onehouse

Book 35 of 52: The View from the Monastery

I just realized I have a bunch of book write ups sitting in my draft folder for my 52 books from last year. I'll post them on the date I wrote them and then update it here if anyone wants to go into the time machine to have a look.

The View from a Monastery
Brother Benet Tvedten

The View from a Monastery is a lighthearted and honest take on life in Blue Cloud Abbey, "one of the monasteries where Kathleen Norris discovered the compelling world of the Benedictines" (back cover).  Brother Benet Tvedten, who entered the community in 1958, underlines the very human side of life in a spiritual community. He writes, "There are many false notions about monasticism. Pious people think we are holy. People who don't know much about religion think we are peculiar. The truth of the matter is that we are neither."

This one quote in particular has been rolling around in my tiny brain over the last few weeks. I have been wondering when it is wise to shout "Bullshit!" There is a time and a place for it but only the most foolish go around yelling it as if their nose is more attuned than the rest of the human race. But it does seem that we hold back from saying at the very least that certain things are silly and should be avoided by those seeking the kingdom. So I liked this. And you can substitute a lot of adjectives for the word "medieval".

Father Bernardine was my novitiate classmate. One day the novice master gave us copies of the Tyrocinium, a manual of piety used by novices in American Benedictine monasteries in the years before Vatican II. When Father Bernardine came to the section on sensuality and its prohibition of a monk's smelling flowers and petting dogs, he declared, "This is a lot of medieval bullshit." We were all grateful to him. The novice master collected the books and we never had to use them.

Book 33 and 34 of 52: Le Petit Prince

The Little Prince/Le Petit Prince
Antoine Saint-Exupery

I read this in both French and English again having found a French version in a second hand shop this fall. I still never fail to be amused by boa constrictor drawing number one and by this paragraph in the first few pages:

"The grown-ups' response, this time, was to advise me to lay aside my drawings of boa constrictors, whether from the inside or the outside, and devote myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic and grammar. That is why, at the age of six, I gave up what might have been a magnificent career as a painter. I had been disheartened by the failure of my Drawing Number One and my Drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them."

One of the most helpful things when I was learning French was reading children's books like this and, one of my favorites, Petit Nicolas. This book has been around for over 60 years so I don't have much to add to the chorus except go ahead and read it.

You can read The Little Prince online but it's not as much fun as lying on the couch and reading it out loud to someone or no one in particular in the language of your choice.

Book 32 of 52: The Educated Imagination

The Educated Imagination
Northrop Frye

"The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life,then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in."
- The Educated Imagination

I borrowed this from a friend's bookshelf. I've never read anything by Northrop Frye even though he has been recommended to me. I always enjoy The Massey Lectures, our annual Canadian lecture series broadcast on the radio and put in book form since 1961. This book is the lecture from 1962 so this was a good way to read a little Frye.

Anansi who publishes The Massey Lectures introduces the book this way:

"What good is the study of literature? Does it help us think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it?" Written in the relaxed and frequently humorous style of his public lectures, this remains, of Northrop Frye's many books, perhaps the easiest introduction to his theories of literature and literary education."

A good quote:

So you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they're so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can't see them as also possibilities. It's possible to go the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

And this quote, seems to apply to many things from all kinds of boxes be they religious, political, or artistic:

What we express badly, we do not know.

Book 31 of 52: Nutritional Healing

Prescription for Nutritional Healing
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC

While I can't say I read this book from cover to cover, it was an essential reference in my focus on health for 2006. In addition to training for a 10K, I tried to pay more attention to what was going into my body. This is a slow process. I don't think I'll ever be a person who takes handfuls of vitamins but I am willing to try certain things. For example, I know from an experience several years ago that St. John's Wort does not tend to help me with seasonal lows but vitamin B makes an almost immediate and extraordinary difference. Concentrating on health does not have to be an individual effort. I have ongoing conversations with friends about the role that nutrition plays in their approach to holistic living and I can see how societal concerns about cloning, agri-industry, poisoned food and water could all become something that communities could study as part of the local and the ordinary.

