Flannery O’Connor at Emory

Just arrived in my email:

You are cordially invited to “Down on Paper: A Reading from the Flannery O’Connor-Betty Hester Letters,” to be held in Emory’s Cannon Chapel at 6 p.m. on May 22. Actress Brenda Bynum will give a dramatic reading drawn from the newly-opened collection of 274 letters between these two women. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. Co-sponsors of the event are the Robert Woodruff Library and the Aquinas Center of Theology.

Perhaps I’ll see you there…

Breathe in, breathe out

I had this thought while driving to work this morning. It’s so obvious I’m surprised no one has built a book around it yet. Or perhaps they have, and I just don’t know about it. At any rate, this could wind up being the skeleton on which a future book proposal of mine is built…

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets (Matthew 22:37-40, NRSV).

Here is the schema for Christian spirituality. The first commandment signifies the realm of mystical spirituality: the spirituality of the mysteries. By falling in love with God, we are ushered into the Divine mysteries: the mystery of grace, the mystery of penance, the mystery of light, the mystery of deification, the mystery of ecstatic consciousness. Here we discover the image and likeness of God, engraved in our hearts.

The second commandment signifies the realm of communal spirituality: the spirituality of encountering Christ in service to the other. This is the realm of Benedictine hospitality and Jesuit spiritual guidance, of the Celtic love for nature and the Franciscan embrace of Holy Poverty.  Here we find the liberation theologian’s commitment to social justice and the charitable work of the Salvation Army or the St. Vincent de Paul society.

If the first commandment represents the spirituality of receiving from God, the second commandment represents the equally important spirituality of passing on what we have received to others.

I think it can be likened to breathing: mystical spirituality is the “breathing in” of Divine Love and Light, while communal spirituality is the “breathing out” of such love and light in our efforts to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Just as you can’t keep breathing in without breathing out (or vice versa), so too these two dimensions of Christian spirituality are absolutely dependent on each other: you can’t be a contemplative without loving the neighbor as yourself, and you won’t have love to give to your neighbor without grounding yourself in the life of contemplation.

Like I said: it’s obvious.

Entering the Castle

Mark your calendars! On June 7, Darrell Grizzle, aka Grateful Bear, and I will be teaching a class at the Phoenix and Dragon Bookstore in Atlanta, on the new book by Carolyn Myss, Entering the Castle, which is a guidebook for spiritual development based on the wisdom teachings of the Carmelite mystic Teresa of Avila. Should be a fun evening of celebrating Christian wisdom in an ecumenical/interfaith perspective.

Click here for more details about the class.

Christians and Atheists in dialogue

The Christian Science Monitor recently ran an interesting article about efforts to spark congenial, constructive grassroots dialogue between Christians and atheists. Click here to read the story.