Spirituality in a Mandala

I haven't talked much about Spirituality time on my blog. JVC requires us to do a Spirituality night and a Community night every week. Because of our schedules, we find the Spirituality time often fits better in the mornings. We rotate who leads, so once a month it's your turn to decide what we'll do with the time.

In a recent Spirituality morning, we made mandalas. If you don't know anything about mandalas, click here and skim the wikipedia page really quickly before coming back. We had lots of materials (water colors, pens, markers, cut up old magazines) at our disposal and about an hour to get creative with this visual prayer. 

My first thought was that I wanted something to center my mandala. The song I am on the Battlefield for my Lord had been stuck in my head for the past week so I picked that as my phrase. The idea of being on the battlefield resonates with me because Catholic isn't an easy thing. It's not just a call to Sunday morning worship, it's a call action. It's about picking sides – do I side with the oppressors or the oppressed? Do I shine a light in the darkness, or give in to the darkness because the night seems so big? I've always understood the idea of a passive Catholic to be an oxymoron. The idea of being on the battlefield resonates especially strongly now. People from all religious walks of life are familiar with the idea of retreats. JVC requires us to make four retreats each year. The word retreat is battlefield language; a retreat is step backing from the struggles of the world to rest, recuperate, analyze, and heal. When we're not on any of our 4 required retreats, I think the JVC experience is one of advance. Instead of retreating from the battlefield, we're advancing onto it.

The phrase “I am on the battlefield for my Lord” seemed too long to put at the center of my blank circle so I kept thinking. The phrase “prayer warrior” surfaced on the sea of memory, first heard at the annual Black Catholic Revival many years ago. I think Catholics are called to be prayer warriors, to pray hard and fight hard. The Jesuits have their own term for prayer warriors: contemplatives in action. As JVs we're called to be contemplatives in action as well (that's part of the reason we make 4 retreats a year). I like the term prayer warrior better because it's more concise, more direct, and more forceful. In the term 'contemplatives in action' the noun, the focus, the key part is contemplatives. Contemplatives in action are thinkers first. But they are thinkers who understand that “thinking is for doing.”* St. Ignatius had his own historical/cultural reasons for using the phrase he did. I prefer 'prayer warriors' because the noun is warriors. Prayer warriors are people of action whose use their actions as prayer. It comes to the same thing, but I have my preference. So I wrote prayer warrior in the center and painted the circle around it in red, my favorite color, the color of the fire and the Holy Spirit.

The word warrior got me thinking about my martial arts training. At Body Mind Systems, one of the martial arts I studied was Shi Pal Gae, or 18 weapons. I drew 18 spaces branching out from my center to represent a complete set of weapons (spiritual weapons to be used on the battlefield fighting for social justice).** Looking at the 18 spaces I saw two trinities of trinities, one of darkness and one of light. The Christian experience isn't always a 'Hallelujah good time.' You have to face the Darkness if you want to be a soldier for the Light. There's also an element of balance there, a variation on the yin-yang. As human we are all made with darkness and light inside us. To deny either would be to deny ourselves fullness.

Moving to the golden layer of the mandala, the influence of Body Mind Systems is most obvious. Their logo features an octagon with words on it. 

At Body Mind Systems we spent a lot of time analyzing the logo. It was put together with a great deal of thought and care. There are 4 axes which contain equal opposites. For example Mind-Body. I used that same idea in my mandala. You can see an axis of Prayer - Action. One should inform the other and vice-versa - that's what being a prayer warrior or contemplative in action means. I won't go into the explanation of each axis, but I do want to talk about the Peace-Lucha axis.

Lucha is the Spanish word for struggle. In Latin America, the idea of la lucha, the struggle, is a prevalent idea. People are in la lucha for a better life, they're in la lucha for equality, for justice.** Peace is generally thought of as tranquil, lucha is anything but tranquil. But in the end, I want to be in la lucha for peace, and want to find peace in the struggle, and struggle for peace. Nora tells me that one of the most frustrating things about me growing up was how calm I'd stay even when I provoked her. That was special older brother torture powers at work, but it connects to a part of who I strive to be. I want to be the calm inside the storm, the peace inside the struggle, so that the winds don't blow me off course and so that others know they can depend on me.

While I was inspired by the octagon from BMS, I decided to make a circlule, partly because it fit the artform best, and partly because it lessens the sense of divisions between these 8 concepts. The mind should be engaged in the struggle, emotions should inform prayer, and so on. These are interconnected ideas.

Finally I painted the 8 sections in blue and purple. In Catholic liturgy, purple is a color of waiting, preparing, and searching. It's the color for Advent and Lent, the two times when we prepare ourselves for the biggest celebrations of the year. “Seek first the Kingdom of God” (Mark 6:33). Purple is the color of royalty (at least in Roman tradition), so it represents the Kingdom. But as it's also the Catholic color of waiting and seeking, it represents the active search for, and encounter with, the Kingdom. The purple is also a nod to BLS, which formed me in many of these 8 aspects. I suppose that means the blue could be interpreted as a nod to Brandeis, which was not my intention. If it is a nod, then it's a curt one. I chose the blue because it's a calm color. It's the color of the sky and the rivers and the sea. It's a color that's filled with energy that you can't see from the surface. It's the color of the deep that calls to to deep.

*Psychologist William James

**And if they're in Lima they're in La Lucha for bomb-ass sandwiches. LINK OR SOMETHING