The Website of Unknowing

In search of the perfect Christian Jam Band

November 23, 2009 · 4 Comments

Okay, I’m on a mission.

Last night, Fran, Rhiannon and I went to see Point of Grace and Mark Schultz perform at a local mega-church. It was the second time we’ve seen Point of Grace, our first Mark Schultz concert. We went mainly for Rhiannon, who is just nuts over what she calls “Fish Music” (because the local Contemporary Christian Music, i.e. CCM, radio station is WFSH 104.7, affectionately nicknamed “the Fish”). Now, I do not mean to be a grouch when it comes to CCM; there are a few bands I truly enjoy: Switchfoot and Third Day top the list, and I was impressed with Delirious? when I saw them a couple of years back, and I can even get enthusiastic over someone as squeaky-clean as Rebecca St. James. But you know, in my opinion there are too many CCM bands that sound like U2 knockoffs, and some of the biggest names in the business (Steven Curtis Chapman, Jeremy Camp, Casting Crowns, Jars of Clay, Mercy Me) are all so honed in their midtempo rock, adult contemporary sound, that… well, it all just starts to sound the same after a while. At least to me.

Okay, I understand I’m not exactly their target demographic. I grew up listening to bands like Yes and Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Grateful Dead. As a matter of fact, I still listen to these guys, with the main difference being that at this point in my life I wince at how sexist or violent or angry so many of their lyrics are. But these old progressive rock/jam bands made music that was (at least, for its time) risky, gutsy, edgy, and even a tad bit dangerous. Yes may have been the least scary of the lot, but even their music broke all the rules of pop radio (on their classic albums from the early 1970s, the average song length was about ten minutes).

So last night at the concert, I thought to myself, “Self, it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Since Fran and Rhiannon love the pure-pop sounds of most CCM, I cannot begrudge them the music they enjoy. But if I want Christian music with an edge, I need to go find it — and its normal habitat will not be radio stations like the Fish.”

Now, in its heyday the Jesus music scene of the 70s did produce a few artists who made unusual, edgy, or just plain weird music. The Resurrection Band (later shortened to Rez Band) could be called acolytes of Led Zeppelin, and more recently their protegé band, Seeds, has a sound similar to Crosby, Stills and Nash. Larry Norman, one of the true pioneers of Christian rock, created music that combined his 50s-rock falsetto voice with a bluesy psychedelic sound (and in-your-face lyrics). Probably my single favorite Christian musician, Phil Keaggy, is a masterful guitarist and, having seen him twice over the last eighteen months, it’s reassuring to note that he still knows how to jam. Indeed, his album Crimson and Blue is probably the single best example of improvisational Christian rock that I’ve yet run across. Among younger artists, Zehnder has a jam-band sensibility, even though none of their recordings that I’ve heard seem to be particularly improvisational.

So that’s all good stuff. But I’d like to find some new Christian jam music. Does it exist?

Last night I tweeted a request for “Jerry Garcia with Jesus” music, and people both on Twitter and Facebook rose to the challenge. One person suggested I visit www.indieheaven.com, a website that invites us to “discover the other 99% of Christian music.” You can search their site by genre, and I was pleased to see that “jam band” was among the many genres listed in their search box. So I selected that category, clicked on the search button… and had 0 results.

Ouch.

The Promise of ParadoxMeanwhile, other folks threw out a variety of ideas: Jesse Manibusan, Soul-Junk, Daniel Amos, Waterdeep, among others. Meanwhile, my own Googling yielded The Selah Project, which (along with Waterdeep) seems to be the most promising. I’m beginning to think that contemporary, creative, Christian music that hasn’t been put through the corporate rock blander, er, blender, does in fact still exist out there. And I suspect that there’s more of it, but it hasn’t made it onto my radar screen yet.

So, do any of my dear readers have a favorite Christian band that’s just a little too freaky to get airtime on the big corporate radio stations? If you do, please let me know.

And I should end this post by being honest and saying that both Mark Schultz and Point of Grace put on a fine show. I don’t mean to be a nay-sayer about all the mainstream Christian musicians who I am sure work very hard at their craft and their ministry. So I want to be clear that by saying “it’s not my cuppa tea” I’m not saying “it’s lousy!” Far from it. Once again: better to light a candle than curse the music that isn’t really to my taste. But before I can light my candle, I need to find it.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: Music
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Simon’s Cat

November 22, 2009 · 1 Comment

Simon’s Cat (In His Very Own Book)
By Simon Tofield
New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009
Review by Carl McColman

The Promise of ParadoxMove over, Garfield, Dewey, LOLCats, and all those adorable cats by Kliban… here come’s “Simon’s Cat,” who insinuated himself (herself?) into my heart with a huge baseball bat. Twenty-five million Youtube fans later, Simon’s irrepressible puss has now landed a major book deal, with Simon’s Cat the first of what we can hope will be many releases. The drawings are whimsical, almost primitive, in their simple depictions of life, the universe and everything from a cat’s-eye view. Of course, everything revolves around the holy trinity of naps, playtime, and the food bowl. If you, or anyone you love, are owned by cats, you’ll find this book to be plenty of fun and dead-on accurate in its depiction of the glories of serving our four-legged masters. And I suppose I don’t need to point out that this is a wonderful holiday gift idea.

Now, if only they could figure out how to encode Youtube videos into the pages of a book (a non-Kindle-ized book, that is)…

→ 1 CommentCategories: Books · Reviews · humor
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Quote for the Day

November 21, 2009 · 4 Comments

I pray much to have a wise heart, and perhaps the rediscovery of Lady Julian of Norwich will help me. I took her book with me on a quiet walk among the cedars. She is a true theologian with greater clarity, depth and order than St. Theresa: she really elaborates, theologically, the content of her revelations. She first experienced, then thought, and the thoughtful deepening of experience worked it back into her life, deeper and deeper, until her whole life as a recluse at Norwich was simply a matter of getting completely saturated in the light she had received all at once, in the “shewings” when she thought she was about to die.

