The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

The Mindful Catholic: Finding God One Moment at a Time

2018 Catholic Writer's Guild Award Winner! Whether we are carrying out routine life behaviors, trying to pray, or conversing with others, the way our minds work significantly impacts how well we function. But many times we may feel like our mind has a mind of its own. You fall into bed exhausted at the end of the day, craving a good night's sleep, only to have your mind race in a million directions. - Prayer is an exercise in futility, full of distractions and wandering thoughts. - In the midst of a conversation, you suddenly realize you haven't heard a word the other person has said. - You arrive at a destination with no recollection of how you got there. These all-too-common occurrences are examples of how our minds can seem to be completely out of our control. We end up merely going through the motions day after day, feeling anxious and preoccupied. But it doesn't have to be that way. Dr. Greg Bottaro explains how mindfulness can help us become aware of the present moment and accept it. Catholic mindfulness is a way to practically trust God more in our lives. Instead of separating faith from day-to-day life, mindfulness helps bridge the gap so we can feel the sense of safety and peace God intends us to have. Following the simple exercises in this book, you'll discover how mindfulness can help you be more present to everything in your life from a trip to the grocery store or relaxing with friends to listening more attentively to a homily or meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary. It is a good book not just because it reads well but because it works well. This book is like a cookbook, or an instruction manual. To say that it makes a pretty good read is like saying that How to Build a Boat makes a pretty good read for a castaway. It does indeed make a pretty good read, but it makes a much better boat. It floats. It works. And "you're gonna need a bigger boat" is true of all of us in terms of mindfulness. St. Augustine prayed, "Narrow is the mansion of my soul. Enlarge it." The mind is one of the two most essential powers of the soul (the other being the will). What this book does to your mind is not to fill it with stuff but to enlarge it, to strengthen it. It does to the mind what new batteries do to a searchlight. But you have to do it, not just think about doing it. Many of us, especially we academic types, we "intellectuals," who usually have very active imaginations, are prone to think (subconsciously) that we have actually done something (like prayer or fasting or acts of charity) simply because we have thought about it. We can even come to believe that we are saintly simply because we love to read books by the saints. We are tempted to live in our imaginations, in our world rather than in the real world. (It's much easier!) We're like the theologian who, upon dying, was offered by God the choice between going to heaven and going to a theology lecture on heaven. He chose the lecture. How important is mindfulness? More important than almost any possible object of mind. There are many, many different objects in this crazy, wonderful world for the light of our minds to light up, but if the light is weak or foggy or unreliable, all its objects will be dim, and our grasp of them weak, and our very selves dim and weak like ghosts. Our mind can be compared to the light, and everything in our world is an object to it. To improve the light itself—to clarify it and intensify it and focus it and master it—is more important than to know any of its objects (except God and yourself, the only two realities you can never escape for a single moment, in time or in eternity). Buddha famously said, in the first and most famous and favorite line in the first and most famous and favorite Buddhist book, the Dhammapada , "All that we are is a result of what we have thought. It begins with our thoughts, it moves with our thoughts, it ends with our thoughts." (By the way, this is not a Buddhist book. It is a Christian and Catholic book. It does not lead you into nothingness or emptiness but into everything—especially into God.) I have ADD (which for a philosopher is usually ADHD, Attention Deficit High Definition); I am easily bored and distracted, so I love short, simple books. If a book makes ten points I will forget nine of them. That's why my favorite spiritual classic is Brother Lawrence's simple little one-point book, The Practice of the Presence of God . Its point is so clear and short that even if he never wrote the book, the title alone would be sufficient. Dr. Bottaro's book gives you much more concrete detail, exercises, and specific practical advice, but that's what it all comes down to. St. Paul knew the importance of thought as well as Buddha did. He tells us to "take every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). Adam's and Eve's act-sin began with thought-sin. ("Did God really say that? Listen to what I say.") "Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap