John O’Donohue’s Beautiful Landscape of Language

I came across John O’Donohue’s work through this brilliant interview with Krista Tippett for On Being. It’s a beautiful conversation, one I’ve listened to three different times—at 1x by the way. If you know me you know how rare that is; I usually save 1x speed on podcasts for poetry, like Poetry Unbound, but hearing John O’Donohue and Krista Tippett speak was itself poetic.

Because of that episode I got two books, a book of blessings called To Bless the Space Between Us, and his classic book of Celtic wisdom, Anam Cara. I was going to include thoughts from both books in this article, but time won’t allow. If you want to see some quick ideas from the book of blessings, head over to my Instagram highlights.

Getting both of these in physical form was itself a miracle. Within the last year a whole world of international shipping has opened up to Peru, so I bought the blessing book along with some deodorant and coffee filters for my Kalita Wave on an obscure website (Amazon, I think it’s called?) and, after some issues with customs and having to create an official identity with Peru’s IRS equivalent, the book was brought to my door. Anam Cara I just ordered to my dear friends’ home, Greg and Megan McKinzie, and in their recent visit to Arequipa they brought it to me.

Anam Cara

Anam Cara is interesting, because though brilliant it’s a bit disjointed. Or maybe my brain is a bit disjointed right now—that’s a possibility. Regardless, I recommend it without hesitation. Each chapter is somewhat disconnected from what precedes it, so it takes me a few pages to get into the rhythm of each new section. Once I’m in it, though, the beauty and depth of the language and insight captures me. And each chapter ends with a beautifully written poetic blessing. I find myself anticipating the concluding poem a third of the way through these 35-page chapters. I read it over the course of a week, though perhaps it’s best read just a copule pages at a time. He does, after all, write about in successive chapters: friendship, light, a spirituality of the senses, solitude, work, aging, and death.

O’Donohue writes like a poet, which lends itself to underlining something on every page. His language is beautiful, bathed in metaphor. It flows. And there are ideas that he alludes to in passing that could be an entire day in my humanities class. I’ll share a number of those here, often without comment, to keep them in one place. At this point I just don’t have time for a full review, but documenting these snippets is worth it for my own retention.

The book starts off with this line:

It is strange to be here.

So good. For a book that touches on so many important themes that flow out of wisdom for what it means to be human, it’s perfect.

Near the end, he expounds on that opening line:

It is a strange and magical fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, “Being here is so much.” It is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free. (197)

An opening prayer on the Eternal Community of Divine Love:

The Sacred Three My fortress be
Encircling me
Come and be round
My hearth and my home.

Consequently, love is anything but sentimental. In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence. Love is the threshold where divine and human presence ebb and flow into each other (13).

Presence, and so, awareness thereof:

All presence depends on consciousness. Where there is a depth of awareness, there is a reverence for presence. Where consciousness is dulled, distant, or blind, the presence grows faint and vanishes.

Consequently, awareness is one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your friendship. Many people have an anam cara of whom they are not truly aware. Their lack of awareness cloaks the friend’s presence and causes feelings of distance and absence. Sadly, it is often loss that awakens presence, by then it is too late. It is wise to pray for the grace of recognition. Inspired by awareness, you may then discover beside you the anam cara of whom your longing has always dreamed (14).

“It is wise to pray for the grace of recognition.” That is, recognition, being aware of the depth of life and something significant going on all around us is a grace, a gift. And it’s one of the greatest gifts you can bring to your relationships.

On the material world being infused with the presence of God:

The body has had such a low and negative profile in the world of spirituality because spirit has been understood more in terms of the air element than the earth element. The air is the region of the invisible; it is the region of breath and thought. When you confine spirit to this region alone, the physical becomes immediately diminished. This is a great mistake, for there is nothing in the universe as sensuous as God. The wildness of God is the sensuousness of God. Nature is the direct expression of the divine imagination. It is the most intimate reflection of God’s sense of beauty. Nature is the mirror of the divine imagination (44).

One of his chapters is about the human senses. I love the idea of marrying sight with spiritual sight.

The first sense we will consider is the sense of sight or vision. The human eye is one place where the intensity of human presence becomes uniquely focused and available. The universe finds its deepest reflection and belonging in the human eye, I imagine the mountains dreaming of the coming of vision. The eye, when it opens, is like the dawn breaking in the night. When it opens, a new world is there. The eye is also the mother of distance. When the eye opens, it shows that others and the world are outside us, distant from us… In a wonderful way, the eye as mother of distance makes us wonder at the mystery and otherness of everything outside us (53).

If you love to travel, and believe in the potential of travel and interacting with diversity to teach us something about God, the world, and ourselves, it is because of sense of sight. The eye creates the possibility of travel.

It is a startling truth that how you see and what you see determine how and who you will be. An interesting way of beginning to do some interior work is to explore your particular style of seeing. Ask yourself, What way do I behold the world (55)?

