Moving house and writing up my life

It's been nearly two months since I last posted here - once upon a time I posted most days, sometimes more than once a day.

There's been a lot going on in our household - selling our house, for one thing, and trying to find somewhere else to live for another. At the moment we're 'boarding' with my daughter - who bought our house. So in a sense, things have hardly changed at all. She and her partner and foster boys had already been living in the house a year or more when she bought it, due to circumstances beyond her control. So it was no big change for any of us!

But we are looking for another house. The market, however, has gone crazy in our city. Once you could sell your house and find another easily because it was a buyer's market. Now it's completely the opposite: sellers are the winners, and buyers, if not quite the losers, are certainly having trouble buying something else. The prices are moving upwards at such a pace that if you leave it too long, what seemed a good sale figure on your own house, suddenly becomes not enough when you go to buy something else. And that goes not just for bigger houses but for little townhouses, units, places known as 'doer-uppers' - which usually stands for a place that going to take a good deal more than you paid for it to actually live in it.

When I last posted, I 'reprinted' a piece from 1994 which first appeared in a column I used to write - called Column 8. My intention is to keep on posting these columns (if they're not completely and utterly dated). There were five years of them originally!

But what's held me back from doing that, in part, is that I've been typing up more than 700 printed pages of a journal I kept from 1989 to around 2000. The journal was originally on an earlier computer, and thankfully I kept a printed copy of it. However, it had felt risky for a long time that I only had it on paper, so it's now all back on computer again. Amounting to something like 500.000 words, I guess.

More recent journal notes, from 2000 on, were typed straight onto computer, and copied from one model to another as time went on. And well and truly backed-up online.

When we began to tidy up things that we own in the present house, preparatory to a shift, we got rid of a lot of it. As you do. Including lots of papers and things that were really no longer of value. But I decided to keep a bunch of around 45 exercise books I'd written in over the years. Some of them are completely full; some have empty pages. Most of them relate to my spiritual journey - they might be classed as letters to God. Usually written in the morning, often at white heat (if my handwriting is anything to go by), and, to my surprise, more full of insights than I'd expected. Others relate to the craft of writing - various different approaches to encouraging myself and keeping my writing skills honed.

I've begun typing these books up too, and inserting the entries (which are mostly dated) in amongst the journal entries. It's intriguing how the more down-to-earth journal stuff contrasts with the spiritual. I might not live long enough to complete the task. But I'll give it a go!

Photo courtesy of F. Muhammad from Pixabay 

Spiritual disciplines

A couple of months ago I received a copy of Lynne Baab's new book, Joy Together: spiritual practices for your congregation.  At first sight it seemed to be covering ground that was well-worn by a number of other writers, perhaps most notably, Richard Foster in his Celebration of Discipline.  Baab's approach is different in that she's focused on how such spiritual disciplines might be appropriated by groups or congregations rather than individuals.   Some of her suggestions in this regard have worked with groups she'd interviewed before she wrote the book, and she offers further ideas for congregations to use the disciplines.  However, at the end of the day, the focus comes back to the individual: if an individual is not willing to bring some discipline to his or her spiritual life, then an increase in numbers of people won't make a lot of difference.  Certainly a group can offer support to each member of the group, and this is an advantage, but the process in our individualistic society has to start with each single person.

All that said, the book is a worthwhile read, and I was pleased that she began with a focus on Thankfulness, or Gratitude.  At first sight this doesn't seem like much of a 'discipline' and yet how many of us are thankful for small or great things in our lives?  It becomes very easy to take the gifts we're given on a daily basis for granted, especially when there seems - in Western society, anyway - to be an abundance of everything we're likely to need.  Cultivating a poverty of spirit takes a bit of doing in our kind of world and without a sense of that, we become casual about where everything comes from.   For me, being grateful is something I find it too easy to forget, though there are one or two things in my life for which I'm grateful on an ongoing basis.   But being grateful for what is given to us each day is another matter, and Baab's chapter on this subject is helpful in thinking about being more proactive in this regard.

She covers some of the other more usual disciplines: fasting, contemplative prayer, seeing the need for a real Sabbath mentality in our lives.  On this last subject Baab comes in a line of 20th and 21st century writers who have commended the concept of the Sabbath as something we moderns need to take hold of; we're not good at hearing these people, I think, especially since the society around us has almost completely ditched  the idea of a day - or a way - of rest.  Hospitality is another matter may be less familiar as a spiritual discipline; it's something we're called to do anyway, you'd think, so why be 'disciplined' about it. But called or not, it's worth reflecting on what Baab has to say.

In a stimulating chapter towards the end of the book Baab brings in William Willimon, a well-known American writer who has spoken out against spiritual practices.  His concern is that the practices may take over from our relationship with God.  Willimon may be writing, in part, as a kind of devil's advocate, but Baab takes his points seriously, and then argues her case for the need for spiritual disciplines all the same.  

