I should be good at it. Every morning for six years I spent half an hour in meditation.
I sat in a small oratory in silence and tried to free my mind of all distracting and superfluous thoughts. Nowadays it is called mindfulness. Mind you that was fifty years ago in Rome, the capital of lovely Italy that is presently being crucified by the coronavirus.
Six years is a long time. I should be well suited to embracing social distancing and self-isolation. I should be but I am not convinced I am. I am not sure I was good at the meditation. I used to sit and be quiet and try hard not to fall asleep. My mind and my thoughts would run hither and thither; things I had to do, things I shouldn’t have done; looking forward and looking back and only landing in the present, the place I was supposed to be, only landing there now and again.
Glancing around at fellow meditators, I always felt most of them were better at the task than me. Especially the ones with the straight backs and pursed lips. They seemed to have reached a state of quietness and serenity that I could only envy.
Some guilty pleasure was afforded years later, on discovering that a few of the straight-backed ones fell off the ladder of social respectability. By that time, I had diagnosed myself as being addicted to adrenalin and that is a bad place to be when the world comes to a stop
As we are driven indoors and inward to self-reflection, Pascal’s statement that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone’ has once again come to prominence on media outlets. Pascal was French and a bit of a genius. He was an inventor of counting machines and a theologian of sorts. He contributed to the growth of Jansenism, a movement that gained favour in Maynooth seminary where most of the Irish Catholic clergy were trained.
Like a virus, in the early nineteenth century, it spread throughout Ireland, killing off the vibrant, earthy spirituality of the Irish Celts and replaced it with a sin-based view of depraved humanity. It introduced an obsession with sin and rigorous morality that obsessed with self-sacrifice and piety. I remember an old priest, who was very good at sitting in a room on his own for long periods, describing much of the theology that he was taught in Maynooth as tight arsed.
I don’t consider the six years of meditation as completely lost. I learned that silence and isolation is, itself, no silver bullet for health and wisdom. Like everything in life, it depends what you do with it. It is better to face into the feelings that arise rather than run away from them. The journey inwards is peppered with feelings of hurt, regret, soreness, aloneness, to name a few. If life has been reasonably good to you, there will be station stops of mellowness and warmth which will bring a smile and a tear to the eye. Sometimes, memories of events and persons are attached to the feelings, mostly they are just a sensation in the gut. Many will fear that the intensity of the feelings will overpower them. It won’t. But that is easy to write and not that easy to do if or when the feelings erupt. Tears are good.
With the fragile faith that I can muster nowadays, I go with St Augustine ( who should have known better but who became somewhat of a tight arse himself) when he said that his heart would not rest until it rested with God. Pandemic or not, social isolation or thronged crowds, single or married, loved or neglected, the journey inwards will always bring us to a place where we are on our own. That is humanness for you!
