Turning Within to the Still Small Voice

Who is Catching Whom

2020-03-08T08:49:00.001-04:00

The premise of who is catching whom is just below the surface every time I set out to be on water. Whether piercing bait (yes, I still bait fish and consider it an equal chance to be on water), or tying on a fly - from the bank or in the depths - the simple reality comes across loud and clear. It might not be me who is in charge of this desire to be on water and catch the allusive and elusive prey. It might be the water that is really luring me out and hooking me - no less allusive and elusive. Or, perhaps the fish.

There is affirmation of this understood yet still unknown truth that lay afoot the passion of the chase in the simple poem, The Hound of Heaven:

“I FLED Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 5

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,” - Francis Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven”

It is the affirmation that that which has us in its passionate grip is somehow the thing which we ourselves hold onto because of our passion toward it. Caught or catching, who can say.

Standing chest high in waters, I realized that the trout I had hoped to woo had somehow already started wooing me. Long before I cast my caddis nymph toward the riffles, I had already been hooked. “One ON.” But more than likely it should have and always still should be yelled, “Tom ON.” Who is catching whom? River, stream, lake, trout, sunshine, open-air, bass, salmon, nature, fisher, poet, painter? Who, I ask.

This intuited yet underground relationship is really part of the mythic and mystic allure of the craft of yielding to the call. I mean, come on, would any of us buy half the shit we buy if we were not somehow being reeled in by an unknown mother of a fish or poem or painting - at least in our own minds. Something greater than just the one simple act of entering a stream, or catching a fish, or writing a poem, or painting a canvas is afoot. There is an energetic pull for convergence. We long to be wed to something greater.

Aren’t we all snagged on the great gossamer tippet of eternity. Don’t we all believe that we will cash in on the big one and join the angelic throng of fisher-folk or artists on high and from all time. That great heavenly cloud of water-side, or manuscript-side witnesses. That pen-ultimate trip and cast and catch that will allow us to cry atop our lungs’s capacity “I have the biggest catch of my whole damned life.” Or, “I have just penned my absolute and quintessential poem.” And then, knowingly, tilt our head to the side, don a trickle of blood from the mouth - just along the chin line - and drop over dead. Having performed and been performed upon in the greatest ceremony of life. We had been caught; we had caught. We wrote, and we were written.

There it is. This friend, is your ticket out of church. This is the grand mystic craft and mythic quest that all humans of worth have set and are set upon. This is the passion of the divine. Surely any minister of worth would gladly sign your docket, stamp your pass, and let you out on such glorious and good behavior. If you can acknowledge the divine craft of entering a stream, or of writing a poem, then you have given in to the divine pull and merged with a greater-than-you. Is that not the definition of the spiritual?

I think this was the thought amid the penning of my poem “Gentle Falls”.

Gentle Falls

Gentle falls

The silent foot

Upon the stones

Of time;

Wading through

Th'glorious streams

And watching

For a sign;

Of darting forth

Or rolling o’er

How e’er the

Fish will out.

Revealed to

One who holds

The reel and slowly

Moves about.

Who sets the

Hatch one finds

So near upon

The end of line;

Who casts it back

And puts on power

To land for

Fish to find.

Who sets the hook

And who is set

upon by tethered

meal.

Who is reeling

in the catch

And who is

being reeled.

I it is

Upon the line

What end

I cannot say;

Nor know

If I pull in

Or out - just

Pull with no delay.

Who spies the

Fly what gentle

Falls on riffles

Of the stream,

Who chases down

With swiftest speed

And bites upon

Its dream.

Write the words

Upon my heart

Of how to catch

The fish

Or how to flee

From fisher-folk

Far and away

My only wish.

Of how to dress,

And poach it well

And place it on

The dish

But once

It is devoured

And, no more

In space or time

It will be

my eternal Quest

to find Who’s me

or mine.

And sure I am

That oft’ will change

Of who has who

On line.

Who has not painted a barn on a canvas, or written a few lines of free verse and felt a yielding to some larger thing. An entrance into a bigger reality. This is the nature of craft. We come along side of another great stream of meaning and we conjoin and confluence takes place. We become one with the process and get lost in it. Who and whom are essentially lost, hidden, or unimportant. And then we emerge and continue on as if we were one single being and no longer ALL.

Don’t deny it. Think of your craft. What is it you lose yourself into and among? It is there you shall find your spirit. I do not pose a good or ill to where it is we lose ourselves. That is yours to assess.

First, find where you have confluence. Then decide if you will give your life for such a river. Maybe you know four good streams to be astream amid. So be it. Know them, though. The craft will be the richer and the confluence all the mightier. Like it or not, there is, “One ON.”

Who is catching whom?

A SPRING BLESSING OF THE WATERS

2019-02-15T07:45:00.002-05:00

A SPRING BLESSING OF THE WATERS -

for individuals and congregations alike

Spirit of Light and Life, Giver of All Creation,

We call upon you this day to hallow these waters. These waters rise each Spring to bring new life to the land around them and to the life within - nourishing each strand and fiber and cell of life itself. May they find a pure and an essential place in our hearts and in our minds as well as in our bodies.

May we tend these waters with the utmost of care, being sure to keep from them any harmful impact from all we do and all we produce. Countless years and the efforts of countless lives have gone into upgrading the streams of ours to be Exceptional Value Streams. May we honor those years, and may we honor those lives by maintaining the integrity of their exceptional value.

May our waterways be a path for opening our eyes and our hearts to beauty, to radical amazement, to awe, to wonder, and to grandeur. May they be a path for our minds for opening to the art and artistry of their presence on human landscapes - and to all they cause us to pen and paint. May they be a path for our bodies and our communities to find respite and recreation - wholesome play in nature - cleansing every aspect of who we are.

We commit to being stewards of these and all our waterways and all our natural resources of land, air, water and climate.

Bless them all and preserve them - and us also, in their presence.

Amen.

Read Psalm 1: 1 - 3 in closing.

Psalm 1

1 Blessed is the one
    who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
    or sit in the company of mockers,
2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
    and who meditates on his law day and night.
3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
    which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
    whatever they do prospers.

The ETERNAL UNBEKNOWNST

2018-07-03T16:13:00.001-04:00

In trout fishing we call it structure. It is those places in the river or stream or lake or body of water behind which, or under which, or within which a trout or the food that a trout wishes to eat may linger; remaining isolated and undetected. Places just beyond the beyond, out of reach of sight, or sound, of taste, of smell, or of a ripple that would alert the tiniest particles of touch. Unbeknownst.

Because such places are partially obscured from being fully known, they hold and impart a deep sense of mystery. In that green, brown, golden tinge of water, it may be a fish; but, it may also be a plant or a fully submerged branch.

In a game of manhunt, or war, or of kick the can on Georgie Acker’s front lawn we called it a hiding place or a blending-in spot or really secluded. To be camouflaged. The ultimate act of invisibility and escape. Beyond all sensory detection. Unbeknownst.

Because these hiding places tuck us away; keeping us from being fully known or known at all, they hold and impart a deep sense of mystery. In that shadow may be John or Jimmy or Mark, or the mere elusive mottled hues and blotches of faint light and shadow.

It takes some real doing to be unbeknownst or to find a sense of BEING in the unbeknownst. Especially in a universe that seems always to be revealing and unveiling itself - blossoming open; especially in a culture that holds fast its obligation of uncovering works always toward illumination to grow itself out of harmful ways of being and suffering.

It is APOPHATIC to be UNBEKNOWNST. Wikipedia defines APOPHATIC as: "Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God." So this harkens to the teaching of UNKNOWING from either the Mystic of The Cloud of The Unknowing or the Pseudo-Dionysian writings of the early Church. The Syriac Fathers and Mothers as well as the Hesychastic Fathers and Mothers all enjoin us to find the SILENCE of the GODHEAD and the MYSTERY.

Knowing is good. But in infinity and endlessness there will always be mystery - a further darkness beyond which our light of awareness has yet to reach. The structure of a black hole; or the shape of an emotion speaks to this. Not being able to comprehend a thing much "HUGER" than we, also speaks to this.

We do well to measure the distance between something unknown and something ill or bad. We sometimes confuse the unknown with harm or danger. Something in darkness cannot be assigned a value until exposed to the light. We suspend judgement until all may be seen - or at least more of a thing may be seen. I am not saying that the unknown may not harbor peril, but we should be careful not to throw out the DIVINE with the BATHWATER - as it were.

