Don't be a writer, be a man of God who writes

Playfully smiling in the shade is how we
should all think of contemplative prayer.

Finishing Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain feels like quite an accomplishment.  Dense writing combines with heavy theology combines with my own dislike for memoirs and autobiographies (I rarely care about childhood friends or their parents) might make you think this was a chore to finish.  

In a way, I suppose it had those moments.  The first 2/3rds of the book are spent on Merton’s childhood and as a young adult going to college in New York City.  It’s overly descriptive and focuses on factual happenings.  Merton’s lack of depth either speaks to his own unawareness at the time or his current disinterest in reflecting on past events. This time in his life feels hollow to him as a writer and comes off as shallow to the reader. Brief moments within the shallows, however, find Merton pondering if something greater is out in the world, reminding us of the spiritual depth he’ll soon discover in himself.  

The rapid movement from self-centered intellectual to trappist monk feels a little abrupt, but no more than it did for Merton.  I reread whole chapters in the last third of the book just to keep up with his quickly evolving spirituality and life.

Three things stuck out for me while reading this last section:

1.  Merton’s astonishing sense of self-sacrifice associated with his faith.  Faith through sacrifice isn’t something we hear very often in today’s world. For Merton, a lack of sacrifice meant a lack of meaning. He became Catholic and sought the priesthood not because he loved everything in his life but because he felt unfulfilled with his life. He originally contemplated joining the Franciscans because his personality naturally fit with with their order, but would putting a square peg in a square hole bring him the spiritual satisfaction he craved?

Somehow, sacrificing sex and money didn’t carve enough of him out to make room for God.  Without sacrifice, there could be no spiritual gain for Merton.  Joining the trappists and embracing worldly sacrifice gave Merton the focus he needed to embrace God entirely.

2.   Merton’s writing style changes in the book from factual to meaningful, which is a line I struggle to straddle most days.  I’m a linear thinker (A leads to B leads to C...) and I easily fall into a linear trap when approaching my days.  Seriously, sometimes Kelly comes home, asks me about my day and I relay the order of my day (I went to work, I answered the phone, I wrote some emails) instead of telling her about my day (I’m kind of tired, this conversation really made me think, I’ve been craving breakfast for dinner all day).  Factual vs. emotive  isn’t the right phrasing, but it’s pretty close.  

When Merton hits the last third of his book, his writing goes from relaying information to really wading into heavy topics.  He recognizes his vocation called him to the sudden depth he found himself.  When I’m rooted and healthy, my mind moves to places beyond the daily happenings around me.  I write more.  I exercise more.  I have conversations more often.  A lot of my early life centered on moving linearly from place to place, recognizing an unfulfillment in me but not knowing what to make of it.  I’m not about to join a trappist order (sacrificing sex sounds awful) but I love the path Merton laid out and his ability to express the depth he discovered within his sacrifice.   

3. Most of us, when we imagine trappist monks, we think of priests sitting silently in a room praying endlessly.  In reality, Merton became a farm hand on a functional farm cut off from most of the world.  He learned how to actively pray in order to accomplish his daily chores while remaining in constant contact with God through prayer.  Not at all what he was expecting.

Side Note:  All three of these things happened in the last third of the book.  Seriously, just skim the first 2/3rds.  You won’t miss much.

Kelly knew me for a year before we dated.  Was she waiting and hoping I’d notice her during that year?  Nope.  She actively hated me.  This is a woman who values kindness above all else, and yet managed to tell everyone she knew how much she disliked me. A little full of my own nebulous abilities and an overall belief that I had an internet fueled witty answer to everything kept her at arms reach.  I loved the celebrity that came with being a leader on a small college campus and she hated the ego that came with it.

Fast forward a lot, and now I’m a leader in a small school as a guidance counselor. I came to understand my own pitfalls associated with professional titles and pushed them aside to embrace contemplative simplicity and a career focused on helping others.  Lately, I’ve found myself in situations where a leader is needed and I see the path the leader needs to take.  I’m intimidated not by the challenges this represents but by the possibility of slipping into a linear thinking stratagem that accomplishes a lot but leaves me unfulfilled at the end of the day.

The key, and I think Merton would agree, is to take the path in front of you while embracing the sacrifices needed to maintain a contemplative prayer life.  Contemplative prayer may not make me a great leader, but it’ll help me be a great ‘me’ as I lead.

Don't forget to look up

One of my favorite college courses had nothing to with my major, my minor or my attempted, and eventually jettisoned, music minor. That’s right, a horror movie film class remains my favorite class in college. Not the gross out torture-porn we’ve seen the last few years or endless spin-offs, but horror movies trying to say something within their genre.

