Oct

21

Location, Location, Location

Spirituality

It is said that there are three important concerns in real estate: “Location, location, location.” It’s funny because it’s true.

If you love to golf, your dream house is adjacent to a golf course — maybe not so close that you get golf balls flying through your windows, but close enough to walk to the clubhouse. Likewise, if you love the ocean, there’s nothing like beachfront property; if the lake is your thing, then you want waterfront property. And so it goes.

My wife and I keep going back and forth about where we want to retire. Her best friend lives in Asheville, NC, and we just love that town, nestled in the mountains and filled with more culture — and vegetarian restaurants — than you’d ever expect from a community its size. The one thing it lacks, alas, is a Cistercian monastery. So competing with Asheville is good ol’ Conyers, GA, where the Monastery is. Wherever we end up, we will be drawn there because of something (or some ones) we love.

Human axiom: we want to be close to what it is (or who it is) we love. I’m reading John Ruusbroec these days, and he speaks eloquently about being “touched” by God. We who are drawn to the contemplative life want to be touched by God. We want “God-front” property. The location we seek is God-location.

The punchline to the joke, of course, is that God is everywhere. The only thing separating “God-front” property from locations that feel or seem far removed from God is the dynamics of our own thoughts, mind, attitude, choice. When we build our house on the land we have been given, do we build it facing the lake, or do we turn it away?

Even if we build our house like a strong fortress, God can seep in through the cracks. God is funny that way. It is said that it takes more effort for our facial muscles to frown than to smile. I think the contemplative life works the same way. We work hard at being distracted. The key, it seems to me, is to learn to relax into God’s loving presence.

That’s when every location becomes a Divine location.

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Oct

20

Four sources for personal and spiritual nourishment

Christian mysticism / Christianity / interfaith dialogue / Mysticism / nature

The other day I had an insight about four essential sources for my own spiritual nourishment. I described this to a friend last night, using a cross as the visual metaphor to tie these elements together.

foursources

At the foundation of my spirituality is, of course, the tradition in which I am immersed: the wisdom teachings of two thousand years of mystics and contemplatives, united in our common devotion to the life and passion of Jesus of Nazareth. In the diagram I call this “theology and mysticism” but I think the entire culture of the Christian faith belongs here, including liturgy and sacraments, prayer practices such as lectio divina and centering prayer, the call to live a holy life, the austere beauty of the Rule of St. Benedict and monastic spirituality, and so forth. The grounding of who I am spiritually is anchored in the Christian faith.

But in order for spirituality to be “real,” it’s not just something we can learn about, it is something we must live. God is not just an idea to be a studied; God calls us into an experiential relationship — with God and with each other. To live the Christian faith means to be vulnerable to the wild and joyful leading of the Holy Spirit, who comes to us in ever-new and surprising ways. The tradition teaches us how to pray and how to meditate; and there still comes a point when we must sit down (or get on our knees) and actually do it. While I’ve placed this “experiential” dimension of spiritual nurture at the crown of the cross, this is not to say that such experience is purely a head trip — on the contrary, a relationship with God must be embodied.

So the vertical axis of the cross brings together received tradition and immediate experience. Meanwhile, the horizontal axis — the arms of the cross — reach out to embrace the world, obeying the mandate to love others as we love ourselves. For me, this takes two particular forms. On the one hand, I am continually nourished by a relationship to nature and, increasingly, to science. By this I do not mean to suggest that spirituality should be reduced to a merely empirical endeavor. But I do think science, nature, and good old fashioned common sense, can be healthy correctives to the shadow side of metaphysical speculation, which can lead to surrendering personal power to sources that are unwise or unloving. Christianity is an incarnate, embodied faith, and so it does not contradict the best wisdom from the world of science and natural philosophy. Indeed, current scientific research into meditation and human consciousness represents an exciting venue of cross-fertilization between the world’s great contemplative traditions and the human capacity to gather verifiable knowledge:  see the work of thinkers and researchers like Ken Wilber or B. Alan Wallace for more on this.