While playing manhunt, when I thought I saw Scotty laying on the berm of the rhododendron bed just on and in the edging of the mound, I always checked a few different angles and also a few different times to be sure it wasn’t a raccoon or a skunk or a shadow cast from the streetlight through the maples. There are illusions and misconceptions in the spaces beyond clear light. There is nuance in that which is unbeknownst.

I find this layering of clarity ever present in knowing the DIVINE ONE. Always beyond recognition and the strands of perception. The ALL-WISE hangs often beyond the STRUCTURE of our days. THE COSMIC IT lay partially knowable, like any sweet poetic truth and sensual sensibility. Just out of reach.

I feel we have forgotten the wispiness of truth. Digitally sequestered data and GOOGLING leads us to forget that not everything shall appear in the light of understanding. And, even when a thing is seen and handled it does not mean we have the ability to integrate its presence into all we know and experience in an all encompassing fashion. We may not be able to hold FULL TRUTH. We may need to act in one way because of some other thing we know also to be true. We may have to COMPROMISE the WHOLE for all we can handle or know at one time of the PART.

Consider the haziness of compassion and mercy. This sort of thing was at play in the life of king David. King David who while a man given over to selfish gain repeatedly is also known as a man after God’s own heart. A mystery to be sure. Like any good reader, we become willing to SUSPEND OUR DISBELIEF. This is critical when coming up against THE MYSTERY. Don't you think?

How do you approach the HIDDENESS of the UNKNOWABLE KNOWN? A koan to ponder to be sure? How approach ye the need to know everything? Can you allow your soul the REST OF THE UNBEKNOWNST? To ponder ABSENCE and EMPTINESS? The DIVINE-TROUT or DIVINE-PLAYER-of-HIDE-and-SEEK hides behind the STRUCTURE of life, just beyond the beyond. Are you willing to let go enough to know the UNBEKNOWNST?

Everything between your eyes of perception and the objects of that perception is invisible and

UNBEKNOWNST to the eye of the body. So it is with ALL there is and the EYE of the soul.

The Water Flushed The Praying Mantises Up and Out

2014-05-11T09:19:00.002-04:00

This post is from my book Cairn-Space and for my friend Susan who carried a pod to her garden and watched them hatch one fine day.

+ + +

The watering flushed praying mantises up and out of the cover of stalk and stem; onto walls, and branches, and posts. Had I not been paying attention, I would have missed them. I would have never seen what they had to teach.

They climbed up trying to avoid the water I was adding to the garden. As they climbed, they would often spot a bug and settle in for the kill. Patiently they would wait for the “perfect” moment before striking. In their rising, nourishment presented itself. They would stop and dine. They watched and waited—like the Wise Virgins of Jesus’ parable. They were watchful and alert.

I had the good pleasure to encounter their watching and waiting. Slowly focusing on the meal, almost hypnotizing it before the strike, they would become careful, and lose their place in time to a slowed attention. It was the “Power of the Slowing” that Gerald May wrote about in “The Wisdom of the Wilderness” HarperCollins Books, NY, 2006). Their slowing to capture food made me pause, pay attention, and enter into the slowing myself. It taught me about what it takes to discriminate and discern the quality and nature of things in my life. Although all things can move us toward union with God, some things pose potential dangers and threats of entanglement that are just not worth risking. It requires watchfulness and alertness to become nourished—to grow.

Slowing helps us to focus and become aware. Nature has a tendency to help us enter the slowing, if we watch her examples in other sentient beings. Could my praying become the same? Could I still myself enough to become observant and watch what would arise from my heart as I watered it? Could I become still enough to see the many options for nourishment all around me: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness,

self-control, community, forgiveness?

For many years prior to this experience of the mantises rising, we had hatched mantis pods as a family. We would buy an egg casing from the local garden store and leave it out in the backyard in a covered aquarium. As the weeks wore on, we would almost forget it was there, until one day someone would notice hundreds of mantises on the walls of glass. It was hard to believe that so many mantises could be in one casing. They were a shifting mass of life and limb covering the aquarium walls. We would take off the lid and watch them scurry throughout the yard.

There was another time we had watched the mantises. Glinda and I had just begun dating. We hiked the woods and collected scraps of nature to weave into a wreath. We started with grapevine. We wrapped it into a circle. We tucked dried garlic-mustard fronds into the hoop. We tucked in some mullein leaves and sassafras roots. We also wove in a mantis pod. We had no idea what it was.

One night, when we returned to her room, the walls were covered in moving spots. At first we thought our eyes were deceiving us. We thought we saw shifting movement. As we stepped closer, we were assured that we did. Hundreds of young mantises covered the wall. This was an accidental hatching. The hatchings in the aquarium were not.

I am glad that we took the time to hatch them. They gave me pause in their hatching, and a renewed sense of stillness in watching them rise while watering the gardens. For years, we had more praying mantises in our gardens than anyone around. For years, I had a new way of seeing prayer. Their presence has been a cycle of routine. I have seen their daily morphs and the slow changes that happen to them over time. I have seen how their colors change as summer lengthens and draws to a close. From green to brown they fade. Their numbers decrease throughout the browning, until they leave the yard altogether. Gone.

from Chapter One of Cairn-Space

click HERE for ordering

“I Dreamed A Dream: the Place of Dreams in Spiritual Formation and Direction”

2014-04-24T18:09:00.004-04:00

“I Dreamed A Dream: the Place of Dreams in Spiritual Formation and Direction”

by, Father Dn. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland, CSJ, OSL

The hidden nature of dreams and dreaming in our lives is esoteric – for the most part – because we fail to take the time to sit with them and listen to the value of their content. Whether it is a lifelong dream and ambition we have or a nighttime visitor to our sleeping consciousness, dreams are vital in revealing our current identity, situation, and our longings for something other.

Countless hours of our lives are spent upon waking trying to remember just beyond the fragment of a notion that we still hold onto from our nighttime visit from a dream. Equal number of hours are spent in our lives trying to remember our lifelong ambitions or hopes and why we feel as if we are no longer on their path. Both of these things have to do with what we call dreams. Whether they are the sleeping kind or the goal setting kind, I do not believe the path to their integration into our lives is any different. We must sit with our dreams and listen for their content to reveal itself and empower and engage us.

I think everyone has that one dream they are trying to figure out. What does it mean? Where did it come from? Is there something I am missing? And then, in an instant, we move beyond the notion of discovery and realization by going on to the next thing. We go and make the coffee or wake the kids. Leaving our dream in mid-air, like the gossamer wisp it is. Never to think about it much longer in the future.

There are a couple of ways we can give voice to these dreams that will move us closer to hearing what they are really all about – what they are trying to say. They are simple pathways that do not take up much time. But, they do – as with all aspects of formation and direction – require attention and focus.

First, we can simply go through a chronology of the dream in our head and look at all of the pieces of the drama. Start at the beginning and move through it sequentially. Think about each of the elements as you pass through the content the first time. On the second pass through the story, start to ask yourself these questions:

Does any of this make something else in my life more clear?
Do these snapshots of drama mean anything to me?
Are there symbols for my feelings, beliefs, and hopes laid out in front of me here?
How does this make me feel?
Does this feeling speak to where I am in life right now?
What great teachings do I see in the content?

Once you have begun this dialogue you will begin to engage with the content of the dream and even gain access to some of its empowerment to move on. Some of the content may be disturbing and you do not want to look at it. But, regardless there is something to be said. Listen.

At some point it helps the process if instead of thinking about these things, you actually take the time and space to talk out loud to yourself about the process. Speak the answers to yourself. It will feel odd at first. But, it is a dialogue, after all.

Second, you may want to do the same sort of process, but in a journaling format. Use the same process of sequential review and the same set of questions to write down the components of your dreams and the responses to the dream interview questions. It will yield a content you can come back to later if you choose to review or reengage the dream.

In either case there will be a listening that goes on that will take the dream into the next phase of consciousness. It will begin to unpack itself more because you focus your attention on it and it meaning and importance.

Some people will naturally bring up reasons dreams are less important and transient. They will say that, “I must have eaten something that caused this”. Or, “I must be getting sick”. In either case, we must remember that the contents from our dreams come from within us. They come up and out of us because they are in there to begin with. They have “something” to say. We must be bold enough to listen and hear.

Just the last night I had a dream I was out walking with my family in the woods. Not uncommon since we live in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. Both our home and the property we own ten minutes away are in wooded spaces.

