Instantiation Journal

In September last year I started a side journal specifically to cover what I sensed would be an period of transition. In August I caught somewhat more than a glimpse of an upcoming challenge. I was at the point with my return to active Christianity that it would either stick or all fall apart. One Sunday morning I actually walked the up the middle aisle of the cathedral when everyone else was preparing to approach the table. That morning I couldn't do it. I was simply overwhelmed and was in a literal fight or flight state. There isn't anything too educational about the events of that morning or even the days leading up to it. There were some reasons that I might have been frustrated but really I had knowingly reached that threshold of in it or leave it. I was too close to what the real and that brings up a natural aversion that has to be recognized, addressed and transcended. It happens in lots of contexts. It can be particularly dramatic when it occurs in the realm of the spirit or even better when the spirit is brought to bear on the challenges of incarnated life. So that morning I got out. It was best choice at that particular moment in time. I retreated not far away to Cafe Umbria and began journaling in the notebook that I bring to classes & discussions. Not where I usually journal but it was good that I had it. I found neutral ground, neither the church nor my house, and began to deconstruct the complex pile of thoughts and emotions that I was feeling crushed by.

The result of that morning's meditations is a side journal to my usual one. I enjoy using the moleskin journals. They have nice lined pocket ones that last a good while (despite the term I don't actually journal every day, but over the years it has become an important practice to enable the thoughts, work and experience of days turn into a more lasting transformation). For particular purposes I like these thinner ones that come in packs of three. Quite nice. I even have one hidden in a library in a different work of mine with the condensed version of the manual for the order I created & nearly activated based on alchemical symbolism with a mission of reconciling the traditional opposites of the light and the dark, the left and the right. This is clearly a wholly separate story that some how snuck into this post, but that seems to be the nature of that particular order, which is probably the reason I and the others let it go without further pursuing its manifestation in the apparent world. I do get to revisit the subject of alchemy at a Rosicrucian Conference open to the public next September in Santa Fe. I shall be contented in that. Alchemy was how I came to the Order in the first place. It is a very auspicious return to the beginning for me.

So diversion aside, what I thought might be three or four months, became nine and have been cataloged in this little side journal as a way to remember as well as learn from my experiences, including the creation of this blog as way of recording but also beginning to communicate them. As an aside I realized the other day that this blog is hyper-focused on me, which I will admit is true of a lot of my life. Some reading I was doing reminded me that "humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less". I've seen this two places without attribution so I don't know where it actually originates. That make me wonder whether this blog was following a bad habit. Perhaps, but it is not meant to be a comprehensive representation of my thinking, working, or collaborating. It is essentially an electronic forum where I can perform a necessary self-examination with the possibility of witnesses. I doubt very many people will read these words, which is probably for the best, but one of the things I did at the outset of these writings is notify a handful of people that I trust of their existence. That is enough.

As a way of absorbing some of this side journal into the blog itself, I will do what I did with my primary journal, just list out the headings from the side journal. My usual one just has dates but the side one has no dates but has topic/event headings:

A beginning amidst the stormy sea of Galilee
Counsel from a visionary of Christian Existentialism
Counsel from an old ally
Return to Sabbath reading
Squaring the triangular circle
Healing Prayer (in the context of Trinity's Taize Service & Caritas Community)
A word from the Apostle
A wound from the bow of Par-Is
An echo from the Labyrinth
October: Opus Dei phase two [N.B. Opus Dei as a term for the Daily Office]
On the 40th day...
Schedule my birthday week including retreat to Trappist Monastery
Caritas convened
Class convened
Retreat among the Trappists
Compline at St. David of Wales
Healing Amidst Taize
A revisit to the emerging church
A focused Advent and a foggy Christmastide
Five actions to return to the way
Confraternity of St. Gregory's Abbey
Opus Dei Magnam Gloriam
On to Lent
Holy Week
Albuquerque #2
A lunch to bridge the conference and the diocese
Useful meetings back at home
A class retreat
Episcopal Village - Mission West

And thus I am "in a very different place by June."

A changed a couple titles for this venue as things shifted from the metaphoric to the practical towards the end. This in an of itself tells me that the journal did its work.

