Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for November 30, 2020
November NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative friend,
Tucked in and beaming innocent expressions, my children bear their nightly benediction, “I love you so much, I am so glad you are here” I say. They receive my words with childlike reception and ambivalence every time I put them to bed. Truth spoken plainly in love needs little commentary, I tell myself. In the mornings I place a rotation of love, ribald, and foolish notes on my wife’s coffee. The sacred and the profane have never felt as cozy as they do in those notes. I say this benediction and write these spark notes for my beloveds. I say this benediction and write these spark notes for me.
These ritualized practices serve as trail markers to guide me on the path of love. I get lost so often. Rituals retrieve me from outer space and toss me back to the heart patch behind my rib cage where my soul plays backgammon. These markings and cairns lead me to the one necessary thing, love. I regularly lose my way in roustabout self-evaluation, cursing my faults, or blaming those nearest to me for my own lack of attention. I am quick to tie my gaze to my navel and miss the tides of love. The spoken blessings and chicken scratched notes help me keep my head up.
Only recently did it dawn on me that my nightly benediction to my plucky children is an echo of God’s whispers in me. When I sit in prayer, and drop my monkey mind off at my contemplative heart, I hear the Beloved say - “I love you so much, I am so glad you are here.” She is lavish in Her praise and of my presence. In turn, I can’t get over the fact that the Beloved has noticed me sitting here. She is tickled that I brought all of my picadillo worries to our little get together. My Beloved receives them as an offering. Our prayer is silent and heavy with longing and belonging. Some days* I spring off the meditation cushion and forget to pick up my monkey mind. The gaze of the Beloved has put me in a fog of self-forgetfulness. My monkey mind will eventually notice, catch up, and unleash on me a tongue lashing blue enough to make a sailor soil himself. I’ll smile and say in return, “I love you so much, I am so glad you are here, you teach me how much I need my Beloved.”
And that is when I notice the Beloved has left a ribald note on my coffee.
*I say "some days", because "some other days" the monkey mind won’t stop flinging feces or writing to-do lists while I am in prayer.
November NonRequired Reading List
Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology by Douglas E. Christie (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
It took me months to read Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology by Douglas E. Christie. I found it a joy to read slowly, like a lectio divina practice, soaking in the poetics married with scholarship on the Christian contemplative tradition which I so dearly love. It reads like a love letter, albeit in academic one. Or a feast honoring a contemplative tradition that is bursting with so much fruit and waiting to be tasted by the many. Here is a rich dollop on disciplined practice gleaned from the desert monks,
"Disciplined practice of presence reveals much about what the early monks valued most: a freedom from care that manifested itself in simple, loving attention to the life of another. Anxiety about food, possessions, and money was harmful not because of anything inherently problematic in the the things themselves but because of how the anxiety that arose in response to them undermined one's capacity for living in joyful freedom." (p.333)
Blue Sapphire of the Mind is for any seeker willing to further wet their contemplative whistle, disarm their judgements, and join the great contemplative conversation. Listen to my recent episode with Douglas here!
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
I have a fervor for Thoureauvian thought. Not because I can replicate the conscious of Concord, but like a ritual, he channels me in the right direction. Susan Cheever in her creative style of patchwork storytelling offers a glimpse of the genius cluster that lived in the same neighborhood. Cheever lays out how Ralph Waldo Emerson built the foundation (by funding it all) to attract the brightest thinkers of his age to Concord, Massachusetts to live in a community of illumination. Let the shenanigans begin. Incredible literature, essays, poetry, and speeches were born in this community as were squabbles, shunnings, backstabbings, and love triangles. Perhaps the most inspiring storyline is of Louisa May Alcott who bore the weight of her kooky family and became an author who changed American literature forever with Little Women.
American Bloomsbury is for any lover of community learning. You will bear witness to a genius cluster and the tensions that put minds on fire when differing ideals, ideas, and human relationships collide within one square mile.
Marriage and Other Acts of Charity by Kate Braestrup (Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
I would like to have Kate Braestrup over for dinner. Kate Braestrup is a chaplain for the Maine Game Warden Service and ordained Unitarian minister. In Marriage and Other Acts of Charity Braestrup writes about taking the plunge into marriage, losing her first husband in a car accident, and marrying again. This may sound like heart wrenching reading (it is at times), but the thread of exuberance is disarming. In stories of Braestrup's own heartache and loss she finds flecks of gold to steady her feet and faith. Loss and renewal are so enmeshed into one another throughout her story that any reader with a reflective instinct realizes the illusionary of arrival and departure. The gifts of our relationships are all transitory. Our fleshy gifts of wife, husband, partner, children, whoever, must be met with unclenched hands and courageous gratitude.
Marriage and Other Acts of Charity is for those in committed relationships or have experienced that awful loss of a beloved. You will carry the grit and grace of Braestrup's writing with you for a long, long time.
Arts & Articles
Well Sister: This bonafide beauty of a project highlights the healing and connective power of vulnerability, music, and accompaniment. Visit the website here. The song 'Sacred Sites' is a knockout.
How Gillian Welch and David Rawlings Held Onto Optimism (NYT): If I were to title this article I would do so as 'The Joy of the Lord is Gillian Welch Singing and David Rawlings Playing Guitar'. But nobody asked me, read the whole piece here.
Three Seconds (YouTube): The complex problem of climate change unpacked in a simple metaphor. Watch it here.
Contemplify Update
The three most recent episodes on Contemplify…
These episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
May the gaze of the Beloved entice.
May the monkey mind be humorously endured.
May sleepy benedictions open up spaces of belonging
and may your love notes be profanely sacred.
Beaming an Innocent Expression,
Paul
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P.P.S. The postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still being knitted together dailyish under Quarantined Qontemplative at the Contemplify basecamp.