February NonRequired Reading List
Contemplify / NRR #99
“Find your contemplative teaching and follow it.”
— James Finley
“Most of what Christianity ought to be is a poetic religion that teaches a way, that gives us models of experiencing the world, and not directions for how to be in the world.”
— Christian Wiman
(In the November 2024 NonRequired Reading I named the intent to take a look at each of these contemplative directives from James Finley—“Find your contemplative practice and practice it. Find your contemplative community and enter it. Find your contemplative teaching and follow it.”— as an instigator for the next few Contemplify missives. In December 2024 I released my musing on practice, January 2025 brought us community, and today, teaching is up. )
Contemplative teachers exude a sweet and salty fragrance that sets them apart from other spiritual teachers, leaders, and guides. A specific aroma shrugs off their shoulders and ambles after them throughout the trials of the everyday. It is true, a contemplative teacher can be difficult to locate by nose alone, so one telltale sign is they always point beyond themselves with their teaching.1 Contemplative teachers are not more special than gym teachers or Sunday School teachers,2 but their racket is more radical and their notable identifiers fewer. They model a sandwiched way (sacred and secret, a holy hiddenness in plain sight you might say) for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear—and a nose to sniff it out.
These contemplative teachers walk shorelines to empty their pockets and consent to the wind that blows where it will. Trimming their personal sails, they harness the wild breath of God. This is not a disappearing act, it is a voyage of ordinariness into fathomless waters. These windblown escapades bequeth a musky smell on their person. Under bright cloudless skies or in nervous thunderstorms, contemplative teachers become vessels, cracked and cranked, open to the elements. Returning to land they pick up their beached keys and sandblasted wallets. Fluttering their wild eyes they reacclimate to small talk between big silences. This path does no favors to their pocketbooks, but an unchallengeable aliveness passes through them. Some call it prayer, others goofball eccentricity. When they open their mouths to teach, a seabreeze bouquet reaches out to disarm the olfactory receptors of their students. This fragrance calls to them. Goads them out beyond the breakers, towards their own adventure into a mysterious and communal unshored place of being.
Once your nose finds its teaching, following it is up to you.
No pressure.
So where does one look for contemplative teachings to follow? Teachers are around, but short in localized supply. Books are an old standby. Podcasts are readily available but disembodied voices. Monasteries are slipping away. Communities of practice are helpful, but sparse in number. Contemplative events are sometimes useful, sometimes performative gas. My first recommendation is the dead. I know. I know I mentioned this large lot last month, but these three directives (practice, community, teaching) are more of a three-legged race than a stationary stool. These directives move wildly and trip over each other. So I want to double down on the dead. We do not get the benefit of receiving all contemplative teachings from those living in our fleshy midst. Many of the contemplative traditions best teachers have passed over, returned to God, or in Contemplify theological terms—pulled their last pint. But their deathless presence carries on. And death is no barrier for living teachings. Dead teachers are simply those we feel a kinship with that we just missed on this earthly plane. That is nobody’s fault and not necessarily a closed door to becoming a student of the dead.
I want to be in conversation with my dead teachers who have walked the path well and dropped a few cairns for me to follow - John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, Meister Eckhart, and Hadejwich of Antwerp to name a few. I don’t want Hadewijch's death nearly 800 years ago to keep us apart. Her poetry makes me swoon and she has a great notes on the spiritual life. Check out this letter she wrote to a fellow Beguine in the 13th Century, does it not have a word for us today?
“Nowadays most people go astray, deceiving themselves that sanctity is what they long for, when in reality they are taking their ease in second-rate consolations, more is the pity. That is why you must choose and love God’s will alone in all things…But today, instead of loving God’s will, everyone loves themself: it is everyone’s will to have peace and rest, to live with God in riches and might, and to be one with Christ in joy and glory. We all want to be God along with God; but God knows that that there are few of us who want to be human with God in Christ’s humanity, to carry His Cross with Him, to hang upon it with Him…If we look at ourselves we can see that this is true: we will not suffer anything, we will not endure. Just let our hearts be stabbed by the slightest grief, just let someone say a scornful or slanderous word about us, let anyone act against our reputation or our peace or our will, and at once we are mortally injured: we know exactly what we want and what we do not want, there so many different things which gives us pleasure or pain, now we want this and now we want that, our joy today is our sorrow tomorrow, we would like to be here, we would like to be there, we do not want something and then we want it, and in everything all we are thinking of is our own satisfaction and how we can best seek it.”3
Hadewijch informs us that people of her day were just as fickle about their commitment to find their teachings and follow them, and just as likely to appeal for a more pleasing and comfortable path as we are. With an ear to dead friends, the narrowness of the narrow way gets confirmed across contexts and times. But when you carry their teachings within, you might find it easier to squeeze through the narrow gates of today.
