Aug

31

An Undivided Life

Reviews / Spirituality

An Undivided Life: Seeking Wholeness in Ourselves, Our Work & Our World
By Parker J. Palmer (interviewed by Tami Simon)
Boulder: Sounds True, 2009
Review by Carl McColman

An Undivided LifeParker Palmer is a wise and gentle teacher, and his books — such as The Active Life and The Promise of Paradox — are hailed as important works of contemporary spirituality. Ostensibly a Quaker yet clearly transcending any kind of sectarian narrowness, Palmer brings the deep contemplative ethos of the Society of Friends to his own work.

Although I’ve enjoyed reading Palmer’s writing, I’ve found this audio series from Sounds True to be singularly rewarding as a glimpse into the mind and heart of this living spiritual sage. Like Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Konsciousness before it, An Undivided Life presents Parker Palmer in the context of an interview with Sounds True’s CEO, Tami Simon. For this reason, this audiobook has an unusually intimate quality about it, and functions not so much as a teaching program but rather as an unstructured, almost rambling conversation in which Palmer comes across like nothing so much as an old, trusted friend, who is willing to take the time to share his wisdom in a relaxed and unhurried way. As an added bonus, Palmer’s voice is rich, deep, and resonant with a sense of earthy insight. The result is a listening experience that is as delightful as it is enlightening.

The key concept here, the undivided life, lines up nicely with what Ken Wilber calls the integral vision or what Richard Rohr calls non-dual consciousness. A lifelong educator, Palmer speaks of the importance of personal integrity and the willingness to orient our lives toward the deepest truths we can find within ourselves — even when such an orientation might call us to walk a path with others may not understand or appreciate. By honestly and vulnerably sharing his own repeated experience struggling with depression, Palmer ably speaks of the many forces in our lives that can serve to “divide” ourselves, such as the tendency to pursue a career that is at odds with our deepest values and desires, merely because of social or familial expectations. True spiritual health is found in our efforts to knit all the disparate elements of our lives together in a single whole, even though sometimes this might mean moving deeply into the reality of paradox, or learning to live with the soul as a wild, untamed and even “shy” part of ourselves.

Palmer is a natural storyteller, and whether he is recounting the tale of John Woolman’s struggle to lead the Quakers to take a stand against slavery, or the darkness he experienced in his own nights of depression, he knows how to make a story effortless to listen to, even as he wrings meaning out of each narrative. After five hours of hearing him speak, I felt that, without promoting a particular religious perspective or philosophical agenda, his words had truly nourished my soul.

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Aug

31

Mysticism in San Antonio

Announcements / Christian mysticism / Christianity / Formation / Spirituality

I’ve just now learned about a program that looks really wonderful: A consortium of organizations in San Antonio, TX, including the local chapter of Contemplative Outreach, the Oblate School of Theology, and a local Ecumenical Center, have joined forces to sponsor a three year program called Christian Mysticism: History, Wisdom and Insights. The program consists of a monthly series of Saturday morning sessions that include a presentation on a major mystic or school of mysticism from throughout the history of Christian spirituality, along with time for group discussion and the practice of silent prayer. They have quite an impressive array of presenters, including Ronald Rolheiser, Carl Arico, Wendy Wright, and Susan Muto. The program is not onerously expensive ($200 per year), and those who stick it out for three years will receive a thorough grounding in the sweep and grandeur of the Christian contemplative tradition.

Here’s the syllabus:

Year 1: Foundations to the Early Middle Ages
• Introduction to Christian Mysticism: The Mystical Jesus.
• Mysticism in the Hebrew Scriptures
• Mysticism in the New Testament: John and Paul
• Desert Fathers and Mothers
• Origen and Clement of Alexandria
• Augustine
• Cappadocian Fathers: Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa
• Benedict
• Celtic Spirituality: Matter Matters

Year 2: Christian Mysticism During the Classical Period
• Franciscan Spirituality
• Pseudo-Dionysius and Eastern Mysticism
• Meister Eckhart and John Ruusbroec
• Ignatius of Loyola
• Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich
• Dominican Spirituality (Dominic and Catherine of Siena)
• French Mystics (Francis de Sales, etc.)
• John of the Cross
• Teresa of Avila

Year 3: The Modern and Contemporary Period
• Russian Spirituality
• Protestant Mystics (the Quakers, William Law, etc.)
• Thérèse of Lisieux
• Psychology and Spirituality
• Simone Weil
• Thomas Merton
• John Main
• Bede Griffiths
• Christian Mysticism Today

While I don’t think it’s perfect (e.g. not enough attention paid to Eastern Orthodoxy, or to the Cistercians, the Beguines, or Guigo the Carthusian), it’s still an awesome syllabus, and I for one am jealous for not living in San Antonio. But maybe something like this could be put together in Atlanta. What do you think?

