On prophets

Below is a passage from one of the books on my list - that's definitely stuck with me. I love the poetic, ponderous way in which Rubem Alves writes - speaks to my soul somehow.  The prophets in the Bible are some of my favourite characters, especially John the Baptist. Something about their wildness and non-conformity and not really fitting in. Standing on the edge, I suppose. Not a comfortable place, but a necessary one. Every community needs a prophetic voice, if they are to grow and move forwards and become all they were intended to be. Prophets speak truth, and prophets get rejected. They see what the culture around them has not yet awakened to. Like Alves describes in his book, creativity and prophesy are often intertwined...beauty, poetry... Sometimes I can relate to this description below of prophets, and I definitely know people that fit the description. So this is for them :-)

God and beauty

I've just bought a new book... "Transparencies of Eternity" which is a collection of reflections by the Brazilian author/philosopher/poet/professor Rubem Alves.  I've read some of his stuff before and really enjoyed it so I'm pretty excited about this book.  I think it'll be one to consume in small bite-size pieces to chew on and mull over.

Here's some tasty morsels from the chapter, "Does God exist?"

Beauty is a volatile entity - it touches the skin and quickly vanishes.

What we refer to with the name of God is like that: a great, huge Emptiness that encompasses the whole beauty of the universe.  If the glass were not empty, we wouldn't drink water from it.  If the mouth were not empty, we wouldn't eat fruit with it.  If the womb were not empty, life wouldn't grow in it. If the sky were not empty, birds, clouds and kites wouldn't fly in it.

...There is too much beauty in the universe, and beauty cannot be lost.  God is a bottomless Emptiness, an infinite wooden trough, who wonders through the universe picking and gathering up all the beauties and guaranteeing that none will be lost, and saying that all that was loved and lost will return, and be repeated.  (p.24)

I don't feel like I've got much to add to that, just that he's beautifully put into words what my heart attempts to articulate.

Some beauty from my weekend, Gwythian Bay, Cornwall

'Still and still moving', or longing for change

Everybody has to change, or they expire.  Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die.  I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Donald Miller, from the Author's note in 'Through Painted Deserts' (p. x)

This is one of my favourite books. I'm reading it again, because... because I suppose I'm feeling restless again.  I'm longing for a journey.  I'm gazing into the distance.  I'm hungry for something that I can't put into words.  I'm yearning for more from life, more depth, more of knowing God and knowing how to love better.

Some days these feelings make me want something new, something else, want more change.  [Other days they make me want to hide away for forever until my bones feel less uneasy]

But there's a difference between leaving and running away.  I have just left somewhere.  We've been in Cornwall for 4 months.  That's not very long, is it?  It feels like we've been here a while.  And I'm on a journey even as I am stationary. Even as I am living in a house and working at a restaurant and shopping for food and driving in and out of Penzance most days.  Even then, I can still change, I can still grow, I can still write a good story with my life.  I just think it's more of a challenge than when you are on the move or going through big life changes.  Leaving now would be taking the easy way out.

So God, help me learn, once again, like I had to in Brighton, how to STAY. [For a while, at least].  Help me learn to embrace stillness and silence.  Help me find peace when it's all to easy to worry about the things that fill our day to day lives.  Help me live my ordinary life in an extraordinary way.  Help me re-direct my restlessness to mine your depths of love and mystery rather than letting it unsettle my mind and spill over, splashing ugly grey onto the people and places around me.

Don't let me go, though.
Don't let me go unchanged, unmoved.
Don't let me become numb to protect my heart.
Don't let me go.

Spirituality is always about how we see. It’s not about earning or achieving some kind of merit. Once you see rightly, the rest follows and the road widens. You don’t need to push the river, because you are already in it—and floating along! The Great Life is already living within us and we only gradually learn how to say yes to this always-existent Life. This Life is so large and deep and spacious that it even includes its opposite, death.

Adapted from 'Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer' pp.32-34 (Richard Rohr)

Living on the Edge

"Living and accepting our own reality will not feel very spiritual.  It will feel like we are on the edges rather than dealing with the essence.  Thus most run toward more esoteric and dramatic postures instead of bearing the mystery of God's suffering and joy inside themselves.  But the edges of our lives - fully experienced, suffered and enjoyed - lead us back to the center and the essence".

