praxis 6 below

Three Stages of Living . . . Parker Palmer

Take your time & read the following from Parker Palmer.  This is good wisdom to live into during a season that so often subsumes us with busyness, exhaustion, and isolation from God's presence.

"Separation is the starting point for many of us, a stage in which we feel forced to make a choice between contemplative and active life.  Because our culture tends to value action over contemplation, we often begin by choosing a life of activity that can become frantic, that exhausts and fragments our souls.

When exhaustion overcomes us, and we are too drained to keep up the pace, we move into the stage of alternation, which might be called the vacation approach to life.  Exhausted by activity, we take a little vacation to refresh ourselves, then we plunge back into action until we are exhausted again, then we take another vacation until we renew the energy to wear ourselves down once more - and on the cycle goes.

ride these monsters deeper down - annie dillard

"In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us.  But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for another, and for our life together here.  This is given.  It is not learned."

- Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

This is the dangerous & yet beautiful night language of the spirit.  It is in learning to trust deeply - even in the midst of terror - that one can begin the journey of global renewal (all newness that heals within your own soul moves determinedly & inextricably toward all people).

Openness to Mystery - the essence of contemplative spirituality

"Regardless of one's theology, an encounter with true mystery is something that neither can nor should be taken lightly.  Amid the beauty and wonder there is at least an equivalent quantity of fear.  Part of this may be the result of normal human reluctance to be with mystery, and part may be very wise.

The first requirement for even partial encounter with mystery, then, is to be willing to surrender one's habitual tendencies to either solve or ignore mystery.  Secondly, one must be willing to risk some degree of fear.  These two conditions combine to make up what in my understanding is the essence of contemplative spirituality: the willingness and courage to open oneself to mystery."

-Gerald May, Will and Spirit

And isn't solving & ignoring mystery the relentless proclivity of so many 21st century North Americans?  Why, after all these years, these centuries even, so many North Americans continue to lead lives of quiet desperation? Gerald May is a good one to read if Mystery is only terror-inducing & nothing more for you.  But please know - a certain terror is necessary.