Stephen King's horror novels have great messages within their grisly stories. The Shining tells a story about alcoholism destroying a modern family through a haunted hotel driving a man crazy. The Cell tells a story about the lemming culture of technology through cell phone created zombies. Misery tells the story of the contraints of obsessive fan demands through an actual obsessive fan. I love the boundaries genre-fiction provides and the creativity authors have within those boundaries to tell different messages.

My love of genre fiction, while also explaining my love affair with superhero comic books, brought me to The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. End-of-the-world fiction is pretty popular right now, and there’s a lot of themes running around as authors wonder what the heck would happen if 99.9% of the world suddenly died/turned into zombies/got nuked.

Moslty, as one would expect, things get really f-ed up. Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games) imagines America would get pretty totalitarian and hyper-focused on violence as entertainment. Cormac McCarthy (The Road) sees a father’s bond overpowering the horrors of a lawless America. Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) looks at everyday people struggling to make sense of their world and coping with their own horrific actions needed for survival.

Taking a different approach, Heller looks for hope and vitality in his novel about a small aircraft pilot living in Colorado after 99.9% of the world dies of the flu. Sure, there are some tragic scenes (a flashback to the main character’s wife dying in an overcrowded hospital), but Heller doesn’t dwell on the awfulness. In fact, the novel opens after the plague and the ensuing lawless chaos has already died out. Heller’s characters have survived and are left searching for what comes next.

That search for meaning plays itself out many times in other novels and movies, but not so much in end-of-the-world sagas. The way Hig, the main character, realizes there's more to life than day-to-day survival and the emotions he goes through looking for that meaning kept me coming back to the book more than the standard lawless theatrics inhabiting most apocalypse genre fiction.

Don't let my comparisons to other books make you think this one doesn't stand on it's own. When Heller isn’t writing novels, he’s a regular contributor to a lot of outdoor magazines. His loving familiarity of nature offers wonderful backdrops for much of the novel. Fishing, hiking, gardening and sleeping outdoors all make appearances in the novel and always seem to herald some level of healing and normalcy for Heller’s characters.

The fine art of being bored

 I recently spent 3 weeks in Europe, and discovered a lot about myself as I looked history that predates American history (which I love), topless beaches and the art of being bored.

Cadaques, Spain.  We spent 3 days here wandering through the city, eating tapas and enjoying the beaches.

The history was just humbling.  Being in Spain and talking about the Spanish conflict against the Moors that lasted 700 years was crazy to think about.  700 years.  That’s older than America.  Heck, that’s a longer period of time than people have been in America.   European people, at least.  Lets not get too racist this early in the summer.  Anyways, it was refreshing to in a place that takes such a long look at history.  There aren’t as many WWII enthusiasts b/c every country in Europe has seen better wars and had more decisive victories.  

The Alhambra, a Moorish palace built when they invaded Spain in 711 A.D.  The carvings on the pillars are the Qur'an and took 100 years to carve into the stone throughout the palace.   

As titillating (pun intended) as European topless beaches are for Americans, they get a little overwhelming at the same time.  Sure there’s some attractive ladies there, but there’s also Mom’s and their kids, Grandmas with grandkids and plenty of men in speedos.  Plenty.  Again, though, there was something refreshing about being in a place where human bodies, by themselves, aren’t sexual.  Sexuality is a personality trait that people show or they don’t, just like any other emotion or personality trait.  Sexuality isn’t boobs, sexuality is boobs combined with emotions and feelings.  Just boobs?  Not sexual.  

Did you think I was going to post a picture of a topless beach?  It's not that kind of blog.

One of the things, though, that I greatly appreciated about my time was the boredom.  Part of my trip was chaperoning kids on a schools sponsored tour complete with buses, schedules and tour guides.  Turns out the freeway in America is about as interesting as the freeway in Spain, so I had plenty of time to think, read and be really really bored.

You know what I realized, though?  I’m never bored at home.  Never.  As soon as I feel boredom creeping into my mind I reach for my phone, on demand Netflix or the internet.  Boredom, though, pushes me.  It propels me forward to be creative and really think about what I want from my time.

So, in my never ending quest to create a theory of living for myself that solves all of my problems in one giant swoop, I’ve decided that every day needs to be filled with ASO.  Active Spritual Output.

Do I look contemplative?  I'm hoping to go for contemplative.

Every day I need to be active (walking, hiking, jogging, biking, gym), spiritual (praying, reading, journaling, reflecting) and outputing (anything that isn’t passive sponging on my part, such as writing, playing guitar, coaching.  Pretty much anything where I’m putting something out instead of just sitting and taking in).  

Did I eat some good food?  Oh my God, yes.  Did I relax on the beach and have a wonderful time?  Yep.  I’m hoping, though, that my appreciation of my time moves beyond the “wonderful vacation” mode and really nudges me in a different direction.  

A picture of a pretty door?  Deep.

