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Mindfulness

23/6/2018

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This week I went to a meeting on mindfulness. I had of course come across mindfulness mainly in my contact with Buddhism, but also through the work of Jon Kabbat-Zin who almost thirty years ago used mindfulness and meditation techniques to reduce stress and help people with mental illnesses. I heard of him through a friend who found his techniques invaluable in her constant struggle with depression.

Mindfulness has now become main stream in medicine, education, prisons, business even.  In fact it’s become a business in itself. Courses can cost quite a lot of money; people can do degrees in it and then a teacher training course to teach it! I even know a Buddhist monk who did such a course – even though he had probably been living mindfully for all of his religious life. It’s a symptom of the world we live in where paper qualifications are sometimes valued over experience and people feel they haven’t achieved anything without a qualification of some sort. It’s the same with spiritual direction. Once on retreat I was encouraged by a spiritual director to get involved in spiritual direction and when I mentioned the need to do a course he said I was too intelligent to believe that.  Whether that statement was true or not I do feel that there is a bureaucratisation and secularisation of religious practices going on.  Do they need to conform to the ways of the world where there is a price on everything?  I do realise of course that if someone is offering a course and a service for which they are being paid then it’s important to know that they are qualified and capable of doing what they are advertising.  In the past people would have sought out individuals whom they trusted as having lived and experienced mindfulness and meditation.  But maybe it’s not so easy to find these people today – and so easier to do a course on it.

In the past meditation and mindfulness practice would have been taught within the context of a religious faith. Buddhism and Hinduism, the religions of the east, are particularly associated with it but it’s to be found in all religions though I think it’s true that Buddhism has helped Christianity rediscover this tradition, which is not always obvious in formal institutional Church worship. Today there are meditation groups in Christian churches that are teaching people to meditate within the context of Christian faith and mindfulness resonates with what in Catholicism is called ‘ the sacrament of the present moment’.  The aim of this is different, as you would expect, from Buddhist meditation and from its secular counterpart.  For Christians, or at least for this Christian, even when I’m sitting still and silent, attending to the breathing, letting go of distractions, meditation is to be aware of the gift of the life force that courses through my veins, to be open to the power of love, compassion, healing. I cannot meditate without being aware of my relationship to the Transcendent, to the Source of Life and Love, the Ground of Being, to God in other words though the word God more often obscures Reality than it reveals it. In meditation I feel called into the adventure of life – and sometimes it needs courage to embrace that.
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For Buddhists meditation is more about watching the mind, observing how erratic it is, recognising the games it plays on us when we get caught up in our imagination and take our perceptions for reality.  We all know how our mind can run riot and have us imagine disastrous scenarios,  how judgemental it is, how critical and negative, how difficult it is to slow it down never mind let it rest in peace. Buddhists talk about monkey mind and in the West at least we are trained to think, evaluate, discriminate,  jump from one thing to the other from the moment we enter the education system so it’s no wonder that some Buddhist think that it’s more difficult for westerners to meditate because we are going against our conditioning.  And it’s also no wonder that many people are looking to meditation and mindfulness as a way of finding peace in what for all of us can be a chaotic  and troubled world.

There is no doubt that mindfulness and meditation have become very popular and fulfil a need or desire for peace in people of all ages and from all walks of life. The meeting I was at this week was free – no money involved though it was possible to make a donation. It happens weekly and has been happening for many years. The leader has been practising it for decades and has come from a Zen background. It was very well attended and the format was simple – a half hour talk about how our mind can lead us down the path of negativity and then a body scan for half an hour in which we were imaginatively guided to relax each area of our body.  It was a half hour of relaxation, a time to set aside worry and anxiety  and it was obvious that people left feeling uplifted and energised by it. And it had nothing to do with religion – supposedly.  No creed was preached to set up any conflicts about belief but it did have a spiritual message about well-being and care which people responded to.  Perhaps those followers of religion who are worried about its demise need not be and perhaps this way of pursuing spirituality will lead some  people at least to seek for meaning and even return to religion to find it.

