Sunday Stories: Just Sit
Sunday Stories: Just Sit
Patience never has been my strong suit. When technical gremlins struck an online contemplative sit with Father Richard Rohr this week, they brought unexpected wisdom with their delays.
LISTEN: For those of you who would rather listen than read, I’m giving the audio embed option a go, but with my voice, rather than the automation. One tiny edit: In the audio version, I misstate Father Richard Rohr’s age. He is 79.
Patience never has been my strong suit.
I recall praying for patience when I was a Southern Baptist tweenager and then immediately panicking when our youth pastor admonished us to “be careful what you pray for” because God would give us the opportunity to cultivate what we asked for.
Ergo, if we prayed for patience …. well … get ready to wait. A lot.
Some people, take, for instance, the person to whom I have been wed for 25 years and our son, possess an almost preternatural ability to abide the passage of time, a long wait, nonsense, and technical difficulties. For most of my life, la plupart du temps as the flâneuse to which I claim to aspire to be might say, this has not been me.
Of late, however, that is, slowly and not by any means magically, changing. Perhaps it is stage in life at which I have arrived—half-a-century-plus of being human on this planet, an accumulation of experience, lessons learned, wisdom accumulated. But my best guess is that it has more to do with contemplative practice than anything else.
My contemplative practice is inconsistent and wonky. But it is a practice. And by that I mean it’s something I’ve been doing for a while, imperfectly and improbably, but doing nevertheless. Practicing.
Practice does not make for perfection, but it does create muscle memory and, occasionally, endurance. I usually can sit longer and with less self-judgment (and therefore discomfort physically, emotionally, and spiritually) than I could a few years ago before I began my journey at The Living School, before “sitting” (as some of us call the habit of being in quiet contemplation and/or meditation for short or long periods of time) became for me a regular (or more regular than it was pre-2020) thing.
This last Friday (Oct. 21), to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Center for Action and Contemplation (home of the Living School) as well as to mark the public retirement of its founder, Father Richard Rohr, CAC hosted a public sit live-streamed on YouTube and Facebook. It was meant to mimic publicly what has been the private daily practice of Rohr and the CAC staff for many years—a short reflection led by Rohr followed by 20 minutes of silent meditation.
A few years ago, when I was dispatched to the CAC headquarters in Albuquerque, N.M., as a reporter to interview Rohr for a profile in advance of the release of his book The Universal Christ, I arrived just as the community “sit” was about to begin. (Rohr’s staff had invited me in advance to join them before the interview if I so desired. I did.) I can still picture vividly where I sat on the floor near a threshold, my perspective looking up at the serene faces of the CAC staffers and Rohr, who is one of the most comfortable-in-his-own-skin people I have ever met.
Yoda-like in the best way possible. There is no try, only sit….
Rohr, 79, who I promise you is not on death’s doorstep, as reported and implied elsewhere, has had a few health issues over the last several years, including cancer. Stepping back from the leadership of CAC and as dean of The Living School is something that was planned for quite some time. In the last few COVID years, Father Richard has been less publicly available (haven’t we all), and going forward, he will be even less so, which made the opportunity to “sit” with him a rare treat for those outside the CAC.
When I logged on to CAC’s YouTube channel at the prescribed time—10 a.m. PT—there were already 1,000 people in the digital waiting room. While we waited for the sit to begin and a few hundred more people joined the queue online, folks began a conversation in the “chat” window. As 10 a.m. came and went, then 10:15, and then 10:30, what unfolded in the online chat was a masterclass in contemplative spirituality—conceptually, communally, and in praxis.
More than a thousand aspiring mystics from all over the world had the chance to practice what they’ve been practicing (and in some cases preaching): How to sit.
Just, sit.
Patiently. In the face of the unknown. When things go wrong or not according to plan.
Waiting, for whatever comes (or doesn’t come) next.
Present. Breathing. Grounded to the Earth and your heartbeat.
