June NonRequired Reading List

Contemplify / NRR #91

“He suffers from the malady of the present, so take him to tomorrow.”

— Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish delivers the above sentiment, defiantly and yet cheekily, in his poetic autobiography In The Presence of Absence¹. It arrives in a troubling scene where Darwish is speaking as a boy in Palestine after being freshly labeled an “internal refugee” in his own hometown in1948. The tragedy he is naming is that when you don’t belong anywhere, the present is is a malady. Suffering the present tugs on tomorrow’s ungiven promise. You feel imprisoned in the jello mold of the inbetween. 

Kobayashi Issa was a 19th century haiku poet. One of the greats. His pen name, Issa, means “cup of tea”. Delighted by this, I pause this writing to sip my ginger tea to honor his glorious nicked name in a tiny way. Then, I read that smallpox took his two year-old daughter, Sato. Shattered, Issa wrote, 

“The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet! And yet.”²

Life fades like parchment. Stasis is an illusion. Such knowledge is unsatisfying in magnitudinal grief, only pain profits. The clean shaven tomorrow we had hoped would show up with daisies, rolls up drunk on jello shots. The promise of tomorrow slides off today’s plate.

You cannot disrobe the truth. It is as naked as this present moment. What I learned from Darwish is that to not belong ices the word home. Issa instructs that cooly saying goodbye to loved ones is an untrod path of enlightenment. Accepting the malady of the present is necessary employment for the soul, a torrential chore really, that grinds hope down into indiscernible scraps. Anguish sweeps up without disposing and chaperones this “world of dew” into tomorrow.

Are we surprised? We are a forgetful lot, so yes, but we carry these lessons in our ancient bones, so no. This is how we manage to both turn away from and listen for the shrieks of broken toothed children whom we will never meet that will die today. This pain of the innocent is not painted over with nondual babble, but evidenced by attendance. Sorrow hangs on the face like heavy makeup. Let this affliction fall and fold over into your very being, collapsing into its deleterious arms. It is too much to bear and there is not enough sand to bury our heads in. Only broken hearts carrying this affliction can stay soft enough to greet the world of dew with an and yet. 

Is there a Presence that is presencing this universe into this tumble dry moment? Is there a safe haven in tomorrow?

I believe in such a Presence, but I do not believe it protects us from the maladies of the present, the unmet tomorrows, or the world of dew. And yet. The movement is held in the heart of the and yet. Love’s great mischief maker, Jesus, sluffed off some clues on this too. He has got this one diatribe on adultery (Mt 5:27 - 32) that fascinates me for its most subtle point. In it, Jesus rails against lust and offers a bevy of solutions that includes severing body parts to avoid future bad behavior. But what compels me about Jesus’ hyperbolic tirade is the way he slyly starts off with how misdeeds begin in the heart. I do not believe (nor recommend) lopping off limbs or gouging out eyes is a healthy corrective to behavior³. The subtle point Jesus makes is sharp enough. Attend to the quality of your heart with the same extreme seriousness as extracting limbs. The heart provides the medicine of the present. Our heart only beats in the present moment. Our heart is only strangely warmed in the present. Our hearts belongs to the present moment. As a spiritual organ, a rhythm is formed out of heartbeats that we collect and ride into this moment.  This heartbeat allows us this next action, a rhythm has been set that marks a trail from our past learnings of how to bask in present reality while our hearts simultaneously breaks before us, and in us, again and again.

Attend to the heart’s backbeat that pulsates and syncopates and yet, and yet, and yet...

Darwish and Issa also remind me of a favored koan-like image of Jesus, the Kingdom of God (or as my pal Gary likes to call it, the Kin’dom of God).⁴ The Kin’dom is here, and not yet (Lk 17:20-21). Can you feel the realizing shape of that phrase? Present, and not yet. When the Kin’dom of God breaks open within my heart, pieces drift further than anticipated, past boundaries that comfort would never yield.

