Desert Youth Worker
Disciplines, Mystics, and the Contemplative Life
by Mike Perschon
The words "Jesus' blood never failed me yet"
are being sung over and over, but it's not
Martin Smith of Delirious singing them.
It's Tom Waits accompanying an unnamed homeless man on Gavin Bryars'
74-minute modern classical piece, "Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet." It's
tape loop played over an orchestra with the same phrase repeated for the duration:
"Jesus' Blood never failed me yet, never failed me yet; Jesus' blood never
failed me yet. This one thing I know, for he loves me so. Jesus' blood never
failed me yet." When I bought the CD, I remember the clerk saying, "You might
not want that one. It's sooo repetitious." But for me, that's the whole point.
I used the CD as part of a spiritual disciplines
retreat for teens. It served as
a multimedia approach to what's
called Logos meditation by some and
Lectio Divina by others. Simply put, it's
the repetition of a thought over and over
again. "This one thing I know"
The sun had just set, and I was sitting
in the common room of a lakeshore cabin
with 10 teenagers, two of whom were
sleepingone snoring. The rest of us were
in a semi-conscious state. Hearing Tom
Waits singing along with the tape loop
told me the disc was nearly over. One of
the students later commented to me that
as he realized the music was starting to
fade out, he experienced a sense of loss.
"I didn't want it to end," he said.
I know what he meant. I felt like I was
cradled in Jesus' arms, just resting there.
The worries of school, work, and life in
general were a million miles away. The
words "never failed me yet" have taken
hold in my heart, and today I'll still find
myself humming the tune during a traffic
jam and returning to the thoughts this
meditation birthed.
In the morning, we packed up from the
retreat and returned home. It was the second
year we'd held this sort of retreat—no
fun games, no big events, just around-theclock
prayer vigils, prayer walks, times of
meditation, and teaching on the spiritual
disciplines. We can't even say the food
was great, since we fasted for the first 24
hours of the retreat. The closest that
weekend came to resembling a regular
youth retreat was a time of worship and
celebration. And this was nearly ten years
ago, when it wasn't in vogue to use spiritual
disciplines with students.
The Disciplines
I bumped into the classic spiritual disciplines
while taking a course called
"Dynamics of Christian Life" in my second
year of Bible school. One of our textbooks
was The Spirit of the Disciplines by
Dallas Willard. The course and textbook
only touched on the actual disciplines, but
the concept captivated me. The following
spring, I found a copy of Richard Foster's
spiritual classic Celebration of Discipline
in a used bookstore. Opening it and discovering
each discipline detailed chapter
by chapter, I felt a profound sense of joy
and excitement. I'd found a real treasure.
I began reading and exercising the disciplines
one by one. Working as a camp
director, I was virtually alone in a provincial
park for two months before the summer
program began. Instead of
bemoaning my loneliness, I found myself
embracing the solitude. I also set out one
day of every week for fasting.
When the summer program began, I'd
prepared an experience for each week with
the teens that revolved around the disciplines.
Each day we spent 15 minutes in a
time of meditative prayer, followed by
daily Bible study. We spent a day fasting,
which gave our cooks some well-deserved
time off. We spent a day practicing "celibacy"
by dividing the camp in half and doing
all our activities separated by gender. That
night was one of my best moments in
camp ministrya two-hour guys' run
through Lodge Pole pine forest to the top
of a lookout point, where we watched the
sun set over the prairies in meditation and prayer. The week culminated in an
intensely interactive spiritual worship celebration
that had been planned by the
campers throughout the week.
Sadly, I didn't know how to replicate any
of the disciplines once I returned to my studies
in the fall. It was easy to be meditative in
the middle of God's creation and to practice
solitude when there was no one around.
Fasting when your roommates just ordered
pizza proved to be much more challenging.
