Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for January 31, 2020
January NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative Friends,
All is quiet on the Southwestern front. This has been the longest stretch of radio silence from the Contemplify podcast in its four year tenure. I wish I could say I’ve proffered my efforts into strengthening policies on environmental protections or clearing the fog of war, but alas, I’m in the fog of sleeplessness. And it covers most days.
My youngest sleeps like a cranky Trappist monk; waking throughout the night to follow the Divine Hours, not in prayerful chant, but in ecstatic shrieks. His cries are answered by his Mama and me, responding in bedraggled and sleepy love as best we can muster. In this forced wakefulness, I sometimes stumble into the effusive nature of prayer. For my kids, my family, and in solidarity with all of the parents awakened by love in these unwelcome hours. This quiet sacrifice is known by the fellowship of parents and caretakers around the world. It is the purgation of the subtle illusion that I am in control. The winnowing comes through loving attention to my son in this moment. Rather than a transcendent moment, it's a disciplined turning of the dial to welcome Christ in my tear-stained blue-eyed wonder. When I can relinquish my need to solve this moment, I am given the slightest capacity to truly see and love this moment. And the gate to the universe opens.
Only when Love flows through my veins can I relax enough to release the rehearsed stories that usually limit my full participation in this life. This has been the great lesson of parenthood for me. Paula D’arcy says that God comes to you disguised as your life. How could it be otherwise? Life is a playground where God chases you and you chase God, often bumping into each other and laughing.
In the playground of my life, I am pushing two little ones on a swingset and holding hands with my beloved. Any playground worth its name is not safe, but a field of challenging play. There are bumps on the noggin, hurt feelings, sleepless nights, foggy days, and repeated instructions to bring your dishes to the sink. The highs and lows mingle together, requiring a different glance on my priorities and energies.
Back to the podcast, my intention is to do many more episodes...just not yet. I have interviews to edit and stories to share. Until then, a deep bow to you as you explore the playground of your life.
This month’s NonRequired Reading List plays with the wisdom of elders and healing trauma through embodied contemplative practice: “The World We Still Have” and My Grandmother’s Hands.
January's NonRequired Reading List
“The World We Still Have: Barry Lopez On Restoring Our Lost Intimacy With Nature”
by Fred Bahnson (Get it at The Sun Magazine)
I am tempted to simply highlight quotes from this conversation between Barry Lopez and Fred Bahnson. It’s that good. Barry Lopez is a writer (and National Book Award winner) known for harnessing his energies in solidarity with humanitarian and environmental concerns. A number of years back I heard Lopez speak at the University of New Mexico to a sardine packed room. My wife and I still feel the reverb of his evocative talk. Here is Lopez, in conversation with Bahnson, speaking to the contemplative life in the 21st Century,
“To dismiss contemplative life as a luxury or as an idiotic thing to be doing in 2019 is to misunderstand the whole tradition of monasticism, which is known by different names in different cultures. But that idea — a handful of just people who are unaware of each other but who continue their prayerful way in the world — is to be found among many cultures. Those people are the ones, many believe, who provide humanity with stability. Indigenous people call these people “the elders.” The thing to value here is not progress; it’s stability in the storm. Who provides stability in the chaos of modern life? It is people living in a prayerful way. And living in a prayerful way doesn’t need to have a formal religious structure around it.”
Can you feel how he is expanding the idea of a ‘contemplative life’? My Christian heart beats in applause to this rhythm. Barry Lopez is an elder modeling what a contemplative looks like in rhythm with this world. Lopez is living in a Christ-soaked world (not his words), for when Bahnson asks who God is, Lopez responds,
“That. [Gestures to the trees outside the window and the river beyond.] Everything outside the self. Outside the realm of “I am important”; “I” this, “I” that. The essence of the Divine is good relations across the board.”
What happens when you see the Divine spark in all of reality? All of the hours of the day become an invitation to inflame the pleasant Presence of the present tense.
“If you’re really advanced, you know you’re in the presence of the Divine even when you’re doing the dishes. So my answer to the trouble is: Make your acquaintance with God, in whatever form that takes for you. It’s just good relations with the Divine that gets you through the wickedest trouble.”
I am pulling out the contemplative goodies, but Lopez is not wandering around in a blissed out state oblivious to the absurdity of the evil at play. He speaks with empowered nuance to the trauma humanity has inflicted on one another and the world. Treat yourself to reading this conversation in its entirety, and I’ll leave this piece with a few eldering words from Barry Lopez.
