Since it is neither easy nor painless, civility does not come naturally. It takes some work, and that work takes time.
I have a very full and busy life and occasionally am asked, 'Scotty, how can you do all that you do?' There are multiple answers, including being blessed by a superb staff. But the most telling reply I can give is: 'Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.' Ironically, the questioner usually responds by saying he's too busy to do that.
My two hours doing nothing are the most important hours of the day for me. I do not take them all in one gulp. usually they are distributed into three forty-minute periods: shortly after I first awaken, in the late afternoon, and again before I sleep. They are 'alone' times, times of quiet and solitude. I could not survive without them.
I refer to these periods as my 'prayer time.' During them I actually spend no more than five to ten percent of the time in what most people would call prayer: talking to God. And no more than five to ten percent in meditation: listening for God. Ninety percent of the time I'm just thinking. But if I called it my thinking or contemplation time people would feel free to interrupt it. So I call it my prayer time instead to make it seem holy, which it is. It's another one of the benefits of being a 'religious person.'
Even though I am an introverted, introspective person by nature, setting aside these prayer times did not come naturally to me. I had to have some outside help. Fifteen years ago, when I first asked her to fill the role, my new spiritual director immediately inquired about my prayer life, 'Oh, I've got a rich prayer life,' I informed her. I pray all the time. I pray when I'm out walking. I pray when I'm going to sleep. I often pray silently when I'm seeing a patient and I don't know what the hell else to do.' '
Do you set aside specific times during the day to pray?' she asked next, looking quite innocent in her nun's habit.
'No,' I replied. 'That feels stultifying to me. Kind of rigid and unspontaneous.' `
'Maybe so,' she countered, `but what I hear you saying is you communicate with God whenever you feel like it. That seems to me like a very one-way relationship. If you love God as much as you say you do-and I suspect you do, Scotty why then I think you owe it to him to make yourself available to him at certain times whether you feel like it or not.'
So it was I began to carve out my prayer times. It took a little effort. It felt somewhat unnatural at first. But it is our glory as human beings that we have it within our power to change our nature when we need to. It also felt rigid and unnatural when my parents first demanded I brush my teeth, yet it has long since become 'second nature' to me. I would feel unnatural not brushing my teeth now. Just as it would feel unnatural not to take my prayer time. If you don't want to have time for prayer, fine. But please don't tell me you're too busy, because setting aside this time will shortly make your life all the more efficient. Don't let anything stand in your way. You don't have to get dressed up for these occasions. You don't have to get on your knees. All you have to do is be available. When I returned for my second visit with my spiritual director, feeling like the most depraved individual in the world, I asked her if it was all right for me to smoke when I prayed.
'That's a surprisingly common question,' she said with a smile, 'so common we have a standard answer: If you can pray when you smoke, then you can smoke when you pray.'
Spiritual directors tend to have a way of being tough and consoling. Like God herself, prayer has never been adequately defined. And never will be. It is too large, too deep, too multidimensional and paradoxical.
It can be divided into types and subtypes, if you will: prayers of praise, of thanksgiving, of confession and contrition; petitionary and intercessionary prayer; formal and informal prayer; verbal and wordless prayer, and so on. Here only one type will be considered: contemplative prayer. Entire books have been written about contemplative prayer alone, so this book on civility must restrict itself to brief mention of only a few aspects.
Contemplative prayer may be looked at as a life-style. If so, it is a life-style dedicated to maximum awareness. Those who adopt it--contemplatives-desire to become as conscious as they can possibly be. To this end, they set aside vast amounts of time for quiet and solitude. After a while this requires little discipline; they need and yearn for such time.
They do not see this as time wasting. To the contrary, they feel it is the most efficient and cost-effective way to live. For them, as Plato put it in the Dialogues, 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' What we contemplatives do during our precious quiet times is to examine our lives. We enjoy experience, but only in relatively small doses. What we like to do is take a little bit of experience and, by contemplating it, milk it for all it's worth. We believe that in this way we can ultimately learn more-become more conscious-than those who lead more frenetic lives crammed with far greater amounts of unreflective experience.
One of the things I am continually doing during my prayer time is checking out my life with my Ideal Observer. 'Tell me, God,' I am asking, 'what I just did or what I am thinking of doing-how does it look through your eyes? Does it look civil?'
I have spoken about how a major function of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is the development and exercise of our observing ego and, hence, our capacity to utilize an Ideal Observer. In fact, much of such therapy might be looked upon as a variety of contemplative prayer. It is both similarly and properly habituating. psychotherapists are so frequently asked the question 'How do you know when it is time to leave therapy?' that they have come up with a fairly standard answer: 'When you have become your own therapist, so that therapy has become a way of life for you.'
