Mindful

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week (11th-17th May), an annual initiative raising awareness of mental health and wellbeing issues. There is a constant need to bring into the open, not least among Christians, the invisible severity of mental illness and the pain of those who live with conditions such as depression and schizophrenia.

This year’s Awareness Week however focuses on a positive strategy which can lead to improvements in our mental and often also our physical health - mindfulness. Mindfulness involves creating space to focus on and lose ourselves in the present moment, to still the deep places in us, to observe our thoughts, motives and reactions.

 I have just finished reading an inspiring book - Cry of wonder by the Scottish Jesuit priest Gerard Hughes who died last year aged 91. It’s an old man’s book, a distillation of a lifetime of wisdom. 

Father Hughes’ spirituality centred on the Spiritual exercises of St Ignatius which encourage us to seek out God at the core of our being, and to observe with discernment the impulses we discover there – some prompting love and goodness, others negativism and darkness.

This Ignatian spirituality is firstly a thoroughly Christian take on mindfulness and secondly a description of something I myself have been learning recently.

I have always found it difficult to ‘be still’. There were rare times when a great peace dropped into my heart and mind, and in the resulting stillness it was easy to talk to God. There was a different kind of totally-absorbed focus as I’d sit with a notebook simply listening to the thoughts and ideas rising up in me.

But more recently, I’ve been learning to look inward. The first lesson was to accept what I find there – including the stuff I don’t welcome: negative and destructive thoughts, guilt and other monsters lurking. It’s easy to turn and run, to label these as ‘the enemy.’ But I realised that these ‘enemies within’ are part of me, and that I can come to God as I am, shadow and light, and  in God’s acceptance and love find myself no longer divided but whole. In this sense of acceptance the dark stuff in me loses its power.

The second lesson was that everything in my heart has something to teach me. I’m learning to listen to and question my moods and emotions, my impulses to act or speak, to hope or to despair, seeking to discern which come from and lead to life, which are sourced in darkness and lead to a dying of light. One thought shows me how much I need to be liked; another that I’m striving for personal significant; yet another reveals part of me as selfish and judgemental. And the very fact of discerning the motive enables me to acknowledge and smile at these impulses while leaving them unactioned.

Where do these positive, creative impulses have their source? Am I simply talking to myself, or as St Ignatius and Gerard Hughes assure us, encountering God? I used to think seeking God was a reaching out to the Beyond. Sometimes a Bible verse or a thought from a sermon or a chapter of a book would come alive in me, but these experiences were comparatively rare. It seemed to me that the God out there was awakening these insights in me remotely almost, and I wished God would be more communicative.

Now I realise that when I am still, and breathe slowly, and step out of my current busyness I find within a well of wisdom and creativity, the well of God’s Spirit which irrigates deep places in us, flowing constantly.

These are my experiences on my clearer-seeing days, which Ignatius would call days of ‘consolation’. (There are other days, days of ‘desolation’ when it seems we cannot find the pathway to the well.) This is not a mystical, other-worldly spirituality, but a spirituality for the everyday, a spirituality of encounter with the God who delights to meet us. Having met God in the stillness, we can enter, and seek grace in, and live out of that quiet place even in the thick of our busyness.

One Scottish writer on ‘Christian mindfulness’ (Richard Johnston) addresses on-line the question of whether mindfulness promotes self-focus rather than God-focus. He quotes John Calvin’s conviction that ‘the knowledge of God and that of ourselves are connected. Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God. Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.’

Finding the well within is neither an esoteric art to master, nor a special gift for special people. Someone who has never thought about God before can enter the stillness with the same confidence as the most dedicated believer and cry ‘I believe! Show me myself, make me whole.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 14th May 2015)