Contemplify NonRequired Reading List for October 30, 2021
October NonRequired Reading List
Contemplative,
God has big nostrils. Massive air ducts to the divine olfactory senses. This is true. It is also true that humans have a tendency to dress God up like a human to our own detriment. For God, the artist behind the cosmos, is a recluse yet imminently present, eternal, and Her attributes are breathtaking to behold. Endlessly praiseworthy and forever unsayable. In my attempts to describe God, I blow it.
Still I contend that God has big nostrils.
The anthropomorphizing of God (fancy lingo for putting God in drag) has symbolic and poetic benefits. Look at the Bible. One can find God whistling (Is 7:8), shutting boat doors (Gn 7:16), laughing (Ps 2:4), and of course getting jealous (Ex 20:5). Do you ever imagine the sound of God’s squealing laughter? Or wonder what tune God whistles? Does God’s face get beet red when jealous? And I have no further wonderings about God shutting a boat door...that makes sense. God is a boatsman. A holy hoveller. A salty sea God.
This banter on what God is like is dangerous. Language like this punches god into a small corner. And God does not do corners. One should be light on their feet when grappling with Divine Mystery. All descriptions of God are not scientific, but gestures towards ineffability*. They are sublime gestures that dissipate as they are expressed. Articulate in the transient now and retracted just as quickly.
I have learned a great deal from God’s big nostrils. As a person with physically big nostrils, I am smitten by this idiom. The "big nostrils of God" is a gift from the Jewish tradition. God's big nostrils is a metaphorical speakeasy on God’s slowness to anger, long-suffering, patience, and gentleness. I have embraced it as a physical practice. When I flare my nostrils for a deep infill (or exhale with measured gusto), it calms my nerves, slows impulsive anger, and regulates breathing. Even amidst everyday conversation it produces a generous space for absorption and exchange^.
Try on the big nostrils of God. Become conscious of your God-given rhythmic breathing. Rest in the tides of your breath. Harness the force of love that finds you. Expand in inhalation, release in exhalation, and find a stillness born in empty reception. This practice of big nostrils leads to an outflow of gentleness in you. A gentleness that is a perfume wafting off you, a person ripening in the union of spirit and body`. When you breathe with big nostrils, you breathe in the Spirit of God to harmonize the mystery of your being….and breathe out all that steps in the way of that harmony.
*p. 56 Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition by Jean-Yves Leloup
^I do not have to tell you, but we live in a culture of small nostrils; impatience, rushed anger, and sharp edged commentary.
`Evagrius, the influential 4th century Christian monk, thought gentleness was the great quality of the monk since it is the lived expression of a person’s divinity and humanity.
October NonRequired Reading List
Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation by Josef Pieper (Get it the Public Library or Bookshop)
There is a malnourishment in art. A culture that hyperdrives brands as identity and busyness as accomplishment loses the life-giving intensity of the type of art that draws a slow drag from the inside out. Hyperdrive culture makes art for pleasure, popularity, and purchasing power of the marketplace. It is the champion of today’s art. But I am not here to throw stones at market art, I stopping by to say that this type of art does not move me. Art that moves me to awe and wonder begins in contemplation. Only the Lover Sings gives me the philosophical groundwork for why art that bursts from contemplation makes me quake in my boots.
In Only the Lover Sings the philosopher Josef Pieper unties the knot of pseudo-artistic endeavors in his musings on leisure, festivity, silence, and originality. Across this field of reflections, Pieper bemoans that the “average person of our time loses his ability to see because there is too much to see!” (p.33). This was written decades before our current flood of content that overfills our eyes across mediums both new and old. Pieper warns that ‘too much to see’ stokes passivity in the viewer. The remedy? Turn the viewer into a participant. Create from the depths of your own seeing.
Pieper's final string of essays preached to my unpainted soul. Pieper writes, “Art flowing from contemplation does not so much attempt to copy reality as rather to capture the archetypes of all that is. Such art does not want to depict what everybody already sees but to make visible what not everybody sees….(And then he kicks it into high gear, so forgive this lengthy quote, I’ll make it up to you down the line)...For even the most intensive seeing and beholding may not yet be true contemplation. Rather, the ancient expression of the mystics applies here: ubi amor, ibi oculus -- the eyes see better when guided by love; a new dimension of “seeing’ is opened up by love alone! And this means contemplation is visual perception prompted by loving acceptance!” (p. 74-75).
Only the Lover Sings is for artists seeking to be guided by love rooted in contemplation. Not just for artists in the traditional sense, Only the Lover Sings is also for those who see a well-lived life as the truest artistic expression.
The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds by Pete Fromm (Get it the Public Library or Bookshop)
Stories about being alone in the wilderness find their way onto my bookshelf. I blame Gary Paulsen (rest in peace, good man) who whittled my imagination through multiple readings of Hatchet. It didn’t help that I was smitten by Jesus who was led to the wilderness for 40 days. Then there is my fascination with Desert Fathers and Mothers, wilderness lookouts, and long thru-hikes. Just thinking about solitude in the wild makes me stretch my legs. Then I look towards my beloved and our kids. They love the wilds too, we explore it together often, but my opportunity for solo traversing has slowed significantly this past decade. Not a bad thing, a shift of responsibility calls for a different orientation to all passions.
Pete Fromm knows this story in greater detail than me. Fromm charts his life in the wilds in The Name of the Stars; from his unhitched twenty-something days to his family focused forties. In The Name of the Stars he takes on the task of attending to fish eggs deep in the grizzly laden and isolated Bob Marshall Wilderness for an extended period of time. Fromm hopes to bring his two sons with him into the wilds to share this experience together. Due to the real dangers, Fromm ends up going solo and the adventure turns internal as much as external. As a husband and father, Fromm looks back over his life and work that led him to this place of seclusion and grandeur. A gifted writer of the interior landscape, he tackles the big questions from a slant and allows the stories to speak for the answers he is living into.
I recommend The Names of the Stars to all my fellow fathers in the midlife dance of meaning making.
Contemplify Update
The four most recent episodes on Contemplify…
Season 2 Trailer! (new episodes starting next week!)
Your Work Should Be the Praise of What You Love (September Musing)
These episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: iTunes, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
Arts & Articles
“The Anesthesia of Abstraction” by Teddy Macker (poets.org): Read and reread this poem. The line that tips me over is this,
“For every time someone says systems theory
one must say pines in the darkness;”
You can revisit my conversation with Teddy Macker on Contemplify right here.
“Upward Over the Mountain” by Iron & Wine, featuring Andrew Bird (YouTube): This is one of my favorite tunes in a place that formed my spirit. (It is not lost on me that I am recommending a piece of art that is branded by a jeans company. Discernment never ends.)
“Does Co-Housing Provide a Path to Happiness for Modern Parents?” by Judith Shulevitz (NYT): Alternative communities are something I have tried, enjoyed, resisted, and seek yet. This was good food for thought on how communities might form outside the norm of the privacy of individual family units.
May you breathe
unconditionally
with nostrils big and flaring.
Let gentleness walk
you on the essential
path of creation.
Listen,
Solitude calls! Community calls!
Struggle all your life
being madly in love
with both.
Pines in the darkness,
Paul
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