December NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #97
“Find your contemplative practice and practice it.”
— James Finley
“The family is the Practice Hall.”
— Gary Snyder
(In the November 2024 NonRequired Reading I named the intent is to take a look at the aforementioned contemplative directives—practice, learning, and community—individually as the instigator for the new few opening musings. Today, I lean into practice.)
As a kid in Minnesota I had a five gallon white plastic bucket that I hid in the woods behind my house. On summer mornings before the humidity moved in I would sit on the bucket on a wooded hill overlooking Lotus Lake. Gazing through the clearing, green leaves moved gracefully like fingers across harp strings towards the waving light clustering off the blue, blue water. Bluejays, robins, and sparrows flitted overhead. The nosiest neighbors—squirrels and chipmunks—puttered around like middle aged men looking for their keys. The days that revealed rabbits crouching, darting, crouching again were special. There I would sit on my bucket with a lake before me and underneath the summer sun. I sat on my hard plastic with a sensation edging out from inside that I was hidden from the world, yet connected by my immersion in it. And I felt free. No words clung to my mind or hung on the edge of my lips. I was simply sitting on my bucket in a place I loved. There was always a book in the bucket that I never read. Sometimes books are just an excuse to go sit on a bucket in the woods. And when the bucket sitting was complete (or the mosquitoes became unbearable), I would stand up and flip the bucket over, plop the book in, and flip it back over for next time. This was the first intuitive practice of presence that I can recall.
What about you? If you stretch into the recesses, what seemingly strange practices do you remember from childhood that brought you to your own proverbial plastic bucket? Some of us begin with intuitive practices that get habituated over time. Others of us observe a tingling gap like a tongue on an empty tooth socket or feel a pull to put their shoulder to the wheel to explore unmet horizons. All are different pulses of presence.1
Make a List, Check it Twice
Practice makes practice. Paying attention to which practices are making us is a big deal. So when contemplative teacher James Finley writes, “Find your practice and practice it,” I think there is an unspoken a priori that you first take an inventory of what practices (contemplative or otherwise) are dogeared in the pages of your life. So my small word of guidance is to review this past year before seeking out any new practices. Make a list. Lay it all out there, the good, the bad, and the unmentionable. Reflect on what deliberate practices (meditation, PTA meetings, running, Eucharist, sex, gardening, etc) you engage in a day, week, month, season, and year. Make those the five columns you parcel out your deliberate practices into. Write them all down. Then reflect on what reflexive patterns (Netflix binges, church services, scrolling, journalling, work emergencies, etc) you unthinkingly participate in a day, week, month, season, and year. Another list with the same five columns. Your lists will be unique to you. Let them sit for twenty four hours, return to the lists, and jot down any additional practices and patterns that come to mind. Look over the lists with a soft gaze and a wry sense of humor. Neither is inherently right or wrong, both lists are capable of carrying enough water to quench you or drown you. Ask yourself, what practices and patterns do you notice bringing you life? Stealing the zest of life? Which one of these paints a big smile on your face? And which causes you cringe and look over your shoulder to make sure nobody is catching a glimpse?
This is not willfully listing your way onto a path of perceived spiritual perfection. It is a notice of how you are living. A temperature check of which practices and patterns are making your life. A pat on the back and slap upside the head. You might discern that you need to start pointing your feet in different directions. One of my teachers, Chuck Hosking, talks about making 1% changes to alter the direction of your life. This could be meditating for five minutes a day or not buying anything new for a month. One percent changes orientate and encourage radical blossoming. When you amend your course by one degree, you find yourself in unchartered transformation you could never predict. So if you want to make a big change in your practiced way of being, try making a 1% change.2 Don’t swing for the fences, practice bunting first. Trim one thing off one of the lists. Add one practice to your day. Once the trim has become standardized or your new practice is folded into the day, then consider another. There is no finish line in practicing your practice.
Why Practice a Contemplative Practice?
A response to this question could be a book. My quick and dirty response is this; to engage in contemplative practice is to consent to create the conscious conditions to connect with God. And what does that even mean to connect with God? I think it means to realize, awaken, abide, and act in and with God. Contemplative practice is a catalyst to realize that you are a part of the Mystical Body of Christ. This is a vivifying container to stir your awakening participation, to stand on the bottomless grounds of abiding, and to act in grace. As the sacred words of old say, “for in [God] we live and move and have our being.”3 Practicing freely refines our participation and perspective of God’s ineffable yet poetic presence. It is accepting and exercising a gift. Practice relaxes the body’s innate incarnational wisdom of being. Practice inflames the devotional lamp of the heart, enlightening a hidden hallway for the mind to drop into the heart anytime it wishes. Practice makes practice.