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Register now for Evening at Emory Spring 2010

November 20, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Online registration is now open for Evening at Emory’s Spring 2010 classes. I’m teaching the following classes:

A Brief History of Everything
American philosopher Ken Wilber writes books that combine eastern and western spirituality, psychology, biology, cultural theory, and other strands of contemporary thought to create what the author calls “integral theory.” Wilber seeks to bridge the divide between science and religion, explain the dynamics of human consciousness and moral development, and speculate on the future evolution of our species. Despite the complexity of his thought, many of Wilber’s books are written in an accessible style, including the textbook for this class, A Brief History of Everything. In this class we’ll read the book, discuss its merits and flaws, and consider how Wilber’s ideas can impact both the scientific and spiritual communities. Tuition includes textbook.
Textbook: A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber.
February 10-March 10, 2010
7:00-9:00 pm
To register, click here

Introduction to World Mysticism
Madonna is studying the Kabbalah. The Shack is a runaway bestseller. Centuries after he died, everyone’s reading Rumi. Yoga, Buddhism and other eastern practices are more popular among Americans than ever. So what gives? At the heart of all these cultural trends is mysticism, a vague word that can be translated as “the spiritual principle at the heart of religion.” Many people believe mysticism is the golden thread that unites all the world’s religions. Others scoff at the idea. Come decide for yourself in this class as we explore major themes and writings from the world’s great mystical traditions. Using Andrew Harvey’s The Essential Mystics as our textbook, we’ll examine the world’s great wisdom traditions — Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as pagan and philosophical forms of mysticism — acknowledging both the common ground and the distinctive qualities of each mystical path. Class is taught from an academic/nonsectarian perspective.
Textbook: The Essential Mystics : Selections from the World’s Great Wisdom Traditions edited by Andrew Harvey.
April 14-May 5, 2010
7:00-9:00 pm
To register, click here

See you there!

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Charism

November 19, 2009 · 13 Comments

Is there a relationship between the charismatic renewal and the mystical tradition? Years ago I bought a book called Contemplation and the Charismatic Renewal. I never read it — maybe I should go back and read it now — but I liked the basic message as described in the blurb on the back cover: that the fervent excitement of charismatic experience can and perhaps ought to mature into the deep loving silence of contemplative practice.

I hung out with charismatic Christians for about a year or so back in high school. As I’ve said elsewhere, when I was sixteen I had a fairly profound experience of the presence of God during a youth retreat Communion service. Profound experiences of God’s presence weren’t really on the menu at the Lutheran Church my parents and I attended, so I started to hang out with my Pentecostal and charismatic friends, since they had a language for experiential spirituality and I could speak of my experience without anyone thinking I needed meds. Before long I had worked the program: I had been Baptized in the Holy Spirit and was speaking in tongues and prophesying and dancing in the spirit along with the best of them.

But it only lasted a year. A few things happened to cause me to move on, including a disillusioning weekend at a national charismatic conference where I saw some real out-of-integrity behavior on the part of the leaders of my group. But probably the main reason I gave up on charismatic Christianity was, ironically, the fact that I couldn’t square my own experience with God with what the charismatics were telling me. They had a pretty high theology of evil — Satan was behind every rock and bush, and definitely active in the occult, eastern religions, and rock music — which didn’t square with my rather mind-blowing experience of God as pure love and ultimate, sovereign power. Nowadays, using the categories of integral theory, I can see that the group I was involved in had (and enforced) boundaries consistent with a strong tribal/mythic-membership consciousness, whereas I was already moving to more of a world-centric/pluralistic consciousness, which simply has an entirely different set of boundaries. Without meaning to sound judgmental, my experience was like hanging out with a group of people huddled around a bonfire, scared of the dark — and I was the only one who could see that the sun was rising.

So I got disillusioned with charismatic forms of spirituality, and have been rather armored against the charismatic world ever since. After a number of twists and turns that I don’t need to go into here, I discovered contemplative spirituality, and despite a rather long detour into paganism, that’s pretty much where I’ve dropped anchor.

Back to my initial question: is charismatic experience is any way related to the profound exploration of the mysteries of God that characterize the heart of Christian mysticism? And the older I get, and the more I am capable of understanding the dynamics of why charismatic community didn’t work for me when I was a teenager, the more I am inclined to say “yes.”

After all, we hold that God is one. Three persons, but one God. If this is so, then either charismatics and mystics are inspired by the same Holy Spirit, or else one group or the other is erring spectacularly. And yes, I know that there are charismatics who will insist that mystics come straight from the pit of hell. But see what I wrote above: those charismatics, in my view, are trapped in a tribal way of relating to the world. My question is more about charismatics who (or at least, who are willing to) embrace a more global, pluralistic, world-centric consciousness. Is there a place for glossolalia, ecstatic dancing, and prophetic utterances at the threshold of the abyss of God’s deep silence?

I think so. I have no idea what this looks like, but I think it’s worth pondering over and praying about.

Part of what I loved about the charismatic world was its confidence. Charismatics loved the idea that God is just waiting to bestow gifts on his children. They loved to quote this passage from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?  10 Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:7-11)

Somehow, when I got disillusioned with charismatic spirituality and removed myself from that corner of Christian practice, I also gave up on this degree of simple, childlike trust. I got sophisticated in my thinking: “It’s wrong to ask God for a good parking spot; someone else might need it more than I do.” Of course, by that logic, it soon became wrong to ask God for anything. And guess what? I stopped asking God for anything.

So let me be Hegelian here for a minute: if I’ve gone from the thesis of simple, childlike trust (in a charismatic sense), to the antithesis of silent surrender that, alas, was not nearly as trusting (in a contemplative sense), then perhaps now as I move toward my sixth decade on this giant whirling rock, I’m trying to find a synthesis, combining a deep childlike trust with a deep, serene silence, characterized by a pluralistic, boundary-less love. I’m not sure that this has anything to do with speaking in tongues or ecstatic dancing. Not to pass judgment on such things, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. I’m looking for the sense of deep trust in God’s goodness and God’s willingness to give us gifts, even better gifts than we can ask for or imagine.

I suppose I can begin this quest for a new charismatic-contemplative synthesis by asking God for it. And while I’m at it, I can ask God for help in my discipline, and help in my quest for holiness, and help in dealing with my distractions and inner turmoil whenever I sit in silence. And… following the theme I’ve been writing on lately (“how to become a mystic”), I can take Karl Rahner’s idea that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic” to God, and trustingly share with God that I am ready to be re-formed and transformed into the Christian that God would have me become.

Wow. I’m hitting my resistance. Time to breathe deeply, again and again. And to work on that trust issue.

→ 13 CommentsCategories: Christian mysticism · Christianity · Contemplation · How to Become a Mystic · Prayer · spirituality
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The Road Not Taken

November 18, 2009 · 11 Comments

My dear readers, I try to keep the angst-quotient on this blog to a bare minimum, but this morning I am going to indulge myself a bit. You have been duly warned. Read on at your own risk.

Yesterday morning I received an email from Bob P., a reader of this blog, who wrote this observation:

I’ve been reading your wise blog posts on discipline and your rule for life and the huge amount of reading that you do.  I’m wondering why is this guy not teaching Spirituality at the Phd level at a well known University.  Just from a human maybe false self perspective you could make a ton more money and have some recognition for your reading efforts. Having a chair of Theology or Spirituality of a famous dead person could open up a lot of doors.  Or be a famous monk like Merton.  I’m wondering why is he wasting his life at a bookstore.  Anyway that is my issue.  I know I’m not telling you something new.

