A Haiku for the End of the Workday
I walk to my car.
The grounds shimmer with silence.
A lone monk strolls by.
On the Air Today — AM 1690
If you are in the Atlanta area, tune in to AM 1690, WMLB — The Voice of the Arts Radio, today at 10:30 AM and 4:30 PM. The station interviewed several Evening at Emory instructors, and I’m among them. I’m discussing the topic of “world mysticism” in light of the upcoming course I’m teaching on this topic.
If you’re not in Atlanta or can’t tune in today, eventually the talk with be archived online, and I’ll provide a link when that happens.
The Books I Would Take
Twice this week, an interesting question came up.
A few nights ago my wife had a nightmare. In it there was an unspecified terrorist attack on Atlanta, and we were forced to evacuate. We only had a few minutes to decide what to take with us. She shared the dream with me the following morning, and we talked about what would be important enough to grab: Rhiannon’s meds? My laptop? Family photos? My eyes gazed over the literally thousands of books that fill our house. I wondered, which books would I take?
Then yesterday, I read a Cistercian pamphlet called “The Tragic Story of the Lives of Our Jewish Brothers and Sisters.” It’s part of a series called Cistercian Witnesses of Our Time, about Cistercian monks and nuns of the last century or so who have been martyred or otherwise lived lives of heroic faith and virtue. This particular pamphlet tells the tale of a Jewish family that converted to Catholicism in the Netherlands during the early years of the twentieth century, with six (!) of the children eventually becoming Trappists. When the Nazis conquered Holland and experienced resistance from the bishops, they targeted Jews who had become Catholic, and five of these brothers and sisters were forcibly removed from the monasteries (in the middle of the night, of course) and eventually dispatched to Auschwitz, where they all perished.
Part of the drama of this story lies in the fact that these Jewish converts knew they were targets even before they were taken into custody. One of the sisters had previously written “I’ve put everything in order. I’m ready to leave. I only want to take these books with me (breviary, missal, New Testament, The Imitation of Christ). That’s enough for me.”
So for the second time in less than a week I was faced with this question: what books would I take with me if a crisis forced me to leave my home, possibly forever? (more…)
In Constant Prayer
In Constant Prayer
(The Ancient Practices Series)
By Robert Benson
Foreword by Phyllis Tickle
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008
Review by Carl McColman
Thomas Nelson’s “Ancient Practices Series” brings together some of the most vibrant and interesting of contemporary Christian authors (like Brian McLaren and Scot McKnight) to explore some of the venerable ways in which early Christians expressed their faith — not as some sort of museum piece, but to commend these ancient practices to the lovers of Jesus in our day. Some of current and forthcoming titles in the series unpack themes that will be familiar to pretty much any Christian, like fasting and the sabbath. But this book, by the Episcopalian contemplative Robert Benson, looks at a topic that I suspect is virtually unknown in many corners of today’s church: the Divine Office (also known as the daily office, or the Liturgy of the Hours).
For my readers who don’t know about the daily office, it is a compendium of psalms, canticles, readings and prayers, arranged for daily use, following ancient customs that have been particularly associated with monasticism (although in some churches, clergy and even laypersons are encouraged to pray the office as well as monks and nuns). What puts the “office” in the daily office is its status as the official liturgy of the church (or community) that prays it. Thus, there is a Roman Catholic Liturgy of the Hours, an Episcopal Daily Office, as well as Orthodox and various monastic versions of the liturgy.
To pray the entire liturgy is a bit of a commitment, as it consists of four to seven “offices” or specific liturgies for different times of the day. To do the whole enchilada would probably take an hour each day, or longer, given time for silent meditation and personal prayer woven into the set prayers of the day. Of course, this hour to ninety minutes isn’t all prayed at once, so a person could arrange his or her life to pray the office over the course of the day, with any one office only requiring 10 – 20 minutes of time.
Sound overwhelming? In our frantic, frenetic, non-stop culture, this kind of a time commitment seems not only daunting, but positively absurd. Maybe it’s okay for monks (or retirees), but hardly practical for the rest of us. Right?
