Dear reader,
I’ve been thinking about meditation this week, in preparation for a Sunday School class that I’m teaching this term. We’re using Richard Foster’s classic Celebration of Discipline to work through the twelve spiritual disciplines that he explores.
Part of my preparation for this week included a skim through Linda Allcock’s book on meditation, Deeper Still. I was struck by her claim that, actually, we all know how to meditate. She draws attention to the self-talk that fills our minds—about ourselves and our failures or successes, about others and our relationships of jealousy of competition, about a myriad other things that we have no trouble turning around and around internally. The question is not, she argues, should I meditate, but rather, what is the content or focus of my meditation?
Immediately I thought of my most common meditation: one on time. It usually goes something like, “Quick, quick, hurry, hurry, on to the next thing, will I have enough time?” This is the posture towards my time that my mind chews on, the way I think about time even as it passes. Pass is too gentle—I usually feel swept along in its current.
This year I have, more intentionally than before, tried to deal with the external causes of that feeling. I’m protecting uninterrupted evenings at home, and saying “no” to more responsibilities and opportunities. There is a real sense in which feeling harried and pressed for time is something I have done to myself externally in the obligations that I have taken on.
There is also, I’m realising, an internal cause: my own meditations on time.
I’ve written before about living from abundance, about a posture towards the world that recognises God’s plenitude. The opposite, of course, is living from lack. In this posture, we primarily see what is missing, what is not enough. This leads to grasping, discontentment, and bitterness. Not enough is the way my days and hours are too often framed.
Without framing meditation as a psychological mind trick that will allow me to simply reframe my time so that I can continue running myself into the ground—only now with a smile on my face—I do want to change the way I think about my time. If it is true that, as David Bentley Hart says, that God’s being and actions are characterised by “superabundance,” “infinite extravagance,” and “everlasting outpouring,” then this must be true for the time that God has measured out. More than enough.
For what? is the next logical question. Not, I am sure, for a frenzied way of living that is more mechanical and artificial than human. Perhaps, though, there is more than enough time to allow me to move through time without impatience or anxiety. To move more slowly, intentionally. To receive the minutes and hours and days instead of grasping them.
This, of course, will not eliminate all hurry—deadlines still exist, and not unjustly! But I want to be able to receive the time given me with joy, learning the wisdom to discern opportunities that I ought to accept and responsibilities that I cannot refuse, and to ground my days in gratitude.
The contrast of work and play is what strikes me about this piece, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, with the industrial factories in the background, and the leisurely bathers in the foreground. We usually think about life in this way—leisure separate from work, rest opposed to hurry. But perhaps there is a different way to live, as Josef Pieper suggests in Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He defines leisure as an affirmation and celebration of the goodness of creation. This posture is not “the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation,” but must be cultivated each day—in the days and hours that we receive.
O Lord God of time and eternity,
who makest us creatures of time
that, when time is over,
we may attain thy blessed eternity;
With time, thy gift,
give us also wisdom to redeem the time,
lest our day of grace be lost;
for our Lord Jesus’ sake.
Christina Rosetti
On the road with you,
Laura