It started with a broken heart. An utter sense of helplessness and hopelessness had taken hold, and it was making me physically sick. I was horrified with each nightly newscast, and then Renee Good was murdered. In desperate need of community, solace, and some hope, I joined a national prayer service via Zoom, and then I understood. We are called to love, and love can be very hard work. But love is the only way. Days later, when Alex Pretti was murdered, I thought, I am going to need some help here. How can I extend love when I have a broken heart? And I was certain she was broken. Well and truly.
So, with my broken heart, I turned to my head for help. My cerebral self took shelter with old friends, aka favorite writers and favorite books. And a reading frenzy ensued, beginning with Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. Having ripped through that one in an afternoon, I moved on to one I had somehow missed, Parker Palmer’s On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old. This one, while mostly a compilation of earlier works, hit me at just the right time as I find myself on the brink of everything. The work was one of those books you read with a notepad and pen at hand. I can’t count how many times I called my wife across the house to listen to a particular passage and hash it with me. She was less impressed but, as ever, tolerant of my tangents.
Parker Palmer called on the hope for a supple heart. One that can withstand the injuries that a life well lived imposes on us because, Palmer posits, a supple heart breaks open, where a rigid heart breaks to pieces. More simply, a supple heart breaks open rather than apart. Ah Ha! All I needed was a supple heart. Now, how do I get one of those, instead of this very tender and fragile one I’ve got now?
Enter the School for Contemplation and Discipleship’s announcement for The Sacred Ordinary: 30 Days of Centering Prayer for Epiphany. Yes, please. I’ll give that a shot as a possible way to at least reach my heart. My head is the driver here, but she’s at least keen enough to know that we are in trouble if we don’t help our heart supple up and supple up fast because this world isn’t getting one bit easier to navigate.
My previous experience with meditative practice has been mindfulness, loving-kindness, guided imagery, and labyrinth walks. However, these experiences engage both heart and head and therefore generally don’t tempt my cheeky monkey mind. Each has its place, and they have become a meaningful and powerful access point to the divine within. But they are not fully a listening activity. Centering Prayer is solely and heavily heart-centered, with listening as the focus—a clear challenge to my cheeky monkey, who wreaked regular havoc as we got underway.
Week One of Centering Prayer was a whole lot of me repeating my anchor word, Peace. I had to remind myself to hold the admonitions in check. How ironic my word was Peace. At least it was Peace Week One. I found it spontaneously changed itself as it pleased or as it felt necessary. I just went with it and practiced daily.
By Week Two, I had a revelation. Not unlike the time I overdid squats at the gym (if you know, you know), this new and different practice was activating less-used “muscles”. And yes, the Great Susan Squatastrophy has been top of mind as I give myself permission to be gentle moving into this new practice.
My ongoing reading frenzy had moved from Parker Palmer to Thomas Merton to John Philip Newell, and then to John O’Donohue. I was consuming writers, philosophers, and poets with a voracity I’ve not known since Shoney’s closed their Breakfast Bar. If the enduring pain of my Squatastrophy were not enough to vouch for Gentleness in my approach to contemplative prayer, my new friends above all continually reminded me to turn a gentle gaze inward at the wonder of the interior life quietly and patiently waiting there for me. So I invited Gentleness to be my companion on the journey through Weeks Three and Four of the Centering Prayer practice.
My heart is broken. But you know what, if these times haven’t touched your heart and soul in some deep way, I mourn for you. And I pray that you may be happy, healthy, safe, and whole. I’m trying, ya’ll. I said loving was hard.
If, like me, you find yourself more tender than usual, or maybe your fuse is shorter than you’re used to, or even if you have a voodoo doll under your bed with your last straight pin protruding from its eyehole, or wherever :/ take a beat and remember that we are all here to learn to love and to receive love.
May you be blessed in your inner world.
And may you bring a kind gaze inwards with the eyes of your soul.
May you see nothing impoverished within you, but may you see the great riches that await you there.
May you learn to love your inner world.
Longing and Belonging – John O’Donohue
About the Author
A quiet observer who manages to take it all in without judgment, Susan is a loyal friend. She is the kind of person who will tell you when you have lipstick on your teeth, will not bat an eye, and will cover you while you sort it out. Susan and her wife live in Dandridge with an inherited, rather grumpy, judgmental geriatric ginger cat.