Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for January 31, 2021
January NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative friend,
I detonated our Zen garden. In the future it would be prudent for a Christic beast like myself to be chaperoned while strolling through a Zen landscape. Likely you have seen one of these miniature Zen gardens; a regal looking school lunch tray containing a handful of sand in one compartment (often outfitted with a lego-sized rake) and polished rocks in the other. A contemplative accoutrement indeed. My wife had acquired it for free and I knocked it over at great cost. As it began its descent I cursed my blundering actions. The fine-grain sand funneled in slow motion into our printer's gaping mouth. And rocks--once mindfully constructed into cairns--pelted dust bunnies before dispersing into the four corners of the room. The tiny rockslide delivered an oversized annoyance. Again curses rained down from my flaming lips. It was as if a thumb was jammed into my third eye and monkeys tugged on the hairs under my armpits. A moment of pause ensued. The irony was realized immediately; what was intended to bring calm and mindfulness had brought racket and filthy words. My overreaction was soon eclipsed by my heart's laughter licking my beginner’s mind awake. The trouble with contemplative practice is that it reveals the current state of your soul as it cultivates it.
I have come to discover that my practice in contemplation gives me pause. Quite literally. The pause is a reverberating prayer sent directly from my heart. The heart is sweetened by my daily prayer practice and offers her own prayers back in the guise of pauses to entice my return to this presence. This pause slows the speeding pedals of my judgmental mind. When given the opportunity, the pause jiggles a door of perception ajar and fills the whole room with laughter of the heart. A glad heart reveals that the dramas concocted by the mind are mostly, well, mind games. Do not mistake the heart and mind as counterparts. They are beloved companions. The pause is what flings open the skylight of the heart so the mind can freely drop in. When the heart and mind embrace, the laughter of the heart quickens the beginner’s mind. From this heart centered posture, one can feel the subtle movements of the Beloved within.
You have probably noticed this embrace of the mind in heart in you. It happens when you start to note that prayers taste like avocados. Or when your body weeps in loud unspoken prayers. Or when the lunges of violence are met with a fierce uprising of compassionate power. When your longing for home and longing for God become indistinguishable. The soul craves movements from this posture of the mind in heart. Much more than the safekeeping of accoutrements for contemplative signaling.
This month’s NonRequired Reading List runs a route of depth, punch, and frequency.
January NonRequired Reading List
"The Lost Dimension in Religion" by Paul Tillich in Adventures of the Mind. Editor, Mark Van Doren
(Get it at the Public Library)
Theologian Paul Tillich bearhugs the shivering questions of culture, the broken containers of religious institutions, and the application of religious symbolism to reclaim the lost depth dimension. “If the idea of God (and the symbols applied to Him) which expresses man's ultimate concern is transferred to the horizontal plane, God becomes a being among others whose existence or nonexistence is a matter of inquiry. Nothing, perhaps, is more symptomatic of the loss of the dimension of depth than the permanent discussion about the existence or nonexistence of God--a discussion in which both sides are equally wrong, because the discussion itself is wrong and possible only after the loss of the dimension of depth.”
This essay is for any reader willing to step into the bog and sink in above their eyeballs. It will take some work to get out, but it will be worth the sweat.
It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful by Lia Purpura
(Get it at the Public Library or IndieBound)
Lia Purpura writes garlicky poetry. Enhancement of the day's flavor comes in small shavings. Purpura offers poems that tap you on the shoulder to make you look, offer directions, corrections, and praise what you had missed.
Take the poem titled “Light”,
In watching
it pass
you can’t see it
passing,
slipped into
day, or
absorbed into
night,
it’s both
slow
and over with
at the same time.
This book of poetry is for attentive ruminators. Those who appreciate a poem that reads easy and then burns like hot iron.
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
(Get it the Public Library or IndieBound)
Hold the phone, a celebrity autobiography? Yeah, this one snuck up on me. The last celebrity autobiography I read was by George Burns and I was in the 5th grade. When Greenlights hit my awareness, I remembered a story McConaughey told Jon Stewart years ago on The Daily Show. He told a yarn about traveling to float down the Amazon after having a dream of the people he would meet there. Well, my curiosity ran high with the recalling of that story and I had to find out what makes this man. Greenlights does not disappoint. McConaughey is a splendid storyteller (and self-described bullshitter) who regales readers with stories of trips to the Christ in the Desert Monastery, self-discovery as a lonely high schooler in Australia, parents who loved fiercely (I’d say too fiercely), and finding his frequency as an artist, husband, and father. This book is entertaining from the get, all the way to the final period.
Greenlights is for anyone wild about the lessons found on the trails of life’s fortunes and foibles, locating your north star, and following the prompts that a dream demands.
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May the chaos of 2021 champion the pause
as you moonwalk to the depth dimension.
May the smell of garlic waft your breakfast table
as you recall the night’s dreams that unsettle your bones.
Pausing for laughter,
Paul
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P.P.S. The postings to kindle the examined life in a quarantined world are still being gathered and posted dailyish under Quarantined Qontemplative at the Contemplify basecamp.