When I look over my shoulder at the history of our species, I see what uncomfortable wretches we can be to the more-than-human world and to our fellow rapabout bipeds. The Kin’dom of God is here? Baloney. And yet. Of course it is. When I am attending to my heart, kindness and sacrificial service are revelations of brotherly love all around. I feel the trees bear witness to this Kin’dom. Bowing with bough and leaf or needle to the wispy here and not yet here nature of our rapscallion human race. This Kin’dom of God is full of breakers meeting the shore and then going beyond it.

The best predictor of the future is the past, they say. But how do you get your own past to predict your future? You suffer the malady of the present and the not yet. The here and the not yet will march with every single one of your hundred thousand heartbeats today. This creates a past carved by an organ consenting to loving Reality today in the tension of the not yet. The heart carves more like a glacier than a sculptor. Speed is inconsequential in this small, unhurried practice. The heart breaks, bends, and mends, slowly rearranging what lies hidden beneath the breastplate. 

David James Duncan says “The heart [is] an organ that I find, if you have faith and know how to surrender to it, unfolds and unfolds in a most wonderful and unscientific manner, till it becomes the vastest and most pristine wilderness in existence.”⁵

Our practiced heart knows this to be true. Our practiced heart expands into a vast wilderness wide enough to bear and cleave together the malady and the medicine of the present. There is no tomorrow to be taken to in the Kin’dom of God. The Kin’dom is now and yet. The Kin’dom of God belongs to the practiced heart beating in the malady and the medicine of the present and the and yet.

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Contemplify teaches me a great deal about what this Kin’dom is all about now, and yet. Imperfect. Rickety. Wonderful. I tumble toward this in the simplest way I can by kindling the examined life for contemplatives in the world. Starting with me, this gangly fella who loves this life through all its mangled ways. Thank you to all who support Contemplify by dropping in on the offerings (podcasts, NonRequired Readings, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices). For those who wish to support Contemplify through monetary means, press the button below. Becoming a paid subscriber is a both show of kindness and a no-look fist bump. Your support humbles me and keeps the jukebox playing. Some folks want to support just for the sake of supporting Contemplify (a tip of the hat to you, folks), but paid subscribers are also automatically invited to the weekly Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session on Wednesday mornings. Good, clean, unglamorous contemplative fun. Hope to see you there (see the footnote if you want to join the weekly practice but do not want to become a paid subscriber).⁶

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June NonRequired Reading List

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

There is a great episode of On Being when Mary Oliver was the guest. My favorite bits are when she talks about her commitment to smoking cigarettes and rummaging for goods at the dump. Mary Oliver never snookered her groundedness or practiced pretense. I hail this unwavering guilelessness. Her inner sheepdog nudging devotion through the gates of form and discipline. This comes through in her essays in Upstream.

Upstream contains five sections, and the first one blazes so brightly I almost returned the book to the library. That was more than enough. Mary Oliver delivers such an abundance of groceries in that first trip out that I feared the rest of the sections would be spoiled by the time I got to them. In the final essay of the first section, “Of Power and Time”, Oliver writes,

“My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all. There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”⁷

It is true that the remaining four sections did not overpower my faculties into a grateful goo like the first one. But I read them with glee and appreciative wonder. That is quintessential Mary Oliver, she holds my face close to the earth to look and see, and the smell of her cigarettes rise like incense to a well-pleased Mystery. I am changed forever.

Upstream has an essay for all types of contemplatives, when you swoon over one, you tip over in many.

One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

There are some writers we are lucky enough to overlap with for a stretch of time on this planet. We take solace in their work when it gets freshly printed in columns and books. It brings a grinning joy. Then there are writers who exit out the back door before we stumble into their work and become a reader. That is my story with Brian Doyle. Man, I would have liked to shake hands with Brian Doyle, buy him a pint as we chat over hoops, writing, and spirituality.

This collection of essays by Brian Doyle was introduced and put together by his friend David James Duncan (friend of Contemplify). Doyle writes essays like Bob Marley writes songs. There is a profound simplicity to reading his writing. It is an outcome of a meticulously honed craft. His style selects the precise word to effortlessly honor the premise and mystery of his subject matter without globbing on extra layers. And a prayerful quality runs through each. His short essay “Dawn & Mary” is one of the best pieces I have ever read hands down or up (the memory is so strong that I cried writing that sentence). Same goes for “Leap”. A reflective essay on the two people who were witnessed holding hands while jumping from the fiery towers on September 11th.

