Continuous Prayer – Part 2

From The Tradition of Meditation, by Laurence Freeman, Meditatio Talks Series 2010 B

In the beginning of the Ninth Conference Cassian lays the foundations for his understanding of continuous prayer by speaking about the need to control what he calls our anxiety or care about fleshly things. That immediately turns us off – here is this monk sitting out in the middle of the desert telling us not to worry about fleshly things like food and drink and everything else! But what he is talking about and he goes on to describe are these. These are what he means by fleshly things: gossip, idle talk, clowning around, pretty well everything that we associate with the media, TV and chat shows.

Turn on the radio as soon as we get into the car just to have this background chat and gossip and celebrity news, and look through the magazines to see who Hollywood stars are marrying or not marrying – that’s fleshly things. If we want to approach continuous prayer, we’ve got to control that. And then he means other things like anger, controlling anger, sadness, depression. These are things we have to
work with.

These are not things we have to blame ourselves for feeling necessarily but when we recognise them, when we recognise that we are controlled by the demon of anger or the demon of sadness as the Desert Fathers described it and also psychology, then we have to work on it. We have to recognise it and work on it. Lust and the desire for money, well these are pretty common demons of our culture and of our age as well, substitutes for God, ways of avoiding the top priority, ways of running away from the goal of life.

So this is what we do every time we sit to meditate. We have to control our care for fleshly things. And this spills over into the way we live as we will see. Planning, analysing, remembering, day-dreaming, all the things that we call distraction, our busy mind. The Irish have a nice expression; when they can’t call something to mind they say I “dis-remember” it. I dis-remember it. That’s what we do when we meditate, we dis-remember, as what The Cloud of Unknowing calls, “pushing all the stuff down into the cloud of forgetting”. Let it go. That’s how you control it. It’s letting it go. Control doesn’t mean you have to struggle with it all the time; it means you have to let it go.

And that’s the work of meditation. Moderation and necessity, what we actually need, and using things in moderation shape the moral life. Wherever there is moderation we have what we need. But if we have more than what we need, he says, we will feel immediately care and anxiety. Well that’s a wonderful lesson here for us in the middle of our ecological crisis and our financial crisis. We are probably going to have to get used to living with less. We are going to have to come a little bit closer to the level of what we actually need to live with rather than what we imagine we want. Too much leads to the disease, the diseases of affluence, and there is a real hunger for simplicity in our over-saturated world.