Tag Archives: Thich Nhat Hanh

Praying the Hours (4): Terce

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This is the fourth in a series on the canonical hours, the ancient Christian practice for living a mindful day. The first, “Reclaiming My Time,” gives a general introduction, with a list of helpful resources for your own practice of prayer and meditation. This fourth reflection concerns Terce, the first of the “Little Hours.”

St. Isidore (kneeling at right) was a farmworker criticized by his boss for spending his mornings in church instead of doing his job. When an angel was seen to be filling in for Isidore in the field during mass, the boss relented. Although he is the patron saint of farmers, his legend speaks to all who seek to balance work and prayer. (Anonymous Bolognese painting, 17th century).

The design of Prayer . . . is not merely to make us devout while we are engaged in it, but that its odor may be diffused through all the intermediate spaces of the day, enter into all its occupations, duties, and tempers. 

— Hannah More, Practical Piety (1812) 

Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will.

— The Book of Common Prayer

The “Little Hours”—Terce, Sext and None—are the most challenging for a personal prayer practice, because they span the middle portion of the day, the “9 to 5” when we are most occupied with our business in the world. Unless we are professional contemplatives, our days involve more doing than being. We are busy with whatever it is we do, with little chance for prayerful pauses. Even the monks who created the canonical hours kept their daytime devotions short, or “little,” to allow sufficient time for work and study. 

During his two-year sojourn at Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau managed to renounce working and doing for long stretches:

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.[i]

An entire morning given to reverie is an enviable use of time, but for most of us, including Thoreau, it is hardly sustainable as a daily practice. A viable spirituality for the Little Hours must come to terms with the demands and obligations of the day. As Benedictine abbot Cuthbert Butler (1858-1934) put it, “a contemplative life does not lie in the absence of activity, but in the presence of contemplation.”[ii]

How then do we nurture a contemplative awareness as we perform our daily work? How may we “remember God and eternity in the midst of [our] business” so that the fragrance of prayer “may be diffused through all the intermediate spaces of the day?”[iii] Let’s examine each of the Little Hours in turn, beginning with Terce.

Terce (“third”) is the 9 o’clock hour, when the working world is getting underway. Whether resuming ongoing projects or conceiving new ones, we launch into the morning with fresh energy and commitment. In the Book of Acts, Terce is the hour of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit filled the disciples with the power of enthusiasm and possibility. This “third hour” invites us to engage each new day’s work—our own Book of Acts—in that same spirit. 

Come, labor on!
Who dares stand idle on the harvest plain,
while all around us waves the golden grain? [iv]

Wendell Berry sets a high bar for our labor when he says it “defines us as we are; not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.” Even when our work is less than ideal, or only a means to an end, it may still be possible to honor our tasks with the mindfulness and care of a Brother Lawrence, who found joy in the humblest employment: “It is not necessary to have great things to do,” he said. “I turn my little omelet in the pan for the love of God.”[v]

Of course, not everyone’s day may feel like participation in the divine task of repairing the world, or the cultivation of human flourishing, or the fulfillment of personal vocation. There are some jobs which should not even exist, because they bring harm to the planet, society, or the worker. There are many people whose sense of purposeful time has been diminished by unemployment, retirement, or illness. And there are those who suffer days of perpetual affliction and sorrow. At such negative extremities of human experience, can prayerful awareness still flourish? Can we still cry to God “out of the depths?” Or is consciousness of transcendent presence and divine impulse only for the fortunate or the serene?

In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested for political activities. After seven dismal months in prison, he was taken out to be executed by a firing squad, or so it seemed. It turned out to be a cruel charade—there was a last-minute reprieve. The rifles were lowered and the condemned prisoners were returned to their cells. But having looked death in the face, Dostoevsky realized the utter preciousness of life under any conditions. Back in his cell, he dashed off a letter to his brother.

“When I look back on my past,” he wrote, “and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul—then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness!”[vi]

Dostoevsky’s revelation from the depths of human suffering would sustain him through four years in a Siberian labor camp, and bear fruit in his visionary writings about the power of divine compassion to humanize a heartless world. Even in the abyss, we can be surprised by joy. Even at the grave, we make our song.[vii]Praise to the Giver! Praise to the gift! 

