Best of 2005: Books

8. Ethics -- I remembered Brian McLaren recommending this book to me while on a little hike in Glorietta, NM a few years ago when I saw in at Half Price Books. Technical enough, but perfectly readable, a gutsy effort to revitalize the "baptist" vision of God's Story.
7. A History of the World in Six Glasses -- As a beverage fanatic, this was a most rewarding pop history of the role liquids have played in shaping cultures. "There is no civilizaion without fermentation" turned out to be quite literally true. Fun reading.
6. New Seeds of Contemplation -- An outstanding representation of Merton's best comtemplative writing. Nearly every page could have ended up with highlights. Lectio Divina material.
5. The Cartoon History of the Univsere III - Borrowed this one from my buddy, Callaway. Not only is this funny and irreverent, but it is also well-researched and informative. A great way to take in the major events of history (including the bits that get passed over in traditional "western" histories!). Going back for vol. 1 soon.
4. Radical Brewing -- The second most-referenced book in my life this past year. This book has great recipe ideas, but more importantly it is foaming with respect and homage to a beverage that has been respected and honored by a host of cultures for thousands of years. Contagious enthusiasm.
3. Citizenship Papers -- Digested cmar's copy in quick-time, then loaned it to said friend Callaway, only to have it disapper into thin air. Brilliant, profound and unapologetic. I still reach for the courage to put my life on a trajectory in line with the one described here by Berry.
2. The Life You Save May Be Your Own -- I resonnated with this description of the lives of Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy and Dorothy Day on too many levels to list here. One of those reads that will keep speaking into my life, I believe, for many years.
1. The idiot -- Thanks to the guys who spurred me onward to read this book in pseudo-community, I was able to complete a most-challenging novel and savor it's beautiful deformities. Masterful and haunting.

Christmas at the Movies

Jolie and I went to see Munich on Christmas night (after all, it was Hanukkah, too). Spielberg did a nice job making an entertaining movie that also had a pronounced-yet-subversive anti-violence position. I was most interested in a small scene where one of the Jewish “assassins” loses his stomach for all the violence, saying that true Judaism doesn’t try to retaliate every time they are attacked and that “righteousness was everything.” He felt that if he lost his righteousness, he would lose his own soul.

This is curious to me, as I don’t associate Jewish righteousness with peacefulness, but rather with the Old Testament cries of vengeance and justice, and the current expression of Israeli nationalism. It was refreshing to hear this character (reflecting Spielberg’s own position, I would gather) casting a core value of Judaism in a manner much more in line with Jesus’ vision for the Jews. It certainly struck me as a very New Testament-friendly version of righteousness, and it also gave me pause to realize that most of the world wouldn’t associate Christian righteousness with Jesus’ Way either!

Having been an avid learner of the concept of righteousness in recent years, I am re-challenged to live up to its biblical ideology, especially in the light of Jesus. Righteousness is an active living for others, an incarnate gesture of validation for the dignity of others, and a collaborative demonstration, with God, of His true nature as a lover of the hurting and oppressed. Shouldn’t I, as a follower of Jesus, feel the same connection between righteousness and my soul’s salvation?

Advent Journal Entry: The Anunciation?

December 2, 2005

To await the birth of a promise you never asked for,
Because you didn’t want one,
Because you were too young,
Because it would be an inconvenience,
Because you never dared to heed
Those silent, shapeless urges
Grasping for utterance.

To suddenly sense a new life within,
Resting in the day time,
Kicking in the dark,
Redistributing your synaptic gaps,
Re-firing your neurons,
Canceling your own hopes,
Negating intentions from family and betrothed.

To brace for the worst possible outcome,
That you would somehow ruin it,
That you were too ordinary,
That you were only a dreamer,
That the dreary world would engulf you
In despair and unsorted fragments
And noble nothings.

To behold an angel,
Hearing an unthinkable proclamation,
Feeling an impossible verification,
Knowing an unnamable redemption,
Breathing an unmistakable lightness of being,
And a certainty that now reveals
The secret of your glowing disposition.

To await the birth of a promise you never cared for,
Because you were insecure,
Because you were immature,
Because your sight was too small,
Because you had only begun to understand
That a promise such as this
Has cares enough for the whole world.

Rainforest Alliance

At Central Market we are currently featuring a suberb estate coffee, the Nicaraguan La Bastilla. Unlike most Nicaraguan coffess I've experienced, this is world class brew. It has a medium to heavy mouthfeel (body) and a great balance of darker and brighter notes, with a hint of the nuttiness typically associated with Central America.

What's the secret? Among other things, it is a Rainforest Alliance certified coffee. If Fair Trade is your thing, then please do yourself a favor and learn up on this organization.

Fair Trade takes a percentage (both from farmers and merchants) for themselves. Rainforest Alliance makes no money from it's certification.

Fair Trade uses only co-op products, which can help the poorest farmer in the short term, but will never result in consistent yields. The Rainforest certifies specific estates, thus promoting long-term sustainability. The Rainforest is also far more stringent about environmental and social factors, as well as the actual quality of the coffee beans produced.

Granted, the Rainforest certification is much rarer and more difficult to find (this is one of it's strengths, not handing putting it's name on everything) and you will most likely pay a little bit more. Still, if you want to maximize the overall global benefit of your consumption dollar, a few extra pennies per cup can make a difference. Check for Rainforest coffee in your area...

Another Advent Journal Entry

December 10, 2005

Thomas Merton died, during Advent, 37 years ago.