Another similarity is the issue of time. Just as many will protest that they don't have time for a more contemplative life-style, so many complain that 'therapy takes so much time.' Yet in reality, as with other varieties of contemplation, it is often a profoundly cost-effective process. Another standard question is, 'Since we're all neurotic, how do you know when to go into therapy?' and, again, there is a standard answer: 'When you're stuck.' People who enter therapy frequently do so because of an accurate sense that they are spinning their wheels. And if therapy is successful, when they leave-when they are unstuck-they do so with a deep sense that all the time and money was well spent-a small price to pay for the increased efficiency and effectiveness of their liberated lives.
We contemplatives pay attention not only to our outward experiences but also to our inner voices. Indeed, those of us who are religious believe that God actually often speaks to us through such voices: that they may be revelations. We further believe that a contemplative life-style dramatically increases either the frequency with which God speaks to us or else our capacity to hear her.
For instance, both in psychotherapy and out, we pay attention to our dreams because they may be such revelations. I say `may' be. I think only a small minority are messages from God and that most of our night dreams are dross. How then do you separate the gold from this dross? The same question arises with other internal voices. How do we know when that 'still small voice' is the voice of the Holy Spirit as opposed to simply that of our glands, or possibly even the voice of Satan? This is the issue-the problem-of 'discernment of revelation.' It is an enormously important issue. Were it not a distraction, the subject would deserve several chapters in and of itself. There are no formalistic solutions to the problem, but there are guidelines. Here I shall only touch upon three. I call them the guidelines of time, heart, and emptiness.
The first and most crucial guideline is to take time. It takes time-thinking time or contemplative time-to discern whether a dream is pregnant with hidden meaning or whether it is more likely a mere distraction resulting from random neuronal activity. It takes time to test all our inner messages (after we've taken the time to listen to them in the first place), to check them out against reality and reason and experience, to question their wisdom and creativity. Except in the rarest of circumstances, beware of instant revelations! Beware of them in yourself, and beware of others when their every thought or feeling is immediately ascribed the status of godly wisdom or origin.
In summary, it takes time to think. It takes time to become conscious. And since consciousness is the major root of civility, it takes time to be civil. Indeed, the desire to be as civil as possible is a deep motive for the contemplative life. Over and again it has been made clear to me that it is probably not possible for someone to be a deeply civil person without nurturing her or his contemplative side.
To my mind, the best of the works of the controversial theologian Matthew Fox is his early book about prayer, On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear. Although not wholly adequate, his definition of prayer is still my favorite. It is a definition that doesn't even use the word God. Fox defines it as 'a radical response to the mysteries of life.' Three things make this definition so meaningful to me. The first is the word radical, which comes from the Latin radix, for 'root.' It implies that prayer requires that we get to the root of things without being distracted by superficialities. We must think deeply about our lives, which, of course, takes time. It is a contemplative definition.
The second is the word response. It implies that through prayer we must not only think deeply but also translate our thinking into action. We need to behave out of deep thoughtfulness. Such behaviour is civility if we assume, as I do, that deep thoughtfulness will result in both consciousness and submission to a Higher Power.
Finally, it implies that life is an inherently mysterious business and that there are no easy answers or simple formulas. Even those answers we arrive at through our very best thinking will not necessarily be crystal-clear ones that relieve us from the burden of taking risks.
As mentioned, Fox designated 'the mystery of vocation' as one of the six greatest mysteries of life to which we need respond. So it is that to be civil, we must struggle with such questions already raised as 'Who am I meant to be?"What is God calling me to do in this instance, in this organization, in my career?' 'Why me?' And, after all our struggling, the proper response will still likely require some leap of faith. Furthermore, to be civil, we must struggle to discern not only our own vocations but also the vocations of others. The following sections on the family and business will demonstrate the need to assess the vocations of our spouses, our children, our subordinates, and even those of our coworkers and supervisors. And respond with the kind of faith demanded by 'submission to a Higher Power.'
There are no formulas. In regard to the discernment of vocation, however, theologian Frederick Buechner does offer a second guideline:
It is not, however, a simple piece of advice. Joseph Campbell's expression of the vocational guideline of the heart, 'Follow your bliss,' has recently become very popular. It is valid for many occasions, but not for some others. When Jesus, for instance, sweating blood in sheer terror in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted his calling to go to the cross, he was not following his bliss. He did, I believe, choose the cross because it was the only alternative that felt right in his heart. But it was hardly a blissful alternative.
So, from time to time-not too often, mind you - we may be called to make some 'radical response' to life that is actually sacrificial. At such times, precisely because it is not blissful, the call, as it did for Jesus, may feel quite murky. Moreover, since life is continually changing and evolving, these murky 'judgment calls'-to use a play on words-may have to be made repeatedly.