Here’s the website about the program: www.christianmysticismsa.org. If you live in San Antonio, I’d encourage you to sign up.

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Aug

30

Beloved Dust

Books / Christian mysticism / Christianity / Reviews / Spirituality

Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life
By Robert Davis Hughes, III
New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008
Review by Carl McColman

Beloved DustI’ve quoted from this wonderful book more than once in this blog. Now the time has come to write a more in-depth review of it. First, a disclaimer: I’ve known Bob Hughes since the late 1980s, when I managed the campus bookstore at Sewanee: The University of the South where Bob teaches theology. I learned a lot from Bob back then, and so I approached the book with the assumption that it would provide an in-depth examination of its topic. It more than lived up to my expectation.

As Bob himself put it, this book aims to be “the first fully constructive spiritual theology since before Vatican II.” Beloved Dust: Tides of the Spirit in the Christian Life begins with about seventy pages devoted to surveying the history of spiritual theology (also known in earlier times as mystical theology or ascetical theology), particularly unpacking the reasons why mysticism became marginalized after the Reformation, and why the entire discipline of spiritual theology more or less collapsed after Vatican II, largely because trends in ascetical theology in the early to mid-twentieth century were essentially rendered obsolete by the council. Of course, even if theologians and the church at large were not paying much attention to a theology of the Spirit, the Spirit himself (or herself, as Hughes clearly prefers the ancient Syriac rendering of the Holy Spirit as feminine) was on the move, as evidenced by the post-conciliar explosions such as the charismatic renewal, the interest in Christian meditation and centering prayer, the growth in oblate and lay monastic associations, and the increased (actually, emergent) interest among lay Christians in the writings of the classical mystics (of which my own work post-2005 is but a modest example). Hence, Hughes correctly discerned a need in the larger discourse of the Christian community: a survey of the issues and concerns related to the theology of the Holy Spirit, anchored in the tradition but fully engaged with the issues of our time. This is what Beloved Dust sets out to do. And while I may lack the academic knowledge or credentials to identify any specific scholarly weaknesses in Hughes’ argument, speaking as a layperson for whom spiritual theology is deeply relevant to my own identity and practice as a Christian, I’d say this book is not only a splendid compendium of the first two thousand years of Christian spiritual wisdom, but it offers plenty of food for thought to nourish us as we move forward into the third millennium.

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Aug

29

Does Julian of Norwich ride MARTA?

humor / photography

My friend Jason Herman saw this recently at the Martin Luther King Memorial MARTA Station (MARTA is Atlanta’s public public transportation authority). In his words: “I found Julian of Norwich at the King Memorial MARTA station! Well, I guess they didn’t have the phrase ‘OK’ back then, but still… ‘All manner of things will be OK.’”

jason-kingmemorial

I find it rather amusing that this unlikely paraphrase of Julian’s most famous quotation would adorn a fire extinguisher — after all, Julian’s optimistic theology and visionary understanding of the love of Christ is only of the best “fire extinguishers” I know of.

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Aug

28

Carolina Liar: Telling the Truth

Music / Spirituality

Since I’m such a public radio junkie, I’m not too dialed in to popular music these days. But the other night I was in Publix and the song from the following video was playing over the store’s sound system and I had to stop and listen. Unless I’m really missing something, I’d have to say that this is one of the most spiritually honest songs I’ve heard in a while: kind of a rejoinder to U2′s “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” which — hard as it is to believe — is now a generation old. Spirituality starts with a gnawing yearning for what C.S. Lewis called “I know not what,” and I think this is a lovely statement of such ineffable desire.

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Aug

27

Quote for the Day

monasticism / Quotations

A monastery can never be merely an escape from the world. Its very purpose is to enable us to face the problems of the world at their deepest level, that is to say, in relation to God and eternal life. Everything in the monastic life down to the deepest level has to be viewed from this angle.