Thankfully, most of our lives are less dramatic than Dostoevsky’s, but whether our story be sweet or not sweet, may we perform each day’s work mindful of time’s gift—the opportunity to make a difference, to add more goodness, truth and beauty to the world. Where there is hatred, let us sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is injustice, action. Where there is darkness, light. Where there is sadness, joy.[viii]

The spirit of Terce is oblation: as our day begins to unfold, we offer it up as expression and embodiment of the divine impulse. An old eucharistic prayer puts it this way: “And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee.” Elizabeth Rooney’s devotional poem, “Oblation,”[ix] posits self-offering as a daily practice:

I hope each day 
To offer less to you,
Each day
By your great love to be 
Diminished
Until at last I am 
So decreased by your hand
And you so grown in me
That my whole offering
Is just an emptiness
For you to fill
Or not
According to your will.

As we dive into the flow of the day, Terce reminds us to keep God in mind and heart and body. Our hours belong to God. Receive every moment, every labor, every encounter, every delight, every challenge as divine gift. 

Prayer isn’t just a momentary act. It is a stance toward reality, a state of awareness. It may involve words, chant, ritual, or pure silence—an attentive pause to listen for whatever needs to be heard. And it always involves breathing. “By following your breath,” says Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, “and combining the Full Awareness of Breathing with your daily activities, you can cut across the stream of disturbing thoughts and light the lamp of awakening.”[x]

Pray at the door of morning … pray as you go … pray as you labor.
Want what God wants. 
Be thankful.
Do love’s work. 
Refuse despair.

In 1960 New Orleans, a six-year-old African-American named Ruby Bridges became the first black person to attend an all-white elementary school in the segregated South. On her first morning, she was met by a shouting mob of white people. At first she thought it must be some kind of celebration, like a Mardi Gras parade. But she soon realized the screams were directed at her. Federal marshals protected her from physical assault, but the hateful words and jeering faces were terrible enough. A few years later, Norman Rockwell painted that little girl’s courageous walk to school for a story in Look magazine.

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With (Look magazine, Jan. 14, 1964).

Ruby Bridges was met at the school door by Barbara Henry, the one teacher who was willing to teach a Black child. Years later, Bridges would write about that moment, “You cannot look at a person and tell whether they’re good or bad. Evil comes in all shades and colors. That is the lesson that I learned from the teacher that looked exactly like the people outside that threw things, spit, and yelled—she looked exactly like them, but she was different, and I knew that at six years old, because she showed me her heart.”

For a while, Ruby’s first-grade mornings—her Terce—always began with the taunting mob. One day, she paused before going inside. Her lips were moving, but the shouting drowned her out. Her teacher later asked her why she had stopped to talk to the crowd. “I wasn’t talking,” she said. “I was praying. I was praying for them.”[xi]

[i] Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), from the 2nd paragraph of “Sounds.”

[ii] Dom Cuthbert Butler, cited in Rowan Williams, The Way of St. Benedict (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), 112. Butler was a Benedictine abbot and patristic scholar. 

[iii] “remember God”—John Gother (1654-1704), cited in Gordon Mursell, English Spirituality: From 1700 to the Present Day (London: SPCK 2008), 34; “may be diffused”—Hannah More (1745-1833), in Practical Piety; or, the influence of the religion of the heart on the conduct of life (1811), cited in Mursell, 118. Gother was a Catholic priest who catechised the London poor; More was an Anglican writer who stressed the inseparability of prayer and social action.

[iv] From “Come, labor on,” a hymn text by Jane Laurie Borthwick (1813-1897), #541 in The Episcopal Hymnal 1982. This was often sung at chapel during my 6 years at an Episcopal school in Los Angeles, where self-motivation was strongly encouraged!

[v] Citations from Karen Speerstra, ed., Divine Sparks: Collected Wisdom of the Heart (Sandpoint, ID: Morning Light Press, 2005). Wendell Berry, p. 520; Brother Lawrence  (from his 17th-century text, The Practice of the Presence of God), p. 521.

[vi] Cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 181-182.

[vii] This beautiful statement of resurrection faith is from the Eastern Orthodox Memorial Service, sung as part of the Burial Kontakion in The Episcopal Hymnal 1982, #355.

[viii] From the famous prayer attributed to St. Francis, although the earliest traceable source is from 1912. I added the injustice/action line.

[ix] Elizabeth Rooney (1924-1999) was an Episcopal poet and a member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. 

[x] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (1987), cited in Dennis Patrick Slattery, Grace in the Desert: Awakening to the Gifts of Monastic Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004), 40.

[xi] Ruby Bridges, cited in Marion Wright Edelman, “Lessons from Ruby Bridges” (Oct. 26, 1918).

Backpacking with the Saints (Part 1)

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Sky Top Creek carries glacial meltwater from Montana’s highest peak.

I am going to allure her, and bring her into the wilderness,
where I will speak tenderly to her heart.

