Goals for this blog
It’s probably going to be another four or five months before The Big Book of Christian Mysticism is finished. In the meantime, as has been true for the past few months, this blog will continue to suffer from a benign neglect. However, I’ve been thinking about where I want to take the blog once I have the time to focus on it more fully and regularly.
No major changes of course — as this blog’s welcome widget states, it will continue to be “all about Christian mysticism, Celtic wisdom, interfaith spirituality, the emergent conversation, and assorted other topics.” But I was thinking it might be helpful for me to unpack that a little bit more.
So here’s what I’ve come up with, as goals for the future direction of this blog: (more…)
12 down, 31 to go
Facebook is awash with a “25 Random Facts” meme, in which individuals are asked to write 25 random facts about themselves, and then tag a bunch of their friends to do the same. In case you want to read it, my list is here.
Item #22 on my list concerns a “bucket list” — a life-long to-do list, consisting of key goals to complete over the course of a lifetime. I created a rather modest list along these lines when I was 30; I say “modest” because I had completed everything on the list within 15 years! On my “25 Random Facts” notes, I ponder that perhaps it is time to create a new bucket list; one a bit more challenging.
So, with that in mind, I have joined the 43 Things social networking site, where everything is oriented around setting up a list of goals to complete. Tonight I came up with 12 initial goals. I’m sure I’ll add more as time goes on. Some of these goals are rather simple (“pray Compline every night”), others more challenging (“learn Gaelic”). At least one goal — to live in Asheville — I don’t expect to complete for at least another decade.
Anyway, here’s my list: http://www.43things.com/person/mccolman
If you’re on 43 Things, let me know. Perhaps we can join forces and help each other’s dreams come true!
Just for fun…
Buying my books
I’ve received a request as to the easiest place to find all my books. The answer, of course, is Amazon… and to make it easier on anyone who wants to buy my books, here’s a link you can use: http://astore.amazon.com/earthmystic
Indeed, please use this link — if you make a purchase through that link (of any Amazon product, not just books by me), I’ll get a wee little commission. Help an undernourished writer, the next time you shop at Amazon! You’ll be glad you did. 
Just to make it fun, I’ve also added short lists of books, DVDs, and both classical and popular CDs that are among my favorites. So if you want to see what’s rattling around in my head media-wise, just follow the above link and have fun.
Best University’s 100 Fascinating Celtic Blogs
Check out this link: Best University’s 100 Fascinating Celtic Blogs. My humble blog is on the list.
My vision for the Website of Unknowing basically involves four key topics: Christian mysticism, the emergent conversation, interfaith spirituality, and Celtic wisdom — as well as book/movie/CD reviews of titles related to the above. But since I’ve been writing a book on Christian mysticism (and mysticism is a topic of interest to both the emergents and the interfaith crowd), I’ve really rather been neglecting the “Celtic” dimension of this blog. But I’m happy that the good folks at Best University felt it was nonetheless Celtic enough for inclusion on their list. I do hope that after the book is finished (should be by the middle of this year), I can pay more attention to things Celtic again, both in my personal spiritual practice as well as here on the blog.
“Best University” appears to be a new site devoted to gathering together information on different online degree programs… and also drawing up lists of cool blogs. Nice to be noticed by them so early in the game.
Their’s lots of other tasty Celtic-themed blogs on the list as well. So go check it out.
Douglas Kmiec on Obama and the Catholic Blogosphere
…Right-wing Catholic bloggers, acting as a thinly disguised political front for the GOP, remain fixated on the goal of precipitating an unnecessary war between the Holy See and America’s next administration. It is dismaying to see a few American prelates and their “anonymous” Vatican commentators acting as witting or unwitting coconspirators in this divisive action.
Obama himself has written that the golden rule tells us that we “need to battle cruelty in all its forms, [with] the value of love and charity, humanity and grace.” Even spinning a pervasive web of falsehood, the right-wing Catholic blogosphere is no match for the self-evident truth of that golden rule-nor would its bloggers want to be, were they to indulge a microsecond of charitable thought before hitting the send button.
The above quotations come from Douglas Kmiec’s new article in Commonwealth, called A Tangled Web: The Election and the Blogosphere. Kmiec is the author of Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Right Questions About Barack Obama. Kmiec, an attorney who served in the Reagan administration, offered in his book a carefully nuanced argument about why Catholics, even while remaining faithful to the church’s opposition to abortion, could in good conscience support Obama. Kmiec certainly helped me in the formation of my conscience as a voter this election, and I suppose his work helped many others, since 54% of Catholic voters supported Obama. But as a Catholic who so publicly supported the Democratic candidate, Kmiec paid a price — he was routinely vilified in the Catholic blogosphere.