Find Your Practice and Practice It
Experimentation with a sense of self is useful. When I look at my wandering way into a committed community of practice, I can see the breadcrumbs that brought me to this day. To name but a few, it was with youthful fervor I sought out practices that would “bring me closer to God”. As a teenager, Brother Lawrence taught me the Practice of the Presence and Jack Kerouac had me curious about zazen in Dharma Bums. Lectio Divina and the Jesus Prayer became mysterious friends in college. While studying abroad I picked up a book with the audacious title, Christian Zen. I began, candle lit and nerves aflame, to flirt with a disciplined daily sit. Was this ok for a curious Evangelical to do? It would be years before I would practice a “contemplative sit” within a community of practice. Once I became an intern at the Center for Action and Contemplation I was introduced to the popular practices of Centering Prayer and Christian Meditation as methods in the Christian contemplative world. My practice deepened and continued.4 I bet your story has its own trail of breadcrumbs, different varieties (maybe gluten-free or with nuts), but equally nourishing that brought you to this very moment.
Finding your practice deepens what is possible. Days of practice is what becomes a life of practice. Poet and essayist Gary Snyder has this to say on practice, which heartens me in this exploration on finding your practice, “Practice simply is one intensification of what is natural and around us all the time. Practice is to life as poetry is to spoken language. So as poetry is the practice of language, “practice” is the practice of life.”5 Meditate on that for a bit.
Practice is simply the intensification of life. A nutritiously packed dose of life. You might find it on a plastic bucket, a buckwheat zafu, or a woven prayer mat. But don’t just look to those sacred vessels. You will also find it in a poem, an omelette, a helping hand, or a crisis. Your life is the grounds of your practice. Examine the grounds. Encourage the good and trim the unhelpful edges as you are able. Find your practice and practice it.
Contemplify is a verb and a practice. I have been seeking to kindle the examined life for contemplatives in the world in this practice since 2016. Thank you for welcoming the offerings of Contemplify (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices) into your life. Becoming a paid subscriber is a kindness that keeps Contemplify a free resource for contemplatives in the world. Paid subscribers are also automatically invited to join the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. A regular contemplative practice that supports the rhythms of your ineffable yet noetic life. Join live with fellow practitioners in a practice led by me or practice with the recording. Either way, good contemplative fun. Hope to see you there.6
Some folks want to support Contemplify simply for the sake of supporting Contemplify. I toast you, unseen dear ones. And for those of you who wish to join their ranks and directly support Contemplify through monetary means without becoming a paid subscriber, go here.
December NonRequired Reading List
Here is the annual list of Contemplify books that stirred me most in 2024. They are in order by which they first appeared in the monthly Contemplify NonRequired Reading Lists this year. (See past lists here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016)
Practice of the Presence: A Revolutionary Translation by Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / January 2024
In the 17th century, Carmelite Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection was a man of little means, living with a disability, and without formal education. There was an irresistible glow about him that drew others to seek his presence and counsel. It is easy to see why. He offered a simple of way of turning one’s attention to God in all things (“I flip my little omelet in the frying pan for the love of God.”). In his letters, Brother Lawrence’s plain speech and engaging relational metaphors for the Beloved (such as the intimacy found between a wet-nurse and baby) charms readers into direct contact with Mystery. Carmen Acevedo Butcher gracefully delivers Brother Lawrence’s mystic heart to the page with skillful interpretation in inclusive and boundaryless language for God, that never trips, but always smiles as it rolls off the tongue.
Practice of the Presence is a wonderful book for beginners and proficients on the contemplative path, always more gold in this stream. You can listen to my conversations with Carmen here and here too.
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988 - 2000 by Lucille Clifton (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / February 2024
Lucille Clifton peels her poems down. The layers, edges, trimmings give way to the elegant core. Once the center is reached you recite the sweetest of fruits. This core is centered. There is no waste. The integrity of the poetry is held in what survives.
Lucille Clifton is a master craftswoman. In a Lo-Fi & Hushed practice session last month we worked with “blessing the boats”, allowing the rich imagery to roll over us. Meditating on this poem, this question met me, can I meet unwieldy situations with toothy grace and love? Others poems like “the photograph: a lynching” moved me to a prolonged, stark, bare reflection. Clifton does this over and over, the personal regales the collective and the universal plucks a single hair. The interconnectedness of story and lyric never breaks, but sapiently bends in expression. Pointing and saying, do you see, can you see what I see?
Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988 - 2000 is for contemplative readers who know you only need a little to go a long way.