And so, O’Donohue gifts his readers with “A Blessing for the Senses”:

May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here.
May the love of the Earth bless you (68).

I really liked this description of nature:

The silence of landscape conceals vast presence. Place is not simply location. A place is a profound individuality. Its surface texture of grass and stone is blessed by rain, wind, and light. With complete attention, landscape celebrates the liturgy of the seasons, giving itself unreservedly to the passion of the goddess. The shape of a landscape is an ancient and silent form of consciousness. Mountains are huge contemplatives. Rivers and streams offer voice; they are the tears of the earth’s joy and despair. The earth is full of soul. Plotinus in the Enneads speaks of the soul’s care for the universe: “…this all in one universally comprehensive living being, encircling all the living beings within it, and having a soul, one soul which extends to all its members in the degree of participant membership held by each (75).”

Blessing is there, the only barrier is our readiness:

When a well awakens in the mind, new possibilities begin to flow, and you find within yourself a depth and excitement that you never knew you had. This art of awakening is suggested by the Irish writer James Stephens, who said, “The only barrier is our readiness.” We often remain exiles, left outside the rich world of the soul, simply because we are not ready. Our task is to refine our hearts and minds. There is so much blessing and beauty near us that is destined for us, and yet it cannot enter our lives because we are not ready to receive it. The handle is on the inside of the door; only we can open it. Our lack of readiness is often caused by blindness, fear, and lack of self-appreciation. When we are ready, we will be blessed. At that moment the door of the heart becomes the gate of heaven (76).

On the eternality of music:

One of the most beautiful gifts that humans have brought to the earth is music. In great music, the ancient longing of the earth finds a voice. The wonderful conductor Sergiu Celibidache said, “We do not create music; we only create the conditions so that she can appear.” Music ministers to the silence and solitude of nature; it is one of the most powerful, immediate, and intimate of sensuous experiences. Music is, perhaps, the art form that brings us closest to the eternal because it changes immediately and irreversibly the way we experience time. When we are listening to beautiful music, we enter into the eternal dimension of time. Transitory, broken linear time fades away, and we come into the circle of belonging within the eternal (64).

Music remains to me a fascinating mystery.

On silence as an avenue for solitude for the interior life:

Ascetic solitude involves silence. And silence is one of the great victims of modern culture…There is a sinister eviction taking place; peoples' lives are being dragged outward all the time. The inner world of the soul is suffering a great eviction by the landlord forces of advertising and external social reality. This outer exile really impoverishes us. One of the reasons so many people are suffering from stress is not that they are doing stressful things but that they allow so little time for silence. A fruitful solitude without silence and space is inconceivable (95-6).

Silence is one of the major thresholds in the world.

Fundamentally, there is the great silence that meets language; all words come out of silence. Words that have a depth, resonance, healing, and challenge to them are words loaded with ascetic silence…Language that does not recognize its kinship with reality is banal, denotative, and purely discursive (96-97).

To grow is to change:

In a poetics of growth it is important to explore how possibility and change remain so faithful to us. They open us to new depths within.

John Henry Newsman summed this up beautifully when he said “To grow is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often.” (113)

This goes well with the adage, “strong opinions, loosely held.” The only way to be right 100% of the time is to do your best to get things right, and when you’re wrong, admit it right away.

Each new day is a sacred place, wherein waking up itself is a gift. A Celtic prayer:

God bless to me the new day
never vouchsafed to me before
it is to bless thy own presence thou has given triumph God
Bless thou to me mine eye
may mine eye bless all it sees
I will bless my neighbor
may my neighbor bless me (115)

What about a new day makes it a cage? What barriers to the newness and sacred are there, whether they be metaphorical or real?

Not zero-sum:

In the world of soul: the more you have, the more everyone has. The rhythm of soul is the surprise of endless enrichment.

So the world of soul is not a zero-sum game.

On awkwardness and difficulty as light:

Perception is crucial to understanding. How you see, and what you see, determine how you will be. Your perception, or your view of reality, is the lens through which you see things. Your perception determines the way things will behave for you and toward you. We tend to perceive difficult as disturbance. Ironically, difficulty can be a great friend of creativity (136). … Sometimes awkward situations, problems, or difficulties are really disguised opportunities for growth. Very often at the heart of the difficulty, there is the light of a great jewel. It is wise to learn to embrace with hospitality that which is awkward and difficult (139).

Just as in Michelangelo’s Prisoners in Stone, captured in marble, what shape is poised to emerge from the stone of your difficulties?

