December NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #73
This Advent has been a flood. Meetings, travel, retreat, and sickness lingering around every Advent candle. Alongside Season of Glad Songs: A Christmas Anthology, I was kept afloat by musing on Hadewijch, 13th Century beguine, musing on Mary, mother of Jesus. And oh did she pull me in close. The breath of her incarnation was hot on my cheek. Hadewijch theo-poetically translates Mary’s bodily experience of pregnancy and childbirth into spiritual terms,1 exemplifying the incarnation and our own holy participation in it. And with such gusto.
Hadewijch was a mystic theologian who employed poetry and letter writing as the primary vehicles for her teaching. The mystic poet holds the symbolic and the actual in artistic tension2 while speaking truth, goodness, and beauty. This is how Mystery winks. Hadewijch embraced this post and detected Mary did too.
Hadewijch leans on Mary’s Magnificat as the exemplary outflow of intuitive and theo-poetic justice that recognizes the call of Love growing within. “Love” was Hadewijch’s favored term for Christ, and thus she called Mary—the Mother of Love. She carries this further. She saw an unsplit intimate and incarnational reality between Mary and Christ. Hadewijch saw mystical becoming available for all in Mary’s bearing and birthing of Christ. To say it another way, in the theo-poetic eyes of Hadewijch, Mary both symbolically and in actuality bears Christ’s Divinity in her body and imitates Christ’s humanity in the suffering and delighting of his birth. The incarnation of Christ is the divinization of Mary, and if you trust Hadewijch’s theological bender, for us too.
Scholar Emily A. Holmes inspired this Advent reflection and sums it up in her theo-poetical power this way, “Mystical union with God takes place on the model of the incarnation: enjoying God’s divinity by imitating the Humanity of Christ. In Hadewijch’s view, divinization is the effect of, and a way of, participating in the incarnation. It takes place as the soul becomes the mother of Love and as the poet sings Love’s true melody, both of which incarnate Love. Works of justice and the poet’s songs are ways of practicing the incarnation and extending it in the world through other bodies, such as the sister beguines to whom Hadewijch wrote.”3 May it be so.
In the embodied Divine flow of this gritty human life we can all become the Mother of Love. One who follows the path of mysterious incarnate Love birthing a union already started, and ripened everyday by suffering and delighting in service of Love.
In this final day of Advent I echo Hadewijch inviting us to approach Christmas as Mothers of Love, by the faith that we are all bearing and birthing Love. And I wonder what this might look like for you this season. How might you already be preparing, bearing, and birthing love?
December NonRequired Reading List
Here is the annual list of Contemplify books that stirred me most in 2022. They are in order by which they first appeared in the monthly Contemplify NonRequired Reading Lists this year. (See past lists here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016)
Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy with translations and commentary by Reiner Schürmann / February NRR / (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Wandering Joy is the book I am immersing myself in right now. Slow, meditative reading. For me it is like sitting by a stream, watching light dance and refract upon it. Then in the water I see a trout. The trout holds their position in stillness just beneath the surface facing upstream, releasing its movements, in union with flow. Inspired by the trout, I lunge to grasp it. Soaking wet and empty-handed, I get out and begin again.
This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley (July NRR / Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
This book is perfectly written. Cole Arthur Riley is a poet of contemplative verse. The beautiful pen she wields is a tool for storytelling that guts and stitches, but always for the sake of healing. The words radiate out what has and is forming Riley. This Here Flesh is for contemplatives who love poetry that faces reality, affirms dignity, and pursues liberation. Cole Arthur Riley has written a book to be savored on the tongue and spirit.
A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland (August NRR / Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Let us honor those in prior days whose lives were enveloped in silence while we also wait with alert eyeballs for the words from those swimming beneath the surface of silence in the cold here and now. Sara Maitland has my attention.
We Walk the Path Together: Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh & Meister Eckhart by Brian J. Pierce, OP. (August NRR / Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
We Walk the Path Together works on the reader like the slow heat of a sauna. Relaxing and purifying in the present moment. A meeting place to enjoy the gifts of friendship across traditions. Sharing practices that can enrich one another. These sauna dialogues can challenge lazy patterns of thought and inspire new arisings. If you are drawn to Zen-Christian dialogues, this book is for you.
The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water by Chris Dombrowski (October NRR / Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
The River You Touch is for any contemplative steeped in the fullness of life’s responsibilities and strives to walk with integrity in their sense of calling in the world. The writing is drop dead gorgeous. You will pause in wonder and appreciation. You can tell I loved it. I’ll stop gushing now.
Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation by Adam Bucko (November NRR / Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide is for contemplatives who seek the grainy fullness of life pouring forth out of a connection with “God who is always accompanying us and guiding us. God who is suffering with us. God who is moving us towards healing and liberation. God whose life giving love and justice will one day be “all in all”.” (p.132)
Contemplify Update
Season Three is all wrapped up. You can find the complete list here, but here are the three most recent episodes.
Engaged Contemplation in a Heartbreaking World with Fr. Adam Bucko (Season 3, Ep 9)
Heathen (Season 3, Ep 8)
Vitality Out of Emptiness with Fr. David Denny (Season 3, Ep 7)
All episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast
Arts & Articles
‘HUNG FIRE’ BY HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER (YouTube): “It’s Christmas baby, thank God we made it.” Listen to the whole album, it’s a new Christmas favorite.
OPENING MINDS, OPENING HEARTS PODCAST (Contemplative Outreach): Good people, there is another contemplative podcast in the world! The fine folks over at Contemplative Outreach have launched a fantastic new podcast. The hosts Colleen Thomas and Mark Dannenfelser are deep practitioners who ask thoughtful and winsome questions.
“I do not complain of suffering for Love,
It becomes we always to submit to her,
Whether she commands in storm or stillness,
One can know her only in herself.
This is an unconceivable wonder.
Which has thus filled my heart
And makes me stray in a wild desert.”
— Hadewijch of Antwerp
Practicing incarnation,
Paul
Without diminishing the embodied experience or putting down others who did not bear children, Hadewijch had no kids herself.
I am riffing on an idea from one of the great poets of our time, Maurice Manning.
Holmes, Emily A. “Hadewijch and the Mother of Love: Writing the Incarnation through Maternality and Mysticism.” Magistra, vol 18, Issue 2. 2012, p. 68.