At some point we saw three bear cubs (grizzlies – which we do not have here in the Poconos, so their place must have had some metaphoric content to it) playing along the side of the path. Almost immediately, someone shouted, “There must be a mother. Run.” And, we all ran to some makeshift shelter that was just around the bend – one that we all knew was there.

Once inside, I slammed the door shut and held my hands against it with great force as there was no latch or hasp to keep us safe. The mother grizzly appeared through the crack between the door and the frame. She was huge and menacing. Oddly, although she was a grizzly, she and her cubs were as black; black as the night.

I held the door in place with my full weight. The mother grizzly began snorting and sniffing. She began smelling my hand through the crack. She stayed there for smelling for some time.

The room was filled with a great tension and stillness. It was then that I could begin to smell the strong aroma of garlic and remembered that my hands were coated with the aroma as I had been cracking the paper shells off of garlic cloves and crushing them for our meal just before we left for the walk.

I held my breath. She then decided to move on and we were no longer in danger. We gathered ourselves and waited before we left.

The waking life truth is that I had been shelling cloves before I went to bed and my hands did in fact smell of garlic. But, not for a minute do I believe that that dream was not telling me something.
Our family has been going through some tough discussions about or black lab Eli these last few days. Eli, who was not anywhere in the dream at all.

It did not take me long to realize the connection to the dread decisions we were trying to make about Eli and his ensuing death from cancer. It was a large and menacing darkness that took us by surprise.

We were clearly grieving and sensing what it would be like without him in our lives. The garlic became the bridge to the everyday reality.

After years and years of paying attention to dreams and dreaming, I began to notice a shift in my life. I felt more settled. I felt more homeostatic in my world. I noticed that my writing took on more solidity and I began to write poetry. I found myself more connected to the deeper recesses of my being.

In the craft of dreaming and sitting with the dream, we will find an opening to our identity and the meaning for who we are. This is particularly critical during times of illness and great transition in our lives. It is worth the investment to unpack the meaning of the gifts we receive from our inner self – the gift of dreams.

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you."
The Gospel of Thomas, verse 70

http://tomspublications.blogspot.com/

A selection from Chapter 2 of "Cairn-Space"

2014-04-12T10:46:00.000-04:00

Uncovering growth and nurturance from the routine practices of daily life has long been a reality passed on from generation to generation. It is responsible for the development of “tradition” in faith, philosophy, art, politics, and the sciences. It is how we learn what it is passed on. Repetition builds continuity. It is a neural thing. It also helps us open to greater things. Laws are fashioned by it, and organizations are developed because of it. Routine practices keep us moored to the safety of the dock of life.

The notion of routine practice has its bearing on our individual daily lives. We live each day enacting patterns or habits that we have allowed ourselves to accept as meaningful. We go as far as to say that a day has been worthless because we have not checked off one of the habits we hold dear. But, are these habits all necessary? Are they all nourishing? Discernment would tell us, “No”.

We get up everyday and have a cigarette with our coffee. The pattern, over years, weaves itself into the meaning of what we call “morning”. The need for the nicotine is wrapped around the need to repeat familiar events and we are hooked on a habit that we cannot shake. We watch the news before we go to bed. The pattern, over years, weaves itself into the meaning of what we call “bedtime”. The need for tantalizing headlines is wrapped around the need to repeat familiar events and we are hooked on a habit we cannot shake. We know these things are not healthy for us, but we have woven them into our expectations.

We must develop patterns that feed us and strengthen us. We must look for the things we need as divine creatures and build them into habitual routine. This way (just like returning to the prayer practice when distracting thoughts arise) we can return to our core and avert building unhealthy routines. These habits entangle themselves in both our bio-chemical make-up and our cultural patterns of living. They can be at once a physical driving need and an emotional attachment. Habits and routines can ride the crest between the body and mind continuum.

Prayer is needful. Silence is needful. Compassion is needful. Rest is needful. The practices we develop around these needful things should reflect nourishment, health, and wholeness. If we do not routinely make room for the needful things in life, they will not just happen upon us. We do this by wrapping them in the myelin sheaths of repetition.

The same sort of practices should also be present in our lives together – as the body of Christ. Fashioning sacred space and filling it with the heart and essence of prayer is not a journey for the individual alone, it is a corporate practice as well. Having prayer space and prayer time is good for the one; it is also good for the many.

In a day and age when people would like to lose any connection to a daily routine and be set free to experience one new event after another (at least in our own estimation), the need for a nourishing daily routine is great. Having a heart center and a routine visit to that heart center is vital to an emerging stability and health. It is something we can practice together and apart. It is something we can build into the positive associations of what it means to be the Body of Christ.

Although people may verbally acknowledge that routine is not necessary or a healthy requirement in daily life, they do enact the need for routine on a daily basis. People often enact things they need even if they cannot make a verbal or cognitive assent to the importance of the task.

They may not turn each day to the sacred routines of old – prayer and or liturgy, but they do turn to the routine of reading email, checking social media, and watching the news. We find comfort in routines. Unbeknownst to most, we crave routine and create it whether we know it or not. Routine finds a way in our lives until we are able to recognize and give voice to the need. It is a myelin sheath sort of thing.

Routine is a cairn. Routine is a marker in time and space that helps us to know where we are, remember where we have been, and gain a sense of identity as we visit it again and again over time. Routine digs down deep below the structure of past, present, and future; into the reality of the eternal sense of NOW. Routine is a bridge that unites the dimensions of time and space.

We transmit the signal from axon, to dendrite, through a neural pathway wrapped in fat. We pile the rocks – stone on stone – leaving a visible mark in space and time. Have we discerned the soundness of the stones? Why were they placed? What do they sign?

Liturgy, tradition, and prayer are cairns. They help us gain perspective in landscape of life. They mark how far and how close we come and go as we journey. They are a gauge. And, by their nature they are seen as repeatable events. We do them over and over again, wrapping them in meaning and depth. We can do these things as individuals and as a corporate body.

Click HERE for Cairn-Space

King Solomon and the Mystic Space of the Cosmos

2014-04-06T08:11:00.004-04:00

King Solomon and the mystic space of the cosmos. A section from CAIRN-SPACE, Chapter 4:

There is a tradition of stories told about King Solomon that speak of his spiritual practice of prayer. The stories tell that Solomon carved out a prayer-space around himself with his words, his feelings, and his desires. The stories come from the Sufi tradition. Rumi (Jelaluddin Rumi, AD 1207) is the teller of many of these tales. These tales are about King Solomon’s cairn-space.

It is said that Solomon cleared a space around himself and filled it with the escaping power of his intention and love. He cleared a space to make a palace of prayer: words and sighs offered up to the Father. He found a way to convert time and space into an encountering and wrestling with God. He connected with the Source of All from within his own personal projections. He fashioned the air into a tabernacle of meeting.

It is hard for we modern-folk to recognize that things exist in the “invisibility” of space between objects. Fields exist in these places. Energy exists in these places. Despite our being surrounded by thousands of science fiction stories containing force-fields and energy waves, we are slow to realize that there is something between the electrons of an atom. There is something in the nothingness of space.

There is something present in the nothingness we behold. There is something between particles of matter. There is something between the earth and the moon. We may not see it, but there is something there. Perhaps the “something” that is there has myelin sheaths wrapped around it so information can be passed from one point to another. Perhaps the invisible holds millions of axons and dendrites passing neural data back and forth. Perhaps this whole universe is hardwired with the neural pathways of God; energy moving across the surface of the deep, in matter and in space.

This same field, this same energy surrounds us and permeates us as individuals. It is easy to perceive it on a day when someone is riled up and angry. The air around them is palpable. You can feel the anger. It is the same with mirth. When someone is exuberant with joy, you can feel the joy. We radiate feeling out into the “space” of our own lives; out into our immediate environment. The tenor of the space around us reflects the tenor of the heart.

The Fathers called these fields and energies that surround us and permeate us “logosmoi” (pronounced lo yose mee). Logosmoi are thought-forms. They are our thoughts, emotions, and desires taking shape and form as they dwell within us and as they leave us and enter into the world around us. They are very real.

Perhaps these logosmoi are the angels and demons the desert solitaires wrote about and did battle with in the deserts of Nitria, Scetis, and Kellia. Perhaps these logosmoi are the forces that we battle with in Church when someone leans over and says, “She hasn’t been to church since her husband had that affair.” Perhaps the logosmoi are what distract us from silent stillness in our prayer-spaces.