Waiting for the sit was the sit
It was fascinating and a delight to read the chat stream as people encouraged each other to embrace the uncomfortable. Most of those active in the chat did just that. Some posted wisdom soundbites from a host of contemplative teachers including Rohr himself (“Everything belongs, even this,” as one waitee put it), James Finley, St. Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, Cynthia Bourgeault, Barbara Holmes, Howard Thurman, Pema Chodron, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Many wrote about how waiting in digital liminality while the tireless CAC staff wrestled with whatever tech gremlins were causing trouble not only was an opportunity to practice contemplative, meditative presence, it was the practice.
Waiting for the sit was the sit.
Because even aspiring mystics are fully human, there was also some grumbling. One waitee wrote, seemingly breathlessly, “We’re running out of time.” To which I responded with what was intended to be kindness (although I beg your indulgence in advance): “Time is a construct. Love is endless.”
I KNOW. Such earnestness can be cringy. But being earnest is, in my experience at least, so much more life-giving than being anxious or curmudgeonly. That is not the energy I wish to put into the world any longer. As previously mentioned, I want to be a force for love rather than fear.
The morning of Friday’s sit, I set out from the house we’ve been renting this week in Big Bear Lake, California, for a lakeside ramble along the Alpine Pedal Path Trail, one of oodles of hiking/trekking/walking trails that, along with the autumnal cool that reminds me of home in New England, drew us to this gorgeous spot to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary. I had timed it (read: planned) so that I would be approaching a camping area with benches at 10 a.m. so I could settled into my optimal sitting position—straight-backed with feet on the ground and hands on my knees or fingers touching in a v-shape in my lap—a few minutes before the sit began. When the wait stretched past 30 minutes, I decided to turn my waiting meditation into a walking meditation and got back on the trail.
A few minutes before 10:50 a.m. PT, the CAC staff sent out a new YouTube link (if you click on it now, you can watch a replay Friday’s sit in its entirety) followed by a short message: “Thank you everyone for your flexibility in this technological liminal space!”
The conversation about contemplative practice continued apace in the chat on the new YouTube feed. “Just think of all the wonderful things that came to the world through the love dished out in that wait,” wrote one of the 750 or so hold outs who had continued to wait on YouTube for the sit to begin.
When the new YouTube link had come through, I was nearing the end of the hiking trail, turned left toward the lake, and a weathered wooden picnic table quickly came into view. I placed the pine cone I had picked up and carried with me from my original “sit” site a mile or so farther north on the bench and took a seat beside it.
Father Richard, looking more hale and hearty than he had when I last saw him in person in Albuquerque in late July and clad in a happy blue shirt that mirrored the sky above me, appeared on my iPhone screen from the living room of his New Mexican hermitage.
“Hello friends!” Rohr said, leaning in toward his computer screen. I leaned in toward my phone, balanced somewhat precariously on the selfie-stick-phone-holder-tripod combo gizmo I’d attached to my fanny pack before beginning the trek. I imagined a thousand other souls throughout the world doing similarly—a bow to the sacred presence of the Holy and each other.
“We call [this] a 20-minute ‘sit’, maybe a strange word but you get to know it after a while,” Father Richard continued. “All you are doing is sitting, in the presence of God, the presence of your life.”
The tradition of contemplation/meditation is one that is largely unknown to the Western world, a tradition mostly lost to Christendom in the Middle Ages when formulaic, recited prayers replaced what Rohr calls the “emptying-out prayer” of silent contemplation.
During silent contemplation, “This head here watches the games that it’s playing of resentment, of negativity, of fear, of accusation—and you do all have your games, I don’t mean to be rude, but you do. But you have to see ‘em or they go on controlling your whole life.”
“Let’s sit together and see what we can learn or see what we can let go of or see what we can notice or see what we can pay attention to — but it’s not about thinking, listen closely, it’s not about thinking, it’s about being present. And when you’re present, you know what you experience? The Presence, coming at you…Let’s sit.”