On memory:

One of the great poverties of our modern culture of rapidity, stress, and externality is that there is so little attention to memory…Human memory is…more refined, sacred, and personal.
The beauty and invitation of old age offer a time of silence and solitude for a visit to the house of your inner memory. You can revisit all of your past. Your soul is the place where your memory lives. Since linear time vanishes, everything depends on memory. In other words, our time comes in yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows. Yet there is another place within us that lives in eternal time. That place is called the soul. The soul, therefore, lives mainly in the mode of eternity. This means that as things happen in your yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows and fall away with transience, they fall and are caught and held by the net of the eternal in your soul. There they are gathered, preserved, and minded for you. Levinas says, “Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.” Consequently, as your body ages and gets weaker, your soul is in fact getting richer, deeper, and stronger. With time your soul grows more sure of itself; the natural light within it increases and brightens (151-2).

Harvesting experience with meaning:

It is part of the process of reflection that gives depth to experience. We all have experiences, but as T. S. Eliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. Every human heart seeks meaning; for it is in meaning that our deepest shelter lies. Meaning is the sister of experience, and to discern the meaning of what has happened to you is one of the essential ways of finding your inner belonging and discovering the sheltering presence of your soul. There is an amazing line in the Bible from the prophet Haggai: “You have sown so much but harvested so little.” Everything that happens to you is an act of sowing a seed of experience. It is equally important to be able to harvest that experience (158).

Holding onto beauty:

I love Blaise pascal’s idea that in a difficult time, you should always keep something beautiful in your heart. Perhaps, as a poet said, it is beauty that will save us in the end.

This reminds me of my uncle Robbie Shackelford’s mantra of “aggressively seeking beauty in every day.”

This quote from T. S. Eliot captures where I end with my theology of travel:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time. (168)

On wisdom:

There is more information now available in the world than ever before. We have so much knowledge about every possible thing. Yet there is great difference between knowledge and wisdom. You can know many things, you can know a lot of facts about things, even facts about yourself, but it is the truths that you realize yourself that move deeply into you. Wisdom, then, is a deeper way of knowing. Wisdom is the art of living in rhythm with your soul, your life, and the divine. Wisdom is the way that you learn to decipher the unknown; and the unknown is our closest companion. So wisdom is the art of being courageous and generous with the unknown, of being able to decipher and recognize its treasures.

Wisdom, then, is the art of balancing the known with the unknown, the suffering with the joy; it is a way of linking the whole of life together in a new and deeper unity. Our society would be very well advised to attend to the wisdom of old people, to integrate them into the processes of decision making. The wisdom of the aged could be invaluable in helping us to articulate a vision for our future. Ultimately, wisdom and vision are sisters; the creativity, critique, and prophecy of vision issue from the fount of wisdom (170-171).

On the urgency of life:

So many people are, as Patrick Kavanagh put it, “preparing for life rather than living it.” You only get one chance. You have one journey through life; you cannot repeat even one moment or retrace one footstep. It seems that we are meant to inhabit and live everything that comes toward us. In the underside of life there is the presence of our death. If you really live your life to the full, death will never have power over you. It will never seem like a destructive, negative event. It can become, for you, the moment of release into the deepest treasures of your own nature; it can be your full entry into the temple of your soul. If you are able to let go of things, you learn to die spiritually in little ways during your life. When you learn to let go of things, a greater generosity, openness, and breath comes into your life. Imagine this letting go multiplied a thousand times at the moment of your death. That release can bring you to a completely new divine belonging (192).
…
Death is the great wound in the universe and the great wound in each life. Yet, ironically, this is the very found that can lead to new spiritual growth. Thinking of your death can help you to radically alter your fixed and habitual perception. Instead of living according to the merely visible material realm of life, you begin to refine your sensibility and become aware of the treasures that are hidden in the invisible side of your life (195).

True spirituality is the ability to attend to the depth of this invisible nature.

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Clint Smith’s “Ode To Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep” →

Clint Smith is an incredible writer and his interview for On Being with Krista Tippett is fire. How the Word is Passed is the first pre-release book I’ve ever gotten (well, except for the Padraig O’Tuama book that came out earlier this year and Bookshop sent to me a couple weeks early). It’s a fascinating, important book.

In addition to being a writer and a poet, Clint Smith is an Arsenal fan and a father. His award-winning book of poems on fatherhood came out last year. He read this poem in the full episode of On Being, but it’s so good that they also released it as a standalone episode of the podcast. Enjoy:

“Ode To Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep”

Praise the couch that welcomes you back into its embrace as it does every night around this time. Praise the loose cereal that crunches beneath your weight, the whole-grain golden dust that now shimmers on the backside of your pants. Praise the cushion, the one in the middle that sinks like a lifeboat leaking air, and the ottoman covered in crayon stains that you have now accepted as aesthetic. Praise your knees and the evening respite they receive from a day of choo-choo training along the carpet with two eager passengers in tow. Praise the silence. Oh, the silence. How it washes over you like a warm bedsheet. Praise the walls for the way they stand there and don’t ask for anything. Praise the seduction of slumber that tiptoes across your eyelids, the way it tempts you to curl up right there and drift away even though it’s only 7:30 PM. Praise the phone you scroll through without even realizing that you’re scrolling. Praise the video you scroll past of the man teaching his dog how to dance merengue, praise the way it makes you laugh the way someone laughs when they are so tired they don’t know if they will ever stand up again. Praise the toys scattered across the floor, the way you wonder if it might be okay to just leave them there for now, since you know that tomorrow they will simply end up there again.

