Meditation: a written or spoken discourse expressing considered thoughts on a subject.
Some folks say mediation is better described as chewing cud. In a spiritual context, we bring up Scriptures and chew over and over again, making sense of them in our life context.
The prolific songwriter Neil Sedaka writes ferociously hard-to-forget melodies. He is also capable of turning out novelette-length inane lyrics— “where is he going with this hot mess?”
Too many words, too many thoughts, too much brain noise are the enemies of meditation. In the car today, a scripture song smothered me, verses tumbling out too many words for meditation. There was no time to slow down and sort them out. No pause, no refrain, no chance to consolidate noteworthy insights.
In short, not a chance for meditation.
Meditation filters out extraneous noise, letting significance rise to the fore and draining off the rest. It takes slowing way down. It takes parsing a phrase or a word and shelving the rest for the moment.
Without sleep, the brain cannot process life’s quick parade of daily happenings. Without meditation, we cannot understand which of these life events are really significant, and why.
Like an unforgettable refrain in a song, meditation consolidates and plays the life-defining stuff back to us, a sound track that keeps our lives on track.
Bagpipes are gifted with two voices. The melancholy drone reminds us of its earthbound connection, a track laid down to attach us to the real world.
When the pipe lets loose its second, shrill and ethereal voice, we are lifted to high places, released from earthly fetters.
We are mesmerized by the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” On bagpipes, it stops us with its wondrous melody, the drone anchoring the soaring tune to earth.
The day before Easter, a dozen bagpipers let go the voices of their instruments, blending their earthy drone and heavenly pitch. The closer they marched, the sharper their voices split the air. They stopped directly in front of me, kilts and caps and stockings coming to an abrupt halt. As they neatly turned, something dangling from the waist of a kilt before me caught my eye. An incongruent plastic water bottle glistened against the tidy, plaid pleats.
The unexpected water bottle caught my full attention.
I’m not sure exactly how an unanticipated water bottle allowed me to enter fully into the event. But the costumes, the bagpipes, and their dual voices suddenly became uniquely “mine”—the music’s beauty distilled through the humor of a lowly, so misplaced, bottle of water. It was my own snapshot, my insider view.
Then, fewer than twenty-four hours later, in the church service I attended, Easter was everywhere. It was in the one hundred-strong choir. It was in their voices, like the spirited high voice of yesterday’s bagpipes. It was in the orchestra. Like the bagpipe drone, the instruments grounded the cosmic heaven-and-earth Easter story.
Easter is huge; it is profound. But I had a problem. Where was today’s “water bottle” moment for me? Hearing the earth-shaking Easter story one more time did not make it “mine.” It was routine. The cosmic message was too vast, too big to grasp. The heaven and earth connection was too abstract.
I needed a hook to connect to the profound message. It was too enormous to get my head around.
Until, that is, sitting there in the pew, I recalled my own recent shortcomings. Now they fell on me—cold and stinging like hail. When I thought about them, and owned them, my failures seemed big as the universe.
Raw nerves were exposed. My humanity embarrassed me. It was personal.
So finally, my Easter water-bottle moment had arrived. My humiliation hung on me like that bottle. It was so out-of-place. So obvious. And I had to own it.
The wayward water bottle! My own missteps! Suddenly, Easter came alive. I badly needed that Easter Message to meet my newly-admitted condition.
We’ve all seen the Energizer Bunny, beating his drum interminably; we are told the batteries never run out. But out of camera range, he doesn’t keep going and going and going as advertised. Nothing does.
The all-young jogger passing me by, all-grinning, all-carefree, all-future-driven doesn’t really keep going and going and going. What I don’t know about is the slow drip her boyfriend is draining from her life.
The schedule-driven train hoists passengers within, clickety-clacking monotonously, horn religiously blasting watch-out-for-me-I’m-coming-through at each crossing gate, but it doesn’t keep going and going and going. A car stalled on the tracks or a broken crossing gate posts all red signals and eight-hundred passengers are late for their jobs, miss conference calls, forgo a college entrance exam.
A cold has the head in a vise, stabs the throat at each swallow and muffles the hearing with a throbbing ache. Chronic pain claws at the lower back, and the arthritic big toe tries to balance a lurching, ailing system that doesn’t feel like going and going and going.
Just then, a street lamp posts an unanticipated sermon at its base—“Hey,” with an arrow pointing upward.
Upward. Oh, yeah. Upward.
A voice from somewhere enters the head, and the voice says, “I still see you!”
And with that, the world falls away.
We can keep going and going and going a bit longer.
Most of us will remember the recent iPhone 4 pre-release debacle that transpired when an Apple company employee lost the new, not-yet-released phone in a bar he frequented, and it was discovered by the media.
Now the fiasco has recurred. This time, I am the one who discovered Apple’s latest top-secret not-yet-released gadget, mounted on the back of a bicycle.
This latest hi-tech wonder by Apple is apparently designed to help meet the needs of the non-techie-minded public. The device appears to be a technological step backward. They have created an alternative to having e-mail delivered to a computer’s digital mailbox: a silver-colored physical mailbox, in this case, attached to a bicycle.
The device actually converts e-mails sent from a computer into a physical letter that is delivered into the aluminum mailbox.
Thanks to this creation, the geek-fearing souls among us need no longer suffer the embarrassment of showing their limited e-mail skills. Apple’s newest common-man’s e-mail conversion technology forever removes the customer’s need to climb the exotic digital-expertise ladder. Apple has found a way to convert e-mails into an old-fashioned physical letter and deliver it into the new, fashionable shiny silver mailbox, which can be mounted anywhere: attached to a bicycle, glued to the hood of a fancy Ford Mustang, or pack-mounted on the back of a miniature schnauzer.
I had to see this secretive device in action with my own eyes. As I stared at the contraption, I heard a distinct whirring sound from within it. What luck! Apparently, a piece of reconstituted e-mail was just then arriving! What an opportunity to break into Apple’s newest product and retrieve this digital e-mail that would be magically transformed to hardcopy letter!
With the bicycle’s owner nowhere to be seen, I stealthily crept toward it. Slowly and gingerly, I drew down the mailbox’s handle, breaching Apple’s high-tech security system.
There, before my eyes, I beheld a message that was still in the process of reverse-engineering. An e-mail avatar faintly appeared, then faded before my gaze. In its place materialized, first as an apparition, then as a reverse-engineered hard-copy, a reincarnation of the original digital message:
“Barry, thanks for your good e-mail late last night. I knew we had been out-of-touch, but it was so good to hear or your wanting to come back on the Winning Side.
“It’s incredibly hard being a mortal, and it’s sometimes hard for even me to imagine. Challenges and defeats often come before victory. Always remember that. Last night, when you connected with me, that was your victory.
“The other hard thing for me to remember is that people don’t easily forget their errors, even once they get on the Winning Side. The thing is, I do forget all those errors—I promise that I do! I know that’s hard for you to fathom.
“So, because of my memory loss, could you shoot me the topic of your defeat to remind me again what this was all about?
“On second thought, never mind—I still won’t remember, whether I get it by e-mail or hard copy. I totally forget everything that you’ve set aright with me.
“Thanks again for trying to be all that you can be. You haven’t disappointed me. I’m eager to see the next chapter.”
