Thomas Merton

You should be meditating.

/ antonioyrocinante / 2 Comments

Stop, inhale, focusing on the air entering your nostrils or your lungs. Exhale, focusing on the air leaving your lungs or your nostrils. There, you did it!! For a brief time, you didn’t worry about what’s for dinner, your bills, the weather, what you were going to tell your boss, your customer, or your friend. You didn’t think about politics, and you weren’t scrolling through social media. You had a moment —albeit a very short one—of meditation. The trick is to do that exact exercise with your breathing for 5, 10, 20 minutes, or half an hour. The longer you do it, and the more often you do it, the better you will feel.

My dear friend Paco encouraged me to try meditating while I was in a deep, dark depression over ten years ago. It was not easy for a hyperactive fellow like me to embrace it, but now I cannot live without some quiet time every day. And although I have written about meditation here before, it was usually in passing while talking about health and mental health in general.

This all comes to mind because I recently had the opportunity to see and hear Paco give a presentation on Christian Meditation at the Antonio Azorín bookstore in El Escorial. He filled the room and had a wonderful talk. I originally thought the attendees were curious about meditation, but during the Q&A, I realized some of them were very advanced, although from different “schools” of meditation —see below.

There are many labels for meditation, just like there are many different philosophies and methods: Mindfulness Meditation, Mantra Meditation, Zen Meditation (Zazen), Vipassana Meditation, Transcendental Meditation (TM), or Body Scan Meditation. The ancient Fathers and Mothers of the desert, the early Christians, also developed a method of meditation which nowadays is called Christian meditation, or even centering prayer. Some recent Catholic proponents of meditation might be Thomas Keating, Thomas Merton, or Richard Rohr.

Whichever way you choose to sit down in silence is fine. Of course, nowadays you can use an app on your phone to time your sits, or to guide you. I have been using Insight Timer for years, and I love it!

Every class I teach at school starts with one minute of silence. This time is a buffer between whatever the students were doing before and class, between English and Spanish; it is a moment to regroup, to breathe, and for me, it is a minute of meditation.

Recently, Maria Popova also wrote about the importance of spending time alone and in silence, not exactly meditation, but close to it. Check it out here.

So carve out a few minutes from your day: when you wake up, before you go to sleep, in the middle of the day, or, paradoxically, if you are really busy, more than once a day. Whatever works for you, sit down, and start focusing on your breathing. You are welcome.

Oh, you should definitely check out this video of Villanova’s Fr. Martin Laird on the benefits of meditation. It is a bit long, but worth it!!

Yes, you need a silence and meditation retreat,

/ antonioyrocinante / 1 Comment

Unless, of course, you are a Zen master or a monk or a nun. This is my third such retreat, but my last time here was in February of 2020, the week right before the Covid lockdown. Since then, I started a new job far away in Florida which means I only come to Spain for the holidays and that time is pretty busy with family, friends, chores, etc. and although I had been meaning to get out here, things do not happen unless you make the commitment, so here I am.

El Paular monastery is an ancient (1390) Medieval monastery built in the confluence of two or three streams where a hermit used to live. The monastery was originally of the Carthusian order, but it got dismantled in the 19th Century and re-started again in 1948 under the Benedictine order. It currently has eleven monks, which is a couple more than when I was last here!

The journey here brings you over the mighty Guadarrama mountains, specifically the 2000mt Navacerrada pass. That is your first threshold, leaving Madrid far away. The descent on the other side is your second signal that you are entering a new world. And then, there you are, face to face with what used to be a massive monastery, which is now a fraction of what it once was, but still beautiful and awe inspiring.

The first thing you notice stepping into the cloister is the silence, there are no TVs, radios, music, nothing other than the birds chirping. Then you notice the rhythm, the pace. There is no rush here, everything works pretty much the same way it did over six centuries ago. Then you notice the massive 52 Vicente Carducho paintings depicting the history of the Carthusian order!

As for the retreat, you get a cell which is a perfectly nice room with a bed and a desk, and a bathroom with great water pressure and even better views of the mountains!

You are encouraged to pray with the monks five times a day:

6:30 Maitines

8:00 Laudes before breakfast

2:00 Sexta before lunch

8:00 Vísperas before dinner

10:00 Completas

One does not talk with the monks unless the monks talk to you, which when they do is briefly. You eat your meals in silence in the refectory -well, there is a reader, yesterday they were reading Merton’s biography!

Other than that, you are free to go walking in the mountains, or to the village a couple of miles away, but that kind of breaks the silence –unless you did not pack enough socks and you have to venture into the village to get some. You spend most of the day reading, writing, meditating.

The abbot is my spiritual director, so when I come, we spend some time talking. Padre Joaquín, like all the monks emanates spirituality, patience, love. Being in the presence of the monks brings down your blood pressure, after all these guys have the key to happiness. It is scientifically proven that monks are the happiest people in the world!

Yes, I have my phone, but it spends a lot of time just sitting in my cell. I take it with me on my walks mostly so I can take photos. This is the beginning of feeling free… (to be continued)

Libraries (continued)

/ antonioyrocinante / Leave a comment

I have the privilege of working on a beautiful campus. There is a pond smack in the middle, there are a couple of gazebos for meditating, there is a beautiful chapel (arguably the most beautiful building in Boynton Beach), there is even a tree swing! There is also a beautiful library. It is not a massive library, it is rather quaint by university standards but still, it is a lovely library.

This is where it gets interesting: In order to get to my office, you have to go through or around the library, through is the much faster route.

So not only do I walk by the periodicals section where I can -at a glance- look at the new magazines coming in, then I lower my blood pressure by walking through the peaceful, quiet stacks, and right before getting to my office, there is a shelf with free books that the library no longer wants. This is my perdition.

I wrote about libraries and bookstores recently (ok, a year and a half is recently for dinosaurs like me), but that was before I had to work next to the goodie room that is the “Free books” shelves outside my office!

Over the months I have collected many varied books. My most recent find – and the detonator for this blog – was a first edition 1944 Divine Comedy with drawings by William Blake. Last year a retired history professor went into an assisted living facility, and he donated his whole library! It was chock-full of great books of which I got a good number of. And since my office is next door to these books, I always have first choice. In fact, sometimes I have even help the librarian stack the free books as he rolls them out!

The Camino is what the world should be like

/ antonioyrocinante / 1 Comment

Pyrenees on day 1 of the French way
Need we say more?
Remember to stay hydrated
Keep on walkin’
No filters. Photo cred KK
Exactly what Thomas Merton is saying
Downhill, uphill, no difference
Smell the pines

Three months have passed since I finished my Camino for the year. I have had time to think and process my pilgrimage. In the meantime, a student from UNC interviewed me about my experience on The Camino, which helped me to vocalize my feelings about the experience.

My conclusion is that The Camino is what the world should be like. Pilgrims are generous,  considerate, and kind, we are all fairly equal, united in the task of walking to Santiago. Add to this the human and humane pace of walking, allowing you to talk to others, to enjoy the beautiful scenery, there are no unwanted interruptions, there is no need for technology. There are no hidden interests, we are all just walking and that is pretty much all there is to it. You can walk faster or slower, you can stop wherever you want. It really is a parallel world that is as much of a real world utopia as you can find.

I recently read this passage from Thomas Merton, a real modern-day mystic, and I immediately connected it to my Camino experience:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. . . . This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being [hu]man, a member of a race in which God . . . became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now [that] I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. . . . Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.

Unfortunately The Camino ends, and one returns to the world we have created. We return to noise and pollution, but even worse: to rude and aggressive people, to rushing, to everything we have constructed that separates us from peace, and beauty, and truth.