This is a really helpful reference when trying to put together a reasonable vitamin regimen. You don't have to buy it new either. I have seen many copies at book sales and second hand book stores. When I head to the doctor for something, I want to be able to say that I have made an effort towards both exercise and nutrition. Doctors may be able to help investigate certain problems but they are not responsible for how I treat or mistreat my body on a daily basis. This work is an important part of the daily.

Book 30 of 52: Essential Monastic Wisdom

Essential Monastic Wisdom: Writings on the Contemplative Life
by Hugh Feiss, Order of Saint Benedict

In her foreword to this book, Kathleen Norris writes that this is "a guide I searched for in vain when I first encountered the Benedictines...". Having spent many years stumbling around the edges of Benedict's Rule and Benedictine communities, I would have to agree. Even though I spent my childhood in a certain form of christian living, much of the language in monastic and contemplative pursuits was new to me. (I spent some time in a room full of Catholic youth and they had never heard of Benedict or his rule either so I guess this is not indicative of what sector of the religion you were raised in.) There was a moment in internet history where there were very few guides, communities and blogs available and so my journey consisted of finding one small resource, one little explanation at a time. Looking back, I feel fortunate to have been able to process slowly although my feelings then were colored by deep frustration. This meant I had to take one little thought at a time - waiting, contemplative prayer, silence, solitude - and perhaps it was building a good foundation. Today a simple google search provides so many resources that those who are just beginning may feel like they under the deluge of a fire hose rather than receiving things sip by pleasant sip. More is always just more.

Hugh Feiss has created a helpful guide with concrete introductions backed up by quotes from monastic literature presented in chronological order. The back of the book introduces each of the authors with brief biographical sketches.(I am not sure why the publisher chose to put these sketches in a tiny font suitable for either Superman or Magnify Glass Boy. Strange.)

The book is divided into three parts - Ordering Time and Place, Character, and The Good Desired and Possessed. Chapter titles are simple - Prayer, Reading, Silence and Speech, Humility, etc. - and the chapters themselves are short. Simple and short do not mean simplistic and trite. This is concrete stuff and I return to it again and again. Even if you are not into this particular form of contemplative exploration, this book is worth owning.

Some highlighted thoughts:

From Chapter 6, Silence and Speech:

The first word in the Rule of Benedict is "Listen!" Monastic life is a training in the art of listening, which begins in silence, develops in attentiveness, and is perfected in communication.

From Chapter 13, Separation:

Monasticism is by definition a countercultural movement, not because monastics make it a point to define themselves against any existing culture, but because they try to maintain their own values and virtues, whatever values the surrounding culture may exhibit. At their best and wisest, monastics listen to and learn from existing culture, but they do so critically, with a preexisting understanding of who they are and who they want to be.

Book 29 of 52: My Friends

My Friends
Taro Gomi

The ever delightful Deegy gave us this beautiful board book called My Friends by Taro Gomi over the Christmas break. "I learned to explore from my friend the ant." might echo in my memory as I "encourage" the various ant colonies around the Onehouse yard to stop eating some of my plants and setting up their own onehouses indoors. 

Taro Gomi is a well known illustrator. He creates beautiful little paintings with a simple palette and does not like categorizing his art as "for children" or "for adults". (PDF interview here.)

First of all, although you use the terms “children” and “adult” unconsciously, for me, it doesn’t make any sense to make categories like “for children,” or “for adults.” I don’t know when humans began to categorize things, but in the field of art, it was great that there were originally no categories. Categorization could be a defining feature of civilization, and it has been helpful to people, but things are way too categorized now; they’ve become boring. The most boring field of all is art. In the world of painting, someone who worries about whether a painting is for children or adults has been poisoned by modern civilization. As for me, I’ve been much less affected by the poison of categorization. Also, when I started drawing, I didn’t have any awareness that I was painting “for children.” I used to be an industrial designer, but I wasn’t satisfied with the work of designing. So, I started painting for my own pleasure. Then, a friend who happened to see my paintings said, “These are drawings for children’s books,” and he sold them to a publisher. I didn’t have any particular intention of my style being an inspiration to children.

If you need a little something to push you towards play this year, try Taro Gomi's Doodles: A Really Giant Colouring and Doodling Book or Scribbles: A Really Giant Colouring and Doodling Book. Get yourself a brand new 64 pack of crayons and let loose.

