Well, this evening I'd like to talk about prayer, meditation, and contemplation. Talk to a community of monks about prayer. It's sort of like you feel like you're preaching to the choir. What can I say? That's new. I'm sure you've read many books about prayer and had conferences on prayer and the example of elders and a lifetime of exposure to liturgy, psalmody, and so forth. Tomorrow what I'm going to do, the morning conference is going to be, I'm going to lead you on a guided meditation using the Trinity icon. So it'll be basically an experiential conference tomorrow, tomorrow morning. So what I'd like to share with you this evening will be rather simple, but it comes out of my experience and my conviction. One of my favorite Quotations about prayer comes from Joying of Norwich, who says, prayer oneth the person, you know, in your medieval English, oneth us, ones us, unifies us, holds us, integrates us.

[01:14]

Prayer is like the glue, you know, it's the center in our life which everything relates to, or at least should relate to. When Merton was on his way to Asia, I think it was in Alaska, they had a meeting of religious to talk to him, ask him questions. And someone asked him, can you give us some advice about prayer? And this is what he said to them. He said, if you want to pray, pray. if you want to do it. In other words, just don't read books about it or, you know, actually the experience itself will teach you. And here's my basic conviction about prayer, and it comes out of my personal experience. If there's one thing I'd like you to remember out of this conference, it's this. I believe that there's a grace of prayer, and that you should pray to the Holy Spirit to help you pray. It's a gift of the Holy Spirit.

[02:18]

The Holy Spirit, I mean, Jesus says in the gospel, I will send you the Holy Spirit who will teach you all things. So the Holy Spirit is the great teacher of prayer. I think that's the great open secret. I'm preparing for a retreat down in Dallas, and the other presenter is a leading Quaker theologian in the United States. And I've been reading Augustine Baker. to prepare for that because Augustine Baker was talking about silencing the mind and that kind of Quaker silence and so forth. So we want to do a kind of comparative presentation on Benedictine prayer and meditation and Quaker prayer and meditation. Abhishekta Nanda says this, I think I brought it along with me.

[03:22]

The true secret of the life of prayer, and this means the whole life of anyone who is born of God, is to put oneself completely at the disposal of the spirit. Now that's not just a nice, you know, quotation. I really, from my own experience and from knowing some deep people of prayer, in fact I've had two sisters from active religious communities coming for spiritual direction over the years and one time, both of their prayer lines really impressed me and I said, Would you mind telling me, you know, what made the difference in your prayer life?" And both of them came up with that same answer. I prayed for the grace of prayer. I asked the Holy Spirit to help me. So deep prayer flows from faith. And I think the deeper and richer our faith becomes, we just automatically pray and pray deeper. You know, there's a quotation, out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

[04:31]

And if our heart is filled with faith and belief, then just out of our mouth will flow that depth of prayer. And perhaps there's a dialectical relationship between the two, that, you know, the deeper our faith, the deeper our prayer, the deeper our faith will flow. So it helps both ways. Since I do a lot of spiritual direction willy-nilly, I don't put on a board that says spiritual director, but people come and they want help, so I end up talking to them. Many people come wanting to know how to pray or how to pray better. And one of the first things I tell them is to deepen their faith. Are you going to Mass as much as you can? Can you go to daily Mass? Can you read scripture every day? So on. And then there are some people who are very earnest in their spiritual life and, you know, obviously really trying, and they want to deepen their prayer.

[05:35]

And what I tell them is, don't try harder. That's what I usually tell them. I said, if you're finding that you can't pray, maybe what you have to do is open up your heart more, open up your soul. So I recommend that they take a walk in nature and then try to pray then or listen to classical music or sacred music. The true and the good and the beautiful will lead us to prayer. Tell them take a little vacation, you know, just refresh yourself, a new environment. I have a friend in California who's quite earnest, you know, about wanting to deepen her spiritual life. And she talked about a lot of dryness and not being able to pray and so forth, so I gave her Kathleen Norris' book, Acedia, which I found a little bit tough to read. It's kind of a dry book. She faithfully read the whole book and she said, well, that book nailed me.

[06:38]

That book nailed me. So we have to find what expands our heart. The great Benedictine, what was his name? In English, he said, don't pray as you should, or ought, pray as you can. Chapman. Chapman, Chapman, John Chapman. So wonderful, truly Benedictine approach to pray. Point what works for you. Follow your nose. Maybe you can pray better out in nature, whatever. Somebody did a survey of German students, college students, this was 20 years ago or so, and found out that the place where or how they found a sense of the transcendent the most was in nature. So we have to learn how to expand our heart. Philippians 4 says, fill your minds, and I prefer the translation fill your souls, with all that is good and true and noble and worthy of praise.

