From Distraction to Return

Have you ever wondered about the compatibility of your own vocation, season, station in life and the invitation to a contemplative way in the world?

In October 2018 I was in my early thirties, married for three years, having just welcomed our first baby six months earlier. I traveled to Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist Monastery in South Carolina, to be part of an interfaith dialogue on monasticism and contemplative life. After days of more intentional dialogue, we joined the monks for Compline and then our hosts put out some wine and cheese in the cozy gathering room and we enjoyed informal conversation. 

There were a dozen participants in this dialogue, most of whom were abbots and abbesses of other monastic communities around the country (“Why am I here?” was my constant chorus, sung with gratitude). Many of the monks were seasoned contemplatives with decades of practice in growing awareness of God’s presence. I sat in awe, basking in admiration of these new friends and the wisdom cultivated through their stories. 

One evening, I took my shot. We munched crackers and cheese: a motley crew including a couple Catholic priest-monks from Mepkin, a Buddhist female monk, and a Hindu monk. Three of the four were superiors or leaders of their own religious communities. And so, I asked the question that had been churning in me over the few days of the retreat: “What aspects of the contemplative life are accessible to me? And in what forms?” 

At the time, I was a husband and new father, navigating all the confronting dailiness of intimate community life in a house of eight people (now ten) — people of all ages, people with and without disabilities, people from all different families now forming one family. I was eager to receive the guidance of the gurus in the room, particularly as the fog of fatigue was settling in with the new rhythms of taking care of an infant.

One of the Mepkin monks looked me squarely in the eye and said, “Obedience to the needs of your wife and child is your contemplative pathway.” Another nodded and smirkingly added, “and perhaps make space for regular silence in the midst of everything.”

Goodness. The response I heard that day remains with me now, six years later. It has framed my vocation toward prayer in the midst of a vibrant shared life with others. 

Encounter Jesus there. Return to Jesus right where you are. This became my breath prayer from that moment. I began to recognize a disruption to all sorts of illusions that had been, up to that point, covertly at work in my imagination in regards to my life of prayer. I was under the illusion that the interruptive needs of family life were a distraction from my contemplative vocation in the world. I began to open myself to the possibility that rather than distractions, these demands (sometimes seemingly incessant) are pathways of return…return to awareness of God’s presence…return to the ground of my existence…return to my home in God and God’s home in me. 

More often than I’d like to admit, I treat the demands of my children like distractions. The demand can be as basic as a glass of milk. And you may ask, ”Distracted from what?” and sometimes the answer is as absurd as “my own thoughts” or “doing nothing.” And yet, distractions I imagine them to be.

But what if the stuff of my daily life – the duties and responsibilities of my kids and wife and community-mates – are pathways of return to God? What if these demands on the time I cling to as my own are really the 10,000 opportunities to return to God…the concrete invitations to be present with the God who is already here, now? Thomas Keating is known for responding to centering prayer novices who lament their ten thousand distractions with a bright smile: “How lovely, that’s ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”

A practice like centering prayer – 20 minutes of quiet consent to God’s presence – overflows into an embodied daily life. It renews our vision and reframes distraction into channels of return. The silent practice, and the life lived in all the in-betweens, mutually enliven one another, ushering us into the simple invitation to be present, to cultivate a readiness to consent to the deepest reality of our lives: God’s loving, active presence.

And yet, I miss so many of the opportunities. Ten thousand of them every day, perhaps. I am prone to forget, susceptible to a cluttered mind that unwittingly says “no” to frequent communing with God. I often cultivate inattention…un-readiness.

And so, I return. I recognize that God never left me alone, and through this small gesture of consent my soul breathes deep and I rest in undeserved, spacious mercy. After all, the whole endeavor of participating in God’s life relies on “an Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion is inexhaustible” (St. Faustina). As I return, intermittent as it feels, I can offer my very life (in its ordinary messiness) as an embodied prayer. Return makes me present to the freedom I have to consent.

In February 2024 – two months ago and six years removed from the interfaith dialogue – the counsel of those same Mepkin priests struck again. I had committed to a year-long pilot program – the Institute for Contemplative Leadership – hosted by the monastery, and was eager for the spiritual nourishment and nurture to come. 

And then, my third child was born surprisingly early. Though she’s a happy and healthy baby now, her entry into the world was filled with grief and uncertainty as she suffered through breathing troubles in the NICU for a couple weeks. She came the day before I was set to go to Mepkin for the first intensive week of this Institute. I sent an email to the monks, letting them know I was no longer able to attend the week (and therefore unable to participate in the year-long cohort). I heard back very quickly. Along with rejoicing in the “unexpected interruption” of this new birth, my wise and humble friend said: “It sounds like you are being called to take a different route on your contemplative journey.” 

Encounter Jesus there. Return to Jesus right where you are.

Greg Little is a husband to Janice and father to JoyAna and Elias and Terese (Resa), and he has a home at Corner House in Durham, North Carolina. He has learned from various schools, including several Christian communities seeking justice and peace (a Catholic Worker home inspired by St. Francis, Durham’s Friendship House and Haiti’s Wings of Hope) and is committed to a life ordered by daily communal prayer and littleness. He works at Reality Ministries, a place proclaiming that we all belong to God in Jesus through fostering friendship among people with and without developmental disabilities. Greg and Sister Julia recently met in the wonder of interfaith dialogue about monasticism and the contemplative life at Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.