January NonRequired Reading List

Contemplify / NRR #74

“Keep me close to the edge, where everything wild begins.”
- Tom Hennen

There is a crescent pocket. A snugness in the right spread of the legs, clutch of the pillow, and wrapping of a bulky comforter. The preference of angles goes to each bed sleeper. When one awakes in their sweetest of spots you hear angels humming Van Morrison. We are always resting in the bosom of God, but in this moment we believe it. When morning breaks like this for me it is difficult to roll out of bed. My will is called upon to gather itself and go against all my creatureliness and shed the hug of a heavy blanket and the bed I share with the woman I love. It's gotta be done. You know this feeling as much as I do. There is a short window each morning when the silence of the house is the heavy sigh of peacefulness. I sneak out of bed. Praying I am quiet enough not to disturb the slumbering family, I close the bedroom door. Small houses with creaky floors and cranky doors can’t be trusted, but neither can the snapping joints and tendons of middle age. If I make it to the couch without waking my creatures, I grab my stack of my morning books. I welcome the sun’s rising with morning prayer, a few poems, and lectio divina. The living room becomes a desert with silence and the soft rays of sunrise shrouding me. An interior fire is stoked to warm the soul for the joys and challenges waiting in the day ahead.

This is true and this is lovely. And there is an equal and exhausting truth. 

Perhaps one of my kids shrieks from a nightmare or maybe they just got cold because their blankets fell off their restless bodies, either way, I am awake to tend to them. They fall back asleep quickly, but the startle can be enough to turn on the ignition of my mind to drive restlessly off-road and tangle with brutish thoughts and distractions. When work stress rides shotgun and offers navigation, I am in for an unfair fight. Revisiting the barbs and concerns of the previous day, they scrape and cut me until I cry out in prayer. I cling to the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me.” Attempting to surrender my worries and illusions, I recite it like my life depends on it. The worries of the night are much smaller during day’s light, but the rational mind is drowsy and the frenetic ego kicks up so much dust it is hard to see. After an hour or two (please don’t say more) I fall back asleep. I awake to a child’s murmur about breakfast, or worse, the clang of my alarm. Mornings like this feel like reentry into the atmosphere. The graceful, practice filled morning has been sublimated by the hour of the wolf howling desperate prayers. A grainy stretch of sleeplessness alters the morning rhythm and prods a rush to make coffee.

What does it gain me if I cling to the perceived results of a rhythm well executed, un-executed, or just plain executed? Headaches. How fragile is this rhythm if one bristly work email recalled in the night can throw the whole prescription of practices off for an entire day? Frail as a paper tiger.

A Rule of Life

¹

is intended to brine one’s rhythm of life with salt. I have a life that humors my rhythm. It reminds me of a kindergarten art project. I recall making diligent designs by dripping white glue over a blank page with the intent of sprinkling glitter to color my gluey design. With pinches of glitter falling gracefully from my fingers I was focused on the task at hand. Then tragedy occurs, lost to the world in my art, a bump of the table sends glitter flying to the floor. Some glitter sticks to the glue but most of it spills everywhere else. The carpet, my shoes, and even some down my shorts. Glitter lost to void is impossible to regain. This happened again and again. Sometimes it was my doing, sometimes a friend, and sometimes it was the pudgy fingers of reality. These infractions were not gross misdemeanors or a reason to raise a war cry, they are the constant grounds for holy art. Forever and always these are chances to begin again, just as it should be. That is the primary rule of a Rule of Life being lived out by a contemplative in the world. 

My rhythm of life has been nuanced and tweaked over the years to guide me in ancient (and some less ancient) contemplative practices. It is an exercise of community commitments, what gives me life, and whatever most creates the conditions of least resistance for divine union.

²

I am contemplative in the world with loads of external responsibilities that don’t carve their day around my practices. The Beloved is not stuck in my rhythm (even as beautiful as it is). If I miss a meditation, God does not tap his watch wondering where the hell I am. Nor does she punish me for it. God is not with me in my practices. God is in me and I am in God. But I do think God gets a big kick out of me seeking to live a committed Rule. Like a hot tub on a chilly night, I sidle into my rhythm of life to be immersed in the Passionate Presence. God smiles and is already relaxing into my curated Rule of Life, cries in the night, or the crescent pocket of sleepiness. God is present and hidden, absent and revealed. The conditions of my life are redolent with God’s yearning for me.