[07:44]

All that is good and true and noble and worthy of praise. And this will expand your heart. It will create a larger spiritual capacity. Remember I talked the other day about the soul being a vessel. One of the ancients of monastic prayer that is being rediscovered in our own day is Evagrius Ponticus. In Evagrius Ponticus, there's a little paperback that Jeremy Driscoll put together called the Odd Monocos of Evagrius. It's a little essay, maybe 70 pages long. Not even an essay, it's just one-liners that he has about monastic life and monastic prayer. One of the liners that I like very much, he says, a vessel of election, the pure heart. A vessel of election, the pure heart. So he uses the word, the vessel of the heart. And I think sometimes people, you know, our life is so scattered, so hectic nowadays, and there's so much impinging media and so forth, that people have to find their heart.

[08:54]

They have to, you know, the Quaker word for prayer is to center down, to come to our own center and go down. And our society, you know, has all of our psychic energy going outward. I made a 30-day retreat. Well, I didn't make the retreat, but I went with the students from St. Louis University to Manresa in Spain. And since I had never made the Ignatian exercises, I wasn't directing people. I got to just do the business work for the whole month. But it was very interesting because it gave me a month off. I didn't speak Spanish. Nobody was talking during the retreat basically. And so I had the luxury of basically a Benedictine retreat for a month. And seven times during the month I got on a little local train there in Manresa. In a half hour I could get over to Montserrat. So I went to Montserrat seven times in one month. But what I began to notice is that having that space and that silence and just basically one thing to concentrate on, my psyche really was just flourishing in terms of

[10:03]

imagery, and I was having three, four, five dreams a night, believe it or not. I'd write them down in the morning. It was just a wonderful experience of finding, you know, going to the center and going down, and what came up was, you know, a rich experience and an opening of heart, too. I think that was a graceful time. I have to tell you one little amusing story. in the refectory when the participants in the Institute of Religious Formation came down for supper in the evening at the Van Mason Retreat House. The staff met, but I was with the students in the long refectory. There were about eight tables with four people at each table. It was strict silence, and then one night I noticed down at the end We always got wine every night, and everybody was toasting. And we hadn't done that before. I thought it must be somebody's birthday. So I went to the next table.

[11:05]

Somebody whispered what was going on. I went to the next table. I got to the last table where I was. And the sister next to me leaned over and said, this is the anniversary of the day of which St. Ignatius got hit by a cannonball. I think that at that point in the retreat they were, you know, sort of frustrated with Ignatius and his system. Anyhow, it was amusing. So, how to open the heart in, you know, Philippians 4. The truth, the good, the beautiful. Maybe reading a novel like Dostoyevsky or some valuable literature that will open your heart. The Life of the Saint, perhaps. Whatever. And I think Salmati is, you know, a very great way to learn how to pray. You know, the early Christian and early monastic sense of meditatio was not the contemporary modern sense of meditatio.

[12:07]

It was to murmur on the text, the true heart of the text, and to repeat it, to internalize it. So one year, a couple of years ago, I chose from Psalm 51, in the depth of my heart, to pray that all year. He prayed that all year and really tried to internalize it. But I think that psalmody also washes over a person. You know, even if you're sort of half-attentive, you know, and the words are coming out of your mouth, I still think it seeds the unconscious. You know, it drops into a deeper part of us. So the years of saying psalms are extremely formative. And the words that are stated in the Psalms, the expressions, certainly help to relativize the ego, bit by bit. For example, to pray, O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me, recognizes the transcendent, okay? That you're in need and you're asking for divine help.

[13:10]

So that just general context in the psalmody is very formative. So then I think our life of prayer is, you know, our individual prayer, our liturgical prayer in psalmody, our individual Lectio. And I'd like to say more about Lectio, but maybe tomorrow. And all of that is formative. You know, Benedictines live in a scriptural liturgical culture. And that's one thing I would say about Lectio is that A lot of people are trying to make it into a contemporary technique, a technique of doing Lectio. To me, that's almost a violence to what Lectio is supposed to be. Lectio is supposed to be a kind of wide-open, reading, reflective crane of scripture, you know, to put it into Lectio, Meditatio, Lauratio, Conoplatio. That came with Ligo, you know, in the 14th century, I think, and that's not what the ancient method of Lectio was.

