Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for September 30, 2021
September NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative,
The world is a buffet plate. Warm to the touch, stained, and eventually overwhelming. I grip my plate while I walk the line. Disparate breakfast smells blend into one universal and indistinguishable scent. Spires of crisped bacon, eggs Benedict, frittata, and a syrup soaked waffle teeters on the plate’s edge. In times of unconscious addition, I take all I can while I can. Emptiness is not found in a buffet line.
The world is a growing cucumber. Cool, refreshing, and dressed in a turtle-like skin. Born from soil and greened under the sun, cucumbers are unobtrusive. Slice one. Add it to a glass of water to reveal its subtle flavors or munch it to unmask its reticent quenching nature. The seeds of a cucumber--ah the seeds--slime about my mouth with no useful end that I can decipher.
Why do we see what we see in what we see? How do you see a buffet plate? Or a cucumber? Seeing is the harbinger of contemplation. The filtration process of seeing leads to symbols, thoughts, and concepts. But there is a moment--an incalculable millibreath--where we see reality unblemished. Pure seeing baptizes the seer before it gasps for a preconceived certainty. The seer receives before she perceives.
The apophatic (negation) reception is a precursor to cataphatic (affirmation) experience or expression*. This can lead back into apophatic release. They are not preferences or a binary choice. Apophatic and cataphatic are tides that rise and retreat. Or to pin another image to this musing, the scullery of the mind is empty before it receives the dirty dishes of symbols and images to wash before it is empties out again.
Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras when asked the catechism-like question, “Why are you here on earth?”, replied, “To behold” --eis theorian (a Greek expression, later translated by the Romans as contemplatio!)^. A heater of a response, Anaxagoras.
I write to name beholding as the tide that touches both the seen and the unseen. The Mystery longs to be felt. The marvels of creation call for witnesses. So I praise the ants who build their subway systems and the Pilot G-2 pen that bleeds ink with measured restraint. I praise the Love that binds my relations. And what is beholding without strains of grief? I grieve drone strikes on children. I grieve the extinction of the ivory-billed woodpecker and the speed of my oversight on creatures perceived lesser in the breaking moment. May the tide rise and fall over this grief and praise. Behold, the Mystery. Lord have mercy.
Wading in this praise and grief, I bless it all.
*People wound tighter than a slinky in a garbage disposal overlook the cataphatic in preference for the apophatic. Yes, yes, the unknowing , the negation, the emptiness is of immeasurable value. But the cataphatic is tasty too. Lest we dismiss the wink of an icon, a setting sun’s lazy rays, or that a cucumber sprouts from a gourmand’s useless seed.
^p. 72. Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper. Ignatius Press, 1990.
September NonRequired Reading List
Jesus for Farmers and Fishers: Justice for All Those Marginalized by Our Food System by Gary Paul Nabhan (Get it the Public Library or Bookshop)
Jesus for Farmers and Fishers is for the peach stained cheeks of the foraging gourmands. The untuckable shirt wearers. The inscrutable troublemakers who run their fingers over the Gospels to drum up the rhythms, stories, and spittle of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jesus for Farmers and Fishers Gary Nabhan immerses the readers in the contextual waters of Middle Eastern agrarian workers of the first century and wrings out the direct throughline to today’s agrarian workers, food systems, and climate crisis.
Nabhan reimagines the Gospel scenes in which Jesus tells the stories and parables about farmworkers, fishers, and other “essential workers” that unspools the localized wisdom held in those yarns. The humiliating joy of realizing that those whom the parables and stories were about would in fact be the exact audience who understood them best shivered my whiskers. Reading Jesus for Farmers and Fishers is a physical act, you feel the breeze off the Sea of Galilee and the aching hunger for a fig in the blistering heat I also smacked my forehead in epiphany on multiple occasions).
Jesus for Farmers and Fishers is written by a man I admire for his mind, spirit, and embodied participation in the world we are given. Jesus for Farmers and Fishers is for any seeker longing for stories from a dusty Jesus that speaks to the heart of the climate crisis and the woeful food systems that marginalize people today.