Richard Rohr, 'Everything Belongs: The gift of contemplative prayer' pp.17-19

Day 4 - La Poesia (Pablo Neruda)

Here's an excerpt from a translation of Pablo Neruda's poem, 'La Poesia' ('Poetry').  I'm enjoying discovering his poems, little by little, because each one says so much!

And it was at that age...poetry arrived
in search of me.  I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.

From 'The Essential Neruda', translation by Alastair Reid

The Light we are waiting for // Advent

On Sunday at church we focused on Advent, and on welcoming the Light of the World.  It was a contemplative and peaceful morning, with time and space to reflect and to pray.  So thought I'd continue in that vein with other bits and bobs I've gathered and let you do the same.  Don't rush :-)

This is what Advent means: to be chosen and upheld by God, to be filled with God's delight and Spirit, to bring justice to the nations, to hold God's hand and be God's promise, to open eyes that are blind, to free captives from prison, to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness          (Isaiah 42:1-9).

From Friar Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

Light shines through ordinary things and makes them extraordinary

"If we aren’t going to love the world around us, then we might as well pack it all up and go home. If we don’t love, and if we don’t bring freedom with us, then we are simply another religion, lumped in with the rest of them. But first, of course, we need to understand who we truly are and what we have at our disposal.

The truth is, the light of the world resides within us".

(Darren Wilson, maker of the amazing documentary, 'Father of Lights' )

The light shines in the darkness, 

and the darkness has not overcome it

John 1:5

'The Lord is my light, my light and salvation
In God I trust, in God I trust'

Taize song

St Therese of Lisieux

On Sunday there were a whole load of old Christian books left out in the building where our church meets for anyone to take.  I picked up an Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun who died at just 24-years-old in 1897.  I don't know much about any saints, but I've been wanting to read more about people in the past who've devoted their lives to following God, because there's always something to learn, and I'm interested to know if over 100 years ago, a young woman faced similar struggles and questions to young women today.  I've just started it, and the language is pretty old school - it was translated from French   and published over 50 years ago, but I'm quite enjoying the 'quaintness'.  And already, have read something I'd like to share:

"The sun's light, that plays on cedar-trees, plays on each tiny flower as if it were the only one in existence; and in the same way Our Lord takes special interest in each soul, as if there were no other like it.  Everything conspires for the good of each individual soul, just as the march of seasons is designed to  make the insignificant daisy unfold its petals on the day appointed for it" (p.27)

the Naked Now

On the recommendation of friends I've just started subscribing to Richard Rohr's daily contemplations.  Rohr is a Franciscan priest and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation.  This was yesterdays thought:

"It is living in the naked now, the “sacrament of the present moment,” that will teach us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad, or ugly, and how to let them transform us. Words by themselves invariably divide the moment; pure presence lets it be what it is, as it is".

Richard Rohr, from 'The Naked Now: Learning to see as the Mystics see' p.12

Another person's Grey

"I lay back on the bed and looked up at the chains.  I was thinking, That sunshine, that colour yellow, maybe I will not see very much of these now.  Maybe the new colour of my life was grey.  Two years in the grey detention centre, and now I was an illegal immigrant.  That means, you are free until they catch you.  That means, you live in a grey area.  I thought about how I was going to live.  I thought about the years, living as quiet as could be.  Hiding my colours and living in the twilight and the shadows".

- Little Bee, a Nigerian Asylum Seeker in 'The Other Hand' by Chris Cleave (p.108-109)

Picture from www.chriscleave.com

nomad

"You are a stranger to them, an alien among them, a nomadic wanderer who, while refusing to be rooted in this life, seems to somehow enjoy this life most".
(The Barbarian Way', Erwin McManus, p.93)

Definitely relate to the first part, and hoping for the last part to become something people could say about me too...

"The Barbarian Way"

I've just started reading a book by Erwin McManus called, 'The Barbarian Way', bought for me by a friend.  It talks about how following Jesus was never intended to be safe, or conformist. I like!