[14:11]

All right, to say a few things about meditation. And I'm talking about meditation in the more contemporary sense of like Centering Prayer or John Bain's Christian Meditation and so forth. Or Zen Meditation or Mantric Prayer, whatever it might be. First of all, I myself don't believe that it should be imposed on a whole group in a monastery. I could mention one monastery where I know everybody does Zen meditation. It works for them, okay, but I would never do it. If, in the community, you want to say, well, there'll be a Centering Prayer group that meets at a certain time, you know, five days a week or something, okay, then it's voluntary. But I think imposing one particular method is necessarily too much of a constraint on people. In monastic life, I was not taught a method of meditation.

[15:16]

I'm sure most of you were not. When I went to Fordham to study theology, I did go to an Eastern teacher of meditation, and that was helpful. It was using a mantra, and sometimes when I get to chaplain, I can't seem to quiet down. I find myself automatically going back into that mantra for a bit, or saying a Christian mantra like, come Holy Spirit, whatever. So the ancient monastic form of meditatio is to murmur a text, very related to scripture. The modern sense of meditation, to meditate on, let's say, a scene in the life of Christ, or the Passion, or whatever, doesn't really begin to arise until about the 13th century. And even Ignatian prayer, its roots go back to Franciscan meditation. Right after the 13th century, the next century is Devotio Moderna, which shaped Catholic spirituality down to Vatican II.

[16:23]

Devotio Moderna, very pietistic. The imitation of Christ is a prime example of Devotio Moderna. And then, Ignatian meditation, which is basically meditation on scenes in the life of Christ and so forth. Some people really like it, and it works for them. It's fine. I have a friend in Syracuse, she's... an actress and a psychotherapist and a very creative personality. And she said she went to Lemoyne, so she said, I could never learn to do Ignatian meditation because as soon as I imagined the scene in the life of Christ, I was in it myself upstaging everybody. The thing that did help her eventually when she was practicing psychotherapist, and still is, she said, I discovered John Main's Christian Meditation, read some of his books, listened to tapes, and she said, nothing has made a greater difference in my practice as a psychotherapist than practicing Christian Meditation, which is basically silencing the mind using the mantra and so forth.

[17:35]

She said it's made me much more receptive and sensitive to my clients and so forth. Centering prayer definitely is a 20th century packaging of the basic method in the cloud of unknowing. I've had the privilege the last five years of giving a retreat, conference retreat, to a group of Jungian analysts in California and we generally met at Sancta Sabina and They on their own started reading and studying the Cloud of Unknowing, and they call themselves the Clouds. But they have found it very helpful. So Centering Prayer, John Main's Christian Meditations, and so forth, are all about quieting the mind, stilling the mind, coming to a place of depth and quiet, like the Quakers, Centering Down. Now we might say, well, is there anything in our ancient tradition that's like that?

[18:38]

Well, it's White and John Cashin, you know. In fact, Christian meditation, as you probably realize, comes out of John Cashin's method of prayer in the conferences. And what Cashin said is that the monks in the desert began to notice how unruly their mind was. It was like the image he used, it's like it's a waterwheel in a river, and I would just keep turning and turning, you know, and you've got to learn to go with it, okay? And so that's what a mantra is. It ties down the mind. In India, the great teachers of meditative prayer said, our mind is like a monkey. It swings from limb to limb. What you have to do is still the mind. The Desert Fathers used the image of a donkey. They said a donkey will go around kicking up its heels. Maybe you've seen that here since you have donkeys. What you have to do is tether the donkey.

[19:40]

So there's a wonderful English Benedictine monk who says that he found in the Desert Fathers this apothecary saying, the mind is untameable, tame it. Sounds like a Zen saying, doesn't it? I have read a lot of the Desert Father literature, you know, Greek translation, Latin translation, anything available that I could find. I've never found that quotation. I think he invented it. I asked the English Benedictine sister one time, did Father Sylvester invent that? She said, he maybe did. The mind is untameable, tame it. Okay, so our superficial mind is full of distractions and thinking of the past and thinking of the future. We have to learn to tie down our mind. Last Friday evening, we were invited to a meeting in Benton. A former Trappist, I won't mention his name, well, I guess I could, his name is Francis Bennett.