Books 26 to 28: Spiritual Direction

It has been much easier to read the books than to blog about them this year. I should just lay out a list of the 52 or so books that I have chosen to highlight but I would much rather take some time to write about them so I am going to go on into 2007 because there are no big guys with guns at this blog and I can do what I would like until I hear someone say  "Leave the books. Take the cannoli."

I'll briefly round up three books on spiritual direction that were part of the reading list for my course in Vancouver this summer.

Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction
by Margaret Guenther

Episcopal priest, Margaret Guenther has created a primer on spiritual direction that is warm and accessible in tone. There is a lot of good information here for anyone investigating spiritual direction but there is a narrative as well and the more feminine examples - spiritual director as midwife - are welcome metaphors. There is also a chapter specifically for women and spiritual direction.

The Practice of Spiritual Direction
by William A. Barry and William J. Connolly

Jesuits Barry and Connolly, or the blue boys as I called them because I could only remember the cover and not their names, have a much more extensive if formal introduction to the subject. The book is pragmatic and considered a must have for those interested in pursuing the possibility of becoming spiritual directors. It's a little dry for me but I will probably read it again a few years down the road. I am not connecting with the Ignation exercises at this point even though they have been recommended to me by many people. I'm not going to worry about that as I have enough to concentrate and I guess that will work itself into my life if and when it is needed. Leave the exercises (for now). Take the cannoli.

When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions
by Sue Monk Kidd

This was an extra book on the list that I picked up and read on a break from class. I didn't like it at all. I found the writing overwrought, filled with the kind of "sun filtering through the window" phrases that are so prevalent in many earnest blogs.  I do not mean to discount the author's personal pain even if I don't understand the complete embrace of middle class North American existential angst but in the world of searching-for-self-fulfillment disguised as spiritual journey, I feel like we are consistently acting like we are 14, writing notes about our personal feelings which are personally hurt by well...everything. That boy. That kid. Our parents. Their parents. That really sad song on that CD. Our uncontrolled tumbling towards middle age and perceived obsolescence.

I know we are all wounded. I know we have all been given the gift of longing that can sometimes be twisted into obsession should our focus turn to longing itself and not the object of that longing. God knows, he hears my moaning and must wish I would change the station from time to time. I just can't relate to the way this story is told. This was written over 15 years ago and I should try some new Sue Monk Kidd but this has put me off for quite some time. I relate more readily to the elegant Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong. 

Book 25 of 52: Unholy Ghost

Unholy Ghost: Writers on depression
Edited by Nell Casey

In one of the next issues of the magazine, we hope to do a few pieces on depression. With this in mind, I picked up Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression. I have many, many friends who have or are suffering from this and I've had a couple bouts with the beast myself. Donald Hall's essay "Ghost in the House"was especially moving. He was married to poet Jane Kenyon who struggled with depression much of her life until her death from leukemia in 1995.

Artists and writers are associated more often with depression or "artistic temperaments". This is not supported by research. The fact that artists are able to express, make known such darkness through their own chosen and trained instruments of light, could make this seem true.  Lesley Dormen's description of depression as a "one-industry town" in her essay "Planet No" struck a chord with me:

One of the many things I hate about the word "depression" is the assumption of blankness attached to it, as if the experience of depression is as absent on the inside as it looks to be from the outside. That is wrong. Depression is a place that teems with nightmarish activity. It's a one-industry town, a psychic megalopolis devoted to a single twenty-four-hour-we-never-close product. You work misery as a teeth-grinding muscle-straining job (is that why it's so physically exhausting?), proving your shameful failures to yourself over and over again. Depression says you can get blood from a stone, and so that's what you do. Competing voices are an irritating distraction from the work. No wonder depression doesn't get invited out much. Not because it's not the life of the party, it knows it's not that, but because self-absorption as a work ethic is so prickly and one-eyed. That's okay with depression--it figures, who'd want to be friends with it anyway?

I don't know that I could have read this in the midst of darker days. A person who is depressed may not need to hear more about what they are already experiencing. However, through these stories, those with friends in or living on the fringes of mental illness may gain more of an understanding and respect for the complexity and frustration of this disease.