The one at the end which did not change is the Episcopal Village- Mission West conference which I think it really what will make that connection between my subjunctive future and my indicative present tenses. It should be excellent and hosted right here in Portland at St. David's (mentioned above as the location of Compline after my Trappist retreat). One month away. Just in case it does anyone any good I can't help but put in the link:

Episcopal Village - Mission West

And on it goes. With the sun, another little Easter.

Ok back to that traveling together thing

So I received a friendly reminder today that I can't effectively be doing this myself. There's a conference coming up next month. Following my old patterns I had been looking at it as an opportunity to get information. One of the organizers sent me a message suggesting that I aim for a team from the cathedral in order to help bring back the lessons more easily back into the parish.

Signing up for things is easy for me. Asking other to do things, less so. My natural inclination is to keep as my tasks under my personal control as possible. Luckily, my day work has involved management for three years no so delegation is becoming more natural. Somewhere between those two is actual collaboration.

Here's to hoping I can make that leap in the next five weeks. Last fall I had the impression that I would be in a very different place come June (why June, I've no idea). Perhaps so.

A story complex and intriguing

There is a thread that I'm going to acknowledge as picked up by a recently by a well known author of fiction and then hopefully let it go. I'd like this blog to concentrate on "the gathering center" as called by Phyllis Tickle rather then the possibly good but distracting circumference that Richard Rohr warns against in Everything Belongs.

Phillip Pullman, famous for the trilogy His Dark Materials beginning with The Golden Compass, has very recently released a book called The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ. It is a fascinating story that could prompt readers to very important questions about the past, present, and future of the church as well the radical nature of what Jesus was bringing to us.

It picks up a very neglected piece of the Christian story: the challenge of the Shadow of the mission. It does so by by weaving the pieces that we know and possibilities of what I like to think of as the back stitching of the story. In needlework there are a lot of interesting things going on the other side of the fabric. Those odd crossings and resurfacings are what makes the image on the front possible.

Hopefully now that a version of this highly heretical story, and that's all it needs to be: a story, is out there in the public forum I can stop worrying about finding a way to tell it.

Next stop: back to the river. Now that I've readjusted to being back for a bit, I can review my notes and bring out some of the gifts from the Albuquerque conference.

Blessings.

Called out by The Cloud

After my trip, I am working on getting back to my daily and other reading habits. One of the books that I am steadily working with is "The Cloud of Unknowing". I just stumbled onto a passage that really diagnoses the type of experience that I described a couple posts back when I talked of repenting from a gnostic error. The author of The Cloud in Chapter 4 talks about two primary faculties: Knowing and Loving. They say that God cannot be known through the first but is entirely known through the second. If we were speaking Spanish I would hazard to guess that the first "know" is saber and the second is conocer. God cannot be grasped as a fact, but can be beheld as a person.

Though it probably violates the admonitions put forth in the very beginning of The Cloud, I'd like to post the primary paragraph that resonated with a stretch of years in my past. It has some very profound things to say about that attempt and its dangers:

A person hearing this book read or quoted may misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that if a person thinks hard enough, he or she will succeed in the work of contemplation. I do not want people sitting around analyzing, racking their brains, their curiosity forcing their imagination to go entirely the wrong way. It's not natural. It's not wise for the mind, and it's not healthy for the body. These people are dangerously deluded, and it would take a miracle to save them God in his infinite goodness and mercy would have to intervene, making these people stop such a wrong-minded approach and seek the counsel of experienced contemplatives; otherwise, such erring souls could succumb to madness, frenzied fits, or the devil's lies, which lead to the profound misery of sin and eventually to the loss of body and soul, for all eternity.

I can definitely say that the author is right. In the ten years between 1997 and 2007, I experienced all of the pitfalls mentioned, not as the only feature of my life, but certainly in large events and large swathes of time. When pushed to my limit, I looked to God in the small hours and said in great distress, "I do not understand". There is no worse feeling on the gnostic quest when knowledge and understanding are the keys to the imagined life that "should" be.

