Practice

A lot of spiritual writing seems to come from people who’ve never had to make rent. It talks about letting go and renouncing the world, and then you close the book and there’s an invoice due Friday and a manager who wants the report by noon. The Gospel of Thomas has a reputation for being that kind of book, mystical and otherworldly, a string of riddles about light and solitude. But scattered through its 114 sayings is a handful that talk about money with almost no metaphor at all. They mention merchants, rent, loans, and a man planning his investments. I’ve been reading them as a set, and they add up to something I didn’t expect, which is advice for people who still have to go to work in the morning. ...

Try something before you read any further. Without touching your phone, recite one passage from any scripture you care about, beginning to end. The exact words, the way they’re written. If you managed it, there’s a good chance you learned it as a kid, from a parent or a Sunday school teacher who made you say it until it stuck. If you stalled after the first line, you’ve got plenty of company. I’ve written about the Gospel of Thomas on this blog for months, and I still reach for the search bar more often than I’d like to admit. ...

I can’t remember the last time I was bored for longer than a minute. Waiting for coffee, stopped at a red light, standing in the hallway while the kettle boils, my hand finds the phone before my mind has registered that nothing is happening. Boredom used to be weather. Now it’s something I can switch off. That sounds like progress, and in some ways it is. But nearly every contemplative tradition I know of treats the dull stretch as a door you’re supposed to walk through, and I’ve been wondering what happens to a person who never gets near it. ...

The Gospel of Thomas appears to contradict itself about fasting, and the contradiction is worth the price of the book. In saying 14, Jesus tells his disciples, “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves.” Thirteen sayings later he warns, “If you do not fast from the world, you will not find the kingdom.” So fasting is spiritually dangerous, and fasting is spiritually mandatory. Texts this compressed rarely blunder into contradiction, which suggests the two sayings are a single teaching delivered in two strokes. The first knocks the practice out of your hands. The second hands it back aimed at a different target, and the difference between the targets is everything this post is about. ...

You surface from sleep with a whole world still draining away, a house that was also a ship, a conversation with someone dead and beloved, and by the time the coffee is poured it has thinned to almost nothing. Everyone knows the feeling. A dream that weighed a great deal at 6 a.m. is gone by 6:15, and most of us let it go without a fight. Carl Jung thought that loss was expensive. He wrote: ...

Your thumb knows the way to the feed before your eyes are fully open. By the time the kettle boils you have absorbed a stranger’s outrage, two advertisements, and a piece of news you will never act on, and the day’s attention has already been spent by somebody other than you. Monks faced a version of this problem fifteen centuries ago. Their solution was one of the stranger inventions in spiritual history, and it has aged better than almost anything else from the sixth century. They wrote down a rule. ...

Before sleep each night, Seneca put out the lamp and put his day on trial. He scanned everything he had done and said since morning, retracing his steps without excuses. The Pythagoreans were doing a version of it five centuries earlier, refusing to let sleep close their eyes before reviewing each act of the day. The habit is older than Christianity and simpler than almost anything we call spiritual practice. ...

Somewhere along the way, you probably picked up a spiritual checklist. Pray more. Give more. Maybe fast, if you get serious. And underneath it all, a low hum of guilt about never doing enough. The Gospel of Thomas records Jesus saying something that should make every checklist-keeper sit up: “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.” ...

The ancient Gnostics didn’t just theorize about rest. They practiced it. But their approach looked nothing like “taking a day off.” They transformed the Jewish Sabbath commandment into something radical: a discipline of inner awakening that could be practiced by anyone, whether or not they belonged to a formal religious community. Here’s how to adapt their practices for a life that includes smartphones, work emails, and Netflix algorithms designed to keep you from ever stopping. ...