Then, I found a post from Fencing Bear at Prayer, a blog by a medieval history professor at the University of Chicago, who said in part:

Carl McColman over at the Website of Unknowing has a post this week about discipline that speaks to many of the issues that I am struggling with here. Full disclosure: I’ve just started reading his blog a few weeks ago, and I am incredibly jealous. He (like Jennifer at Conversion Diary) is pretty much saying everything that I want to be saying in my blog, but much better than I ever could and without even having an academic degree. Plus he’s published ten books and counting while I, as you know, am still struggling with number two. Which is actually relevant to my frustration about doing my homework. See, here I am, the good student, having gone to graduate school and gotten my Ph.D., having jumped all the hoops and been well trained, and somehow they who have not jumped even one hoop (at least of the “do your homework first” sort) are doing exactly what they want to be doing (respectively, working in a bookstore owned by Trappist monks; raising four kids and writing a memoir about her conversion) while I, somehow, am not.

This historian may have only written one book so far, but it looks really cool: it’s called From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200. Needless to say, I wasted no time ordering a copy. She may be jealous of my ten books, but then I’m envious of her one; I always compare myself unfavorably to those whose work is peer-reviewed and published by academic presses. So I wrote her a comment on her blog about how the grass isn’t always as green as it looks, and she posted a very warm reply, saying “I do want you to know how valuable I find your writing from a perspective outside of academia. You are able to say things that academics find it very difficult to say but often want to be saying themselves.”

Sigh.

Like Fencing Bear, a lot of people have told me they’re envious of me. Nevertheless, like Bob, I myself secretly wonder if I’m wasting my life — working at a job that only requires skills I had mastered by the time I was 23. I suppose many of the monks I work with have similar feelings; some of the older ones entered the monastery fresh out of school, but the more recent vocations have been men who’ve entered the monastery after they’ve had successful careers “in the world,” including engineers, lawyers, and yes, college professors. It’s got a be a jolt going from teaching at the University level to making fudge for four hours a day while praying and meditating for another six. Not exactly what most people would call a significant career advancement. And perhaps that’s the point. Keep reading →

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Community

November 17, 2009 · 5 Comments

One of the monks who is reading the manuscript of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism teased me yesterday, by saying “It looks like you are just trying to get people into the pews!”

I defended myself by saying, “No, I’m insisting that community is an essential, foundational aspect of Christian mysticism. Granted, for many people, Christian community means the church. But I really do have room for a broad variety of types of community.”

Our culture (I’m speaking here of North America, but I suppose American values have seeped all over the world by now) is so individualistic: our mythic icons are figures like the Lone Ranger, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed — all figures who have some measure of singularity or solitude knit into their very bones. We admire fictional heroes like Captain Kirk or even Harry Potter because they flout authority — they make their own way in the world, again and again saving the day by their very willingness to reject strictures laid upon them by others. In the American psyche, community exists to serve the individual, but never the other way around.

How this plays out in mysticism, of course, is the idea that somehow mysticism represents a “higher” or “better” form of Christianity than mere tribal church-going. It’s almost Neitzhchean: the mystic is an Übermensch, to whom the normal rules and regulations of conventional churchianity do not apply, by virtue of his “superior,” experiential relationship with God. This is the notion that lurks beneath the rallying cry of the new age movement: “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” In other words, I have a direct pipeline to God and I don’t need no stinkin’ church.

While I think it’s obvious that slavish obedience and submission to group authority has its own serious problems (and is not what I am advocating here!), unfettered individualism, that rejects community accept insofar as community may be convenient or directly beneficial to the individual, is both contrary to and ultimately subversive of true Christian mysticism. Plotinus may have described the contemplative journey as “the flight of the alone to the Alone,” but Plotinus was a pagan philosopher, not a Christian (and I should note that anyone who truly believes that mysticism ought to be a single, solitary project, is certainly free to pursue their course, and I wish them well, and I would recommend heartily starting with Plotinus. All I’m saying here is that such an individualistic, privatized form of mysticism is by definition not Christian mysticism). For that matter, Neitzche’s concept of the Übermensch doesn’t belong in any Christian understanding of mysticism, either. Mystics are not meant to be better than other people, but to willingly and sacrificially serve other people.

But, you might be thinking, what about Julian of Norwich? the Desert Fathers and Mothers? Thomas Merton at the end of his life? Isn’t there a long tradition of hermits, those who abandon the company of others to seek God in total solitude?

Yes, the hermitage has a prominent place on the landscape of Christian mysticism. But it is instructive to consider that the Desert Fathers and Mothers, within just a few generations, moved out of the eremitical (solitary) life and into the cenobitic (communal or monastic) life. Julian of Norwich and Thomas Merton both found their solitude while remaining connected on some level to others: Julian lived in a cell that was attached to a church, while Merton’s hermitage remained on the grounds of his monastery. “Whose feet will the hermit wash?” asked one of the Desert Fathers, and this remains the key to the relationship between Christian mysticism and community: Christ commanded us to love and serve one another. We simply cannot do this unless we are in relationship, and to be in relationship requires community of some form.

I know that there are some very good reasons not to be involved in a traditional, paid-clergy-and-brick-&-mortar church. I know that churches are often inexplicably hostile to mysticism (or, not so inexplicably, since mysticism has been viewed with suspicion by both Catholics and Protestants ever since the Reformation). A person interested in the mystical life needs to be engaged in community not because community will teach us how to be mystics, but rather because community will teach us how to be holy. And holiness is an unavoidable prerequisite to the Christian contemplative life.

Thankfully, ours is an age when many different types of community are flourishing. If your local Baptist or Presbyterian Congregation simply leaves you cold, you can look for community through the house church network, or through informal Bible studies and prayer and praise groups, or even through meetup groups. Many monasteries have lay associate groups, and these are often ecumenical in nature. While I think it is counter-productive to flit from group to group (that is individualism in another guise), most of us thankfully have the freedom to “shop around” to find the right community that will teach us how to grow in holiness. Maybe to find our community we will have to sit in the pews. But just maybe, community will be found somewhere else.

