Collected and Recollected

You are the topos tou theou (God's place) and the spiritual life is nothing more or less than to allow that space to exist where God can dwell, to create a space where his glory can manifest itself. —John Eudes Bamberger

"I just have to stop and collect myself!" she says. "Everything's happening at once and I'm about to come apart." Down the hallway an executive cradles his head in his hands and moans, "This pressure is getting to me." Events crash in relentlessly and we experience the panicky despair common to us all, that feeling of being scattered, fragmented, and uncentered. It is more typical than not, in this century of acceleration, that we will be confronted by decisions before we have even had a chance to think through what we need to do. Few of us enjoy the luxury of "enough time." There are periods when we feel unprepared for even the expected and for what we have known all along was about to happen. We have days and months when it seems that everyone and everything makes demands on us at the same moment. Pressure builds and what we may want most in the world is a closet in which to hide, a stretch of wave-washed beach where we can forget it all, a person who will give us that soothing promise that things will be all right again. We want anything that will lift us out of our dilemmas. If only we might have just a moment to collect ourselves.

Times like these illustrate—indeed, prove to us—that we believe ourselves to be happy or unhappy as a result of circumstance. Isn't it true, after all, that if things go well we will be happy? I think we must admit that it does help. Who among us can realistically say that circumstance, good or bad, does not affect us? It is more than reasonable that we should make efforts to secure for ourselves and those we love safety, security, comfort, and advantage. The person who does not strive to secure these blessings is usually called impractical and, at worst, masochistic.

Singer Sophie Tucker told us, "I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is better." Although we've seen that this is not true in every case, nevertheless, circumstances do matter. It helps to have resources! In asking the question, "Is that all there is?" we are actually wondering out loud about resources. What or whom may we call upon to get us through the times when circumstances are against us? And even when life seems to be cloudless and our circumstances quite good, where is that enjoyment and tranquility we expected to experience? It is a commonplace that we suffer that vacant dis-ease that comes when one is vaguely unhappy even though things are going well. We want to know, "If everything is so good, why do I feel so bad?" It is our "not at home in the world" feeling.

What Is Recollection?

The frantic plaint, "I just have to get myself collected," is exactly opposite from the calm assertion "I am recollected." Recollection is a word used by spiritual writers, mostly in the past, who wanted to describe the concentration of the attention on the presence of God. It is sometimes used in a more limited way to describe a particular stage of prayer during which someone is so stilled that God may work in that person without hindrance. For our purposes, the first and more general definition is the more helpful. Being recollected simply means being conscious that God is with you. The essential feeling is that of being accompanied. It suggests the development of an interior life within a person, one that is not the same as exterior and circumstantial events, but which nonetheless affects every aspect of one's life. All of this has to do with what we are currently calling "spirituality," a term that is often used and seldom defined. Geoffrey Wainwright defines spirituality as the "combination of praying and living." The inner life of recollection inevitably results in an increased outer life of connection, compassion, and a certain composure.

Recollection, as it once was called, is a mental state of awareness. It serves as the connective tissue that holds all our life within the matrix of a consciousness of God. For instance, the religious but unrecollected person (most of us) may attend services of worship, act according to a religion-based ethic in the conduct of work and relationships, give money to charitable causes, and even say formal prayers at specific times. All of this is extremely commendable and, indeed, such acts are part of the very fabric of civil society and provide some personal fulfillment. But there is something important to notice about this. In fulfilling these obligations, we may be segregating our acts from our thoughts and attitudes at those times when we are not especially engaging in "religious" things. Very often we participate in religious activities as special events disconnected from the rest of life. Acts we do in obedience to our highest values are good things, and they enrich our lives and the lives of others. Scripture says such conduct "pleases God." That is no guarantee, however, that we will feel God's presence within us, long term. The "something more" that we seek is that sense of always being accompanied, of God-with-us at all times and not in special moments only.

Theologian Paul Tillich writes about "ecstatic reasoning," by which he means the intersection of the immediate with the ultimate, the horizontal with the vertical. In other words, what is going on right now can be informed and influenced by my consciousness that God is also "going on" right now. Whatever is happening in the present moment, God is also happening, which is to say, God is active. It is as though we learn to think of two things in tandem—our experience of the events of the moment and our experience of God in the moment. This concept is actually not a foreign one. You can recall times in your life when you have heard in your mind the inner voice of a parent or teacher just as you were about to speak or act. You were thinking of both the immediate circumstance and of the inner voice all at once. Take a moment to remember times when this sort of tandem thinking made a difference in what you did or did not do.

These inner values can be good and important, but there is a potential problem for us if the voice we hear tears us down rather than builds us up. How easy and natural it is to resent the voices we do not like. Didn't they often deprive us of the very thing we wanted most at the time? We may even recall them as putting us down, not an uncommon experience for many. Seeing God as the parent who denies, or the stern and punitive teacher, we might even want God to go away!

Think instead of how you felt when you were deeply in love with someone, one who's presence in your thoughts accompanied and dominated all your waking moments. To think of the person you loved affirmed you and made you feel alive and whole. This is exactly how we experience a consciousness of the divine when we see God as God truly is. It takes a lot of unlearning for some of us to believe that God is "for us,"...