Mindfulness and Jesus

Disclaimer: In this entry, I'll wade into some areas of science and religion that I know relatively little about. If you spot errors or misconceptions, I'd welcome some dialogue! Okay. Disclaimer over.

Perhaps it is because I’m in a Buddhist country for the first time in my life that I feel strangely compelled to write about a topic that found its way recently from Buddhist thought through self-help gurus and the zany rat race of American pop psychology and finally through credible scientific study to our common vocabulary in America: that is, mindfulness.

These days it’s hard to avoid mindfulness on bookshelves, articles, and talk shows. Now through a variety of resources, you can learn to become a mindful parent, a mindful entrepreneur, even a mindful politician. Mindfulness has become such a buzzword that it can be hard to nail down. Thomas Joiner of the Washington Post offers this definition drawn from respected practitioners: “Mindfulness is the nonjudgmental awareness of the richness, subtlety, and variety of the present moment – all of the present moment, not just the self. Mindfulness is not the same as meditation, although meditative activities and exercises are often deployed in its cultivation.”

To me, mindfulness is a fascinating experience of accepting the reality of the now in the richness of its observable textures.  It’s the ability to embrace what is with open hands, accepting joy and sorrow, the chirping of birds and roar of a diesel engine, the tranquility of the mountains and the hubbub of the city without greed or defensiveness. When mindfulness is practiced, a whole universe of non-evaluative being is opened up and the psychological effect can be profound, especially in a culture that fixates on the past or the future but primarily seeks entertainment and distraction in the present. But a growing body of research is leading many to proclaim mindfulness as a cure-all for everything from bipolar to political divisiveness.

But for me, mindfulness at its best represents a pathway to something much more.

As a Christian, I’m actually a huge fan of mindfulness. In fact I see significant harmony between historic Christian spiritual practices and mindfulness teachings. I’m not an expert on mindfulness so I’d welcome some dialogue on this. But I believe that Christ meets His followers most readily in mindful spaces, but also parts ways with traditional mindfulness in some significant ways.

I like to think that I stumbled onto mindfulness not through pop-psychology or Buddhist thought but through the pathway of Christian disciplines... specifically through the practice of prayer. I’d like to say Jesus taught me to be mindful. I’d also like to say that the biblical Jesus (as well as the one I spend mindful time with each day) provides a rich context in which mindfulness as a Christian discipline can be both embraced and challenged.

I have to confess; I’ve never cared much for prayer as it was modeled to me. To me, prayer has always represented of the most boring things you could spend your time on. While I’m sure I’ve always known there was more to it than this, I’ve wondered at times if the main value of prayer was to teach you perseverance in the meaningless of mind-numbing rituals. Maybe that’s because prayer to me always looked like this:

1. Start every prayer like a letter (“Dear God,”)

2. Tell God in eloquent (but informal enough to look sincere) language a few things you’re grateful for.

3. Remind him in of the things he said in scripture and the characteristics the Bible attributes to him.

4. List some things you think should happen in the world and in your life. Make sure to make your requests vague enough or add “if it’s your will” to protect yourself from inevitable disappointment.

5. Ask Him for guidance on important decisions but don’t listen long enough to see if He responds.

6. If you can make this last at least an hour each day, you will be awarded the “sufficiently spiritual” merit badge and eventually admitted to the ranks Christian leadership.

7. Remember to pray “in Jesus name” because Jesus said something about that and because it makes a nice closer.  (You can also say “and all of God’s people said...” during group prayer for extra flair.)

8. Say “amen” to close... or skip it. That might make the prayer look like an ongoing conversation.

It should be no surprise then that I never cared much for prayer. I learned to dread anything on a church bulletin containing the word “prayer”, especially “pastoral prayer”, “congregational prayer”, and “prayer team meeting”... although “closing prayer” and “meal prayer” were tolerable as indications of good things to come.

But something has started to happen in me over the last 5 years that has opened new worlds to me in prayer. And today I can say I’m a bona-fide fan of prayer.

The first thing that happened was I began to hear God speak consistently in my mind. And the more I heard him speak, the more space I gave him to speak because I found when I listened to that voice I ended up on some pretty crazy adventures. He spoke about all kinds of things: what he wanted me to do that day, how I would spend my summer, what bible verse he wanted me to read, who he wanted me to call. He even told me to fly on a whim to Atlanta, which started a cascade of events leading to a new career and a cross-country move. He’s spoken to me directly about pretty much every trip I’ve taken and every person I’ve partnered with.

But perhaps the best thing He spoke about early on (and still today) was his enduring love and acceptance of me as his child. It’s not just that I heard him say “I love you” but that I heard it in a variety of ways consistently, often many times a day, over a long period of time. And that finally began to thaw things out inside me. I was nicer to everyone, more peaceful, less judgmental. Suddenly my spiritual habit didn’t consist of just a chapter of the bible and a journal entry. It also consisted of long spells, quietly sitting there with open-handed acceptance of God’s love and presence in the present moment, which I actually experienced as a physically sensation in my body with its own distinctive warmth and texture and a unique ability to remedy doubt, judgment, unforgiveness, and defensiveness. Interestingly, during these times, I often put my journal away as I found the experience of God’s Presence accomplished the organization of my thought life more efficiently than writing.

