Christian meditation app fills the gap

Jump into this video here for insight into a richer experience

Sam Harris is a writer and podcaster with a background in neuroscience. His is the youngest face of the "New Atheism"  brigade, which we don't hear about so much now because it has become clear that it is a touched-up version of traditional atheism.

However, Harris has gone on to promote Mindfulness, a well-meaning fad that has a business side attracting products such as Jimmy Kimmel's Mindfulness Coloring Book or the emag, 108 Mindfulness Lessons, which offers advice on surviving test stress and other student difficulties.

Harris' interest in mediation dates from his college days and his Waking Up app has been well-received. However, he has given his attention mostly to the Hindu and Buddhist strain of meditation, ignoring the riches of the Christian experience.

This is where those who want a more complete form of meditation, one that aligns with the hunger for a relationship with the deepest element of reality, that is, God, need to turn to groups such as the long-established World Community for Christian Mediation. This is "a global spiritual community united in the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. It shares the fruits of this practice widely and inclusively, serving the unity of all and building understanding between faiths and cultures."

The community serves people in all kinds of situations, including business people and physicians."Members of WCCM span more than a hundred countries. There are about sixty-seven national coordinators. Its international centre is Bonnevaux – an ancient monastic site now dedicated to global peace and dialogue around the daily practice of meditation – near Poitiers in France."

For the latest community news on its website have a look here, and jump into the mediation page here. 

Watch the video titled The Pilgrimage - The Way of Christian Meditation here. Access the WCCM app here 

Sam Harris is right that we must do something to rid ourselves of the "habitual distraction" that contends with us for control over our time and mind space -  "your thoughts are incessantly appearing and capturing your attention and deluding you", he says.

But you can see how more profound  the Christian experience is when meditation is regarded as the pathway to deep attention to God, leading us to "feel the feelings of God". That is the path to follow!

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All belief points to a spiritual capacity

Detail from art by Lia Halloran A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

New Scientist magazine has a series of articles on the topic of "Effortless thinking". One is titled "The god-shaped hole in your brain". 

The profound implications on the issue of the mind having a spiritual capability beyond what the brain produces are clear when the author writes:

If God designed the human brain, he (or she) did a lousy job. Dogged by glitches and biases, requiring routine shutdown for maintenance for 8 hours a day, and highly susceptible to serious malfunction, a product recall would seem to be in order. But in one respect at least, God played a blinder: our brains are almost perfectly designed to believe in him/her.

This is akin to the point of the famous passage from man-of-the-world Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions in which he states:

Great are you, O Lord, and exceedingly worthy of praise; your power is immense, and your wisdom beyond reckoning. And so we men, who are a due part of your creation, long to praise you – we also carry our mortality about with us, carry the evidence of our sin and with it the proof that you thwart the proud. You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. 

The New Scientist writer also goes into the kindred matter of " the powerful and very human attribute we call belief":

Beliefs define how we see the world and act within it; without them, there would be no plots to behead soldiers, no war, no economic crises and no racism. There would also be no cathedrals, no nature reserves, no science and no art. Whatever beliefs you hold, it’s hard to imagine life without them. Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human. They also come so naturally that we rarely stop to think how bizarre belief is.

In 1921, philosopher Bertrand Russell put it succinctly when he described belief as “the central problem in the analysis of mind”. Believing, he said, is “the most ‘mental’ thing we do” – by which he meant the most removed from the “mere matter” that our brains are made of. How can a physical object like a human brain believe things? Philosophy has made little progress on Russell’s central problem.

The writer of this series reveals in one article that he is an atheist, but he does his readers a service by stating clearly key elements of what humans have experienced of the spiritual world.  

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When the front door of the mind is locked

What's allowed in? Kevin Bidwell photo - Pexels

J R R Tolkien wrote, “Myths, fantasies, and stories can open the heart’s back door when the front door of the mind is locked”. Already around the middle of last century he had recognised that the common mindset had become "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist". That "front door" is often the "plausibility structure" that individuals unconsciously construct in their way of thinking, and these days many commentators have expressed dismay at the shallowness of thought generally - typical examples here and here. 