We weave a shelter around us with the fields of thought, emotion, and desire we generate from within and project out onto the world. These fields we are weaving create the “me” of our lives. They become what we consider to be the personality. In a real sense they precede us and are still around when we leave. If we fail to cut down an inappropriate logosmoi by returning to our practice, it enters the neural field of our communications about prayer.

Think of the affect certain people have when they walk into a room: some liven things up, while others shut down conversation. Some people exude an atmosphere of love and union, while others exude an atmosphere of distraction and chaos.

Scientists have discovered a whole “mirror” system within us. The mirroring begins with the “mirror neuron” which assumes the behavior and emotion in the immediate environment and then reflects it. Individuals mirror “the other” as if it were themselves. It is how we pick up feelings of conflict and dis-continuity. If someone is saying something with their mouth that they are in conflict with in their heart, their body language will relay that information to us and our mirror neurons will pick up the disconnect. It is that feeling that something does not ring true or is just a bit off.

If we are presenting ill-health and darkened logosmoi, we are setting the tone for the people around us. We are leading them into the valley of the shadow of distraction and separation.

It is believed that the use of language is somehow related to this notion of mirror neurons. Language carries mirroring information and that language is a part of the mirroring process. Emotions are clearly perceived in the mirroring process. Someone walks into the room who is depressed and you can feel the gloom affecting you.

We are not talking about magic. We are talking about the freedom of personal choice. We chose what we will project, but we can also just simply reflect what is all around us. We have control over the things we create in us and project out into the world around us, or we can relinquish control and mirror the world. People can affect the tenor of their own lives. There is a giving and taking in our lives and mirroring neurons are a part of the equation.

Perhaps the greatest wrong we commit on a daily basis is not recognizing that we have the freedom to create – today - the things we choose. We are bound only by what we choose to bind us. We can also choose what we mirror. This day, this moment do not have to mirror every other day or moment, or even the people around us. We can slow down enough to retrain our neural communications and develop sound and healthy habits and routines.

The process of purification at the outset of monastic therapy (purification, enlightenment, and union) is about purifying the inner man (the human nature) by destroying negative logosmoi and creating positive logosmoi. Spiritual practices help us to remove negative strands from the weaving of our personality and replace them with positive strands. Prayer, fasting, vigils, charity, scriptures, hymns, creeds, prostrations are all tools that work on the purification of the heart of man.

Rumi let us know that daily, Solomon would build a space at dawn made of mystical conversation, intention, and tender compassion: a place within which he could work with his own logosmoi. Rumi called it “The Far Mosque”. Solomon created a holy place around him where he could weave heaven and earth together into the fabric of his own personality. He built a prayer-space within which he could meet God through his spiritual practice and then enter into the stillness of the presence of the Most High. He kept within the scope of this ideal by always returning to praise, adoration, wonder, and awe before the Creative Father. He built in positive logosmoi; positive routines.

Solomon is one of the holy ones (in what will become a long tradition from Merkabah mysticism through the Hassidic movement) that sought to conjoin heaven and earth within himself. The “Far Mosque” – this prayer-space that King Solomon created daily -was Solomon’s place to flee to; his place to hide and be still.

It is said that all of his wisdom was given to him in this “Far Mosque”. His constructive prayer gave him a place within which to give and receive. He gave to the All-Wise his adoration and praise. He received back the wisdom of the ages. Because he made a place to give, he was given to, in return.

Among the wealth of wisdom he received, Rumi teaches that Solomon was taught the mystic use of all of the plants of the earth during this time. He was shown which plants healed which diseases. Solomon emptied himself to God in this space and God filled him back up.

He mirrored the wisdom of the Wise Father.

Click HERE for Cairn-Space

Entrance Into the Heart

2014-04-05T10:02:00.001-04:00

On entrance into the heart from CAIRN-SPACE:

Once we have arrived in the heart and encountered God many things transpire. We are left with the raw data of the encounter, the fresh impression of the meeting. We are asked by this meeting to become different people. We have met God; we feel a need to be transformed. We move ahead and live our lives anew, based on what we have beheld and how we have been changed. These inner changes begin to change the world around us.

The markers that we leave (CAIRNS) in life tell us volumes about who or what we have accepted as God. Sometimes we allow the wrong things to take the place of God and they are instead “gods”. Some of our cairns may be askew. But, the cairns will still remind us of the process we were about, the journey we were on, the milestones we have gone beyond.

Click HERE for Book

Freedom of Forgiveness

2014-04-04T09:45:00.002-04:00

"To live in the freedom of forgiveness
and the power of the spirit of love."

Iona Abbey Worship Book, p. 75.

The holding onto of things in our lives creates a wear and tear on the inner-self that is so subtle that we tend to forget it is happening. Slowly, in small incremental ways, our lives are altered by all of the things we hold onto. If we are holding onto positive things, our inner-self leans into positive ideation; if we are holding onto negative things, our inner-self leans into negative ideation.

We are a composite of all of the increments of our inner-self.

I have always loved the Iona Abbey Worship Book and their other resources. There is a crisp clarity that has always come from Celtic spirituality and this community is a powerful mirror of a Celtic interior life. This one simple line reveals two core principles in Celtic spirituality that show up again and again: freedom and power.

I love that these two show up in one line of a prayer since that makes us free is our true power. It is a comforting thought and a supreme challenge to know that we can gain real freedom and true power in learning to forgive. A great personal mission and ambition in life.

Thank you, Iona Abbey!

http://www.ionabooks.com/iona-abbey-worship-book.html

Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

2012-06-15T19:14:00.000-04:00

It really is a step-by-step guide for anyone with something to say or sell. He is not lying. As with everything Michael does, says, or writes about, he is only putting out there what he knows to be true from his own wrestling, practice, and long-endured experience. The integrity behind what he says is tested before it comes out of his mouth or before the pencil is put to paper.

Michael is the real deal - and I have known his work for many years and on many frontiers.

Over the past 25 years everything has changed. It is not only true for the world of writers; it is true for every person's individual world (predominately because of the shift in the world of the writers/information givers). Everything has changed.

Whether it is the packaging, the content, the style, or the delivery; everything in writing has changed. The speed with which you can get an idea/bit-of-info out into the world, digested and commented on has exponentially increased to dizzying speeds. And Michael has seen it coming from several perspectives. As both a writer/informer and a publisher/enabler he has seen the world of creatives be born anew.

I think we all knew the world changed when the internet hit the scene. We were reminded that things were still changing when Apple helped speed up the evaporation of paper-books and journals. We gasped in fear when Borders died wondering if we could stop the eventual digitization of everything in the world.

What Michael has done here is to take all of that input and map out a pathway through the haze of progress that will keep us on target - even when we cannot see - because of what he has sensed and experience in his life as and individual, author, and professional.

This guide is based on that which he has heard, seen with his eyes, looked upon, and that which his hands have handled. Because of that, this is clearly Michael's very own Gospel and Epistles. This "ain't just his passion" this is his passion and experience. He is not "all hat and no cattle"; as he reminds us Texans are ofttimes known and want to say. He is hat and cattle.

The book is divided into strategy by processes. It is a beginning, middle, and end guide for building the platform you need to shout out your "offering" to the world in such a way as to be heard. He lets you know what works and what doesn't work in each of the phases of the work.

"Do this." "Don't do this." Every section is chocked full of the advice he has lived; and, each and every suggestion is backed up with solid fact. You will find nothing pulled out of thin air. I have always loved that about Michael. Nothing hits his blog unless it is based in his own experimentation and acceptance process. Michael is a master at processes.

He helps you to strategize and implement the building of your platform within the framework of these milestones:

I. Start with WOW
II. Prepare Your LAUNCH
III. Build your HOMEBASE
IV. Expand your REACH
V. Engage your TRIBE

You need to build a platform to share what you have with the world. You need help to do that because it is impossible to go it alone. Let Michael start the project with you and help you see it through to the end. You cannot afford to not read this book if you have anything to offer while you are here on this planet. Hurry up, life is short and time is wasting. Don't miss the prophet's suggestions and message - Borders did fall in a day (well, just about).