“The Insight of Interbeing” →

Thich Nhat Hanh:

There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn’t “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought.” Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.

We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate self-entity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are.

I came across this reflection thanks to Michael Wright’s excellent Still Life.

There’s a lot of history and ecosystems that made that peach possible: the water, the tree, the nutrients in the soil, the weather, all the complex lives of the people who picked the fruit and prepared it for sale—it’s all there in the first bite. It’s enough to make your head spin. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls this “interbeing,” the deep and unavoidable interrelationships that make all life possible. This is a “sweet fellowship” we all share, and for the poet, stopping to eat a piece of fruit is an opportunity to let his mind wander toward all these relationships that made this nourishment possible.

The poem he shared in that issue struck me, and I recommend reading it (and subscribing so that you get his letter each week!), though I will leave you with the closing stanza that is still resonating with me:

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

I just finished reading this book for the third time in the last two years. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, by one of the best writers I’ve ever read. It’s beautiful. As I sat holding the book, closed, a sacred artifact in my hands, it struck me how significant a collection of words on paper can be. It’s one of the miracles of our shared human existence. Words. And stories. In seven years of being a father that’s been working on me. I marvel at it. Kids start to communicate and it’s miraculous. At some point they won’t stop speaking 😅. My two kids are doing this in two languages, which is its own brand of beautiful.

I’m trying to embrace what Cole Arthur Riley’s words are doing to me and for me. The book is inspiring, challenging, devastating, and beautiful. She shows a sacred attentiveness to life and shares her story as a liturgy. She takes fifteen chapters (Dignity. Place. Wonder. Calling. Body. Belonging. Fear. Lament. Rage. Justice. Repair. Rest. Joy. Memory. Liberation.) and weaves stories and questions and truth into a tapestry of humanity and depth. She combines personal stories and those of her family origins with selective passages from the Bible, brilliantly interpreted (e.g. God as the first mathematician and artist). She gives a voice to inanimate entities: [the ground says] “Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me” (7). She draws on the work of other authors sparingly but when she does it’s gold: Dr. King, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Toni Morrison. There are only 27 entries in the bibliography—each worthy of attention.

This books helps me to see more deeply and to feel more acutely.

Before getting to pieces of the book that challenge me to think deeply, I want to share a glimpse of her storytelling. The book is filled with visceral, heart-wrenching stories. I was on the verge of tears throughout. You hear her family through her writing. In her chapter on “Joy,” she narrates her father’s embarrassment at having food stamps, and how her uncle transformed shame into joy while buying groceries.

My father says they went cuttin up all through that store. And he’s cracking up as he tries to tell me about it now. When they finally got to the counter and my father’s shame reappeared, my Uncle Dave snapped out the book of food stamps and started plucking bills out theatrically. And what do we owe you? he said, as if he were prim and polished. With a cart spilling over, they expected to have to pay more than the stamps could cover, so when the woman said $185, they let their knees go weak and start cracking up even harder. The whole store turned to look at them, two golden-skinned boys hanging on to each other, play-punching each other in their bellies and letting the howls echo between them.

We’re talking about relief. It was food, and it was such a relief. But it was more than that, he says. It was fun as hell. And he’s still smiling.

It requires attunement to practice humor without violence. You have to acquaint yourself with insecurity, people’s stories, and the needs in the room to bring levity into their heaviness without diminishing their pain. But done right, humor can hold together seams under the harshest duress. (161-2)

There are a few sections that contribute specifically to what I’m trying to do with students in Peru, in an attempt to be better humans. It’s all about what we learn when we’re confronted with difference and diversity and how that tells us something deep about God and humanity.

Wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. It allows us to jettison the dangerous belief that things worthy of wonder can only be located on nature hikes and scenic overlooks. This can distract us from the beauty flowing through us daily.

To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountaintop, the sunlight refracting—this manner of vision is what will keep up from destroying each other (36).

In her presentation, “Wonder” includes seeing and naming evil. It is not naive or blind, rather, an antidote to despair:

To be human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation (40).

In her section on “Belonging,” the following trinitarian reflection has direct implications for life in community that we learn through travel:

People talk about God as three distinct people in one. If this is true, it means the whole cosmos is predicated on a diverse and holy community. And if we bear the image of God, that means we bear the image of a multitude. And that to bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other. Maybe every culture, every household, every community bears that image in a unique way (73).

Closing the chapter, on mirrors, faces, and inner life:

We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person. I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I’ve never seen it. I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf (81).

On justice and dignity:

To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us (134).

On sacred story:

Few would deny that storytelling is core to what it means to be human (179).

