Readings
8
Listen!
I eased the rental car along a narrow, hedgerowed lane under the shade of looming oaks overhead. Pheasants darted out of the undergrowth and across the road, all but throwing themselves under the wheels. I slowed to a crawl, winding with the road around the gentle contours of the north Yorkshire hillside until it finally broke free of the trees and a broad green valley opened up before me. In the distance a small scattering of red-roofed farmhouses were dwarfed by a complex of half-ruined buildings. Crumbling, pale sandstone walls glowed under the early morning sun. The verdant grass was broken here and there by the remains of tiled flooring. And soaring above it all was a congregation of delicate arches stretched toward heaven, seemingly weightless stone flung skyward and held in the skies by slender pillars, suspended in their own subtle tracery. I caught my breath in wonder. This was Rievaulx Abbey.
The valley around Rievaulx is idyllic. The modern visitor sees a landscape quite different from that settled by the founding Cistercian monks in the twelfth century, but even so the words of Walter Daniel, an early visitor to the site, still ring true:
The spot was by a powerful stream called the Rie in a broad valley stretching on either side. . . . High hills surround the valley, encircling it like a crown. These are clothed by trees of various sorts and maintain in pleasant retreats the privacy of the vale, providing for the monks a kind of second paradise of wooded delight. From the loftiest rocks the waters wind and tumble down to the valley below, and as they make their hasty way through the lesser passages and narrower beds and spread themselves in wider rills, they give out a gentle murmur of soft sound and join together in the sweet notes of a delicious melody. And when the branches of lovely trees rustle and sing together and the leaves flutter gently to the earth, the happy listener is filled increasingly with a glad jubilee of harmonious sound, as so many various things conspire together in such a sweet consent in music whose every diverse note is equal to the rest.
The abbey at Rievaulx was one of the most important Cistercian monasteries in medieval Britain, and for almost four centuries played a central role in the spiritual life of northern England—and far beyond. And at the heart of the monastic life in Rievaulx was a determined pursuit of the presence of God through Scripture. While darkness still swathed the valley, and the stars slowly turned overhead, the softly tolling bell would summon the brothers to matins. Psalms were chanted by candlelight, punctuated by lengthy readings from the Bible and silence within which to digest them. For many, a period of lectio divina would follow before sunrise. The rhythm of the unfolding day continued to be marked by praying Scripture; the offices celebrated under those magnificent arches were abbreviated reminders of matins, also shaped around singing psalms and listening for God’s voice in short Bible readings.
I walked around the ruins, stopping to look through the doorway of the old refectory. Here the monks gathered to eat in silence while one of the brothers read, perhaps from one of the prophets or a Pauline epistle. Further round the cloister the chapter house provided space for discussing abbey business and the practicalities of life in community; it was also a place for sharing together the practice of seeking God in the biblical text. (Bernard of Clairvaux’s voluminous Sermons on the Song of Songs, recording his teaching at a sister Cistercian house, gives us an example of the nature of these conversations.) Over a doorway in the remains of a building on the south side of the complex were the worn remains of a sculpture: the annunciation of the birth of Christ to Mary by the angel Gabriel. The presence of the Bible was pervasive and inescapable. These medieval brothers must have been soaked in Scripture to a degree most of us would find unimaginable—and that immersion in the Bible drew them into an ever deeper immersion into the life of God.
Rievaulx Abbey
As I ambled round the site, soaking in the warmth of a beautiful summer’s morning, I reflected that life in Rievaulx must have been glorious; secluded from the troubles of the world, communing with God in quiet prayer, absorbed in reading and meditation, drawing ever nearer to the divine. It seemed light years from my own experience—and perhaps yours. In our time, how many of us can enjoy the slow-paced reflective rhythm of a medieval monastery? A busy executive, pressured by targets, deadlines, budgets and the stress of office politics, has neither the time nor internal quiet to meditate throughout the day on the Bible. The mechanic unbending a fender in the body shop and the young mother besieged by feral preschoolers, both hedged in by incessant noise, can only dream of solitude and stillness. An elderly widower, held in his home by failing strength, might experience his isolation less as space for praying Scripture and more as a crushing burden of loneliness. Few of us, it seems, have the luxury of a life suited for contemplation.
