THE CENTER FOR CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE

Prayer is all about lifting your heart and mind to God.  There are lots of reasons to pray.  Here is one reason that probably goes unnoticed.

Think about this!  You are driving down the highway at 80 mph, clearly above the 70 mph limit, when you realize you are on a road with which you are not familiar. Rather than slow down, you reason that you should speed up to get to a place where you can turn around. Suddenly, a deer darts out in front of your car and you swerve to miss it. The momentum takes the car off-balance and it leaves the road and crashes into a bunch of small trees and bushes. You end up hitting a large tree and barely escape without killing yourself, but the person in the passenger’s seat is killed and your friend in the back is badly wounded and bleeding.  In the moments that follow, you find yourself in complete silence, and also in shock. Some people arrive and finally an ambulance comes to pick you up and take you to the hospital. You have five broken bones and a broken nose, but you will live. The two other passengers are not so lucky. They are your best friends, out for a nice ride to keep from being bored before going off to college to study law.  There is something else the physician tells you. Your blood alcohol level is way over the limits for normal driving.

THINK ABOUT THIS. All of our actions have consequences, the results of our choices. Some choices have good consequences and some have bad ones. Sometimes the results of our actions don’t show up now but pop up later on in life, or maybe even never at all.  Our actions are not created in a vacuum and can affect others even after we die.

Now, let me take you on another adventure, a mythical but real one that happened a long time ago.  You are being interviewed for a position to head a large garden. It is the vast estate of a man of means who owns everything as far as you can see. You will be his managers. He wants you to take care of it and see that the animals, the plants, and fish all have what they need to live their lives in happiness and peace. As he takes you around the garden, he points to one tree and says that it is a special tree, his prized possession. He warns you not to touch the tree, for if you do, you will die. The you look at each other, amazed, and walk on. Having given them the grand tour, the owner gives you a chance to freshen up, for it has been a long day. While resting,  a swarthy looking woman approaches you and asks if the owner has told you about the poison tree. You say that he had.  She goes on to say that, “he tells that to everyone because he doesn’t want you to be like him, powerful and rich.” She just laughed and walked away. Curious about the stranger’s statement,  you want to take another look at the tree. It is a normal looking tree with low hanging fruit, ripe and luscious. You reaches up and take fruit from the tree and eat it. And… time changes from that moment on. You can read Genesis 3 to see the consequences of this act of disobedience. The results are what we live with even today.

Here are some of my reflections: both cases were of people who did something that they should not have done.  In the first case, it was putting many people in harm’s way by reckless driving and drinking, In the second one, by deliberately disobeying the admonition of the land owner and seizing forbidden fruit.

In the first instance, the driver killed two people, and totaled the car. He said he was sorry to the judge and was let off with a light sentence. Yet, his life was changed forever. He would not go to law school, college, if at all, was years off while he paid his debts. It would seem that saying you are sorry for what you did would be enough, but then there is this: the car is wrecked, lawsuits pending over wrongful death, jail time, monetary ruin for him and possibly his family.  To put it another way, if you steal $210,00 from me in fraud, and get caught, then say to me, “I am sorry,” what is there remaining that you owe me?  The $210,000.  Reparation is the debt that I owe for the wrong that I committed. It is more difficult when the wrong is invisible or happened many years ago.

Let’s look at the second instance, the one where Adam and Eve represent all humans. The offence was doing something that would result in death, but what death. If this was the original sin, an archetype of what it means to be human, death for all humanity was the result, not just for Adam and Eve. Reparation means someone had to recreate the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, the tree of life, and apologize to the owner of the garden. Since we are talking in mythical terms, someone had to become Adam and Eve to pay a price for the offense. That is why the term redeem, in Hebrew, means to go to a pawn shop and buy back that which was hocked. Jesus had to be man, to satisfy the debt of Adam and Eve. Jesus had to be God to be able to return to the Father with our apology and give him his rightful glory and honor. Even though Jesus paid the price of his own death, willingly, we all have to live with the effects of the original sin of Adam and Eve. Christ paid off the debt that humanity owed by giving his very life as ransom. (Philippians 2:5-12)

We live in a time-limited universe. We will die. We suffer pain. We endure the temptations to, once more, be like Adam and Eve and eat of the forbidden fruit. The wily one still prowls about seeking whom he may devour. We sin, we get up, we say we are sorry to God, but there is something missing. The $210,000. Jesus doesn’t owe it, we do.

Prayer is lifting the heart and mind to God. We can make amends for our past offenses and sins in reparation. With humility we can continue to ask God for mercy and forgiveness. Reparation means to repair that which was torn or broken. Reparation is not forgiveness, but is the result of our sins and, like Adam and Eve’s sin, the consequences of our faults and failings. We should acknowledge that the evil we do is ours, as St. Benedict says in his Rule, Chapter 4, but the good we do belongs to the grace of God.

We pray for our parents and family, our friends and faith companions that they be loosed from their sins. There is no conveyor belt that I get on to get to Heaven. It takes work, just as Adam and Eve had to work after their fall. (Genesis 3) I know that Christ draws all things to Himself. I pray reparation petitions for the whole Church as well as for individuals I have place in my Golden Book of Life, to once again make all things new through, with and in Christ to the glory of the Father, in union with the Holy Spirit.

