The Reverend Mark P
One of my best friends from college, who is now a UCC minister in Vermont, has begun a blog. He’s posting his sermons, mostly, although he told me that at some point he might post audio files of his sermons, which I think would be way cool. Pay him a visit, and if you leave a comment, tell him Carl sent you…
Quotes for the Day
The tragedy of modern man is that his creativity, his spirituality, and his contemplative independence are inexorably throttled by a superego that has sold itself without question or compromise to the devil of technology.
…
The contemplative seeks to liberate his soul from all external control, to purify and detach it from material, sensual, and even spiritual compulsions, and to surrender it to the truth and creative freedom of the Holy Spirit.
Patheos is Live!
If you haven’t already been there, go visit www.Patheos.com. I think the best way to describe this site is “Facebook meets the Library of Alexandria.” It’s a Web 2.0 social networking site embedded within an evolving, peer-reviewed library of articles about the world’s major wisdom traditions, covering beliefs, spiritual practices, ethics, history and organizational structure. Basically, all you need to know to get a basic understanding of major wisdom and religious traditions from the world over.
I contributed to the content for the Paganism section — the first major Pagan-oriented project I’ve worked on since 2004! It felt like old-home week. Even though I’m no longer a practicing Pagan, Patheos’ commitment to fair and objective exploration of all the world’s wisdom traditions gave me a structure in which I could write about nature-based spirituality in a congenial and balanced way. Of course, there are other contributors to Patheos’ Pagan pages who are current practitioners. Meanwhile, although I did not contribute any of the peer-reviewed content on Catholicism or Christianity in general, I’ve begun a few discussions on the Catholicism page, and it would be lovely if some of my blog readers popped in to contribute a thought or two.
When you set up your Patheos profile, send a friend request my way. My Patheos profile name is (of course) Anamchara. I’ve also created a group on Patheos for conversation on Christian Mysticism that needs members — how about you?
Quote for the Day
Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men.
Thoughts on Abundant Living (John 10:10)
A friend of mine who is a theology student at Emory asked me this weekend how I understood John 10:10: In which Jesus says that he came so that we may have life, and “have it abundantly.”
This is my reply to her…
Regarding your question, the Greek word for ‘abundantly’ is, as you know, perissos, related to peri from which we get words like “periphery” and “perimeter.” This seems to have a connection with place and location, and my Greek dictionary suggests that it has connotations related to “neighborhood” or “vicinity.” This makes me think of the Irish word tuath, which has a rich meaning related both to “community” but also to “land” — since a tribe or community is, in Indo-European cosmology, intimately related to the land on which they dwell. There is a symbiotic relationship between a people and their land, a consciousness which I fear we have lost in our society, where land is seen as a commodity to be exploited, owned, used, or bought and sold, rather than something teeming with life, in which we are bound in living trust (think “Garden of Eden” or “New Heaven and New Earth.”) All this is to say that I see Our Lord’s notion of “life abundant” has to do with this idea of a fully enriched life, lived with loving and joyous relationship with land, where we consciously and intimately nurture the land entrusted to us, to its (her?) maximum fertility, not only feeding us but also feeding all the wonderful living beings with whom we are privileged to share the land — and in our care for the land, we actually contribute back to the land’s ongoing fertility so that as we grow in our health and “wealth,” so too does the environment in which we live in a conscious and spiritual relationship.
I put the word “wealth” in quotation marks because I think wealth has become a dangerous word, mainly because we tend to think of wealth in terms not of living in harmony with our environment, but rather in terms of what we can extract from the land to our egoic advantage. Whether this means mining shiny metals to adorn ourselves, converting non-renewable resources into consumable fuels, or transforming other resources into objects that we will rather quickly discard into landfills (!), we have, I think, a horribly impoverished notion of what constitutes wealth in our society. See www.thestoryofstuff.com for more on this topic. So I think we won’t have any idea of what Jesus’ vision of perissos (abundance) is, until we perform radical surgery on our current ideas of wealth and prosperity, built as they are on competitive economics (the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) and on unsustainable exploitation of the environment.
Ironically, I believe the abundant life that Jesus promises may actually entail a simplifying of the life that many of us Americans have become accustomed to living. I think true abundance will mean a society based on sustainability, simplicity, and shared wealth — not in a Marxist, managed economy sense, but in a relational, familial/tribal, we-love-each-other-so-we-naturally-take-care-of-each-other sense. I don’t believe “abundant” life means everyone has exactly the same amount of “wealth” or “stuff” — I suspect there will always be ambitious types and then others like me who are too busy having fun to bother with making money!
But I think in Jesus’s vision for abundant living, the difference between the haves and the have-nots will be far less dramatic than what we see today.
Now, lest I come across as too much of a materialist in my reading of John 10:10, I should also add that I understand “abundant Christian life” in terms of the joys of spiritual practice — from contemplation to the Divine Office to lectio divina — and so, when I talk about the “abundant living” of a network of right relationships (human to human, and human to environment) it’s important to remember that the key to this abundance is Christ’s presence in the midst of all our relations: the “human to God” relationship which holds all other relations together.
If you’d like a far more eloquent exploration of these ideas, look at Brian McLaren’s book Everything Must Change.
Come Alive! (Howard Thurman meets Michael Noyes & Fran McColman)
I’m delighted to announce that my good friend Michael Noyes has created a new work of calligraphy that features a photograph by my wife, Fran.
