Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for March 31, 2020
March NonRequired Reading List
(in light of NonRequired Reading List falling this week, I skipped the Practice List yesterday)
Contemplative Friend,
When the Bears of Misfortune wake from hibernation, how does your philosophy of life present itself? Perhaps you turn to your black mirror for a brush up on wisdom. I've done that. And when these Bears burst into your home, what do you do? Maybe seize the moment to sweep the dark corners of the kitchen to distract yourself from the beasts milling about in your bedroom. Been there too.
I am a field agent of invasive Bear watching. I take note of how I and others respond to these unwelcome houseguests. This practice has taught me a great deal about the “line between commitment and detachment”. In recent days the space has opened up for me to redefine my relationships with the Bears of Misfortune. My sympathies for the mammalian crew of Misfortune range from tenderness to standoffish. The Bear called Fear resembles a forlorn Pooh Bear, who finds himself without a honeypot or a hug at the ready. The Bear named Terror on the other hand moves quickly, too swiftly in fact to get a decent look at him, but he leaves a trail of scat in his wake for somebody else to tend. In watching myself watch these Bears I've noticed a very simple, yet significant pattern about myself. The immediacy of my responses to Misfortune sprout from my core philosophical approach to life. And this philosophy* (conscious or not) is revealed in my habits, bodily responses, and practices.
When the Bears of Misfortune swipe a paw at your manufactured self, what do you do? Self-observation tells me that I crack back to what I know in my bones. Hindsight has taught me that a healthy practice of contemplation strengthens my bones so they don’t completely break in the jaws of a Bear of Misfortune. My short take on Bear wrasslin' is as follows, a contemplative training ground is necessary for preparing for the vicious side of an absurd reality. To unpack that a step further I'd say the work of a contemplative is to see the fragmentation of reality and attentively attune your presence in union with Mystery for the healing of that dissolution in self and others (if that sounds like theological mumbo jumbo, I hear ya, jump down to the contemplative layman's terms below). The crucible of animating your personal philosophy is to see it through with commitment, while paradoxically releasing your clutch on prescribed outcomes. It is the razor’s edge of contemplative perception. For me, this training takes place daily on the meditation cushion. And in fearless self-reflection. In embracing the ‘Other’ in whatever form they appear. In shouting my worries to the stars. I believe it only takes a lifetime to befriend the Bears of Misfortune with such commitment and detachment.
Why does adrienne maree brown call this ‘the deepest pleasure’? My take rallies back to the term ‘crucible’**. The crucible is the alchemist pan for the melting of metallic elements into gold. The heat necessary for this transformation is fierce. The patience it takes to stoke the fire is long-suffering. The heat of paradox, conflict, and contradictions is the way Mystery shows up to call us beyond the false safety of our egoic boundaries. The burning away of the unessential leaves the skin exposed and aflame, begging to be washed in the grace of becoming. It appears to happen slowly until suddenly a flash of gold appears in the pan. And that gold of grace-filled becoming is our deepest pleasure.
In contemplative layman’s terms, shit happens. But if we have the audacity to shovel it into a compost pile, allow the process to take its course, new growth becomes possible. And this is my deepest pleasure, to be in adventurous participation with “the slow work of God...and only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within [me] will be….[and I need to] accept the anxiety of feeling [myself] in suspense and incomplete.” (Teilhard Prayer)
Steady on, just like the Bears of Misfortune, the Mystery never leaves you alone.
* Differing from my religion or schools of philosophy I admire
** My dear friend Cliff has been energizing this term for me in conversation the past few weeks. Deep bow to Cliff for expanding this term for me.
This month’s NonRequired Reading List takes us to the soil, the night, and the river: Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth, and Siddhartha.
March's NonRequired Reading List
Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith by Fred Bahnson (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
Those with a penchant for detail will have already noticed that the work of Fred Bahnson has been peppered in the NonRequired Reading Lists with increasing regularity. Some of my top recommendations over the past few years come from his pen and perspective (Merton, Barry Lopez, Priest in the Trees). Bahnson is a public contemplative intellectual. I wish I wrote that sentence more often. Public contemplative intellectuals are in short supply these days.
I finally had the opportunity to read his book Soil and Sacrament, the record of a pilgrimage of depth across the topsoil of sundry landscapes. Bahnson travels through community gardens (Christian & Jewish), a Bennedictine monastery, and communal subsistence farming in Mexico. I found two incarnational questions echoing on each page. They are the same two questions that I walk around with in the back pocket of my heart - how then shall I live? How then shall we live?