The other arm of the horizontal axis reaches to all of the world’s great wisdom traditions that emerge from sources other than Christianity. Mysticism is not just a Christian phenomenon, it is a world phenomenon, and the testimony of amazing spiritual journeyers from around the world can shed light on our own path. While I am particularly drawn to Celtic wisdom and Buddhism, the wisdom teachings of Vedanta, Taoism, shamanism, Judaism (particularly Kabbalah) and Islam (including Sufism) all belong here as well. Engaging in constructive dialog with other traditions does not need to imply lack of fidelity to one’s own path: on the contrary, it can be a powerful way to deepen the practice to which we are already committed. This has certainly been my experience.

Finally, one of the most important dimensions of any spiritual practice — community — is represented by the circle in the Celtic Cross. In other words, community is something which encircles and encompasses all four dimensions: we encounter community in the tradition, in experiential spirituality, and in the larger community of naturalists/scientists and practitioners of other paths. Community is essential all the way around.

So there you have it. It’s very  personal, so I don’t know how useful this diagram would be for others. Some might think nature belongs at the bottom rather than Christianity, and I can see the logic of revising the diagram that way. But since I have committed myself to the Christian tradition, I thought it makes the most sense to place Christianity at the foundation. Nature, off to the side, is not meant to be marginal, but is meant to include the entire sweep of natural reality, encompassing both material and spiritual dimensions of reality (I see “matter” and “spirit” not as two separate entities, but rather as two dimensions along the continuum of the cosmos).

So, I hope this is helpful. Perhaps you can come up with your own diagram of the sources for your personal and spiritual nurture?

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Oct

19

God is love (and the Eskimo words for snow)

Bible / Spirituality

There’s a popular urban legend that the Eskimo have many words for snow. It’s kind of like saying “Europeans have many words for water” — there is more than one language among the Inuit, and even within one language, often various words are employed to describe similar phenomena: think of the English words river, rain and ocean, for example. The urban legend persists, though, because it asks an interesting cultural question: how do languages evolve to parse out distinctions in meaning? The Urban legend maintains that there are so many Eskimo words for snow because the Eskimo live in a world where snow is so prominent. If you’re surrounded by snow, so the reasoning goes, sooner or later you’ll learn to distinguish — and name — the differences between powdery snow, wet snow, icy snow, and so forth.

Yesterday I was thinking about one of my favorite Bible verses, I John 4:16:

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

God is love. That just about says it all, doesn’t it? But then, there are all those Eskimo words for snow. Just what do we mean by “love”? And how do we understand that “God” is it?

Forgive me for being rather base in my thinking, but when a hot and bothered sixteen year old boy pants into the ear of his cute girlfriend “I love you,” I rather suspect that what he’s thinking about is somewhat removed from what a mother has in mind when she croons those same three words to her baby. C. S. Lewis wrote a book called The Four Loves in which he considers the distinctions between friendship, eroticism, familial affection, and agape, that Greek word (used by John in the above referenced Bible quote) which Lewis, following the Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, defines as self-sacrificing love. Incidentally, this understanding of agape is not without its critics — see Markus Vinzent’s Agape and the “Christian” Gospel. But whether we agree with Nygren and Lewis or not, plenty of questions arise as we ponder this notion that God is love. Is God all kinds of love? Is God only self-sacrificing love? What is the relationship between God and eros? Is love a “continuum of experience,” where the differences between eros, filias, caritas, and agape are differences of degree rather than of kind? And if so, what then does this say about who God is and how we relate to God?

Parker J. Palmer in The Promise of Paradox minces no words when it comes to this idea that “God” can mean different things to different people:

As far as I can tell, a person who believes that he or she speaks God’s truth in pure, unadulterated form — or believes that some other mortal being speaks that way (e.g., one of the folks whose words ended up in the Bible) — is an idolater, a person who worships false gods, the false gods of human formulation. I want to say to them, “Neither your concept of God nor mine is the same as God. It says so in the Bible, and it’s just plain common sense. So we should learn to talk to each other in hopes of understanding God — and maybe even each other — a little more deeply.”

Phyllis Tickle talks about how about every 500 years or so the church goes through a form of evolution that includes, among other things, re-thinking how we understand authority. I think Palmer’s words are emblematic of this, and signify the dawning of a new, post-Protestant Christianity, that no longer anchors authority in scripture (or in whoever has the most influence in how they interpret scripture).

