Meditating Monk to Mindful Father

Is it possible?

For 20 years, until 40 years old, I was a monk in a contemplative monastic community. Although we were Christian, part of the Anglican Communion, when I went to interfaith conferences of monastics, I hung out with the Buddhists, because what they were doing in their meditation halls and communal life was closer to what we were doing in my community than, say, Catholic Benedictine communities with vast retreat centres and schools and ministry in parishes.

Now I am a father of a 10 month old daughter, married to an academic — an important details, because it means her life is pressured too — spinning a new life for myself as a therapist, an Anglican priest in so-called ‘specialised ministry,’ off the side of the Church, and in writing and speaking.

Both my wife and I are committed to the mediation practices, and the different feeling for life which these allow, the different potentials for living, engaging, and creating they elicit. Regularly we start meditating in the morning, and almost as regularly, our little girl wakes up after 20, 10, or 2 minutes after we start, demanding at least my wife’s attention.

Of course there are practical solutions: waking up earlier or meditating at work (complicated by broken sleep because of our daughter, and work pressures, but of course all possibilities.) But as any couple with young kids, a husband trying to spin a new life for himself, a wife lecturing and researching at a top-level university will tell you: these practical solutions break down quickly. Life is too volatile.

Of course I need to be persistent in my practice with my wife, and flexible. It’s still an open question for us just how little regular meditation practice can support an authentically contemplative way of living, day to day. I have a feeling I am rapidly drawing down the reserves I built up in the monastery.

I want however to get at something more radical than just the need to be persistent, practical, and flexible, or just to survive until my daughter leaves home.

As I push my daughter’s stroller along, past meditation halls and churches where I know people are engaged in contemplation and prayer — and I’m just trying to keep my daughter occupied so that my wife can put in an extra 3 hours of weekend research, I’m keenly aware that, all of sudden, mindful living is no longer a nice option. It’s the only way I can do this. And as monks will tell you, being tired (the perennial bane of new parents) can even help towards this: feeling the tiredness in your bones, and living in that awareness, moment to moment.

I know I have a difference to make in the world, and in contemplative fashion I still believe it will be made more in the manner of how I live in this moment, engage in this conversation, care for this person, work on this IT disaster. It’s about how I am, and what this manner of being allows in relation with others, and what it opens for what I do and create that makes the real difference.

I can’t count anymore on 90 minutes of meditation a day, or 4 hours in chapel, or bells to stop life to call us to prayer (and meals, and meetings). What I can count on is the feeling of being, that feeling that is right now in my tired body as I drop my teething (unhappy) daughter off at nursery and go to work. I’m guessing, I’m gambling, that being here, now, physically in my body, that this will be enough.

Stay tuned.