Check out Michael's short bulleted synopsis of his offering at:
http://michaelhyatt.com/platform

Reaching In and Down

2012-03-10T18:35:00.004-05:00

There is a massive spiritual pattern to the movement in and down. It is a habit that bespeaks the power of mending and healing. We need to fall apart before we can be put back together. My review of Richar Rohr's new book Breathing Under Water is shared below. Richard knows the path in very well. In his book he is able to address the power of what the poets call DUENDE, and merge it with the twelve steps of the AA program. Addiction is a way of lying to ourselves about the nature of what is real. Check out my review:

It is somehow a long way down to the bottom of a life that we hold onto so desperately; to the bottom of a heart that is hidden behind the constructs and machinations of a mind that is nothing more than a cloak for a hungry ego. And yet, when the journey in and down—the duende of the poets—has begun and blossomed

into a full and robust death angst of despair; it is then, in the whispering hush of the last escaping breath that life can be infused and re-blown into us. When we are truly empty, we shall be filled - the Spirit can win out.

Breathing Under Water is Richard Rohr’s masterful telling of the unwinding nature of addiction and entropy in our lives. So often we claim that addiction is different than the natural process of falling apart. These words make it visible that entropy and addiction are one and the same. What wears us down is the same. What is different is that in entropy we tell the truth; in addiction we lie.

The spirituality of coping with addiction is the same spirituality of all of life’s descents. Entropy is upfront about the fact that things wear on us and weather us into non-existence and humble realism. In addiction we claim the thing that wears us down is actually giving us life. It does not matter if we are addicted to the ego or to a needle or shot glass. We sustain ourselves in addiction on a lie. In entropy we come to terms with the truth of the nature of things.

Rohr help’s us to see the redemptive nature of recognizing that life begins from the bottom. When we whisper defeat and acknowledge we are undone, then we can begin to live. It is not just in this book of his, it peppers everything he does. The gospel he proclaims is that life can only begin when we are able to say “I am not in this alone” and “My own way is just not the fullness it could be”. We all need a community in order to be who we were meant to be.

The break-open point in people’s lives is when they can unabashedly admit that things are a ramshackle. When we can say we have crashed into the bottom, we can awaken to the possibilities of truth. When we are down and out we open to the fragility of human existence. “The wheels have gotta fall off for there to be any movement.”

The 12 step program is an odyssey toward organizing the life of abasement. This is also what grace is all about. An opening toward the agony of entropy is a sure sign of mature spiritual development and wholeness. When I am weak then I am strong.” “The way up is down.” “Everything belongs.” Pick the

phrase or the telling of the tale, it matters not the truth isthe same: honestly looking at yourself, wrestling amid the turmoil of amending, correcting, and repairing, leaning into repentance, forgiveness, and asking is the

only way to become saturated with a genuine love—a love that is able to allow the darkness of the shadow to burgeon into shards of blinding light.

This book weaves classic spiritual depth work with the twelve steps that ignites a fire in the mind, the heart, and the belly all at once. It does not take long in the reading to recognize the undercurrent of good religious principles—a good philosophy of religion. Some of the underpinnings of the 12 Step Program could easily

footnote the works of Heschel, Kierkegaard, Boehme, Nouwen, or Wilber. We figure out we are not whole,we figure out we need larger “I” to live through, we clearly identify our need to repair damage we have been a part of, we work toward mending amid a community of like minded people.

The themes are ancient and eternal. The themes are from the mythologies of all ages. The themes are: power/powerlessness, a Higher-Power or God, surrender to this Higher- Power or God, reviewing the nature of our lives and errors, confession of our wrongs, a willingness to have our wrongs removed, asking for our wrongs to be removed, the reparation of whatever damage we have caused, development of a community of people who abide by these themes. This process is the process of all religious faith. It is the way we come to terms with living in a universe that is compiled of small pieces of matter that are all interdependent.

What makes this book so immense is that Rohr has been able to make connections between the 12 Step Program and the long-standing religious traditions of men and women in search of God. And, in allowing

the greater underground themes to bubble up and merge with a post-modern paradigm of healing, people are able to meld a pragmatic contemporary schema to eternal themes that have passed the test of time.

I also think this piece has great merit in that the pathway of descent that is exposed in the telling is the same pathway that good psycho-therapeutic adherents rely on. People only change when they have hit the bottom

and know they need something to buoy them up. When THEY know. Not when they are told, but when they know it. When people are ready to be cracked open by experience – and when in being cracked open the are able to be self-aware of their brokenness – then they can begin to mend toward wholeness.

Henri Nouwen would have said that it is in the process of discovering our brokenness and woundedness that we actually begin to heal. In this sense, the religious process toward wholeness is afoot of any experience in

life where the wheels fall off. It could be addiction, death, loss, divorce, mental unwinding, grief, or war. There is no triumph in human existence until we are able to recognize that our prevalence toward weakness is our one true strength. The person who can weep at our own human condition is wiser than those who have never touched their shadow.

Click image to Order

From the Belly of the Whale

2011-05-06T16:05:00.000-04:00

My latest volume of poems will be out in a few weeks. It includes Yosemite at Fifty: The John Muir Poems. I am including one of the poems from the John Muir selection. I am hoping to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship this summer to work on a collection of poems on conservation and the endangered species of Yosemite. These is such a need to bring awareness to a deeper level. We need to feel the suffering of the earth and creation if we are to mobilize and change the way we live.

Reaching Out From the Chest

Everything in my chest

reaches out to bathe itself

in the chestnut colored loam;

strewn all about

with burnt and blackened

pieces of bark and wood.

I mingle with earth and

needles as if I am living from

the basement of my days.

My insides reach toward the

the forest floor that has

been asleep for the winter

of my adult life—building up

warmth and food for my soul

against a hollow detachment.

My wholeness is drawn out by

the heat of an age old woods;

by the heat of everyman’s

journey through these days

of finding a voice—finding

a central home in the me—one

of comfort and uncluttered

belonging to itself.

I find myself relaxed in my own

aging. Coming to myself like

a moist, sunlit bed of needles on

the dirt of thousands upon thousands

of aeons, and winters, flowering blooms

of gentle-life growth.

Cones pepper the view and

thick blankets of retreating snow

withdraw their reach to the bottom

of the hills; uncovering all that has

fallen and died since autumn; all

that is in there—that

I have forgotten until now.

My days have pulled in

a bit lately, retreating back

to the bottom of meaning

and the corrugated layers

of place and thing.

I find pieces of myself

scattered on the floor of my

life, and see wonder in the

ripening of passages

and aimless ambling turns.

The compost of my days is rich

with dank, wet, dark expression;

holding itself against the leaner times.

I have found more life in me

than I knew I had held.

The darkness holds no absence

it only hides the view. Flowers and

blooms for a future glory

lay dormant in the tubers

and roots of all life’s meandering

of imagination and place; of

time and space.

Standing on the remnants

of all that is past,

tenderness rises like the

scent of fresh dirt.

Tilled and open, it awaits

the planting of

the second half of life.

A raven sings this same song

from the other side of this vista.

I can hear it, but he escapes my view

Lessons of the Way

2011-04-30T13:37:00.000-04:00

Lessons of the Way picks right up where "Adventure and the Way of Jesus" left off. If you have not read this book first, I would go ahead and do that. I blogged about that book at: http://tjm-stillsmallvoice.blogspot.com/2011/03/adventure-and-way-of-jesus.html

Robinson and Rose start out by reviewing some critical questions that lie at the root of our lives in community - our lives in groups. They ask:

What makes a person valuable or important?

What role does feat play in our decisions and actions?

Does my life really reflect a trust in God?

How do we see people around us?

How we answer these questions or live into our beliefs surrounding these questions deeply impacts our identity as an individual and a member of the myriad of communities to which we belong. They share their impressions of these questions and how they see the impact they have on our identity.

Putting these core questions at the outset of the book should help cement the idea in us that communities and groups are diverse and complex. At any given moment you have not only the external reality of the common and shared experience of all of the members, but an interior reality of the many constituent parts of the group - the personal reality of each member.

Helping people to live out a common and shared existence is a grace. The authors go on to share some powerful tools to facilitating this common and shared existence. They help us see that community happens by grace, but that that grace is possible and enhanced in the structure of planned activities. Organization can bear out God's presence and call.

The remainder of the book is divided into six sections. The first five share the same structure: there is a teaching point, scripture, a verbal lesson around the topic, an activity portion, some facilitator notes, reflection questions, some quotes, and a section for personal notes.

The first section is about thinking and the way. The second is about emotions and the way. The third is about sharing and the way. The fourth is about scripture along the way. The fifth is about communion as a shared experience.