Well, not so fast, says Robert Benson. (more…)
Facebook/Kecoughtan
Your humble blogger in 1979
In 1979 I graduated from Kecoughtan High School in Hampton, Virginia. Even though I was a nerd and a rather obnoxious Jesus freak for most of my high school years, I still have very fond memories of my time at KHS. But as I’ve written before in this blog, I tend to do a pretty poor job at maintaining old friendships. Some of my high school friendships lasted through my college years, but by the time I was in grad school my life had pretty much moved beyond Hampton, which had become to my mind basically just “where my parents lived.” I did go back for my 10th anniversary reunion in 1989, but haven’t made a reunion since… by the time I got married in 1993, not a single high school friend was at the wedding — not because of bridges burned so much as the sheer inertia wrought by the passage of time.
Anyway, about a year or so ago I discovered that two networking sites: LinkedIn and FaceBook, seemed to be fertile ground for re-connecting with old friends. And of the two, FaceBook is the better. (more…)
Microteaching
I had an interesting insight the other day.
As I’m wending my way through my midlife years, I have been playing with the “What if…” questions that I suppose haunt many people in their forties. But I guess where some people wonder “What if I really had become an artist/musician/actor/writer instead of just settling down in my career?” my questions run more along the lines of “What if I really had pursued a professional career instead of the writer’s life?”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m deeply honored to be a writer, and to be as modestly successful as I am. It’s really cool having been published, getting to do interviews, being invited to come speak to groups or lead retreats, and so forth. I love the writer’s life and am wildly thrilled and truly humbled that I have been granted this particular dream come true. But like many artistes, part of the price that I have paid as a writer has been to put my energy into my writing rather than into work that actually pays well (!), which means that, at almost 50 years old, I’m still doing work that almost any reasonably well educated 25 year old could handle — with compensation and prestige commensurate to my position.
But what if I had chosen a different path to follow? (more…)
The Beautiful Monastery
The Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia, is a beautiful place. It’s a peaceful environment, perfect for an hour, a day, or a weekend (or, if you’re a single Catholic man sensing a vocation to religious life, for a lifetime) devoted to prayer and contemplation.
Here are a few photographs I took at the monastery this past Friday.
Exterior of the Abbey Church
Inside the Abbey Church
The Monastery Lake
The Gatehouse and Monastery Welcome Center
To be “open and free” with one’s views?
Longtime readers of this blog know that I am fascinated by the atheist critique of Christianity. Sometimes that gets directed at me specifically, as in this comment — by a skeptic who posted several comments here at the Website of Unknowing, and then made the following observation about this blog on the Darkness Forum:
One of the things that bothers me about this blog and many others is that there is no real discourse between spiritualism and scepticism. Many of these people are deluding themselves by believing they’re looking at both sides of a coin when in truth they cannot do so. It’s possible to entertain a new ideology on top of your own but not if that ideology cancels yours out…Else you destroy your own original ideology by doing so. I’ve never destroyed my atheism by thinking about the world in religious terms but I find very few ‘believers’ capable of thinking about the world genuinely as an atheist would. This would risk too much. This is exactly why it is all important that people are open and free with their views or else you get no communication between theosophical groups. Just as with ethnic divisions this is a dangerous situation that promotes conflict.
Well, this is interesting. I’m not sure how possible it is for anyone — believer or skeptic — to truly and completely adopt the viewpoint of another. In other words, I am skeptical of this man’s skepticism. I think he is probably as locked into his ideology as I am locked into mine.
He appears to recoil at the thought of one ideology “destroying” another. But isn’t that part of what metanoia is all about? Of course, true metanoia goes far beyond substituting one ideology for another: it is the adoption of an entirely new level of consciousness, where not only things look different, but truly the cosmos is experienced in a new way. But unless one has actually undergone such metanoia (what in Philippians 2 is referred to as letting the mind of Christ be in you), then this will strike the observer as only so much gibberish.
One thing I am fairly confident of, is that my non-believing critic appears to have no knowledge or appreciation of the fact that the Christian mystical tradition is by its very nature deeply agnostic — it is the spirituality of darkness and unknowing. It is what I have elsewhere called Holy Agnosis, to contrast Christian mysticism from its most ancient counterfeit, gnosticism. What I think most atheist agnostics forget is that there is a beautiful tradition of Christian agnosticism, where instead of saying “I don’t know, therefore I don’t believe,” one can say “I don’t know, and yet I still devote my life to love and praise.” Beyond that, I suspect we must only judge the trees by the fruit they bear.
Finally, one nitpick: I am neither an spiritualist nor a theosophist. I do hope this skeptic will do his homework in the future!
