We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
Romans 6:4
meditation
Who am I if I am not who I am?
Who am I if I am not resisting?
Who am I if I am not making my own way?
Who am I if I am not doing my own thing?
Who am I if I am not leading?
Who am I if I am not following?
Who am I if I do not have an enemy?
Who am I if I do not have a friend?
Who am I if I am not what I do?
Who am I if I am not what is done to me?
Who am I if I am not what I think?
Who am I if I am not what you think of me?
Who am I if I am not what I feel?
Who am I if I am not what I say?
Who am I if I am not what I stand for?
Who am I if I am not what I stand against?
Who am I if I am not how I look?
Who am I if I am not how you look at me?
Who am I if I am not who I am?
Who is asking?
Who is ‘I am’?
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations on God and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Practicing the presence of God through writing
There are many ways to practice God’s presence. Writing is one such practice. This is not true for all writing, but these days, the writing I do here and at Holistic Budo is one way that I practice God’s presence in my life. That doesn’t mean that everything I write is divinely inspired—far from it. Rather, I can feel God’s presence within the practice when I write with my mind on God.
I don’t write for myself. In truth, it was never my goal or desire to write as much as I do. I write because I feel called to do so. It feels like a spiritual requirement for me, something that God is asking of me. Much like when I don’t pray or meditate, when I don’t write, I feel out of sorts. It’s as if God has given me a gift, and when I squander that gift, he lets me know it.
I also don’t publish my writing for attention. I publish what I have written to free myself of it, let it go, and put it into the world without shame, judgment, or expectation. I publish my work as an act of not hiding. This is me not hiding behind my fear, my insecurity, or my concerns over the opinions of others. This is what I wrote. Here it is. Love it or hate it, I sat down today to write, and this is what came out.
Writing has become, for me, a form of prayer. It’s an act of listening. I sometimes sit down with an idea in mind of what I want to write about, but that idea is usually just the thing that gets me started. Once I begin writing, it rarely, if ever, goes the way I expected. I’m merely a conduit for that which wants to be written. I’m not trying to write. I’m trying to get out of the way.
My best writing comes out of the quiet spaces between my thoughts. When I don’t know what to write, I wait. I listen. I feel what wants to come out, and then I do my best not to taint or distort it. Some days, it’s a struggle—it’s like grappling with a ghost. Other days, it’s easy, like the Holy Spirit is writing through me.
The more I write, the more I realize how insignificant I am and how much God truly loves me. I know that my words and blog are a drop in the ocean of creation. I don’t write, however, to make waves or even ripples in the water. I write because God has given me the ability and the inspiration to do so. And it is my way of thanking him for the Spirit he has sent to guide me. It’s an act of gratitude. It’s a practice, a method for practicing the presence of God in my life.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations on God and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
My value is not contingent upon my usefulness
I have a friend who frequently calls me to tell me how overwhelmed he is and, ironically, I allow this to overwhelm me. This is one of the challenges of being an empathetic person. I feel what others are feeling and often have a difficult time separating their feelings from my own. I call this being emotionally porous.
I’m learning to look for the space between other people’s feelings and my own, however. I’m starting to understand that, even if I can feel what they feel, I am not obligated to take action, to offer advice, or to try to solve every problem within my vicinity. But this has been a long, painful process.
After much reflection and discussion with people more well-equipped to understand these things than I, namely my therapist and my spiritual director, I have found there are many reasons why, in the past, I have felt so driven by some overwhelming invisible force to try to fix every problem presented to me. All of these reasons point back to one thing, however, and that one thing is fear.
For whatever reason, I have a deeply seated fear that, I am only worthy of love to the degree that I am able to fix everything and everyone around me. It’s not my essence or my nature as a human being that makes me lovable. Rather it is my ability to solve other people’s problems.
This belief that I am only lovable to the degree that I am useful, I have discovered, is at the root of much of my restlessness, anxiety, and insecurity. While this self-belief seemed, in the twisted way that an abusive relationship seems to be normal when one is in the midst of it, to serve me for some time, for most of my life in fact, when it started causing me more problems than it was solving, something had to change.