The Mystics
Thankfully God provided another impetus
to press on. My church history class
introduced me to the word "mystic" in the
Christian tradition, and after looking further
into the history of Christian mysticism,
I found overlap between the
disciplines I so wanted to practice and the
teachings of these Christian fathers and
mothers. I read the writings of Meister
Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Teresa
of Avila. Their words were poetic rather
than prosaic—which, for my spirit that had
been fed entirely on the modernist apologetics
of the "evidence that demands a verdict"
late '80s, was like eating a gourmet
meal after years of protein shakes. These
were people of the faith unlike any I'd
encountered—those who had rejected the
pleasures of wealth and comfort to live in
solitude or monastic communities in
deserts, mountains, and forests.
As an artist growing up in the church,
I'd always wondered where my place really
was or if I even had one. As I studied the
mystics and the classic disciplines, I realized
I'd been hungering for this way of
knowing God. In my late teens I'd often
rise after a lengthy period of reading the
Bible and run barefoot out into the night
air. Sometimes my runs took me to the
desert-like coulees that surround my
home town of Medicine Hat. Surrounded
by cactus and tumbleweed, I imagined I
was one of the desert mystics or Elijah or
David out in the Judean wilderness. I felt
far closer to God in those moments than I
did sitting in pews on Sunday morning.
Encountering Resistance
While the lives of the mystics were an
encouragement to press on in practicing
the spiritual disciplines, they were also a
hindrance to finding acceptance for those
same disciplines in my faith community.
Evangelicalism was suspicious of such
desert experiences in those days.
Meditation was considered "New Age"
(but I think everything that the church
couldn't label and wanted to disparage
was called "New Age" in the late '80s). In
fact, when my friend would go for prayer
walks in heavy rain, people began to
wonder if he was mentally disturbed.
I had ideas from the mystics about
implementing the disciplines into everyday
life, but no one to help me examine
these ideas. When I asked my professors or
pastors about it, I got mixed results. Either
they didn't see the need or warned I was
making my faith too esoteric. Even when I
took a seminary course on the subject, the
teacher admitted that in undertaking the
disciplines, we would be experimenting on
our own since he was no expert in the
field. Consequently, I had no mentor to
guide me on this path save for the writings
of people long dead.
Morton Kelsey refers to the experience
of contemplative prayer in all its forms as
entering a "laboratory for the soul." While
this phrase entices me with its sense of
adventure, it frightens most believers.
For too long, evangelical Christianity has
packaged faith in safe bundles. Very few
books on prayer need to have a "dangerous
goods" sticker applied to them (Pray
like Hell by Maxine Outlaw being one of
the exceptions). Describing contemplative
prayer as a form of exploration into uncertain
territory didn't inspire confidence in
my peers.
Inward Journey
Therefore I was largely alone in my
explorations. I tired of debates with classmates
who accused the disciplines of
being occult practices, so I started using
the phrase "listening prayer" when I
talked about my own experiences in
meditation. I built myself a prayer
room—a tiny sanctuary in a basement
closet filled with books on spiritual disciplines,
contemplative prayer, and
Christian mysticism. In that space I lit
candles, burned incense, hung rosaries,
and listened to tapes of Benedictine
monks. I meditated for hours on words,
images, and sounds. I reached the point
of being able to achieve alpha brain patterns,
the state in which dreams occur,
while still awake and meditating. I made
many journal entries of my prayers,
thoughts, and dreams. I listened to that
Gavin Bryars CD a lot.
Corporate Journey
Likewise, in the midst of my personal
journey I began to embark on a corporate
one. I proposed the idea of a weekend
spiritual disciplines retreat while I was
working as a high school ministry
intern. My boss liked the idea, but people questioned how many teens would show
up. Who would actually pay to go to something
where you wouldn't be fed and
would have to get up in the middle of the
night to participate in an all-weekend
prayer vigil?
As it turned out, around 25% of our students
attended the retreat—far exceeding
my expectations. The weekend was a
microcosm of my own experience; learning
to teach the disciplines was nearly as
daunting as learning to undertake them
had been. How could I be authoritative on
a subject about which I was still learning?