On rest as sacred liberator, active contentment and joy that still dreams, truthfulness and justice in remembering, holy rage, and beauty—you’ll just have to read it.

In the preface Riley says she wants to reclaim “a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that diverges my mind from my body, voice, or people” (ix). Near the end of the book, she says “I hope any truth I’ve written unfolds slowly, encountering you first as what I, Cole, believe to be true in this particular season” (187).

Maybe that’s why I had to sit with it for a year and a half and read it three times. This will most likely be a yearly read for me. It’s good for my soul.

Cole Arthur Riley is the author of Black Liturgies on Instagram. If you’re not quite ready to pick up a book yet, you can follow her there.

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Everything Belongs: the Gift of Contemplative Prayer

“If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.”

Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

(From Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, quoted at the opening of the second chapter)

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I really, really like Everything Belongs. I like it so much because it’s good for me. It functions for me as a sort of mantra. I tend to live inside my head. I search for the right thing to think—constantly. And this book exists to remind me that I’m more than what I think and that life is more than the sum of our thinking. This book invites me to open my eyes.

My early faith and religious experience helped form my identity. But it wasn’t long before I was just trying to “get it right.” That’s pretty normal for religion, but it can also drain you of life. I fall into the same old pattern when I make my life and reading and search all about thinking the right things.

The fundamental premise of this book is that there is something deeper to reality, that our everyday distractions don’t let us access. “The [God question] is resolved in you, when you agreed to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world and God’s ecstasy in the world” (17). Everything belongs: contemplation and spiritual sight mean holding the tensions. It’s about learning to see and a readiness to learn. God is at work in the darkness and despair, so even the dark moments “belong”—don’t rush through.

Rohr says that “we live ourselves into new ways of thinking,” not the opposite (19). I wrote in the margin: “But also, sometimes, we think ourselves into new ways of living.” That’s from experience, where something I’ve read or a thought I’ve been challenged with has changed the way I live. It’s both things, right? And maybe Rohr is right; living is the primary way of formation.

On being human:

In other words, our journeys around and through our realities, or “circumferences,” lead us to the core reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.

This bit has special significance to me in light of how I’ve brought the question of what it means to be human to my HULA students.

Spiritual Sight and Liminal Space

The key to spiritual sight is the starting point that you’re already there: you are already in the presence of God. We must learn to see it. “Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence” (31).

Rohr argues that “most spiritual work is readying the student” (38). That’s my starting point at HULA because that was my experience: you learn when you’re ready to learn. I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t ready to learn when I studied abroad. I barely learned when I was in college. It wasn’t until grad school, when I took a church history class of all things, that I was finally ready to learn, and everything started to connect. Then Katie and I got to direct Harding in Zambia in the fall of 2012, and that’s when I began to see more deeply. The students we traveled with as well as our hosts in Zambia taught me something important about what it means to be human. My three months in Zambia brought me into a liminal space. It was “voluntary displacement for the sake of transformation of consciousness, perspective, and heart” (48). That’s the key piece about what gives travel the potential to be spiritually formative. “There is another world, much bigger and more inclusive, that both relativizes and re-enchants this world that we take as normative” (48).

I went on to write a dissertation about travel as a spiritual practice, so I won’t say more about that here. But when I first read this section of Everything Belongs back in 2018, things clicked into place. It’s not only about travel, but my experiences of travel—from my first ventures to the US from Italy, to mission trips and study abroad and everything in between (aka, vacation)—have opened me up to be ready to learn. I’ll repeat, I was a late bloomer, so it took me until I was 24 to travel with humility and honesty, the two virtues Rohr argues are the “foundation of all spirituality” (48). Only then was I able to hear something beyond what I already knew. It’s good to have our fundamental assumptions questioned every so often. Liminal space gives you a pattern for living and learning that becomes a part of the way you see all things. And it leads here:

When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own (58).

The Contemplative Stance and Being Whole

On contemplation, this was a gut punch, and really the reason I’m taking the time to write something about this book, and others that are my favorites. It helps me stop.

Only then, when you stop the parade of new voices and ideas, will you see the underlying and ever-recurring patterns. (76)

But being nothing has a glorious tradition. When we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. (77)

“Prayer heals our split from life itself. It heals our disconnectedness from the deepest stream itself” (87). This is why I need this reminder: I wake up early, make coffee and read and read. I go about the rest of the day and connect with people. I spend the evening with my kids and go to bed, and the cycle repeats. I need the practice of connecting to the deepest stream. Otherwise I’ll walk blindly through each step.

On coming to peace within the search: “Prayer lives in a spacious place” (90).

As someone said, “If you understand it, things are just as they are. If you don’t understand it, things are just as they are.” The mystery is to be ready to receive things just as they are and be ready to let them teach us. (90)

The Vulnerability of God, Holy Tears, New Life

On the vulnerability of God, “forgiveness is God’s entry into powerlessness” (134).