“That’s why I told my grandson in the book’s prologue, as we stood over the wreckage of that battleship at Pearl Harbor, “This is what we do.” He had no idea that we killed each other on that scale. But I could say to him, “I love you, and I want you to know that this is what we do. And as you grow, you will see a way to help. And I hope that when you do, you choose that path, no matter how hard it is.” And, I would add now, you can do that in a monastic cell or in the great wide open. I don’t think you can do it in government, and I know you can’t do it in corporate business. Everything large-scale business promotes is antithetical to the support of life. The major, fundamental contradiction in this country is that you can’t have a true democracy built around the goals capitalism espouses. You can’t do it. You’ve got to change it, and what a vision that is.”
I recommend this article for all who feel confused, dispirited, and brokenhearted about the state of the world. It will sharpen your contemplative glance.
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
I read My Grandmother’s Hands as I would drink a high dollar wine. It was gifted to me and sipped slowly. More than a book read, it was a book experienced. I switched from the written text to the audio format because it allowed Resmaa Menakem’s words and practices to filter throughout the entirety of my body. This book is all about bodies and the ways our bodies carry trauma (present and past), perpetuate or are burdened by white body supremacy, and ways we might be bold enough to heal.
Make no mistake this a book of contemplative healing. Each chapter ends with an embodied practice that makes the theoretical concrete. Rather than the practices feeling like an add-on (as most practices in books feel to this reader), they are dazzling encores meant to settle the insights gathered by the mind into the cells of the body. My Grandmother’s Hands focuses on the trauma experienced of three different types of bodies: white, Black, and police. Ever nuanced and compassionate, Menakem weaves in the importance of doing this type of embodied contemplative healing for ourselves and our descendents.
“All of this suggests that one of the best things each of us can do—not only for ourselves, but also for our children and grandchildren—is to metabolize our pain and heal our trauma. When we heal and make more room for growth in our nervous systems, we have a better chance of spreading our emotional health to our descendants, via healthy DNA expression. In contrast, when we don’t address our trauma, we may pass it on to future generations, along with some of our fear, constriction, and dirty pain.” (p.42)
In the contemplative traditions of Christianity that I am most familiar with, the body has oft been relegated to a piece of furniture for the soul to nap on. Forgotten or abused in spiritual circles, the body has not been given its proper place in an incarnational worldview. Menakem’s work has bridged for me the necessity of understanding the body’s intertwining with spirit and mind. My Grandmother’s Hands crafts a perspective on how racialized trauma is an every-body trauma and the tremendous work of healing is possible through our bodies.
As a person who identifies as Christian, the Body of Christ has always been a fruitful metaphor for me, and Menakem ripens my approach to understanding the way the Body of Christ holds, metabolizes, and heals trauma. What would a future Christianity that works towards healing the Body of Christ through Menakem’s approach look like in the 21st Century?
My Grandmother’s Hands is for anyone who desires to gift themselves, their community, and descents with a settled body for bending towards justice in embodied love. And I can think of no better way to honor our collective ancestors who sometimes unwittingly, and more often brutally, carried this trauma by healing ourselves for our lineage.
Arts and Articles
‘Colors’ by Black Pumas (YouTube): This song appeared in my inbox (hat tip to Cliff) and changed the tone of my day. Do watch the video, the power of film and song rarely coalesces with such power like this in our overly saturated media.
‘The Rule of St. Francis of Assisi’ by St. Francis (Salem Community College): My interest in monastic and mendicant spirituality has been stoked again in these dire geopolitical times. I was struck once again by how much emphasis St. Francis put on how one should live.
‘40 Questions to Ask Yourself Each Year’ by Stephan Ango (Medium): A useful yearly practice to help you take stock of your precious life.
‘Every Moment with My Son is an Act of Creation’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen (NYT): This one made me well up with tears. The elasticity of time, love, and creativity in the roles of father and son.
Contemplify Update
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May your nights be fields for restful dreams of planting sequoias and healing our bodies. May the abrupt awakenings of a child, parent, or dog startle you to attention.
To see fullness of this magic life wrought with worry, misgiving, aching beauty, and renewal. May its tenderness be a memory of its fleeting nature.
Steady on,
Paul
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