Feb

22

The Stake and the Soil

Spirituality

This thought occurred to me this morning:

So often, we approach religion as if it were a stake being used to hold up a plant in the garden. You and I and everyone else are the poor unruly plants, in need of the strong sturdy stake to provide firm, unyielding, inflexible (and completely external) “support.” This support helps the plant grow, but it also restricts the plant movement. “Conservatives” are those who think the loss of freedom is worth the chance to grow straight and tall, while “liberals” think that the freedom is really more valuable than conforming to some unbending external standard, no matter how adept it is at fostering growth in the straight and narrow.

But what if religion isn’t really the stake at all? What if the point of religion is to be the soil itself, the ground from which all life emerges? This is not to say that the stake is rendered unnecessary: stakes such as moral codes, ethical norms, and educational benchmarks could still have their use in the formation of a strong and healthy life. But those “stakes” are not the same thing as the soil, the rich, wonderful, dark humus out of which all life emerges.

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Feb

21

Quote for the Day

Quotations

Our discontent with the church is the very reason that we engage rather than pull out. Within the brokenness of the church is our own brokenness.

—Shane Claiborne, quoted in The New Atheist Crusaders
and Their Unholy Grail by Becky Garrison

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Feb

20

Quote for the Day

Christian mysticism / Quotations

Paul never conceives Christ Jesus in us in a material manner, a concrete, physical way of existing within us. He, in so many ways, leads us into the indwelling presence of Christ Jesus by maintaining always the “mystery” of God’s perfect love for us and our return of that love to God in and through Christ and the Holy Spirit. If we wish to enter into Paul’s mystical vision of our unity in love with the risen Lord, we must strenuously avoid any “objectification” of Christ’s union within us.

— George Maloney, SJ, The Mystery of Christ in You:
The Mystical Vision of Saint Paul

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Feb

19

Teach pobail

Celtic Christianity / Ireland

No, the title of this post has nothing to do with instructing indigents on how to get out of jail. It’s an Irish word that means “church.” The correct pronunciation for American English speakers would be approximately chack PO-bwil (it would more or less sound like “Jack Pobble”).

What’s neat about this word, though, is to dissect its meaning by looking at each word individually. “Teach” means “house.” “Pobail” means community (it’s a cognate of people). In other words, this Irish word for church basically means “the house of the community” or “house of the people.”

The potential cross-fertilization between Celtic spirituality and the house church movement probably needs no further commentary. It’s just nice to see how the Irish language, which of course is the native language spoken by at least two of the three persons in the Holy Trinity, is so supportive of this nexus.

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Feb

19

Personal Update…

Bass Guitar / Family / Writing

Lots of fun stuff happening in Carl-world…

  • The outline/table of contents of the big mysticism book is mostly complete. I meet again with the world’s coolest spiritual director, Fr. Tom Francis OCSO, on Friday to go over the details. This is important because once the skeleton is done I can start hanging the meat on the bones. I probably have some 30,000 words written on the book — not to mention material from this blog that will eventually find its way into the book — but I have to have a working outline before I can begin to put it all together.
  • Yesterday I signed up for bass guitar lessons! They start March 19, which is good, because my Ken Wilber class runs through March 5. I’m excited. Right now I only know how to play two little riffs: the opening riff of “Smoke on the Water” and the middle section of “Roundabout” (the section with the lyrics that begin “Along the drifting cloud, the eagle searching down…”). Obviously, I need professional help to do something other than make noise…
  • Also yesterday, thanks to some über-cool rebates and combining my DSL, cellular, and landline service into a package deal from AT&T, I was able to upgrade my phone to a BlackBerry, with only about $11 out of pocket expense and an actual reduction in my monthly phone/mobile/DSL costs. This is very exciting. I’m not the most technically up-to-date person — considering that the BlackBerry has been around since 1999, I guess that I’m finally just now crawling into the twenty-first century. I know the BlackBerry is all about email and online connectivity, but I’m mostly excited about the ability to blog and/or take notes when I’m not at a computer.
  • Thanks to my brother’s lead, my family is in the process of moving my father from Virginia to an assisted living center in Athens, Georgia. He’ll only be about a mile from my brother (which is good because my brother is retired and can spend more time with Dad) and only about 70 miles from me. This is an 87.5% reduction in the distance I will have to travel to see Dad. We’re all excited about this. The move should happen by early March.

Life is good.

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Feb

18

Green Burial Interview

nature

The “Forecast Earth” program on the Weather Channel recently aired a segment on green burials; they interviewed Billy and Kimberley Campbell of Memorial Ecosystems, who are managing the Honey Creek Woodlands green cemetery at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit.