–– Hosea 2:14

We all need to get away––beyond the noise of history and culture, the deafening roar of the social imaginary, the insistent obsessions of the constructed self, the blinding glare of the familiar. We all need to go into the wild. But the exodus “away from here” is not merely escape. It is also quest. We lose in order to find.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers knew that the trouble with wilderness is that you risk meeting God there. That’s exactly why they went. Celtic monks put to sea in rudderless boats, surrendering personal control to the unpredictable wildness of wind and tides. Only a power beyond themselves could show them the way to an unmapped reality. John Muir had to disappear into California’s Sierra Nevada to find a “church” commensurate with his praises. True pilgrimage always takes us away from here. And even should we return, we will be somebody else.

Belden C. Lane, an American theologian and scholar, writes about the deep connections between geography and spirituality. Landscapes of the Sacred (1988) examines the “spirit of place” in various American religious movements and traditions. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998) focuses on the physical and spiritual extremes of desert and mountain. Backpacking with the Saints (2015) draws on his personal outdoor adventures to explore “wilderness hiking as a spiritual practice.” His most recent book, The Great Conversation: Nature and the Care of the Soul (2019), models the vital and necessary dialogue between the human soul and all the voices of creation.

Believing that transformative works are best read in transformative places, Lane always throws a spiritual classic in his backpack before setting out. In my own 49 years of backpacking, I too have taken other voices along, and Backpacking with the Saints, drawing on a variety of wisdom teachers from St. Columba and John of the Cross to Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh, has been my choice for a number of backcountry walks, including a recent week in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana. Even though it’s only available in hardback (1 pound!), its abundant riches are worth the extra weight.

In each chapter, Lane links a personal wilderness experience to the life and writings of a particular saint. Whether a venture into the wild produces fear or wonder, discouragement or exhilaration, joy or grief, the saints know what he is going through. But the holy teachers are not always consoling. Sometimes Lane feels the reproof in their words, which can “slap me upside the head as may be required.”

After an introduction to the virtues of walking, reading and being in places of silence, solitude and natural beauty, Backpacking explores the fourfold pattern of wilderness spirituality: Departure, Discipline, Descent, and Delight.

Badger Pass Trail, Banff National Park, Canada (2012).

1) Departure (Leaving the trailhead)

The call to venture out may come from dissatisfaction: something is wrong, or something is missing. Or its source may be a hunger for mystery, a thirst for renewal. “The mountains are calling and I must go,” said John Muir. But getting out of the house (or routine, or to-do list) can be the hardest part. I keep a walking stick by the front door to remind me that the path is always waiting just outside. But the gravitational pull of the safe and familiar is a strong force. Sometimes a great leap is required.

Lane draws on the Celtic wanderers to help him out the door and into the wild. “Well does the Fair Lord show us a course, a path,” they said. The Sufi poet Hafiz employed a more violent image: “Love wants to reach out and manhandle us, breaking all our teacup talk of God. . . It wants to drag you by the hair and rip from your grip all the toys in the world that bring you no joy.” Whether the leaving is gentle or wrenching, there’s a lot of letting go and leaving behind, if one is to travel light and venture far.

But once you are on your way, disillusionment will greet you sooner or later. You’re not the hero you imagined. You make mistakes. You get tired. Romantic illusions crash and burn. There are no shortcuts. As the mountaineers warn, ““It’s always farther than it looks. It’s always taller than it looks. And it’s always harder than it looks.”

Lower Aero Lake and Mt. Villard, Beartooth Mountains, Montana.

Feeling strangely vulnerable in the “vast loneliness” of a Wyoming peak after dark, hemmed in by the impenetrable shadows of a place where humans don’t belong, Lane had the sensation of being watched, of being exposed to a dread he couldn’t name. “[M]y image as professor, spiritual seeker, and self-styled ‘wilderness backpacker’ counted for nothing.” I’ve had similar experiences out in the lost and lonely places. Nature doesn’t always smile back.

Lane found comfort in Thérèse of Lisieux, the “warrior saint” whose desire for spiritual greatness was tempered by an acceptance of her own littleness. In the last months of her short life, her characteristic lightness gave way to desolation. “If you only knew what darkness I am plunged into. . . the night of utter nothingness! I feel no joy. I sing only of what I wish to believe.” But Thérèse’s dark night of abandonment was where she became best acquainted with divine mercy.

Once disillusionment has stripped us of grandiosity, we can begin to examine our desire. The first step is to release our attachment to all the “unmet desires of the past,” that insatiable “yearning that lingers in unhealed wounds.” Just as the forests act as a sink for carbon emissions, the “quiet presence” of trees is also “able to receive whatever we need to release in terms of misspent passion.”