A second element that impacts our pattern of thinking - what we accept as plausible - is the lack of ongoing contact with a rich variety of people outside the "we" group determining our reactions. Therefore, there is a lot of "emotional" responses to stimuli as against calmer reasoning as to best behaviour or where the truth lies.

In this connection, longtime readers of this blog will know that one area of interest of mine is how the supernatural realm is sometimes unveiled, but the wonder can be glossed over because of predetermined habits of mind, or simply by the distractions of this digital age. 

In my previous post, the experience of one survivor of the Florida apartment collapse is highlighted because the chain of events that led to her survival readily prompts recognition as a reality that prayers are effective. As she told reporters who took her account, she felt it necessary to thank God for keeping her safe, given she had lit a prayer candle before an icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe, signifying her belief that God answers prayers made through the intercession of other Christians, on earth or in heaven.  

Further, in a post here I report an account of a father who was part of a series of miracles in bringing an adopted son from China and seeing the boy's medical problems overcome. 

Now, I want to offer two more cases of people whose experiences are inexplicable other than that they arose from an encounter with the spiritual realm. The source of this information, the same as above, is a trustworthy author and journalist. He writes:

 A] I know that the divine is truly present in some things and places, and not in others. I also believe that the demonic is likewise present in some things and places. I once interviewed a woman who could not get books to stop flying off her shelves in her house until she burned and buried the ashes of two little humanoid wooden figures she and her late husband had bought at a bazaar in rural Indonesia on a vacation. She had not imagined it, but those objects had been used in some kind of wicked ritual. When she placed them on her bookshelf, she would wake up the next morning to find all the books splayed on the floor. 

B] If you have ever been part of an exorcism or a deliverance rite, you know that holy water is not the same thing as water that comes out of the tap. People who are demon possessed, it burns them. A couple of years ago, I was in Manhattan visiting friends. The wife of the family is possessed, and under the care of an exorcist. When her husband brought out a blessed object he had concealed, she reacted badly, her face changing, and a voice not her own coming out of her, cursing the presence of this object. I saw this with my own eyes. The poor wife apologized, and said, “I’m sorry, that’s not me.”

Store these accounts in your heart. They are not "stories" in Tolkien's sense of being fictional but they can contribute to a deeper mindset, one that accepts that there is a greater richness to life than meets the uncurious eye or the distracted consumerist world view. Each of us has a responsibility to form our "plausibility structure" in an independent fashion in order to better know the truth when we meet it, the truth that will set us free.

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A natural witness to the supernatural dimension

From the horror collapse of  Florida's Champlain Towers South comes an extraordinary account of survival. Just before it all fell, something jolted condo owner Iliana Monteagudo awake - she calls it a "rare force" - and thinking an open door at her balcony might be letting gusts of wind into her apartment, she got out of bed to close it. Then, behind her she saw a widening crack moving down her wall. She realised she had to get out of the building immediately. 

What followed is a startling series of events that lend weight to the notion of protection for those who pray for God's help.  Monteagudo, 64 and a Miami resident for 40 years, said she believes that if any of those moments had gone differently she would not be alive today. Let me use a report from CNN to describe what happened.

Before she went to bed she had lit a prayer candle before an icon of Our Lady of Guadelupe, and so by that action asking Mary, Jesus' mother, to intercede before God on her behalf.

But after she saw the huge crack Monteagudo went into overdrive. "Something inside me said run", she said." You have to run to save your life." The first help toward her quick escape was that the night before she had put her pills and credit cards into her purse because she knew she had to get up early in the morning. Quickly she put on clothes, grabbed her phone and purse, blew out the candle and left her condo.

She knew not to take the elevator but didn't know that the emergency stairs were just beside her unit, so she went to the farthest set of stairs instead.

"If I knew that, maybe I would have taken that one," Monteagudo said.

