also learn to recognize how resistance feels. Does it take the form of blame,
anger, fear, avoidance, projection, denial, an urge to pretend? You want to spot
the clever ways that you personally push back from daily reality, or they will
run your life—and you will never spot them. You will think you are “thinking”
or “choosing” when you are actually just operating according to program. To get
out of your programming is a big part of what we mean by “consciousness.”
Foundationally, we must find a prayer form that actually invades our
unconscious, or nothing changes at any depth. Usually this will be some form of
centering prayer, walking meditation, inner practices of letting go, shadow
work, or deliberately undergoing a longer period of silence (as I did while
writing the first draft of this book, thirty-five days largely alone and quiet).
Whatever you choose, it will feel more like unlearning than learning, more like
surrendering than accomplishing. This is probably why so many resist
contemplation to begin with. Because it feels more like the shedding of thoughts
in general than attaining new or good ones. It feels more like just letting go than
accomplishing anything, which is counterintuitive for our naturally
“capitalistic” minds! This is our age-old resistance to the descending kind of
religion.
The human need for physical, embodied practices is not new. Across
Christian history, the “Sacraments,” as Orthodox and Catholics call them, have
always been with us. Before the age of literacy emerged, in the sixteenth
century, things like pilgrimage, prayer beads, body prostrations, bows and
genuflections, “blessing oneself” with the sign of the cross, statues, sprinkling
things with holy water, theatrical plays and liturgies, incense and candles all
allowed the soul to know itself through the outer world, which we have in this
book dared to call “Christ.” These outer images serve as mirrors of the Absolute,
which can often bypass the mind. Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a
Shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very
finite.
In 1969 I was sent as a deacon to work at Acoma Pueblo, an ancient Native
American community in western New Mexico. When I got there, I was amazed
to discover that many Catholic practices had direct Native American
counterparts. I saw altars in the middle of the mesas covered with bundles of
prayer sticks. I noted how the people of Acoma Pueblo sprinkled corn pollen at
funerals just as we did holy water, how what we were newly calling “liturgical
dance” was the norm for them on every feast day. I observed how mothers
would show their children to silently wave the morning sunshine toward their