and we must understand the underlying distinction between the sacred and the profane.
It became common, in the early years of the 20th century, and in some sense far earlier, to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, experience, on the one hand, possessed of a numinous quality — experience of a reality that is overwhelming, awe-inspiring, at once (or on different occasions) terrifying and ecstatic, always permeated by mystery, “wholly other,” not in the sense of alien but rather different,extraordinary if one can imagine the full resonance, the furthest reaches of that word. Rudolf Otto's summary Latin phrase was mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means in English about what one would imagine it to mean. And, on the other hand, experience that is not numinous: the dogged reality of every day. The interesting thing about this distinction, however, is that it is never at rest, neither hard nor fast. Any object, for example—a stone, a tree, a sip of wine, a breath of air, an apricot—can reveal itself as sacred or profane, so that its sacredness is not inherent in the object itself, but in the character or quality of relationship between knower and known, a reality requiring both an “I” and an “Other.”
That is why the distinction is between sacred and profane, and not sacred and mundane. Profanity, in its deeper sense, implies impersonality, turning away, withdrawal, rather than turning towards, fragmentation or partiality rather than wholeness, absence more than presence, seeming rather than being; mask (persona) or semblance instead of authenticity, withholding rather than giving, monologue rather than dialogue, collectivity rather than community.
"There is a realm of time," writes the great scholar of Jewish ethics and mysticism, Abraham Joshua Heschel, "where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord." That is Sabbath time. While there is great wisdom in setting aside a common day once a week as Sabbath time, a wisdom that may reside within our souls--the Biblical command to keep the Sabbath is the only one of the Ten Commandments to begin with the word "Remember," as if it refers to something we already knew, but may have forgotten — Sabbath time is not limited to that day, but is a way of being in time. If it is not a familiar practice, one might start with an hour — in which one is less likely, in any event, to be interrupted.
Heschel, in his small book of meditation on Sabbath, first seeks to convey an understanding that may not coincide with our common intuition: Sabbath, wisdom, holiness, life in its most vivid authenticity, has to do essentially with the sanctification of time. The verb shabat in Hebrew, in addition to the correspondence noted above, is one of the names of God; thus the intriguing conclusion, not quite explicitly drawn by Heschel, that God is a verb, not a noun. ("Even God," writes Heschel, as if we should know better, "is conceived by most of us as a thing.")
The essential spirit of Sabbath is that of reanimation, redemption and resurrection. All week--in profane time--"there is only hope of redemption. But when the Sabbath is entering the world"--in sacred time--"man is touched by a moment of actual redemption; as if for a moment the spirit of the Messiah moved over the face of the Earth." Sabbath is the soul in time, and time is full of such moments, if we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Indeed, our hope and our practice may bring us more and more Sabbath time, even to the experience of life as Sabbath. As one wise soul recently wrote to a dying friend,
"This sacred time is not about convenience or inconvenience; it isn't about meeting deadlines. It isn't about you (or anyone else) being in control. This sacred time is about learning to trust the eddies and shoals of the River. It is... about mystery. It is a broader, deeper, infinitely more significant agenda that is beyond our charting. It is singularly about you and your union with the Other. It is beyond our reckoning."
It is our choice and our gift, then, our craft and our practice, if you will, to make the most of Sabbath. The traditional prescriptions and proscriptions of Sabbath, when not sinking like all dogma into formalism and legalism, are designed to assist us in that task. The more we measure and divide time, the less we allow its consecration. (Think, in mundane terms, of the difference between digital and analog watches.) Heschel's language is particularly vivid. The more we pursue "the profanity of clattering commerce...[think Black Friday], the screetch of dissonant days,..." the farther we move from Sabbath.
So, I have moved far afield from my question, when do we — or I — practice meditation. Yet in moving to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and then to Abraham Joshua Heschel, I am closer to the heart of that question than when it came to mind early this morning.
This is a time of Thanksgiving, of Chanukah, of being thankful for the light as we approach the shortest day of the year at the winter solstice. At some point a few moments ago I wrote of an apricot, of the possibility that an apricot, like almost any object, can be sacred or profane or both. I was remembering these lines of W.S. Merwin's poem, "West Wall," with which I shall end these reflections:
In the unmade light I can see the world
as the leaves brighten I see the air
the shadows melt and the apricots appear
now that the branches vanish I see the apricots
from a thousand trees ripening in the air
they are ripening in the sun along the west wall
apricots beyond number are ripening in the daylight.
Whatever was there
I never saw those apricots swaying in the light
I might have stood in orchards forever
without beholding the day in the apricots
or knowing the ripeness of the lucid air
or touching the apricots in your skin
or tasting in your mouth the sun in the apricots.