The important thing is: if you want Christian mysticism to be part of your life, start by making community part of your life. And don’t rest until you’ve found your community.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: Christian mysticism · Christianity · How to Become a Mystic
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Quote for the Day

November 16, 2009 · 2 Comments

Now if God is beyond distinctions, God is also beyond language. This explains the mystics’ playful use of language to subvert itself… Whichever way language is used, God is not named by it. It does not matter if language is used only to deny things of God for these denials always fall short of the mark and have themselves to be denied. Thus apophaticism creates room for a great deal of affirmative language about God (as long as it is remembered that these affirmations also fall short of the unknowable God)… Predictably, the mystics’ recognition that God ruptures language has been of great interest for postmodern philosophers. This is partly because of the mystics’ subversive playfulness with language, partly because they are nevertheless concerned with unsaying the foundation of language that is the foundation of all — God the creator who is outside the universe, indistinct from all that is, and therefore one with it.

— Ralph Norman, The Rediscovery of Mysticism, in
The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology

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Amazing Books from Blackwell

November 15, 2009 · 5 Comments

I know that I’m an odd duck. I’m not a scholar — I struggled my way through two years of graduate school, and now make my living as a humble bookseller for a monastery gift shop — but I enjoy keeping my finger on the pulse of what is happening in the world of academic religious studies. Of course, I know that many of the readers of this blog are academics, as well as clergy. So, whether you are just geeky like me, or actually have made the study of religion part of your livelihood, then I think you will be as excited about these books as I am. They all come from Blackwell Publishing, a leading academic publisher in the UK that is now part of John Wiley (a leading academic publisher based here in the US). Whenever I go to the UK I always love to visit a Blackwell’s Bookshop; although the retail and publishing companies are distinct, they were founded by the same family back in 19th century Oxford.

I learned from he-who-knows-everything-about-religious-publishing, Mike Morrell, that Blackwell has an impressive list of “Companion Guides” to various aspects of Christian theology and practice. These hefty tomes consist of an anthology of essays, by leading scholars, exploring the topic at hand from a variety of perspectives. Here are a few examples:

The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality is, for me of course, the juiciest book of the lot. It features essays by Mark A. Macintosh (“Trinitarian Perspectives on Christian Spirituality”), Robert Davis Hughes III (“The Holy Spirit in Christian Spirituality”), Diana Butler Bass (“Christian Spirituality in Europe and North America since 1700″, with Joseph Stewart-Sicking) and Philip Sheldrake (“Special Topics in Contemporary Christian Spirituality: Interpretation”). Essays cover not only a variety of special topics, but the history and theology of Christian spirituality as well as examining the topic from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives.

The Blackwell Companion to Catholicism and The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity, as their titles suggest, consider these specific ecclesial traditions from a variety of historical, cultural, doctrinal and praxis-related perspectives. Contributors to the Catholic companion include Luke Timothy Johnson, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Peter Phan, Avery Cardinal Dulles, and Wendy Wright. While I’m not as familiar with the contributors to the Eastern Christianity companion and so I can’t as easily cherry pick the most impressive names (!), take a look at a few of the topics covered: “Byzantine Christianity,” “Coptic Christianity,” “Russian Christianity,” “Syriac Christianity,” “Eastern Catholic Christianity,” as well as essays exploring the liturgics, iconography, architecture and hagiography of the Eastern churches.

I don’t consider myself a theologian, but I say that not as a point of pride, but rather as a confession. I think all Christians need to be theologically informed (and those of us who blather on about our faith in blogs, even more so), but of course it’s a daunting task, bringing one’s knowledge of theology up above the mere Baltimore Catechism level. Particularly in our age, when the shift from modernity to postmodernity has created both new crises and new opportunities for Christian discourse. So with this in mind, I’d like to commend a few additional Blackwell books to you.

The Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology can help you figure out where we’ve been which is usually a helpful prerequisite to getting a grip on where we’re going. Broadly covering the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth century, modern theology represents the rise of theology as its own scholarly project, independent of ecclesial control. This companion provides a history of theology from the patristic age, through the medieval and reformation periods culminating in the modern era; examines the relati0nship of theology to other disciplines, such as Biblical studies, history, philosophy and social theory; considers key theological doctrines such as the Trinity, Incarnation, and Eschatology, points out the key players of modernity, from Kant and Barth to Rahner and Von Balthasar, and finally considers a few key topics, including feminism, social justice, interreligious dialogue, and my two favorites: eco-theology and the revival of mysticism (conspicuous in its absence is an essay exploring the theological foundations of Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism, but no book is perfect).

Whew! What a roller coaster ride. But wait, there’s more! For as soon as you get comfortable with the kaleidoscopic world of modern theology, the light show really begins, as we turn to The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology. Okay, all of you folks out there in blog-reader-land who are interested in the emerging church: here is the theological engine that is powering that grass-roots project. I won’t bore you with trying to define post-modernity, a term even more slippery than plain modernity, but clearly this represents the most recent trends in the great theological conversation. In this book we find a cornucopia of topics to explore; let me list just four of the essay titles so you can see what’s on the menu: “Earth God: Cultivating the Spirit in an Ecocidal Culture” by Mark I. Wallace, “The Poetics of the Impossible and the Kingdom of God” by John D. Caputo; “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Regulated Improvisation: Ecclesial Hybridity and the Unity of the Church” by Mary McClintock Fulkerson, and “The Christian Message and the Dissolution of Metaphysics” by Gianni Vattimo. The essays are grouped into these categories: Aesthetics, Ethics, Gender, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Heideggerians and Derrideans.

Now, if all this is making your head spin and you feel like you need a more foundational look at postmodernity, there is The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader (Blackwell Readings in Modern Theology), which gathers together essays by pretty much all of the key figures in the postmodern conversation (Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, René Girard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and others), along with additional essays considering topics such as feminism, liturgics, metaphysics and phenomenology. Read it and your grasp of postmodernity will be as clear as mud (which is about as clear as it’s gonna get).

Finally: for all of you non-scholars out there (like me), who feel totally humbled if not outright intimidated by these theological tomes, let me recommend a few other Blackwell titles that might serve as a “remedial” curriculum in theology. Indeed, these titles (each written or edited by the respected Anglican scholar Alister McGrath) are designed for undergraduate courses in Christian theology, so pretty much any reasonably intelligent reader will find much to savor here. Plus (I know this is trivial, but I can’t resist) look at the covers: they are gorgeously designed books.

Christian Theology: An Introduction considers theology from a historical as well as a doctrinal perspective, and also considers some of the philosophical problems associated with the study of theology; The Christian Theology Reader provides close to 300 original writings by great Christian theologians from the 1st century to the present day, mostly in short (1-3 pages) excerpts; think of this as “Christian Theology’s Greatest Hits.” Finally, McGrath’s Christian Spirituality: An Introduction connects the dots between theology (theory) and spirituality (practice) in the Christian life.