They're broken, I'm broken, we're all broken

Some of my favorite stories from the bible occur whenever Jesus surrounds himself with sinners.  His followers, following ancient Judea customs, believed that being around sinners, or “the unclean,” would cause them to become unclean themselves.  Jesus scoffed at this tradition and showed his followers the importance of being with ALL people.

There are a ton of lessons in these stories:  The importance of meeting people at their level when trying to help them.  The dangers of believing that we’re ever too good to be around another person.  And, my personal favorite, that everyone has something to offer, and that by loving everyone, especially the ones we find difficult to love, we bring ourselves closer to the loving image God has for us.  

My friendships in Dayton bring this image to mind, if only because a lot of people I visited over the holidays were struggling in different ways.  Marriages have become tense.  Steady work remains allusive and ways of living remain different than what I work for and enjoy in the Twin Cities.  

My first reaction to these differences was deep deep sadness.  I just felt grief in my bones for these beautiful people and the friendships I felt were fading with time.  My second reaction, not surprisingly, was defensive.  I started in on the whole “I work hard for what I have,” and “They make their decisions just like I do” line of thinking.  I think that was my way of feeling guilty for my success, which is pretty modest by most accounts.

All that changed, when my wife sent me THIS link, beautifully written from a woman in Dayton.  I tapped in to this kind of spirituality when I came to Minnesota, and I think some part of me didn’t believe it existed back in the Gem City, if only because I’ve only known it since moving away.  

I loved the sentiment and the music (Over the Rhine is a great Indie-folk band from Cincinnati), but most of all I love that it reminded me of the stories I mentioned earlier.  I love these people not for what they produce or give, but because they are.  It would be easy to push all of the hard complicated things out of my life, get defensive about my own and put up some strong fences.  

That isn’t life, though.  It’s some weird suburban fantasy where everything is easy and clean.  It isn’t, and that’s why it’s important to love people and relationships that become messy or painful.  It reminds me there’s good in the hard.  There’s beautiful and love and amazing in the messy.  It’s a lesson I keep relearning, and I hope I always will.

Jesuits, Buddhism and Christmas

I was in a rough place a few years ago around this time of year.  Halfway through my senior year of college at Xavier University, I ended a messy relationship and started questioning my chosen career path.  The relationship should have ended much much earlier than it did, but we both held on because sometimes the bad patterns we know are preferable to the patterns we don’t.  Also, I think questioning your direction in life is always a good idea, but doing so halfway through your last year of college produces a fair bit of anxiety in everyone.

I went to the last student Mass of the semester with quite a bit of personal trepidation.  Fear of being single.  Fear of my chosen path.  Fear of unchosen paths.  Sadness over lost time and opportunities associated with my recently failed relationship.  Just an all around uneasiness concerning life, not to mention a looming graduation with uncertain job opportunities ahead.

Fr. Graham, Xavier’s President who celebrated the Mass, gave his homily and, of course, talked about Christmas and why we celebrate and what it means worldwide.  But then, as Jesuits often do, he asked us to reflect on the message from a personal standpoint.  What would it mean to let Jesus be born within us this holiday season?  How would we be different?  I wish I could say something exploded inside of me, that I jumped up from the pew and realized everything there was to realize, but, of course, that didn’t happen.  It definitely gave me something to think about, though, as I walked to Dana’s to grab a post-Mass beer with friends, but I pushed it to the back of my mind to get through finals, travel home and weather normal family madness associated with the holidays.  

My family is small, so Christmas day consisted of me and my parents opening presents and then settling in for a day of watching holiday movies and reading new books.  I have this distinct memory of sitting in an old brown recliner, surrounded by wadded piles of torn wrapping paper and opening a new book, The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.  One of his main theories in the book is happiness vs. pleasure, which are two different things our society often confuses.  He, not surprisingly, believes that happiness leads to greater personal joy than the addictive nature of pleasure.  

Sitting in the chair, book in my lap, I thought about happiness, pleasure and Fr. Graham’s message of a personal Christmas.  My ex-girlfriend certainly provided me with pleasure on many different levels, but our lack of real happiness had become more and more apparent.  The same with my chosen career path.  I had wanted to write for newspapers my entire life, it seemed glamorous and exciting, but the high divorce rate I saw for journalists, endless story chasing and disposable nature of print media left me feeling empty at the end of most work days.  In both cases, I constantly chased things for pleasurable reasons with no regard for greater happiness.

This greater happiness, not just fleeting pleasures, is what God calls for me.  My wife, my home, my job all fill me with a peaceful joy I feel in my bones.  This bone-deep happiness gets me through good and bad days, easy and difficult times.  God meets me in these places and walks with me along our path.

I know this means a lot of different things for different people, but Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and good luck.  I hope this is a rejuvenating time for you, and I’ll see you next year.