But as she was flying down the six floors of stairs, pleading with God to let her see her sons and grandsons again, she heard the sound of the tower she lived in collapsing. If she had been in the stairs closest to her home, she likely would have been crushed, her son, Andres Alvarez, said.

"She had to wake up early the next day, the next morning," Alvarez said. "She didn't take her sleeping pill because she was afraid she was going to oversleep. If it wasn't for that open door... if it wasn't for that wind... if she hadn't seen that crack... she wouldn't be here telling the story."

If a person is open to the wider principle of letting the eyes see and the ears hear, the "what ifs" do pose the question: Did God answer Iliana Monteagudo's prayers? Only God knows the answer.

In one way it is strange that Jesus, though understanding that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, directed everyone to pray for what they need - "And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith” (Matthew 21:22). He used the parable of the persistent widow and the evil judge to urge not to give up when prayers are not answered in the way and time we expect.

A couple of preachers this Sunday had insights into how a person's faith, or that of someone close to them, was very much involved in Jesus' miracles, and how this is so in our lives, too. The gospel reading was about Jesus going to Nazareth, and his former neighbours did not accept him as an authoritative teacher and healer, though they knew of his miracles elsewhere - he did cure a few sick people there, though. 

What's involved is a "faith dialogue" with God. God offers, but we have to accept the offer. With an openness of heart and mind, miracles can happen. The message on Sunday was: "Let go of a scepticism that is born of limited expectations."

With Jesus' miracles he repeatedly told the cured person: "Go, your faith has healed-saved you." We can go to Jesus in hope and fearlessness.

The twin ideas of hearing and seeing are closely linked to the concepts of learning and understanding, both hallmarks of life and intelligence. However, all of us have that inclination to block out what we might see, to talk over what we might hear, and so shut our heart to what we need to understand. This is where repentance and metanoia (Greek for turning around) come in. The prophets knew their message was usually not accepted because their people were rebellious (Ezekiel 2:2-5). Isaiah (6:9-10) and Jesus (Matthew 13:13) were saddened... "because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand".

"We must not delimit the power of God to act and save...Everything is pure grace and God has the power to do everything... [so] 'if our faith is weak, all we need to do is to imitate the father whose child was suffering from epilepsy. He said to Jesus, 'I believe; help my unbelief'" (Mark 9:24).

To "delimit" means to "determine the limits or boundaries" of something. To avoid blocking our hearts and minds to the spiritual is a real challenge when the main players in society have been captured by the secular mindset and, in turn, they turn their firepower on us and want us in the same chains of conformity as themselves.  "Secular" means being being directed away from the spiritual order of life to have a focus only on the material and what is of this earth. This is very damaging to human wholeness. Conversely,  a "spiritual" mindset is all enveloping and open to all possibilities. 

To a Washington Post reporter, Monteagudo described her abrupt awakening this way: “It’s like something supernatural woke me up. I felt something strange..." Before leaving the apartment, "I blew out the candle that I light every night for Our Lady of Guadalupe”.

“I was afraid I was going to be crushed,” she said, adding: “I kept going, screaming, ‘God, help me, please help me. I want to see my sons, I want to see my grandsons, I want to live, please help me, God.'"

Monteagudo thought about all the things she lost: wedding photos, first Communion photos, kids’ birthday photos. "I lost everything, I don’t have a past,” she said. “But I say thank God, I’m still alive.”

Clearly, there has been a dialogue of faith in this woman's life, and it continued during her short but horrifying ordeal. 

A final point is that God can perform whatever wonders he wishes, at any time he desires, but he usually only performs a miracle when faith is present in a person's heart and mind. As in Nazareth, it's hard to envisage Jesus, the Creator God, healing someone who outright rejects him. The way to bridge the gap in our dialogue with God is to cultivate whatever tender shoots of faith that we have still alive from our religious upbringing, or that we find springing up as we experience the mysteries of the human journey.  

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Germans in tussle with teaching authority

The Church in Germany is offering the rest of the world a view of the clash between what many Germans believe should be a democratic institution but which, in fact, is a body whose role is the preservation and dissemination of what God has revealed by word and deed, through Scripture and Tradition. 

