Taste and See - Christian Mindfulness
Spoken Word by: Michael Rudisill | Download video HERE
On January 12, 2007 on a Washington D.C. subway platform, something amazing and beautiful happened. Over the course of about 45 minutes, the famous concert violinist Joshua Bell performed several classical masterpieces for everyone present. Thousands of people had the opportunity to enjoy a free concert that normally would have cost $100 per seat. The problem was nobody really noticed. People continued to rush on, preoccupied by their own busy lives. Security footage from that day revealed only 6 people stopped to listen for more than a few minutes. How much do we miss when we are always rushing from one thing to the next, caught in an endless cycle of progress and movement? What don’t we see? What can’t we smell? What is our body numb to? What becomes tasteless?
Thich Naht Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, believed that we constantly face the dangers of “going without arriving.” What he meant by that statement is that we often give our complete attention to the destination we are trying to reach, forgetting the importance of the steps we take to get there. We fly through life with tunnel vision, only able to see the goals we are trying to attain. We no longer have time for surprises, unexpected adventures, and unforeseen beauty. We keep pressing forward, impatiently awaiting the time when we have ‘arrived.’ How often we forget that God is present in every moment.
“To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
These words speak to the importance of mindfulness—the importance of being fully present in each and every moment. Mindfulness is so essential because God is present in each and every moment. God is present in those major life-changing events in our lives: the weddings, the funerals, the celebrations and the heartbreaks. God is also present in each of those events we experience every day that seem meaningless: in the commute to work, in brushing our teeth, in washing the dishes. In the book Backpacking with the Saints by Belden C. Lane, Lane writes “to do anything with the totality of consciousness is nothing less than extraordinary.” How much more fulfilling could each moment be if we brought our full selves into it? How much more could we experience God? Mindfulness requires a shift in perception. Lane uses the imagery of washing dishes. What if we washed the dishes to simply wash the dishes? Taking the focus away from the goal of making the dishes clean, the act of washing dishes becomes an end into itself. We become present in the act, not the end.
The practice of mindfulness requires both the ability to welcome a moment as it happens, as well as release a moment as it leaves. It requires the humility to say “these moments don’t belong to me” and to remember that each of us can only ever be present in a moment. It requires us to release any need for control with the understanding that we never really had any control anyway. We can sit and be present in each moment without our own emotions and biases stealing away our attention. We can intentionally open ourselves to experiencing God in each moment—to a continuous relationship making our entire selves a prayer. In his book titled Gracias, Henri Nouwen describes the continuous sounds he heard in Bolivia: the children laughing and playing, the birds chirping, the dogs barking, the people going from place to place. Nouwen recognized those sounds together as an unceasing chorus of prayer, the sounds of life as one long, endless prayer to our creator.
Nouwen noted: “How sad it is that thinking often makes prayers cease.”
Today the practice of mindfulness seems more distant and unattainable than ever. In the quote above, Nouwen describes how our own thoughts—whether over-analyzing, overthinking, or simple wandering thoughts—can silence our own prayers. Our thoughts can become a barrier to mindfulness, to the prayer associated with recognizing God in every moment. With the complete integration of smartphones and social media into our society, the ability to be fully present in any one single moment seems to be a distant memory. Even in those moments we call the most important we often spend more time and energy trying to capture it on our cameras so we can post our experience (is it even an experience anymore?) to social media. What hope do we have for the more mundane moments if the exciting moments can’t even hold our attention anymore? I believe that’s exactly where we should start—with the mundane and uninteresting. If we can practice mindfulness in those moments, maybe we can relearn how to be truly present in each moment. Maybe we can learn how to see God in each moment. Maybe we can truly make our own selves a continuous, unceasing prayer.