The Denver Art Museum, Asian Collection, Fifth Floor, May 2016 – a lunch hour sitting with images that sit.
Sitting in peacefulness is a hard thing to do in our culture. We move fast. We accomplish a lot. We have to, in order to maintain the standards of living we have decided we need and so that we stay the 1% of the wealthiest humans on the planet. And of course one may wonder if that standard is chosen because we really need the things we have or if that standard is chosen to support weak self-esteem, inflated self-ego, self-comparison to others and so many of the other pathologies in which we engage as hairless bipeds.
What if sitting, in silence, and thinking or simply being were an activity in which we engaged for an hour each day, or 15 minutes? What if we trained in silence like runner trains for a marathon? What would we notice about ourselves? What might God say to us in the silence? What might we see? What would we observe about ourselves and about others? About what would we wonder? What new ideas would appear on the whiteboard of our mind’s eye?
I am convinced of one thing. Satan needs no brothels and bars to entice us to sin – if “sin” is just a word meaning “missing the mark” when shooting the arrows of our lives. No. I have seen people try to shoot arrows and have studied archery and fencing when I was young. All you need to shoot an arrow off-target is a distraction. Satan does not need Las Vegas, Amsterdam, shopping malls, internet porn, shopping magazines or any of the other things we use to anesthetize our pain. Satan just needs very busy people, who are keeping or grabbing for money and status; and who are rarely, if ever, stopping to think about their lives.