 Here's a quote from it that resounded with me:

"If we learn anything about God through John (the Baptist), it is that God has no problem with spiritual eccentrics.  The point, of course, is not that God makes us mentally or emotionally imbalanced, but that He makes us passionately and spiritually unbalanced.  God steers us in the direction of His kingdom, His purpose, His passions.  His desire is not to conform us, but to transform us.  Not to make us compliant, but to make us creative.  His intent is never to domesticate us, but to liberate us" (p.64).

wide or deep?

"Perhaps we need to ask how we go about entering into a large life: Do we travel the world and pick up artifacts and souvenirs, bring them home and assemble a museum or workshop in which we can be in visual and sensory touch with as much as possible? Or is there another way to go about it? Does largeness come by aquisition of a lot of stuff from here or there, or by deepening into what is at hand? Dowe form a spirituality text on analogy with multinational companies who make their mark by means of buyouts and takeovers, taking control but ignoring local culture and family relationships in order to turn everything they touch into the ultimate depersonalized abstraction, money?

OR, do we take what is right before us in our own backyard and sink our lives into what is already given to us, enter into the intricacies, the endless organic relationships that make up this world and live in this world"

(Eugene Peterson, 'Eat this Book', p.43)

winter

"I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields,

and to sing of its passing while it waits"

(from 'The Crest' by Wendell Berry)

"...truth is holy, and truth-telling a noble and useful profession; and the reality around us is created and worth celebrating; that men and women are radically imperfect and radically valuable".

(John Updike, More Matter, pp. 843, 851 in Eugene Peterson, Eat this Book, p.8)

More on writing

I'm in Oxford at the moment at my parents house. They have a whole shelf-full (shelful? shelfull? shelf-ful?) of books inherited from my grandfather and great aunt about Africa and India, mainly written in colonial times. I picked up one called 'The Dark Eye in Africa' by Laurens Van der Post, published in 1955. The title sounds quite ominous and I wondered what the 'dark eye' referred to. Far from being a fantasy as I imagined, Van der Post actually writes about racial tension and how he viewed this to be the source of many problems in Africa, in particular South Africa. Having judged the book on its dated cover and brown pages, I was surprised at the passion and sensitivity with which the author writes. Anyways to follow on from my previous post, in the introductory chapter, there is another great quote about writing:

"Art to me is the technique of presenting unrealised and hidden values to people potentially capable of appreciating and understanding those values. It is a means by which men can penetrate places in their minds and souls they had never reached before. Writing especially can be a kind of magic mirror which holds up to man and society the neglected and unrealised aspects of himself and his age. Writing can be many other things as well but at this desperate moment I think this may be its most important function" (p.16).

On writing

I'm reading Stephen King's book 'On Writing'. I can't say I've ever read any of his other books, and to be honest I don't intend to... being someone who's particularly sensitive to any kind of horror/thriller/vaguely scary anything. BUT, I am really enjoying this book which is partly memoir, partly advice on writing, and... I haven't read the rest yet. It's honest, direct, easy to read and has made me laugh out loud several times.

Here's one of my favourite bits in it so far:

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again; you must not come lightly to the blank page".

(p.117-118)

It is the word...

“Poetry, my teacher: light the certainties of men and the tone of my words. You see, I risk speech even with bullets piercing phonemes. It is the word – that which is larger than its size – that speaks, does and happens. Here it reels, riddled with bullets. Uttered by toothless mouths in alleyway conspiracies, in deadly decisions. Sounds stir on ocean floors. The absence of sunlight really does darken forests. The strawberry liquid of icecream makes hands sticky. Words are born in thought; leaving lips, they acquire soul in the ears, yet sometimes this auditory magic does not make it as far as the mouth because it is swallowed dry. Massacred in the stomach along with rice and beans, these almost words are excreted rather than spoken. Words balk. Bullets talk”.

Paulo Lins, 'City of God', (p.16)

character

"I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibilty inherent in the acknowledgement. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remanrkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants".

'A million miles in a thousand years' by Donald Miller (p.59)

Aslan's call

"Aslan threw up his shaggy head, opened his mouth, and uttered a long single note; not very loud, but full of power. Polly's heart jumped out of her body when she heard of it. She felt sure that it was a call, and that anyone who heard that call would want to obey it and (what's more) would be able to obey it, however many worlds and ages lay between".

'The Magician's Nephew' by C.S. Lewis (p.127)