In his Commonwealth article Kmiec tells the story of that vilification, partially defending his own position and partially challenging the extreme Catholic right to leaven their hatred with some Christian charity — and humility. Even if you’re not a Catholic, I think it’s an article well worth reading, as it touches on the question of how our public discourse can have ramifications far being whatever issues we might be discussing. In other words, while the hard Catholic right sees itself as a faithful minority fighting a holy war on behalf of the unborn, their rhetoric of division and contempt could actually be undermining Catholicism and its overall role in public discourse. After all, who wants to be the member of — or even politically affiliated with — a religion that is all about hating its enemies? And this, unfortunately, seems to be the message about Catholicism that certain segments of the Catholic blogosphere seems hell-bent on proclaiming.
The Great Emergence
The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why
By Phyllis Tickle
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2008
Review by Carl McColman
The cover of this book— featuring four images of Jesus, cobbled together to kinda sorta create a composite image of the Christ — is a hint about where Phyllis Tickle ultimately takes her introductory survey of emergent Christianity. This is a useful and often entertaining, if not entirely satisfying, short overview of the historical forces that have led to what is probably the most controversial movement within American Christianity today, particularly in the evangelical world. Emergent (or emerging, both variants get used, it seems interchangeably) forms of Christianity are diffuse, decentralized, and therefore somewhat maddeningly impossible to pin down, but the easiest simple definition of this phenomenon would be “the expression of Christianity that has emerged following the encounter between the faith and the postmodern world.”
Naysayers argue that Christianity doesn’t need to be shaped or influenced by postmodernity, any more than the Republican party needs to be influenced by Barack Obama. But this kind of purity-driven rejection of anything perceived as “un-” or “not sufficiently” Christian has been around since the early days, when some of the church fathers tried to engage in dialogue with the Greek philosophers while others rejected such efforts as threatening to Christian identity. Similar tensions have arisen around Christianity’s engagement with science, modernity, Eastern religions, and now postmodernity. Phyllis Tickle avoids any hint or moralizing or sermonizing and does not try to weigh in on whether postmodern expressions of Christianity is a good thing or not — although her upbeat assessment of how the faith holds a “rummage sale” every five centuries or so (she sees the flowering of monasticism in the sixth century, the great schism in the eleventh, and the reformation in the sixteenth, as pivotal events in Christian history, and asserts that “the great emergence” of the 21st century will stand alongside those earlier transformative events) suggests that she is pretty much affirming of the emergent conversation.
Tickle is a natural born storyteller and she truly shines when she simply and succinctly traces the history of the social, cultural, scientific, religious and spiritual events over the last century or so that have culminated in the roiling transformation of Christianity that she calls the Great Emergence. (more…)
I’ve become Twitterpated…
I’m on Twitter now: www.twitter.com/earthmystic
So if you’re on Twitter too, let me know!
Soularize
Just a quick post this morning, as I want to get some work done on the book before I go to the monastery… I’ve been listening to recordings of talks given by Richard Rohr from the Soularize 2007 conference, which are anthologized in a collection called Soularize in a Box, Volume II. If Rohr’s talks are any indication, the entire anthology must be dynamite. I’ll write more after I listen to more; but in the meantime, I thought I’d throw up a link here to encourage you to check it out for yourself.
Richard Rohr on the Emerging Church
Here’s a video teaser in which Spencer Burke (off camera) chats with Richard Rohr about some of ideas underpinning the upcoming The Emerging Church conference in March, which is basically a “gathering of the tribes” — Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, Evangelical — for a weekend of visioning and community-building.
I must confess to sharing the sense, that Rohr speaks of in this video clip, of sometimes feeling more at home with non-Catholics who are engaged in the emergent conversation, than with my fellow Catholics when they seem to be invested in a neo-conservative attempt to roll back Vatican II — preferring a nostalgic view of the church, to the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course, there are those Anglicans, Protestants and Evangelicals who appear to prefer idolatrous ecclesiologies to the gospel as well, so that problem is not limited to Catholics by any stretch. But hopefully, in bringing together Christians of different “tribes” who share a common hunger to discern the will of the Holy Spirit, we can all be nurtured in a shared sense of our call to be the body of Christ in our day.
Facebook?
Hey, if any of my old LJ friends are now on Facebook, and want to stay in touch with me, here’s how to find me: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=590663568
The Ex-Philes
On the last day of 2008 I had a dream about an ex-girlfriend. This was someone I dated for about a year, some 20 years ago. It was an intense, passionate relationship and we were even briefly engaged. The romance fizzled after I took a new job and relocated out of town. In my dream, I ran into the woman, and profusely apologized for all the mistakes I had made in the relationship. The dream was so vivid and moved me so much that I looked her up on Facebook, and found her, and sent her a message.
Two days later I ran into her, in person. It was such a weird coincidence that I was literally left speechless — I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, and she didn’t recognize me so of course she said nothing either. But later on she did respond to my Facebook message and we’ve corresponded a couple of times since then, with a gentle, gracious exchange.
Meanwhile, a couple of days ago, someone else whom I had once briefly dated appears out of nowhere and friended me on Facebook.
Then today, yet another ex emailed me and asked if she and a friend could crash in our house while en route to Florida next month!
Each of these women had more or less dropped out of my life. I’ve been married for over 15 years now, which means I haven’t seen any of these three since 1993 at the latest. And while I harbored no bitter feelings toward any of them (I can’t speak for their feelings toward me), naturally the awkwardness of being “exes” had, in each case, worked against ongoing friendships.
