The Equipment God Gave Me

Teacher / Poet #42

The Equipment God Gave Me
Notes on Prayer and the Imagination

The older I get, the more I think about wisdom. Specifically, how I neglect it too much in my daily life–in my relationships and in my work.

I know that the Bible, that ancient text which I read daily (or better it reads me daily) is nothing if not a wisdom teacher. So, I ask myself, how can I be instructed by this text, not as fundamentalist or literalist would, but as a genuine student, that is, a disciple?

Mysticism is a word that’s in vogue right now. We are spiritual but not religious. We distrust big institutions. We love the still small voice. Etc. Etc. All of that energy makes sense to me given the world we live in, but also makes it a tricky business to pray, especially to pray with a text as loaded down with cultural meaning as the Bible is.

My own first introduction to mysticism came in a very structured way: via the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola–founder of the Jesuits, a religious order that has had a pretty big impact on my life. (I’ve taught at a Jesuit high school for almost 15 years, more than a third of my time on the planet.)

Ignatius’ emphasis on the creative faculty has always resonated with me. His injunction to the ordinary human to use that extraordinary faculty of the imagination for good purpose. His advice to “put yourself in the scene” of the scriptures you’re contemplating: with Jesus in the desert or the Garden of Gethsemane, listening to the seductive devil try to tempt the teacher, or watching the blood drip down that same teacher’s face in agony, as you struggle to stay away.( I’m Peter in the Garden, sleepy, betraying; I’m a stone in the desert, and will never not be stony.)

This way of spirituality, this structured mysticism as I’ll call it, moves me. And yet, in spite of practicing this often, and being moved by the practice, I also distrust it, as I distrust my own imagination. I think, who am I to picture a scene with the Lord? To add to the words of the prophets and the writers of the scriptural text? These acts of imagining seem beyond even ordinary human chutzpah, which I definitely possess.

Yet here I am, stubborn and knuckleheaded poet, and I intuit this practice has value in my life though I can’t quite explain what it is. And the fact that it scares me doesn’t stop me from doing the thing. From writing. From imagining. In short, I keep going.

The quiet calls me too. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I stumbled upon the work of the monk Thomas Keating and his work on Centering Prayer. The simplicity of this practice–entering into total quiet for chunks of one’s day (he recommends 20 to 30 minutes)--attracted me then, and attracts me now. I welcome how the practice strips me down. Throws me back upon my own inadequate self. How it humbles and even humiliates me. Makes me laugh at myself.

Ben Okri, in an interview I was listening to this past week was talking about his novel The Last Gift of the Master Artist which was published in 2022. That novel is itself a revision of Starbook, published in 2007. Both works consider Africa in the historical moment right before the Transatlantic Slave Trade became an established evil in the world–a kind of “cusp” moment that Okri circles back to often.

Okri said in this interview that readers of Starbook, the 2007 novel, for the most part did not engage with the parts of the novel that addressed or considered slavery, rather reading them as fable or allegory. This was very disturbing to Okri. So he spent years revising it, and as he did so he saw that the “cusp” moment before the Transatlantic Slave Trade took hold was being echoed by other “cusp” moments today–that there are tragedies and crises right in front of our faces–especially our (un)care for the natural world–that we often refuse to see.

Okri went on to say that cultures often deny their own fluidity at their own peril. Meaning that they often seek some bygone era of their own history and its ways that could bring salvation in the present moment. But culture is always in flux, he maintained. The imaginative person, the artist, must acknowledge this flux state. And the art work they make ought to carry wisdom from the past but also be awake to the present, and the opportunities that a current crisis might offer.

These are big words I’m using, words from a big-time poet and prophet. And here I am with a Dixon Ticonderoga pencil and the 80-page Composition I bought at Target struggling with the English language early on a Sunday morning, trying to shape and be shaped by the words coming to me.

I only have the equipment God gave me. I only have the strange and misfit church I was given to be baptized into. (I mean the Catholic one.) I only have this Ignatius character and his limited but real colonial/colonizing-infected wisdom. I only have impurity. I have no answers, and lots of questions.

I’m slowly learning the Greek of the New Testament so that language can more clearly read me, too, the language of the Gospels.

I am rambling, I know. In part, I ramble with the hope that some of this might rhyme with something in your own rambling thoughts, reader.

Another way to say this: during the pandemic, as I started to practice Centering Prayer and spend 20 minutes of silence at the beginning of a day, I did so in the virtual company of virtual strangers, others who rose at 6 or 7 am and logged on to Zoom and saw each others’ sleepy faces and heard the bell ring and closed their eyes and surrendered to prayer.

And surrendered to the tumult of their own thoughts. As I did (and do) to mine. As we all do whether or not we do it intentionally in a community of quiet prayer.

Father Keating teaches the pray-er to ‘come back’ when they are distracted, to a single word, uttered voicelessly in the mind’s ear. Mine was (is) “surrender.” So, during that strange and chaotic time when everybody was (is) in flux, it was (is) important to me to acknowledge with a single word that I am not in control. That I am in God’s hands.

This combination of intentional silence and being thrown back or into one’s own thoughts and darkness (I usually close my eyes)--this is still important to me, and I think always will be. I don’t kid myself that these things are themselves prayer. But they are aids or avenues–for me, necessary ones–to connect with God.

So too are the actual sacred words in the text. Lately, the Psalms, particularly Robert Alter’s poetic translations of them, have helped in quieting my rabbit-brain, my monkey-mind. Allowing me to focus it for a space. I try to memorize a few verses of a psalm a day, and in this way, slowly, slowly, parts of the psalter I now know by heart. I know they will slip away from me as all things do, soon enough, but it is nice to have the words near me right now. After all, right now is all I really have.

I fear I have rambled and circled too long. My justification? That the movement of this essay–confused, open, yearning, earnest–at least mirrors the fumbling towards prayer I myself try for. And I hope I will always say try for and never achieve. Say held by and not hold.

I hope these words are some help to you, reader.

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Notes / Resources:

-Here is the link to that lovely interview with Ben Okri about his (two) novels, “The Role of the Artist In Times of Crisis” on the podcast Tricycle Talks.

-There are lots of great resources on Centering Prayer. But Father Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart was my own introduction. I recommend it.

-There are even more resources on Jesuit and Ignatian spirituality than those on Centering Prayer. My own entry point–in conjunction with a number of wise and helpful human guides–was Fr. David Fleming’s book Draw Me Into Your Friendship: A Contemporary Reading of the Spiritual Exercises.