this, too

Meditation is slow business. I recognize how bad I am at it, which I am not supposed to judge, making me even worse. Images the word "meditation" brings to mind: sitting in the balcony at Gethsemane, the monastery where Thomas Merton once lived; the rough-cushioned pews at the Friends meeting house on east 16th street; Elizabeth Gilbert's sappy prose in Eat, Pray, Love; the small, blonde Vipassana teacher at my church in Louisville; Eduardo, the bald, mustachioed yogi who first taught me to meditate in a cold room in Benares, India. I smell dust in the small "chapel" room at the University of Essex, with old, utilitarian campus chairs--wide seats, with outdated upholstery and curved wooden arms and legs, where I sat with a Quaker woman who worked for the school under flourescent lights. I sit on a lumpy cushion in a carpeted room upstairs at James Lees Presbyterian Church in Louisville, the youngest Vipassana participant in the room by far. Our teacher of indeterminate age wears scarves and yoga pants, and tells us what it means to sit. I remember the supreme discomfort of sitting for so long, and the self-consciousness brought on by others listening for your motions, the disgrace in moving to scratch a nose or adjust a leg that has achingly fallen asleep. She taught us walking meditation downstairs in the aisles of the sanctuary, which were on an incline, so i traversed the musty red carpet in my socks, not yet dark outside, with the sun beams settling on the golden stained glass window that portrayed Jesus alone, on his knees, looking up to the sky. I always wanted to stay and keep going long after the class's exercises had reached an end. Did that make me more holy? Crave more? Somehow, a misplaced naivete. Young yearning. It's a wonder the older, retired participants did not look at me with overwhelming pity. So earnest, but arrogant in my expectations. A regular Simone Weil.

There was another class that met in the same room--still old people except me, but in assorted wooden chairs rather than lumpy cushions on the floor. We were there to learn about the life of Thomas Merton, and from the first session, I determined that our teacher was simultaneously elitist and ignorant. He had the air of a know-it-all professor, wore a tidily trimmed gray beard, and brought a grande Starbucks coffee to each class, which was at night. How can one learn about the life of a holy man while jacked up on caffeine? Weren't we supposed to have a few minutes of prayer and meditation at the end of every class? God does not want our thoughts racing, or at least, if they are, they should be fueled by fair-trade shade-grown beans, not a corporate plutocracy. As much as I remember disliking the man, I cannot recall the specifics as to why--a talking down to us, or an air of being privy to information that we the novitiates could not have known. Probably, it was my recent escape from college and need to prove myself as both smart and spiritually mature. Having Merton dissected as a man, with faults--large faults--following his youthful meanderings he himself exposed in Seven Storey Mountain was not the enlightened life I wanted to understand. He travelled to Asia, embraced Buddhism. Wrote from the hermitage he was eventually granted in the woods. Still had a drinking problem, and probably an illicit relationship with a woman in his later years. I cringed at the image of him dying by electrocution in a bathtub, perhaps the least glamorous or spiritually enlightened way to meet one's end. I often think of Merton now, those laughing eyes, the white and black cassock and leather sandals, hidden ink stains on his fingers, piles of chopped wood. Gethsemane has no doubt benefited greatly--financially--from Merton's fame. Why must everything and everyone, spiritual or striving to be, be so muddled and sullied? Why must I focus on the flaws within myself and others, and not have the grace to accept them?