I’m not sure where in the Bible Palmer sees “Neither your concept of God nor mine is the same as God,” except perhaps the verse that comes just a few lines before the one I quoted above:

No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

— I John 4:12

To me, this sums it up rather nicely. None of us have God figured out, but if we focus more on loving one another (and God), we’re way ahead of the game as opposed to the temptation to keep arguing about God, thumping our chests and jockeying to prove who’s right, while love gets thrown out the window. And that’s pretty much every kind of love.

So… I’m not sure what love is, and I certainly have no way of putting God into words. But maybe it’s like “light is a particle” and “light is a wave.” Truth is love, and truth is God. I’m not entirely sure what either of these mean, but the more I explore one, the more it sheds light on the other.

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Oct

18

In a monastery bookshop

Books / Christian mysticism

Today someone  came into the Abbey Store and walked up to me and said, “I need a book with a title like ‘The Third Alphabet’ or something like that.”

“Oh, I imagine you mean The Third Spiritual Alphabet by Francisco de Osuna,” I said. I explained to the customer that it’s not a title we keep in stock, being rather obscure even for our clientele, but I offered to special order it for her.

She said she’d have to think about it.

“If you’re interested in Teresa of Avila, it’s probably one worth having,” I said. “After all, it’s the book that Teresa herself credited as being one of the most important spiritual books she ever read.”

“You’re right,” said the customer, her face lighting up. “I attended a lecture that Susan Muto gave on St. Teresa not long ago, and she mentioned it. I’ve been looking for it ever since. In fact, you’re the first person who had any idea what I was talking about.”

I smiled. “Why do you think I work in a monastery bookstore?” I asked her, and we both laughed.

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Oct

17

Quote for the Day

Christianity / Quotations / Spirituality

The way of the cross is often misunderstood as masochistic, especially in an age so desperately in search of pleasure. But the suffering of which Jesus spoke is not the suffering that unwell people create for themselves. Instead, it is the suffering already present in the world, which we can either identify with or ignore. If pain were not real, if it were not the lot of so many, the way of the cross would be pathological. But in our world — with its millions of hungry, homeless, and hopeless people — it is pathological to live as if pain did not exist. The way of the cross means allowing that pain to carve one’s life into a channel through which the healing stream of the spirit can flow to a world in need.

— Parker J. Palmer, The Promise of Paradox

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Oct

16

Quote for the Day

Christian mysticism / Quotations

Mysticism involves not just intense forms of contact with God, of whatever duration, but also a transformed life. It is part of a process that begins, as we have seen, with acts of asceticism, reading the scripture, spiritual direction, and preparatory forms of prayer, but it is meant to spill out and over into a new mode of living.

— Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism

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Oct

15

Teresa of Avila

Books / Christian mysticism / Christianity / Spirituality

Today is the feast day of Teresa of Avila.

To honor her, I thought I’d mention a few books that newcomers to her work might find helpful.

Teresa’s writings fill three large volumes, not to mention her letters which fill up another two books. But for students of the contemplative life, three works are truly essential: her autobiography, and two manuals of instruction in prayer and mystical theology: The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle. Here are my recommendations for exploring each of these:

The Book of My Life is Teresa’s autobiography; this edition features a contemporary translation by Mirabai Starr that beautifully captures Teresa’s enthusiastic voice.
The Way of Perfection: Study Edition is from the definitive translation of Teresa’s work published by the Institute for Carmelite Studies.
The Interior Castle with Spiritual Commentary features the classic translation by E. Allison Peers, along with new annotations from Redemptorist Father Dennis Billy.

The Interior Castle is one of the truly essential works of Christian mysticism. But it can be a dense and challenging work, in which Teresa’s profound theology is often as not obscured rather than helped by her rambling, stream of consciousness writing style. Thankfully, a number of contemporary scholars have written guide books to help us explore the Interior Castle. Here are three commentaries you might find particularly useful:

WLM

Entering Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren
Interior Castle Explored by Ruth Burrows, OCD
Where Lovers Meet: Inside the Interior Castle by Susan Muto

Gillian Ahlgren, Ruth Burrows and Susan Muto are all recognized as authorities on Teresa and/or on the spiritual life in general, and each of these books are accessible and handy guides to Teresa’s masterpiece.

Finally, let me wrap this up my letting the great mystic speak for herself…

The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.