That in all things, God be glorified. –St. Benedict

The following excerpt is from my still unpublished journal on You Know You Are Going to Die, New What?  Three Questions You Must Face Head On

Sometimes is it easier to write down your thoughts before you attempt to express them with others. As a cancer survivor of Leukemia, CLL type, that is what I did and I thought you might like this non-intrusive way of organizing your thinking about the fact that you may or may not die as a resut of cancer, some other like-threatening illness. or AIDS.

              Whether you have some faith system or no faith system at all, you have a value system, know it or not. That is your default system of what you hold as your center. Only you can choose what you place at your center, be it money, fame, fortune and glory (as Indiana Jones said in The Temple of Doom) or nothing at all. Before you accuse me of flying under false colors, I will tell you that I am a Lay Cistercian (Trappist) member of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, GA. Although it has influenced my view of reality, I am not trying to make you this or that. I don’t care. I do care about contemplative practices of silence and solitude and conversion of my life to the purpose I have selected. I do care to share with you some reflections on how contemplation helped me secure a North on my compass when I learned I had cancer. I hope that you can apply at least one or two ideas to your situation, given that you know you are going to die soon. I do care that you have an opportunity to write down YOUR thoughts and feelings as you confront yourself and the situation in which you find yourself.

There are three questions that I asked myself, upon learning that I had cancer. I used contemplation (going into the rich interior of my inner self) to seek peace, purpose and forgiveness all within the silence of my own heart. While it is true that you are diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening illness as an individual, you can be sure you don’t have it alone, as soon as you allow your friends to share in your diagnosis and how you assimilate it into your way of thinking. Cancer is always a family disease.

The first part of this workbook, I will give you my take on the three questions that I faced. No apologies. It is what I did, not what you did or will do. In the second part of this book is a journal so that you can write down your answer to these three questions. No one needs to see what you write, unless you share it with them. I encourage you to do so. I will read it, if you want me to do so.

1. AM I GOING TO DIE?

This is the big, elephant-in-the-room question, the so called question everone knows but no one wants to talk about. It is classic avoidance and we all do it. After all, who wants to die? Who wants to be told they are going to die? It affects both patients and physicians. Physicians are petrified because they don’t know how their patients will accept it; patients are stunned when they hear the “C” word and begin playing an endless loop of doomsday scenarios in their minds.

The question is not, nor will it ever be, “Am I going to die?” Name one person you know who will not die? I can’t, except for two persons, but that is the subject of another set of assumptions for another workbook. I received a phone call from my primary physician, Dr. Judith Lewis, M.D., Internal Medicine, one day in September of 2014, stating she had reviewed my WBC count (> 20) and wanted to make an appointment for me with an Oncologist, Dr. Robert Tetreault, M.D., in Tallahassee, FL.  She said to me, “Y ou know what we are talking about, don’t you?” I said, “Yes. You are telling me I probably have cancer but you want to make sure with a bone-marrow biopsy.” I thought is was nice that she called me. I hung up and had no thoughts in my mind, which some say is normal, but I did fall back on my center, the set of values and meaning that give worth to my life.

Each of us has a center, one which we alone can choose, based on what we value as meaningful in our lives to that point. When there is trauma and urgency, such as when you are told you are going to die, prisoners get religion all of a sudden, those about to die, want to confess to a Priest, if they are Catholic, people think of their value system, as their life moves before their eyes. You may have experienced this. If what we have selected as our center is substantial and meaningful, we stand on the solid grounds of our humanity, if our center is like Jell-O, we don’t do so well with the news that we are going to die.

Here are three lessons that I learned,  when confronted with my mortality.

Lesson One: Keep life simple. Your center is the one ground of your being. The default emotions and feelings, when someone says you are going to die, can be like Kubler-Ross’ five steps of grief:

1 – Denial.

2 – Anger.

3 – Bargaining.

4 – Depression. Also referred to as preparatory grieving. …

5 – Acceptance.

See Google for “Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages”

Not all centers are capable of sustaining you as you work your way through these five stages of grief, let alone provide you with what you need to move to the next stage of your life. When I was told I had cancer, it was like saying, “The world will end in ten minutes.” I don’t remember being depressed or angry, when I actually found out that I had a football-size mass of CLL cells in my liver. Not good. The worst part for me was not the chemo-therapy, the liver biopsy, twelve sessions of at least five hours apiece, but the MRI and PET scans. I am severely clostrophobic.

2.  Lesson Two: You die yourself, but you don’t die alone. The family goes through the stages of grief with you. If your family sees you as a defenseless victim they will never raise the one question I need to hear about my dying and what that would mean. Unless someone from the outside (a friend, minister, rabbi or priest) brings this up, it probably won’t be addressed. Every time you meet together, there is the great unspoken taboo that needs to be addressed. What I learned is, it is my death they are talking about, so I must bring up the subject and address it head on. I could not do that unless my ground for walking was concrete and I was in control of my dying well. I don’t control that I will die, but I can control how to die well.

I had my wife and daughter accompany me to the Oncologist, Dr. Tetreault’s office for the results of my tests.  I wanted them to know what I know and not begin conjecturing or playing the “what if” game. It worked out well, in terms of them knowing what I know. In terms of the type of lymphoma, it was CLL type and there were a bunch o these cells in my liver the size of a football. I had to have a liver biopsy to see what was going on.  Like most non-medical types, I had no idea what that meant, although I did know a little about liver functioning. Modern research in oncology is fantastic and I was given a newly approved drug.

Lesson 3: Be realistic. You know you are going to die, but you have the opportunity to die well.

In the next installment, I will discuss the impact of using Cistercian contemplative spirituality as a way for me to gain control of my life. I cannot control my death.