Finally, a word of warning: like all good academic works, these books are all tomes (averaging about 550 pages each) and are not cheap (especially the hardcover editions). So just get one at a time. Or go talk your local library into ordering copies. They should for these are books for the ages.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: Books · Catholicism · Christianity · spirituality · theology
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Discipline

November 14, 2009 · 6 Comments

Check out my to-do list:

  • I want to lose about 25 pounds.
  • I want to learn to play the bass guitar (and, for that matter, the regular guitar, but first things first).
  • I want to de-clutter the garage (ay yi yi) — and come to think of it, there’s plenty of clutter inside the house that needs dealing with as well.
  • I want to complete two new book proposals, and edit one of my out-of-print books for the publication of a new/revised edition.
  • I want to improve my daily fidelity to contemplative prayer and the Liturgy of the Hours.
  • I want to save enough money to purchase a vacation/retirement home in the not too distant future (I’m almost 49 and my wife is 51, so now’s the time to be making those kinds of decisions).

What do all of these goals have in common? They require discipline.

It’s one thing to say “I want to visit Spain some day.” You find the money (even if, God forbid, that means using a credit card), you book the flight, you get there and rent a car and off you go. Nothing to it (except figuring out how to pay off those credit cards once you get home).

But my goals are different. None of them can be achieved in a day, or a month. They all require small actions done repeatedly, over time. They are goals that are manifested as the result of cumulative choices. This is really what discipline is all about.

I have a confession to make. In many ways, I’m an old hippie, and the word “discipline” frightens me. Keep reading →

→ 6 CommentsCategories: Art · Bass Guitar · Contemplation · Formation · How to Become a Mystic
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Suffering

November 13, 2009 · 5 Comments

Recently I received this sobering comment from a woman named Karen, posted to the Mystics page of this website:

God abandoned me, killed my brother, father and mother and left me with no family
God hurts people and could choose to help but doesn’t
It is hard to understand why he makes some people suffer so and gives so much to others, not very charitable

Karen, while there are many details of your situation that I do not know, it seems clear to me that you are dealing with profound suffering. First of all, let me say that I am very sorry for your pain.

Everyone’s situation is different, but mine is not empty of suffering. My father is wasting away with dementia, after losing my mother almost three years ago. But even worse than that is my stepdaughter’s situation. Born with polycistic kidney disease and related liver disease, she suffered a stroke at age 3 and now, at 24, is confined to a wheelchair, with impaired kidney functioning, end-stage liver disease, and intellectual disability. She regularly has to have blood transfusions to stay alive. She is incapable of caring for herself and must spend her day in a boring day-care facility while her mother and I work. The doctors have turned her down for transplants because of her limited self-care skills, and predict that she will need dialysis, possibly within a year. She will likely die within the next five to ten years. Needless to say, while she has an amazing personality, she is naturally very angry and depressed over her life circumstances. Just as painful for me is seeing how this has inconsolably broken her mother’s heart. My wife is a strong and resilient woman, but there is a shadow on her soul that only someone who has watched their child suffer while powerless to do anything about it can understand.

Karen, I’m not telling you this to say “my suffering’s worse than yours,” because of course no one could anyone ever compare their pain to another’s. I only tell you a bit about my story to let you know that I am no stranger to suffering.

It seems to me that you are standing at the threshold of one of life’s most profound mysteries: the mystery of why a good God allows evil and suffering to persist. There are many ways to respond to this mystery. Some people see it as proof that God doesn’t exist. Others see it as evidence that God is not good. Others, like myself, see it as pointing to the limitations of the human mind to fathom everything that is going on in the universe.

Given the fact that we have a choice of how to respond to the mystery, I believe our choice is important. It’s important whether we respond to suffering by saying “I believe in Love” or not.

Yes, I said “Love.” Christianity teaches that God is Love, and I believe this with all my heart. In fact, when I read over your comment, I re-phrased it like this:

Love abandoned me, killed my brother, father and mother and left me with no family
Love hurts people and could choose to help but doesn’t
It is hard to understand why Love makes some people suffer so and gives so much to others, not very charitable

Karen, does this ring true to you? Is this what you mean to say? If not, then I wonder if you have a distorted idea of who God is. Perhaps you equate God with fate or kismet, or with bad luck, or with the indifference of nature. If so, I invite you to reconsider who God is.

God is not fate, for God (Love) is bigger than fate. God is not luck (good or bad), for God (Love) is bigger than luck. God is not nature, for God (Love) is bigger than nature. When fate, or luck, or nature result in bad things happening to us or to those we love, we can be tempted to blame God for the bad things. But blaming God doesn’t help. In fact, in my experience it doesn’t even feel good. Blaming God for my pain just causes me more pain.

The great mystics teach that sometimes we do experience God as abandoning us. God seems to be absent in the midst of our deepest suffering. Why could this be? Is this because God doesn’t care? Or perhaps Love has its reasons, that are beyond our understanding?

If I say God doesn’t care, then I am saying “No” to Love. In the short term this might seem like protecting myself from further pain. But in the long run, it can only lead to a meaningless and loveless life. But on the other hand, if I believe that God does care, then I am saying “Yes” to Love. I am saying “Yes” to life and to hope. Note that this does not take away our pain, and frankly it might make sense to go out in a field somewhere and scream our lungs out, telling God just how angry we are! Because when we suffer, we do get angry. We get furious, we get enraged. We want to break things and do mean things to God. We would hurt God if we could. And the fact that we can’t hurt God just makes us madder.

And God loves us through all of this. For just as God is bigger than fate, or luck, or nature, God is also bigger than our pain and our suffering, and God is bigger than our rage and our fury. Love is the answer. And at the end of the day, it’s our choice whether to accept Love even in the midst of our pain, or to reject Love.

You know what else, Karen? What I have seen in life is that everyone suffers, sooner or later. Sooner or later even the ones who seem on the surface to have been “given so much” will suffer pain and loss. And we can never judge if our suffering is “worse” than theirs. All we can do is try to help one another when we see each other suffer (and we can learn a lot about God when we choose to help one another, but I’ll leave that one for you to explore on your own). It’s not that God wants us to suffer in some sort of sadistic way, but rather that God allows us to suffer. A spiritual teacher I highly respect, Richard Rohr, says that great love and great suffering are the doorways to higher consciousness. I believe he’s right. God gives us love, and God allows us to suffer. How we respond to these mysteries is up to us; but we are always given the choice to say “Yes” to Love.

One more thing I believe: God does not abandon us forever. Love waits for us to open our hearts. Love is the source of serenity and peace. If we feel like Love is absent, then the best thing we can do is to seek Love with all our heart. To cry for Love, to hunger for Love, to live for Love. In my experience, such yearning does get rewarded. Maybe not as soon as we would like. But Love will not abandon us forever. And when Love comes, Love brings peace and hope.