But change of this sort is rarely, easy. To stop doing something one has done for most of one’s life doesn’t usually happen all at once. It’s a slow, arduous process. Along with therapy, spiritual direction, and prayer, I can honestly say that the most profoundly perspective altering practice I have ever taken up in this regard has been meditation in the form of centering or contemplative prayer.
While therapy has helped me to understand why I have these unhealthy tendencies, spiritual direction has helped me to see that other people’s problems are neither my fault nor my responsibility, and prayer has brought me into a relationship with a God who can and wants to change me into a healthier, happier version of myself, centering prayer has created the space within my heart and mind to make growth possible.
The fascinating thing is that centering prayer, or any form of meditation, does not address the issue directly. Instead, through regular practice, it simply gives one more internal space, a buffer of peace if you will, between stimulus and response. By regularly practicing silence and non-attachment to my thoughts and feelings, I don’t always feel the overwhelming urge to respond to the problems presented to me like I once did.
Of course, my old habits and patterns still come up. They are rooted deeply in my psyche and those roots are difficult to dig up. When they do, however, I can better see them for what they are. That is to say, I am able to see that these thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. They are not who I am.
As a result, my relationships are starting to feel healthier. I can listen to problems without making them my own and without feeling the need to solve them or give advice. Not only that, but I no longer feel guilty about letting someone else have their own problems. As much as I am not my own thoughts and feelings, I am beginning to realize that my value is not tied to my usefulness to others.
My value is God-given, as I am a child of God created in God’s very own image and likeness. It is not what I do, what I think, or how I feel that gives value to who I am. There are no conditions on God’s love for me. I am his child, his creation, and his beloved, and my very existence is a divine gift to be cherished and appreciated for the very fact that it is from God. I am not lovable because of what I do. I am lovable because I am.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Going to the source for joy and peace
During breakfast, my daughter asked, “Daddy, why is the water auntie’s house different than the water at our house?”
“It comes from a different source,” I told her.
Sources matter. This is especially true when it comes to prayer and who we rely on for inspiration, guidance, and salvation. There are many different sources, but they don’t all promise the same end product.
As the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.”
For many years, partly in rebellion against my Christian upbringing and partly out of a genuine curiosity, I was deeply attracted to the religions of the East, particularly Buddhism. I took classes, attended workshops, read books, listened to talks, and visited monasteries. I even married a woman from a predominantly Buddhist country.
Buddhism was attractive to me because it offered something I didn’t think Christianity did. It offered a method by which to practice. Christianity had prayer, Scripture, and church, but Buddhism had meditation and the promises of meditation were what really drew me into the religion, and it worked for a while.
Then one day, I had a crisis, a spiritual crisis. A series of events and personal choices threw my life completely out of balance and I started to experience anxiety attacks, severe depression, and what felt like the beginning of a nervous breakdown.
Among other things, I tried to recenter myself by returning to my Buddhist books, lectures, and meditation, but something was missing. It felt like I was hitting my head on a spiritual ceiling and I just couldn’t break through. I was almost there, but not quite and I couldn’t figure out why.
In hindsight, I can now see that God was allowing me to struggle so that I would learn a lesson only pain was going to teach me. In my desperation, I cried out to God for help. I prayed for guidance and wisdom, and, as divine providence would have it, I stumbled upon a book called The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – A New Perspective on Christ and His Message by Cynthia Bourgeault (2008).
Upon reading The Wisdom Jesus, I discovered what was missing from my practice and that was God. Bourgeault’s book not only helped me bridge the gap between Buddhism and the teachings of Jesus, but it also reminded me of who I was and am, and that is a Christian. This book clarified why Buddhism no longer spoke to my heart as it once did. Buddhism had not changed. I had.
This realization restarted my journey in Christ and reignited the fire in my heart for the Lord. Through Bourgeault’s work, I was introduced to Thomas Keating and through Keating I was introduced to centering prayer. In centering prayer, I found a method for meditating which, instead of focusing on me and my attempts at enlightenment, focused on God and inviting him into my heart to do his work.
Both meditation and centering prayer are similar in many ways and they both promise transformative results. The difference between meditation and centering prayer, however, is the source of those results. In meditation, the results come from the practice itself and these results can be amazing and life-changing. The results from centering prayer, however, come from God.