When I first began to lecture, I didn't know whether it was the right thing. Was it something God was calling me to or was I just on a narcissistic ego trip, eager for the roar of the crowd? I agonized incessantly over the question. A woman who sponsored my second speaking engagement, with whom I had shared my agony, sent me a poem she had written a month later. She had not written it with me in mind, but the last line of it provided me with the answer I needed-not the answer I wanted-to my dilemma. It read: 'The Truth is that I want It, and the price I must pay is to ask the question again and again and again.'
I understood then the root of my undue agony. The problem was that I had been looking for a voice from God that would not only clearly tell me what to do, but also lift me from any burden of sequential vocation. I wanted a fail-safe formula, a revelation for all time, telling me, 'Yes, go speak, Scotty, always,' or else, 'No, Scotty, don't speak ever.' Instead, I realized what I would need to do each time I spoke, each month, each year, when I renegotiated my schedule, would be to ask the question again and again, 'Hey, God, is this what you want me to be doing?' The discernment of vocation-of what feels right in our hearts-frequently must be an ongoing process.
Meditation may be categorized as a subtype of contemplative prayer. Listening for God is my definition of meditation. It is not the way, however, the word is often used. The essence of Transcendental Meditation (TM), for instance, is attentiveness to a repetitive sound-a mantra -that one says silently to oneself, and not attentiveness to God. Similarly, in many varieties of yoga, the practitioner is taught to attend only to her breathing. These practices are effective techniques for relaxation. As such, I would refer to them as `meditation aids.' They can be helpful- occasionally even required-for us to become sufficiently relaxed that we can begin to meditate, but they are not meditation itself. I come now to the third guideline: emptiness.
Far closer to true meditation, from my point of view, is the Zen Buddhist meditative practice called 'No Mind.' Here the practitioner is instructed not to fill the mind, as with a mantra, but to empty it. This process of emptying the mind is of such importance it will continue to be a significant theme. It is not an easy process. Despite the fact that mystics through the ages have extolled the virtues of emptiness, people are generally quite terrified by it. It may help to remember, therefore, that the purpose of emptying the mind is not ultimately to have nothing there; rather it is to make room in the mind for something new, something unexpected, to come in. What is this something new? It is the voice of God. But God-or life-can speak to us in many ways.
My first day in the fourth grade was a traumatic example. It was not only a new school for me; in entering it I also skipped over the third grade. No sooner was I seated among strange classmates and the door shut than Mr Spicer, our austere teacher, instructed us to prepare to take dictation so that he might ascertain how well we students had retained our academic skills over the summer. The other boys all reached into their desks and extracted fresh pads and pencils. In imitation, I did likewise.
Mr Spicer then began to read a story entitled 'King Bruce and the Spider.' I was puzzled. I could not understand why he was reading it so slowly. Nor could I understand why my new classmates had started to write away so furiously. The problem was I had never heard the word 'dictation' before and had not the foggiest idea what it meant.
But no matter. Despite its painfully slow recounting, I rapidly became totally immersed in the story. It told of how Bruce, a Scottish tribal chieftain, had gone to battle six times in an attempt to unify the tribes of Scotland, and had failed each time. Following the last failure, he had retreated alone, deserted by his soldiers, to a small hut deep in the mountains. In the hut was a single piece of furniture, an old table adjacent to the only window. Bruce was sitting in a corner, huddled in his cloak against the cold, empty of hope, when his eye was caught by a spider as it made a leap from the windowsill toward the table. It missed and fell to the floor. Because he had nothing else to do, being a totally defeated man, Bruce continued to watch the spider scuttle across the floor, up the wall to the windowsill, and leap again for the table. Again it missed. But back to the wall it went. Bruce followed it through four more missed attempts. Finally, on its seventh try, it barely made it. It seemed to be resting on the edge for a minute, and then suddenly it darted through midair back to the windowsill. And back to the table. And back to the windowsill. Bruce realized the spider had began to spin its web.
Bruce contemplated what he had just witnessed. If the spider could have the pertinacity to keep trying, then he himself should not give up on his dream, his vocation. So emboldened, he shortly ventured forth to make the allies and the plans to go back into battle yet one more time. Only this time he won and succeeded in forging Scotland into a new nation with him, Bruce, as its first king.
Mr Spicer had stopped reading. The story was clearly over. But my classmates were still scribbling frantically. I looked over at the little red-haired boy to the left of me to try and figure out why. When he finished, he saw me peering at his paper, raised his hand, and exclaimed in a loud voice, 'Mr Spicer, sir, the new boy next to me is cheating.' Mr Spicer stood up from behind his desk, marched down the aisle, grabbed my pad, and pronounced, 'Why, this paper is empty!'