But over time, I began to realize that my daily prayer practice had become utilitarian. It dawned on me that I was searching more frequently for the benefits of prayer than for the relationship prayer offers. By the way, I’d welcome some dialogue here, but I think this is one of the ways in which prayer offers a superior vision to mindfulness; because while mindfulness invites a utilitarian usage of itself toward insight and self-actualization, prayer necessarily resists being used in a utilitarian way for its benefits. Rather, the relationship with God which prayer facilitates insists first on relationship and secondarily offers the psychological benefits of that relationship by natural extension. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My relationship with God in prayer had become functionalistic: I’d look for His guidance, I’d listen for His insight, I’d try to receive a sense of the Love that was so cathartic for me. I’d ask for his help and blessing. But God began to offer tender but pointed rebukes to me with words like, “just be with me” and “can you simply enjoy our friendship?” So I started trying to just “be with Jesus.” I dropped the 5-point prayer agenda and functional approach to “filling my tank for the day”. I’d try to see him walking next to me quietly and we’d just enjoy each other’s company for half an hour or so. Often he was quiet, just walking alongside me, enjoying my company as well. And I contented myself to accept His Presence as the simple gift it was, not for the guidance or therapeutic value it would bring. Ironically, this “non-anxious presence” with Jesus increased not only the quality of our friendship but its benefits as well. I had sharper clarity, stronger guidance, quicker compassion, and deeper peace. This is when things really started to take off for me. But for that 30-60 minutes when I was with Him, I had to lose the agenda and just BE with Him.

In that way, I began to be present not only to God in the present tense but to the world around me. I was suddenly able to “simply be” in my environment... whether sweating it out in a 106 degree motel room in northern Ghana or a quietly sipping coffee at sunrise in Appalachia. Whether observing the veins of an autumn leaf or the abrasive rattle of construction equipment. Some things I started to notice for the first time: shapes on road signs, the layering of colors on a choppy lake, the hum of the refrigerator, or the way fluorescent lights illuminated the cereal aisle. Actually I used this practice this week to quickly flip my brain from discomfort to acceptance in my new (and sometimes overwhelming) environment in Myanmar.

This experience of the present often coincided with a tangible experience of God’s presence. It’s as though God wired our brains to live here and now more than in the future or the past. And if we are open to it, the experience of His presence can open us to the experience of the world around us in the present and vice versa. It makes me wonder about the lessons we can learn about living in the present from manna in the wilderness or the teachings of Jesus on sparrows and flowers.

But I think Christians feel some anxiety about this brand of mindfulness, even in a Christian context. Generally, I think many Christians in western cultures, are conditioned (more than we like to admit) by rationalism and fundamentalism to distrust anything that smacks of mysticism. But perhaps a more specific fear is that in mindfulness, Christians may either unwittingly be sucked into an eastern or secular narrative with spiritually disastrous consequences... or that they would seek some sort of mental oblivion where “renewal of the mind” is called for and moral ambiguity through non-judgment where discernment and conviction are called for. To be fair, I do think these fears may largely be grounded in perceptions and may do injustice to mindfulness teaching, which I don’t believe necessarily calls for mindlessness or moral ambiguity.

Actually, I’ve found that what we might call “mindful prayer” has brought a much deeper level of clarity and conviction both about who God is and who I am to be in the world. I’ve found that mindful presence with Jesus has nullified or reduced many of my personal judgments about people and the world, but it has also strengthened what you might call “Jesus convictions”...about myself, the people around me, and the world I live in. Mindful prayer has removed the emotional weight of having to fix, convince, or manipulate myself or others while it has bolstered core convictions derived from my relationship with Him and my willingness to live “out” with those core convictions: neither forcing them on others nor apologizing for them. Far from making me wishy-washy, I’ve found these “Jesus convictions” are much easier to be bold about while personal judgments and pet opinions are easier to be quiet about. Most importantly, my ability to tell the difference between the two has been gradually increasing.

Mindful prayer has given me what I’ve started affectionately calling “clean brain”, since one effect of simple, mindful friendship with Jesus is what feels like the mental equivalent of a good shower. It creates a relatively stable psychological environment conducive to warm relationships, intellectual curiosity, creativity, and spiritual receptivity to God’s presence not just in times of concerted prayer but in the moment-by-moment awareness of God while you’re in the car, at work, or in the cereal aisle. I have to think this is what Paul meant by “pray continually.”

(Aside: Actually there is some interesting research that leads me to believe there are real neurological components to this experience of God in prayer, including a release of dopamine and a gradual strengthening of fibers connecting different parts of the brain which would naturally lead to a greater sense of mental clarity and integration.)

But I think the best thing I can say to commend a habit of mindful prayer to you is the simple goodness of a friendship with Jesus. He’s just a lot of fun to be around. He’s severely beautiful and impossibly kind. And the friendship alone without any of its psychological or pneumatological outworkings is enough reward within itself.

If I can humbly suggest a point of departure where mindfulness as a general practice ceases to resemble mindful Christian prayer I would say it is the honest-to-God fact that at ground zero of our existential brainspace, we find through prayer neither the mystery of our own consciousness nor the wonder of the universe we inhabit, but a relationship; not just a relationship toward ourselves or toward the world around us but toward an intimate other in whom “we live and move and have our being.” I feel theologically comfortable with this assertion since the baseline reality in the Christian narrative is not God in solitary static self-sufficiency but God in a triune relationship with himself. This then ripples out into a relational creation narrative, a relational redemption story, and relational revelation ultimately grasped through a relational epistemology (“I am the truth”). So then this relational other delights in knowing and being known. In addition, this knowable God is morally weighted in a specific self-emanating vision of Good over and against evil with all the particularistic claims that entails. So while for followers of Christ, nonjudgmental mindfulness is useful in detoxing and gaining distance from our anxious thoughts and judgments grounded in unseen emotions, the final goal for Christians is to increasingly know the mind of Christ. As Paul says first and foremost, “I want to know Christ.” Why? Because... well because he’s wonderful. And while religious philosophies make for interesting debates, and mindful practices offer rich and practicable tools to us, it’s my estimation that a daily friendship with Jesus is and ever will be irreplaceable.