February NonRequired Reading List

Contemplify / NRR #75

“To be reduced to nothingness in Love / Is the most desirable thing I know.”
— Hadewijch

A sunny desert day betrays itself frosting my breath. Still winter. Billows of cold breath plume out of my mouth as I check the mailbox. Flipping through the mail, I see a letter from the Beloved. Setting the aside rest, I sit at my desk and open it. The Divine’s handwriting is scratchy (too much passion I suppose) and tough to discern. Then it dawns on me…this is a prenup. God has sent me a prenup for our union. About halfway through I put the paper down and take a deep breath. I stare out into the winter light and try to compose myself. Resisting the heavy sighs until I couldn’t. I sob into my hands. In exchange for union the Beloved is asking for everything. My entire being. The gull of the Almighty. Settling for less than all is not how the Divine operates. There were signs that this request was coming but I thought I had more time. To the Cosmos-trotter, time is inconsequential. There is no rush to anything, I suppose, to the One beyond time—so why not ask for it all? Over on my end of things life is a touch different. I hesitate on small decisions. I hem and haw over purchasing a pair of pants. Pants. Will they serve me well over the next few years? I ask myself. Unsure of the high single-digit price, I hang them back on the thrift store rack. I mostly have shallow pockets for commitments unless they are being emptied for family. Commitment is a nonsensical word to me absent from concrete love that handles life’s allurements. So I ask without the fresh thrift store pants, how then does one commit their entire self to an invisible God? What is the line between obsession and commitment anyway? And clearly, the power dynamics are off. And isn’t a prenup inappropriate at this point in our relationship?

The commitments I am bound to rise to mind. shedding a light of guidance before I seek resolution with the Creator of the universe. The commitments that buoy my heart are sweaty; mostly enfleshed beings that unfold the mysterious laundry of love and the worn passages of practice. A spackle of spirit and matter on a dusty way of life. They are interconnected. Wholeheartedly I care for my people, but they are not mine to carry forward. There is a fuzzy third space between self and mutual responsibility where love flourishes. Yet I have failed as many as I have loved.¹ Each commitment that is saturated meets another that is fractured. The grueling path of love. 

This commitment of love calls me to a way of life and practice that has no recognized accreditation or worth in the global market. It is a dreadful realization. Have you had this one? It is when the wrecking ball of commerce slams into the countercultural incarnational life. There is a wispy after-smack feeling that claws up your skin until it reaches the nape of your neck calling your hidden hackles to attention. It just happened to me again. I am reminded that the coarse way we approach one another, the conditioned value we see in ourselves, neighbors, and the world—it can appear mighty, but is all straw. It is so easy to be confused in this culture of survival. We must put our shovel to the earth and move a little dirt while we are here. Make a little scratch, buy some cocoa cocoa puffs, bang our head on the wrong wall. The naughty normal keeps up the appearances while we ponder the prenup from the Beloved in secret. This collision of desires loosens attachments. Not right away, and, definitely not in an orderly fashion. The pondering of the prenup is the natural reverb of what matters most thumping out a backbeat from the chest. This reverb is the subtle soundtrack to the Kin’dom of God².

But the Kin’dom of God is here and not yet here you say, that we live in realities, not a singular reality. I hear you. Do you believe there is a “something” that transcends all of these realities? Is there a really real that that cuts across? I tend to think so. My commitments are rooted in something I perceive as really real and dangerously mysterious. She sometimes calls herself God and then hides amongst the bramble and behind the bends of the inner mountain. 

Under the mountain air, the Beloved and I saunter in a prosperous meadow, encircled by towering ponderosa pines with dashing taproots. I am pretty sure my capacity for loving is limited if cut off from this meadow. Love that sprouts and bends in asymmetrical ways, reaching towards sunlight and hanging shade in the balance. Branches bear and drop seeds for tomorrow.³ The shade beneath this tree is where I ponder the commitments before me. If my commitments are sourced in the soil of a Mystery that provides life, and the richest aspects of it, is it not an act of profound gratitude to commit back to Mystery with the entirety of my life? Isn’t it inevitable anyhow (considering the Beloved’s frustratingly infinite patience)? Is this what dying to myself means?

Returning to the pre-nup, I read on. This is not what I thought it was. This is no contract. There is no place for a signature or a notoriety. Approaching this post from my cultural bent, I mistakenly assumed a litigious tone, when in fact it is an endless love letter. A gushing missive from the Beloved, a heart outpouring an unwavering commitment beyond “death do us part”. She is asking for everything, yes indeed, that is undeniable. She wants all of me. Nothing held back. I hold my breath. Invisible pins prick the back of my hands as I hold the letter. She says she is giving me everything in this moment, even as I read her declaration of unfettered love. She really knows how to make a fella blush. I breathe in deep. I read that this is what commitment looks like, a breath by breath commitment to what is. And what is required is an unclenching of all that bars our union. Even if it takes me forever to let it all go. She will wait. Each breath a decision. A prayer comes to my lips, “Dwell in me, as you have said, so that I too might become worthy of dwelling in you and of entering incessantly in you and taking constant possession of you. Deign, O Hidden One, to take form in me, so that, gazing upon your unfathomable beauty, I might bear your image, you who are beyond the heavens, and forget all things visible.”⁴ 

Breath by breath, I commit myself. That what was invisible might become visible.

