Sunlight spills across a shallow sheet of green grass between the Airborne barracks built upon the sands of Benning. An earthen mound rises away from the cement walkway, letting me sit quite comfortably while cross-legged, facing the setting sun. The United States Army physical fitness uniform consists of shorts and no underwear; my pale white legs jut like chicken-wings in that evening Georgia peach shade-of-setting sun.
My position may have been the most pronounced and obvious in the entire Battalion: fifty feet in front of me was a pavilion, the only authorized smoking area on the block. Soldiers, Airmen, and Marines, male and female, wandered from the sidewalk at my feet to the smoke shack and back to their respective barracks. Three vertical walls with three floors of rooming in each could look down contemptuously from their sentry posts along the sidewalk between me and the smoking pavilion. I sat there, reading at the shoulder of a gravel shortcut for two buildings, as obvious as a forehead of zits on the first date.
By heart didn’t hammer, but feelings of foolishness flared. In eleven years of experience with military culture I’ve learned that few soldiers, if any, sit alone. We act in terms of teamwork, “battle buddied” for safety in numbers, someone to talk to, camaraderie to kill the boredom. Soldiers are as social as high school queens. If a soldier sits alone, they do so backed against the corner of a building with a cigarette held in their lips or a cell phone pressed to their ear. From the first day of Basic Training you learn to blend in; doing something that stands out makes one a target or an opportunity, assigned extra responsibility for your proven capabilities or revoked a pass for the most minor infraction: walking atop the grass.
If any soldier stopped to ask what I was doing or why, I didn’t know what I’d say. “Enjoying this sunset, this breeze, those clouds, this evening. Reading ancient history of the Church, happy for the silence, lack of biting insects, and abundance of life all around me.” Perhaps I’d tell them, “Next time you interrupt me, and you’d better follow it with ‘Staff Sergeant.’” More likely, I would look them right in the eye and follow with, “What are you doing, and why?” just to get that flustered look mixed with wonder that proceeds most people laughing and informing me that I’m strange. I concur, we laugh, and the discomfort they feel passes.
Nobody stops to ask. Fellow members of 1st platoon call out and continue to walk by.
In truth, I have to will myself not to feel foolish tonight as I enjoy the sunset, this breeze, that cloud, this abundance of life and the absence of noise or biting insects. I don’t allow my soul enough spring evenings like this, before the heat of summer begins a curtain of perpetual sweat that attracts the biting insects. Freed from any paranoia and the foolish thought that people have nothing better to do than gossip about the geek sitting cross-legged on the green, the silence allows me to appreciate the clover, the sun setting behind pines and XXXXXXXs. As the experience is appreciated I am filled with warmth, gratitude for the chance to sit and breathe. I’m overwhelemed.
I’m indeed reading a book on Orthodox history, and had just begun a subsection on Monastic Theology, “a continuation of the original trend of theological speculation: the disclosure of the content of faith in the experience of life.” (p232) St. Simeon the New Theologian left behind hymns, letters, and treaties “dedicated wholly to the description of illumination and mystical contemplation – to that ‘communion with the Divine Light’ which had been the purpose of monastic asceticism from the start. … Grace appears with all possible stillness and joy, and this light is the preparation for the Eternal Light, the radiance of eternal bliss. The mind plugs into it, is clarified, is itself made light, and unites completely with the Source of light Himself.”
In the 10th century, on Mt. Athos, St. Gregory Palamas practiced the act of “gathering the mind,” or Hesychasm. “In the image of the God-Man in Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Christianity is revealed as a vision of the fullness of God in the essence of man, and in this fullness, of the “communion with God” of everything in the world.” Hesychasm was regarded as heresy until the Constantinople councils of 1351 and 1368 confirmed Palamism as a true expression of faith of the Church.
Bring things back to the meditation here.
A common practice of Hesychasm is to repeat that which is known as “The Jesus Prayer,” a mantra of sorts said to slip into an everlasting fountain of prayer. I can attest, at least, to the ease of which it refocuses my mental sins: if I catch myself considering slander, gossiping, judging or condescending, I almost roll my eyes and whisper, “Oh Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” The rolling of the eyes is not out of the lightness of my sins; rather, when one observes the frequency in which their Ego passes judgment, speaks falsely, avoids connecting in depth with professionals by filling silence with idle talk, ignores the needy, complains about anything, etc., one will reach a sublime exhaustion in chastising the Ego. It is at this point the Jesus Prayer becomes a quite powerful reminder. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.”
