Just as meditation moves our consciousness from the head to the heart, and from Doing to Being, so poetry also leads us to an inner richness that we hunger to experience. Long-time meditator, educator and author Dr Noel Keating* reflects on how poetry gives rise to rich contemplative insights and helps deepen our appreciation of the mystery of our own spiritual experience. Part II of his reflection will appear in two weeks. The articles are a slightly edited version of an online talk Dr Keating gave to a group of Christian meditators on 28 August 2023*.
Words are inadequate to describe our meditation experience because that experience is ineffable. It occurs at a level of consciousness deeper than our everyday self-consciousness and so it defies rational elucidation. Yet, when John Main or Laurence Freeman or other contemplative teachers speak about the experience of meditation, what they say can resonate deeply with us because we too have experienced it.
So, while no combination of words can give adequate expression to it, they can point towards a truth we recognise because of that resonance. The words they use become stepping stones for us towards an inexpressible truth – to use a metaphor from the Rule of St Benedict, they disclose ‘the inexpressible delights of Love’ (Prologue 49).
Heidegger once wrote that poetry is language in service of the unsayable. It was Heidegger too who coined the word ‘inception’ to describe the process where our understanding takes a deeply insightful turn, where we suddenly grasp the truth of something at a very deep level, deeper somehow than the intellect. Knowledge disclosed by such insight lies beyond the rational; it is knowledge of the heart – it is not irrational but trans-rational.
John Main captured this understanding when he said that meditation moves the centre of gravity of our consciousness from the head to the heart. Just as meditation in our tradition is not a form of mental prayer but a prayer of the heart, the fruit of meditation is not rational knowledge but knowledge of the heart. As John Main expressed it ‘The “heart” is that focal point in our being where we can simply be in the Mystery without trying to explain or dissect it. A mystery analysed becomes merely another problem. It must be apprehended whole and entire.’
I’d like to explore with you how metaphor can help us to speak about contemplation in a way that can give rise to deep resonance within the listener who longs to deepen their own contemplative experience. All of us who meditate – in whatever tradition – are drawn to it because we experience an inner yearning for something deeper in our lives. We have developed an intuition that there is more to life than the desires of the ego.
We often experience that yearning first as children. I recall at the age of ten or eleven reading a library book in which a character refers to a phrase from St Augustine – the saying that ‘You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.’ I remember how deeply that phrase resonated with my own heart when I first read it. And I think it is fair to say that that childhood yearning has ultimately guided my life.
James Finley uses a lovely metaphor that captures very well a malaise of our times. He says we spend much of our lives trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of our lives. I think that is a really rich metaphor which helps to capture how we get so easily caught up in the needs and desires of the ego and fail to pay attention to the inner richness of our lives. We are so busy doing, we don’t take time to simply be and we forget that the quality of our doing depends on the quality of our being.
As we strive to teach the richness of our meditation practice in a world that has become increasingly secular, I think the kind of metaphorical, non-religious language that Finley uses here is very helpful. I think that for many young people a phrase like that – how for so much of our lives we remain trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of our lives – can resonate more readily with their inner yearning than the theological language of any meditation tradition.
So while Finley reminds us that meditation brings us from the outer circumference of Doing to the inner richness of simply Being, John Main speaks of meditation moving our consciousness from the head to the heart. The words themselves don’t matter. They are metaphors, it is what they point towards that really matters. Metaphor, poetry and the arts can all point insightfully towards the inner richness that we hunger to experience and which leads to wholeness. Metaphor is a figure of speech where one thing is described as, and in terms of, another.
Metaphor can be a rich portal between self-consciousness and our deeper intuition. Poetic language takes us beyond the literal meaning of words and concepts into the metaphorical, evoking an awareness or experience of reality that goes beyond words. The poet Jane Hirshfield notes that while the unsayable remains unsaid, its meaning can be grasped and apprehended experientially albeit never exhausted. Metaphors succeed because the images they evoke resonate so strongly with the human heart.
I lead an online meditation group in Ireland every Thursday and Sunday evening at 7:30 p.m. and each time I use a different contemporary poem as the reading. In what follows I’m going to look at a few poems to explore how they can give rise to rich contemplative insights and help deepen our appreciation of the mystery of our own spiritual experience.
Our opening poem is a very short poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer called 'One Eventual':
after fifty years of spinning
I learn standing still
is another way to dance
(from
https://ahundredfallingveils.com/2023/05/21/one-eventual-2/)
Just take a moment to ask yourself, what does this short poem arouse in you?...
Is the central message of this poem not what we discover when we first begin to meditate? After fifty years of spinning – after spending so much of our time trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of our lives, after expending so much energy on doing – we learn standing still is another way to dance; a way of being as distinct from a way of doing.
We discover meditation as a journey into the mystery of our being, a pathway into the mystery of God. John Main repeatedly used metaphor in this way, as, for example, when he wrote that ‘by stillness of spirit we move in the ocean of God.’ [Monastery Without Walls: The Spiritual Letters of John Main (Letter 24, p221)].
He goes on to say: ‘Our meditation teaches us … that we have to put our whole heart into this work of the Spirit if we are genuinely to respond to the call to leave the shallows and enter into the deep, direct knowledge that marks a life lived in the mystery of God. John Main tells us that meditation enables us to pass beyond merely looking at the mystery of God as observers and to enter the mystery itself. We come to know God to the degree that we forget ourselves.
And, how do we enter this Presence? By saying our mantra. John Main builds on the metaphor of the oceans of God, adding that ‘Once we have left the shore of our own self we soon pick up the currents of reality that give us our direction and momentum. The more still and attentive we are [to our mantra], the more sensitively we [resonate with and] respond to these currents.’ This kind of metaphorical writing helps us to capture the transcendental nature of the experience without becoming lost in or confused by theological language and abstract concepts.
The poem by Trommer uses a different metaphor very succinctly to make the same point. She writes that we discover after fifty years of spinning that standing still is another way to dance. And note too the use of paradox – that standing still is a way to dance. Through metaphor and paradox we are able grasp immediately what we know to be true from our own experience.
After so many years trapped on the outer circumference of our lives, busily doing, doing, doing – which she refers to as ‘spinning’ - we discover that standing still is another way to dance. That last phrase captures beautifully that the stillness of meditation is not static, but dynamic and receptive, that in meditation we cease to spin and allow ourselves to be danced. And once we discover this for ourselves, we feel drawn to create time for being still every morning and evening in the hope of ever so gently deepening our experience of mystery.
*Dr Keating has spent forty years in the education sector in Ireland, as a teacher, principal and education officer. He is author of ‘Meditation with Children – A Resource for Teachers and Parents’ (Medio Media) and voluntary coordinator of the Meditation with Children Project, which involves over 40,000 children, who meditate several times each week on a whole-school basis, across more than 200 primary schools throughout Ireland. He can be contacted at mnkeating@gmail.com
For more information about John Main, how to meditate and the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
*Dr Keating’s article is a slightly edited version of a talk given at Benedict’s Well, an outreach of the Benedictine Oblates of the WCCM. The weekly event (Mondays) consists of a period of meditation followed by an inspirational talk. See: https://www.youtube.com/@benedictswell6373/featured
For more information contact Fr Mark Kenny at: themarkkenny@gmail.com