[20:41]

He's now becoming a quite well-known teacher of meditation and contemplative prayer around the United States. Some people we didn't even know in Binghamton invited him, heard about us and invited us. It was very interesting, you know, that these people who are basically Zen practitioners wanted to hear what he had to say. So I think that's one reason that meditation practice for us is very important, is that the wider society which is interested in spirituality is very interested in contemplative prayer and meditation. And if we don't practice it ourselves, we should be able to talk about it. You know the story about John Mayne, he was at St. Anselm's in Washington, and a young man came to him and said, can you teach me meditation from your tradition? And John Main said, we'll come back in a week. And he didn't know quite what to say in that first session. And he remembered hearing Kashin on prayer, you know, so in conferences 9, 10, 11, in the conferences of Kashin.

[21:51]

So he read them quickly during the week, and when the young man came back, he taught them a method, okay, of meditation using a mantra. In the summer of 86, I was teaching a summer course at Collegeville at St. John's, and there was a monk on campus doing his MA dissertation or thesis on meditation, whether monks should meditate. And he took a very strong position that monks don't need meditation in this modern sense, like Centering Prayer and so forth, or even John Main's meditation, or Zen or whatever. His thesis argued that monastic life faithfully lived creates centeredness and will bring you to deeper levels gradually. Now, in essence, I'd say, yes, I think that's true. But increasingly, I think it's not the case because of contemporary society and its pressures and all the stress we have in the multitasking and the media and cyber world.

[22:59]

So I think that it's very valuable for monks to practice privately some form of meditative prayer, Centering Prayer, Chong Ming's meditation, or perhaps you have some exposure to Zen. I did a little bit in New York when I was studying. Terence Cardon, I heard him say at a meeting maybe 10 years ago, he says, what's destroying monastic life, and this may apply more to apostolic monasteries, what's destroying monastic life nowadays is professionalism. I think that's quite obvious in monasteries that are running schools, universities, seminaries. They have to keep up with their professional background. But I think that's been entered into contemplative monasteries too, that we become more pressured to take on certain expertise and so forth.

[24:02]

So how to remain centered at that point of calm? Another thing we should look to is the Hesychastic tradition and the Eastern tradition. Somewhat foreign to us, and there's a very interesting interview in the American Benedictine Review about two years ago, I think the year before last. I think it's Carence Cardong, or maybe he translated, an interview with Gabriel Bunge. Bunge is a Benedictine from Shetonia, who just recently, in the last year or so, converted to Orthodoxy, had been living for a hermit for over 20 years in Switzerland. He's probably the greatest expert nowadays on Evagrius Ponticus. Now, you know, Shabtonia is a bi-ritual monastery. And so he was following the Eastern path. But the whole article in the American Benedictine Review is about the question, how did you learn to pray? How did you learn to pray?

[25:05]

And it's his personal answers to that. So it's a good introduction to Gabriel Bunche. There's also some things on the internet. If you just look up, even on YouTube, there's some of his talks, some of the Lord French, but they're very good presentations of Eastern spirituality. I think it has a lot to teach us. One of the things he says in the article is that Until the 14th century there was no explicit method of hesychastic prayer. There was no explicit method. And years ago Father Jean Leclerc was asked, is there a Western hesychasm? Is there a type of prayer in the Western monastic tradition that's comparable to a hesychastic prayer? And Father Jean Leclerc said yes. You know, it may not be the method that the East had, but the same experience happened, that inner quiet and calm, which Hesakia in Greek means calm, stillness, peace, and so on.

[26:14]

I think it's very important for us to know about contemporary types of meditation and to experience them ourselves because As I've been telling groups lately, I really think there's a big train heading across the United States that's about meditation. There's so many groups practicing meditation. A new pastor in Binghamton Congregational Church said to me, first thing I'm going to do in my church is build a meditation hall in the basement. He wants to do meditation. So people are looking for deeper prayer and meditative experience. So we have to know about this, I think. There is a group worth looking into called Contemplative Mind in Society. Look it up on the internet, Contemplative Mind in Society. It's an ecumenical group, you know, it's all sorts of Buddhists, Sufis, Christians, Catholics.

[27:20]

I happen to be giving a retreat in New England, and the other group using the retreat house was Contemplative Mind and Society. Their whole effort is to bring meditation, knowledge, and practice into the academic world with staff, teachers, and students. And they feel this contemplative approach needs to be brought into the secular and academic world. They also now are trying to bring it into the professions, both law and medicine. So it's a very interesting phenomenon to watch. And their material on the internet is very interesting. Let me just read one quotation from their web page. One of their board members is a member of the board of directors of the New York Stock Exchange, but he's a meditator. This is what he says. I think we'd all agree with him.