“The search for an authentic life is an old one. When the early Christians went to the desert, this is what they prayed: ‘We beg you, God, make us truly alive.’” (p.11)
This courageous petition to Mystery enchanted me. In your most vulnerable moments, does this not ring true in your heart? Is this not what we all long for, to be truly alive? Bahnson poetically observes this perennial longing seeded within him. His pilgrimage draws him to farms honoring the sacrality of all relationships; Divine, human, non-human, soil, and seed. In the posture of humble attention, a great allowing occurs. Each of these communities waters a fallow field in Bahnson's interior landscape and suddenly his pilgrimage becomes our own. And this leads him and us beyond the edge of human control.
“Edge is not so much a place as it is a heightened transfer of energy that happens in the meeting of two distinct entities: field and forest, ocean and estuary, scrub and grassland. These interstitial zones between ecosystems are where the greatest exchanges of life take place…’If change is to come, it will come from the margins,’ wrote Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America, ‘It was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets’...In farming, and in life, pay attention to relationships. Stay close to the edges, for that’s where you’ll find the greatest energy.” (p.115-16, 117, 119)
The prayer --‘We beg you, God, make us truly alive’--seems like a necessary first step before a true embodied dialogue of relationality can occur. This exchange is the outflow of courageous prayer. Listen to the Mystery at the depths of your innermost being, dust off the soot from your boots, and walk the edges of the field. At the edge of cultivation you are free enough to experience the wilds of the divinity, of the ‘other’. This, my friend, is the energy that allures you into abundant life.
This rich work could only be touched on. I could fill pages on the beauty of Soil and Sacrament. It is a book for the courageous contemplative in conscious solidarity with the whole of the planet. And it is in the whispers and subtle edges of each page that Soil and Sacrament leaves its mark on your soul. Highly, highly recommended.
The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth by Gerald May (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
In the Christian tradition, the phrase ‘dark night of the soul’ holds a place of exalted lore. It is oft dismissed by the common person, relegating the dark night experience for the holy or nearly sainted person. It is popularly named as a season of absence from the presence of God. Take a breath and let that notion go softly into the night. It is an obscured path, walked in shaky faith, and often experienced without the previously cherished consolations. The Spanish mystic John of the Cross coined the term in a poem and it took him an entire book to unravel its meaning. Gerald May’s book is a wonderful companion to John of Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul. Take up these books and don’t rush, let each page slow you down.
“Teresa [of Avila] and John [of the Cross] both say that we easily become so attached to feelings of and about God that we equate them with God. We forget that these sensations are only speaking to us of the divine One. They are only messengers. Instead, we take them for the whole of God’s self, and thus we wind up worshipping our own feelings. This is perhaps the most common idolatry of the spiritual life.” (p.93)
This longing taps the keg of the dark night of the soul. We are in love with our feelings of and about God. This is a common idol among us contemplatives. In the pursuit of the peace of God, we confuse it with the peace of introversion. The red-faced admission to this folly arrives when the unconsummated longing for the Beloved breaks through. Frayed at the edges, this longing frees us from ourselves.
“The movement of the soul and God is always finding its way toward freedom. In prayer as in the rest of life, it is a movement toward freedom from willfulness, from the compulsion to be in charge and the fear of loss of control….And it is a movement toward freedom for simple loving presence and appreciation, a willingness to respond and participate in the divine Spirit in the world, a trusting confidence that allows radically loving action.” (p 130 -1)
Now that I think about it, this book was radicalized within me by reading it alongside Soil and Sacrament. Soil and Sacrament is an unwavering record of a man moving ‘toward freedom from willfulness’ and “toward freedom for simple loving presence and appreciation’. Can you feel the difference between ‘willfulness’ and ‘willingness’? The obscured path awaits, willingly follow the tattered line of longing in all of the mundane duties of daily life.
“It is the realization of our essential union with God and creation that enables and empowers the practical living of love in the real situations of life...In John’s understanding, they are the result of the intellect’s becoming faith, the memory’s becoming hope, and the will’s becoming love.” (p. 185). Again the obscured path is applicable. We often refuse to follow the path of union because we can’t control, manipulate, or straighten its course. God is a wild lover alluring us to a field of freedom without boundary, protecting us from nothing, but sustaining us in all things (this is a distilled Jim Finleyism). And to our egoic selves, that feels like the bears of misfortune.
