Olive Crest United Methodist Church
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Omaha, Nebraska 68152

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Rev. Debra Tompsett-Welch

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The Spiritual Life

May 2004

Living in the second when God breathes life into the Universe or Learning How To Live

By Rev. Michael Lee Burgess

How do you deal with your emotions can make or break your life. And Christ has some ideas to help with that. But before we can get to that, we have to learn to hear and see life and listen to God. So that is where I am going to start. If we can do that, be have the basic skill we can build on to handle our emotions, get more open to God and love others and ourselves.

I have been reading about a powerful new therapy technique call Dialectic Behavior Therapy, pioneered by Dr. Marsha Linehan. "Fine," you say, "glad you are studying Rev. Michael. But what does that have to do with my life? I'm not really mentally ill, I just got some rough spots." Well I'm not going to go into the whole practice of DBT, but standing out at the edge can often help one see the subtle things that are going on in our ordinary lives. Because folks with mental illness have lives just like ours, and we have the same struggles they do, only ours are not as noisy so we can overlook things because they seem small and unimportant.

Dr. Linehan borrows from a huge number of sources including Christian mysticism and Zen meditation practices and here is where I got hooked. Her eventual goal is to teach people who have Bipolar, Borderline, and Multiple personally disorder (the almost impossible to treat big three) to have a "Wise Mind" that would enable them to function in ordinary society with less pain and greater joy. A "Wise Mind" is the goal of all sages and our great mystics and saints. St. Paul called it "Christ in you, your hope of glory." I call it my "Christ self" when I am most completely Michael, my unique and best self. I don't have space to overview anything but a part of her techniques, but I do want to lift up a part that I think are critical to living a Spirit filled life and moving closer to our sacred or Christ like self.

It is the entire idea of "Mindfulness". A word Dr. Linehan uses that summarizes much of the way of being that the church has called walking in grace. It is not all of it, but it is part of the practice by which you get to that state of sanctification, or walking the grace of God. Mindfulness, as Dr. Linehan defies it is "Awareness without judgment." You experience life as it is, yourself as you are, other people as they are in the here and now. When you are mindful you experience life, you are alive and not walking around dead. It can help you become aware of the presence of God if you use it like that, as our Christian saints and mystics of the past have. You can be gracefully accepting, not judgmental of others, loving to yourself and others in ways that free you to find joy and live fully. It is an attitude and a practice that take a great deal of practice. It is a lot harder than it sounds, but it pays off big.

So what is the practice? "The repetitive act of directing your attention to only one thing in this one moment." I can already hear the same objection I had, "What about multitasking? Isn't that what the modern world is all about?" Well yes, perhaps that is a skill you need in your business life, but it is deadly to your spiritual life and if you become good enough at mindfulness you can pay attention to what you are doing and living as you do it, you will find your productivity going way up and also your joy in life. But since it is so hard to do, why do it?

First: Because it trains you to get control of your attention.

Second: Because whatever your attention is on, that IS what LIFE IS for YOU at that moment.

Does your life have enough joy in it? Do you like your life the way it is now? Would you like someone you love to live a life exactly like yours? If you can't answer yes to that, then God would like to help you change your life, but to do that you have to be able to hear. To hear God somehow we have to give God some attention and most of us have enough trouble paying attention to our loved ones that they have to scream to get our attention. Our brother, the Christian contemplative Thomas Merton described our untrained minds like a crow flying over a wheat field. The crow sees lots of things that sparkle in the field, swoops down to pick them up, only to discover that what glitters in the field is only old pieces of scrap metal, not something delicious to eat or something useful for a nest. Or another from Zen meditation, the untrained mind is like a new puppy. You tell the puppy to sit and stay, but your puppy runs away, rummages through the closet, chews up your new shoes, goes through the garbage can, and then has an accident on the carpet. Or perhaps in a modern vein, your mind is like a TV that is always on but you've lost the remote. It can show thousands of channels, but without the remote it keeps replaying the same scary, painful or angry show over and over again.

If we can train our mind to pay attention to the moment, we can learn to let go of pain, experience joy, and learn the lessons God has hidden in every leaf and rock. So how do you go about learning this skill? Here is one practice that will work if you practice it. There are others that work, but the real secret is doing a practice. This is a learned skill and takes time and doing it over and over.

Get in a comfortable position, with your feet on the floor and your back straight but not tense. Sit still, breathing normally but slowly as is comfortable to you. It would be good if the room is quiet. Now just watch your thoughts for a few minutes. Don't try to force thoughts or think specific thoughts. Don't push away some thoughts or hold tight to others. Just watch what your mind brings up. If your mind wanders away from watching your thoughts, like you get stuck on one thing, such as planning what you are going to do after you read this article, just notice it wandered and gently bring it back to watching thoughts. If you start to judge yourself ("I'm bad at this"), or your thoughts ("That is a stupid thing to think"), or the practice ("This is a real waste of time") just notice your judgments and go back to watching your thoughts. Practice this for five minutes. (This example is based on work by Cindy Sanderson, Ph.D.)

Now was that difficult? The harder it was, the harder it is for you to pay attention to the present moment of time that is real, in which God dwells and you live. If it was truly easy for you, then use that skill and go the next step of focusing your attention on that which brings life and joy into your world, being effective and looking for good. But everyone I've ever met has had real trouble staying with this practice. When you are mindful you can eat dessert and notice every flavor instead of eating the desert and having a conversation and looking around the room to see who you know. If you are mindful you are not thinking "is it good or bad to have dessert?" you are just having dessert. If you are mindful you are becoming contemplative, you are developing the depth of listening that will allow you to hear the still small voice of God.

Dr. Linehan has a helpful metaphor for this practice teaching your mind the skill of mindfulness. Mindfulness is the anchor and chain that gently pulls the boat (your attention) back each time the waves start to carry it away. Even if your mind wanders off 1,000 times, you've done the exercise if you gently pull your attention back to your point of focus. There is no right or wrong to it. All that matters is paying attention to your experience while you do the exercise as well as you can. You can do this type of practice with anything you care to bring your full and undivided attention to. In doing so, you'll learn a lot about yourself, about other people, and about what is going on around you. And, just like a muscle that gets stronger and stronger with exercise, you capacity to move your attention to what you want to focus on will grow stronger.

Once you have the gift of experiencing this second of time, and the next, and the next, we can go on to work with painful emotions, reading the Bible as a spiritual meditation, listening for the voice of God in music, reading and understanding what you read, eating and losing weight because you know when you are full and stop, all things of becoming whole. The contemplative life, for this is what this skill can help you learn to live, is lived balanced in God in all that you do. It is only one step, but it truly can help anyone with anything because it is not a thing you do, but a way you do it.

We are all in this life together, and how you live is part of my life and our joint life before God who loves us. Let us encourage each other to live it well, in this moment and joyfully as possible.

May God continue to come to you in each breath of time.

Your brother-in-Christ,
Reverend Michael Lee Burgess

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