A Christian View of Mindfulness: Episode 11

 

We’re still traveling, yesterday we spent all day in the car spanning bay bridge and turning west toward Ohio. For the rest of the week, we’re visiting Andrew’s family deep in Amish country. Last night after we arrived we sat on the front porch listening to the birds, the interstate’s low hum, and watching the slow yellow blink of fireflies. Out here we’re surrounded by 13 acres of forest and outside the porch, rain is pattering on a thousand leaves.

 

 

When I’m traveling, and maybe you’ve noticed this too…especially overseas, my senses are heightened. Every sound is a novelty. Every walk is an adventure.

Facebook memories reminded me that three years ago today I woke up in Sori, Italy, a beach town on the Italian Riviera and a short walk from where I was born in Pieve Ligure. Our Air BnB was four flights above a family-owned gelato shop. It did indeed have a great view of the Mediterranean Sea but what the ad didn’t tell us was that we would be eye to eye with the town church bells next door. Sleeping in was not an option. I didn’t mind. I put euros in the pocket of my sundress and headed down the street to watch Sori wake up and gather breakfast for my family. Old men crowded around the bar with their first espresso chatting about last evening’s world cup match. At the fresh pasta shop, the striped awning was just being rolled up.  A train sped overhead from one Ligurian mountain to another. Sori spills down a bowl of mountains and into the sea.

 

 

I was alone, gazing through small enclosures of kitchen gardens at lemons ripening and listening to the sound of the sea as it crashed and pulled at the pebbles on the shore. It was easy to keep a running conversation with Jesus sharing the freshness of the morning.

We step back into our original design when we stop, savor and then slide into relationship with God bearing the most simple gift: gratitude.

I ducked into the bread shop. Bread was neatly tucked into baskets on the wall, like precious trochkes. I picked out a loaf to add to the yogurt and Nutella I’d gathered from the grocery and headed to the produce stand. After asking for fruit in my halting Italian, the owner pointed to the white peaches in the top basket, lighting up as she picked out four perfectly ripe specimens and placing them in my market bag. She smiled. She must have known she was handing me not just a peach but an experience.

Back upstairs, I cut three of the peaches onto a blue platter and then leaned over the sink and bit into the fuzzy cream flesh, juices running down my chin, my hand, dripping down my elbow.

Oh, so this is what You meant when You created “peach.”

 

 

Matthew 6:26 invites us to look at the birds in the air.

This work “Look” in Greek has deeper connotations than just mere sight. The Greek concordance brings up words like:  “focus intently on. Gaze. Look at in a sustained, concentrated way.”

Do not be anxious. Look. Focus.

 

Bring the view of the present moment into the Presence of God.

 

Focus on the birds. “They do not sow or reap…and yet watch them, they are fed.”

See, watch, gaze. and open your hands to receive.

This scripture is a beautiful example of the Sacrament of the present moment.

Mindfulness is Christian as it leads our full embodied presence into the courts of God’s presence.

The present moment can be a doorway to communion.

 

 

Alexander Schmemann, professor and theologian said this in his book, For the Life of the World, “All that exists is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation: “O taste and see that the Lord is good.”

When Andrew pulls a rainbow trout out of the water, he is the first Adam, pulling up a wriggling living thing, naming it, blessing it, and then throwing it back. It flashes in the light as he holds it under the water letting the current cover its gills as it breathes and swims away.

Again, Alexander Schmemann, “The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God –and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him.

We’ve put nature, pleasure, wonder, material life, and then God into completely different categories.

God belongs at church. Lattes belong to Starbucks.
The sacred and the secular. They’ve all been carefully dissected with a religious scalpel, pulled apart and placed on separate tables. Something God never intended.

 

 

Proverbs 8 gives us an intimate view into another person in the Trinity watching God the Father create.

I was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,

when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,

when he gave the sea its boundary
so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.

Then I was constantly at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
rejoicing always in his presence,

rejoicing in his whole world
and delighting in mankind.

 

 

Did you know that God was filled with delight as He planned and created you?

How about the fact that He’s filled with delight as He spreads out the map and shares his world with you?

Or think of this: God longs for shared experience with you as you walk through the world, whether it be the suffering you’re slogging through, the ordinary dish washing, or the joy in this morning’s first cup of coffee?

 

God longs to dwell with you in the present moment.

 

 

Last Wednesday we packed the kids and inflatables and traveled lengthwise through the Chesapeake to Assateague National Beach where wild ponies roam through the marshes. It was a 2 – 3 hour drive. Andrew tapped away next to me on the computer in the van.

We pulled an igloo of cut watermelon and drinks over the dune to the water’s edge through the sand. The kids whooped at the sight of the waves, dropped towels, grabbed boogie boards and ran into the surf.

Our oldest boy, fourteen years old, usually dead serious, couldn’t stop smiling. As he rode a wave from its breaking out to my feet where I was holding a camera, our eyes met, his joy became shared joy.

 

What is the sacrament of the present moment except for a return to the elemental invitation to walk with God in the cool of the evening?

And what is present moment gratitude except for shared joy?

 

 

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