We stared at each other, he with astonishment, me with dawning horror. 'There isn't anything on it,' he said. 'What's the meaning of this?'
I began to cry, which was hardly the thing for a boy to do on his first day in the fourth grade in a new school. The year did not get off on a good start. But that is not the moral of the tale. I tell it because it is a tale of meditation.
First, it is a tale of Bruce's meditation. Ordinarily, an important, powerful, and busy man would not take time out from affairs of state to watch a lowly spider. Only because he was empty of hope, defeated with nothing else to do, did Bruce allow the spider to fully enter his consciousness. As a result, the very course of history was changed.
It is also a tale of my own unwitting meditation. How many of my fourth-grade classmates, do you suppose, still remember the story of King Bruce and the spider? Not many, I would venture. Yet precisely because I was not busy writing it down-because I was listening-because my paper was empty, blank, I was perhaps the only one who was truly able to hear the story, absorb it, and today recall it almost word for word. Just as something quite profound happened to Bruce, so something profound happened to me.
The goal of meditation, therefore, is not relaxation, but to relax, to slow down sufficiently to silence the chatter and empty the clutter of our everyday minds. The purpose of this silencing, this emptying, is to make room in our minds so as to let in either such indirect revelations as may come from spiders and stories or to more directly hear the voice of God calling in our minds and hearts.
But God does not always speak. Often she is a 'silent God.' While meditation and other forms of contemplative prayer will increase the frequency with which we hear her, they never guarantee it. There are many times when, no matter how desperately we yearn and assiduously pray, the desired revelation does not come. God does not operate according to our schedules. She is not a possession, an 'It.' It is a delight to have a clear calling. There is no longer any doubt, any uncertainty, when we are following our 'bliss.' But we all must also go through our own little `Gardens of Gethsemane,' when there is no voice from God and the place feels utterly empty of God's presence. Frequently, it is not at all clear what the right thing is and the Truth that we want seems murky indeed, no matter how often or loudly we scream the question. Still, there is no alternative except to persevere, to seemingly go it alone and simply do the best we can in the dark.
For this reason, the most crucial form of emptiness is not just that of meditation; it is the emptiness of not knowing. This terrifying emptiness is the ultimate price of the contemplative life, of radically responding to the mysteries of life with full awareness of their mystery. It is also the price of civility. To my mind, one of the best religious books to be published in the past decade is entitled The Myth of Certainty : The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment by Daniel Taylor. The 'illusion of certainty' might be an even better title. It would be a strange God who showered us with certainty, thereby relieving us from any need to exercise courage, initiative, and our capacity to figure things out for ourselves.
But, oh, how we still yearn for certainty!
Far and away the most common question I am asked at lectures is, 'Dr Peck, would you give me the formula so that I know that what I am doing is right?' It comes in a thousand different guises: 'How do I know when to blame somebody or blame myself?"How do I know when to intervene with my child and when to leave him alone?"How can you tell when to get out of a bad marriage or when to keep working on it?' 'How do I know when to challenge my boss?' 'Just where is the dividing line between being sacrificially loving and masochistic?' 'Where do you draw the line between trying to help someone and being codependent?' Note that these are all questions that pertain to issues of civility. And lest it need be endlessly repeated, please remember the answer: 'You don't know. You can never know for certain. But just asking the question is likely to bring you much closer to the right track. Only there are no formulas. Every situation is different. Consequently each and every time you will need to ask the question all over again.'
So the guidelines offered for the discernment of revelation are merely guidelines, and not formulas to relieve you of having to go through empty deserts of uncertainty. Still, there is a sort of formula for the discernment process in general, although hardly a very consoling one. I have previously written an abbreviated version of it in discussing 'the emptiness of not knowing.' The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind in the right direction or the wrong direction. It is therefore impossible ever to know that what you are doing is right, since knowing is a function of consciousness. However, if your will is steadfastly to the good, and if you are willing to suffer fully when the good seems ambiguous (which, to me, is about ninety eight percent of the time), then your unconscious will always be one step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. In other words, the Holy Spirit will lead you and you will do the right thing. Only you won't have the luxury of knowing it at the time you're doing it. Indeed, you will do the right thing precisely because you have been willing to forgo that luxury.
If you are unclear about what this formula means, you might want to consider its opposite and remember that most of the evil in this world-the incivility-is committed by people who are absolutely certain that they know what they're doing.
Extracted From M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to be Born
I have a very full and busy life and occasionally am asked, 'Scotty, how can you do all that you do?' There are multiple answers, including being blessed by a superb staff. But the most telling reply I can give is: 'Because I spend at least two hours a day doing nothing.' Ironically, the questioner usually responds by saying he's too busy to do that.
