How are We to Center Down?
In the fog of life today, in times that seem unprecedented, during a month dedicated to remembrance, I strive to recall that I am not alone; that, in fact, I am in good company, not knowing my next step or the way forward. Others before me, people I celebrate, some well-known and others obscure, also had to discern life without any more knowledge or insight than I possess now. How did they do it? What magic did they harness to make their lives the beacons they are today?
The truth is, they were asking the same of their forebears. They too wanted a moral education. They too wanted to know how to make a way out of no way. It is as Howard Thurman says of each generation, “The questions persist: what are we doing with our lives? —what are the motives that order our days? What is the end of our doings? Where are we trying to go? Where do we put the emphasis and where are our values focused? For what end do we make sacrifices?”
Thurman names the problem: “The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; Our spirits resound with clashing, with noisy silences, While something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.” He suggests that out of the collective dilemma comes something personal: “Where is my treasure and what do I love most in life? What do I hate most in life and to what am I true?”
For each generation of African Americans, the questions persist, and for each generation, the response, thank goodness, also persists. In the midst of it all, Thurman concludes, “How good it is to center down!” African Americans have made it thus far along the way, with their sanity intact, by centering down. “As we listen, floating up through all of the jangling echoes of our turbulence, there is a sound of another kind—A deeper note which only the stillness of the heart makes clear. It moves directly to the core of our being. Our questions are answered, our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round. With the peace of the Eternal in our step.”
The moral genius of the African American tradition is to invite a third party, the Divine, into a strained conversation with an unwelcoming world. We see it in the intercessory prayers of mothers and grandmothers, in the irresistible creativity of artists, in the compelling courage of seekers and tellers of truth, and in the dignified diligence of everyday people. This is what it means to center down. It is to seek what has always been there—occluded, buried beneath disrespect, overwork, anxiety, fear, pain—and what will always be there, for each generation as it engages the questions anew.
My time with Shalem is one way I pay homage to this tradition. As an experienced facilitator for the Group Spiritual Direction workshops, I practice and teach how to invite a third party into the group conversation, how to center down, and how to trust what’s in the stillness. Shalem is a voice in the wilderness of our world right now, and group spiritual direction is a way for each of us to summon our own voice, and to tell our own truth. God knows we need it. As for me, I will continue to center down, and hopefully, prayerfully shine a light for some future soul.