A few days ago, my four-year old asked me if I ever cry. I told him that of course I cry, and that it’s good for us to cry sometimes. And then he said, “But Dad, I’ve never seen you cry.” Touché.

It’s an important critique. Toward the end of the book, Rohr says that “weeping is a gentle release of water that washes, baptizes, and renews” (148). Tears are a gift, and the church would do better to grieve than to accuse, as we are more often known for doing. “A Christian is one who, along with Jesus, agrees to feel, to suffer the pain of the world,” and shed tears. “We need to take the low road of Jesus back to tears” (152). And in the liminal space—that sacred, in between space—transformation is found. The divine pattern of transformation includes failure, death, so that the God of life may bring about something new.

The contemplative stance is the Third Way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from the power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the realization, seeing the dark side of reality and the pain of the world, but we hold it until it transforms us, knowing that we are complicit in the evil and also complicit in the holiness. Once we can stand in that third spacious way, neither fighting nor fleeing, we are in the place of grace out of which newness comes. Creativity comes from here, and we can finally do a new thing for the world. (171)

Following Jesus, then, is “a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world” (179).

It’s the path of grounded, embodied wisdom, where everything belongs.

Helpful Mantras

Here are a few of the mantras from throughout the book that I’ll leave you with:

God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me. (57)

God beneath you,
God in front of you,
God behind you,
God above you,
God within you. (57)

You cannot not live in the presence of God.

Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be. (62)

I recognize that I’m in a river that is bigger than I am. The foundation and the flow of that river is love. Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. (79)

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Whether you’re coming from a place of faith rooted in a specific tradition, or you no longer consider yourself a person of faith, the following disclosure might be helpful: Rohr is a Franciscan universalist who looks for truth in all of the great religious traditions. He writes mostly from a Jesus-centered space, but he also argues that “the Gospel is not a competing idea. It’s that by which we see all ideas in proper context” (94). So he leans on Buddhism quite a lot, as well other perspectives well outside of Christianity. I find a lot of what he writes compelling; you’ll have to see for yourself.

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On Falling in Love with Twitter, Love Lost, and New Beginnings for Text-Based Social Media

I loved Twitter. For years I loved Twitter.

Twitter’s beginnings and my love for words

In 2009 I got a desk job and began to pay attention to the world of tech. It coincided with my first-ever Apple Keynote, headlined by Steve Jobs introducing the first iPad. By “first-ever” I mean the first time I watched (and followed the liveblogs)—I wasn’t actually there. I was hooked.

That’s also when I got my first Twitter account. In the early days, I would share a lot, too much, and of course I cross-posted it all to Facebook for good measure. Nowadays I usually check Facebook just for the Memories feature, and laugh (and cringe) when I see occasional tweets that made it over to Facebook that are plain embarrassing.

Sometimes, though, what I see on Facebook memories is nostalgic, like the early manual retweet days, when you would write your comment, then “RT @username:” and then copy someone else’s tweet. Beyond the @-symbol for usernames, the #hashtags (all common now, but gibberish to most folks at the time), and a code-language including RT, yfrog, and link-shorteners like ow.ly, it was fun to watch a social network like Twitter take off.

Then Instagram happened, and we Twitter users leveraged Twitter to bootstrap Instagram. And of course, Instagram became way bigger than Twitter ever would be, because generally speaking people like pictures more than words.

But I always loved Twitter. With the advent of Twitter I started paying attention to words. Twitter’s 140-character limit was originally designed because Twitter was built with the idea that a @username plus 140 characters could fit into an SMS message. While the need to forward tweets via SMS faded quickly, the 140-character limit defined the platform. It intrigued me. In the early years, we would tweet with such intention, trying to make every word count. I thought about how poorly I had written so many papers for my undergraduate degree, and how much better they would have been if I had designed each sentence with the care I put into a tweet.

As Twitter grew, it needed to drive engagement for the sake of its ad business, and so grew the cynicism and toxicity that Twitter became famous for. I didn’t see much of that, however, thanks to 3rd-party apps. Twitter’s early years had been built on a rich 3rd-party app ecosystem, where people like Loren Brichter helped define the platform. He invented pull-to-refresh and the app Tweetie (which gave Twitter the idea for its logo). Eventually, Paul Haddad built Tweetbot (see the memorial). As I write this, the iOS App Store just celebrated its 15-year anniversary, so these early Twitter apps coincided with a brand new platform that was interesting and good. One of the great benefits of using a 3rd-party app for Twitter is that you never saw ads. (Another great benefit was seeing Instagram photos inline). And when Twitter switched to an algorithmic timeline, Tweetbot allowed me to continue viewing tweets only from the people I followed, chronologically.

