A Mindful Messiah

Mindfulness is all over the news lately. On New Year’s night, the NBC Evening News  reported that several violence-ridden high schools are teaching mindfulness meditation to their students and seeing amazing results. Books about Mindfulness by people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabit-Zinn are flying off the shelves. Even American business executives are experimenting with this Eastern spiritual discipline to bookend their workday.

Mindfulness has been defined as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.” (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu) I also like John Kabit-Zinn’s abbreviated definition of mindfulness as “presence of heart.”

While some Christians may consider Mindfulness a foreign concept, a discipline that seems more Buddhist or Hindu, and thus lying somehow outside the Christian framework, I would like to challenge that notion. I see Jesus as a Mindful Messiah.

Mindfulness, at its core, is about being fully present in the here and now. It is about tuning into one’s breathing and becoming completely aware of one’s body in space and noticing everything that is immediately before us. A mindful person is keenly aware of this moment and doesn’t want to miss any of its giftedness or possibilities. That strikes me as being exactly like Jesus.

I made this connection a number of years ago, while making a systematic study of the four gospels. I noticed that almost everything Jesus did was done on the way to doing something else. It was when Jesus and his disciples were on their way to Gerasa that the famed Gerasene Demoniac came from the tombs to accost Jesus, and Jesus healed him. It was while Jesus had crossed to the other side of the lake and began to address a large crowd, that Jairus, one of the synagogue leaders, fell at Jesus feet and pled for the life of his dying daughter, and  “Jesus went with him.” It was while Jesus was pulling the disciples away from the crowds to a quiet place that Jesus noted their hunger and said, “We must give them something to eat,” and the 5000 were fed. It was while Jesus and his followers were just entering Jericho that the blind beggar Bartimaeus cried out, and Jesus stopped to heal him.

In all these and dozens of other instances, Jesus was on his way some place to fulfill some purpose. But being fully present, aware and mindful of where he was, each and every step of the way, Jesus consistently responded to the moment, to the holy now. And to reinforce his way of mindfulness, he even focused on it in his parables.

In his famous Good Samaritan tale, Jesus includes two priests who were on their way to somewhere or something important. And when those priests encountered a beaten and bloodied man – right in front of their eyes – they, in their busy-ness and preoccupation, crossed to other side of the road and walked right passed him. It is as though those holy men were focused on the future - the meeting they were to attend, the sermon they were to preach. And in that preoccupied, future-focused, non-mindful state, they failed to assist their brother in need, the one who was right in front of them. But the Good Samaritan – the one who stopped, dressed his wounds, lifted him onto his own donkey, and carried him to the nearest inn – that man was on his way someplace too. He had people to see and things to do. But he was mindful, in the moment, open to the possibilities of the here and now. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that it was the mindfulness of that Samaritan that made him “good.”

In his famed Sermon on the Mount, one can see further evidence of Jesus’s teaching on mindfulness. “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or what you will wear…Look at the birds of the air; they don’t sow or reap or store away in barns…Can any of you add a single hour to your life by worrying?...Therefore I tell you, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Centered, grounded, and mindful of every moment, Jesus walked through each and every day responding to what was immediately before him, possibilities that, like breath itself, come only in the holy and gifted now. Jesus was of such incredible use to God precisely because he was so uniquely present in each moment, so mindful.

Mindfulness is a much a Christian practice and virtue as it is a Buddhist and a Hindu one. If we want to be more like Jesus, we must learn to be mindful, to be fully engaged in what is immediately before us. May it be so.

P.S. - For a great 4 minute summary of Mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh, check out this address : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD7i6VUOriI