My two hours doing nothing are the most important hours of the day for me. I do not take them all in one gulp. usually they are distributed into three forty-minute periods: shortly after I first awaken, in the late afternoon, and again before I sleep. They are 'alone' times, times of quiet and solitude. I could not survive without them.
I refer to these periods as my 'prayer time.' During them I actually spend no more than five to ten percent of the time in what most people would call prayer: talking to God. And no more than five to ten percent in meditation: listening for God. Ninety percent of the time I'm just thinking. But if I called it my thinking or contemplation time people would feel free to interrupt it. So I call it my prayer time instead to make it seem holy, which it is. It's another one of the benefits of being a 'religious person.'
Even though I am an introverted, introspective person by nature, setting aside these prayer times did not come naturally to me. I had to have some outside help. Fifteen years ago, when I first asked her to fill the role, my new spiritual director immediately inquired about my prayer life, 'Oh, I've got a rich prayer life,' I informed her. I pray all the time. I pray when I'm out walking. I pray when I'm going to sleep. I often pray silently when I'm seeing a patient and I don't know what the hell else to do.' '
Do you set aside specific times during the day to pray?' she asked next, looking quite innocent in her nun's habit.
'No,' I replied. 'That feels stultifying to me. Kind of rigid and unspontaneous.' `
'Maybe so,' she countered, `but what I hear you saying is you communicate with God whenever you feel like it. That seems to me like a very one-way relationship. If you love God as much as you say you do-and I suspect you do, Scotty why then I think you owe it to him to make yourself available to him at certain times whether you feel like it or not.'
So it was I began to carve out my prayer times. It took a little effort. It felt somewhat unnatural at first. But it is our glory as human beings that we have it within our power to change our nature when we need to. It also felt rigid and unnatural when my parents first demanded I brush my teeth, yet it has long since become 'second nature' to me. I would feel unnatural not brushing my teeth now. Just as it would feel unnatural not to take my prayer time. If you don't want to have time for prayer, fine. But please don't tell me you're too busy, because setting aside this time will shortly make your life all the more efficient. Don't let anything stand in your way. You don't have to get dressed up for these occasions. You don't have to get on your knees. All you have to do is be available. When I returned for my second visit with my spiritual director, feeling like the most depraved individual in the world, I asked her if it was all right for me to smoke when I prayed.
'That's a surprisingly common question,' she said with a smile, 'so common we have a standard answer: If you can pray when you smoke, then you can smoke when you pray.'
Spiritual directors tend to have a way of being tough and consoling. Like God herself, prayer has never been adequately defined. And never will be. It is too large, too deep, too multidimensional and paradoxical.
It can be divided into types and subtypes, if you will: prayers of praise, of thanksgiving, of confession and contrition; petitionary and intercessionary prayer; formal and informal prayer; verbal and wordless prayer, and so on. Here only one type will be considered: contemplative prayer. Entire books have been written about contemplative prayer alone, so this book on civility must restrict itself to brief mention of only a few aspects.
Contemplative prayer may be looked at as a life-style. If so, it is a life-style dedicated to maximum awareness. Those who adopt it--contemplatives-desire to become as conscious as they can possibly be. To this end, they set aside vast amounts of time for quiet and solitude. After a while this requires little discipline; they need and yearn for such time.
They do not see this as time wasting. To the contrary, they feel it is the most efficient and cost-effective way to live. For them, as Plato put it in the Dialogues, 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' What we contemplatives do during our precious quiet times is to examine our lives. We enjoy experience, but only in relatively small doses. What we like to do is take a little bit of experience and, by contemplating it, milk it for all it's worth. We believe that in this way we can ultimately learn more-become more conscious-than those who lead more frenetic lives crammed with far greater amounts of unreflective experience.
One of the things I am continually doing during my prayer time is checking out my life with my Ideal Observer. 'Tell me, God,' I am asking, 'what I just did or what I am thinking of doing-how does it look through your eyes? Does it look civil?'
I have spoken about how a major function of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is the development and exercise of our observing ego and, hence, our capacity to utilize an Ideal Observer. In fact, much of such therapy might be looked upon as a variety of contemplative prayer. It is both similarly and properly habituating. psychotherapists are so frequently asked the question 'How do you know when it is time to leave therapy?' that they have come up with a fairly standard answer: 'When you have become your own therapist, so that therapy has become a way of life for you.'
Another similarity is the issue of time. Just as many will protest that they don't have time for a more contemplative life-style, so many complain that 'therapy takes so much time.' Yet in reality, as with other varieties of contemplation, it is often a profoundly cost-effective process. Another standard question is, 'Since we're all neurotic, how do you know when to go into therapy?' and, again, there is a standard answer: 'When you're stuck.' People who enter therapy frequently do so because of an accurate sense that they are spinning their wheels. And if therapy is successful, when they leave-when they are unstuck-they do so with a deep sense that all the time and money was well spent-a small price to pay for the increased efficiency and effectiveness of their liberated lives.