But then, in reality, neither did the monks. Beyond the church and cloister, Rievaulx was a bustling center of activity. The land around the abbey was extensively developed for livestock, and sheep farming became an important industry for the brothers. Animal hides were tanned to make leather. The community developed mines for both lead and iron. There is even evidence that, near their woolhouse in Laskill, the monks developed an early (but very efficient) blast furnace for smelting the iron; after the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, nothing so technologically advanced would be seen for almost two centuries. Although we might picture an abbey like Rievaulx as a quiet, secluded center for contemplation, far removed from the activity of the world around, the truth was quite different. This community sought the presence of God in the midst of industry, commerce and political instability. If they were able to seek God in Scripture, and allow that searching to shape the course of their entire lives, so perhaps might we.
Paying Attention
If we truly desire to encounter God in Scripture on a regular, habitual basis in the midst of our frenetic and sometimes chaotic lives, we need first to cultivate the skill of maintaining a disciplined and sustained attentiveness toward God. Reading begins with perception, the ability to encounter Scripture to allow it to become internalized, part of our own minds and souls. This requires us to pay attention to the text, but even more so to pay attention to God who meets us in the text. This mindfulness of God is an unfamiliar practice to many of us in the contemporary Western church—and it is in precisely this area that we can learn so much from the example of the medieval monks like those at Rievaulx.
The monastic rule of St. Benedict, followed at thousands of communities like Rievaulx across the world, opens with a single word that encourages us from the very beginning to pay close attention to Christ: Ausculta! (Listen!) This attitude of the soul is emphasized repeatedly throughout the rule’s prologue: “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. . . . Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God, and our ears to the voice from heaven that every day calls out. . . . Let us listen well to what the Lord says.” That opening Ausculta! set the tone for monastic life for the next millennium and a half, right up to the present day. Every action, every custom of monastic life was carefully and intentionally ordered to help the monk be more attentive to Jesus, to be able to incline a listening heart to his gentle voice.
The rule of Benedict itself overflows with examples. The liturgy centered on praying the Psalms because they were believed to represent the prayers of Jesus himself, who even now intercedes for us before his heavenly Father. To pray the Psalter was to learn to pray like Christ—with Christ, even. Obedience to the abbot gave opportunity to practice obedience to Jesus. Kitchen service emulated the foot washing Christ gave to his disciples. Even the hospitality offered to guests—for which Benedictines became so famous—was an exercise in loving Jesus through others, as Benedict wrote in his rule: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ.”
It’s important for us to notice that every aspect of life became an opportunity to practice attentiveness. Chanting psalms or praying in the oratory could clearly enable the fervent monk to soak himself in Christ. But Benedict, and the Benedictine tradition that developed from his rule, were very clear: cooking a meal, fixing fence posts, shearing sheep, balancing account books, teaching children, tending the sick—all of these, and every other imaginable everyday activity, also offer the chance to immerse ourselves in the presence of Jesus. The trick is simply paying enough attention, discovering how to be present to God in the moment.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. It is not that God is reluctant to reveal himself to us—quite the opposite. Innumerable people throughout the history of the church have borne witness to the wide variety of ways in which God has lovingly made himself known. We may even have experienced in our own lives the gracious Spirit drawing back the veil between this world and the greater reality in which God dwells. But God desires more from us, for a deeper and intimate relationship that has to be founded on more than a few chance encounters of grace. God longs for us to be more consistently attentive.
When Moses was captivated by the burning bush, he wasn’t cultivating a discipline of habitual attentiveness to God; his eye was caught by the sight of the flames and curiosity drew him closer in. But as his life with God deepened, so he sought to develop a more deliberate and sustained practice of seeking the presence of God. During the forty long years in which the Hebrews traveled between Egypt and the Promised Land, he purposefully erected a tent on the edge of the camp at every stopping place, calling it the “tent of meeting.” Then day after day Moses would go out to this tent to meet with the Lord, to seek the face of the Holy One of Israel. The fire that animated the burning bush also burned here, but in a great pillar of flame and smoke that rested over the tent. The same voice spoke, but now not an unknown and unfamiliar voice; this was the voice of a constant companion, one who had made himself known. The book of Exodus tells us, “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11).
