No Time for Spiritual Practice?

You’re telling me you have no time for spiritual practice. Otherwise, you’d give Zen a try. No time for prayer. Not even thirty minutes a day. Sit with that awareness. How unimportant you make yourself. It’s time for a change.

I don’t remember now who turned me on to Cardinal Bernardin’s Gift of Peace, but it must have been shortly after its publication in 1997. For me, his most powerful teaching was the observation that, when you really need it, it’s too late to develop a spiritual practice. The time to develop that practice is before you need it. Bernardin was talking about prayer practice. He could as well have been talking about meditation.

His teaching resonated. I’d learned a similar lesson years earlier, managing public mental health programs. Mental health programs, particularly those serving the folks who are living most treatment-resistant challenges, frequently come under attack. Our patients were frequently blamed for community ills. When your clinic is being pilloried, you need all the political support you can get; but when you’re under attack, it’s too late to make friends. Make friends when you don’t need them. Get to know your elected officials. Go to their fundraisers. You never know  when you’ll need a friend.

I already had a sense of this. As my meditation practice was taking hold in the early 90’s, I’d caught a glimpse of what Bernardin was talking about. I’d found peace in the thought that I could sit through whatever life would throw my way, not in thirty minutes, maybe not in a day or a week or a year, maybe I would have to move to a Zen monastery where I could sit full time, but if I kept sitting, I would eventually emerge. There was comfort in the thought. Was it true? How could I know? But I would find out. I was grateful for my sitting practice. I was charmed by Bernardin’s way of expressing this.

You don’t have the time now for your spiritual practice? By the time you realize that you need it, it will likely to be too late to learn. Bernardin wrote The Gift of Peace while battling the pancreatic cancer which would take his life. Don’t wait for the excruciating pain and the pain killers to build your practice.

No time for spiritual practice? What you really mean, I fear, is no time for yourself. Out of your whole day, you cannot close the door to a room and take thirty minutes for yourself. Think about that. How unimportant are you? In your own life.

Why do so many of us have so much difficulty making time for ourselves? Why are we always postponing. There was a young prof on the sociology doctoral faculty at NYU who we all liked. He could really relate to what we were facing, but he couldn’t speak up. “Wait until I get tenure,” he said. I’d already graduated when he got tenure, but I heard from friends still in the program that he still hadn’t spoken up. There was something else in the way.

No time for yourself? You’ll make time for your spiritual practice when you retire. Or will you be too old then? When death is knocking on the door, when you’re flat on your back with nothing but time, will the pain be too late?