It is worth repeating. We are a part of a lineage of contemplative seekers, some of our predecessors are so kind as to leave behind their ways, writings, and methods for us to try on. But let’s slow dance with the why for a song. Why follow a teaching?
To apprentice ourselves to wisdom that has lasted. We seek teachings so we don’t center our own experience as the primary reference point of our spiritual understanding. Best not to begin our path by assuming we know more than the masters of yesteryears. Or more than the collective (& very human) living movement that adopts the new ways alongside the old.4
To glean from the teachings of living teachers who can assist in the camp of relevancy to our times, seasons of life, and cultural context. Teachers are human and no golden pedestal should ever be built for them. At best, teachers can model, inspire, and instruct. They cannot do the work of following the teaching for you. Always remember Dylan, “Don’t follow leaders and watch your parking meters.”
To unhinge a self-interested sense of direction in spiritual growth that can lead one to the lonesome corner of narcissism. Only burnt effigies survive there.
To be humble and disciplined. Because trial and error on the spiritual path is inevitable, so being humble enough to learn the disciplines from those rare and brave souls (or community of souls) who had the audacity to test and teach their methods of practice, spiritual experiences, and growth frameworks that the tradition has upheld goes a long way.5
To find a community that holds a meaningful center that provides examples of 1-4. A community worth its salted nut roll is willing to give and receive critiques. Not on a five-star yelp system of critique, but as an honest to goodness application of the teachings that a) the imperfect community espouses and b) as a mirrored critique in loving, committed relationship. Without that, sever that shit and head for the hills! I exaggerate, but not too much, be careful out there.
To find a practice that supports you in creating conditions for the graced potential of transformation. Found in community, exercised together and alone.
To learn how to better love and serve this world6 in word and deed.
To make lists that help you internally order your own strolling sense of following a path to share online.7
To live and stretch within the time-tested and trusted patterns of spiritual maturity is to graft oneself to the teachings that call to your bones. Let us look at this in two examples. First, Francis of Assisi. This is popularly exemplified in Francis’s narrative arc that shifts from a restless young merchant to a humble man who sheds their status and identity to live in radical poverty8 under a rule of life composed of Jesus-breathed gospel snippets. Francis is a rarified example of a person so emblazoned by the teachings of the gospel that a comprehensive overhaul takes place. The boldness of his path is one most folks will admire, but not undertake themselves. Despite the evidence of the fibery abundance of what my tradition calls the fruits of the spirit9, it is not easily imitable. And the life and movement of Francis is undeniably bursting with this fruit.
Finding your teaching and following it is not all exhilarating work at the extremes like in the life of Francis. The second example we will tip our cap to is the Franciscan savant Bonaventure. Bonaventure followed in the footsteps of Francis, and tempered a Franciscan way through his leadership that sought to bridge a faithfulness to the way of Francis while organizing the nascent movement. Bonaventure provides an example of the delicate and layered work of following a teaching, uniquely embodying it, encouraging others to do the same through philosophical articulation, spotlighting theological necessities, and creating modalities for eager beginners to be formed as robed and knotted Franciscans.