God Laughs & Plays; Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right by David James Duncan (Get it at the Public Library or Bookworks) / February 2024
This book slipped in just in time. Hell, I was way behind on this. Didn’t know it existed, would have been really helpful to read about 15 years ago. Still useful today. Sometimes you have to wait for the book to bite you in the ass. God Laughs & Plays is an unshaven set of sermons. Sometimes it effectively reads like a circus barker outside the doors of the war machine, and other times, as spirited as a child running through a lawn sprinkler. Always with wonder at the center.
In the foreword, Laurie Lane-Zucker nails the importance of God Laughs & Plays “because we, the peoples of Earth, need a new cosmology that can effectively embrace both our innate thirst for deeper, often obscured and intuited meanings as well as the necessary rigors of our intellectual life.”(p. xi) David James Duncan brandishes his wit, study of the mystics, and incarnational observational truths to the writing table. You can see the seeds sprouting of his magnum opus, and this shoveler’s favorite novel, Sun House in it too.
My temptation to rally around each essay is waylaid by my commitment to simply recommend books, not give book reports4. It is worthy to note that Duncan’s praise of Meister Eckhart throughout transported me back into the nowhere of mystical play. It is a call to find the teachers that slack your jaw and flex your muscles, for there is “too much dead text and too little living intuition in American spirituality these days!” (p.181) Read the lively, leave the dead to bury their own.
God Laughs & Plays is for those who take the call to become childlike seriously. It is the entrance gate to the kin’dom in the here and now. Listen to my conversation with David James Duncan here.
Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders (Watch wherever you can / trailer) / March 2024
The last two movies I saw on the big screen were directed by Wim Wenders. I saw the documentary Anselm and now the feature Perfect Days. Both were charming enough (without being saccharine) to pull off a pace slow enough that makes drying paint shudder. They are contemplative invitations to forget the zip and zeal of storyless movies made on green screens. Watching Perfect Days felt human, like holding a child’s plump hand or your immediate reaction when a drop of rain hits the nape of your neck.
Perfect Days follows the central character Hirayama over the course of a few weeks as he cleans toilets in Tokyo. The rhythm of his day profits from attention to detail, shadows and light, consistency, the support of trees, and the presence of those overlooked. The thickening of the story that disrupts his routines and rituals reveals the subtleties of a universal love rooted beneath the surface. Hirayama shares it freely, without pious romanticism, in the dancing shadows and flickering lights.
Perfect Days is a quiet film that shows you how to look and see, how to really look and see what and who is present in you life.
Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / March 2024
Everything about Zero at the Bone grabs me by the collar, twists, and brings me close to the hot breath of life. The poet, essayist, and professor Christian Wiman came into my orbit with his meditative memoir My Bright Abyss. Ten years after that publication he turns up the heat against despair. Zero at the Bone is a combination of poems, quotes, musing, essays, and at least one ripping sermon.
The thing about Wiman is that he writes naked sentences; stripped down to the bare essentials and stands before them glorifying their collective bodies. Whether relishing in the genius of Lucille Clifton or the poetics of Job’s rancor, Wiman dazzles. His penchant for theological paradox—a la “Jesus promises both the fullness and annihilation of identity”—sit like stones on the tongue, watering the mouth with a serious heaviness. Half of my book is underlined, annotated, or marked with exclamation points…all pages I will return to with contemplative consideration.
Zero at the Bone is for readers who pick the despair out of their teeth with the bones of poetry.
The Salt of the Universe: Praise, Songs, and Improvisation by Amy Leach (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / July 2024
There is a fine line between playfulness and self-serving sass. Amy Leach kicks rocks at that line in The Salt of the Universe. Leach was born and raised in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and ultimately rejects this controlling path for the wild-haired poets.
The Salt of the Universe is not about leaving, but a book about delighting in becoming. Leach pokes fun at the laundry list of rules that drove her batty for their inaneness (not eating pickles) and astute in the ways groupthink can detonate your internal organs, “You might occasionally find yourself in environments where you fit in but where the fitting in is so vigorous that you would be scared to be somebody who did not fit in, so even though you do fit in, it creeps you out.”3
Leach takes the zingers of Jesus and holds them up against the practices and teachings in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and allows the tension between the two to create opportunities for absurdity to bubble up into hilarity. Promoting a rule heavy way when Jesus would rather eat, drink, and celebrate children is obscene. For certainly, “while he was here Jesus wanted to hang out with people with oomph.”4
Amy Leach is a dazzling poetic writer, sharp in critiques and wide in wonder. The Salt of the Universe is for anyone who has left a community or tradition to delve into the great wide open. Listen to my conversation with Amy here.
