Bigger When We Hope

Every Friday during Lent the folks at Franciscan father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation are hosting a half-hour sit meditation. I only just discovered that last Wednesday, and decided to take advantage of the free, live-streamed YouTube opportunity. I clicked the link, opened the page, and got myself comfy, readying my brain to begin.

As it was, we were about 10 minutes late starting. That’s fine, okay. I get that sometimes there are InterwebGremlins™️ that like to eff things up. I fidgeted and tapped and kept refreshing the page with that “Oh, no, they started without me!” angst. Great way to prepare! By being impatient! Ha!

When we did get going, a nice young man read something from Matthew’s gospel and then did the “Be still and know that I am God” prompt,¹ and then, just like that, he shut his eyes. I stared at the screen for a minute, watching him sink into his meditation, which felt sort of intrusive and wrong to do, so I shut my eyes, too, and tried to hush my brain, and for a minute or so that worked.

Monkey-mind is a powerful interrupter, though. My history with meditation is mostly just when I feel like I’m sinking into the moment, monkey mind waves its long monkey arms and lets out a shriek and flings some poo.

My eyes kept flicking open, and there was Nice Young Man still with his eyes closed, looking beatific. And so it went for the duration of the half hour. During one of my peek breaks, I scrolled through the live feed’s comments and saw a woman’s post that caught my attention and gave me something to chew on.

“We are bigger when we hope together,” she said in response to someone, and my heart said, “Ohhh…” because right then I realized how many people — around fifty, I think — were opening themselves to the moment of together holding and tending something important, separated as we were by distance but connected through intent.

“Sending love and peace to all,” one person had commented.

“Shalom,” said another.

The French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had a whole developed evolutionary theology that included something he called the Noosphere (a sort of consciousness-cloud) as well as the “theorized future event” of the Omega Point, the culmination of creation as all things evolve upward (evolutionarily) and are drawn into union with Christ. “There is no matter,” Teihard de Chardin wrote, “there is only matter becoming spirit.” As a scientist, he thought evolution made a lot of sense and saw a lot of evidence for it. (He was part of the team that discovered Peking Man.) The Catholic Church was not always amused and in the 1960s condemned his works, but later Popes softened the church’s position and looked upon his writings more favorably.

George Lucas offered us The Force. Obi Wan Kenobi told Luke Skywalker, "The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

However you slice it, we’re definitely all in this together. Quantum physics theories point to everything in the infinite universe being interconnected all the way down to the subatomic level — and whatever is beyond that.²

Which, oddly enough, brings me back to hope. I’m coming to believe it’s something we have to carry with and for each other, that doing so connects us in deeply meaningful ways.

This Friday I’ll try to sit still and be present in those moments. I’ll ask the monkey to go find a quiet corner and settle for a while. Important work will happening, and somehow we’ll be doing it together.

1. Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.

2. “The equations which describe quantum entanglement seem to tell us that two particles across the universe from each other can correlate their behavior simultaneously. Simultaneous is faster than the speed of light. And lab experiments which demonstrate quantum entanglement seem to support these equations.”