The last section of the book is the full collection of the activities with detailed instructions and considerations. The last section is an activity manual absent the context of a full lesson. So, you can really come at the book from two directions. You can use it in it's complete setting and have full-blown lessons that are structured to support the work of the activity, or you could just glean the activities and develop session content on your own.

The whole piece is so well integrated that you would be remiss not to use the book as it was intended: a unified guide to forming and directing the concept of community in groups.

Building community is a spiritual task that engenders far more than simply doing things together. It requires a deep rooted trust that comes from a relationship with Jesus and bringing that relationship into the contracts and activities you share with the people of God. The way you induce, create, and sustain connections to others in the group must match the quality of the life you live in Jesus.

The authors have found the soft spots and tender bruises that emerge in relationships with other people in community. They have purposefully bundled activities that will stimulate a groups ability to navigate these central issues in our common shared experience as humans.

If you are looking for a way to plant, nurture, and grow Christian community in and among a group of people, you need this book. It will help you plan and execute lessons that will bind people together. This book blends the heart, the mind, the Holy Spirit and scriptures into a process of activity and discussion that facilitates unity and growth.

I plan on using it with our youth group to grow into the next portion of our shared experience in Jesus. I know it will provide the space for formation and direction in a balanced way that other materials will not. Grab a copy today!

How to be a Presentation God

2011-04-23T20:06:00.001-04:00

Scott Schwertly's book, How to be a Presentation God, is a must read for anyone who ever has to give a presentation. I do not care if it is your first presentation or you 10,000th. You need to read this book.

I have been speaking since the age of 15 - I just turned 50 - and I found this book added deep focus to the pieces of speaking that I have picked up intuitively through trial and error over the 35 years. It added some new tools to my toolbox for crafting presentations. These tips could help you avoid taking the long hard road and improve your craft early on in the practice.

Truth be told, my speaking experience and refinement over thirty-five has gotten me to a place where I end up leaving about 70% of the presentations I attend as a listener. I usually leave within the first five minutes. Right at the outset you get all the vibes you need to make a darned good assessment of whether or not the person your are listening to has any passion, any skill, and can give you any ROI. If I feel I could get all of the above at Google in five minutes, then I am out of there. I have books to write and a family to live and play with before I die. I don't need another bad presentation.

That being said, I wish everyone of those presenters I had walked out on had given me their cards because I would give them a link to this book and tell them that they could step up their engagement with the community by giving this book a serious read. Scott, you ROCK!

Our culture has accepted presentations as a valuable form of communication. But, they have not given enough education toward accomplishing this with any real success. Scott not only reminds us of the tools we need to research, develop, and deliver an awesome presentation, but he reminds us of the things he cannot give us. He cannot give us a passionate fire about the topic and he cannot make us extraordinary people. This we must come to terms with on our own. So get busy on your personality while you are preparing to give your presentation.

The first major fact that he drops in your lap about your presentation is that it takes about seven seconds for folks to make a decision about whether or not you will be worth their while to engage with in your presentation (this gets at what I said about leaving within the first five minutes). The second fact is that a presentation is all about perception. Not only the perception of the crowd listening, but also about your perception of the needs of those folks listening. If you are not up their pulling in data from how the crowd is reacting while your are jabbering on, then you are not flexible enough to provide a fluid presentation that meets the needs of the people who have come to allow you to serve them.

Make your topic and your presentation EXCELLENT. Raise your EXPECTATIONS. Deliver STORIES not data. Do not be TRENDY. Research how peoples' brains LEARN. Research how peoples' ears HEAR. Live the fullness of the content of your presentation with ALL of yourself - heart, mind, and body. Don't WASTE their time. These are just a few of the awesome tags he throws into the mix of content in the book.

The rest of the book is a broad and thoughtful expose on content, design, and delivery. Get these three things into your head as the process guides toward making your presentation robust, not flashy. He lays out powerful tools for each of the three portions of the process. You will hear about styles, methods, procedures, and suggestions that the best of the best have used over and over again after countless failures at other attempts. Take a lesson from Scott. The stuff he has written about is the cream of the crop. He will help you build, clarify, brainstorm, outline, drill, perfect, individualize, and experience the whole process of presentation crafting from beginning to end.

I love all of the insight he sneaks into the text and all of the website options he puts forth. I am all over the internet looking for ideas and I have to say that the content Scott puts out there is new, vital, and rich in nutrients. If you ever have to do, or ever have done a presentation, you need to go online or to Borders and get this book. It is perfect. And, Scott has thrown in enough of his personality in the writing that it is edgy, challenging and dead-on honest. I read the book on the flight to Yosemite and never lost interest. He is a Master!

Order book HERE - http://presentationgod.com/go/index.html
View Michael Hyatt's Vid with Scott HERE - http://michaelhyatt.com/an-interview-with-scott-schwertly.html

Adventure and the Way of Jesus

2011-03-18T21:11:00.003-04:00

Here is a good book that crosses over from simply being about formation and direction into being a book about formation and direction within the individual and group process of adventure programing. Folks involved in Camping and Retreat Ministries will love this book. It is a reminder how adventure scenarios are a small slice of a life in faith and descriptive image of it all at once.

Greg Robinson sets out with some groundwork that lays out basic definitions of faith, formation and adventure work in general. At first I thought that this book was only going to be helpful only for folks in the Camping and Retreat Ministries genre of things, but I really found it to be an expose of theory and practice for anyone working with groups. If you are trying to experience or process community with people - people with an adventurous curiosity - then this book is right for you.

There are a couple of keen observations and core insights that Greg makes in this book that you won't want to miss. Three key factors that leaders need to keep in mind when planning, executing, and evaluating any group work and formation work (even for individual formation) are: 1. What is the intent or the end toward which you are working. 2. What things are best suited to help people grow and what resources are at the leaders' disposal to engage this piece of the work. 3. What are the issues that you are working toward revealing and overcoming. With these three concepts in mind you can set out to alleviate the negative interactions of fear, doubt and the consequences of both of these things in individual and group spiritual formation.

I love what he has to say about adventure. He lines adventure experiences up along a definition that shows how much risk is involved. He says that adventure is an experience in which the outcome is unknown. In group settings, this blows open the parameters of what adventure is since with most groups many if not all of the outcomes are unknown. Most group experiences are adventures (any youthworker knows this intuitively). So he makes you feel right at home with the concepts in the book and whatever level of risk you and your group are currently experiencing or able to tolerate. Your group may not be doing high ropes courses, but they are risking every time one of the kids in the group shares what they think, feel, or do about some particular thing in their own personal lives. Being a community always engenders risk.

His emphasis on learning from mistakes, failures, and limitations is perhaps the one thing I valued the most since I feel that most groups tend to hide or disguise their mistakes, failures, and limitations. A key feature in outdoor and adventure programming is that it requires a raw vulnerability that demmands honesty. The keen and adept facilitator knows how to challenge the group along accurate and bold fault-lines: exposing just enough of a groups responses and identities to them to get them to seek integrating what they find with where they are headed and want to be.

In adventure experiences, group engagement, and in growth oriented endeavors we must look for clues to our own identity and voice outside of our own individual productivity and look for them in an among the ways we interact in those groups and with those groups during times of great risk.

Robinson points out that this whole process of learning begins with some disturbance or increase in the risk the individual or group faces. They are then left trying to work through the chaos either by applying quick fixes like deal making, blame, control taking, or looking busy; or by learning to let go of their control, comfort and certainty. When a group succeeds at letting go, the experience itself tends to reveal honesty, reflective content, and immense bonding in the close proximity and risk encountered.

The book has a few great diagrams that organize the work and there are several pages of questions that help facilitators touch base with themselves and find out what personal biases and personal ambitions they may be bringing to the work and how that may impact or interfere with the groups development and growth. He also talks about the posture that facilitators operate from.

After doing 8 years of group work in a residential treatment facility as a group worker, I was pleased by all the tough and ingenious work that went into this book. It is right on the money and you will not be disappointed in the read. Your take away will be immense. Get it. Read it. Do it. Process it!

Ciao!

tjm+

Mirror Neurons and Building the World around Us

2011-02-22T08:39:00.000-05:00

"We weave a shelter around us with the fields of thought, emotion,
and desire we generate from within and project out onto the world.
These fields we are weaving create the “me” of our lives. They become
what we consider to be the personality. In a real sense they precede us
and are still around when we leave. If we fail to cut down an inappropriate
logismoi by returning to our practice, it enters the neural field of our
communications about prayer.