The Dark Night of the Soul is for the stuck contemplative. The contemplative who senses that the next jag of the obscured path will present itself as they shed all they think they know about God.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
I first read Siddhartha on my last day of college. In my mind’s eye I can see myself sitting on the floor in my dank empty college apartment, furniture already tossed to the curb, finishing my collegiate career with an invitation to a further journey. Nearly twenty years later, married and with a couple of kids at my heels, I read Siddhartha again. I’ve written a reminder on my invisible calendar to read Siddhartha again in 2030 (I figure the older I get the more often I’ll need Siddhartha as a reminder). As my body moves towards the grave this book offers new wisdom on old pages.
The first moment that stuck out in my rereading was when Siddhartha dialogues with the Buddha. In this passage he is cleverly explaining why he will not join this newly gathered community following the Buddha. The Buddha responds with a wry smile, “You know how to talk wisely, my friend. Be aware of too much wisdom!” The innocent arrogance of a young seeker, unknowingly posturing before the teacher. I know I’ve been there, throwing stones at the tradition or wisdom figures of the past. Or spiritually romanticizing the next book as the missing key to the locked door of enlightenment. Thank God the whims and pitfalls of life opened the aperture of my attention and patient humility was forced into focus.
Siddhartha walks many roads of life; an ascetic, merchant, gambler, epicurean, and ultimately a ferryman on the river. He exhausts each leg of the journey. At each end, a trap door opens and Siddhartha tumbles into the further journey. It is the river that ultimately becomes Siddhartha’s final teacher. Guided by his ferryman mentor Vasudeva, Siddhartha learns to see and hear the voice of the river. The goalless goal finds him.
“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
The paradox of seeking and finding is as serious as life and death. There is that old saying, “You can’t catch the wild ass by chasing it, and you can’t catch the wild ass if you don’t chase it.” What is one to do? I’m not sure that another person can answer this for you or me. Rightly or wrongly, my tact is to drink deeply from the river of life, pay attention, judge not (easier said, then done) and welcome the weird. I’ve never been able to construct a threshold to liminal space, the river only appears on my path when my attention and Reality collide in the grandeur of everyday life.
The river flows through all of our lives, can you hear it? Do you pause to listen deeply? This river is the soundtrack of your life.
Siddhartha is a book for the seeker (or is it the finder?) of God in drag. Or as the Jesuits say, God in all things. Pay attention to where this book speaks to you at this point in your life, and revisit it again down river, and you’ll hear the river’s song anew.
Arts, Articles & Practice
‘the return of the pleasure activist’ by adrienne maree brown (blog): An older post, and Brown has written a book that relays her pleasure principles. A worthwhile read for any contemplative in the world seeking to make change from a sustainable and embodied stance.
‘Towards an Infrastructure of Sacred Hospitality’ by Adam Horowitz (Medium): A snippet to whet your appetite, “By choosing to put our faith in life rather than our faith in power, orienting to love rather than fear, we become heretics in a dominant society built on greed, growth, and separation.” (Hat tip to Poff)
‘No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi, No Problem. Growing Up Inside America’s ‘Quiet Zone’’ by Dan Levin (NYT): There is a small percentage of young folks growing up without cell or wi-fi access and its impact is building deep relational ties without screens and with the natural world. A reminder of what is lost when we embrace ‘connectivity’ without asking what we may lose in the process.
"Heartfelt Meditation" by Adam Bucko, Katrina Tovington and Larry Tremsky: If you are feeling nervous, anxious, or afraid about the pandemic…this meditation is for you. It is a stirring practice for opening your heart to the pleasant presence of the present tense abiding in God in times such as these. This meditation is lead by Fr. Adam Bucko and featuring music from Katrina Tovington and Larry Tremsky
Contemplify Update
The (same) 3 most recent episodes...
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May you beg God to make you fully alive. May you live in the now as if Mystery has already filled your dance card.
May the river call you into its current, revealing the many faces of God. The path may be obscured but the river is near and thinks skinny dipping is in order.
In Commitment & Detachment,
Paul
P.S. I seem to be confusing some folks by my inarticulate emails. My intent is not bombard your inbox beyond what the FDA recommends for daily email consumption, so if you want to read the daily Quarantined Qontemplative posts go here. If you were forwarded this NonRequired Read List and want to sign up to receive the next one, sign up below.