— Bede Griffiths, The Golden String

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Aug

27

The Word as Icon

Bible / Spirituality

During my tenure as an Episcopalian, some of my friends and I used to refer dismissively to Biblical fundamentalists as Bibliolators — those who make the Bible into an idol, worshiping it (and their particular way of understanding its words) rather than the Word of whom it testifies.

Nowadays I’m inclined to see such name-calling as not particularly useful (and not evidential of much in the way of Christian charity), but I continue to have some concerns about the human capacity to turn anything — even the Bible, even the church, even the Blessed Sacrament, anything — into an idol, misplacing our worship toward a thing that we think we can control, instead of toward the untameable, out-of-control God who is not only beyond all human capacity for manipulation, but who remains even beyond the limits of human thought and reason and imagination.

Let’s face it. Highly educated liberals can idolize their historical critical method or Jesus seminar skepticism as much as a relatively unsophisticated fundamentalist can idolize his or her naive reading of the text. So, in the spirit of Matthew 7:3-4, perhaps instead of worrying about how others might turn Sacred Scripture into an idol, I/we all need to focus our attention instead on how to approach the text so that it functions not as an idol, but as in icon.

If an idol diverts our worship away from the living God toward a useless cul-de-sac of superstition or imagined control, then an icon functions as a luminous “window onto heaven,” directing our gaze and our love through and beyond itself to that which can never be contained by anything of human design.

I think the key to understanding the difference between an idol and an icon lies in control. An idol is something we seek to control, whether consciously or unconsciously. We bargain with it, we perform superstitious rituals to gain favor with it, we decide that we have it all figured out. An icon, by contrast, is something we approach in poverty and humility, conceding that we cannot control it and instead open ourselves up to be changed, transformed, illumined by it. When we encounter the icon, we open our hearts because we seek to be made new by that Divine Mystery to which the icon directs us.

My prayer for myself, and you, and all people today is that we can encounter the words of the Gospel, indeed of all Sacred Scripture, as sacred icons, that directly reveal God’s glory (Colossians 1:15-20) or even that indirectly reveal it, by pointing out how we human beings ignore it (Psalm 137:8-9). May we be transformed by the Word that pulsates before, beneath and beyond the words.

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Aug

26

Distinguishing Mysticism from Contemplation

Contemplation / Mysticism

Gary asks: “Christian mysticism, contemplative Christian spirituality, (pardon my naive position but are these different, similar or the same?)…”

Regarding the distinction between contemplation and mysticism: I do address this issue in my forthcoming book (can’t resist the plug), but briefly, I would say mysticism is an umbrella term for spirituality that engages the mysteries of the  faith (and this is a pun, for the Eastern Orthodox Churches call the sacraments the “mysteries”), whereas contemplation is a form of prayer that emphasizes silence, the surrendering of discursive language as a means of communicating with God in favor of entering the Divine darkness — the mystery of God beyond what our finite human minds can fathom — what in the fourteenth century was deemed “the cloud of unknowing.” Anyone with a passing knowledge of mysticism will recognize what an essential role contemplation plays in any form of mystical spirituality, no matter how humble or ordinary.

So they are different in the sense that mysticism refers to a type of spirituality while contemplation refers to a type of prayer; yet they are similar in that contemplation is a mystical form of prayer. Meanwhile, I think because mysticism is, in the popular mind, so associated with supernatural/extraordinary experiences on the one hand, or with occultism or new ageism on the other, many Christians are naturally hesitant to apply this term to themselves. I agree, for much the same reason why it is bad form to call oneself a “shaman”: a calling that is inherently humble (i.e., self-forgetful) would naturally be evidenced most clearly in those who do not bother to claim the calling for themselves.

On the other hand, of course, is Rahner’s comment about the Christian of the future. But if we are all called to be mystics, doesn’t this mean we are all called to enter into the darkness of contemplation? I think so. And so, for this reason, while I don’t like to call myself a mystic, I am willing to speak of myself as a contemplative (or, perhaps, an aspiring contemplative), since I do yearn to encounter God in the space before, between and beyond my faltering thoughts. Classical ascetical theology distinguishes between infused contemplation (contemplation as gift from God) and acquired contemplation (contemplation freely chosen by the human being, in grateful response to God’s freely given grace). Furthermore, contemplation is related to unitive or nondual consciousness: the space beyond words is also the space beyond dualistic or oppositional thinking. While I think it is true that we attain that degree of consciousness only through grace, I also believe it is a level of consciousness available to everyone, and therefore attainable by those who are willing to embrace it (as Richard Rohr teaches, usually through great love, great suffering, or a sustained practice of contemplative prayer).

