onehouse

Tree of Contemplative Practices

I found this tree of contemplative practices a few months ago. This site offers an explanation of practices across many different traditions. Really interesting and thorough.

Recommended Podcast

I'm listening to the Tapestry podcast, The Father from Cactus Lake, while doing some ordinary administrative tasks:

Tapestry is a weekly exploration of spirituality, religion and the search for meaning, hosted by Mary Hynes.

Father Ron Rolheiser is a widely-read columnist in Catholic newspapers, an author and a popular leader of spiritual retreats. He's originally from Cactus Lake, Saskatchewan. Father Rolheiser joins Mary Hynes, the host of Tapestry,  for a wide-ranging conversation about celibacy, popular culture,  depression and the need for community.

I especially like the thoughts on the deep search for a revitalized and meaningful vocabulary. I can relate to that.

Kingsfold Retreat & Renewal Centre

I have mentioned the Kingsfold Retreat Centre on this blog before. It is one of the most beautiful places you will come across, situated on the Ghost River and face to face with the Rocky Mountains. I have usually stayed in the lodge but this time my friend did a fasting retreat in The Hideaway - a treehouse which is just what is sounds like.

If you are ever in the neighborhood, this place could be good for what ails you.

Hermitary

The Hermitary features "resources and reflections on hermits and solitude".  Extensive and from a variety of backgrounds.

What is a hermit?
A hermit is a person who lives apart from society. Traditionally, this has meant living alone and self-sufficiently, but not always. The word "hermit" is derived from the Greek eremia for "desert," in reference to the Desert Fathers of the fourth century; and eremos came to mean solitary. The Latin equivalent is solitarius.   

The term recluse is often taken as a synonym but it has a more behavioral sense to it, while the term "hermit" often retains its deliberate, even spiritual sense. For example, the famed eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica defined "hermit" as "a solitary, one who withdraws from all intercourse with other human beings in order to live a life of religious contemplation." However, the American Heritage Dictionary defines "hermit" as "a person who has withdrawn from society and lives a solitary existence; a recluse."

Why Spiritual Formation is Not an Option

A brief and vicious bit of cold air is crawling across the Canadian prairies. I am busy with indoor work, transferring the magazine website back to typepad, getting ready to mail out the new issue, drinking hot things, and generally avoiding the outdoors. I have a bunch of posts sitting in draft from the last week or so but the computer wears on mind and body and I haven't had the time to sand the edges off them as yet.

I have finally been able to listen to Why Spiritual Formation is Not an Option with Eugene Peterson podcast that Jordon has recommended a few times. There are many good reminders here of why we engage spiritual formation. Peterson points out that:

The means by which we do anything at all is as important, equally as important, as the end product that we intend.

You can get turned around inside of this thing, pulled by themes or questions or even the practices themselves. Peterson reminds us once again that spiritual formation is important but it is not about us, our personal fulfillment or development. It is, in the end, about God. It is about the local, the ordinary, and the live that is lived rather than merely analyzed and talked about. Good stuff.

Peterson also has an article from a few years ago, Transparent Lives, that touches on many of the same themes:

The contemplative life, growing toward congruence, is slow work. It cannot be hurried. It is also urgent work and cannot be put off. Life is deteriorating around us at a rapid pace, and the life at the center, the gospel life—with the elements of congregation and scripture as major pieces—is being compromised, distorted, degraded at an alarming rate. In the American way, slow and urgent are not compatible. They cancel one another out.

But in the Christian way, they are joined together. Urgent as this is, there is no hurry. Impatience cancels out contemplation. Patience is prerequisite. Formation of spirit, cultivation of soul, developing a contemplative life, realizing congruence between the way and truth—all this is slow, slow work requiring endless patience. Human life is endlessly complex, intricate and serious. There are no shortcuts to becoming the persons we're created to be. We can't pump contemplation on steroids.

Unfortunately, patience is not held in high regard in American society. We get faster and faster and we become less and less; our speed diminishes us.

Talking at length about the contemplative life under American conditions seems just absurd. It seems such a fragile way of life in this culture of massive technology, arrogant leadership, pushing and shoving, insatiable consumerism. Contemplation? Kingfishers and dragonflies? Stones . . . tumbled over roundy wells? It's so inefficient, so ineffective. Yet Jesus tells us to do it this way.

 

The Rule, The Hours, The Strangeness.

A couple of things that I've come across lately:

Benedictine Baptist is blogging his thoughts on Benedict's Rule.

Coming to the Quiet has a good post about the liturgy of the hours.

and lastly, I have a friend that works 6 months of the year in Nunavut. This post, Neo-Pentecostal Revival Suspected for Destruction of Ancient Arctic Art, made me kind of sad.

