8/31/20
PROOF IS IN THE PEACHES. The final leg of the triad of Contemplify emails was dispatched this morning (part one can be read here and part two here). I am convinced that when the tops of our heads are spinning the contemplative drops to the Ground like a mellowed peach. The virtues are peaches heavy on the branch, bursting with potential and slyly emanating God’s goodness. Being and becoming fuse into one. And when I bite into an August peach I have proof of God’s ripening.
If you missed it, you can read the whole reflection here.
8/30/20
VIRTUOUS ANCESTORS. Part two of the triad of Contemplify emails snuck out early this morning, if you missed it, you can read it here (part one can be read here). It praises the virtues of esteemed ancestors and cheers on modern ones. Part three is stretching it legs to dash your way tomorrow morning.
8/29/20
SONG OF SUFFERING. Today marked a first for Contemplify, a three-parter meditation. The first offering landed in inboxes this morning, if you missed it, you can read it here. It holds the quarantined heart of our times, cultivating meaning and virtues in the midst of suffering. In spite of suffering. More to come tomorrow and Monday. I hope you like them.
8/28/20
ACEDIA. The noonday demon has arrived in quarantine nomenclature. Monks popularized the term acedia back in the desert days as a descriptor of a cocktail of feelings that terrorizes the solitary life. When a monk felt listless, apathetic, without direction—acedia was the diagnosis. Anyone else going a few rounds in the ring with acedia these days? This is a great article on the history of acedia and how it correlates for those of us living in today’s quarantined world. Read it here. (h/t Tyler)
8/26/20
A SINGLE CONTINUOUS GESTURE. This punchy statement from Doug Christie is worth reflecting on throughout the day…
“To open oneself to such [contemplative] practice means learning to live in the Divine and in and for the world as a single continuous gesture.” (p.52, Blue Sapphire of the Mind, Douglas Christie)
8/25/20
TUESDAYS WITH MERTON. The fine folks over at the International Thomas Merton Society are hosting a series called “Tuesdays with Merton“. It is free, but you gotta register. I am signed up for the first one on Merton and Black Lives Matter. It is a powerhouse lineup of Merton scholars, students, and kindred spirits. Contemplify friend Christopher Pramuk is in the mix too.
8/24/20
A LONG WALK. I love a long walk. Mario Rigby takes its to the next level. Rigby spent two years (2 years!) walking across the African continent. A reflective snippet resides below, do check out the whole piece.
“…these were areas of vast nothingness, where everything looked the same; that’s where you really have to learn to become your own best friend. It’s just you and the environment, and particularly in the desert, with heat stroke, often the easier option is to just sit down and die rather than keep going. You really need to understand yourself and have perseverance to survive.”
8/23/20
ONE IN FOUR. Mental health is on the slide in the U.S. The latest from the CDC is that 1 in 4 young adults has considered suicide this past month. What other segments of society has seen an increase? Unpaid caregivers, essential worker, Black and Hispanic folks.
What is the value of mental health? Of spiritual health?
Is it monetary or qualitative?
It appears that if you put a word in front of ‘health’ like ‘mental’ or ‘spiritual’ it causes the money grubbers to roll their eyes. It also appears that if you put a word after ‘health’ like ‘system’ or ‘industry’ it garners fierce political debate about the importance of health and the economics of well-being. That is the short-sighted nature of greed. A more generous question that sits on my lips is how can I contribute to the health quality of my community? You can’t be all things to all people, but you can be the particular sort of friend that encourages health mentally and spiritually. Contemplatives are good at that sort of thing.
And if you happen to be one of the folks who feels likes a statistic in considering suicide or you know someone who is, help is available. In the U.S., call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. You can also text with an emotional support counselor with the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.
8/22/20
COMPLEXITY AND DIRECT EXPERIENCE. Pausing to ruminate while reading this passage from Range by David Epstein,
“Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity, and that has manifested as flexibility, with profound implications for the breadth of our intellectual world…Where the very thoughts of premodern villagers were circumscribed by their direct experiences, modern minds are comparatively free. This is not to say that one way of life is uniformly better than another. As Arab historiographer Ibn Khaldun, considered a founder of sociology, pointed out centuries ago, a city dweller traveling through the desert will be completely dependent on a nomad to keep him alive. So long as they remain in the desert, the nomad is a genius.” (pp. 46-47)
What strikes me about this passage is the ways in which travel and curiosity across ontological landscapes (or lack thereof) shapes our potential to embrace the whole of reality. There is surely a gift in deep local knowledge as there is in polymath exploration. What are the ways we can be localized experts in our direct experiences while withholding our biases and preconceived conclusions from situations completely new to us? Who are the exemplars of such paths? What do modern rationalists lose when dismissing hyper localized wisdom because the data is not available outside of lived experience?
