An excerpt from Laurence Freeman in FIRST SIGHT: The Experience of Faith (New York: Continuum, 2011), pp.24-25.
If meditation changes our life it’s because it helps us to see the true value of living faithfully. It shows what being faithful in small things means, not just believing in big abstractions or holding tenaciously to the comfort zone of certain ideas because we have always done so or because they shape an identity for us. As meditation develops the muscle of faith, integrity begins to matter more, not as a prescribed moral code but as a sense of what wholeness means. It is more uncomfortable living with ourselves if we act or speak without it, therefore, we seek it even at some cost. Being a faithful human being, keeping our word, acting truly in all our relationships, intimate and professional, trying to tell the truth as it is, being just and compassionate in small daily matters becomes increasingly linked to our sense of meaning.
Faithful to what, we might ask. Just faithful, faithful in all we do. Faithful in the way we love, faithful in the way we work. Faithful in the way we walk and talk and walk the talk. Faithful in the way we sit still in meditation, faithful in the way we accept the gift of life by using our time mindfully and treating our own body and others and this earth our home with respect. In living faithfully we discover the meaning of goodness firsthand.
After Meditation: Prayer by Ellen Bass in LIKE A BEGGAR (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2014), Kindle edition.
Prayer
Once I wore a dress liquid as vodka.
My lover watched me ascend
from the subway
like I was an underground spring
breaking through.
I want to stop wanting to be wanted like that.
I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June,
the chorus of hope, the ravenous green,
the earth, her ornate crown of trees
spiking up from her loamy head.
There are things I wanted, like everyone.
But to this angel of wishes I’ve worshipped
so long, I ask now to admit
the world as it is.