— Teresa of Avila

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Oct

14

Saint Rafael Arnáiz

Lay Cistercians / monasticism

This past Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI canonized six new saints. One of them, Saint Damien of Molokai, has received the lion’s share of the attention, because Father Damien (who served a leper’s colony in Hawaii in the 19th century until he eventually succumbed to the disease himself) has been a celebrity for many years. But for members of the Cistercian family, just as exciting has been the canonization of a rather humble and largely unknown Spanish Cistercian oblate, Rafael Arnáiz Barón. Earlier this year my Lay Cistercian community read and discussed a short biography of Blessed Rafael, as he was known then; Sunday’s ceremony “upgraded” him from “blessed” to “saint,” acknowledging him as a figure worthy of admiration, imitation and veneration.

To Know How to WaitMy knowledge of Saint Rafael is admittedly pretty minimal. I know that he died young, after struggling for years with diabetes, and that he spent most of his short adult life bouncing back and forth between living at the Trappist Monastery where he was an oblate, and returning to his family’s home for periods of convalescence. His illness finally claimed him in his 27th year.

After we studied Saint Rafael, I managed to find a secondhand copy of a book of his writings published in 1964. called To Know How to Wait. It’s a small little book, mostly just filled with vignettes and brief little meditations, many rather ordinary, but a few quite luminous in their insight — for example:

God asks of me silence among my fellow men; I gladly offer it, though after all I don’t regard it as a sacrifice as the world does, since to keep the tongue quiet is to give the heart rest.

Amen.

But what I love the most about St. Rafael’s little book is, simply enough, its title: To know how to wait. It seems to me that this is a lost art. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am pretty much a babe in the woods when it comes to patient waiting. I wait pretty much only when circumstances force me to, and rarely do I embrace the opportunity to wait: mostly I just chafe against the situations in life where waiting is called for (at a red light, in line at the post office, looking for a check in the mail). So I don’t really know how to wait at all. It seems to me that knowing how to wait has something to do with the “meditation minutes” I wrote about a few days ago: it has something to do with cultivating contemplative mindfulness as an ongoing part of our lives. When we can do that, when we can embrace life’s interruptions and waiting-times as opportunities for silent self-donation to God, then — and only then — do we truly “know how to wait.”

Thank you, St. Rafael, for this simple little insight.

N.B. If you want to learn more about the St. Rafael, his biography has been published: God Alone: A Spiritual Biography of Rafael Baron by Gonzalo Fernandez. I haven’t read it yet, but it has been a popular title among my fellow Lay Cistercians.

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Oct

13

The Big Book of Christian Mysticism — available for pre-order!

Announcements / Books / Christian mysticism / Mysticism

I’m thrilled to announce that my forthcoming book, The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality, is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

The book won’t be published until August 2010 — but why wait? Place your pre-order now by clicking here.

The Big Book of Christian Mysticism

The Big Book of Christian Mysticism

And while I cannot say for sure that this is the final cover design — publishers will often change a book’s cover, sometimes at the last minute — I can say that I hope this is what the cover will look like, for I sure do like it. In fact, let me use stronger language than that: I love it. It anchors mysticism in the monastic tradition; it is clearly Christian without being in-your-face religious, and it has just the right touch of both beauty and mystery.

What do you think about the cover design? Please let me know, either by email or by leaving a comment here.

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Oct

12

Quote for the Day

Christian mysticism / Mysticism / Quotations

In their ignorance some think they do not desire God unless they are always calling him with the words of their mouth or else by words of desire in their hearts, as if I were to say, ‘Ah, Lord, bring me to your bliss’, ‘Lord save me’, or something of this kind. These words are good whether sounded in the mouth or formed in the heart, for they stir a man’s heart to the desire of God. Nevertheless, a pure but wordless thought of God or of any spiritual thing — virtues, the manhood of Christ, the joys of heaven, or the understanding of holy scripture — may, with love, be better than any such words. For a pure thought of God is a true desire for him, and the more spiritual your thought is, the greater your desire; therefore when you pray or think about God or do any outward deed for your fellow Christian, be in no doubt or perplexity as to whether you desire God or not, for the action shows it.

— Walter Hilton (1340-1396), The Mixed Life

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