This is what I hope for you, Karen. May Love bring you peace and hope.

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Vocation

November 12, 2009 · 3 Comments

Abram and Sarai were called to leave their homes and travel to the west. John the Baptist was called to preach in the desert. Jesus was called into the desert to fast and pray. Saul was blinded on the road to Damascus and was called to go into the city there and submit to one of the leaders of the Christian community.

Call — in fancy Latin parlance, “vocation” — is a foundational experience of the Christian spiritual life. Normally we think of the concept of call in relation to Holy Orders, as in a person being called to the priesthood or to the monastic life. But marriage is also understood as a vocation — God calls us into the life of the person we wed.

How does the concept of call relate to mysticism?

If we take Karl Rahner and William McNamara at face value (Rahner said “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all,” while McNamara said “The mystic is not a special kind of person; every person is a special kind of mystic”), then we can assume that all Christians are called to enter into the mysteries in some way. It’s not as if some people win the lottery while everyone else gets to applaud. Union with God is not an extraordinary Christian vocation, it is the ordinary vocation of the Christian life. But what does that look like? If everyone ran off to the monastery, who would raise the next generation of children? If everyone gave over their entire waking lives to blissful meditation, then who will raise our food? That’s a caricature, of course; even contemplative monks are required to earn their own keep. So we have to disabuse ourselves of any notion that mysticism somehow involves a retreat form the practicalities of life. Rather, the call to enter the mysteries of God includes a coterminous call to enter more deeply the mysteries of ordinary life, including the mysteries of love, of work, of money, of community. Mysticism does not change who we are; it makes us more truly who we are.

I believe the call to be a mystic is, in fact, the call to live life deeply, passionately, wildly, joyfully. It is a call to make the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) — love, joy, serenity, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and moderation — central to our identity and experience. And if “moderation” and “wildness” seem to be at odds, remember the old saying: “everything in moderation, including moderation.” Sometimes, mysticism is like the extreme sports of God. It can take us to the edge of our comfort zone, to the dangerous places of our psyche and our relationships and  indeed our world. Maybe some of us are called to settle down in those dangerous places, and we become heroes of the faith like the desert fathers and mothers or, for that matter, Mother Teresa. Others only go to visit those on-the-edge points once or maybe twice in our entire life. That’s okay.

Because the paradox here is that, while the call to the mysteries is a general call, each of us will receive a unique calling. “Every person is a special kind of mystic.” We are like snowflakes: no two contemplatives are alike. Consider the importance of silence and solitude on the one hand, and discernment and spiritual friendship on the other. We each need silence and the space to listen for the nearly inaudible whispers of our own unique call. Where, in the silence, are we beckoned to explore? Discernment and the wise counsel of a spiritual friend or guide or director can help us from mis-hearing or misinterpreting the whispers of our vocation. As always, Christian mysticism is anchored in the community of faith.

We have to get over the idea that renowned contemplatives like Thomas Merton or Thérèse of Lisieux are somehow different than ourselves. Yes, they were consecrated religious; yes, they were gifted authors; yes, they were profound teachers. But you know, you probably can do some things a lot better than they could, and it just so happens that their gifts included a measure of celebrity, which (especially for a monk or a nun) is more curse than blessing. But there’s a 95% or more sameness between you and me and the “great” mystics. We need to bear this in mind. The 5% is where the uniqueness of our call kicks in, and it’s an adventure to discover just how my dance of intimacy with God will look like no other dance that ever existed. Meanwhile, you’re on your own road of singular God-discovery. Thanks to the samenesss we share, we can learn about and support each other on our unique pathways, even though we cannot walk the whole length of them together. There, again, is the splendor and importance of community.

So take some time and listen for your call. Chances are it will surprise you. Remember in The Sound of Music when the nuns couldn’t find Maria (because she was up on the mountaintop, singing)? One of the sisters said to the Mother Superior, “I’ve looked in all the usual places.” The abbess replied, “Considering that it is Maria, I suggest you look in someplace unusual.” The process of discerning our mystical vocation is probably a lot like looking for Maria. We need to look in the unusual places.

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How to Become a Mystic

November 11, 2009 · 8 Comments

I’ve been thinking about how so many self-help books begin with “How to…” Consider these examples:

  • How to Win Friends and Influence People
  • How to Raise the Perfect Dog
  • How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth
  • How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
  • How to Lie with Statistics

… and there are many, many more. But to the best of my knowledge, no one has written a book on How to Become a Christian Mystic. I wonder if such a book would be useful to people. Keep reading →

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Interfaithing

November 10, 2009 · 2 Comments

I’ve just found a new website devoted to interfaith dialogue and spirituality that looks very promising. Check it out: www.interfaithing.com

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Harvey Cox on Fundamentalism

November 10, 2009 · 1 Comment

My brother alerted me to an article that ran in the Boston Globe on Sunday by Harvey Cox, called “Why Fundamentalism Will Fail.” Among other things, this hopeful essay suggests that fundamentalism is on the way out because mysticism is on the way in.

I only hope he’s right.

Here’s a link to the article: http://shar.es/akIMO

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Intimacy

November 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Is there a difference between “union with God” and “intimacy with God”?

Unpack the etymology of intimacy and you’ll find that it has to do with speaking, announcing, making known. Intimacy means self-disclosure. I tell you who I am. I listen as you tell me who you are. So there seems to be a relationship between intimacy and language. Sure, in human terms we speak of “being intimate” as a code-word for sexual intercourse, but isn’t sexual intimacy a physical expression of words such as “I love you,” “I desire you,” “I want you,” “I give myself to you”?

As we relate to God who is bigger than any material thing, obviously there is no physical expression of intimacy, but this does not mean there is no erotic dimension to intimacy with God. On the contrary. Intimacy with God is not only profoundly erotic, but is indeed the foundation and form of all human eros — the experience of making love, even illicitly, can happen only because of humanity’s essential participation in the eros that emerges from the Divine. God is love, and this means all forms of love. God is desire, God is friendship, God is compassion, God is charity, God is over-flowing self-donation. And God is eager to tell us all about it. And then God waits in silence, eager to hear us tell God all about who we are, and the choices we make, and the dreams we hold dear, and the shames we bury or the fears we try to ignore. And out of this conversation, by this conversation, through this conversation, intimacy happens.