Inward/outward

I've been fatigued by most things contemplative over the last few weeks and have many more questions than pithy things to blog about. Thus the offline/off blog for the last while. I have been enjoying one place. The Church of the Saviour has a new blog called inward/outward that has been feeding mind and soul. (I was just talking to someone the other night who asked "Do you ever see yourself back in a church?"  And I said no. We talked of our friends who have converted to Catholicism and Orthodoxy and the reasons we won't be there. And what would be destroyed and denied to return to soul-killing denominations listing to the right and left and up and mostly down. And I said I could see myself being involved in something that was closer to the Church of the Saviour idea.)

Here are a couple of bits from  inward/outward.

The Church as Echo
By Frederick Buechner

Even when churches are full to overflowing, it is often hard not to sense an inner emptiness - that sense that though the great feast is still in progress and many of the guests still in their seats, the heart has somehow gone out of it, the passion, the adventure have been replaced by shadows, and the host himself no longer there.

Is that the truth of it - the church as museum, as echo? Many would say so. In the part of the world where I come from, the people who say so are apt to be some of the wisest, most concerned people there are. They have little or nothing to do with the church because for them the church speaks a dead language, is for them a dead-end street. And if we are honest, you and I - we who are the church and try to hold on to whatever there is to hold on to in it - I think we have to admit that often they are right.

Source: A Room Called Remember

How to Know Truth or Beauty

Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self. Don’t think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers. Remember how wonderful you are, what a miracle! (Think if Tiffany’s made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!) If you are never satisfied, that is a good sign. It means your vision can see so far that it is hard to come up to it. Again I say, the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them the ocean is only knee-deep…. Don’t be afraid of yourself…. Don’t always be appraising yourself….

And why should you do all these things? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

Source: If You Want to Write by Brenda Euland (emphasis mine)

Turning the Wheel: Henri Nouwen

This looks really good for those of you "out East". (I heard someone complaining on the radio day how we're always referred to as "out West" like we are some kind of strange netherworld. So there you go.)

Turning the Wheel: Henri Nouwen and Our Search for God

A three-day conference on May 18-20, 2006 at the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto

The year 2006 is the 10th anniversary of Henri Nouwen’s death. To mark this anniversary, the Nouwen Archives at the University of St. Michael’s College is hosting a three day gathering on May 18th-20th, 2006 that will bring together scholars, ministers, university students, and spiritual seekers to explore themes and ideas that preoccupied Nouwen in his lifetime and which have particular relevance in today’s context. Just as Nouwen used his academic learning and role as university professor to speak to the heart, this event aims to balance the world of scholarship with experiential explorations of the Christian spiritual life.

       

Online labyrinth

Online labyrinth

I think someone might enjoy this but for me it is the farthest thing from what walking a labyrinth brings to my life. Everything can be a tool and there's a lot of contemplative things that work on the web. But there are some things that should be experienced quietly and deeply without narration and images and pointing and clicking. For me, some practices are about absence instead of stimuli so a lot of symbols and stations and things just get in my way. Give me lots of clean white space and I feel like I have some space to process. To me, adding so much stuff to something that is supposed to be quiet and simple is like using a hammer, or in this case a keyboard, to try and mix up a cake. You can do it but why would you?

That being said, there's a lot of good information about labyrinths on the site and you might get more out of the underlining than I would.

30 good minutes

How have I never heard of this before?  30 good minutes has archives of sermons in printed, audio, and video  by a lot of people. Some, I won't spend time on, but wow - Buechner, Chittister, Nouwen, Norris, Peterson, Vanier - just to name a few.

I just watched a ten minute video on Seeking The Interior Life with Chittister and then was able to check the written version. Wonderful. Here's a bit to remember: 

Silence, the contemplative knows, is that place just before the voice of God. It is the void in which God and I meet in the center of my soul. It is the cave through which the soul must travel, clearing out the dissonance of life as we go, so that the God who is waiting there for us to notice, can fill us. A day without silence is a day without the presence of the self.

The pressure and pull of a noisy day denies us the comfort of God. It is a day in which we are buffeted by the world around us and left at the mercy of the clatter and jangle of our own hearts. To be a contemplative we must put down the cacophony of the world around us and go inside ourselves to wait for the God who is a whisper not a storm.

Silence not only gives us the God who is stillness but, just as importantly, it teaches the public self of us what to speak. Then we finally understand what Abba Isidore meant when he said: “Living without speaking, is better than speaking without living...if, however, words and life go hand in hand, ah, that is the perfection of life.”