Born into a family shadowed by disappointments, failures, betrayals, abandonment, alcoholism, sexual abuse and suicide, Lane’s testimony to wilderness healing is authentic and moving.

“We hike into wilderness with the accumulated desires of the past. We carry our own twisted longings and those of our parents, our lovers, and our children as well. We’re the ‘walking wounded,’ battle-scarred by desires we’ve carried throughout our lives. More than once I’ve lugged a wounded father on my back up Rockpile Mountain. Father and mother wounds are handed down to us, filled with frustrated desires we still try to satisfy.”

Over time, Lane says, he has been able “to release these wounds back into the wilds. I let them go, like injured animals. . . It’s not far wrong to think of our wounds as creatures who’ve wandered into our lives from out in the wilds. Doing so gives them the respect they deserve. It also allows us to identify ourselves as separate from them.” And once we do that, our deepest desire––for the one true thing worth having––begins to speak.

Pink monkey flowers along Sky Top Creek.

2) Discipline (The practice of the wild)

Just like the Christian life, it is possible to drift unchanged through a wilderness walk. You may enjoy it, or learn from it, and still return pretty much the same as when you left. If you want to invite a deeper transformation, the saints would encourage you to practice certain disciplines: solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness.

Kierkegaard is Lane’s saint of solitude. The 19th-century Danish theologian refused to be part of the herd. He sharply criticized both church and culture, and was ridiculed and scorned in return. He even broke his engagement to the love of his life, choosing “to stand like a lonely pine tree” for the rest of his life. But his personal solitude produced the existentialist understanding of Christian faith as no collective generality, but a specifically personal risk––demanding no less than everything.

Solitude, in its freedom from external forces and the need for approval, makes space for our truest self to emerge. “I want to be the person that I am when I’m alone in wilderness,” says Lane. At the same time, solitude can remove the hindrances to a deeper communion with the mystery of God and the interconnectedness of creation––“the common life that binds our separate solitudes into one.”

Traveling light is the second essential discipline in the wild. “The only indispensable item I pack is a capacity for amazement,” Lane writes. As a hiker who carries more than one book, journal, camera, binoculars, bear canister, tent, sleeping bag, rain suit, cooking gear and a few extra treats beyond the basic meals, I have yet to attain ultra-lightness. I have, however, trimmed 2 inches from the end of my toothbrush as well as the white space from the edges of my maps.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations Secretary-General whose profound inner life was unknown to the world until his spiritual testament, Markings, was discovered after his untimely death. As a powerful and famous world figure, he wrestled with both self-importance and despair. But his mountain hikes, and his writings, helped him to release those burdens.

“To be free,” he wrote, “is to be able to stand up and leave everything behind––without looking back––to say ‘Yes’ to whatever comes.”

Traveling light not only means to leave behind burdens, hindrances and negativities. It also means to renounce expectations and outcomes. I’ve met walkers on the Camino de Santiago and the Pacific Crest Trail who were in such a hurry to accomplish the journey that they missed exquisite moments of Now along the way. And perhaps we could even renounce language––stop naming and labeling what we see, receiving everything in its indescribable fullness. As Hammarskjöld put it, “In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest. . . Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation.”

The third discipline in Lane’s wilderness praxisis mindfulness, “a rigorous practice of welcoming the moment, whatever it brings.” Be present to the presences around you. Don’t let your feet take a walk without you. Receive the bird’s song, cloud’s shadow, wildflower colors, sunlight on your skin, wind in the pines, the steepness of the trail––all the gifts of the moment––as they happen. Do not grasp, but “catch and release.”

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle,” says Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. “But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.” Whenever I climb a steep trail, I try not to think of how hard it is, or how far I have to go. I simply attend to the act of lifting my foot, swinging my leg, lowering my foot, step by step. If I am fully present to these actions, I am free from longing for a future state of rest.

Walk “as if you are kissing the earth with your feet,” Hanh says. Mindfulness is the best form of reverence. And it is also the key to perfect presence. In the words of an old Celtic prayer,

May I arrive at every place I enter.

In my next two posts, I’ll cover Lane’s final two pillars of wilderness spirituality: Descent (When the trail gets rough) and Delight (Returning home with gifts). But for now, I leave you with my favorite story from Backpacking with the Saints.

In the chapter on desire, the saint is Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century Anglican metaphysical poet whose Centuries of Meditations celebrates unbounded desire and delight. “You must Want like God,” he urged, “that you may be satisfied like God.” For Traherne, enjoyment of God and God’s world was not a matter of feelings, occasional and intermittent like gusts of wind. They were chosen practices, a form of faithful participation in divine delight.