In the months ahead, representatives of German lay groups, parishes, and religious orders, will meet with bishops in a form of an ongoing synod - what they refer to as a "synodal path" - on how to reform the Church, especially its structures, to prevent a recurrence of the scandalous tide of sex abuse. 

Though that is the stated goal, and it is a noble objective, there is a fear the journey will be a wasted one as participants rehearse the hoary topics of  greater share of power for the Church members, the ordination of women, and a change in its stance toward the sinfulness of homosexual acts (N.B. the Church makes no moral judgment concerning the person who is, among other things, a homosexual). The hope is that the path will come to an end next February.

Debate on the ordination of women to be a priest, in particular, will display in stark terms the conflict between the "enlightened" ones and those charged with upholding the living teaching office of the Church. This office is its "magisterium" involving the "clarification and manifestation of the truth contained in the deposit of faith or truths connected to the deposit and the mission of the Church" (Feingold 2016)* 

Note that "this teaching office is not above the word of God in scripture, but serves it". The commission can be fulfilled only through God's anointing of those who fill the office as successors of Peter and his fellow apostles, and through the help of the Holy Spirit.

Pope John Paul II declared in 1994 that priestly ordination must be reserved to men only.  He did it in such a way that made plain he was making a definitive and infallible statement that confirmed the Tradition of the Church:

Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful. 

Read the short document here. It displays the elements of an exercise of the teaching authority of the pope in a case of infallibility, which is immunity from error in the teaching of the magisterium through the assistance of the Holy Spirit.

Feingold comments:

In this paragraph, the Pope has expressed himself very precisely so as to make clear that this pronouncement is definitive and therefore infallible, and thus can never be changed by any future pope or council. All of the requirements given in [the Vatican Council's] Lumen gentium §25 (summarized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church §891) are clearly realized. First, the Pope confirms that he is acting as supreme pastor when he speaks “in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren.” Second, he explicitly intends to make a definitive act (“this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”). Finally, he is teaching on a question pertaining to faith and morals, for he says that it is “a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine constitution itself.”*

Here is an instance of God acting in the Church for the guidance of His people. For those who have lost the sense of the spiritual as an integral part of our world along with the material, this is a hard saying.  

Therefore, that the ordination of women as priests is still on the agenda in the German discussions has caused the fear of another German schism to grip many in the Church outside secularised Europe. 

*Feingold, Lawrence, 2016, Faith Comes From What Is Heard: An Introduction to Fundamental Theology, Emmaus Academic, Steubenville, Ohio.

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We must not squander the Covid crisis

As with a world war, so too with the pandemic that maims families and nations

As Winston Churchill was working to form the United Nations after World War II, he famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. With the Covid crisis creating havoc all around us, each community and even each person would do well to follow Churchill's prescription.

A common refrain in conversations is, "It'll be good when we get back to normal". But is it going to be true? So much of the lifestyle in developed countries seems unfit for purpose, if that purpose is to engender mental and physical health, happiness in the way of personal satisfaction with a meaningful role in society, and a hopeful mindview that knows worthwhile goals. 

Once again, for those of us bogged down in the mundane, a vision of what is possible when we decide to take control of  our life comes from Pope Francis in speaking this week about the aftermath of the pandemic. Several times in the past year he has returned to the theme of transforming whatever is not working in personal life and in the world's structures.

Pope Francis said this week that the world must not return to its “normal” way of life as the Covid crisis eases:

Only one thing is more serious than this crisis, and that is the risk that we will squander it, and not learn the lesson it teaches.

It is a lesson in humility, showing us that it is not possible to live healthy lives in an unhealthy world, or to go on as we were, without recognizing what went wrong. 

Even now, the great desire to return to normality can mask the senseless notion that we can go back to relying on false securities, habits and projects that aim exclusively at pursuing wealth and personal interests, while failing to respond to global injustice, the cry of the poor and the precarious health of our planet.