We contemplatives pay attention not only to our outward experiences but also to our inner voices. Indeed, those of us who are religious believe that God actually often speaks to us through such voices: that they may be revelations. We further believe that a contemplative life-style dramatically increases either the frequency with which God speaks to us or else our capacity to hear her.
For instance, both in psychotherapy and out, we pay attention to our dreams because they may be such revelations. I say `may' be. I think only a small minority are messages from God and that most of our night dreams are dross. How then do you separate the gold from this dross? The same question arises with other internal voices. How do we know when that 'still small voice' is the voice of the Holy Spirit as opposed to simply that of our glands, or possibly even the voice of Satan? This is the issue-the problem-of 'discernment of revelation.' It is an enormously important issue. Were it not a distraction, the subject would deserve several chapters in and of itself. There are no formalistic solutions to the problem, but there are guidelines. Here I shall only touch upon three. I call them the guidelines of time, heart, and emptiness.
The first and most crucial guideline is to take time. It takes time-thinking time or contemplative time-to discern whether a dream is pregnant with hidden meaning or whether it is more likely a mere distraction resulting from random neuronal activity. It takes time to test all our inner messages (after we've taken the time to listen to them in the first place), to check them out against reality and reason and experience, to question their wisdom and creativity. Except in the rarest of circumstances, beware of instant revelations! Beware of them in yourself, and beware of others when their every thought or feeling is immediately ascribed the status of godly wisdom or origin.
In summary, it takes time to think. It takes time to become conscious. And since consciousness is the major root of civility, it takes time to be civil. Indeed, the desire to be as civil as possible is a deep motive for the contemplative life. Over and again it has been made clear to me that it is probably not possible for someone to be a deeply civil person without nurturing her or his contemplative side.
To my mind, the best of the works of the controversial theologian Matthew Fox is his early book about prayer, On Becoming a Musical Mystical Bear. Although not wholly adequate, his definition of prayer is still my favorite. It is a definition that doesn't even use the word God. Fox defines it as 'a radical response to the mysteries of life.' Three things make this definition so meaningful to me. The first is the word radical, which comes from the Latin radix, for 'root.' It implies that prayer requires that we get to the root of things without being distracted by superficialities. We must think deeply about our lives, which, of course, takes time. It is a contemplative definition.
The second is the word response. It implies that through prayer we must not only think deeply but also translate our thinking into action. We need to behave out of deep thoughtfulness. Such behaviour is civility if we assume, as I do, that deep thoughtfulness will result in both consciousness and submission to a Higher Power.
Finally, it implies that life is an inherently mysterious business and that there are no easy answers or simple formulas. Even those answers we arrive at through our very best thinking will not necessarily be crystal-clear ones that relieve us from the burden of taking risks.
As mentioned, Fox designated 'the mystery of vocation' as one of the six greatest mysteries of life to which we need respond. So it is that to be civil, we must struggle with such questions already raised as 'Who am I meant to be?"What is God calling me to do in this instance, in this organization, in my career?' 'Why me?' And, after all our struggling, the proper response will still likely require some leap of faith. Furthermore, to be civil, we must struggle to discern not only our own vocations but also the vocations of others. The following sections on the family and business will demonstrate the need to assess the vocations of our spouses, our children, our subordinates, and even those of our coworkers and supervisors. And respond with the kind of faith demanded by 'submission to a Higher Power.'
There are no formulas. In regard to the discernment of vocation, however, theologian Frederick Buechner does offer a second guideline:
There are all different kinds of voices calling you to do all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God, rather than that of society, say, or the superego, or self-interest. By and large, a good rule for finding this out is the following: the kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do, and (b) that the world needs most to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you've presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing deodorant commercials, the chances are, you've missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you've probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you're bored and depressed by your work, the chances are that you've not only bypassed (a), but probably aren't helping your patients much either. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.This is what I call the guidelines of the heart. Eight years ago, at a moment of intense struggle over whether to take on a new task that the world very much seemed to need done even though I was feeling depleted of energy, I made my only emergency phone call to my spiritual director. 'God never calls someone to do something that doesn't feel right in his heart,' she told me. It was a piece of advice I have used a number of times since.
It is not, however, a simple piece of advice. Joseph Campbell's expression of the vocational guideline of the heart, 'Follow your bliss,' has recently become very popular. It is valid for many occasions, but not for some others. When Jesus, for instance, sweating blood in sheer terror in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted his calling to go to the cross, he was not following his bliss. He did, I believe, choose the cross because it was the only alternative that felt right in his heart. But it was hardly a blissful alternative.
So, from time to time-not too often, mind you - we may be called to make some 'radical response' to life that is actually sacrificial. At such times, precisely because it is not blissful, the call, as it did for Jesus, may feel quite murky. Moreover, since life is continually changing and evolving, these murky 'judgment calls'-to use a play on words-may have to be made repeatedly.
When I first began to lecture, I didn't know whether it was the right thing. Was it something God was calling me to or was I just on a narcissistic ego trip, eager for the roar of the crowd? I agonized incessantly over the question. A woman who sponsored my second speaking engagement, with whom I had shared my agony, sent me a poem she had written a month later. She had not written it with me in mind, but the last line of it provided me with the answer I needed-not the answer I wanted-to my dilemma. It read: 'The Truth is that I want It, and the price I must pay is to ask the question again and again and again.'
I understood then the root of my undue agony. The problem was that I had been looking for a voice from God that would not only clearly tell me what to do, but also lift me from any burden of sequential vocation. I wanted a fail-safe formula, a revelation for all time, telling me, 'Yes, go speak, Scotty, always,' or else, 'No, Scotty, don't speak ever.' Instead, I realized what I would need to do each time I spoke, each month, each year, when I renegotiated my schedule, would be to ask the question again and again, 'Hey, God, is this what you want me to be doing?' The discernment of vocation-of what feels right in our hearts-frequently must be an ongoing process.
Meditation may be categorized as a subtype of contemplative prayer. Listening for God is my definition of meditation. It is not the way, however, the word is often used. The essence of Transcendental Meditation (TM), for instance, is attentiveness to a repetitive sound-a mantra -that one says silently to oneself, and not attentiveness to God. Similarly, in many varieties of yoga, the practitioner is taught to attend only to her breathing. These practices are effective techniques for relaxation. As such, I would refer to them as `meditation aids.' They can be helpful- occasionally even required-for us to become sufficiently relaxed that we can begin to meditate, but they are not meditation itself. I come now to the third guideline: emptiness.
Far closer to true meditation, from my point of view, is the Zen Buddhist meditative practice called 'No Mind.' Here the practitioner is instructed not to fill the mind, as with a mantra, but to empty it. This process of emptying the mind is of such importance it will continue to be a significant theme. It is not an easy process. Despite the fact that mystics through the ages have extolled the virtues of emptiness, people are generally quite terrified by it. It may help to remember, therefore, that the purpose of emptying the mind is not ultimately to have nothing there; rather it is to make room in the mind for something new, something unexpected, to come in. What is this something new? It is the voice of God. But God-or life-can speak to us in many ways.
My first day in the fourth grade was a traumatic example. It was not only a new school for me; in entering it I also skipped over the third grade. No sooner was I seated among strange classmates and the door shut than Mr Spicer, our austere teacher, instructed us to prepare to take dictation so that he might ascertain how well we students had retained our academic skills over the summer. The other boys all reached into their desks and extracted fresh pads and pencils. In imitation, I did likewise.
Mr Spicer then began to read a story entitled 'King Bruce and the Spider.' I was puzzled. I could not understand why he was reading it so slowly. Nor could I understand why my new classmates had started to write away so furiously. The problem was I had never heard the word 'dictation' before and had not the foggiest idea what it meant.
But no matter. Despite its painfully slow recounting, I rapidly became totally immersed in the story. It told of how Bruce, a Scottish tribal chieftain, had gone to battle six times in an attempt to unify the tribes of Scotland, and had failed each time. Following the last failure, he had retreated alone, deserted by his soldiers, to a small hut deep in the mountains. In the hut was a single piece of furniture, an old table adjacent to the only window. Bruce was sitting in a corner, huddled in his cloak against the cold, empty of hope, when his eye was caught by a spider as it made a leap from the windowsill toward the table. It missed and fell to the floor. Because he had nothing else to do, being a totally defeated man, Bruce continued to watch the spider scuttle across the floor, up the wall to the windowsill, and leap again for the table. Again it missed. But back to the wall it went. Bruce followed it through four more missed attempts. Finally, on its seventh try, it barely made it. It seemed to be resting on the edge for a minute, and then suddenly it darted through midair back to the windowsill. And back to the table. And back to the windowsill. Bruce realized the spider had began to spin its web.
Bruce contemplated what he had just witnessed. If the spider could have the pertinacity to keep trying, then he himself should not give up on his dream, his vocation. So emboldened, he shortly ventured forth to make the allies and the plans to go back into battle yet one more time. Only this time he won and succeeded in forging Scotland into a new nation with him, Bruce, as its first king.