8/20/20
IN THE HIPS OF A CANOE. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is a divine location in northern Minnesota. God has been seen paddling her canoe and skinny dipping throughout those chains of lakes for years. Pretty sure She summers there. I close my eyes and drift into the memories of my trips along those waters and my breath goes deeper. This video essay by Nathaniel Riverhorse Nakadate feels like a shared memory, or, a poem read so many times I think I wrote it.
8/19/20
COLOR. I can see the precious future lights shining in the suffering shadows of becoming. Speaking of future lights, my daughter told me I am not as colorful as her. I don’t disagree. Last week when our lone remaining chicken died my daughter ran into my arms and wept for an hour. She has so much color. In the face of suffering, she sheds peach-colored tears.
8/18/20
MATCH OF PERSEVERANCE. Words to quell an anxious spirit. Words to champion the liberatory flow of God. Beguine Mechtild von Magdeburg says, “Love the nothing, flee the self. Stand alone. Seek help from no one. Let your being be quiet. Be free from the bondage of all things. Free those who are bound. Give exhortation to the free. Care for the sick but dwell alone. When you drink the waters of sorrows you shall kindle the fires of love with the match of perseverance–this is the way to dwell in the desert.”
8/17/20
TALES FROM ISOLATION. For those who have hung around the Contemplify basecamp for a stretch will no doubt remember my fawning over the music of J.S. Ondara. He is back with a new album Folk n’ Roll Vol 1: Tales from Isolation. A timely album, that channels the uncertainty, anxiety, and relational reality of life in the pandemic (recorded during the shutdown but before the killing of George Floyd). You can listen to album here. (h/t Cliff)
8/15/20
I GO TO MY HEART. Don’t want to spoil this tune by talking too much about it. It rings right and true. The heart is a contemplative compass when misdirections try to guide your way.
8/13/20
86. Last week one of my heroes had a birthday. Wendell Berry turned 86. A week late, but I don’t think Mr. Berry will mind me saluting him today. The fine folks over at Orion Magazine collected some of Berry’s best writing for their publication in politics, food and farm, poetry, fiction, interview and video. You can find the curated list here. You can listen to a few Contemplify interviews focused on the work and life of Wendell Berry with Laura Dunn and Chad Wriglesworth.
8/11/20
HOKUSAI. As a novice block printer, I have come to enjoy the deeply contemplative art of slowly carving away at material to leave an image in what was never touched. This interactive dive into the work of Hokusai is a wonder for new eyes and a welcome reminder for old admirers. Read this awe-inspiring interactive piece here.
8/10/20
THICK SHADOWS OF KITCHENS. I wish I had a thousand lifetimes to explore this planet. Big souls are often found in diners, street corners, and ragged playgrounds. I was reminded of this by the poem below, which came from Alan Jacobs’ newsletter.
The great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) was for many many years a village parish priest. After his retirement he wrote a poem about his experience:
I was vicar of large things
in a small parish. Small-minded
I will not say, there were depths
in some of them I shrank back
from, wells that the word “God”
fell into and died away,
and for all I know is still
falling. Who goes for water
to such must prepare for a long
wait. Their eyes looked at me
and were the remains of flowers
on an old grave. I was there,
I felt, to blow on ashes
that were too long cold. Often,
when I thought they were about
to unbar to me, the draught
out of their empty places
came whistling so that I wrapped
myself in the heavier clothing
of my calling, speaking of light and love
in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.
8/9/20
ABLAZE. Alanis Morissette played God in a movie a long while back. It caused a stir. I can’t recall why. Not so long ago I was tipped towards this video (h/t Joey) of Alanis singing her latest with her daughter. I hit play while holding my sleepy dog boy with no premonition of what would come. This song rushes from separateness to oneness, to the particularity of each of her children and then back out again to the unified whole. This contemplative song and video is a treat for all ages.