[28:22]

Contemplative practice is an effective way, in my experience, the only effective way to bring about integration and healing of the self and to establish a realistic basis for healthy relationships, sane, creative institutions, and a just, sustainable world. I agree with him. And we've got to be able to speak to this kind of movement that's out there in the wider society. I'd like to say a few things about Evagrius Ponicus. I don't know if you're acquainted with him at all. The reason is that his works have not been published very much until maybe the last 10 years, I'd say. In 1973, when I did my master's comprehensives, I had three questions to answer. You know, they give you the questions in the morning, and you've got from nine o'clock to three o'clock in the afternoon to write the answers.

[29:24]

One of the questions I had was this one. Was Evagrius Ponticus a Buddhist? And the only book I really have read about Evagrius was John Hughes Bambergler's book on Evagrius. The reason that question was posed is that von Balthasar had written an article in 1939 saying that Evagrius was a Buddhist, and he was in no way a Christian, and we shouldn't pay attention to him. He's basically a heretic and so on and so on. Well, John Deutz Bamberger was the first one in English to really come out and kind of present a healthier look at Evagrius. Evagrius is so interesting because he was an educated Greek who went to the desert and lived with the desert fathers, and so he was gathering their experience the way that Cassian was, and the monks, the old monks, talked about imageless prayer, to getting to a point in meditation and prayer where you have no image, it's just silence.

[30:33]

And so that's the debatable question, you know. How Christian is this imageless meditation? Well, I'm no expert on it, but Jeremy Driscoll has been bringing out books, and also Gabriel Bunche on evangelists. And so this book, Earth and Vessels, the Practice of Personal Prayer, according to the patristic tradition, is by Gabriel Bunche. Excellent, but a little bit tough going. I mean, it's not recreational reading for sure, but very good. And Columbus Stewart from Collegeville has this article, Imageless Prayer and the Theological Vision of the Vagrius Ponticus. And he raises the question, the central theological question, what about meditating on Christ, you know? Is the Incarnation part of this? Or is it bypassing Christ? Is this authentic Christian meditation? I haven't finished reading this, but it's a very key question.

[31:37]

It's the reason that St. Teresa of Avila was under suspicion. And she and John of the Cross both, because it was the time of the Inquisition, they both said you can never bypass the body of Christ or the incarnation. You've got to always have a devotion to the humanity of Christ. From what I have read, I think that Vagrius certainly is authentic and, you know, orthodox. He was talking about the experience that the monks of the desert had, which was coming to a place, not only of immaculate prayer, but this is very important, an experience of inner light, which the hesychasts talk about. which other forms of meditation talk about, an experience of inner light, and he identifies that inner light as the Holy Spirit.

[32:41]

I talked about it the other day. I have another article here just to mention how quick this is getting. This article is titled The sapphire light of the mind, the schemata of the Vagrius Ponicus. Some of the Fathers experienced a kind of blue light in the forehead. That's experienced also in Hinduism. Does that mean that they're having Hindu experience? No. I think it's something about the depth of ourselves and the divine indwelling that's in us. Mukta Ananda, who some of you may know about, talked about the blue sapphire. Here's a Vagrius talking about the same thing. Well, the theologians are wrestling with this whole question now, but the Vagrius is much more accessible to us than it was in 1973 when I did my master's.

[33:43]

And I'd say he's virtually being much more accepted because of people like Gabriel Bungi, Very important. Finally, a few things about contemplation. In the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Jordan Allman has written a long article about types of contemplation in the Catholic tradition. Jordan Allman is a Dominican who taught at Catholic U for a time. And Jordan Allman says this, I just absolutely was stunned when I read it, he said, he talks about Franciscan contemplation, Ignatian contemplation, Dominican contemplation, Who knows what else, you know, solution, contemplation. And then he gets the Benedictines and he says, the Benedictines have no teaching on contemplative prayer. At first I thought, what's he talking about? And then I realized, yeah, we don't have a method. We don't teach a method. Our whole way of life is contemplative.

[34:47]

The whole thesis of the monk, the silence, living in community, scripture, liturgy, and so forth, are all training us and forming us in a contemplative disposition. It's the contemplative disposition of heart. So, you know, I was just stunned, but actually he's right. There's no method, there's no particular teaching. It's a way of life which is deeply contemplative, okay, in its predisposition and also in the ongoing depth that it acquires. Mervyn did a lot to make contemplation acceptable, accessible, not only to us, but to the average person. He says, for example, contemplation is the highest expression of a person's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake and fully alive.