Mr Spicer had stopped reading. The story was clearly over. But my classmates were still scribbling frantically. I looked over at the little red-haired boy to the left of me to try and figure out why. When he finished, he saw me peering at his paper, raised his hand, and exclaimed in a loud voice, 'Mr Spicer, sir, the new boy next to me is cheating.' Mr Spicer stood up from behind his desk, marched down the aisle, grabbed my pad, and pronounced, 'Why, this paper is empty!'
We stared at each other, he with astonishment, me with dawning horror. 'There isn't anything on it,' he said. 'What's the meaning of this?'
I began to cry, which was hardly the thing for a boy to do on his first day in the fourth grade in a new school. The year did not get off on a good start. But that is not the moral of the tale. I tell it because it is a tale of meditation.
First, it is a tale of Bruce's meditation. Ordinarily, an important, powerful, and busy man would not take time out from affairs of state to watch a lowly spider. Only because he was empty of hope, defeated with nothing else to do, did Bruce allow the spider to fully enter his consciousness. As a result, the very course of history was changed.
It is also a tale of my own unwitting meditation. How many of my fourth-grade classmates, do you suppose, still remember the story of King Bruce and the spider? Not many, I would venture. Yet precisely because I was not busy writing it down-because I was listening-because my paper was empty, blank, I was perhaps the only one who was truly able to hear the story, absorb it, and today recall it almost word for word. Just as something quite profound happened to Bruce, so something profound happened to me.
The goal of meditation, therefore, is not relaxation, but to relax, to slow down sufficiently to silence the chatter and empty the clutter of our everyday minds. The purpose of this silencing, this emptying, is to make room in our minds so as to let in either such indirect revelations as may come from spiders and stories or to more directly hear the voice of God calling in our minds and hearts.
But God does not always speak. Often she is a 'silent God.' While meditation and other forms of contemplative prayer will increase the frequency with which we hear her, they never guarantee it. There are many times when, no matter how desperately we yearn and assiduously pray, the desired revelation does not come. God does not operate according to our schedules. She is not a possession, an 'It.' It is a delight to have a clear calling. There is no longer any doubt, any uncertainty, when we are following our 'bliss.' But we all must also go through our own little `Gardens of Gethsemane,' when there is no voice from God and the place feels utterly empty of God's presence. Frequently, it is not at all clear what the right thing is and the Truth that we want seems murky indeed, no matter how often or loudly we scream the question. Still, there is no alternative except to persevere, to seemingly go it alone and simply do the best we can in the dark.
For this reason, the most crucial form of emptiness is not just that of meditation; it is the emptiness of not knowing. This terrifying emptiness is the ultimate price of the contemplative life, of radically responding to the mysteries of life with full awareness of their mystery. It is also the price of civility. To my mind, one of the best religious books to be published in the past decade is entitled The Myth of Certainty : The Reflective Christian and the Risk of Commitment by Daniel Taylor. The 'illusion of certainty' might be an even better title. It would be a strange God who showered us with certainty, thereby relieving us from any need to exercise courage, initiative, and our capacity to figure things out for ourselves.
But, oh, how we still yearn for certainty!
Far and away the most common question I am asked at lectures is, 'Dr Peck, would you give me the formula so that I know that what I am doing is right?' It comes in a thousand different guises: 'How do I know when to blame somebody or blame myself?"How do I know when to intervene with my child and when to leave him alone?"How can you tell when to get out of a bad marriage or when to keep working on it?' 'How do I know when to challenge my boss?' 'Just where is the dividing line between being sacrificially loving and masochistic?' 'Where do you draw the line between trying to help someone and being codependent?' Note that these are all questions that pertain to issues of civility. And lest it need be endlessly repeated, please remember the answer: 'You don't know. You can never know for certain. But just asking the question is likely to bring you much closer to the right track. Only there are no formulas. Every situation is different. Consequently each and every time you will need to ask the question all over again.'
So the guidelines offered for the discernment of revelation are merely guidelines, and not formulas to relieve you of having to go through empty deserts of uncertainty. Still, there is a sort of formula for the discernment process in general, although hardly a very consoling one. I have previously written an abbreviated version of it in discussing 'the emptiness of not knowing.' The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind in the right direction or the wrong direction. It is therefore impossible ever to know that what you are doing is right, since knowing is a function of consciousness. However, if your will is steadfastly to the good, and if you are willing to suffer fully when the good seems ambiguous (which, to me, is about ninety eight percent of the time), then your unconscious will always be one step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. In other words, the Holy Spirit will lead you and you will do the right thing. Only you won't have the luxury of knowing it at the time you're doing it. Indeed, you will do the right thing precisely because you have been willing to forgo that luxury.
If you are unclear about what this formula means, you might want to consider its opposite and remember that most of the evil in this world-the incivility-is committed by people who are absolutely certain that they know what they're doing.
Extracted From M Scott Peck's A World Waiting to be Born
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