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February NonRequired Reading List

Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition by Jean-Yves Leloup (Get it at the Public Library or Better World Books)

If you want a primer on Christian contemplative practice, pick up Being Still. I am tempted to leave my recommendation at that, but it would not cascade the joy of this book. There is a bevy of contemplative practices in the Christian tradition that are worth exploring. And practices, my friend, are what make contemplative. Theology, creeds, belief, dogma are fine and well. No shade intended, I participate in all, but none of them hold a firecracker to the fire (or smoke) of God’s abiding presence.

In  Being Still, Leloup draws from the Desert Tradition and the unbroken tinkering of practices in the Orthodox monastic tradition. Some practices have a twin in other traditions, some seem to have fallen out of the orthodox sky, and of course, others are old standbys. Practices that clean the lens and pump the blood. One passage that wooed me early, “‘Grace,’ said [George] Bernanos, ‘is to forget yourself.’ This self-forgetfulness is not the result of a specific act of the will, but the fruit of an experience of transcendence at the heart of the ordinary. Seeing each thing as it is in itself, not simply as it relates to us, restores our clarity. It does not exile us from the world, it restores it. We return to the Real world, but we remain free with respect to it – ‘in the world but not of the world’.”⁵

Being Still is for any reader who desires more functional language on Christian contemplative practices to wear out about town every damn day.

Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

We are scraping the bottom of the tin. The remnants of human life as we knew it are feeling the fork. Dunderheads ignoring the losses will keep doing so. Realists living within the unfolding reality of the climate crisis are growing. Then there are the true believers, those tilling the soil for tomorrow’s garden in the crumbling alleys of empire. These seers are the focus of the necessary book of wandering and pilgrimage, Believers. 

The folks profiled in Believers do not seem like easy hangs. They are committed to an alternative way of life in the belly of the blind empire of more; off-grid Finisia Medrano planting seeds in the high desert while cursing out her disciples, botanist Joanna Clines and North Fork Mono elder Ron Goode plotting resurrections and exchange of meadows in the Sierra Nevadas, and watershed discipleship co-conspirators—Todd Wynward, Ched Myers, and Elaine Enns—staying put in humility and deferring storytelling to those with older stories. While the entrenched nature of radicalism of some is hard to cotton to, I take solace in the multiplicity of lived responses of these rarified agents of healing to an ailing planet. An alternative medicine to feckless recycling programs.

What makes Believers hum for me is Lisa Wells’ writing. Her winsome perspective and piercing questions, her side-eyed self-disclosement, anxiety at the pace of the planet’s demise, and her ability to hold gaze of the world in its frustrating losses and scrumptious scenes.

Believers is for anyone concerned about our species survival on our home planet. 

Hogs and Personals by Leo Dangel (Get it at the Public Library or good luck, couldn’t find it for sale online)

The prairie poets keep inviting me over for supper and sending me home afterwards with full tupperware. It is a hot dish protest against the blandification of our whole situation.⁶ I love small presses for the community they gather and the scene they create. Though a scene might be the wrong nomenclature when the reading tour consists mostly of nursing homes. My brother lent me this book with a grin. He had the good sense to say little, but told me of his favorite poem, “Farming in a Lilac Shirt”. 

Dangel’s poetry is stained glass on a country church, colors catching distant light to hazily glow over its congregation. Beauty that doesn’t fuss. Language that is simple and evocative. If you can find a copy, pick it up. If you find two, send me one. They are tough to come by and I have to return my brother’s.

Hogs and Personals is for readers who need only the title to know that this book of poems is for them. 

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Contemplify Update

Season Three is complete. Although I have been adding some bonus musings. Though both ‘bonus’ and ‘musing’ are best defined by the ear of the listener. You can find the complete list here, below are the three most recent episodes. Season Four is slowly putting its shoes on its feet. Keep an eye out for another musing in the near future.

• Prairie Eye & Woods Eye (Bonus Musing / Season 3, Ep 11)

• Sitting on the Present Moment (Bonus Musing / Season 3, Ep 10)

• Engaged Contemplation in a Heartbreaking World with Fr. Adam Bucko (Season 3, Ep 9)

All episodes are available from Contemplify through these fine outlets: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, or Overcast 

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Arts & Articles

CAL NEWPORT NAILING TRUTH ON THE DOOR OF DIGITAL WORK (AGAIN). I am a big Cal Newport fan. I interviewed him a few years back. Here he is expounding on creating work of value, “So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace (meaning one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed), but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.” Read the whole interview here.

THAT RIVER by MARGO CILKER (YouTube): A winter song for rivers and much more. (Hat tip to Del)

STILL GOT YOU by DEL BARBER (YouTube): Speaking of Del, he just released this winner. A sure sign of spring and of fine things to come.

GO ON, BROTHER LAWRENCE (The School of Transfer of Energy: Workshop Studio Land): My wife and kids got me this block print of one of my nearest and dearest old pals, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection. My gateway to practice in this tradition I love.

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Breath by breath
I commit myself.
May what was
invisible
become visible.

In a lilac shirt,
Paul

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1. Often at the same time.

2. Gary Nabhan has been peeling off the ‘g’ from Kingdom of God to make it Kin’dom of God. I dig it.

3. Favorite seeds are love, joy, peace, cigarette trees, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

4. Prayer from Symeon the New Theologian from Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition  by Jean-Yves Leloup, p. 128.

5. Ibid, p.42.

6. Pretty sure that is a Greg Brown line, not sure what song.