Book 24 of 52: Dialogues with Silence

Dialogues with Silence: Complete Prayers and Select Drawings
by Thomas Merton

From the introduction by editor Jonathan Montaldo:

This book is a partial harvest from over four hundred prayers collected from all of Merton's published and unpublished works. Merton's line drawings have been selected from a  collection of eight hundred drawings archived in the official repository of his work at Bellarmine University's Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, Kentucky. The drawings in this collection are, in the main, representational, and they are mostly from the 1950s. During the 1960s Merton's art would become more calligraphic and abstract and resonate with his interest in Zen and Eastern Cultures.

I picked this book up in the library during a recent trip to Edmonton. I am not usually attracted to books of written prayers but  was interested in seeing some of Merton's drawings. Altogether, this is not a book I would choose for the my own shelves since much of this is available elsewhere and my own prayer life is not in a place of words. In fact I agree with Merton when he writes:

My God, I pray better to You by breathing.
I pray better to You by walking than by talking.

A few things I want to remember:

A Prayer to Dorothy Day

O Dorothy, I think of you and the beat people and the ones
with nothing and the poor in virtue, the very poor, the ones no
one can respect. I am not worthy to say I love all of you.
Intercede for me, a stuffed shirt in a place of stuffed shirts an
a big dumb phoney, who has tried to be respectable and has
succeeded. What a deception! I know, of course, that you are
respected, too but you have a right to be. You didn't jump into
the most respectable possible situation and then tell everyone
about it. I am worried about all this, but I am not beating
myself over the head. I just think that, for the love of God,
I should say it, and that, for the love of God, you should
pray for me.

and

A Prayer to Jailed Ladies

Keep me in your pocket if you have one.

Keep me in  your heart if you have no pocket.

Book 23 of 52: Three Day Road

Three Day Road
by Joseph Boyden

I read this book in Ottawa several weeks ago. A wonderful book with a unique rhythm that should be experienced rather than described. W.P. Kinsella writes:

In 1919, Niska, an old medicine woman, ventures into civilization to retrieve one of the two boys she reluctantly sent to war. She speaks of the townspeople: "I must look a thin and wild old woman to them, an Indian animal straight out of the bush." She expects Elijah Whiskeyjack to return, but is it Xavier Bird who gets off the train. He is a mere shadow of his former self; he is without a leg, addicted to morphine, and near death. The three-day road is a journey between life and death. Niska, the medicine woman, paddles Xavier in her canoe, and as they travel, in an attempt to keep him alive, she tells him her life story. In return he tells her of his and Elijah's terrible experiences in the First World War. As they travel, hovering over them like a dark cloud is the "Windigo", a terrible Indian spirit monster. A Windigo is what a man becomes after eating human flesh. Niska's father bravely killed a Windigo, but was tried by white men and died in captivity.

Xavier and Elijah grow up together, become fine hunters, and without understanding the consequences, enlist in the Canadian Army. They are sent to France where both boys, because of their extraordinary marksmanship, become snipers. They are eerily successful at what they do and become heroes of sorts, and legends among both the Allies and the Germans. "Elijah has reached 356 kills as of today, and these are only the ones of which he is quite positive. Today is a new personal record for one day and he says as much to the others . . . They offer congratulations . . . stare at the thin Indian with the sharp nose and blackened face."

The war scenes are some of the most violent and terrible ever put to the page, more shocking than most WWI writing, but authentic and realistic. While Xavier considers sniping a dirty job that must be done, Elijah revels in it, makes wild forays into enemy territory, risks his life repeatedly, and always comes away unscathed-at least physically. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Elijah descends into madness, and flirts dangerously with the legend of the Windigo. Eventually, Xavier is witness to soul-shattering events and has to make a terrible choice. The language is clear, the characters sympathetic, and only occasionally do Niska or Xavier use a word or two that seem out of place in their natural world. The descriptions of nature are brilliantly done: "I listen to the sounds of the night animals not far away. I hear the fox and the marten chasing mice. I hear the whoosh of great wings as an Arctic owl sweeps close by, and after that the almost silent step of a bigger animal, a lynx perhaps, keeping watch with her yellow eyes." Three Day Road is as fine a novel as I have seen during the five years I have been reading first novels. My prediction is that it will win every award for which it is nominated, and that it will become a Canadian and international classic.
W.P. Kinsella (Books in Canada)