Think of the affect certain people have when they walk into a room:
some liven things up, while others shut down conversation. Some people
exude an atmosphere of love and union, while others exude an atmosphere
of distraction and chaos.

Scientists have discovered a whole “mirror” system within us. The
mirroring begins with the “mirror neuron” which assumes the behavior
and emotion in the immediate environment and then reflects it.
Individuals mirror “the other” as if it were themselves. It is how we pick
up feelings of conflict and dis-continuity. If someone is saying something
with their mouth that they are in conflict with in their heart, their
body language will relay that information to us and our mirror neurons
will pick up the disconnect. It is that feeling that something does not
ring true or is just a bit off.

If we are presenting ill-health and darkened logismoi, we are setting
the tone for the people around us. We are leading them into the
valley of the shadow of distraction and separation."

from my book: Cairn-Space, p. 35

How and what are you building?

2011-02-11T11:18:00.000-05:00

"The effects of what we harbor inside, over time, reveal themselves in
the structure of the communities we build and inhabit. It is no wonder
that homes, churches, neighborhoods, and businesses that are filled with
people of angst and duplicity fail because of hopelessness and deceit.
These attributes have been planted in the garden, watered, and they have
come to fruition. They are built one stone at a time. The stones may be
fetid or firm, but we build gradually with each stone. What we build into
something is what remains present."

from Cairn-Space, p. 63.

How and what are you building?

Ciao!

TJM+

Reiteration and Rumination

2011-02-06T11:45:00.002-05:00

"Reading, to the fathers, always meant doing so in an audible voice and was called reiteration. The word of God is reiterated in an audible voice and relished in our inner consciousness. In this manner, it can find rest in our innermost recesses. Reiteration here is like rumination. After a while the words actually become one's own words. Man, then, becomes the faithful storehouse for the word of God. His heart becomes a divine treasury for it." Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life: the Interior Way, SVS Press.

Anyone who has been to a poetry reading or poetry slam knows the power of the written word being spoken. It is a process of speaking things into palpable being and existence. The words on paper have one level of power, the words on paper spoken into the air have a deeper and more rending power to open you up and split you in half.

We have had the good fortune of being able to save the stories verbatim - since the advent of writing and even more so with the printing press. We have lost the magic of reiteration and rumination by individualizing the act of digesting words. We read by ourselves and silently in the head. The power of words exists in the sounds they make, the echoing they perform in the cosmic play of echolocation, and in the clarifying of the geologic landscape of our interior life that they reveal.

It is words and the sounds they call us to that take us further outside of ourselves and simultaneously deeper into ourselves. Words pronounced.

Getting into the habit of muttering out what you are reading adds a layer of cementing those words to the heart that would not occur if they are only scanned and cognitively digested. The scanning and cognitive digestion of words is only one layer of the meaning they offer. The sounding and cadence of words has a heartfelt and soulful task to fulfill as well. Not only faith but depth comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Check out Matthew the Poor's volume and start to mutter while you read. It'll deepen you (and keep people away cause they'll think you've finally gone off the ledge). Also, try to develop a sense of the sound of words, of a practice of reiteration and rumination not only in your reading of spiritual texts and scripture, but of all the words you have gathered around you to inform and comfort you and the life you are carving out in this present existence.

Ciao!

tjm+

Reiteration and Rumination

2011-02-06T11:42:00.002-05:00

Reiteration and Rumination

2011-02-06T11:39:00.000-05:00

"Reading, to the fathers, always meant doing so in an audible voice and was called reiteration. The word of God is reiterated in an audible voice and relished in our inner consciousness. In this manner, it can find rest in our innermost recesses. Reiteration here is like rumination. After a while the words actually become one's own words. Man, then, becomes the faithful storehouse for the word of God. His heart becomes a divine treasury for it." Matthew the Poor, Orthodox Prayer Life: the Interior Way, SVS Press.

Anyone who has been to a poetry reading or poetry slam knows the power of the written word being spoken. It is a process of speaking things into palpable being and existence. The words on paper have one level of power, the words on paper spoken into the air have a deeper and more rending power to open you up and split you in half.

We have had the good fortune of being able to save the stories verbatim - since the advent of writing and even more so with the printing press. We have lost the magic of reiteration and rumination by individualizing the act of digesting words. We read by ourselves and silently in the head. The power of words exists in the sounds they make, the echoing they perform in the cosmic play of echolocation, and in the clarifying of the geologic landscape of our interior life that they reveal.

It is words and they sounds they call us to that take us further outside of ourselves and simultaneously deeper into ourselves. Words pronounced.

Getting into the habit of muttering out what you are reading adds a layer of cementing those words to the heart that would not occur if they are only scanned and cognitively digested. The scanning and cognitive digestion of words is only one layer of the meaning they offer. The sounding and cadence of words has a heartfelt and soulful task to fulfill as well. Not only faith but depth comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

Check out Matthew the Poor's volume and start to mutter while you read. It'll deepen you (and keep people away cause they'll think you've finally gone of the ledge). Also, try to develop a sense of the sound of words, of a practice of reiteration and rumination not only in your reading of spiritual texts and scripture, but of all the words you have gathered around you to inform and comfort you and the life you are carving out in this present life.

Ciao!

tjm+

The Praying Mantises

2010-12-21T10:49:00.008-05:00

This post is from my book Cairn-Space and for my friends Matt and Steph who found out that their Christmas Tree was housing a multitude of praying mantises that hatched from their pod after a few weeks in a warm home!

+ + +

self-control, community, forgiveness?

from Chapter One of Cairn-Space

click HERE for ordering

From Chapter Three of my New Book Cairn-Space

2010-11-09T05:53:00.002-05:00

There is an peninsula in Greece known as Mount Athos. The “Holy Mountain” or “Garden of the Virgin”—as it is also known—is peppered with monastic houses, kelli (small groupings of individual monastic“cells”), and caves for hermits. Each gathering of monastics has its own “rule of life”; its own way of living together.

Some monks gather often for meals and prayer. Others only weekly. Still others only for major feasts or sporadically. Some monks live their rule alone; completely by themselves.However they are organized as communities the goal is the same.The monks seek to perform some sort of spiritual practice and also to enter “hesychia”—the stillness/silence of God. There are as many forms for this as there are monks. They truly live in cairn-space.

In the Western Church, Saint Benedict and other “Rule” writers, focused more directly on the pattern of living that monks shared with one another in their monastic enclosures. The “Rules” looked at the apostolic notions hidden in a common life together: how much should people eat, how many items of clothing should they have, how often should they pray, how should they treat guests. Although these “rules” inhabit the communities on the Holy Mountain, they are not the focus of Eastern monasticism. The focus of the Eastern Orthodox monk is tending the heart and making it a place for the Divine meeting. Spiritual practiceand stillness: prayer and hesychia. The writing of “Rules” and the living of rules does not predominate.

The work that the monastics perform in their spiritual struggle is seen as therapy. It is what restores them to full health in their lives in the Spirit of God. In Classical times, spirituality and religion were seen as daughters of medicine. The spiritual life was a journey in the healing of the soul. It was a medical science. Today we have all but lost that diagnostic approach to faith.

As you begin to unpack the writings found in the Philokalia—the monastic guidebook second only to the Holy Scriptures—you do get a sense that the writers were addressing illnesses within man. Their spiritual athletics in the arena of asceticism were directed at helping believers to find the antidote and cure for their spiritual illnesses. All of the writings approach spirituality with an eye toward removing the things that block us from becoming whole and healthy in the Spirit.

The writings speak a lot about getting back to a simple practice when we have lost sight of the silent stillness of God. Return to a simple method when you are distracted and start again. Fall and get up. Fall and get up. Fall and get up, again.

This was what they taught as a model for growth. This perpetual return to purification in the life of the ascetic moved them into a place where enlightenment and union could unfold without interruption.

Where much of the Church today has been at a lack for an organized schema or anthropology of man—one that permeates the denominational traditions—the Orthodox Monastic Tradition has maintained a consistent and growing body of knowledge of what it means to be human and how to bring human beings back into rightful homeostasis; centered in God. The path toward wholeness clearly requires spiritual practices and the stillness/silence of God—“hesychia.”

The Holy Mountain continues to be a place in space and time in which men still hear the cry of God, “Flee, hide from men, be silent.” The monastics believe it is this medicine that will heal the world.

This peninsula is cairn-space. These monks are cairn-space.

Ciao!