Although Honey Creek Woodlands is on land owned by the monastery, it is an ecumenical burial site where people of any faith (or none) may be buried. For someone like me, though, it’s ideal: to be buried on monastery land, in an ecologically responsible way. Granted, dying and getting buried are at the very bottom of my to-do list, but it’s comforting to know that when I finally kick the bucket, I’ll have someplace so wonderful to go where I can push up the daisies (all organic, of course) in style.

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Feb

17

Salvation and Sacrifice

Christianity

Last night Fran and Rhiannon and I enjoyed the hospitality of three house church communities gathered for an intra-church conference this weekend in Lithia Springs. After a potluck dinner one of the church groups performed skits based on the wisdom of the letter to the Colossians. Much wonderful singing and heartfelt prayer and praise rounded out what was a delightful evening.

As an active practicing Catholic, my spiritual life is oriented toward monasticism and sacramentalism rather than evangelicalism, so it’s always an interesting experience when I participate in a non-liturgical style of worship, last night being no exception. Catholics don’t do a lot of personal testimony and sharing (that’s an understatement), so I find that evangelical worship can be quite intimate and revealing, even to a one-time guest like I was last night. At one point, one person shared an insight he had received about salvation. And in doing so, I received an unexpected insight of my own, into some significant theological differences that separate Catholics and Protestants.

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Feb

17

Quote for the Day

Current events

Every year dairy cows are artificially inseminated to produce a calf to maintain their milk production. A little over half their calves are male. Since these males cannot produce milk and the need for work animals has been replaced by machines, they are useless to the dairy farmer. Such males would grow to a size of 1200 lbs. and live 20-25 years and the cost of feeding, housing, and cleaning up after them would be huge. Therefore, the male calves are killed within a few days of birth, chained by the neck in a small, dark, cramped stall for 4-5 months and then killed for veal, or raised for 1 ½ years for beef. Because the dairy farmer cannot make a profit without killing the males, in every dairy product there is a hidden chunk of veal or beef.

— Jim Skirha, quoted in the
Christian Vegetarian Association
e-newsletter, 2/17/08

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Feb

16

With apologies to Nirvana…

Christian mysticism / Mysticism

“Here we are now, entertain us!”

It may work as the refrain of a rock anthem, capturing the postmodern spirit of a generation weaned on cable TV and video games. But if this sentiment describes the future of Christian mysticism, then I need a new topic to blog about.

Paul commended his readers to “Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5, New Jerusalem Bible) and for contemplatives, this means to enter into the same Godly consciousness that characterized Christ himself (never mind that some of the more recent translations of this verse replace “mind” with “attitude,” betraying the disenchanted, anti-transcendent, flatland assumptions of our age). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that entering into unitive consciousness is a breath-taking experience if there ever were one. But this doesn’t mean that mysticism is about experience. To say mysticism is about experience is like saying a car is about fossil fuels. Sure, you need gasoline to make the thing go, but the point is to get somewhere, not to just sit around and groove on the noise that the engine makes. Or to use another metaphor: The point behind morphine is to alleviate pain; people who take it just to get high are abusing it. In a similar vein, the point behind mystical consciousness is to become Christ in the world, loving and serving those who are victimized, imprisoned, naked, hungry, anxious, violent, terrified, ill, dying, impoverished, addicted, starving, elderly, vulnerable, weak, angry, oppressed, marginalized, self-involved, unrepentant, and otherwise wounded or broken. If we reduce mysticism to some sort of cool spiritual entertainment, then we will have become the religious equivalent of a junkie. Which means that instead of being Christ for others, we will be the ones to whom others will come as Christ…

Sorry to be so cranky about this. But I think that a lot of the hostility to mysticism that surges through the conservative corners of the church may have to do with the idolatry of experience that has infected our culture so thoroughly. Granted, you can’t have mysticism without having experience. But I’ll say it again: this doesn’t mean that mysticism is about experience. it is the means, not the end.

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Feb

15

The Choking Game

Current events

Here’s a sobering news article: The “Choking Game” has killed at least 82 children.

You can read more about the Choking Game (also called the Fainting Game and numerous other names) at Wikipedia’s entry for the “Fainting Game.” Basically, it’s a daredevil game that adolescents and even younger children play in which they submit to choking or strangulation just long enough to get a “dreamy feeling.” Obviously, this is a terribly inexact science and so dozens of youths have lost their lives looking for this momentary pleasure.

One of the continual challenges of mystical spirituality is learning how to celebrate extraordinary experiences of the Presence of God, without orienting our lives to trying to engineer such experiences. This is particularly difficult in our day, when we as a culture are addicted to experiential “highs” — even if the quest of such experience has potentially deadly consequences.

Everyone wants to feel good. We all crave pleasure and seek to avoid pain. But I think we need to reflect on what it means to live in a society where children risk death for a transitory high, and where ecstatic experience has become more important to spiritual seekers than living a holy life.

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