What does all this have to say to us as Christians?  We, too. are called to reflect seriously on whether we want to go back to doing what we did before, as if nothing happened, or instead to take up the challenge of this crisis.  

Crisis, as the original meaning of the word shows, always implies a judgement, a distinction between good and bad.  In ancient times, it was used of the farmer who separated the good grain from the chaff to be discarded.  In a similar way, the present crisis calls us to distinguish, discern and sift, in everything we do, between what is enduring and what is passing.

Pope Francis looked at "a world still struggling to emerge from the dramatic crisis caused by the pandemic" and said: "This scourge has tested everyone and everything". 

How we and the world respond to the test is crucial on many levels. The challenge is to not plod on as a victim of what life throws at us but, rather, to apply our will to create a new set of conditions for the well-being of our own family and for the whole human family.

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Safeguarding the family from the digital juggernaut

The digitally distracted family. Photo by Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

One way to break free from a psychically cancerous society is to be online less. People are increasingly seeing the need to undertake detoxification from technologies that create tension and other forms of distress in their life.

Robyn Ferrell's description of our predicament is so true. She writes:

The smart phone has become like a valet, arranging your life in terms that make it liveable. The smart phone is an object that does your thinking for you. You use its calculator to do what you used to do as mental arithmetic. You use its camera as a repository, and perhaps a substitute, for memory. The calendar is your social secretary, nudging you to your “two o’clock”. You keep track of time with it. You keep track of money with it. In fact, you even use it as money with a cashless payment app. You use it to find out where you are, and to navigate, with the map app.

When waiting anywhere, it is an indispensable amusement, with its podcasts and news apps. It’s the library in your pocket, the encyclopaedia, research assistant and broker of disputes at the dinner table. “Who was that guy in …?” You can even talk to it, and “Siri” will answer you and perform things for you. It makes you feel powerful, with a surge of attachment for this shiny and incredibly useful object.

And yet. Are you really sure who is master and who slave? Now you can’t add up to save your life; you’re lost without the calendar to tell you where to be when; you no longer remember the phone numbers of your friends and relations (or even your own). You need the phone to move funds or record your steps or summon an Uber. And that’s before you even make a call on this (uncannily) smart phone.

This was your instrument, but now you are beholden to it and dependent on it. And meanwhile, it is reporting on you behind your back. Like a jealous lover, it has you under surveillance wherever in the wide world you are roaming, discoverable by mobile phone towers and revealed by your purchases and searches. Or perhaps more like a handler, relaying your information faithfully to the powers that be, the marketers and advertisers who pay well for it. 

Ferrell links this view with that of Martin Heidegger, who died in 1976 and who had the insight that with technology all of nature had become a "standing reserve" - on call, as if it were a part of industrial inventory. For example, soil has no longer an essence in itself, but is seen as part of the food production sector of the economy. Everything has a means or end instrumentality. Ferrell goes on:

In this sense, Heidegger saw the danger of technology as a spiritual one, not only infecting others who become a standing reserve but a habit of thought in which even the self becomes trapped. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this dystopia has arrived, in the form of the internetted world bound in all its fibres to the instrumental-mercantile. 

Therefore, technology generates "consumer logic", central to which is "a prefabricated idea — a shorthand for thinking that forestalls thinking".  With the adoption of instrumental thinking and automated thought, "no other thinking makes sense anymore".

Drawing on other social observers, Ferrell leaves us with the view that "habits of mind associated with a market economy and its related technology ... became inflated in the modern world" and that "this remains a suggestive point of departure for diagnoses of our time".

You may recall the meme: "That moment you've lost your phone but feel like you're the one that's lost." That state must be part of the diagnosis of our time. As well, there is the resulting distress caused by the way tech companies tap addiction psychology in the design of the smartphone, to take one device.

Dr Anastasia Hronis, clinical psychologist and honorary associate at the University of Technology, Sydney, says a smartphone notification gives a dopamine rush similar to a hit of cocaine or a win at the slot machines:

I specialise in addictions — yet clients don't say 'I have a problem with my phone' — they present with anxiety-depression, and often phone addiction is a cause.