A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis by Susan Murphy. (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop) / September 2024
You have likely come across Buddhist koans in your reading, like, show me your original face before your mother and father were born? Or what is the sound of one hand clapping? (that was my first introduction via a Simpsons episode). Koans offers stories of encounter or paradoxical inquiry that pierce beyond the rational thinking mind. Susan Murphy Roshi has written a marvelously poetic, intimate, and wise book on climate crisis delivered by koans. I ran out of ink in my pen taking notes.
Our planet is ailing, much harm has been done thanks to underthought and overconsumption of western humanity since the industrial revolution. A Fire Runs Through All Things focuses its energies on the ways we can engage in clear acknowledgement, safeguarding, and healing of our shared planet. This begins with the ‘self’ through a grounding principle from Dōgen Zenji, “When you know the place where you are, practice begins.”3 Knowing the ‘self’ as a koan discovered in a place, the book expands to introduce climate crisis as a koan itself. Murphy deftly encourages readers to not get stuck in the mud of certainty, but walk the wayward way of not-knowing with Zen koans as guideposts of engagement.
In A Fire Runs Through All Things the Zen tradition partners with the legacy and teachings of Australian Aboriginal wisdom, specifically from Uncle Max (Dulumunmun) Harrison, a Yuin Elder, who taught from the unbroken and distinct Country (a magnanimous word that is difficult to define fully, but you can hear Susan communicate its depth in our conversation here.)
A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis is for contemplatives who seek a perspective on climate crisis that honors the complexity, necessity, and possibility of being a part of the healing of our ailing planet.
Contemplify Update
Season Five has landed. Perhaps a few bonus episodes will trickle in until Season Six gets off the ground. As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are the four most recent episodes of this season.
Peter Traben Haas on Prayer as a Practice of Centering, Abiding, & Radiating (Season 5, Ep 15)
Backporch Advent Outpost with Hadewijch and the Mother of Love (Season 5, Ep 14, bonus)
Katherine May on Enchantment, Building Community, Tasting Words, and a Drink of Lake Water (Season 5, Ep 13)
Andrew Krivak on the Inheritance of Loss, Death as a Character, and Like the Appearance of Horses (Season 5, Ep 12)
All episodes are available from Contemplify through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts worth their salt.
Arts & Articles
WHEN NIKKI GIOVANNI WAS YOUNG, BRILLIANT AND UNAFRAID (NYT): Some poets look longer down the road from their present moment. If that isn’t true, it appears that way. Nikki Giovanni had a vision, her passing this month was the loss of another giant with a wake of poetry that reads like “she really never stopped working, there was a sense of urgency, that the wordplay, the history lessons, the dreaming of the future, the prose tartlets of optimism, inspiration, curiosity, compassion, really mattered.”
RIDING THE LINE: COMPASSION AND BIKES AT THE AMERICAN BORDER (FILM) (Bikepacking): “Riding The Line” is a new film documenting my pal Dawson Allen’s bike ride from Tucson down to the U.S./Mexico border and back north to Patagonia, Arizona, where Voices from the Border, an organization that supports migrants near the border, is based. Watch the film and you can donate directly to Voices from the Boarder here.
WALK ON AIR AGAINST YOUR BETTER JUDGMENT by Caitlan Flanagan (The Atlantic): This article on Seamus Heaney is lovely. It is behind a paywall at The Atlantic, but do I what I did and pick up a hard copy at whatever family or friend might be a subscriber. Written by Caitlin Flanagan, whose father, Tom Flanagan, was a pal of Heaney. She reports stories of mischief, kindness, and direction from the fabled poet. If you have a subscription or a free trial to burn, head over.
Finding
your practice
deepens
what is possible,
days
of practice
becomes a life
of practice.
In the poetic and ineffable,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. Big thanks.
Then in midlife (and earlier if we can stomach it) we have practices to unlearn and toss out. We also discern which ones to relocate as if handling a black widow spider about to give birth.
Look, if you are converted to a radical way of life that causes you to do a 180 degree turn, God bless ya, I am rooting for you but be careful of such turnabouts. Best done in support of a community. Unless your life is on the line or you under the guidance of a teacher, a half turn swing is tough to sustain.
And on and on it went until I began to follow a rule of life within the Community of the Incarnation to which I belong. But there was a time before when my efforts for drafting a rule of life were solo. All part of the unfolding path.
Synder, Gary, The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 134.
Because it is worth making explicit what was originally implicit. If the Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Sessions call to you but you don’t want to (or cannot) become a paid subscriber—no sweat—just add your name and email to this form and you will be included in the practice for free. Money should never be a barrier to contemplative practice. Practice makes practice. Always delighted to add more practitioners to the circle.