Inner and Outer Worlds
Is it possible for any of us to develop such deliberate and continual attentiveness? Isn’t this the preserve of the mystics and hermits—like the monks at Rievaulx, for example—who have the time, space and inclination to immerse themselves in religious experience? Such people often seem to have a certain character, a particular personality that is rare and unusual. The rest of us live a slightly less elevated existence, rooted more in the bare earth than in the seventh heaven. Perhaps we’re simply not wired to encounter God in such a personal and intimate way.
In our contemporary church culture, extroverts are in particular danger of being led to believe that a deep, rich, inner experience of God is simply beyond them. One of the better known, and most well established, categories in contemporary psychology is the scale of extroversion and introversion. It’s also one of the most widely misunderstood distinctions. In the popular imagination, extroverts are the wild, fun-loving party animals, those who are most sociable, active and outgoing. In contrast, introverts are believed to be the quieter souls who keep their own company (sometimes to the point of being downright antisocial), the scholars, loners and contemplatives.
Although there’s considerable truth in these generalizations, they don’t quite hit the mark. Many extroverts are very sociable, but a handful are not. It’s not at all unusual to find outgoing and expressive introverts. Many clergy, for example, are highly introverted, but it would be difficult to guess that while watching them enthusiastically leading worship and preaching on a Sunday morning. For a more accurate picture, start by thinking of a spectrum rather than two poles. Very few people are simply “extroverts” or “introverts”; we all lie somewhere on a line between those two extremes. Those toward either end of the line may fit the stereotyped pictures quite well. But many more of us, finding ourselves partway along the spectrum, will blend a little of both personality types, perhaps functioning now more as an extrovert and then more as an introvert. We are too complex simply to be slotted into one of two boxes.
Those who are more extroverted usually prefer to function in the external world, the universe outside their heads, sometimes through interaction with other people and at other times through physical activity. Extroverts are not typically drawn by their interior life, by reflection and the internal conversations of the mind; they prefer external stimulation. Some can find engaging with their inner world tremendously challenging, even painful and uncomfortable. The more introverted, on the other hand, much prefer to function in that inner world, the universe inside their heads. Depending on the nature of their introversion, they may experience the world around them as somewhat tedious or irrelevant or incomprehensible or threatening. As a result, they are typically content to live in a far greater degree of isolation from the outer world than extroverts could ever tolerate.
Of course, this means that in general extroverts tend to be a little more sociable, and introverts a little less so—after all, “other people” are part of the external world to which extroverts are drawn and which many introverts find so uncomfortable or tedious. But the stereotypes are riddled with exceptions. That lonely hiker may be an unsociable extrovert who loves the physicality of the natural world. The intense group sitting in conversation in the coffee shop may be deep introverts who are exploring the inner world of ideas together. The fundamental distinction which determines whether we are extroverts or introverts is not whether we are sociable or unsociable, lively or quiet, but whether we find the outer, physical world or the inner, intellectual world most stimulating and absorbing.
We might still expect, then, that introverts will more naturally and easily find themselves able to practice attentiveness to God. After all, they already value and enjoy solitude and reflection. The more introverted we are, the more ready we would seem to be to withdraw from worldly concerns, meditate on Scripture and enter a deep experience of contemplative prayer as we practice the presence of God. Maybe the introverts should seek to encounter God through Scripture, while the extroverts focus on organizing the softball team and going on preaching missions.
And that would be right, if the real issue at stake here were the ability to be quietly reflective, to dwell comfortably and silently in the realm of ideas and meditation. But that would be to presume that God were somehow more present to us in our inner world than in the outer world—an idea the Christian tradition has always vigorously rejected. Certainly we experience God in the hidden chamber of the spirit, the silent temple of the heart. But God is also made present to us in bread and wine, in the flowing water of baptism, in other human beings made in God’s image, in the sweeping majesty of creation which declares God’s “eternal power and divine nature” (Rom 1:20). In fact, as I have already said, the skill needed for an encounter with God is attentiveness, the ability to turn our hearts and minds fully in the direction of God (wherever he reveals himself) and keep them there. It is a skill that can be learned. And, surprisingly, it is a skill that is both equally accessible and equally difficult for extroverts and introverts alike.