Back to my initial question: is intimacy with God the same thing as union with God? I think union is the summit and completion of intimacy. But even there, language fails us, for intimacy with God is never complete, never perfected, never reaches the final mountaintop. Always there is a higher, more majestic, more splendid peak to scale. Does this mean we never attain union with God? Some have said as much, suggesting that final union with God is attained only after death. I’m not sure I buy that, in that I suspect that eternity will unfold and expand just as surely as space and time do. So perhaps union with God is not merely a telos, but rather, paradoxically, is as much a present reality as a future hope. We are already in union with God, by virtue of being God’s beloved creation and bearing God’s image and likeness and existing in the universe of God’s making. We are so fully immersed in the ocean of Divine Love that we go through most of our days blissfully unaware of this blissful fact. Back to intimacy: God is just waiting for us to slow down and listen long enough so that his Word can get through to us. “Pay attention, or you’ll miss it!” We’ll miss the fact that we are creatures of love. We’ll miss the fact that God’s love for us is bigger than our sin — our resistance and rejection of that love. We’ll miss the fact that we are called to have the Mind of Christ and to partake in the Divine Nature. We’ll miss the fact that we are already in union with God.

We are already in Union with God, and yet, intimacy with God is the glorious, falling-in-love process of rediscovering that union and realizing it in our lives. It is a scary and heady and exhilarating thing. God asks of us nothing less than our entire lives, asking us to surrender to love so that love might transfigure and transform us. How this plays out in each person’s life is as unique as their DNA and life story. Some of us are called to be contemplatives, others mighty activists for justice and peace, others prophets, others artists, others ordinary husbands and wives and mothers and fathers, living quiet lives but lives filled with dignity and hope and joy. The point is, when we become intimate with God — truly listening to God’s word for us, and truly sharing our “word” with God — then things will change. The point behind being transfigured and transformed is that we become more than what we were before. This is somewhat frightening, for it is out of our sphere of control. But if we trust God, let down our armor and let God in, and breathe through our resistance, then the Holy Spirit will take charge and miracles will ensue.

So the experience of intimacy with God is the process by which we realize union with God. It’s a process that never ends, so we never experience final (perfected) union. But the truth is that union has been our birthright all along. We are falling in love for the first time with our lover who has been passionately present with us for all eternity.

 

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Faith

November 9, 2009 · 10 Comments

For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.

— Matthew 17:20 NRSV

One concept I have run into again and again, both among Christians as well as among others with an interest in mysticism, is the idea that mysticism is about experience which is somehow different from faith.

The logic seems to go like this: as the author of the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). But mysticism, by contrast, is about the experience of God’s presence in our lives. Why would anyone settle for mere faith, which seems to be built on hope rather than real, lived experience? Wouldn’t it be better to trade faith in for a more direct, immediate, feel-it-in-your-bones sense of God’s reality and activity in our lives?

The Apostle Paul says we are justified by faith (Romans 5:1). But if faith justifies us, how much more will direct experience contribute to real, lasting intimacy with God?

The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes an “either/or” relationship between faith and experience. Somehow, if we have a real enough experience of God, then we no longer need faith. “Faith is not important to me, because I know in my heart that God is real and God is present in my life,” someone once proudly told me. She was young, self-assured, a minister in a small church. Politeness prevented me from telling her what I thought of her aplomb: it sounded to me like she hadn’t had a dark night experience yet. Yes, mysticism is all about experience, but mysticism is both bigger and deeper than experience. Sometimes God comes to us through absence. Sometimes faith is tested in the crucible of doubt. And even when an experience hits us over the head with the proverbial two by four, we still must reflect on the experience and interpret it, with the language, values, and religious symbols that contribute to our sense of spiritual identity. Such a process of reflection and interpretation is a process that depends on faith: faith in the very trustworthiness of our own experience, and in our knowledge and ability to reflect on and interpret it.

Why is faith important? Why is it essential, even to the mystically inclined? For one very simple reason: No one has a perfect experience of God. Anyone who says that they do is just fooling themselves. Perfection is a concept related to completion, which implies that nothing can ever be perfect in human experience until we reach the end of our lives. In the meantime, faith is the tool by which we navigate all the great unknowns of life, including our relationship to the future, to our deep unconscious, and yes, to everything about God that is beyond our puny little experience, no matter how personally meaningful such experiences might be.

If you embrace the contemplative life, you will be opening your heart to a quest for experiential intimacy with God. This is a good and beautiful thing. But it doesn’t render faith unnecessary. On the contrary; faith becomes more important than ever. Cultivating faith is at least as important as daily meditation or the practice of virtue.

And how do we cultivate faith? Two thoughts here. “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ,” proclaims Paul (Romans 10:17). Dust off your Bible, my friend; and if you aren’t already participating in the weekly Mass or worship service of your faith community, then start doing so. Participating in regular worship and daily scripture reading is of central importance when it comes to nurturing faith. Granted, the “word of Christ” can come to us in ways other than through Sacred Scripture. But keeping the ear of our hearts open to listen for the word of Christ however it may come to us does not render Sacred Scripture (or corporate worship) unnecessary. On the contrary, reading (and hearing) Sacred Scripture will attune us to recognize the word of Christ however it may come to us: in the words of a homeless person, in an insight while reading the news, in a conversation with a trusted friend. The more we listen for the word of Christ, the more we nurture our faith. And do I need to point out that such listening requires the cultivation of inner silence?

My other thought about cultivating faith has to do with the meaning of the word itself. Merriam Webster defines faith as “belief and trust in and loyalty to God.” So to nurture faith, we need to nurture belief, trust, and loyalty. Belief, incidentally, is not so much about certainty of the mind as openness of the heart; trust and loyalty are also heart-centered virtues. So faith comes not from the intellect so much as from the will: it’s not what we think, but the choices we make, that make us faithful. I choose to trust God. I choose to open my heart to God. I choose to stick with God, no matter what. Out of these choices, faith happens.

And faith does not replace or crowd out the experience of contemplative awareness of God’s presence: rather, it sets the stage for such an encounter to take place.

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Not a Tame Wild Thing…

November 8, 2009 · 10 Comments

Where the Wild Things AreWe went to see Where the Wild Things Are last night. It’s a basic go-to-the-otherworld-to-find-yourself kind of story, in which our hero Max (wonderfully portrayed by the too-cute-for-words Max Records) responds to his mother’s exasperated declaration that he’s “out of control” by running off to where the wild things are. He talks them out of eating him and into getting appointed King of the Wild Things, and the Wild Rumpus ensues. At first Max finds it’s great to be king, but eventually things start to change.

Early reports about the movie suggested that Maurice Sendak (who wrote and illustrated the original children’s book) was happy with Spike Jonze directing the movie because he didn’t try to turn the wild things into just big cute, cuddly teddy bears. In other words, he let them stay wild. Apparently this made the movie studio nervous, and rumors swirled during the production of the movie that it was too scary for kids. Even more to the point, it doesn’t have a tidy, feel-good ending, even though its faithfulness to the book does offer a sense of resolution. Although Max follows the rules of the hero’s journey and makes his return at the story’s dénouement, we viewers are left with the unsettling implication that the wild things remain wild — and in the wild. You never know when they’ll show up again, or when Max will run off for another visit.