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National Identity

9/6/2018

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The BBC published the results of a recent survey yesterday which showed that of all the countries in the United Kingdom the Scots had the strongest sense of national identity.  Most of them were supporters of Scottish independence so it’s not surprising that this should be so. I wasn’t surprised at these results but a bit surprised that most respondents saw this sense of Scottishness being dependent on being born in Scotland or one’s parents being born in Scotland. So what happens to those who don’t fit this category?  Are they to be forever strangers in this land of ours?


According to this I should have a strong sense of Scottishness – true at one level but not another. I was born in Scotland, my parents were born in Scotland.  One set of grandparents was born in Scotland but the other set was born in Ireland.  And one of my Scottish born grandparents’ mother came from Ireland.  They all came from the north of Ireland – Sligo and Enniskillen, both places that suffered from the potato famine of  the 1840s and the subsequent cholera outbreak which led to hundreds of thousands  of people leaving that part of Ireland.  They were all Catholic and when they came to Scotland, mainly Glasgow, they formed a very closed community.  This was partly because of the sectarian attitudes among Scots who feared for their jobs and the influx of poor Irish families with their large families who lived in over-crowded slum conditions.  It was not unusual to see adverts for jobs or accommodation for rent which said ‘Catholics need not apply’. Among the Irish there was a suspicion of anything British that had been the cause of the famine so they didn’t quite want to fit in. When I was in school fellow pupils with strong Irish affiliations would refuse to stand for the national anthem which was played rather more often than it is now. There was a sense of being on the edges of a society that was predominantly Presbyterian.  We lived our own community life which was centred on the Church which not only offered religious services but was the focus for all our social contacts and friendships. I believe this is called a sacral community – a community that is organised along religious lines – religion and community totally integrated.  What made this even stronger is that we had our own schools.  Looking back on my upbringing I went to Catholic primary school, Catholic convent secondary school, trained as a Catholic teacher, became a Catholic nun and then returned to teach in the Catholic school system.  It had its own advantages but it was a narrow and circumscribed upbringing. It was only when I went to university and lived on campus that I lived in a secular situation and for the first time met people of other faiths.


Because of this background I never felt very Scottish, or Irish for that matter.  I only really felt Scottish when Scotland got its own Parliament.  Because this had come as a result of a referendum there was a sense that it belonged to the people – at least those who had voted for it! Somehow it became alright to acknowledge my Irish, Catholic origins and at the same time acknowledge my concern for the future of Scotland. I could claim a Scottish civic identity and be proud to be a citizen. I know that others from other faiths and cultures felt the same. For me this idea of citizenship was reinforced by all the discussions that took place before the independence referendum. No matter whether the results were to people’s liking it or not it gave an opportunity for us all, with our different backgrounds, to think about and discuss  what kind of Scotland we would like to live in and how we might contribute to it. This may not have been the case for everyone but it was very true for those of use involved in interfaith relations.


Since those days I have felt very Scottish, not in the sense of a narrow nationalism, but in a civic sense. I like this. It gives an identity which transcends religious, cultural and national identities but allows an acknowledgement of them. It seems to me that this would be important in those countries (e.g. Myanmar/Burma) that identify nationalism and religion which then leaves those who are different as outsiders and denies them citizenship.  This is a kind of nationalism that is dangerous and does not allow for difference.
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It is, I think, this sense of common civic identity that allows faith communities to work together for the common good here in Scotland, something that is growing in interfaith relations.  All faith communities have their concerns about community, their young people, their places of worship, their elderly which takes up a lot of time and energy. Not everyone can be involved in interfaith relations but there is an increasing desire to work together, to widen participation in social projects, to engage with government, to dialogue about issues of common concern. We meet together as members of different faiths, with respect for our different cultures and viewpoints but we can transcend these differences because we are united in our common concern for the future of this land that we share and this society in which we want to participate. Thank God our society and Government are such that this is possible in a way that it is impossible in so many other parts of the world. It’s no wonder that so many in the BBC survey said they liked living in Scotland.  

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    I am  a Catholic nun, involved in interfaith relations for many decades.  For me this has been an exciting and sacred journey which I would like to share with others.

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