By Father Thomas Ryan
Distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age. We need to practice paying attention. Think of your attention as a muscle. As with any muscle, it makes sense to exercise it, and like any muscle, it will strengthen from that exercise.
Thus said the cover story of the Feb. 3 issue of Time magazine entitled “The Mindful Revolution: The science of finding focus in a stressed-out, multitasking culture.”
The article reports that researchers have found that multitasking leads to lower overall productivity. Students and workers who constantly switch between tasks make more mistakes.
The writer Kate Pickert confessed to being, like so many, hyperconnected, with a Blackberry for work and an iPhone for personal use, a desktop computer at the office and a laptop and iPad at home. “It’s rare that I let an hour go without looking at a screen,” she wrote.
Many of us can relate! The disorder of our time is OCD: obsessive checking disorder. The focus of the article is on a solution to the problem: meditation.
Quieting a busy mind
The meditation method described is called mindfulness meditation. If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then mindfulness is the most logical response. And meditation is considered an essential means to achieving mindfulness. The ultimate goal is to simply give your attention fully to what you’re doing.
The method has been packaged and popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who learned it from Buddhism, personally experienced its beneficent effects, and recognized its positive potential for others.
Zinn subsequently developed a teaching program called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, and today there are close to 1,000 certified instructors teaching mindfulness techniques across North America and internationally. The techniques are intended to help practitioners quiet a busy mind, become more aware of the present moment and less caught up in what happened earlier or what’s up ahead.
Pickert grants that this may sound like New Age retread, but observes that one of the smart marketing things Kabat-Zinn has done is to avoid any talk of spirituality in espousing mindfulness and to simply use a commonsense approach. Example: These attention-focusing techniques, including meditation, will help you free up mental space for creativity and big thinking.
Deepening communion with God
Isn’t it sad that we are so ready to settle for less. In the early 1970s the Benedictine monk John Main at Ealing Abbey in England pulled together the teachings on meditation in the Christian tradition and opened a Christian Meditation Center in his monastery that soon began to draw many people.
The auxiliary bishop of Montreal, Leonard Crowley, invited him to come and open a meditation center there in 1977. Main did, and it drew so many that the small Benedictine community there was overwhelmed. Today, it is centered in London, England, and has a worldwide network called the World Community of Christian Meditation.
About the same time in the second half of the ’70s three Trappist monks at Spencer Abbey in Massachusetts — William Menninger, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating — were also putting order into the scattered elements of the Christian tradition of meditative prayer and, like Main had done, packaging it with an eye toward our contemporary inclination for simple, clear, how-to instructions. They called it Centering Prayer.
The beauty of the teachings in both these ongoing traditions of meditative prayer is that there is no felt need whatsoever to avoid mentioning spirituality. The whole point of the practice is to open oneself to the core experience of the spiritual life: a conscious, deepening communion with God.
Heart-to-heart
For Christians, that translates into a heart-to-heart relationship with the person of Christ and the indwelling Trinity who have come to make their home in us. Coming to this awareness of the indwelling divine presence is the birthright of all Christians, the natural development of the grace of baptism. It is that communion with the divine which is the longing of our hearts and our deepest fulfillment.
This form of mindfulness meditation isn’t content to stop with simply enriching your life each day by helping you become more fully present in the moment. It explicitly invites you to develop the capacity of your mystical heart to become aware of the Mystery present to you always and everywhere.
Mindfulness meditation is certainly good as far as it goes, but why settle for half a loaf? Could this be yet another example of how our secular culture both needs and is enriched by the perspectives of faith?
Paulist Father Thomas Ryan directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in Washington, D.C.
Posted Feb. 4, 2014