Spirituality made simple

...That is part of what makes it so important...

...This has important consequences...

...I waited for the bracing feeling of real maturity, real competence to develop over time...

...Finally it isn't a skill I master, but more like the effort to stay awake when the temptation to fall asleep is pressing and constant...

...The old saying, "Do what you are doing," applies here...

...The childish belief that grown-ups exist is much like the attachment a lot of adults have to certain political or spiritual leaders, and is dangerous...

...I do think that there are people who are truly authoritative, people who know a particular field...

...There are certainly moments of pain and deep discomfort...

...Pay attention...

...When I was younger I thought of spirituality as a kind of skill, a way of mastering concentration and attention, an ability to be clear that could be summoned at will, like pulling down a chart or adjusting a pair of binoculars...

...What happened instead was a kind of routine, a slow growth in habit-but none of that sense of competence I'd longed for...

...But the point here is that the search for a right way or a right technique can be a way of avoiding the present moment, which is the only one you have...

...to know what I must do next...

...For one thing, and at the most basic level, understanding this ends the process of looking around for the right way, the right technique-will I learn centering prayer, make an Ignatian retreat, reject the Ignatian method in favor of the prayer of the heart, go to a spirituality workshop, and then really get my spiritual life going...

...It was a matter, almost, of learning the right technique...

...This, of course, was before adolescence, when parents and other adults were almost always wrong and just didn't get it...

...Anytime you write something that comes off all right, you wonder where it came from...

...There is no sense of mastery...

...They were clear and balanced, never off-center...

...It is a joy to know-and to meet someone who knows-that we really are assisted by the Spirit in this work...

...There aren't any grownups here, in the sense that children understand the word...

...Pray...

...That is not, however, because he is a different kind of creature, or has a competence the rest of us lack...

...This is all distraction...

...He's simply fought off sleep longer...

...having fallen, to learn what repentance means-all of this is part of a process that includes attention to many random blessings and occasions for joy...

...At bottom there are two alternatives: repentance and hardness of heart...

...The idea of necessary youthful illusions is interesting, and leads to a notion of maturity as a process that requires disillusionment...

...It was more like slowly learning the habits of a hunter who lays snares and goes back to them periodically, to see if he's caught anything...

...There are certainly ways of prayer that are helpful, and books (my own favorites are The Way of a Pilgrim and The Practice of the Presence of God), and of course they should be used...

...I think it is a survival of an illusion all of us have for a time, maybe need for a time, as children...

...and flip on the lights and yell, "Caught .you impersonating a real grown-up...

...But it isn't something I can simply do, and it isn't a skill to be mastered...

...If you are trying to pay attention to God's work in you and in the world, you will see what you need to see when you have to see it...

...I also think that there are people who are true doctors of the soul and can tell us what we need to know-to mature spiritually if we learn how to listen...

...I do think, still, that paying attention has everything to do with spirituality, and a certain clarity can result from the right kind of attention...

...That was as good as the job got...

...there is no passage from the plain of struggle to the plateau of ease...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey SPIRITUALITY MADE SIMPLE JUST STAY AWAKE Where are the real grown-ups...

...This is true in the spiritual life as well...

...One involves an ease with oneself and even with one's failures, and an abandonment of the need to assume that the truth lies elsewhere...

...There may be moments of deep stillness, but they are gifts-you can't make them happen...

...I have met a man whose God-filled quality was startling...

...The spiritual life is a process something like erosion, or something like the way driftwood is formed by the passing current...

...It is a belief in the wrong kind of authority, a belief that those who can help us in the struggle live themselves in a state of clarity and serenity...

...Some are more congenial than others...

...and I know that his most keen awareness is of spiritual struggle, and of his own failure to be what he is called to be...

...The desire for a spiritual state different from the one you are in isn't much different from any other form of lust, or any appetite...

...It is apparent in him, and not in me...

...Our participation in it, apart from the struggle, may be limited to a present awareness of what the alternative is: not to be formed, or to think of the self as autonomous...

...A funny part of the excitement was knowing at a deep level that if you did it well enough no one would break into your room at 3:00 a.m...

...After I graduated from college and found myself in situations where I checked into hotels and identified myself as a writer or journalist for one periodical or another, I enjoyed playing the role, and always thought of it, at some level, as impersonating an adult...

...It was, I thought, something to be done by me...

...There seems to be a need for grownups, for the myth of the thoroughly competent person who can tell us what we need to know...

...What I mean about our need for believing in grown-ups is something else...

...I felt like a kid pretending he knew stuff he didn't know and could act at levels he really wasn't competent to operate on...

...If a grown-up was angry it was no doubt for a good cause...

...they knew, whereas I was (or always felt I was) in the dark...

...Over a number of years it has become clear that the struggle to be attentive...

...And although those who have been on the road longer than we have are important teachers for us, no one here is really a master...

...When I was a child I thought of the grown-ups as people who knew things, were sure of themselves, completely competent...

...If you feel some revelation is being kept from you, it may indeed be-but that could be a mercy...

...and it isn't to be tied together neatly...

...I don't know why I put this in the past tense...

...to be clear about my own hard-heartedness and failures of compassion...

...There are a lot of books that suggest precisely this sort of thing, even as they nod to the Pauline understanding that prayer is done in us by the Spirit...

...yet their lives may be a mess...

...but this is not because he has attained a form of mastery they lack, but because he has been more constant in the straggle...

...There are other consequences of dropping the hunt for the right sort of spirituality...

...The image-centered Ignatian way, for example, goes against the grain for me, and I might even have a theological quarrel with it...

...Don't look for the right way of praying or being attentive to God's presence...

...that's as good as the job is to this day...

...They knew things, in an apparently thorough way, that I had to struggle to know in part...

...It is essential to know that they are, like us, incompetent in some fairly basic ways...

...From talking to people who had "made it" in the profession I found myself in, I learned that their own process had not been all that different from my own...

...It is an expression of what the Tibetan Buddhist writer Chogyam Trungpa called "spiritual materialism...

...As one priest told me, "When you give up your expectations, you give up your disappointments...

...It is right here: you may not feel it or know it, but it is not because you haven't found a magic key that will unlock it...

...He is of great help to many people...