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Thinking About Commitment

There are many wonderful things for which I am grateful because I can teach college students.  While I know they are students, in my mind they simply are my younger friends.  They are living their lives, as I am living mine.  My role with them is to help them think about life and help them choose ways to live their lives more fully and more meaningfully.  My way of doing this is not to spend any time telling them what they should think or how they should act.  Instead, I choose to join them in conversation.  I want to assist them to become more reflective, more able to listen to others and themselves and to ask good questions which can add quality and depth to our lives.

One class I particularly enjoy is called Contemplative Spirituality.  The goal in that experience is to learn to live life contemplatively.  That is my goal, too.  If I can live more contemplatively, then my life will be fuller, richer and more deeply meaningful.  “Count me in,” I say!  In the beginning my younger friends typically don’t know what contemplative spirituality means, nor how they would live contemplatively.  I understand; at one point, I did not have a clue either.  

I like to use some words from my favorite twentieth century monk, Thomas Merton, to provide a beginning point.  Merton tells us that contemplation is “spiritual wonder.”  He continues to describe it as “spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being.  It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being.”  I like the word, awe.  We are more likely to hear it in our word, awful.  Oddly enough, awful typically comes to mean bad or disgusting.  However, in its original form, awful, simply conveyed the experience was full of awe.  Awe is more a feeling-word for me, rather than an intellectual idea.  Awe is what I feel in the presence of something deeply profound.  It goes with experiencing God.  The Divine Presence elicits awe.  All I can really say is, “Wow!”

To live contemplatively is to find myself in “awful” places more and more regularly.  My hunch is this happens frequently in ordinary and small ways.  I need to become more aware and alert to the Presence which is always present, but routinely missed in our busyness, absentmindedness and reckless superficiality characteristic of so much modern life.  I want to be different.

It is with this background my younger friends and I commence the contemplative journey at the beginning of a semester.  I am confident in the process.  If they will hang in there and give it a chance, they will come to know life in a richer, deeper way.  We always wander into interesting conversations.  Some of these discussions are predictable and some come as surprises to me, just as it must to my friends.  We always begin by looking at the attachments we all have.

Attachments are normal things we are hooked to that may get in the way of living contemplatively.  Attachments are not bad; they are like habits we do that may prevent a deeper quality of living.  The root of any attachment is desire.  Psychiatrist, Gerald May, whom we read, tells us that desires are at the core of being human.  Desires tap into the basic energy that drives our lives.  Desire can be expressed in frivolous ways and in profound ways.  Most of my younger friends begin to realize their relationship with their phones is an attachment.  

Attachments “hook us” to that which we desire.  In the beginning we simply want a phone.  However, when we get a phone, it lures us into more and more use.  It is an amazingly designed instrument.  Psychologists with PhDs give deep thought how to capture more and more of our time and attention.  A phone used to be a device to call someone when we needed something.  Now we write letters (emails), send texts (messages), watch movies and so much more.  We may not be addicted, but take away someone’s phone and you can see what attachment looks like!

Recently one of my friends asked a question---a good question.  It made me think.  As I thought about it, I realized that a commitment is different than an attachment.  For example, I have friends to whom I am committed.  My commitment is not the same thing as being “hooked” on them---like being dependent on them.  Commitment preserves choice and free will.  My commitment is my desire for friendship lived out over time.  

In writing this, I also realize some relationships are based on dependency.  That is not healthy.  In a dependent relationship, I need you.  In fact, some of these dependent relationships are borderline addictions---I must have you or even think, I can’t live without you.  Choice is gone and free will is kaput in this addictive relationship.

All this brings me back to the Divine Presence all around me.  God desires for us to desire God.  God does not desire dependency and certainly not an addictive relationship.  God wants us freely to choose to be related to each other.  God also wants all of us to be related to each other, too.  As I think about it, I have developed a commitment to my younger friends.  If we all can live out this commitment in a contemplative way, then it is going to be a good life.    


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