Bonaventure was no dummy. He was a strategist and teacher himself, and yet had the humility to raise his visionary finger to feel the wind afresh and cherish the multiple currents available for apprenticing oneself to the Beloved. Bonaventure says:
“Seek grace not instruction, desire not understanding,
Seek the groaning of prayer over diligent reading,
Seek the Spouse more than the teacher,
Seek God not man, darkness not clarity,
Not light but the fire itself.”10
Following a teaching is not all at the extremes or all nerd work either. There is a middle way. It is primarily in the daily happenings and orientation to a life in God in practice and community. The spirit in which that work is applied retains and expands the center as—our brainy pal and happy dishwasher11—Bonaventure notes in the quote above. There is a temptation to elevate one example or aspect of following a teaching above others. This is paltry by comparison to living within the totality of a way yourself. Francis did not jump start the only way of following Jesus and Bonaventure did not follow it up with perfect configurations. There is humility in understanding this. Do what is yours to do and trust that the living tradition will correct your handiwork. Lest we forget, the Spirit blows where it will.
Francis is a first round hall of famer. Bonaventure is a touch more obscure, but certainly a contender. But what they primarily offer is examples of following a teaching and furthering it in their own lived incarnational way.
Contemplative teachings worth following are exercised in ineffable experiences, contemplative practices, transformative stories, and frames for growth in prose, letters, poetry, and song—not just specialized theological systems. Spiritual growth blossoms from both hemispheres of the brain.12
This is a way to check and charge your batteries. This brings me to you. A few questions to consider.
How is this all landing with you? How do you approach finding and following a teaching?
Is there a teaching that has repotted your perspective and rerooted your way of being?
Look at the lives of your heroes (alive, dead, famous, obscure). What are the rhythms, disciplines, and details that formed them?
This is how I chew on the lives of the saints. And I don’t mean officially haloed ones either. The poet Jim Harrison walked for miles each day for health, stump sitting, meal prepping, and ruminating beauty. Mary Oliver visited the local dump, probably with a smoke hanging from her lip, to look for discarded goods she could make good reuse of. My wife does not own a smartphone. She sidesteps all of the distractions it offers by non-participation. In learning these patterns you can recognize the signposts, sneezeguards, and encouragements on the ways of transformation under the teaching that calls to you. With those in hand, you might connect some dots in the lives and teachings of those you already know, how the cultivated conditions of their lives create the potential for what my people call the fruits of the spirit.
If you are still sitting on your sled at the top of the hill having a painful time giving yourself the push you need to follow your nose and plunge down after a teaching, here are a couple options. No pressure, these are just gentle nudges to fling yourself into [potentially] finding your teaching:
SAINTLY AND SUBVERSIVE WOMEN (Monasteries of the Heart): Brigid of Kildare (Ireland, 6th c.), Hildegard of Bingen (Germany, 12th c.) and Teresa of Avila, (Spain, 16th c.) are three women who represent a profound lineage in our spiritual tradition.
BLACK LIVES AND CONTEMPLATION (spiritualimagination.org): Black Lives & Contemplation cultivates a vibrant community where individuals explore the depths of their being through the lens of Black experiences
TURNING TO THE MYSTICS (Apple Podcasts): Turning to the Mystics is a podcast for people searching for something more meaningful, intimate and richly present in the divine gift of their lives through the lives of mystics. Teachings by contemplative teacher James Finley who words started this recent parade of musings.
BUILDING A RULE OF LIFE (practicingtheway.org): Of the four, this is the option I know the least about, but the book related to this website, Practicing the Way, I found to be a beautiful introduction to building a rhythm to follow the teachings of Jesus.
Teachings are tested in community and practice. There is a natural interdependence of practice, community, and teaching. When we incarnate the teachings that undo us, we necessitate a community that binds us. We need one another. When we sit receptively beneath our teaching tree, we tilt our heads back and catch its offerings like snowflakes on the tongue. We begin to see all of life as practice.
When we live out the contemplative teachings that call to us in our own context, bodies, and style, we start to exude a resonant aroma. We start to find our way towards lapping shores. Standing at the water’s edge, we cast glances at far horizons that tug at the blue ocean blanket nearly touching our toes. We chuckle to realize our feet and the horizon are both beyond reach of the ocean, but are comforted to be held by this intimate distance. The intimate distance we feel is the longing to fully consent to the teaching we claim to follow. Dare to follow.