—Richard Rohr, October 21, 2022
Before the 20 minutes of silent meditation began, Rohr turned to for inspiration to his most recent publication, Just This, a slim monograph of brief meditations designed to help the reader “cultivate the gift of waking up to the beauty of reality in all its glorious ordinariness” that I have (and will continue to) press into the hands of friends and family.
He turned to a passage about moving “from ego consciousness to soul awareness,” explaining that “soul awareness is much broader, quieter, inclusive—it doesn’t fight things, it doesn’t hate anything, it doesn’t have time for that.”
“When you meditate consistently, a sense of your autonomy and private self-importance—what you think of as your ‘self’—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial ‘I,’ the self that you likely think of as your only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of your mind,” he read, adding, “And that’s what contemplation helps you to see and then, frankly, God has a much better chance of getting in.”
Quiet contemplation, Rohr continued, helps us move from being fear-driven to being love-drawn, “where you’re not driven you’re being attracted forward by beauty, by truth, by goodness, by love.” It’s an invitation, he says.
“Let’s sit together and see what we can learn or see what we can let go of or see what we can notice or see what we can pay attention to — but it’s not about thinking, listen closely, it’s not about thinking, it’s about being present. And when you’re present, you know what you experience? The Presence, coming at you…Let’s sit.”
And sit we did. For 20 minutes, I listened. To my heart. To God speaking not in words but in the wind that rustled the boughs of the Jeffrey and Ponderosa pines that surrounded me. To the chickadees chattering and crows kraa-ing. To the sound of my breath as it slowed and steadied. To the sound of Father Richard’s calm, steady breathing for which I am grateful beyond words.
I don’t always use a mantra or prayer of actual words when I meditate like this, although I often do—repeating the Jesus Prayer or the words “sat nam” (a common chant from Kundalini yoga taken from the ancient Sikh language Gurmukhi, meaning “truth name”), or “Breathe in joy; Exhale peace,” which is what I found myself silently repeating during much of the Friday sit.
Thoughts came, as they always do, and I tried simply to watch them and release them. There’s a scene from the Netflix series Grace and Frankie that I have used for several years as an image of how to do this. In the scene, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) are escaping from the retirement village where they briefly lived after a few aging health hiccups caused their adult children to panic about their safety. It might have been safe physically but it was crushing their spirits. They stole an electric golf cart and went around collecting their belongings that had been seized when they moved in to protect them from themselves including a fondue pot, a blow torch, and a coffee samovar. (Editor’s Note: The samovar might not actually be in the golf cart scene, but it is an important Grace and Frankie artifact, so … I’m keeping it.)
When thoughts and narratives spring up while I’m sitting, I imagine handing them to Frankie, who tosses them in the back of the golf cart with the other things, as Grace spirits them away, driving out of the video frame of my mind. Because a mantra is essentially something you hand your mind to distract it like a mental fidget-spinner or a Rubik’s Cube, it can be anything. Sometimes mine goes like this:
Inhale: Blowtorch
Exhale: Samovar
Inhale: Fondue Pot
Whatever works.
Don’t judge. Be gentle with yourself, practicing self-compassion as you cultivate compassion for the rest of the world, too.
“And slowly, we come out of the silence,” Father Richard said, his voice bringing me back to the here-and-now of the pine forest and the picnic table and the pine cone. “But bringing the silence with us, to surround our thoughts, our words, our feelings so there’s room for love, so there’s room for God, so there’s room for others. And that is today’s sit.”
I am so glad we waited.
As Tom Petty, he now of blessed memory, said, “the waiting is the hardest part.” That may be be true, but when we are able to wait without trying to control the situation, without fear and anxiety, being present and aware of our breath, the dividends are astonishing.
Patience is a gift. It’s also a practice. Keep practicing. It doesn’t guarantee perfection, but it goes a long way toward being present.
Just sit.
The CAC will be hosting these live-streamed sits every friday from now until the end of November. You can find the times and links for each of the sits HERE.
'Waiting for the sit is the sit' is going to be my new mantra.
Thank YOU, dear Andy.