So I think it is not inappropriate to call ourselves contemplatives, as a way of affirming our intention to respond to the mystery of Divine Love by offering our own feeble attempt at love in return, in the empty places where human words always fail.

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Aug

26

Authority and its Discontents

Emergent

Early this morning my friend Gary left me this morsel of food for thought:

God has been making, since the first word of creation, all things new, so perhaps what is never new under the sun is human behavior, driven by sin, and yet redeemable. That behavior as you commented on the previous blog response to me and reiterated above, is often at its core authority challenge. The emergent church can be an example of how each generation challenges parental/previous generational authority just for the purpose of rebelling, being different and then works to dress the challenge and their replacement in plausibility. The irony is that very action leaves open the door for the next generation to rebel again, and the previous generation actually then begins to affirm rather than reject much of the past. Christian mysticism, contemplative Christian spirituality, (pardon my naive position but are these different, similar or the same?) can inform this process by seeing beyond the coverings of generational rebellion to clarify the presence of God within and outside of history and turn people to that one constant thereby unifying generations, and I think this would apply to ‘cross-cultural’ ministry as well.

I’m glad I’m not a Catholic priest who has to hear confessions every week. It is my understanding from the priests I know that it is a singularly boring task. Sin, ultimately, is far more boring than exciting, no matter what our cultural assumptions about it might be. Indeed, this is the lie that drives addiction: anything that we can get addicted to, from cigarettes to alcohol to gambling to pornography, is fundamentally a boring experience that passes itself off as fun and exciting. Everything that is addictive is glamorous (yes, fame and celebrity fall in here as well). But a glamour is a magical illusion, and so the person who turns to glamour to assuage a hunger has to keep turning back, and feeding again and again, for no matter how much one feasts on glamour, the hunger is never satisfied — and so the addiction sets in.

But I digress. The real juice in Gary’s commentary has to do with authority — and oppositional defiance, our innate human capacity to respond to the command to “Jump!” not by asking “How high?” but by simply bellowing back “Hell no!”

It is said that the transition between modernity and postmodernity which some Christians hail (and others condemn) as the emerging conversation or “emergence Christianity” is, fundamentally, a problem concerning authority. Old categories, from the Catholic magisterium to the Anglican three-legged stool of scripture/tradition/reason to the classic Protestant reliance on sola scriptura are all under attack, mostly thanks to the twin fronts of science and secularism. Shall we circle our wagons and hope that the savages will eventually get bored and go elsewhere? Or do we dare to assume that the Holy Spirit may be prodding us to new ways of understanding authority?

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Aug

25

Yes I said Yes I will Yes

Writing

Okay, the only reason I’m quoting Molly Bloom in this post’s title is because I wanted a snappy way to say yes. But of course, I’m a James Joyce fan, so it only makes sense that Molly would show up in this blog from time to time.

My respondents to yesterday’s post (all seven of you, four more than I had hoped for) all seem to be urging me away from the idea of finding a single focus for this blog, and instead just embracing it all. Which, to be honest, is pretty much what I figured I would be doing anyway. And while Gary (an old friend from my home town church with whom I recently re-connected, thanks to Facebook) might see in Celtic Christianity, Interfaith Dialogue and Emergence Christianity a “trinity of topics,” I think I’ll just go ahead and up the ante — for really, the topical focus of this blog is a trinity of trinities:

  • Contemplative topics: Cistercian spirituality, Christian mysticism, and Celtic wisdom;
  • Active topics: Interfaith dialogue, emergence Christianity, and current events (particularly eco-justice concerns);
  • Miscellaneous topics: Book reviews, family/personal notes, and announcements of upcoming classes, etc.

Perhaps a bit contrived, but I think it begins to shed a bit of light on the kinds of conversations that I find interesting and feel eager to initiate (or participate in).

But wait, there’s more.

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