Contemplify seeks to kindle the examined life. The whole intent of Contemplify is to clear a way for discovery to a path that calls to you (with a slapdash style to throw off curmudgeons.) No stick in the mud contemplatives, please. If Contemplify shovels a path of depth and transformation for you and you never return to Contemplify, well, that sounds like a win. For all those touched by the offerings of Contemplify (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices) into your life, I say thanks for your presence. For those who wish to support Contemplify through monetary means, normally you can do so by pressing the button below. Becoming a paid subscriber is a sweet kindness that keeps Contemplify a free resource for contemplatives in the world. Some folks want to support with a few bucks simply for the sake of supporting Contemplify (Hidden ones, I tip my hat towards you). To join their ranks visit contemplify.com tomorrow, but not today, for today, February 28, is the Economic Blackout.
Those who become paid subscribers (tomorrow) are automatically invited to join the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. A regular communal contemplative practice that supports the rhythms of your one wild and precious life. You can practice live with me and a community of practitioners or with the recording. Good contemplative fun. Hope to see you there.
(Also…because I am trying to make explicit what was 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 or contemplative community. Practice makes practice. Always delighted to add more practitioners to the circle).13
February NonRequired Reading List
(all purchase links are off today in support of the Economic Blackout on Feb 28th)
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
I am a hoops fan. The NBA basketball of the 1980s and 1990s was my bread and jam. I studied the development of college players and programs (The Fab Five were my favorite despite being rivals of my Minnesota Gophers). For a short spell we had season tickets to the men’s Gophers basketball team way up, up in the back bleachers of the stadium dubbed ‘the barn’ with its dangerous elevated floor. In high school, I cheered on friends and classmates. We won the state tournament. Fascinated by the prospects of where some of these peers might end up. Now in my forties, I am teaching my youngest about the fundamentals of the game. And I am being refreshed by the lore and storytelling vehicle that is the game of basketball. This is a long set up to say Hanif Abdurraqib may have written the perfect book about basketball, using the court as the stage for the theater of humanity. Casting LeBron James and Cleveland basketball (local and national heroes) as the centerpiece, Abdurraqib ushers readers into lyrical exploration on belonging, place, hope, and Black American life.
The basketball court is a proving ground, a stage, and a cathedral. Abdurraqib holds the sacredness of this sport as a place of communion. An altar for family, neighbors, and strangers to rally around in connection. A liturgy which demands a sense of devotion, justice, and loyalty from those that lace up and from those who cheer on. What does it mean to Ohio when LeBron James emerges in high school as the next big thing? What about he gets drafted to play in Cleveland? And how about when he departs for Miami? These questions arc as narrative structure for deeper reflection, not celebrity fascination.
Hanif Abdurraqib understands that basketball is an art form of a sport and is great theater. Impassioned by the myths released in basketball around home, commitment, and race, Abdurraqib shows you the truth of his life through the lens of sport. The seasons of heartbreak. The seasons of rebuilding. The relentless hope that staggers on when all commenters say give up.
There's Always This Year is for hoopers who see the ballet in a fast break. For those who cling to sports as a vehicle for stories that express their longings and build community—come what may.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show by Neil Postman (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
When I picked up Neil Postman’s 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death I was not expecting such a fresh read. This book tackles a question that I cannot escape, when all public discourse becomes entertainment, what becomes of that society? We are that living experiment. Sure some of the examples are dated, but a reader can easily supplant those with relevant substitutes of our times.
In this way Neil Postman builds off Aldous Huxley more than George Orwell, our destructive patterns will be licensed and paid for by distraction. A society that Netflix binges like soma and prefers politicians who snark in tidbits and quips rather than considered eloquence.14 The chapter on how televangelists embraced television as a medium for religious education was particularly damning in propensity for shallowing the soul.
My big takeaway was that mediums are not neutral, they have a philosophical bent by their possibilities and limitations. Does your smartphone encourage sustained attention? Or does it dazzle in fragments? Postman calls this mind that needs constant (and increasingly more) of the ‘entertainment mind’. As contemplative folks, we should be first in line to examine how these tools and mediums affecting us and how this culture of entertainment is holding us in its grip.
This book is for contemplatives who can engage in cultural critique, self-examination, and the splinters of attention.
