Well, to that end we begin today a three-part series on spiritual fitness that seeks to follow that “this” that Jesus prescribes in order for us to experience the life we seek. I am getting plenty of fitness advice these days; I don’t know about you. Since my little stint with a stent in the cardiac catheterization lab a couple of weeks ago, I have had no shortage of advisors, who only want the best for me, don’t you know?! The counsel usually involves exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle changes to reduce stress and get the body, mind, and spirit working together in balance. It’s all good. And it’s all timely, what with the fall now upon us, school beginning, and summer indulgence lingering on our hips. Now is as good a time as any to stop and go, again.

My field is the spiritual rather than the physical, so let me offer up three heart-healthy exercises over the next weeks: Pray, Play, and Pay. That’s upward, inward, and outward exercises. It’s about loving God, self, and neighbor. It involves premeditation, meditation, and mediation. It puts God above us and pulls neighbor closer to us.

But it all starts with putting your “self’” in your place. Americans are used to being at the center of things. From the time we pop out of the womb, we have marketers standing over our cribs with clipboards asking about our tastes and preferences. They want to design their products and advertising to appeal to our interests. Apple juice or orange? Cloth diapers or disposable? Blue pacifiers or green? Parents are a little different now from the way they were back in the day. Used to be kids were born into families and had to fight to find their place. Now kids come into the world and know who’s the boss—they are! They quickly learn that the world is there to serve them. Parents arrange their lives to see to their happiness. Parents used to want their kids to have good lives and they knew that meant discipline and sacrifice and pain and service and, yes, even self-denial.  Nowadays, ask ten parents what they want for their children, and nine of them will say they just want them to be happy. Now, I’m not against happiness, and I don’t think Jesus is, either, but happiness is a consequence of goodness, not the cause of it. Happiness is like a dog’s tail: if you chase it, you’ll never catch it. If you go about your business and forget it, it will follow after you faithfully.

Concern with self is natural. We are built for survival, and we have interest in ourselves. But the spiritual trick is to put ourselves in proper position. God is first; we are not. God is king and must sit on the throne if we are to know fullness of life in the kingdom. We live off the good graces of our heavenly monarch, who gives us each day our daily bread. But God doesn’t like giving up the big chair and will not rest until you get out of it. (I picture Archie Bunker and Meathead here.) This is not just because God is a jealous God, always demanding to be number one. It’s because God is a gracious and loving God, always wanting to give us the life we can have only by receiving it and never by grabbing for it.

So we have to put our hearts in the right place first. We have to learn to follow in this spiritual dance, not to lead. As Nikos Kazantzakis says: Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free. And to do so, to be truly free, to be wholeheartedly lost in the contentment of the whirling dervish that is loving God, we have to learn to something quite odd. The wonderfully insightful monk Thomas Merton put it this way: The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.

The only hope of eternal life, of the abundant life that Jesus promises, is in participating in the life of God. The life of God is the dance of the Trinity, the eternal love affair of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that is open for us to join. But that means we have to become more mindful of God and forgetful of self. Selfishness is the sin, not the solution. To become more concerned with self only adds to the seriousness of the problem. Selflessness does not mean losing yourself for good; it means finding yourself in the goodness of God.

God is true north, and we will always be lost if we seek to locate ourselves without reference to God. If you are lost in the woods, it doesn’t help just to say in good Zen fashion, Well, wherever you go, that’s where you are. Yes, but where is that? Well, here. Yes, but where is here?

Prayer allows you to pause and check your spiritual compass. The primary purpose of prayer is not getting God to answer your wish list; it is spiritual relocation. God is not a divine concierge, always there to serve you. Prayer reestablishes God’s proper place of preeminence. Prayer does not begin with Memo to self; it begins with Dear Lord, or Our Father. When you pray, you get outside of yourself. You turn upward to your superior. You remember that you exist to serve God, not the other way round. And when you do this, when you grant God the right to be God to you, you drop a huge load off your shoulders that you could never carry. You were not made to be God. Trying to take care of yourself and everyone around you as if you have are God will only crush you, because you are not designed for that duty.

So prayer is premeditation. Before it is anything else, it is acknowledging what is already true—that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, and that you are neither. But how do you pray like that? Sometimes we are really good at saying what we ought to do and why, but not so good at saying how.

To be honest, it is more important to be honest in prayer than to get the words just right. It is more important to put your heart into it than to put words to it. The content ought to be adoration of God, praise of God, submission to God, acknowledgement of God. This is the first thing you learn in Alcoholics Anonymous and all its offshoot groups. The church is not timid in telling you that the only higher power worthy of the name God is the one who got Israel out of Egypt, the one who got Jesus out of the grave, the one Jesus called Father. Until you get that down by getting down on your knees, you will always be falling down trying to stand up on your own.

Try a simple prayer the first thing in the morning when you wake up. Dear God, I acknowledge your rights and power over my life. Teach me to love and serve you this day. Or pray The Lord’s Prayer: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be THY name (not MY name!). Or try the simple Jesus Prayer that you can say all day long, every time the thought of God pops into your mind or the feeling of trouble stirs in your stomach. It goes like this: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, I am a sinner. Sit still for a few minutes a day and repeat that over and over, mulling the meaning. It will situate you on the map of the world for another day.

By all means, pray other things and in other ways, also. But praying for your boss’s charity or your preacher’s clarity or your mother’s sanity is fine. But that is still secondary to premeditation prayer that reinstalls God on the throne of your life. Everything else follows from there.

When the lawyer asks Jesus about eternal life, Jesus reminds him of what he already knows. The man remembers and puts God first: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. ... Prayer is love. True, whole prayer is nothing but love, St. Augustine said. And in a luscious scene from the movie Out of Africa that would make the coldest curmudgeon swoon, Denys washes Karen’s hair and quotes from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: He prayeth well, who loveth well. Exactly!

But loving takes practice, and we have to be reminded to be mindful. And that is what prayer does—reminds us to be mindful of God. It allows us not to worry about our own lives, but to let God worry about them for us, since that is God’s job. Rejoice in the Lord, Paul says. And then he reminds us, again I say, rejoice. We need reminding where our joy comes from.

All the critics are talking about what a lousy summer this has been at the box office. That’s because the big budget blockbusters, like War of the Worlds, are mostly drivel. But if you search, you can find some gems. My latest favorite is a little film called Saint Ralph. Ralph is a 14-year-old boy in Catholic school in Canada. Like any other awkward coming-of-age boy, he tends to be somewhat self-absorbed. He considers himself above the rules because he is destined for greatness. But things begin to turn as his mother falls into a coma and he believes only a miracle will wake her. He learns that the saints did miracles because of their faith, purity, and prayer.

He is sent to the cross-country team as punishment for his rebelliousness, and he learns there that it would take a miracle for him to win the Boston Marathon. He figures that might be just the miracle that will bring his mother back. So he turns his attention to training body and soul. His attention shifts from himself to God and his mother. He denies himself anything and everything for the sake of the miracle he believes can happen if he were to win the Boston Marathon. I won’t completely spoil the story for you, but by the end we see that everyone is changed by this change in young Ralph. The nurse at his mother’s bedside puts her arm around him and thanks him for letting everyone become part of something bigger than themselves. They were all caught up in the great dance of faith, in the miracle world of God’s love.

In his book Living Prayer, Robert Benson says: Once your heart has heard the music, it is only happy when it is dancing [p.7]. If you want to be happy, don’t focus on the happy; get lost in the music and let your soul dance.