But you know, they’re all fascinating, beautiful, intelligent women (I wouldn’t have been attracted to them otherwise). So, naturally, encountering them again revives in me an understandable sense of being interested in who they are. I’ve always admired people who have managed to maintain meaningful friendships with their exes. Perhaps all of a sudden I’ve been given the chance to cultivate some nice friendships along those lines?
My wife is the kind of person who doesn’t get threatened by stuff like this — we’ve got a great marriage and we both know it, and part of its beauty is the space that we each have to enjoy meaningful friendships even with persons of the opposite sex. Of course, none of these women will suddenly be major players in my life: two of them will at the most only be Facebook friends, and the third is someone we’ll just see for two nights while she’s traveling. Still, that they would all show up within two weeks is, well, kind of freaky.
In my Pagan days, I would have chalked this up to something going on astrologically or karmically. I don’t think that way anymore, but I still have a sense of kismet: as if I were destined to spend the first few days of 2009 checking in with some old sweethearts. Perhaps we live in a random cosmos, and this was just a complex coincidence that came my way — this, instead of some other coincidence, like winning the lottery (sigh). And perhaps there’s a lesson in here somewhere. And no reason why both of those “perhaps’s” couldn’t be true. But if there is a lesson, I suspect it’s about the importance of friendship, the necessity to apologize even for old mistakes, and finally the wisdom in letting go of the past, to allow the present to bring whatever surprises it entails into our lives.
Here’s to letting go and allowing!
See you in Albuquerque?
Fran and I just registered for the Center for Action & Contemplation’s The Emerging Church conference, which will take place in Albuquerque, NM on March 20-22, 2009, and will feature the likes of Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Phyllis Tickle, Shane Claiborne, and other cool folks.
We are very excited.
Would love to see some Website of Unknowing readers at the conference — so if you’re going, let me know.
Secretary of the Arts
This arrived in my email inbox this morning…
While I could see some problems with this, my guess is that it would be more good than bad.
Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President-Elect Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts. While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position. Those in the arts need this and our country needs the arts now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.
Click here to sign the petition.
After the Magic (Four Years Later)
This evening, Google Alerts alerted me to the following critique of my conversion to Catholicism. It comes from a blog called Meanderings Along Ancestral Pagan Paths, by someone who goes by the handle of “Ancestral Celt,” and includes a quote from a members-only Pagan site called An Fianna:
…I cannot understand Mr McColman’s reasoning for Catholicism: the magic left, meditation didn’t work anymore. As someone else recently said:
‘The magic left?’ So what about the catholic priest who claims to magically transform a wafer and a few drops of vino into the body of his God, by way of some mumbled mystical mutterings? Meditation didn’t work anymore? So what about the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, compliments of ‘Saint’ Ignacius De Loyola? Or the mind numbingly boring constant repetitious prayers of the rosary before a plaster catholic idol of your choice? (Source: An Fianna)
It like giving up a diet because you’ve hit a plateau, isn’t it? Or, am I completely missing the point?
Well, I don’t know if “Ancestral Celt” is completely missing the point or not, but my decision to forsake Paganism for Catholicism entailed a lot more than just my dissatisfaction with Pagan-themed meditation or magic (although that was certainly part of the adventure). To push Ancestral Celt’s diet analogy, when I hit my “plateau,” I didn’t give up dieting, but I did switch diets. After four years, I have no regrets, so — for me at least — it was the right choice.
Meanwhile, the quote from “An Fianna” displays precisely the kind of rote anti-Catholicism/Christian-bashing found in some corners of the Pagan world, that I chafed against for quite some time, even before I became interested in the Catholic Church. (more…)
Some Things Last
Fran and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Everyone is comparing it to Forrest Gump, but I think it’s more like what would happen if you put Big Fish and Into Great Silence into an Osterizer. Benjamin Button, wrinkles and all, would pop out once the blending was done.
I commented on my Facebook status last night that I thought Benjamin Button was the finest contemplative film since Into Great Silence, and a couple of folks have questioned that assesment. So I thought I would write a bit about it. Read on (there are spoilers here, so be forewarned) if you’d like my take on why old (young?) Mr. Button could very well be the contemplative hero of our time: (more…)
Quote for the Day
Because He is in the little house of our being, we will learn to control our minds, to gather our thoughts to silence, and to crown them with peace, just as we learn to control our voices and to move softly when a child is asleep in the house of brick and mortar.
— Caryll Houselander, The Reed of God
Vegan Atlanta
I don’t know if I can call it a “New Year’s Resolution,” since it’s not really tied in with the changing of the calendar. But one goal I have is to get to know more people who keep a vegan diet. And to that end, I’ve found these resources for Atlanta-based vegans:
- Atlanta Vegan Activity Group
- Atlanta Vegetarian and Vegan Meetup
- Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe
- Vegan Atlanta
- VegLife Atlanta on Facebook
- VegLife Blog
Here’s to a Vegan 2009!