The Invention of the Darling: Poems by Li-Young Lee (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)
I read and reread Li-Young Lee’s opening poem ‘Love’s Unswerving Gaze’ daily for weeks. I could not get past it without going. It was like a candy store next to an elementary school. I would read it, sit with it, read it again, and go about my day. It was like hearing ‘I Shall Be Released’ for the first time. Repetition deepens the experience.
Li-Young Lee has given the world a book that laces desire and devotion into a knot of eros that rolls towards spiritual vastness. How does he do it? There is a visceral and carnal knowledge in the physicality of desire being named as a ‘darling’. When this is created, we yearn for it, and real or imagined it becomes a paradigm of longing, of worship. Next thing we know we are laying on the floor of cathedral, reading the sacred text of the beloved’s body or barely holding onto our longing for home (Lee is masterful in connecting his immigrant experience into a universal language on belonging without losing its particularity).
Poetry is meant to be read after recommendations. This is poetry that seduces the soul. Seductions hold our attention, our gaze, as the imagination expands towards realizing the possibility. Li-Young Lee does that in poems that sing on sacred knowledge. These poems will reshape your identities of ‘darling’ and relationships that porously hold the mysterious bounties of love.
The Invention of the Darling is for poetry readers who welcome the eros into their contemplative presence. And might even howl at the moon after reading a few of these.
Contemplify Update
Season Five is still sound asleep under the covers. 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 - Season Finale)
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
KENDRICK WINS THE SUPER BOWL THREE TIMES : HALFTIME ANALYSIS by Skye Paine (Professor Skye's Record Review): If you did not understand why this year’s halftime show is being hailed as one of the best. Watch this. Kendrick Lamar is the artist America needs right now. (h/t to Josue)
DON’T BELIEVE HIM by Ezra Klein (NYT): Ezra Klein offering some needed perspective in times such as this. (h/t Dawson)
DEFYING DECLINE by Anne Snyder (Comment): Comment magazine has entered the boxing ring to plant a garden. Here are the questions Comment is raising and volunteering its services to: “Who is in touch with the shifting landscape of our place and time and coming up with creative ways to seed new forms of communion that will flourish in the ground of today, not yesteryear? Who is undertaking the slow, intricate work of regrowing roots, not roots that yield a false coherence or blurry tangle, but roots that interact with one another in soil capable of nourishing something beautiful, ordered, yet free?” Read the whole piece and their manifesto. I love a good manifesto. (h/t to Matt)
chuckle,
realize
your feet
and the horizon
are both
beyond reach
of the ocean.
We are held
in this intimate
distance.
Unshored,
Paul
All Bookshop purchase links (normally) give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and Contemplify. Big thanks to all who typically go that route. And since today is an Economic Blackout, treasure your local public library as a bastion of free education, support your local libraries and librarians as often as you can.
(which they do not claim to own anyhow)
In fact gym teachers and Sunday School teachers might be contemplative teachers too.
Quote from Hadewijch’s sixth letter to a young beguine (Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, p. 192)
This can be done at a nauseatingly slow pace. All I am saying is be aware of its reasons, gifts, and limitations before you outright reject it.
Contemplative traditions are not above reproach or error, so bringing a playful critical lens to what is supposedly classic is a good thing while also reading contemporary works that sinks in previously overlooked or previously ignored or unwanted spiritual experiences or perspectives or undiscovered fields of psychology…I am sure I am miss other caveats
‘This world’ includes you too
This is a joke, of course.
Always remember, there is a huge difference between voluntary poverty and systemic poverty.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control
Rohr, Richard. Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2014), 162.
It may not be true, but there is a story that when Bonaventure’s bishop hat was delivered to him he was washing dishes. He told them to hang the hat on a tree branch while he finished up.
In following a teaching, it can be a temptation to deify the written word (at least I can). Remember the only record we have of Jesus writing anything was with his finger in the dirt (John 8:6). And maybe this John Prine song.
Contemplify never wants money to be a filthy barrier to practice. So if you want to practice weekly with this contemplative basecamp at Lo-Fi & Hushed but aren’t able to offer support (no sweat!), drop your name and email here, I will add you to the next practice. We would be thrilled to have you practicing with us.