Staying and Healing

Many of you know and love the teaching of the Carmelite Ruth Burrows that, ‘Basing ourselves on what Jesus shows us of God…we must realise that what we have to do is allow ourselves to be loved, to be there for Love to love us.’ (1)

It is a simple sentence about something it can take us a long time, perhaps a lifetime, to learn. For many, it also overturns much of how they might have been taught to think about the spiritual life.
We might have been taught that growth comes through what we do for God. But if God is Love, if God is as disclosed in the life of Jesus, then our primary spiritual stance is not doing something for God, but consenting, allowing, receiving.

Our deepest growth comes from remaining open to Love. And it is this that we so often find challenging.

Our wandering thoughts

Many of us live much of our lives with our minds scattered and dispersed in a multitude of directions. Instead of living with our attention gathered in the present, we spend a great deal of time mentally elsewhere, lost in nostalgia or regret about the past, or in worry and wishful thinking about the future. We long for peace, but we are pulled in every direction.

The problem is often not simply distraction. Sometimes the reason we cannot stay is that staying means feeling. When we become still, staying where we are means meeting how we are. We come into contact with what is present within us, with what we might be carrying. Grief, perhaps. Or disappointment. Perhaps loneliness, or unresolved anger. Fear.

Our wandering thoughts are not always entirely random. Sometimes they are thrown up as a protective screen. But the effect of always following them can be to keep us moving, moving, moving, so that we do not remain here, in one place, long enough to learn that we can meet what is present, long enough be healed and find peace.

So how do we learn to be here ‘for Love to love us’?

The early Christian contemplatives known as the desert fathers and mothers understood that stability, simply staying where you are, was itself transformative. ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,’ they said.

Most of us do not have a monastic hermitage to pop into. But that doesn’t matter, because the real cell, the place to practice staying, is not a building, but the cell of our heart.

To ‘sit in our cell’ is to come home to our centre, to the centre. It is to stop living only in the scattered surface of the mind and touch the depths of our being, which is God. Learning to stay quietly where we are is a powerful medicine of the desert wisdom tradition.

The great desert mother Syncletica was famous for training her followers to cultivate gentleness and patience. In a saying about staying, she uses the maternal image of a gentle and patient mother to warn us not to wander from place to place. We must learn to sit like a mother hen on her eggs and stop wandering. We need stay if the eggs of wisdom and healing are to hatch.

In another saying with a lovely maternal image, a novice asks an elder what to do about his wandering thoughts, which were troubling him. ‘Go on sitting in your cell,’ the elder advises, ‘and your thoughts will come back from their wanderings.’

The elder likens the practice of staying where we are to being like a mother donkey that has been tethered. If the mind is tethered, the foal-like thoughts will skip and play and run all around her, but they will eventually run out of energy, calm down, and come back to her.

‘It is like that for anyone who for God’s sake sits patiently in their cell,’ says the elder. ‘Though their thoughts wander for a time, they will come back to Him again.’

Sitting in the cell of the heart

In meditation, we practice staying where we are, sitting in the cell of the heart. Saying our prayer word, following our breath, the mind is gently gathered, the defended heart softens. We are not achieving something. We are consenting. We are allowing something to happen.

The desert wisdom is simple. Learn to stay where you are, to be present. Allow yourself to be loved, to be here for Love to love you.