For more than 10 years, I checked Twitter every single day. And once I whittled down my follow count to 100, I read every tweet every day. Every. Day. A bonafide Twitter completionist. And I like to think that it made me a better person. Since I had never really read websites before Twitter (remember my desk job?), and since I was careful about who I followed, I used Twitter like an RSS feed for websites like Daring Fireball and Six Colors. I followed writers and thinkers from all walks of life. Once I realized my own white male myopia , I followed some amazing women and people of color. I eventually came to know and learn so much from writers like Clint Smith and Nikole Hannah-Jones.

I like to think that my daily practice of reading Twitter enriched my life and expanded my understanding of diverse humanity.

Twitter’s Self-Destruction

Then, early in 2023, Tweetbot broke. A self-important oaf bought Twitter, shut down 3rd-party access to its APIs without any warning, and took over ruining Twitter, completing a years-long journey. And just like that, my daily practice of reading Twitter ground to a halt. I stopped cold turkey.

That was really weird. I didn’t miss Twitter per se, because I was (and am) bitter toward the company. I had long since stopped posting to Twitter, other than the occasional recommendation or retweet. But I missed reading my favorite websites.

The solution? Based on Marco Arment’s recommendation, I downloaded Unread, an excellent, minimalist RSS reader, and added a few websites that I had continue to read after Twitter’s demise. But I missed the community element of conversation around big events, like, say, WWDC, or the serendipity of an amazing thinker, like Esau McCaulley, sharing something they had read.

Twitter taught us that, while it may not be for the billions, there are at least hundreds of millions of people that have room in their life for a text-based micro-blogging platform, and in Twitter’s absence I was missing that. For WWDC 2023, I downloaded Ivory and followed my favorite tech writers on Mastodon. The familiarity was amazing and the conversations around Apple’s announcements (especially Apple Vision Pro!) was awesome. But for better or worse, Mastodon’s federation design and plurality of instances are a barrier to entry that limit its appeal to a wider audience. It’s great for my world of Apple hobby, but the women and people of color that I followed on Twitter were missing.

So, in June, I started checking Twitter again, every so often. And…meh. So many ads. And only a handful of the people I wanted to hear from were still there. And it’s Elon Musk’s thing. So many reasons not to love Twitter. At that point I was convinced of Twitter’s demise.

Then, the week of the 4th of July, it happened.

No, not BlueSky. I did get an invitation to BlueSky in June, got my username and— sad trombone —no one was there either.

Threads and my Current Optimism

Enter Threads.

Another Musk Misstep™ and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg and the Threads team decided to move up the timeline. It grew faster than any platform ever has, with 100+ million in the first week. I’m Threads user number 512,647, and it’s been fun so far. There are some early Twitter vibes to balance the caution Twitter taught us to have over more than a decade of seeing humanity’s worst in that medium. Clint Smith, Bernice King, and Esau McCaulley are on Threads, as are friends of mine Steven Hovater and Mark Slagle. Sandwich Analyst and friend Ben Lamb, table stakes. The one writer who I miss from Twitter is Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project. I find myself reaching for Threads even before Instagram. The algo is wonky (because I’m in Peru, I think), and there’s not a ton of content, but it’s been good.

The fact that most of the tech community I followed is over on Mastodon is a plus; maybe I can wean myself off of my obsession with the world of Apple. And now that I use an RSS client, the websites I know I want to read are in a designated place. So Threads exists for me in this happy medium of connecting with people over words and becoming a better person by leaning on others’ curiosity and expertise.

The Way Forward

I know that Threads is owned by Meta, which makes it tainted from birth. It doesn’t have a chronological timeline yet and no 3rd party access either. But I’m hoping that, at least for a time, it can just be, and that those of us there (read in Coach Beard’s voice: 78 followers for me so far, baby!) can enjoy sharing life and learning through words on a screen.

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Expanding the Meaning of US American Patriotism

Esau McCaulley, in his latest column for the New York Times:

In 1852 Frederick Douglass delivered what may be his most famous address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” This time of year, quotations from the speech dart around Black social media as a subtle pushback on uncomplicated celebrations of American independence.

Douglass wondered what the enslaved might say if they were called from the plantations to reflect on themes of liberty, justice and equality. How might their words differ from the prose of the free orators normally asked to comment on American ideals? There is a revolution in the reorientation of perspective, when the powerless are given space to speak. That hasn’t changed.

The way McCaulley projects Douglass’s words into 2023 is prescient.

This bit about this examination of history coming from a place of love for the US expresses a similar sentiment that Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project have maintained throughout their work: that it’s out of love for the US that we’re calling the US to account for its history, to remember, and to do better. McCaulley:

Our country wants a certain version of the American story told and will laud anyone willing to tell it. But uncritical celebration is a limited and false definition of patriotism. Instead, recounting the full story of America and asking it to be better than it is can be an expression of love (emphasis mine).