A man of faith, Brian Doyle’s essays are born out of his Catholic imagination while being doused in good humor, institutional pushback, and roaring wonder. His essays run the gamut; playfully railing against the anal retentive punctuation police, an abundance of essays about birds, opening up and apologizing for previously held harmful views, and he writes so gently and vividly about marriage and family life.

One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder is for contemplative readers who meander in the nature of humanity, the beauty of this world, and the mysteries that bind us.

Hammer Is The Prayer : Selected Poems by Christian Wiman (Get it at the Public Library or Bookshop)

Poetry is a necessary ingredient in my morning prayer. Without poetry the air is stale, like the breath of everyone on NPR (or so I imagine it). Christian Wiman is an author I adore, and a poet that gets under my nails.

We are brothers when I read his prose, we are acquaintances staggering towards friendship when I read his poetry. We do not line up naturally, the blame is all on me, because I am an intuitive reader who eventually come around when one of Wiman’s poems whispers its meanings behind my ear and my jaw goes slack. He makes me work for it.

From a Window was one such poem.

Christian Wiman is a poet makes me do the honest work for the pleasure of reading his poetry. That is a kindness, to stay with a piece of art until it meets you. Hammer is The Prayer helped me survey the landscape of Wiman’s poetry and see where I fit within it. There is no coddling in this work. More of a free fall into certain death only to be caught by the worn hands of absence.

Hammer Is The Prayer is for contemplative readers willing to do the work.

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Contemplify Update

Season Five is out! Huzzah! What a joy to share these conversations with you. As always you can find the complete list of Contemplify episodes here and below are the three most recent episodes.

• Dr. Larry Ward on America's Racial Karma, the Fragrance of Wisdom, and Learning How To Suffer Less (Season 5, Ep 2)

• David James Duncan on the Unintentional Menagerie of Sun House, Friendship, and the Beguines (Season 5, Ep 1)

• Harmonizing In The Empty Fullness (Season 5 Trailer)

All episodes are available from Contemplify through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get delicious podcasts.

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Arts & Articles

SPIRITUAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE FUTURE (Harvard Divinity Bulletin): What will the landscape of spiritual infrastructure look like in the decades ahead? No one knows, but not a bad guess is that “New technological infrastructure is agnostic about identity, time, and physical location. People of course still look for, practice, and develop all possible particularities in their seeking lives, but tech infrastructure doesn’t require people to forgo particularity to access the grid. Unlike religious infrastructure of old, tech platforms like Pinterest are trans-religious, trans-local, and trans-synchronous. They platform content from distributed networks of networks. And they are agnostic about the content being distributed. The religious infrastructure of the future will be too.” Interesting to ponder. (h/t to Dawson).

THE LACK IS SACRED by Christian Wiman (Commonweal): The poet Christian Wiman loosens rusted shackles from pious wrists. “Faith comes first from hearing, “literally, from the air, from sound,” which is the way that poetry works upon the hearer, and why, Wiman rightly says, poetry must be read aloud. Treat it like prose and you are searching for the meaning. But its meaning can only enter you through the sounds, just as the Word of God reaches a person through everyday occurrences.”

REMEMBER SPIDER JOHN by Kyle Orla Stringworks (YouTube): The great Minnesota musician Spider John Koerner passed away, his music and story is worth knowing.

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Truth is disrobed
in the presence of absence.
Kin’dom now, and yet.

Upstream,
Paul

All Bookshop purchase links give a kickback to a local New Mexico bookstore and to Contemplify. What a kindness.

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1. In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish.

2. 138-9, A Fire Runs Through All Things by Susan Murphy.

3. I do not think Jesus did either, but what was using this as a rhetorical tool.

4. The great Gary Paul Nabhan introduced me this refraining of the Kingdom of God to the Kin’dom of God, check out my conversation with Gary Nabhan (aka Brother Coyote) on Wisdom Gleaned from Fishers & Farmers

5. 133, God Laughs and Plays by David James Duncan.

6. 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, follow the instructions here, no questions asked, just happy to have you practicing with us.

7. 30, Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver