THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
I am reading Eckhart Tolle at the moment – “A New Earth”. I buy some of his arguments that spirituality has become too buried in form and dogma. And his criticism of the ego as the dominant motivator in all our lives has resonance. But for most people, spirituality is hard to sustain in a vacuum. One can contemplate a flower and empty the mind – but for what, and where to?
And the Psalms do not need to sing of a religion of form and intolerance. They can sing of themselves.
Through all ages my mouth will proclaim your truth
Of this I am sure, that your love lasts for ever
That your truth is as firmly established as the heavens.”
MONDAY
Tolle is right to identify the ego as the source of many of our problems. He is wrong to want to blanket it out. Of course exercises to still the mind, to rest it from its innocent worrying are good, but to what purpose?
I believe the point of emptying the mind of the material ego is to seek the soul within. Mindfulness is a technical secular body-based thing. Religious spirituality is then conducted for a purpose.
“Mark this, you who never think of God.”
TUESDAY
I was thinking of the time I went sailing. I was in a day dream. I noticed a large buoy and sailed next to it. On the way back, to my horror, I realised I had sailed without realising it at exactly the right place through the submerged submarine cable in the Spithead. I hadn’t even directed the boat, I just let it sail where it wanted with wind and tide balancing sail. I couldn’t believe that I had forgotten about this hazard, a nasty one. On the way back I noticed even small boats carefully making for the marked gap. I was fighting against the wind, drifted to leeward, had to desperately start my engine being on my own. The tiller slipped, the boat did a violent jibe. I just made it through the gap. Yet going at it had been so happily unconscious that I had rested by back, gazed aft, and let the boat steer itself.
I was thinking of this when I read today’s reading:
“’Save us, Lord, we are going down!’ And He said to them, ‘Why are you so frightened, you men of little faith? And with that He stood up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and all was calm again.” (Matthew 8:23-27)
WEDNESDAY
With a friend I was reading a passage from Escriva’s “The Furrow”. In the chapter on cheerfulness, the author says something like ‘In life, if you try to be happy, you won’t be.’ The implication is that happiness can only come in the next life. I don’t know that this hard-work Christianity really appeals to me. Why not try and be happy here? Who knows what will happen next? But to be fair to Escriva, he does make plain that we should at least attempt to look cheerful. I suppose if you look morose you are focussing too much on the tribulations of the ego. Switch off and try to look cheerful.
Look at this lovely poetry from today:
“Let me have no more of the din of your chanting.
No more of your strumming on harps.
But let justice flow like water
And integrity like an unfailing stream.” (Amos 5:21-24)
THURSDAY
Tolle mentions Decartes’s famous phrase “I think, therefore I am.”
In the context of the ego, being mistaken for reality, our thought is not reality. Only when we recognise it as separate from us, when we look at it from afar instead of being ruled by it, can we find any peace.
As Tolle explains, Sartre hit upon this distinction when he wrote “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thanks.”
I would take this further. At the back of my mind I have always felt but not been able to articulate that we are not our thought. Part of me thinks we can be everywhere. In that sense all of humanity is a unity. But this is still too all-encompassing a thought. I now think that “I think therefore there is a thought. I am because there is a soul.”
FRIDAY
Tolle reminds us that it is only with some great loss that the ego can be freed. This is what he thinks St Paul meant by “the peace that passes all understanding”. We can lose a ring or have it stolen but memory of it soon eases, but sometimes the ego finds relief in resentment at feeling that we are a victim, or fate has been unjust or God has forgotten us or that given this catastrophe he clearly doesn’t exist or at least care.
So the ego no longer really cares about the loss of the ring or a job or reputation or a relationship, it cares about unkind fate.
SATURDAY
I sat in our local medieval church and continued my slow passage through the Psalms.
Dominus me salve (Ps 26)
Lord save me
It is rather nice going through this literature framed on some blazing desert over two thousand years ago, in a land of intense heat and battle in this quiet English country church.