The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life by Joan Chittister (Get it the Public Library or Bookshop)
“We need a way of living life and seeing life that brings more human entirety than it does popular acclaim. We need soul...The key to understanding this life in our time is to realize that what is being asked of us in this ancient Rule of Benedict is simply to begin to live an ordinary life extraordinarily well.” (p. XIV, XVI italics mine). Need I go on with more quotes or praise of The Monastic Heart?
Joan Chittister sees the magnitude of crises in our world. She feels the anguish of the times and will not break her gaze with reality. Behind Chittister's piercing eyes, a living library of Benedictine wisdom can be found. And this is where her latest work shines. The shitstorm hanging out on our global doorstep and the weather tested legacy of Benedictine wisdom meet in The Monastic Heart. There are fifty practices to be found in The Monastic Heart that can be carried out by an ordinary person seeking to live an ordinary life extraordinarily well. In each practice you will find applications to daily life and rhythms without high falutin theological language. The spotlight is on the concrete practicality of everyday life; the purpose and spirituality of work, leisure, hospitality, attention, and leadership to name a handful.
I recommend The Monastic Heart to readers who want to participate in daily practices steeped in Benedictine wisdom for the sake of this beloved and creaky world. If you can muster up a book group to walk this sincere path together, even better.
The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks (Get it the Public Library or Bookshop)
My brother suggested this one to me. I should have him write this recommendation. His enthusiasm for The Shepherd's Life had me racing to reserve a copy at the local library. The story of The Shepherd's Life is not uncommon. It is the story of a boy who takes a shine to the family trade and seeks to follow in his father’s footsteps. This practice of tending sheep through the natural cycles of the year in the Lake District of Northern England has been uninterrupted for centuries. Modern life, and its most bothersome implications, has made the continuation of this way of life and stewardship near impossible to continue.
This way of life is hard. James Rebanks does not wear rose-colored glasses (nor does he slyly slip them on the reader’s nose). He wears layers of sweat and sheep-stanked clothes. Rebanks tells you over and over again in this memoir how this work and way of life is more taxing than he can relay in his gorgeous but guileless prose. Your inner ear hears the steady cadence of love at work. If you love a place, a way of life, and the animals and people who make it possible, you are willing to be married to the struggle for its relevance. Unpretentious perseverance and patience are the heroes of this story. This note is hard to receive if you have not borne witness to noble endeavors unmarred by romantic indigestion. Culture praises pastoral beauty from afar, but scoffs at its “inefficiencies” up close. Read in the right spirit, you will damn the "efficiencies" that require irresponsibility to work that necessitates affection.
The Shepherd's Life is for readers who welcome the reminder that an ordinary life lived extraordinarily well is found through the intertwining of a specific place with all of its inhabitants.
Contemplify Update
The four most recent episodes on Contemplify…
Your Work Should Be the Praise of What You Love (September Musing)
Scott Ballew on Talking to Mountains & the Sublimity of Sad Songs
These episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
Arts & Articles
“Become a Whole World” by Darlene Franz (BandCamp): This chant is a favorite of mine. My daughter first memorized it as a toddler.
“Everyone Must Have Two Pockets” from Martin Buber’s Tales of Hasidism (Contemplify Musings): My pal Lee shared this ruminating nugget. I have enjoyed walking around with it in my noggin.
“A Joint Message for the Protection of Creation” by Vatican (Vatican): Very rarely am I brought to the Vatican’s website, usually when I am looking for the latest trends in Papal threads. I kid. In truth, three head honchos of Christianity walk into a room and draft a joint statement on the impact of climate change–a call for Christians to be stewards of this planet and change directions of community, commerce, and relationship. Pass this joint message around.
May the buffet line be empty
for the farmworkers and fishers
to fill their plates.
May your monastic heart walk the pasture
before the floppy gaze of sheep.
The struggle for what we love
is the mirror of our lives.
Behold and bless it
the best you can.
Crunching a cucumber,
Paul
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