Ancient mystic morning routine
Sitting with suffering long enough to leave the competitive grind behind
Part 2 of our new series with David Benjamin Blower: Notes on Poverty, Death and Nothingness, exploring the writings of St Paul of the Cross
These days, there's an endless queue of influencers willing to share the secrets of their success. Everything begins with the morning routine. Discipline is alive and well. Five minutes of free-writing. A glass of broccoli water. A stiff list of exercises. A hug with the dog to calm the limbic system, and so on.
St Paul of the Cross has a morning routine:
“Your most important business is the care of your soul. This is why, before leaving your room in the morning, you should spend at least a quarter of an hour meditating on the life, the passion and the death of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
15 minutes contemplating the gruesome political execution of a colonised peasant by the Roman empire, some two thousand years ago, is quite a start to the day. What are we ‘manifesting’ here?
I suppose history tells us that the image of this crucified Messiah figure has been held up by people of various energies and postures in the world—some more dubious than others. I'll confine myself to observing what it seems to do for St Paul of the Cross himself.
It must be said that it doesn't lead him into theological reflections. These days, talk about the crucifixion tends to go straight to the head. How to understand the religious meaning of this event? Which atonement theory does one subscribe to? To which theological tribe does one belong? There's none of this for Paul of the Cross. He makes very little interpretation, and no explanation of the passion at all.
He is, rather, entirely fixated on the person being crucified. His meditations on the Passion are characterised by compassion: empathy and love. He enters deeply into feeling for the suffering Jesus, while also sensing that Jesus is somehow feeling for him in return. As with the mystic Julian of Norwich, the reader stumbles, almost awkwardly, into a shared moment between two people who really seem to adore each other.
Suffering is a revealer. When someone suffers, something of their value is revealed to anyone who is willing to stay with the trouble and really see it. The sudden awareness that suffering is tragic (even while it is common) reveals the worth of the one who suffers, and they in turn reveal the worth of everyone who might suffer. When we encounter suffering and feel compassion, we find that in some sense we love the one who suffers, even if we don't know them.
To feel with one who suffers is to leave behind, for a moment at least, an interpretation of the world as an endless competitive grind—“the war of every man against every man,” as Thomas Hobbes called it. If we allow our empathy with suffering to play out, we find ourselves in another world, filled with beings of extraordinary worth, including ourselves, where an inexplicable love, or common goodwill, or mutual solidarity, runs through everything. We find ourselves, paradoxically, liberated by visions of suffering, from an embattled and loveless world into something more peaceable and beautiful.
David Benjamin Blower is a writer, poet, musician, theologian, and podcaster. @davidbenjaminblower
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