Nevertheless, the weekend was a success,
and in the spring of the next year,
the students requested an encore, which is
how I got to that lakeshore cabin listening
to Gavin Bryars with a room full of high
school students.
Recent Experiences
My journey from that cabin has been a
tighter weave of the personal and corporate
journeys. I worked as a church
planter the following year and began
using contemplative elements in worship
from the outset. We held "thin place" services
in reference to a belief that in
prayer, the veil between us and God
becomes thinner. Entire nights were
devoted to guided meditations, drum circles,
and "soul labs." At soul labs we used
the rave culture's approach of multiple
rooms for different music to create a number
of prayer stations, where people could
try various approaches to contemplative
prayer. During Lent, we all fasted—be it
from food, caffeine, coarse language, or
video games. Having a community with
whom to practice the disciplines has made
it less necessary for me to carve out opportunities
to practice them alone.
As a result, when my wife and I moved into our current home, I never rebuilt my
prayer closet. I believe it was a tool for a
season, to help me find a quiet place to
rest in God. Now all I need to do is close
my eyes and begin deep breathing or
whisper a phrase from a Logos meditation,
and my heart is opened to feel God's
presence. Like anything else we do, the
contemplative life becomes more and
more natural with practice.
"Still Apprehensive"
Despite a growing interest in the disciplines,
thanks largely to the huge and continually
growing success of Richard
Foster's book, Evangelical Christians are
still apprehensive about the subject of
meditation and contemplative approaches
to Christian living. While serving as staff
pastor at a large summer camp in British
Columbia, I came face to face with the suspicions
that still surround the mystical
approaches to Christianity. Each morning
I was responsible for staff devotions. My
devotional experiences for the past ten
years have been largely contemplative, and
so I purposed to teach the group the same.
The morning after I expressed my
intention to the group, a young lady came
to me with a concerned expression.
"You're going to teach us to meditate?"
she asked.
"That's right," I said.
"Isn't that New Age or Buddhist?"
she asked.
"Well, Buddhists do meditate, and
there are many New Age meditative
practices, but what I'm going to teach is
Christian meditation." I silently promised
myself to never use the word meditation
in a public Christian setting ever again.
"What's the difference?"
"Well, on the surface, nothing. The
approach to meditation for a Buddhist looks an awful lot like what I do. The difference
is the reason we're doing it. The
Buddhist empties the mind for the sake of
emptying it. The Christian empties the
mind to fill it with Christ."
"I don't know about this."
I wished I could better understand her
apprehension. I wanted to be able to say
something tried and true, to quote Max
Lucado on the subject, and to tell her that
I had strong statistical documentation
proving nine in every ten people who try
meditation come closer to Christ. All that
came to mind is Sam I Am giving his
sales pitch for green eggs and ham, and
his words blurred with the Psalmist.
Try them, try them, you will seesee
that the Lord is good.
"Into the Desert"
It's impossible for me to prove to anyone
that practicing spiritual disciplines will
make him or her a better Christian, or
that contemplative prayer is great to use
with teens. That's not what I've learned
along the journey. What I've learned is
that we all come to a greater knowledge of
Christ along various roads—praying,
singing, and serving differently. If that
road takes you into green pastures full of
friends and family and familiar devotional
books, then so be it. If the road that
leads you to Christ is safe and comfortable,
then so be it. If, however, the road
leads into the desert, to sit in silence or
solitude for days, to pray into the darkness
and silence with no answer for weeks
or months, or to meditate on God's Word,
then into the desert you must go.
But don't worry; you'll be in good
company. Ever since the time of
Abraham, God's people have been called
to the desert. Come join this great cloud of
witnesses. There isn't a lot of water, but
the sunsets are to die for.
Mike Perschon lives in Edmonton, Alberta and works as part-time associate pastor of Holyrood Mennonite Church and part-time freelance writer and speaker at camps, schools, and conventions.
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