TJM+

Cairn-Space

2010-11-06T05:58:00.001-04:00

It is not uncommon to find stone cairns that have been set up as trail markers. These geologic GPS coordinates, piled on the ground, help us to find our way. We remember our way in life because of the piles all around us.

The photo albums that lay about our home are GPS co-ordinates to other places in time and space. Each picture, a cairn that marks whole chapters of life that have seemingly disappeared. The birth of our sons, the hiking of a trail, a trip to the Isle of Skye; they are not gone. The photos remind me of the place in my consciousness within which I have planted those days and ways of life. As I water the seeds of my past, I am informed with a whole new vigor that my life has led me to this moment.
This moment is built on so much more than I can see; but it is available within me.

We are called to pull the past into the present in order to shape our future—in our remembering. This is always the power of signs. They lead us to our future, by way of our past. We stand at a cairn and remember; we dream, we hope, we become.

This is not unlike the call of Jesus to “do this in memory of me”; to celebrate the Eucharist. The cairns in this Jesus-meeting are the species of bread and wine. They bring clarity to this moment and present us
with images and facts that may not be visible, but live deeply in us as realities we assent to. We learn that we are to be broken and poured out for the life of the world as these Jesus-meeting cairns suggest. The words
“in memory” or “in remembrance” of Jesus in this short passage come from the Greek word “anamnesis.” This word is all about the concept of bringing the past into the present and the present into the past. It is a
merging or confluence of time.

The cairns we speak of from this time forward will be cairns that may embody all of this. They may mark off God-space, heart-space, memories, or ideas. They may reveal hidden causes in the fabric of our
phenomenology, or hint for us to listen for the whispering wind; sacramental cairns on the landscape of our lives. They may point to interior dimensions we had no idea existed within our heart, and mind, and
soul. We will amble around the ideas of sacred-space, prayer-space, and sacramental living. We will encounter and wrestle with God all along the way. We will look for and stop at the cairns along the geography of our spiritual heritage.

...from the Introduction to Cairn-Space

Click for details

Review of Common Prayer

2010-11-03T23:41:00.003-04:00

If there is anything that the New Monastics gravitate toward in a sympathetic impulse that may be just beyond the reach of their own self-awareness is the ability to tell stories and to find in them the meaningful and hearty grist from the mill of life. I think most folks involved with this ancient and contemporary call are aware of how much "story" is vital in their lives, I just don't know if most of them know how good they are at telling them.

This prayerbook has the feel of a family gathering. This is a "sit on the porch and get ready to talk to and about God and all of the folks He has worked into His story over the millennia.". Don't get me wrong. There is no dumbing down of the spiritual dilemma or of the complexity of understanding the pre-existent nature of the eternal logos hypostatically conjoined. It is just that this is a prayerbook that helps you feel at ease with our spiritual formation in Jesus.

First, it is simple. We start out with a sensational discussion of liturgy and the traditional pieces of worship that so many folks know that they have heard about, but just don't know much about. It let's us in on some of the mystery behind liturgical worship, the church and the saints. There is a brief description of the daily services.

From there we move out into a simple set of prayers designed for evening. The prayers are not huge and cumbersome (trust me - after twenty five years in the Orthodox Church I know cumbersome) but simple and freeing. They are moored to the holiest of traditions throughout church history and prayer writing - they are moored to scriptural prayer.

Sure you will recognize some things from a Presbyterian format or from the Anglican Monastic Breviary, but that is only because, unbeknownst to most folks who don't liturgy hop, most all of the Christian traditions are hitched to the Psalms and canticles from all throughout scripture. These New Monastics do a fine job of taking the powerful canticles and psalms from our past and setting them free into something manageable.

Not long ago, in one of my books, I asked if folks twenty years from now - in contemporary Christianity - would know the creeds or perhaps the names of some of the great church fathers and mothers that helped us to understand Christian kerygma and dogma. When I read this prayerbook, I am given hope that maybe they will.

Morning prayer is written for everyday of the year. You will find canticles, verses and psalms along with readings from the Old Testament and the Gospels. The part that sets this family story apart from other tellings of prayer is that each day there is something that connects us to a long line of faith. There will be a quote from a church father or mother or a story about the life of some Jesus-lover from the last century. It gives us a family context for our faith that includes the prophets and the social workers, the poor and the oppressed, the rabbis and the farm-workers. Everyone is welcomed at this story of prayer. All are called to this porch of God where we sit about and tell the telling of where we have gone with our Father.

That is refreshing.

The cycle of morning prayer is laid out in a month by month sequence beginning with December, the month of our baby Jesus' birth; the Lenten season of Advent. Each month has some dialog concerning one of the twelve marks of the New Monasticism, and some fantastic artwork that is reminiscent of the Catholic Worker woodcut prints. You will also find a collection of discussion boxes throughout the book on any number of topics and ways of enacting a rich and creative connection with God and His beloved ones scattered all around us - even our enemies.

The prayers call out for silence. Their short length allow us to make love to the ancient craft of sitting in stillness, chewing on what the heart has heard, what it thinks it may have heard, and what it has tied it's feeling to in the words the mind has read.

There are occasional prayers in the back. Perhaps for blessing an office or a home. Perhaps for an adoption. Perhaps for the death of someone in the neighborhood. The end of the book is filled with songs and canticles used through out the prayer services - with the accompanying music.

This book exudes a sense of devotion to history and ease of display that can only come from harsh and laborious hours of toiling research and tears before God. You can't put something together that feels this complete and well practiced without having done the research. There is much to be attained in the praying of these hours of sweat - not only the authors' who have pulled it all together, but from the great line of God-lovers this prayerbook reveals. This ain't Dr. Seuss's "One Prayer, Two Prayer, Red Prayer Blue Prayer." This is a contemplative look at where we have been as a people of God, a prophetic look at where we are called to go, and a sensitive telling of how we can get there - TOGETHER.

In a day and age where we could conceivably see a major collapse of what we have known to be mainline denominationalism - or at least a drastic overhaul of the beast - this prayerbook emerges on the wind to offer hope. This prayerbook says: "Come Methodist, Quaker, Baptist, Anglican, non-Denominationalist, non-attending Believer, Catholic, Orthodox, Presbyterian, Lutheran, et. al., come and share together in the great underground flow of words that all of your fathers and mothers have offered up to God in Jesus throughout time. Sit with us on the porch of our believing. Listen and share, because we are all one family. Sure, there were times you did not get along, but sit, these times are not those. We need to rest and sit a spell and talk to our Father - together. We can still do that. Come. Sit. Pray with me. Let us see where we have been and take hope for the road ahead is long, and we have much to do together to bear His easy yoke of holding hands and loving. We have much to do to be made anew into His image and likeness. Come, sit, pray with me."

This type of stuff, this stuff that is coming to the fore of theology today, this stuff is why it is great to be a God-lover today. Stay open and don't miss this chance for Jesus to get us all together, one more time, so we might continue becoming people that include the whole world in a salvation so much bigger than we could ever know or hope for - one that includes all God's children. That we might get together one more time to tell the ancient Tale and to love the ancient Love.

Order this today and be sure to attend one of the countless launch celebrations!

Launch Celebrations Click Here

Order Book Click Here

On-Line Prayers from the Book Click Here

Ciao! TJM+

COMMON PRAYER

2010-10-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro have a new book out. It is COMMON PRAYER. After years of liturgical research, this team has produced a new staple for the spiritual diet. This prayerbook will be gobbled up by a generation of Jesus-Lovers that crave for the simple, stable routine of ancient and future prayer. People will chew on the grains that have been ground into this book and they will find the sustenance for soul and body. This is what every believer is clambering for - taking the ancient and making it NEW. The whole spiritual journey is about making all things new - in JESUS - and that is what these prayers will do for us. They will give us a measured meeting place for encountering the LIVING GOD.

The emergent, conspiring, new monastic collection of desert dwelling fools for Jesus - the CHURCH - must always be about the task of making what happened yesterday into a present reality. We are remembering GOD into the NOW. These prayers are a part of the spiritual landscape and portions of the spiritual dialog.

Be sure to order this book (check out a sample at: http://www.zondervan.com/media/samples/pdf/0310326192_samptxt.pdf ). You can also register to go to a "celebration event" at the books release (click here for details about where they are happening around the world: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1001893691 ). Our event is happening in Cresco, PA on 1 December 2010 at 10:00 am. You are invite to conspire with us and pray morning prayer. "Let us lift up our hearts unto the LORD..."