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January NonRequired Reading List

The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life by Douglas E. Christie (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

There are few living authors like Douglas Christie. Christie is one of those leading the charge of what it means to be a mystical scholar. Christie and the like drop their big, fat academic brains into their mystical hearts, responding with eyes of their hearts to the glares of injustice. They write from an embodied  flow to reach an audience of readers seeking the same. I savored The Insurmountable Darkness of Love for months. One page was enough to open the past, present, and future of engaged mystical writing. It would become the point vierge, or access point of divine infusion into raggedy daily life.

The Insurmountable Darkness of Love explores the cavernous thought and practice of “darkness” in the Christian mystical and contemplative traditions. Illuminating the textures of this term, in ancient and current times, for the purpose of resounding how one can approach silence, stillness, suffering, and the “common life”. The examples are profound and visceral; the breaths of unknowing in accompanying a friend on journeying their ancestral path back to a death camp. Poetry that shatters preconceptions of love for the cloud of enveloping Love. The apophatic tradition (via negativia or path of unknowing) has never been so hinted at and rotated in service to both scholarly and common folks understanding. 

Christie writes with daring vulnerability without teetering on self-indulgence. In a passage on the final days and death of his father, Christie poetically reflects on the sensational practice of memento mori (remembering death) as it sheds its skein as a practice and infuses the porous skin of reality in the presence of the present moment. He writes, “The gift of becoming aware of the simple, astonishing beauty of anything, even as we recognize that it, and we along with it, will one day be no more. This moment of awareness holds everything.” (p. 199).

The Insurmountable Darkness of Love is for any reader who demands their scholastic reading be graceful, wise, and poetically sharpen the lessons of the Christian mystical tradition. There is so much I did not touch on in my high regard for this book, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say that Christie was my introduction to the poetry of Hadewijch. And she has stirred the mystical pools of my heart. (And you can find my conversation with Douglas Christie on his previous work here).

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

After I read Rebecca Solnit’s piercing article on climate despair as luxury I lunged for more. Climate doom surrounds us and I am desperate for movement builders. There is no pollyanna in me when it comes to the realities of climate change. The shift that is required by oily industrialized cultures is staggering and appears to demand their self-surrendering at scale. I live in the belly of the most comfortable empire the world has even seen and we are snoozing on this. Change is hard. I mean, it is still January but how many New Year’s resolutions are already in the wind? 

Here is where Solnit goosed me to attention. The scale at which we judge movements and systemic change is too small. In Hope in the Dark Solnit notes (and celebrates!) transformative changes in society. That is the point. We celebrate anniversaries not because a marriage has been completed, but to mark the milestones of the mystery of transformative married love. Solnit exemplifies how an individual person or small group can spark a movement for seismic change, and, that those same igniters may not see the work completed. We underestimate the power of one person to enact change over time and overestimate the swiftness in which bureaucrats will act without the conscience of the people prodding them. The road ahead ain’t easy, but good change never is.

Hope in the Dark is for readers who feel inundated with the darts of tragic news and need a truthful reframe to get their action in gear.

Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems by Tom Hennen (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

My first job after college was filling vending machines in Yosemite National Park. The ambience of that workplace remains unmatched. Though enjoyable, the work became monotonous. I started memorizing poems while I was running my route and filling machines. “The Life of a Day” by Tom Hennen was one poem I committed to memory. Hennen employs language ready to work, values space that hangs on emptiness, and centers on subjects that get stepped over most days. “What the Plants Say” squares up and says plainly what it means. Be ready, it will shadow you the rest of the day.

Darkness Sticks to Everything is for readers who recognize an eye crafted to see the beauty of the plains, plain language, and seasonal plants.

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Contemplify Update

Season Three is all wrapped up. You can find the complete list here, here are the three most recent episodes. Season Four is slowly finding its feet. Look out for some musings in the near future.

• 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 

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Arts & Articles

DESERT SPIRITUALITY AND CONTEMPLATIVE PRACTICE: BUILDING RESILIENCE FOR OUR TIMES. (Contemplify): Gary Nabhan is organizing a series of contemplative retreats in Patagonia, Arizona with a slew of co-conspirators Douglas Christie, Jennifer Abe, Kim Haines-Eitzen, Tessa Bielecki, and David Denny. Read the details here.

WHITE BUFFALO (Harper’s): A piece by Christian Wiman on hope and despair. Best to walk into this one tenderly.

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Silence and shrieks
call you to contemplation.
Life yearns for you
in practices
yet to be named.

Trimming the edge,
Paul

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1. The Rule of Life of my community is the foundation of my rhythm. This is the frame of my day, plus some additional pieces.

2. A bastardization of a  Jim Finley quote I believe.