The following story comes from the Zen Buddhist tradition and teaches a lesson that I, for one, need to hear over and over.

One of the devotees in the temple was well known for his zealousness and effort. Day and night he would sit in meditation, not stopping even to eat or sleep. As time passed he grew thinner and more exhausted. The master of the temple advised him to slow down, to take more care of himself. But the devotee refused to heed his advice.

“And how do you know,” asked the master, “that enlightenment is running on be-fore you, so that you have to rush after it? Perhaps it is behind you, and all you need to encounter it is to stand still – but you are running away from it!”

This anecdote, one of many collected by Christina Feldman and Jack Kornfield in a 1991 volume Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart, reminds seekers after the light that waiting on God or spirit or truth can be more important than actively working toward them.

In my reading, the story says that the best way to enhance spiritual growth is often  simply to stand there and let things happen to you. Enlightenment is not on the path ahead where you think it is, but rather lies behind waiting for you to stop your forward progress and turn back.

Would that my novice master had taken the lesson of this story to heart! Instead, he fed me with an activist approach to the spiritual life. Admirable for personal virtues though he was, he taught me and my fellow novices to reach out to God by much speak-ing in prayer and through constant activity in the form of self-denial.

It is a tribute to the spirit of this man that, many years later, he came to see the harm in his approach to the spiritual life and changed his own orientation. After many years of suffering, much of it caused by injuries suffered when he was trapped in a burn-ing building and had to jump from an upstairs window, he realized how his spiritual teaching erred on the side of activism.

What else proves as hard as admitting to oneself, in later life, that your entire course of action has been based on some false principles? And that many other people may have been misled by your teaching?

“There is no time to waste” says the zealous seeker after the light. But,  for those who would approach ultimate truth, wasting time holds great spiritual value. That was a value that I lost when a novice; I got to the point where I could not allow myself to let any waking time pass without accomplishing something worthwhile.

It has taken me a long time to learn once more the benefits of what the Italians call “dolce far niente” (sweetly doing nothing). The spirit had to bend my rigidity before I could ever recover the restful openness of heart necessary for a rich spiritual life and a humanly enjoyable one at that.

The old activism served me badly when I was younger and retains surprising power even now to rise up and place chains on my soul. The lessons of spiritual waiting seem never to be finally learned. It takes courage to just stand here in the expectation that the spirit will act in me.

Remaining passive is not easy. Just standing there with heart and mind open to the spiritual flow remains a big challenge. When you start to pray, you find yourself trying to take charge. Maybe that’s part of the reason why so often, as Elizabeth Lesser says, “me-ditation can feel as if you are slogging through pudding.”

Doing nothing goes against the grain of American culture, of all that we feel about our place in the world. It’s counter-cultural to cultivate habits of the heart that in-cline us to wait in hope. Because enlightenment may not lay on the path ahead, may in-stead wait behind us, perhaps the chance is worth taking.

Richard Griffin