[35:51]

Contemplation is spiritual wonder. To me, that's just a basic human definition of contemplation. It's not a private, you know, Christian thing. Definitely it can be, you know, led by the spirit and so forth, but basic human contemplation, I think it's quite common, actually. You know, people who love gardening and maybe contemplating while they're doing it. It's not so special and esoteric and beyond people. And I think we have to make people aware of that. So contemplation is, as I said the other day, not some climbing of a mountain to get some sort of special experience. When I read the interior castle of Saint Teresa of Avila, you know, she talks about going on the first level, the second and the third, you know, and the third is sort of natural contemplation and the fourth is infused contemplation.

[37:00]

And, you know, my Benedictine instinct said, yeah. And I'm thinking to myself, is this nature, grace, you know, dichotomy and all of that? Changed my mind a little bit because I truly now believe very much in the gift of prayer. I don't quite see it as systematically as St. Teresa of Avila did. But, you know, she distinguishes a very great line between acquired contemplation, which we do, you know, through discipline and so forth and practice, and then infused contemplation. Infused contemplation just seemed like a very foreign notion to me. And that's why the book by the German I talked about the other day, forgot his name, the guy at San Anselmo, Stoltz. Stoltz. Anselm Stoltz. This book is so refreshing because it's rooted in the patristic tradition in scripture, you know, and it's a whole different view of contemplation.

[38:02]

Eastern theologians and Eastern monks and so forth look at our teachings at contemplation from the 16th century on, you know, and I took a course at St. Vladimir's when I was studying down there. They have a hard time with it. It's a systematic kind of making contemplations very esoteric, very rare, very special. I think in our tradition it's much more wide open and common. It's just assumed to be the predisposition of our way of love. I'd like to end this evening with a poem by Paul Clenand, a Trappist from Gethsemane. Poets, to me, are sometimes very contemplative in their outlook. And he's a poet. He was in Rochester this past spring. Did anybody go to that? No? I wanted to get there, but there was conflict in our schedule.

[39:03]

But he's published several books of poem, but his latest book is a collection of poems called Monkswear. And I'd like to share a poem with you. It's a bit hard to understand immediately. And it's titled The Wisdom of the Serpent. Okay, here's the poem. Let void be pivot to all. Know that not of knowledge. Be bliss, acknowledgment of being. Now, who are you? What is paradise? Is there any difference? It's like sand, you know. It's like sand, it's just... I'll give it to you to put up on the board, because I'm sure people might want to read it again. But it's deep and... It's integrative in a deep way, only the way a poet could see. One of my favorite poets nowadays is Mary Oliver, who writes a lot about nature.

[40:04]

And when I was giving the retreat to the Indians two years ago, I sang to Sabina, I had used as the theme for the whole five-day retreat a quotation from Mary Oliver, my job is to love the world. And that ain't great. About the third day into the retreat, I'm going down a corridor towards the bungalow we were living in, and there's a cloister garden over here. Down at the end of the corridor is a refrigerator, and there was a woman sitting next to the refrigerator, and as I got closer, I recognized it was Mary Oliver. But they had told me she came occasionally there when she was on the West Coast, and she didn't like to be, you know, haunted by people and talked to and so forth, so I didn't want to disturb her. But I opened the door and turned around and gave her a cute smile. So, at any rate, We have to learn, you know, what feeds us for our prayer life.

[41:06]

Follow your notes. That's the advice I give to people. And our case change and what works for us changes. So I think John Chapman is absolutely right. Don't pray as you ought, pray as you can. I think tomorrow morning we'll have to... I'm going to bring my... I brought my icon of the Trinity along. I'd like to set it up back there. There's this one, which is far more beautiful, because this one's hand-painted. But mine is just date polish, and it's somewhat beat up. But I believe it's a holy icon, and I believe it's blessed in a special way, because it was made by someone who really prayed. It instigated and catalyzed an experience of me and Claire, which was just astounding. And so I don't use it all the time. I hardly ever use it, but I use it with groups. And I have to say, in using it with groups, I found that it's been very successful. So I just suggest it. It's not something I...

[42:07]

really push at people, but I find that it's a different approach to meditating because it's based on actually a Tibetan technique of following a geometric pattern. That sounds crazy, but it's a way of tying down the mind. You can tie down the mind with sound, mantra, or you can tie down the mind with visualization, and this is visualization.

[42:33]

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