onehouse

Napoleon

Sometimes you have those moments in life when all you can hear is "blah, blah, blah, my journey" and "blah, blah, blah, my vision" sometimes accentuated by "my calling" but always the word "my" repeated ad nauseam. Collaboration? Co-operation? Imagination that doesn't have self-something as the first goal? 

Human beings are a a mix of many motives made of many colors including black and white. I cannot take my "self" completely out of anything anymore than the body and soul next to me. But I do not enjoy being sold vision wrapped in supposed holy intention that is actually ego promotion. It is not my place to say exactly when that time has come but sometimes it sticks out like the only very sore thumb on a hand with no fingers. And that's when you start humming Ani's Napoleon , smile and nod and then go home and pull a few weeds from the garden.

Two Cathedrals

"You feckless thug."

This was one of my favorite scenes from The West Wing. When it was good, it was very good.The Psalms, like this modern day lamenting song on TV of all places, were written down for a reason. Maybe as a protest to all those folks who want us to swallow our anger and frustration, harden our arteries, and go to see Jesus sooner with fake smiles on our faces. As the strikes go on, up with writers. 

Wrestling with angels.

I spent the weekend at Kingsfold taking part in a Henri Nouwen retreat. After Ottawa and the retreat in the same week, I feel full to the brim so a flurry of posts to follow.  In the meantime, this came across my desk:

To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself. The Covenant is broken, the condition is dishonoured, have you not noticed that the world has been taken away? You have no place, you will wander through yourselves from generation to generation without a thread. Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you. You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you, your panic strikes at love. The land is not yours, the land has been taken back, your shrines fall through empty air, your tablets are quickly revised, and you bow down in hell beside your hired torturers, and still you count your battalions and crank out your marching songs. Your righteous enemy is listening. He hears your anthems full of blood and vanity, and your children singing to themselves. He has overturned the vehicle of nationhood, he has spilled the precious cargo, and every nation he has taken back. Because you are swollen with your little time. Because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.

Leonard Cohen: Book of Mercy, McClelland and Stewart, 1984, Toronto.

A crater in your heart.

I found an article, Come Follow Us,  by Cynthia Bourgeault on Belief.net. It is, unfortunately, intercut with that site's incredibly annoying advertising that acts like a frying pan to the head in the middle of a nice quiet moment. The article is an introduction to contemplative practices in the Benedictine tradition. Bourgeault says that "The monastic way of living slowly carves out a crater in your heart." and certainly that has been my experience. The words "slow" and "carving" are especially apt. (Apt, I tell you! Apt!) Over time, these faltering steps bring about a place that can receive strength and quiet grace.

She talks of the perceived trendiness of contemplative practice but defends seekers by writing:

People may say that this Benedictine mini-revival is just nostalgia or monk wannabees. I don't think so. Judging from the caliber of people drawn to this path and the depth of their yearning, I see something else. I see a hunger for a way into the heart and soul of the Christian mystical life. In a religious landscape still dominated by theological gamesmanship and moral clichés, people are hungering for a genuine, integrated practice of Christian life that transforms things from (and to) the core. For better or worse, the Benedictine tradition, 1,500 years old, is still the direct heir and repository (particularly in Western Christendom) of the Christian inner tradition: the praxis, or path, implicit in Christ's challenge, "If you would be perfect ... come, follow me."

How does one become perfect (which in the language of Christ's time meant whole, truly and fully alive)? Not by theologies or theories, but by an actual spiritual practice that teaches you "how to get from here to there." This is the missing link people are really hungering for, and it's the wisdom the Benedictine tradition still has to offer. Embedded in the time-honored Benedictine motto of Ora et Labora--"prayer and work"--is a balanced path to conscious selfhood; a template that, once learned, can be applied to the conditions of daily life to transform any life situation--single or married, fast track or slow lane--into "a school for the Lord's service" (in St. Benedict's words).

The Benedictine life is indeed a rare old wine waiting to be poured into the empty wineskins of our stressed-out, over-committed culture in the hopes of restoring sanity, balance, and a more human way of being alive. And yes, to carve a crater at the center of one's heart into which the mystical life of Christ may flow.

The article leads to another series of columns on learning to sing the Psalms, which is helpful to those of us far from a traditional monastic community. 

The hates we fight.

I am doing a lot of reading on the Psalms lately. I am finding that it is taking someone else's perspective to bring them back to life. My evangelical upbringing taught me to shake hands with the happy parts of the Psalms - parts that were imported usually in the form of worship songs that sounded a bit like commercial jingles. Sing 'em once and they were in there for good. So I need a little help. Here's something from CS Lewis that is running some old bits through the Play-Do machine.

I use to read a lot of Lewis in my early twenties. It is interesting to return to him because it shows my way of processing has changed. It takes me a bit of concentration to follow him around the block now where other writing sinks in as easily as hot water on snow. It helps to read with a British accent. Go ahead. Try it out loud. No one will think you've gone mad. Trust me. And it will help your Monty Python impressions. Here we go:

In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth. In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only by becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naivety.

Lewis finds the cursing in these Psalms petty and vulgar - even childish - and goes onto ask:

One use of dealing with these terrible or (dare we say?) contemptible Psalms is simply to leave them alone. But unfortunately the bad parts will not 'come away clean'; they may, as we have noticed, be intertwined with the most exquisite things. And if we still believe that all Holy Scripture is 'written for our learning' or that the age-old use of the Psalms in Christian worship was not entirely contrary to the will of God, and if we remember that Our Lord's mind and language were clearly steeped in the Psalter, we shall prefer, if possible, to make use of them. What use can be made?

Lewis points out that ancient cultures had many more conventions and courtesies than in our own. And, of course, we cannot claim, a mere four years into the millennium, that we live in a "milder age":

Hatred did not need to be disguised for the sake of social decorum or for fear anyone would accuse you of a neurosis. We therefore see it in its 'wild' or natural condition.

One might have expected that this would immediately, and usefully, have turned my attention to the same thing in my own heart. And that, no doubt, is one very good use we can make of the maledictory Psalms. To be sure, the hates which we fight against in ourselves do not dream of quite such appalling revenges. We live - at least, in some countries we still live - in a milder age. These poets lived in a world of savage punishments, of massacre and violence, of blood sacrifice in all countries and human sacrifice in many. And, of course, we are far more subtle than they in disguising our ill will from others and from ourselves. 'Well,' we say, 'he'll live to be sorry for it,' admitting, that what we predict gives us certain satisfication. Still more in the Psalmists' tendency to chew over and over the cud of some injury, to dwell in a kind of self-torture on every circumstance that aggravates it, most of us can recognise something that we have in ourselves. We are, after all, blood-brothers to these ferocious, self-pitying, barbaric men.

The Ear of Memory

Why I can't read the Psalms in The Message paraphrase:

Modernizing the texts has undoubtedly provided greater access and understanding of Scripture for ordinary people like me, but it has done so at the cost of a common, collective language. I assume older born-Catholics must feel the same way about the loss of Latin in the Mass. For my study, I return to the King James version of my Protestant past to make my way as a Catholic in this Jubilee Year. Sometimes listening is best done with the the ear of memory.

Carol Bonomo, The Abbey Up the Hill