8/8/20
FIFTY YEARS. My parents have been married 50 years today. Fidelity to a love started without a finish line. Watching their marriage over the years– first with the absorptive eyes of a kid, the bored eyes of a teenager, the distant eyes of a young adult, and then all the way up to the current sleep-deprived eyes of a parent about to step into my forties. I am in awe of their sustained love. They belong to one another. The nuptial mystics have gotten a lot of grief in recent years for elevating marriage, or at least archaic forms of it. When you watch up close the marriage of two souls over a lifetime, how can you not marvel at the graced relationship? Marriage is not for everyone, there are a variety of routes in our times one may go in relationship and partnering, but a marriage like theirs seen with the opens eyes…Holy crow. Into the mystic they go.
8/7/20
FLOW. “I have often said, God’s going-out is God’s going in.” Meister Eckhart said that. The past couple of days have been cloaked in a Mystery unfolding within me. Tired and bedraggled in body, my spirit is ablaze. Has that ever happened to you? The flow of God is a wave carrying me to the sandy beaches and back out into the deep end of the ocean. I am a part of it. Riding the wave, uncertain of what is to come, and trusting in the moon’s pull of the tides. Am I about to be dunked or tossed ashore? The Mystery never leaves you alone.
8/6/20
VOCATION. Thomas Merton wrote, “A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.” (Thoughts in Solitude, 87). I wonder how many folks step into this rhythm of vocation? The people I have met who are most alive and present to their work in the world exemplify that quote. How does that challenge or steady your call to life today?
8/5/20
NEW EPISODE. The Contemplify experiment continues. The latest episode “Subtle Sacraments & The Quiet Mind” is audio rendition of the last few missives from the Contemplify NonRequired Reading List. Some visions land better in the ear than through the eye. Meister Eckhart says that hearing God is sweeter than seeing God. So the Contemplify basecamp bumped our heads together and said, why not offer both? Hope you like it.
8/4/20
ISOLATION AND MEDIA. I continue to pay attention to the impact of social isolation. I think of it as spiritually malnourished solitude. When forced exterior solitude struck us in this pandemic, we experienced how ill prepared many of us are for solitude (both interior and exterior). There was a telling blog post that was brought to my attention that connects consuming media in isolation has implications for how we view others. Food for thought…
“We get a dopamine hit by seeing the demonization of people with whom we disagree. So demonization becomes a winning Darwinian strategy in the age of contemporary media.
The whole point of writing The Three Languages of Politics was to describe demonization rhetoric under the assumption that people would not want to demonize. I thought that if you recognize the rhetoric, you would back away from it.
Instead, the religion that persecutes heretics justifies demonization. To criticize demonization is to be a heretic. In a world where people consume media in isolation, an ideology that justifies demonization has an advantage.
My thought is that the fact that we consume contemporary media in isolation has made made people more receptive to demonization, with its totalitarian characteristics. This is probably accentuated by the virus-induced isolation, which increases our use of contemporary media and reduces our social interactions. “
8/3/20
ANOTHER DULL WEEKEND. This farcical reflection on “another dull weekend at home” by Katherine Shonk had me chortling my coffee. Laughter in the midst of painful pandemic realities is necessary.
8/2/20
MALCOLM GLADWELL & MENNONITES. I often feel lost in the woods when it comes to claiming a particular stream as my own. Like a dog hopping from stream to stream, I drink in the source of Goodness whenever I am panting. The contemplative ground is too big for me to chart every nook and knob, but as a Christ creature I claim my kinship with totality. But I do have favorite watering holes. One particular stream that I am camping by is the Mennonites. It is my wife’s home tradition and it has provided some real community and perspective for how a Christ creature might live in the world in the way of Jesus without a roll of the eyes.
Mennonites have often modeled a way of reconciliation in the most dire circumstances. Malcolm Gladwell relays a story of how Mennonites have shaped his past and shook his circumstances by what he calls “weapons of the spirit”. Check it out here.
8/1/20
NUMB. Isolation is crumb of solitude’s pie. Solitude is a force whose power is internalized more than externalized. Yes, hermits have externalized their interior pursuit but most people have not chosen that path. What happens to regular people who don’t have the interior tools for solitude in long stretches of isolation? Many are answering this question in their daily lives. A question forced upon them outside circumstances. Below is a must see 3-minute film by a young filmmaker named Liv McNeil. This creative piece shares that isolated experience through the lens of teenager. I am sure it will raise questions within you about the isolation experience of you, loved ones, and everyone you know.
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