Simply by changing the focus of my practicing an tapping into a different source, by tapping into God, my whole life changed. I stopped having anxiety attacks, my depression subsided, and my relationships started to balance out. I firmly believe that is because God was doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
None of this is to criticize Buddhism or to put down meditation as a practice. On the contrary, both Buddhism and meditation helped me out immensely as far as they could go, but for whatever reason, I needed to go deeper and I needed God’s help to get there. I needed to tap into a different source than Buddhism or meditation had to offer. I needed to tap into God and I needed to go through Jesus to do so.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Some days God reminds us how much we need him
Some days, God likes to remind us how much we need him. He lets us get just far enough away from him that we fall and have to return to him for forgiveness and guidance. Today was one of those days for me.
The morning started out normal enough. I woke up a few minutes later than I would like, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. I went downstairs to make my daughter breakfast and, while doing so, I listened to a podcast about Thomas Aquinas.
As I made my daughter’s ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, I remembered my wife telling me the night before that there were chicken quesadillas prepped in the refrigerator for my daughter’s lunch. All I needed to do was to heat one up, put it in a container, and put it in her lunchbox. But this is where things went sideways.
My next thought after I remembered what my wife said was, “She can take care of that. I’m making breakfast. She can get up and make lunch. It’s time for my prayer hour and I have an appointment later.”
I finished making my daughter’s breakfast, set it on the table for her, and then sat down to for prayer. I started by reading a little bit about the history of Saint Patrick. After that, I read the Catholic Mass readings for the day. Then, holding the rosary my friend gave me, I said one Our Father and three Hail Marys and then sat in silent prayer for twenty minutes.
While I was in silent prayer, I heard my daughter’s first alarm go off and then I brought my mind back to God. A few minutes passed and I heard her second alarm go off and then I brought my mind back to God. Then she came downstairs and I brought my mind back to God. I heard her sit down to eat, open a book, and thought, “That book is going to make her eat slowly and she’s going to be late,” and then I turned my mind back to God.
When I was done with silent prayer, I opened my eyes and started to write my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog post for the day. While I was doing this, my wife came down and made my daughter’s lunch. She then told my daughter to close her book and finish eating because she was taking too long and was going to be late.
After my daughter finished her breakfast and my wife packed her lunch, we all started scurrying to get my daughter out the door on time. She went upstairs to brush her teeth and, when she came down, it was time to go, but her hair still wasn’t brushed or tied up and her agenda book wasn’t signed. Her mother was starting to get irritated and I could feel the tension building.
As my wife helped my daughter with her hair, I grabbed my daughter’s agenda book to sign it for her. I was getting flustered because it was time to go and all of this should have been done earlier. I also knew in the back of my mind that, if I had only been a little bit less selfish and prepped my daughter’s lunch for her while I was in the kitchen, my wife could have done her hair while she was eating, and we’d all be less frustrated.
After I signed her agenda book, I struggled to get it closed and, in my frustration, I lost my cool and tossed the agenda book on the couch in my daughter’s direction. I then grumbled at both of them that if they woke up earlier we wouldn’t all be in such a hurry.
The truth is, however, that I woke up late this morning, not them. It wasn’t too late, but it was late enough that I had to do my silent prayer while my daughter was getting ready and eating breakfast which, while doable, is not ideal. And then there was the selfish attitude I had about my daughter’s lunch.
I got my daughter out to the bus stop and she made it in time to catch the bus. After the bus drove away, I started on my morning walk. I was about a half a mile down the road when my wife called to talk about what happened earlier. We agreed that we need to do better and came up with some strategies for doing so, and then went on about our respective days.
I should say that I am extremely grateful for the fact that my wife and I talk through these things the way we do. Even when it’s hard or we don’t know how to be, we both want to be better spouses and better parents. These little five minute talks after a less than perfect morning where mistakes were made goes a long way to that end.
After I got home from my walk, a friend of mine who is struggling with some personal issues texted me and we shared back and forth about forgiveness and the process by which God expects us to do so, even when we have been truly hurt by someone. Somewhere in that text thread, I explained how I am constantly reminded of how imperfect I am and that these reminders help me to be more forgiving of others. I went on to say, “I threw my daughter’s school notebook in her direction today RIGHT AFTER I FINISHED MY MORNING MEDITATION. My God do I need God’s help!”
With this awareness of my own sinful nature, that even around my morning prayers I can be selfish toward my wife and impatient toward my daughter, how can I possibly hold a grudge against someone else for hurting my feelings or living in an ungodly way? Without God, I am nothing. Without him, I refuse to make my daughter lunch because, “That’s my wife’s problem and I already made her breakfast.” Without the Lord, I am selfish, I lose my temper over stupid things, and I throw notebooks.
Clearly, there is more work to do and more praying to be done. What a blessing it is to see these things today though. By God allowing our flaws to come to light, we are afforded the opportunity to turn back to him for help, forgiveness, and a better way forward. Just like distractions in meditation are an opportunity to turn our mind back to God, mistakes are an opportunity to turn our hearts back to God.
Later in the day, when my daughter got off the bus, we talked about what happened in the morning. I apologized to her for throwing her agenda book on the couch and told her the strategies her mother and I discussed for doing better in the morning. Unprompted, when my wife got home from work, she had the same conversation with our daughter but apologizing for her side of things and explaining how we can do better tomorrow.
I don’t know if these little talks are necessary or if my daughter “gets it,” but as far as I can recall, I never had them as a kid that and they feel like healing. It’s important for her to know that we make mistakes and when we do, that we own up to them, apologize, and try to make things right. It’s even more important, however, for my daughter to know that her parents are working together on her behalf and that God is helping us to do so because we can’t do it without him.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Willingness is a prayer in itself
Centering prayer has become an integral part of my morning routine. Thomas Keating recommends doing two, twenty minute centering prayer sessions each day, one in the morning and one in the evening, however. For whatever reason, I find it difficult to make the time for an evening session.
One of the issues I face is that, when I try to sit down to practice centering prayer in the evening, I almost always fall asleep. This isn’t a terrible problem to have, and it most likely just means I’m tired. But after a while, it can be discouraging to have a twenty minute silent prayer session turn into a twenty minute nap.
In addition to my falling asleep, it can just be more difficult for me to find the quiet space and time necessary to practice centering prayer in the evening than in the morning. In the morning, I wake up before my wife and daughter, which allows me to make the time I need for this practice. In the evening, on the other hand, my schedule is more complicated. My daughter is home from school, I teach jiu-jitsu in the evenings, and when my wife comes home from work, I like to spend time with her.
None of these are deal breakers though. I know that it’s possible to fit a second centering prayer session into my day. I simply haven’t found the right space or timing for it, which is to say that I have not yet made it a priority. The important thing is that I’m willing.
Willingness is a prayer in itself. It’s my way of telling God that, with his help, I will make it happen. He need only show me the way. As long as I remain prayerful and willing, I’m sure that he will. He has yet to let me down thus far and I don’t think he’s going to start now.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Keeping my mind on God instead of on not-God
If I’m being honest, most of my waking hours are spent on not-God. Meaning, most of my time and attention is spent on concerns that feel separate from my conscious connection with God. I think, actually I know, that this is true for most people. But this is not the goal. This is not the direction in which I am headed. This is not my destiny.
The goal is to give more of my time and attention to God than I give to not-God. The goal is to “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for [me] (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, NIV).” This is the direction in which I am headed. This is my destiny.
Prayer, however, must be practiced. It must be something toward which effort is put. And if one hopes to reap the benefits of prayer, it must be done consciously, sincerely, and faithfully.
In the good times and the bad, upon awakening and when we retire at night, and all throughout the day, if we want to have a conscious contact with God, we must return to prayer as often as we can with the goal of, eventually, remaining in prayer regardless of our circumstances.
Jesus wants us to “Remain in [him], as [he] also remains in [us]. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can [we] bear fruit unless [we] remain in [Jesus] (John 15:4).” For some people, perpetual consciousness of God may happen all at once, in an instant, but for most of us, it requires discipline and dedication. We must constantly remind ourselves to return to prayer and to return to God.
This is an honorable task, however. In fact, it is the most honorable task. It is the greatest commandment of them all, to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (Matthew 22:37),” according to Jesus.
The late, great teacher of centering prayer, Father Thomas Keating, often told a story wherein a nun at one of his workshops lamented, “Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at centering prayer. In twenty minutes I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”
“How lovely,” responded Keating, in his ever kind and joyful tone. “Ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”
This returning to God is the practice. It’s not easy, but if we are to develop and maintain a conscious contact with God, it is necessary. Prayer is the good work of loving God, and the more we pray, the more our time will be spent with our minds on God rather than with our minds on not-God.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Is this the kind of dharma you are trying to create
I had a dream last night that still has me contemplating its meaning. In my dream, I was arguing with a plain-clothes police officer because he had unjustly harassed and detained someone. He then turned on me and began harassing me and trying to detain me.
As I struggled to resist detainment, I saw that the police officer had a set of Buddhist prayer beads on his wrist. I grabbed the prayer beads and said to the officer, “Is this the kind of dharma you are trying to create? Is this the kind of sangha you are trying to create? Is this the kind of karma you are trying to create?”
In Buddhism, dharma is thought of as the way or the path, the wisdom teachings that lead a practitioner to enlightenment. Sangha is the community of fellow practitioners with whom a person shares the spiritual journey. Karma is the spiritual law of cause and effect wherein a person’s actions have a direct correlation to the type of life that person will have.
In my sleep, these questions, “Is this the kind of dharma you are trying to create? Is this the kind of sangha you are trying to create? Is this the kind of karma you are trying to create?” just kept repeating in my mind. It felt like I asked them over and over again for hours before finally waking up. Once I woke up, I was in that strange post-dream state where I knew I was awake and my dream was just a dream, but I could still feel the dream as if it was something that I had actually experienced in my waking hours.
Experiences like this make me question which is more real, our awakened state or our dream state. I suppose both are equally real, but it’s easy to dismiss dreams as less real or even imaginary because they happen when we sleep. Dreams like this, however, that have a profound and lasting emotional and psychological impact because they feel just as or more real than what is experienced in our waking hours.
I’m still meditating on the significance of and the meaning behind this dream, but the questions it left me with feel like a spiritual puzzle not easily solved with reason alone and which will, therefore, require prayer. For example, who was the plain-clothes police officer in my dream? Who did he detain? Why was I challenging this unjust detainment? Why did he then try to detain me? Perhaps most importantly, however, what kind of dharma, sangha, and karma am I trying to create?
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Please use your inner voice
My daughter had a dance performance at school to day. It was the result of a week-long special program brought into her school where the kids were taught different dance styles from the 1900’s, spanning from the 1910’s through the 1990’s. I have to say, having been born in the late 1970’s, hearing people refer to that era as “the 1900’s” definitely made me feel old. It’s hard to believe that there are twenty five year olds who were born in the year 2000, but I suppose that is how every aging person feels at one point or another.
Where was I? Oh yeah. My daughter had a dance performance at school today which my wife and I were planning to attend. My sister-in-law was also going, and my wife and her were going to ride together because they had plans to go out after.
The performance wasn’t until early afternoon, so I went to jiu-jitsu class in the morning. When I was leaving class, I got a text from my wife that said her sister was at our house and she was taking a nap in my daughter’s room. She then sent me a text that said, “When you come home, please use your inner voice.”
English is my wife’s second language and, while she speaks, reads, and writes it as well as most Americans, sometimes she mixes up slang or common American sayings. In this case, she clearly intended to say, “When you come home, please use your inside voice,” and I knew what she meant. Still, her actual words caught my attention.
While it is sometimes necessary for me to be told to “use my inside voice” because I can get rather excited and, with that excitement, my volume tends to increase without me realizing it, I can honestly say that I’ve never been told to “use my inner voice before,” at least not in those words. That said, if I’m being honest, it felt less like a typo or misunderstanding, and more like a sign. It’s something I needed to read and it’s been on my mind all day.
We could all do well to use our inner voice more often. I know I could. There are so many instances every day where that quiet whisper of God is drowned out by the world or by my own selfishness, pride, fears, and desires. Temptations are loud, obtrusive, and easy to give in to.
We don’t have to practice listening to temptation. It will gladly impose itself on us without any effort on our part. Listening to our inner voice, on the other hand, requires a great deal of discipline, effort, and time. This is why practicing silence is so important, why meditation or contemplative prayer are essential components of the spiritual journey. Without making time for silence, without making time for listening to God, we may find that our inner voice is too quiet to hear when we need it most.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
ROBERT VAN VALKENBURGH 