However, I was not permanently lost. God did indeed intervene, slow things down, and break me out of my pattern. I did indeed seek the counsel of experienced contemplative. The cathedral community and its various ministries is full of vital and experienced contemplatives.

My descent into Egypt is not a new challenge nor one that I have faced which others have not. I pray that they may be delivered from the pain of having to figure it all out. For those that can turn back and choose love which transcends and includes knowledge that they may gain as much as I did from my wanderings among the rocky paths.

Perfect love cast out all fear, including the fear of unknowing.

Two stray thoughts and a poem

Serendipitous Idea of the Day (actually last Friday) Number 1

Quantum mechanical theory of the afterlife:  dead people are waves, incarnated people are particles.  The contemplative mind can help us particles remember that we too are the waves. 

Serendipitous Idea of the Day Number 2

In healthy situations, children are not load bearing members of society, but rather are freely contained within the structure provided by adults.  Since we are advised that unless be become like a child we will be unable to enter the kingdom of God, perhaps that kingdom is an entire society without any load bearing members.  What a relief indeed that would be.  That to me is an idea worthy to be called Heaven.
 
However before we go to far towards fanaticizing about not having any responsibilities, it would be good to remind ourselves of the seriousness of play and the concepts of “work without effort” as discussed in the first letter of “Meditations on the Tarot”.  Cynthia Bourgeault, wisdom teacher par excellence and one of our speakers in Albuquerque, calls that book the Bible of the Christian Hermetic tradition.  I first read it in college on the recommendation of my Martinist brothers and sisters.  Rumor has it there is a photo of John Paul II at his desk with a copy of the original French edition on top of a stack of books.  When I picked it up again recently, I was surprised to see that the reviewers were Basil Pennington and Thomas Keating.  Certainly not New Agers.  I’m sure I didn’t know who they were at the time.  It is quite interesting how that book holds together just the threads that I’m working on reintegrating right now.  This is unlikely to be the last time I mention it. 
 
How’s this for an interesting perspective (from the book that triggered this thought in the first place:  “The Sacred Journey” by Charles Foster, the eighth and final volume of The Ancient Practices Series edited by Phyllis Tickle, who spoke on the Great Emegence both in Albuquerque last year and just a few weeks ago in Texas at the Episcopal Church’s Bishop’s Retreat):
 
“The child, too, has a real relationship with time, undistorted by the accelerating effect of deadlines and airplanes, the decelerating effect of boredom, or the artificial punctuation of alarms.”

A society where everyone works without effort with the wonder and openness of children; seems like a reasonable goal and perhaps something attainable enough to truly be called “at hand”.  Plus is resonantes with our true role as children of God. God is the adult which provides the containing structure in which we "live and move and have our being".


Poem from a point of return

Already here.
Never so far away
as when we forget
that one all encompassing fact.

Already here.
Already here.

Take off your shoes
for this is holy ground.

Back on the river

So I'm back from the conference and back online. Happy about both. The conference will take a bit more processing before it turns into any postings. It was excellent and very helpful. We really shifted gears this year. The speakers harmonized a bit more deeply and looked carefully at how the contemplative mind will help us stay in this transitional space and open up future possibilities.

Last year, I did not have the confidence to talk to nearly as many people as I did this time. Also it wore me out pretty thoroughly. I picked up Richard Rohr's "Everything Belongs". Last year I think I was making a mistake he mentions in that book: I was "pushing the river". The important thing is to realize that we're already in the river and to let us take us. Our old friend: surrender.

To completely mix metaphors: It is great to be back on solid ground. This spring has been quite an initiation for me.

Light and Peace this night.

Holy Week trumps technology

On the Monday of Holy Week my laptop decided to throw in the towel, probably out of spite since I'd decided to replace it next year rather than this year. Between Holy Week liturgies, the Apple Store being preoccupied with the iPad release and my trip to New Mexico, immediate fixes were not in store for me.

At the moment I'm awaiting departure to Albuquerque and couldn't resist a kiosk to connect in my few minutes of downtime.

Very much looking to new experiences and conversations as well as heightened computing power when I return :)

For now this monk is taking a short sojourn into the wider world.

A blessed Eastertide to you!