Extroverts struggle to be attentive because they are so easily distracted by their external environment. Unable to keep themselves still for long, they are dazzled and drawn away by the bright lights, pulled into whatever excitement lays near at hand—a conversation, the football game, the great outdoors. Introverts, of course, have no such problem. Many of them can happily sit quietly for hours. But only let an introvert have a few moments alone and the distractions immediately flood in. Introverts have a vibrant inner landscape. Thoughts and feelings cascade over one another so quickly they can be hard to catch. A universe of ideas spins within them, a limitless cosmos grips their imaginations. Their bodies may be still as stone, but inside the soul is whirling. Certainly, God is present in both the extrovert’s external world and the introvert’s inner world. But all we see are the glittering, fascinating distractions. When it comes to sustaining focused concentration in one direction—on God himself—introverts are no more gifted than extroverts. Being attentive to the divine is hard for everyone.
The Butterfly Mind
However, we should not despair. Most of us find it difficult to pay attention to anything, whether to God or anything else. We have butterfly minds, constantly fluttering from one bright attraction to the next; the only difference between each of us is which distractions we find ourselves most drawn toward, and whether they are within us or in the outside world. So fixing our gaze on God and keeping it there is hard—but not impossible. Anyone (whether extrovert, introvert or some combination of the two) can learn to be more attentive and so more aware of God, and especially more alert to God’s presence in Scripture. First, we need to learn basic skills that will help focus our attention. One that I have found particularly useful is breath counting.
How hard could it be to count your breathing? As I sit here, relaxed and therefore breathing quite slowly, I begin to pay attention to the simple movement of air into and out of my body. I breathe in, my lungs expanding a little, enjoying the sensation of the cool afternoon air being drawn in. One. My diaphragm pushes up marginally, and I exhale. There is a moment’s pause, and then I breathe in again. Two. Gently the air leaves my body again. How difficult could it be to count, say, ten of these breaths?
It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult. Difficult, that is, for my mind to count ten breaths while doing nothing else. It sounds so terribly easy, but in practice, it’s hard to get past two or three breaths before my butterfly mind begins to flit to something more exciting. The exercise usually proceeds something like this. Breathe in. One. Breathe out. Notice ceiling fan spinning above me. Hear car passing on the street outside. Breathe in. Notice cell phone lying on the table. Two. Remember that I had meant to return a call before dinner. Who was I supposed to call? Something about the car? Breathe in again. Must have breathed out without noticing it. Three. Thinking about the car reminds me that I forgot to fetch groceries this morning. People are coming to stay this weekend, and we need more bread, milk and pasta. Perhaps a frozen pizza or two. Breathing in again. Did I miss one? Is that three or four now? Who did I mean to call? Perhaps I should start counting again. Breathe in. One . . .
If you want to experience the butterfly mind in action, count your breathing. Stop reading for a few seconds, sit still and try to count ten breaths, focusing on nothing but the breathing itself. You’ll find the breathing is second nature, and the counting easy. But the attentiveness—well, that’s something else entirely.
Breath counting is a very simple exercise you can practice almost anywhere and at practically any time. Waiting in a doctor’s office, sitting on a bus, standing in line at the grocery store or drinking coffee in your kitchen in the early morning. Whenever you’re not required to be concentrating on anything else, you can hone your concentration skill simply by paying attention to what your own body is doing. It’s not a New Age meditation technique, an Eastern meditation practice or a yoga discipline. It’s neither esoteric nor occult. It’s just a little trick to encourage that butterfly to learn how to sit still once in a while.
The Practice of the Presence of God
Once we have begun to develop the skill of attentiveness, we can move on to another more fruitful exercise, often known as practicing the presence of God.
A little background might be helpful here. One winter’s day in the early years of the seventeenth century a young man named Nicholas from Hériménil, in the French Duchy of Lorraine, stood contemplating a tree. Shivering in the cold air, he became fascinated as he studied the dry, barren branches. The tree gave every appearance of being dead. No movements, no fruit, no leaves. It seemed to reflect the bitter lifelessness of the snow-covered earth surrounding it. And yet, Nicholas reflected, it was far from dead. Buried in the heart of this tree—and the dozens of trees around it, and every meadow plant and hedgerow shrub—was an irresistible gift of life which would soon burst forth in fertile splendor. Somehow this tree spoke powerfully to Nicholas of the irrepressible and prodigal providence of God. As he stood watching the tree, he became alert to the presence of God.