This seems quite fitting; not the manner and timing of his death, but that he was in no way “a man for all seasons,” but entirely an Advent advocate. His life was a profound and tragic awaiting: profound in his uncompromising insistence upon living in contemplative solitude, waiting upon God and describing the experience in a gripping and contagious way; tragic in that he, like Simeon, died as soon as he had found what he was waiting for.

As much as I have grown to esteem this modern monastic apologist, I must also increasingly wrestle with what seem to be under-developed realities (or perhaps his over-development of certain themes in his writing only makes it appear so). I look to his own self-assessment as a clue. He is acutely aware of his inability, through his personality quirks and the circumstances of being under a Trappist rule, to engage the world directly with more than just observations from a hermitage. He wishes he had the permission and efficacy to live his faith on the streets, like Dorothy Day. He reaches out too desperately for comradeship through correspondence letters that often read like fan mail. Ultimately, in spite of his own resolve, he plunges irresponsibly into the arms of a forbidden woman.

Then, rather abruptly, his abbot dies and the replacement encourages him to travel. The labor has ended and the giddiness of childbirth has begun. He eventually finds his way to Asia, and journals many epiphanies – of the beauty of the landscape, of the simplicity of the monks, but especially of his self-discovery, that he can begin a new life of activity in the world. He knows himself and his faith with such ownership that he is finally capable of intersecting with the great spiritual leaders of other religions and to be seen as a peer, a spiritual brother. He is ready to act as a mediator across eastern and western cultures, skillfully maintaining his own identity in Christ and simultaneously affirming all that is good and true in the wisdom of other beliefs. After 54 years, the waiting is over. And then, more like Kyle Lake than Kaiser Soze, he was gone.

Christ, I want to wait like Thomas Merton. But I want to live like Dorothy Day. Advent, it seems, should be just as active as it is passive. Your Kingdom come; Your will be done.

Now, if possible.

Postmodern Pilgrim?

The winter blast annihilated our little garden. It probably undid all of my rye-seeding efforts last weekend, too. But I welcome this minute arctic reminder with all of my heart. The cold has it's own beauty, and I am prepared to embrace it. So, I tell myself, now is the time to finish that book you were enjoying in the summer, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie. Perhaps I can finish it over the weekend, just in time to commemorate Thomas Merton on Sunday night. The book, you see, traces the artistic lives of Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.

[prepare for a long blog]

Merton (as quoted in the book) speaks of pilgrimage:

Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of 'origin,' the 'home' where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.

It is Walker Percy, however, that truly grabs me today. Continuing with the pilgrimage theme:

He (Percy) tells the story of an American couple on their honeymoon in Mexico. Having come so far, they find themselves in a tourist town among "a dozen other couples from the Midwest." Dismayed, they leave the town, get lost, and stumble on some natives performing a "corn dance" in a remote village. "The couple know at once that this is 'it'. They are entranced. They spend several days in the village, observing the Indians and being themselves observed with friendly curiosity." But have they really escaped the falsity of modern life? By no means. They announce the ritual's authenticity to each other, as if to verify it. They find they are eager for it to end -- to end before its authenticity is somehow spoiled. Back home in America, they tell an ethnologit friend about it, eager to have an expert say that it is authentic; the next year, they return, bringing the ethnologist with them. He watches; they watch him. "'Didn't we tell you?' they say at last. What they want from him is not ethnological explanations; all they want is his approval."

Percy's point -- in the language of pilgrimage -- is that the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible. In the modern world (now generally called postmodern), all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one's consumption by others in advance. Even the rare authentically direct experience is spoiled by modern self-consciousness. The modern person is doomed to an imitation of life; the self cannot escape itself and know the world or the Other.

and at his acceptance speach in 1961 for National Book Award for fiction:

"There is time to say only this: that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the 'dignity of the individual' and 'self-realization' are being heard more frequently than ever."

In five minutes, Percy set out the themes he had explored over a dozen years: the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his main point indirectly, as an offhand sequitir -- the point that "in short, the book [The Moviegoer] attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim."

Advent Journal Entry

The Abbey-dwellers are keeping an Advent journal as a way of trying to embody the right inner disciplines of the season. Each Sunday we share an entry with each other as a portion of our worship together. This one, from last week, seems bloggable...


This resting, this inner discipline of passivity and waiting, seems to steer clear of me the more I seek after it. I look, too, at our own house, and I see even more restlessness and activity than before advent. Can no one be still before the Lord? Can no modern soul pursue Christ through simplicity anymore? When it comes right down to making daily choices, do we really value interior disciplines or are we simply playing charades with all this monk and mission language?

There is a Carmelite vow on Day 2 of the Celtic meditations:

Let each stay in or near their own cell
Meditating, day and night
On the law of the Lord,
And vigilant in prayer,
Unless otherwise employed by the Holy Spirit.

What at first sounds to me like ultra-asceticism and hardened legalism is now beginning to sound more like the proper kind of default mindset for any contemplative follower of Christ. Not that I must spend all of my time in my bedroom reading Scripture and praying and turning into an antisocial recluse. More that I should make certain that my activities have been ordained by God and empowered by His Spirit, making the most of my time, for the “days are evil.” I suppose this goes back to my first post about lacking precision. There is a correlation, at least for monastics, between such precision and finding one’s home in a state of quiet meditation.

I am becoming aware that more activity does not necessarily mean more missional opportunity. In fact, the ability to bring Jesus to bear in any missional enterprise is directly related to my own preparation, speaking to God, hearing from God, resting in God, crying out for the God of salvation Who will speak, but has yet to reveal in a particular area.

Prepare Your way within me, Lord.

St. Nick

There is a real Santa Claus.