A professor of religion at a small college was growing more and
more concerned about her students. Some were taking five courses
while working full-time jobs and caring for small children. Others were
trying to keep their scholarships along with their commitments to their
sports teams, the school newspaper, the choral and theater groups on
campus. A few still lived at home, where their families depended on
their help. Despite their constant state of exhaustion, they refused to
slow down or give an inch. They were immersed in a culture in which a
B+ was a sign of failure.
So, when the course came to the section on meditation, the
professor struck on an idea. Rather than assign a research paper on the
topic of meditation, the professor assigned her students to actually do it,
to meditate—not once, but at least three times for at least 20 minutes.
Their assignment was to stop and give themselves fully to the practice,
to resist the urge to give up and get busy with something “useful”. They were then to write about what they discovered about meditation—and
about themselves.
Most students admitted in their papers that meditation was the
hardest thing they had ever done. “This is just plain stupid”, one student
wrote. “It’s basically vegging out and I’d rather do it my way, watching
television with a beer”.
Another reported what happened when she felt the wind in the
trees blowing across the hairs of her skin: “When I stopped to notice
this, it gave me chills. Then I began to cry. I cannot explain it, but I did.
I believe I was in shock that I do not notice and appreciate the little
things in life that are absolutely wonderful”.
One student, a hunter, did his meditation in a deer stand and
confessed that he went temporarily insane. “For one crazy moment, I
thought I was the deer. I thought I was the forest, the sky, the sun
coming through the leaves. Man, was that weird.”
The professor assured her students that what they experienced was
not unusual, that it was, in fact, very Biblical. She writes of the assignment: “I don’t know if I convinced them, but they did look more rested.
Now if I could only convince them to repeat this act of resistance on a
regular basis—to stop running for a few moments each day, to stop
answering all the sirens long enough to hit the bottom they never hit,
feel the wind they never feel, sense the union they never sense….Their
only hope is to remember how alive they felt, for 20 minutes at least,
and to want that as much as they want the customary rewards of their
busy lives”.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel, which strike us at first reading as
cold and heartless, are an invitation not to walk away from life but to
embrace life’s essence to the full. We can become so absorbed with
building a career that we fail to develop our full potential and talents as a
human being; we can become so obsessed with creating and maintaining
a lifestyle that we do not live a life worth living. Christ calls all who
would be his disciples to “lose” life’s obsessive, meaningless and petty
pursuits in order to “find” a life fully human and alive in hope and joy.
Tags: 6-28-2020