Vigils: Intimacy with the Void
The title of poet Paul Celan’s 1967 collection, Atemwende (in English: Breathturn), suggests that mysterious moment at the end of the out-breath and the beginning of the in-breath. What happens in that gap is… a gap. It permits no concepts (not even “emptiness”) and yet, ineffably, is a part of the fullness of human experience. The breathturn has its ...
Jesus Lama
…the encounter between Catholicism and Buddhism cannot take place at the level of the Magisterium, it can only take place at the level of two contemplatives talking together in private. —Harold Talbott, paraphrasing Dom Aelred Graham, in “Thomas Merton in the Himalayas, An Interview with Harold Talbott” from Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Summer, 1992. If the ...
“Fed manure and kept in the dark…”
Daniel Ingram: An old friend and former meditation teacher of mine and I were ranting in our typically passionate style about this very topic one day, and we came up with the “Mushroom Theory.” Mushrooms are fed manure and kept in the dark, and we speculated that part of the problem was that some meditation ...
The Cloud of Unknowing, “in whiche a soule is onyd with god”
Partially in order to a brush up on my middle english (rusty since reading Chaucer in college), I’ll be working through text of the medieval Cloud of Unknowing, one of the sources of the practice of Centering Prayer. I’ll let you know what I find. HERE BYGYNNITH A BOOK OF CONTEMPLACYON, THE WHICHE IS CLEPYD THE ...
Leonard Cohen is an artmonk
[part of the "__ is an artmonk" series] Cohen, who once spent five years in a Zen Monastery, mentions the Cloud of Unknowing in his 1979 song “The Window”:
‘looking at the contours of the temple’
[Part of a new series, Daily Lectio Divina after the Benedictine tradition of "divine reading." For instructions, click here. Subscribe to Daily Lectio Divina. Send comments or suggested readings to nathan@artmonastery.org]
Nuggets
Ken Wilber, in Always Already: The Brilliant Clarity of Ever-Present Awareness: Many people have stern objections to “mysticism” or “transcendentalism” of any sort, because they think it somehow denies this world, or hates this earth, or despises the body and the senses and its vital life, and so on. While that may be true of certain ...
theFWD submission #3
[I'm not the first person to feel that spirituality is a bit of a Chinese finger trap, but I haven't heard it posed in game language per se. For the Future We Deserve collaborative book project.] Spirituality as a game “My advice to you is not to undertake the spiritual path. It is too difficult, ...
More on “5 Leadership Secrets of a Trappist Monk”
A comment by someone named “elizdelphi” on the Washington Post page for the “5 Leadership Secrets of a Trappist Monk” caught my attention, even before I read the article (I wonder how often I scan comments before reading an article online, and what this says about me): As a Secular member of the Carmelite Order, which ...