I don't myself find some of the disciplines discussed in her book to be helpful to me personally: centering and breath prayer and labyrinths don't grab me, and though I've looked at the Lectio Divina more than once I don't seem to get very far with it.  But there's more than enough other material to think about, and the book is of value to the individual reader as well as those thinking of starting groups, or working with their congregations.  For me this book is the best thing Lynne Baab has written in recent years, and I'll be dipping in and out of it again to keep myself in check!

Missing the point

“I think atheists miss the point. I don’t grant atheism and agnosticism the same moral quality that I give to people who pursue the religious or spiritual way of life… . If you are still an atheist when you get to my age, you don’t know shit. I hope you change.”

— New Statesman - The NS Interview: James Ellroy, author

found courtesy of Alan Jacobs.

Two extracts from Finding Sanctuary

Finding Sanctuary is by Abbot Christopher Jamison.

In February 2004 BBC Television broadcast a programme entitled 'What the World Thinks of God.' As part of their research they commissioned Bradford University's Peace Studies Department to carry out an audit of wars over the last hundred years, with specific reference to the role of religion in causing those wars. Looking back at history, they analysed the actual mechanisms by which religion might case war and found several possible ways in which this occurs. These mechanisms might be the promise of salvation to those who fought the infidel, or the intention of religious leaders to seize holy places - both key factors in the medieval crusades. Or they might be the desire ot convert the enemy, as in the wars of the Reformation.

The researchers then analysed the thirty-two wars of the twentieth century. Their conclusions were that only three had a significant religious element. They considered the Israeli-Arab wars, for example, to be wars of nationalism and liberation of territory (and I would ad that the same is true of the Irish wars and conflicts). They noted that the current campaign being waged by Arab terror groups is largely about political order in the Arab countries, especially the presence of foreigners there. These groups use the language of religion, but the use of religious language to justify terrorism is disowned by mainstream religious leaders.

Political leaders use differences in confessional faith as a way of mobilising support for political wars, and it is mainly in this way that religion becomes a factor in war. Furthermore, the main wars of the century (the two world wars, the Russian civil war leading to Stalin's regime, the Chinese civil war leading to Mao's regime) claimed seventy-five percent of all casualties of war in the twentieth century: they killed 150 million people. None of them is attributable to religion. The recent conflicts in which religion has played a significant role have killed only one per cent of the number of victims of secular wars.

This study provides evidence that religion is not a major reason for war in modern times. But the two great moments of violent religious conflict in Europe, the Crusades and the Reformation, have cast a long shadow over the popular mind, so that even though there have been no truly religious wars for many centuries, even intelligent commentators still insists that religion causes wars. The reality, however, is that in the modern world it is governments, and not religions, that cause wars. (pp 165-6 Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition 2006)

And on another tack entirely:

I offer a final story from the desert fathers and mothers. A young monk once went to see his superior: 'Father, ' he said, 'I must leave the monastery because I clearly do not have a vocation to be a monk.' When the older monk asked why, the younger monk replied: 'In spite of daily resolutions to be good-tempered, chaste and sober, I keep on sinning. So I feel I am not suited to the monastic life.' The older monk looked at him with love and said: 'Brother, the monastic life is this: I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down, I rise up and I fall down.' The young monk stayed and persevered. (pg 172 ibid)

And in spite of the title of this post, one more:

You may be wondering whether such an approach to scripture is only for monks, so I offer you this thought from St John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople. "'I am not,' you will say, 'one of the monks, but I have both a wife and children, and the care of a household.' This is what has ruined everything, your thinking that the reading of scripture is for monks only, when you need it more than they do. Those who are placed in the world, and who received wounds every day, have the most need of medicine." (pg 66 ibid)

On Retreat

I’ve just spent the last night and most of today at a Retreat organised by a couple of the leaders from my church. It was a fairly quiet affair, with only nine participants, but it was well worth going to. I used to do fairly regular retreats just on my own, and need to keep doing more. There’s nothing quite like a day away from the norm, especially if it takes place at some beautiful spot - even if it’s near a beach. (I usually try and make sure my retreats are.)
Anyway, I took with me an old notebook which had Retreat Vision on the cover, and thought I’d fill up some of the blank pages. Turned out that the book had been begun in 1997, and it was interesting reading back through some of the notes I’d made in those long-ago retreat times.
But what I want to mention here now is that there are a couple of quotes from books in the notes, and one of these comes from a book on Colin McCahon that I was reading at the time.
The book’s title is Colin McCahon Artist, by Gordon Brown, and in chapter 4, page 28, Toss Woollaston, (the poster at the side relates to him), another famous NZ artist is quoted as writing: The Spirit that creates Nature and Art is God…an artist must lose his dependence on his optical vision in order to find his spiritual vision, and then paint his picture, carve his sculpture, and it will be authentic art.
I made a note at the time that the whole chapter has great relevance to ‘Christian’ art. I must check the book out again!