The experience never left him. Within a very short time he had been drafted into military service during the Thirty Years’ War then raging across central Europe. While fighting in a pitched battle near his hometown Nicholas received a dreadful leg injury that ended his career as a soldier—the painful wound was to plague him until his death. After recovering he spent some time acting as valet to a local nobleman. But his heart was being drawn in a different direction. Eventually he traveled to Paris and entered the priory of the Discalced Carmelites as a lay brother.
At the time, most monastic communities were divided into two main parts. The “choir monks” sang the daily offices in the oratory, spent extensive periods in meditation and prayer, and had opportunities to develop their education through reading and study. Lay brothers, on the other hand, were the domestic backbone of the community. They were expected to attend to the practicalities of life in community, leaving the choir monks free to pursue their more spiritual and intellectual calling. Lay brothers would farm, cook and clean. They were carpenters, plumbers, builders and maintenance workers. They were expected to pursue their much simpler prayers during the spaces in their daily routine of manual labor. They certainly were not expected to become spiritual giants.
Nicholas was assigned to the kitchens for the first fifteen years of his life as a Carmelite—an assignment he loathed. He was constantly moving about the kitchen, cooking, cleaning and fetching food from the stores, which caused excruciating pain in his wounded leg. On more than one occasion he was sent out of town to buy supplies, which was even more difficult; he later recalled how, while traveling back to Paris on one such trip on a barge loaded with barrels of wine, he could only move around the boat by rolling himself over the tops of the barrels. Eventually, as it became clear that he was simply unable to discharge his duties any longer, he was moved to the sandal workshop, where he was responsible for manufacturing and repairing the monks’ footwear. Here, sitting at his bench all day long, he was much happier—and since the job entailed less constant physical labor, he was more able to receive visitors.
One of those visitors was a young French priest named Joseph de Beaufort. Over a period of a few years, Joseph had a number of conversations with Nicholas, who described to the priest something he called “the practice of the presence of God.” Although during his years of service Nicholas had been able to spend little time in the oratory, or immersed in study of the Scriptures, he had nevertheless sought to become as aware of God’s presence as he possibly could. God was present, he had found, in the kitchens and workshops as much as the chapel; it was simply a matter of paying attention. Just as in his youth he had waited patiently before the winter tree until God had revealed himself, so now he had learned to patiently seek God at all times and in all places.
Joseph was captivated. He made notes on his conversations. He also gathered together letters Nicholas had written to other visitors at the priory, and a handful of short notes Nicholas had drafted out on this approach to prayer. He printed all these texts in a short book we now know as The Practice of the Presence of God—publishing them under the name Nicholas Herman had taken when he first entered the Carmelite priory so many years before: Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection.
In the two centuries since then Brother Lawrence’s little book has sold millions of copies around the world and has become one of the most famous Christian classical spiritual writings of all time. Its secret lies in its simplicity. Unlike some of his fellow Carmelite writers, most notably John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, Brother Lawrence developed no comprehensive and systematic understanding of the contemplative life. He contributed very little to spiritual theology. He wrote no detailed treatises on stages in the life of prayer. He simply commended his simple idea of practicing the presence of God. He described it like this:
In several books I found different methods to approach God and various practices of the spiritual life that I feared would burden my mind rather than facilitate what I wanted and what I sought, namely, a means of being completely disposed to God. This led me to resolve to give all for all. . . . I began to live as if only he and I existed in the world. Sometimes I considered myself before him as a miserable criminal at his judge’s feet, and at other times I regarded him in my heart as my Father, as my God. I adored him there as often as I could, keeping my mind in his holy presence and recalling him as many times as I was distracted. . . . I was as faithful to this practice during my activities as I was during my periods of mental prayer, for at every moment, all the time, in the most intense periods of my work I banished and rid from my mind everything that was capable of taking the thought of God away from me.
There is very little method here, more a determination to turn the heart toward God and keep it focused there. Lawrence would remind himself, wherever he was, that God was present. He would keep that idea fixed front and center in his mind. And then he would live in the light of that knowledge, doing everything for the love of God. Sometimes his sense of God’s presence would be very strong, and at other times almost nonexistent. He paid little attention to this, but simply continued to live out the truth that God was near. Over time that sense of presence became more persistent and he became better at being attentive to it. He was less often practicing the presence and more often simply living it.
