an iMiracle?

At the art museum in St. Gallen: "Glitch" by Claudia Caviezel. 

The Spiritual Exercises as invented by St. Ignatius are a 30-day bootcamp-for-the-soul requiring a silent retreat under close spiritual direction. But there are more accessible formats: doing the 30 days as four one-week stints, for example, or the "spiritual exercises in daily life" where one meditates daily without a retreat, often with weekly reflections in a group. And there's the Grosse Exerzitien im Alltag, apparently invented in St. Gallen, which is not 30 days but 30 (well, 27) weeks of daily meditations, typically with monthly group reflections and meetings with a spiritual director. It's not clear to me (yet) whether or how closely this follows the Ignatian scheme, or the liturgical year, but there's a booklet with five meditations per week, and on the weekend one is expected to look back over the week's notes. And, in my case, write a blog entry. So here we are: week 1.

The theme of the exercises this year is "making a place for God" and for each week there are both Bible verses and a text from Madeleine Delbrêl (1904-1964), a French Catholic / social worker / mystic who lived with other women in an intentional community in the communist city of Ivry in France. She was, apparently, a free and rather uncategorizable spirit. Wikipedia says she was an author, but in fact most of her writings were intended for her friends and community and were published only after her death. She is due to be granted sainthood, but often found herself at odds with the institutional Church. She was known for her love of good wine, cigars, and dancing - and her deep faith.

Last Sunday I went to the opening event in St. Gallen and wow, hundreds of people showed up! So even though I couldn't bring myself to join a group, I don't feel like I'm doing this alone, and I started on Monday with a full battery. My goal for the week was to figure out when will I be doing these meditations. Because if I can't get into a rhythm, there's not a lot of hope for this project lasting 27 weeks, right? I've tentatively settled on: 10 am, Monday-Friday. So I decided to set an alarm on my phone. And my phone, seemingly out of nowhere*, suggested "Come, Holy Spirit, Come" by Anonymous 4. How perfect! Check out these lyrics:

Come, Holy Spirit, come,
With energy divine,
And on this poor benighted soul,
With beams of mercy shine.

It sounds like a call to prayer, for one, and benighted is such a fabulous romantic word for depression, or staring into the abyss, or whatever it is I do a lot of.

From the celestial hills,
Light, life, and joy dispense;
And may I daily, hourly feel
Thy quickening influence.

Daily, hourly...minutely? These exercises are all about seeking a spiritual life not apart from the everyday, but within it. Saint Ignatius: "seek God in all things." Delbrêl: "O God, if you are everywhere, how is it that I'm so often somewhere else?"

Melt, melt, this frozen heart;

After watching this video of Eugene Gendlin at least three times, I've bought his book and I'm using his idea of a "felt sense" in my meditations. Not trying to think, nor trying not to think, but first feeling and then letting words come to describe that feeling. Anyway I would not have said I had a "frozen heart" but in the very first meditation there it was, my heart of stone, thoroughly shielded against the pains of life but also maybe against Delbrêl's mystical sensation of being found by Love...? 

This stubborn will subdue;
Each evil passion overcome,

Do I have "evil passions"? I say no, and then go spend an hour mindlessly scrolling Facebook or buying books I can't find the time to read and decidedly not, like, spending quality time with my children or saving the planet. So. 

And form me all anew.

Gendlin: "Life is an implicit intricacy that wants to be carried forward." To live is to interact, to be in motion, to change: a constant anew-forming.

Mine will the profit be,
But thine shall be the praise;

How does praising God profit me? Y'know what, I'm going to quote myself here, because I've found myself digging up this bit of a One Spirit homework assignment over and over again: 

I suspect that surrender in Islam, grace in Christianity, and releasing attachment in Buddhism are all facets of the same existential secret to a fulfilling, joyful life – which obviously I can’t express any better than the spiritual masters, but it has to do with embracing the paradox of our individual and collective human existence as infinitesimal specs of cosmic importance (per Carl Sagan, “Humanity is a way for the universe to know itself”)…or cosmic beings of infinitesimal importance? Surrender requires an indirect object – we always surrender to something – and Islam seems to be about encountering that Being to whom surrendering results in victory and empowerment rather than defeat and abasement.

Something like that.

And unto thee I will devote
The remnant of my days.

I'm well into the second half of my life (even if I do live to a ripe old age) and when I think about this it terrifies me. Have I done anything useful? Will I?

And will all this meditating (assuming I manage it) help me figure anything out? Early signs are...decent. Stay tuned to this channel. Or check back in with me at Pentecost.

* This truly baffled me. Did my phone in some creepy way know what I was looking for? Have other people used this song as an alarm sound?? The boring answer is that the tune, Abbeville, makes this alphabetically the first song in my phone's music library.