My daughter, who normally has a pretty low tolerance for movies with an edge, liked it, and she and I howled like wolves all the way from the theater to the van.

I’m reminded of one of the most important lines in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when one of the characters (it differs from book to movie) notes that Aslan is not a tame lion. The truth is, we always want to tame God, just as we always want to tame anything and everything about our own deep wildness, and about the stories we tell about “the wild” —i.e., the otherworld. We want the fairy-folk to be cute cuddly garden sprites, despite the fact that in Celtic folklore they are not only not-so-small, but also both dangerous and unpredictable. Tolkien wisely gave us the diminutive hobbits as our ambassadors to his otherworld, forcing his readers to identify with small protagonists because ours is an age that insists on keeping our fairy tales small as well. From a hobbit’s-eye view of things, even a domesticated otherworld can still seem mighty big and dangerous. Something similar is at work with Spike Jonze’s reimagining of Sendak’s story, where a child has to encounter some life-sized monsters. Of course, the psychological punchline is that the wild things all live inside of himself. “Inside all of us is a wild thing,” proclaims the movie’s trailer, set to a spunky, bouncy soundtrack. Guess what? Aslan is inside all of us, too, and he’s waiting to roar.

We all want Aslan to be tame, and we want God to be safe and predictable. This is the temptation behind fundamentalist religion, where God is reduced to a robotic father-figure-in-the-sky who rewards the good and punishes the bad. And then there is the God of liberal religion, who just is a big nice guy who loves everybody unconditionally and who pretends that evil doesn’t exist. Where the Wild Things Are (the movie) takes aim at both of these kinds of domesticated deities and blows them to smithereens. It may not be an explicitly religious movie, but it makes some pretty important theological statements nevertheless.

So if the Ultimate Wild Thing isn’t just a robotic dispenser of justice or a feel-good postmodern psychotherapist, then just what are we dealing with? I’m not sure I can answer this question, for after all, we are dealing with Mystery here. Part of why Aslan remains Not a Tame Lion has to do with Aslan being the Ultimate Mystery. But just as in the book version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the beavers assure the Pevensie children that while Aslan isn’t safe, he is good, I think we can start with that small measure of comfort. After all, if God isn’t good, then the universe is meaningless, and we all have to create our own good, much like Max and and the Wild Things build their fort. But without a deeper and higher meaning, sooner or later we tear down the forts we build. But some things endure, like love, compassion, noble acts of self-sacrifice for the good of others, the belief in fairness even when life seems pretty unfair. That these things persist over time, to me is evidence enough that good exists, not as a convenient human construct but as a real ontological principle, somewhere deep inside the ultimate Wild Thing. And that makes me willing to get on the boat and join Max in the adventure. Even though I suspect it will get pretty dangerous out there (or is that “in there”?).

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The Magdalene Relic

November 7, 2009 · 4 Comments

My dear readers, the veneration of saints’ relics is not a central part of my spirituality, Catholic though I may be. And I’m cynical enough to wonder if any 1st century relic can ever really be accepted at face value (I mean, just how many relics of the “true cross” are there?). However, with this disclaimer and caveat in mind, even I have to say that this is really, really cool:

A relic of St Mary Magdalene is coming to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia. Her relics have been venerated in Europe since the 2nd century. Now, Fr. Louis Marie Ariño-Durand, a Dominican priest will accompany the reliquary to the Monastery on Sunday, November 29, 2009, from 11 AM to 6 PM. The relic will be in the Abbey Church which is open to the public.

The relic is only in the United States for a limited time and the Monastery is fortunate to host it for a day. Look at it this way: if it’s an actual relic of Mary Magdalene, then… wow. And if it’s not, it still represents an interesting piece of cultural history as well as an object of fervent devotion for many centuries. So either way, this is worth putting on your calendar.

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The Promise of Paradox

November 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life
By Parker J. Palmer, with an introduction by Henri Nouwen
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008
Review by Carl McColman

The Promise of ParadoxParker Palmer’s first book almost didn’t happen. As he explains in the new introduction to The Promise of Paradox (first published in 1980 by Ave Maria Press and now reissued in a gorgeous hardcover edition by Jossey-Bass), he didn’t imagine himself as capable of writing an entire book, but when an editor pointed out to him that paradox was a recurring theme in a number of his essays and that they ought to be gathered together and published as a book, not only did Palmer agree, but he realized that he had underestimated himself: as he humorously puts it, “In a moment of satori worthy of a Zen wannabe, I realized that not only could I write a book, I already had! … The Promise of Paradox was an accidental book. But once I held a copy in my hands, I knew I could write more books if I wanted to.” So we all who love Palmer’s gentle and honest wisdom owe that editor at Ave Maria a huge debt of gratitude.

The primary weakness of The Promise of Paradox is, not surprisingly, that it reads like a collection of essays — which it, in fact, is. But this is a weakness I am happy to live with, since there is so much that is strong and good and true about this book. Although paradox is the golden thread that unites all the chapters/essays, each section brings a distinctive perspective on this central theme: from the opening essay which unpacks the concept of paradox through a look at Thomas Merton and his playful concept of being “in the belly of a paradox,” to Palmer’s creative re-imagining of the Stations of the Cross (not unlike the stages of grief), to two luminous essays on the nature and value of community, to meditations on scarcity and abundance and the spirituality of education. And so the book’s weakness is also, paradoxically, its towering strength: each of these essays stands on its own, each filled with wisdom, insight, and gently dry humor. Palmer has a perceptive and discerning mind, and is able to offer keen criticism of the foibles and blind spots of modern life without ever coming across as mean-spirited or angry. There’s not only much wisdom in what he says, but in how he says it.

In his new introduction, the author confesses to being uneasy with how much Christian language informs this 30-year-old book, not because he is no longer a Christian (to the contrary), but because he has become increasingly uncomfortable with how religious language can be divisive and exclusive and how some Christians have hijacked the language of the faith to their own political ends. Perhaps herein lies another paradox. I found myself agreeing with Palmer’s discomfort, and yet also enjoying the explicitly Christian feel of the essays themselves. I was left, by the end of the book, feeling really glad that he made no attempt to revise or rewrite the essays. Yes, it’s a problem that such language has been hijacked by those whose values seem to be at odds with Christ’s. But how wonderful it is to hear Palmer use that very language in such a Christ-like way.

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