Exercises like breath counting help us to become more able to pay attention, to focus our concentration in a sustained way. Practicing the presence of God is no more than turning that sharpened attention toward God and keeping it there.
Slowing Down the Pace
Back in Rievaulx, I strolled south from the imposing pillars of the abbey church, around the east side of the cloister and into the grassed-over, roofless remains of the old scriptorium. Here the monks would have labored to produce the magnificent illuminated manuscripts which enabled the greatest literary works of the Western world (and a not inconsiderable number from the East) to be preserved and passed down through the centuries.
There were surprisingly few visitors that summer morning, and in the quiet peace it was easy to picture some young monk perched on a stool before his desk preparing to write. The writing of a single page required the investment of a great deal of time and effort. First the rough surface of the vellum needed to be scraped and rubbed smooth. Next the brother would mark out guidelines on the page along which to write, often by pricking small holes toward the edges of the page and tracing faint lines between them. If the page marked the opening of a book or chapter it would often warrant an elaborate illumination; in an important text (such as the Bible itself), not only would this illumination be colored but gold leaf might be delicately applied as a highlight. Then the text itself would be written—slowly, painstakingly, the brother constantly comparing his work with the source text as he dipped his pen into the ink, wrote a letter or two, dipped again, wrote another couple of letters and dipped into the ink again. He might invest the whole day in completing a single page of text; heavily illuminated pages would take even longer.
This necessary practice of book copying forced the monks to slow down and become deeply attentive to the text in hand—and, since they approached manuscript production as a devotional work, to become attentive to God in the text, especially when copying biblical texts. In our age we approach the Bible quite differently. We have cheap, convenient printed copies of Scripture that can be stuffed into our pockets or purses. We call up the Bible on our laptops and cell phones. With a quick search on the Internet and a cut, paste and print we can produce a fresh copy of a Gospel or an epistle. What for the medieval brother would have been the work of months is now just a short click away.
And we have become correspondingly inattentive to the text. We race through Scripture as though we were in the fast lane of the highway. Our eyes skip along the lines, half-remembering the phrases we feel we know so well. A young student is cramming his reading of the Bible into the few minutes before a lecture; needing a quick Scripture fix, he doesn’t have time to slow down. The pastor in church is conscious that the clock is ticking; if he doesn’t read the day’s short passage quickly he’ll have to cut back on the sermon. We no longer have anything as expansive as an attention span: we are seeking today’s biblical sound bite.
So how can we become more attentive to the text and to the presence of God who comes to us through the text? How can we use our faculties of perception—our senses and imagination—to their fullest capacity as we encounter Scripture, so that we become as completely immersed in the Bible as is humanly possible? How can we learn to soak in Scripture until we are lost in its fathomless depths?
Readings
This week’s readings help us to reflect on the constant presence of God around us, and our ability to be aware and attentive to that presence. It would be easy to allow these passages to lead us either toward theological speculations about the doctrine of God’s omnipresence or into introspective soul-searching about whether we really are as attentive to God as we should be. While both avenues have their place, try to take a third road as you read this week. Allow the passages to speak to your heart—the heart in the biblical sense, the seat of your will and intention. Let the words draw your desire for God, your longing to be present to him as fully as possible, and your yearning to stretch into him through love.
Turn these passages into prayer. Let them open your soul to God, present with you as you read, so you can continue to seek and rest in his presence throughout the day that follows. You might find it helpful to journal not only about the readings themselves but also about your experience of developing attentiveness for God through the whole week.
Day 1
Psalm 139:5-12
(God is present everywhere)
Day 2
Psalm 73:21-26
(the faithfulness of God’s presence)
Day 3
Proverbs 4:1-9
(listen to wisdom)
Day 4
1 Samuel 3:1-9
(Speak, Lord, your servant is listening)
Day 5
1 Kings 3:3-9
(Give me an understanding mind)
Day 6
John 10:1-5
(the sheep are attentive to the shepherd)
Day 7
Mark 13:33-37
(be alert, keep awake, watch)