I foresee a push towards cafes and theatres introducing phone-free policies in the future, but for now the self-regulation is down to us.

A working mother reports how self-regulation in deliberately trying a digital detox proved a boon for she and her husband and their two sons:

I thought that anxiety, distraction and stress was the inevitable price I needed to paid for being a working mother.

But it was my own decision to not be fully present [within the family], and it was a habitual thing that could only be broken through a total detox.

Research findings on the digital environment coming out of Australia shed light on the worries parents have about their children:

Parents were significantly concerned about the negative impacts of digital media and technologies on their child’s physical activity levels (73%), attention span (62%), and time for, and interest in, playing (62%). 

Parenting and teaching are harder than they used to be:

• Most (73%) parents and grandparents think it is harder to control their child’s digital habits since they have got their own screen-based device.
• 83% of parents, carers and grandparents felt that their child was negatively distracted by digital technologies. 13% of these respondents felt that this distraction was experienced to ‘a great extent’.
• 84% of educators in Australia believe that digital technologiesare a growing distraction in the learning environment.
• 59% of respondents observed a decline in students' overall readiness to learn in the last 3-5 years.

This Growing Up Digital report I have been quoting from has this as part of its conclusion: 

Overwhelmingly, parents, carers and grandparents recognise that they are a critical influence on their child’s use of digital media and technology – in good and bad. 72% of parents recognise that their own technology habits influence those of their children. 90% of participants agreed with the statement, “I need to be a responsible user of digital technology for my child to learn from”. 

A comment that reflected a common view was: “As a parent I need to know how to work the programs and sites the kids access to be able to protect them. I do not assume they are safe”. Indeed, it is unrealistic to expect that children will improve their digital media habits unless they see their parents at home behaving accordingly.

It's not only the addictive nature of the technology and the learned ettiquette, or lack of it, of social media that consign adult and child alike to a toxic psychic state, but there is also the fact that digital media and technologies are mostly offered to young people for consumption rather than content creation. The Growing Up Digital report states:

Parents grapple with confusing messages about whether educational or learning uses of digital media and devices and recreational and entertainment use need to be treated in the same way. The time recommendation increases with a child’s age and are based on the idea of media as a ‘digital babysitter’ and a source of entertainment, rather than recognising the educational, active and engaging purposes that digital media can provide. Clarifying the key point that there are better uses of screens than others, and the need for balance in a young person’s day, is critical to seeing change in parental decision making [My emphasis -BS]. 

Passively consuming digital content poses other risks, too. The content that young people absorb and consume from the digital world around them is filled with ideas and examples that shape their views of the world around them and how they fit into it. Some of these are inappropriate and unsafe and without sharing what they are seeking and experiencing online, parents have little leverage to intervene. For parents, it is far better to engage in a conversation with young people about their habits and share the digital world with them.

Here's the report's punchline:

Ultimately, it has become abundantly clear that we all have a problem, and we all must take responsibility for helping young people grow up healthily, happily and responsibly.

The challenge must be accepted especially by those of us with a religious worldview. First, the technology itself - as I have tried to make plain for parents in this post - has an impact on the way we think, and parents must be ready to counterattack. Secondly, parents must be confident in their God-given role of caring for young ones. Third, parents must decide on practical steps to break the addiction, even simple practices such as putting smartphones in a drawer around meal time.

Based on the arguments and information of the type I have presented here, I am among the growing number convinced that a response in our personal lives is urgent as we wait to see if governments will be courageous enough to take a stand against the economic power and cultural influence of "Big Tech".

An important part of that response must be more time devoted to prayer and the reading of our scriptures. These in particular can provide some spiritual balance to the agitation that purposeless digital use generates. 

SOMETHING EXTRA: "Remembering is a subversive communal activity in an age that coaxes us to drift in the constantly streaming, twittering present, forgetful of history, forgetful of the past." - Richard B. Hays, drawing on his Biblical scholarship

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