“Your enjoyment of the world, is never right, until every morning you awake in Heaven. . . You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars. . . Yet further, you never enjoy the world aright, till you so love the beauty of enjoying it, that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it.” (Centuries I: 28-31)

When Lane tossed Centuries into his pack for a Good Friday overnight in the St. Francois Mountains of southeast Missouri, he was not in the best of moods. Out of sorts physically (a tiring trail, empty stomach, headache and sleeplessness), stressed by thoughts of work and family, and feeling the Holy Week darkness of crucifixion and tomb, he “grudgingly read Traherne by candlelight,” as if daring the poet to cheer him up.

The next morning, his body felt better, but his soul was bored, restless, fraught with “all the unsatisfied longings of the past.” Still, he resumed his reading of Centuries, on a sloping rock at the edge of a “shimmering pool.” Traherne reminded him that those who “put off felicity with long delays are to be much suspected.” It was like a resurrection summons to Lane’s buried heart.

Sky Top Creek on my last night in the Beartooths.

“He was urging that I give myself to Joy,” Lane says. “To embrace what he called felicity despite a world of endlessly unmet needs.” His mind stubbornly resisted the call, but his body could not. He found himself pulling off shoes and clothes. But in his haste, he failed to notice the precarious balance of the book on the sloping rock.

“To my horror, the university library’s copy of the Clarendon Press edition of Traherne’s Centuries began sliding down the rock and into the water ahead of me! As if the author and his book were crying out, “HERE’S how it’s done!! THIS is what felicity looks like!! Wheeeeeeee, follow me!!” And so I did, screaming as I hit the ice-cold water, grabbing the book before it sank out of sight.”

Lane spent the next hour naked on that rock, sponging the book cover to cover with his T-shirt: “I imagined Traherne laughing with me on every page.”

 

 

Most quotations, either by Belden C. Lane or the saints cited, are from Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice (Oxford University Press, 2015)

All photographs are by Jim Friedrich. Except for the the Canadian Rockies trail, they were all taken last month on my backpack in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains. 

Related posts: 

Solitude (Part 1)

Solitude (Part 2)

Footsteps and shadows: Inscribing our traces on the Camino

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This spring I find my mind often returning to the Camino de Santiago. A year ago today I began my tenth day of walking: 140 miles down, 360 to go. But by then I had stopped counting. It was better – and less tiring – to be in the moment, to “cherish every step” as one pilgrim advised me early on.

When I run long distance, or backpack up a steep mountain pass, I try to apply the mindfulness of Zen walking. Don’t think about some other time, in the past or the future, when you are in a more comfortable state of rest. And stop wondering how far you have left to go. Simply be here now. Concentrate your attention on the physical act of lifting your foot, swinging it forward, setting it down. Take note of your breath. It’s not about forgetting the pain so much as accepting your present state of being-in-motion, not wishing you were doing something less strenuous or challenging.

When you walk ten to twenty miles day after day for over a month, this kind of attention becomes more automatic. Walking becomes what you do and who you are. As I wrote in one of my Camino posts, “Walking”:

The past week was spent traversing the immense agricultural plateau of the Meseta and Tierra de Campos. Few trees, big sky, only occasional villages, and long stretches where the only human presence was the long procession of pilgrims migrating westward. The lack of distractions and variations tends to make the very act of walking to be the mind’s principal occupation. As Robert Macfarlane puts it in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, walking becomes “sensational” – it isn’t just conducive to thought; it becomes the form thought takes. I walk, therefore I am. Perhaps it is similar to the way that cinema thinks through the movement of the camera. It isn’t forming propositional thought, but is simply absorbing through its attentive motion the shape of the world, the textures of existence.

I have noticed that I have fewer thoughts out here than I do at home when I run for an hour, or go on a week-long backpack. On the Camino, instead of a lot of thoughts, I simply have thought: not so much words or ideas as awareness. As Thich Nhat Hanh once put it to a walking companion who asked what he was thinking about: “I’m not thinking about anything. I’m aware of the sunlight.”

Macfarlane provides a memorable image of walking as a form of writing on the earth, with every traveler leaving his or her own imprint of dreams, stories and memories as they go. Centuries of pilgrims have been leaving such traces along the Camino, traces which now lie beneath our own feet every step of the Way.

The brief video clip records my shadow and footsteps leaving their faint traces: on the Meseta west of Burgos, on the 13th century bridge of Puente de Orbigo, and among the blooming shrubs of the Alto Predela, a high ridge west of Villafranca. I hope these few steps bring back happy memories for my fellow pilgrims. And for those who want to experience our cumulative act of walking in real time, just replay the 80-second video 11,000 times!