The piece includes a wonderful quotation by the African-American mystic and theologian Howard Thurman, who was a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., among others:
Do not ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive and do that.
Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive!
At the bottom of the print is a photograph of a lotus that Fran took in the summer of 2004, when we visited the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. Fortunately, we had made a CD-ROM of all the photographs from that trip, so when our house was burglarized last year and our computers (with all of Fran’s photographs on them) were stolen, the Arboretum photographs were some of the ones we thankfully still had.
And now one of those photos has been joined to Michael’s graceful calligraphy and Howard Thurman’s words of timeless wisdom.
If you’d like, you can purchase prints (framed or unframed) at Michael’s website, by following this link: www.michaelnoyes.com/product.php?id=196
While you’re at it, browse around Michael’s site. He’s created a truly beautiful collection of inspirational and religious calligraphy, available both as prints and as greeting cards.
And when you make your purchase, tell Michael that Carl sent you.
Show us yer haggis!
This could be the hottest thing since the Macarena…
Thanks to Terry Buchanan of the Clan Buchanan Society of Atlanta for pointing this one out to me. Here’s what Terry says:
This wee song is way too fun! It was released on 23rd March 2009 by Alva Academy & its associated primary schools. On 1st April 2009, just over a week later, it reached number one in the Scottish charts. The song was written by D. Clifford & S. Clyde. Enjoy the song and the video.
Hae the lyrics:
“SCOTLAND’S got a dance for you, it’s funky and it’s new,
So don yer kilts and fill yer boots, we’re bringing it to you.
You can do it on yer own, in pairs or do it in a crowd,
But wherever you do it, you gotta do it proud.
Show us your haggis, raise your right arm to the sky,
Stand on one leg, flip it round and shout ‘och aye.’
Saltire for Scotland, and hoik it to the right,
And grab yer neebors shoulder, and nessie through the night.”
Jesus & Mom
Happy mother’s day, to everyone who either is a mother or has one.
Last night I read something truly sad, in the Atlanta Creative Loafing‘s “Streetalk” column, where local folks get a chance to answer all sorts of ironic or cynical questions and have it printed in this weekly arts-and-entertainment paper. This week’s twisted query was “How did your mother screw you up?” A young woman named Celia offered this heartbreaking response:
She made me watch The Exorcist when I was 5 and told me that was going to happen to me if I didn’t pray. I was devastated. The Exorcist is no longer a scary movie — but every time I hear the soundtrack I do get a little frightened. She also told me that Jesus was watching me at all times, so when I was in a room by myself I was afraid to do something bad. I am now agnostic. And I’m afraid of Jesus Christ.
As Neo would say… “Whoa!” At least in the circles I travel, few people ever seem to talk about how crucially important mothers are to the initial spiritual formation of their children. But as Celia attests, what a mother says (and, I suspect, how she says it) can make a lifetime of difference.
Sigh. My heart goes out to all the Celias of the world, but I’m also impelled to give thanks for all those mothers who communicate by word and example that Christ is the incarnation of love, and that God is the fountain from which issues forth all love. So I think I’ll amend my initial greeting in this post to say: here’s an extra-special “Happy Mother’s Day” wish to all the mothers who manage to rear your children without warping their ability to perceive the love of God.
Lay Cistercian Promises
Yesterday I made my simple promises as a Lay Cistercian, along with six of my friends. Three others, who already were junior Lay Cistercians renewed their promises. The promises are for one year, and need to be repeated annually for at least three years before lifetime promises can be made.
It was a lovely ceremony. We met in the monastery chapter room and, standing before the Abbot and the spiritual director of the Lay Cistercians, read our promises aloud, then signed three copies: one for ourselves, one for the Lay Cistercian archives, and one for the Monastery archives.
Here’s a picture of me signing my promises. The spiritual director, Fr. Anthony Delisi, and the abbot, Fr. Francis Michael, are sitting to the left.
After the ceremony we lingered in the cloister garden to chat with friends, including Fr. James Behrens. Here’s a picture of me, Rhiannon, and Fr. James.
Sorry no pictures of Fran — she was behind the camera!
Félix Caeli Porta
Yes, the concert last night by the Atlanta Schola Cantorum was gorgeous. And among other things, it ramped up my interest in the early medieval hymn, Ave Maris Stella. I spent a little bit of time last night and this morning looking at various translations of it, trying to find one that would work as a devotional prayer (one of my Lay Cistercian promises is to cultivate a devotion to Mary, and it seems that praying the Ave Maris Stella would be a worthy means to that end). But I couldn’t find one that I liked… so I did my own translation, reaching as far deep into the recesses of my mind as possible, to dredge up my two years of college Latin to try to put it to good use.
Here’s what I came up with…
Hail, Star of the Sea, ever nurturing, Virgin Mother of God, felicitous gate of heaven.
By the “Ave” with which Gabriel hailed you, you have established us in peace, reversing the name of “Eva.”
Loosen the chains of the guilty, send light to the blind, dispel our evil, plead for all good things.
Reveal yourself as Mother, that through you may your son, born for our sake, receive our prayers.
O singular Virgin, meek above all others, liberate us from our sin; make us meek and chaste.
Bestow a pure life, prepare a safe way, that, in seeing Jesus, we may rejoice forever.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
