Last year we awarded Jamie Kreiner’s book The Wandering Mind as one of the best spiritual books of the year. She has now created another work from the wealth of spiritual practice that began and was fostered for centuries with monks in their monasteries.
This book is all about the spiritual practices of attention and being present, with help from John Cassian, “whose thoughts about thinking influenced centuries of monks,” as Kreiner explains in a helpful, substantive introduction.
Cassian lived in the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries from Bethlehem to Egypt to Constantinople (Istanbul). At that time, Rome was near its inevitable collapse, but Christian monasticism was in its nascent beginnings. Cassian became a scholar and a writer and an adept at “concentration on the divine.”
How a monk learned to concentrate on the divine was, in part, through vows of poverty and chastity (cutting down on distractions), as well as by joining a community of like-minded practitioners (monasteries). But as Kreiner helpfully explains: “He also recommended forms of mental discipline that are accessible even to the nonmonks among us — think metacognitive habits, rather than major life changes.” Her selections from Cassian’s writings are designed to emphasize these.
250 pages of selections from Cassian follow the introduction. Latin originals are on facing pages with Kreiner’s English translations. The topics are given, in Kreiner’s words, as Goals, Frustrations, Warming Up for Fiery Focus, A Mantra, Memories, Slip-Ups, and Getting Away from It All. Here are two samples:
“The mind can’t be free from the flux of thoughts while it’s wheeled around through the currents of the present life by the violent rapids rushing all around it.”
“The way things go now is that when we’ve gotten distracted from spiritual contemplation, then come to, it’s like we’ve awakened from a deathly sleep. Then we have to go looking for a guide we can use to recuperate the spiritual memory that sank out of sight.”