I wrote about Frederick Douglass’s speech a few years ago, the first time I read all the way through it. And I noticed his use of 2nd person pronouns, when Douglass refers to “your forefathers.” I didn’t know this, however:

A decade prior, Douglass, speaking to white Americans, referred to the founders as “your fathers.” Douglass and other Black Americans were outsiders. In 1862, he took ownership of them, including African Americans in the grand narrative of American history. The “you” of the American Revolution and its principles became a “we” during the battle against the Confederacy. Speaking of the Union effort in the Civil War, he said, “We are only continuing the tremendous struggle, which your fathers, and my fathers began 86 years ago.” Because white Americans had been willing to suffer for Black freedom during the Civil War, we were starting to live up to the idea that all men were created equal.

While McCaulley emphasizes that the work includes much more than “simply [reading] more Black literature,” I would argue that reading is as good a place as any to start.

I humbly suggest, then, taking a break from watching the news, social media—whatever allows you to take a deep breath—and clearing your mind. Open your mind while you’re at it, and start through one of these books this week:

• Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
• Nikole Hannah-Jones (editor/creator), The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story

Or the book I just started reading a couple days ago (which has been in my queue since 2020):

• Esau McCaulley, Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

These authors care(d) deeply about US America. Let’s expand our notions of patriotism, listen, and learn.

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About ten years ago, my brother Seth asked me how many of the people I followed on Twitter were not white males. It was a loving sort of challenge and incredibly important for me. That day I changed. I chose to start learning by listening to a more diverse set of voices. I loved Twitter for that opportunity. I guess it’s a good moment to mourn the dumpster fire Twitter has become, and look for a better future and work toward better spaces to learn from each other.

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The Dignity of Difference

A few years ago, I listened to an interview that Krista Tippett did with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks for On Being. I listened to it again after his death near the end of 2020. Sacks’s questions about “making room for difference” and “seeing the image of God in one who is not our image” became guiding questions for my life in Peru, for thinking about dignity and difference in a world where George Floyd is murdered by police while the world watches, for the process of learning through travel.

One of the lines of the interview that sticks with me the most is about unity creating diversity:

All life, everything — all the three million species of life and plant life — all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God.

I began a doctorate program a few years ago and I chose to research the impact of studying abroad in Arequipa in terms of intercultural spiritual formation, with Sacks’s questions as guiding emphases. That is, spiritual formation in God’s diverse world must be intercultural, it must orient us toward seeing God in people who are different than us. Travel heightens the opportunity for that type of growth. It was only after I finished my research, writing the dissertation, and defending it that I had time to actually read Sacks’s entire book.

And I loved it.

In The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks goes big, taking on globalization, social responsibility, capitalism and the market economy, justice, education, ecology, forgiveness, and hope.

Every human should at least read the prologue to this book. In 20 pages, Sacks does more to center particularity and difference in a world of globalization and universalism than anything else I’ve read. He is inviting, open, and hospitable in his writing. He asks: “Can we make space for difference? Can we hear the voice of God in a language, a sensibility, a culture not our own? Can we see the presence of God in the face of a stranger?” (5). In a world of interconnectedness, new types of tribalism are “driving us ever more angrily apart” (7). He acknowledges the destructive role religious particularity has played in world movements, but calls on people of faith to “be an equal and opposite counter-voice in the name of peace” (9). Jonathan Sacks was a rabbi and writes from an orthodox Jewish context.

Faced with fateful choices, humanity needs wisdom, and religious traditions, alongside the great philosophies, are our richest resource of wisdom. They are sustained reflections on humanity’s place in nature and what constitute the proper goals of society and an individual life. They build communities, shape lives and tell the stories that explain ourselves to ourselves (12).

This is particularly interesting to me because I teach a class on wisdom and justice, using the Bible’s wisdom books (Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs) and prophets (Amos and Isaiah) as a lens for those explorations. What Sacks argues for here is how this ancient Hebrew understanding of wisdom and justice might lead the way in a global conversation that our world needs.

He asks about how we recover moral responsibility and ethical language “when the link between individual agents, actions and consequences has become so tenuous” in the global market? Sacks is for the free market—it “is the best means we have yet discovered for alleviating poverty and creating a human environment of independence, dignity and creativity” (14). “Difference is the source of value” in a free market world (14). But the market is producing unequal outcomes at an ever-increasing pace and must be framed in the context of biblical justice—tzedakah—to center human dignity. Education, Sacks will say, “is the single greatest key to human dignity” (15).

“Can we live together? Can we make space for one another?…Can we recognize God’s image in one who is not my image?” (17) In this new universal order of global capitalism, “universalism must be balanced with a new respect for the local, the particular, the unique” (20).

The glory of the created world is its astonishing multiplicity: the thousands of different languages spoken by [hu]mankind, the proliferation of cultures, the sheer variety of the imaginative expressions of the human spirit, in most of which, if we listen carefully, we will hear the voice of wisdom telling us something we need to know (20-21).

And,

We must learn the art of conversation, from which truth emerges…from the quite different process of letting our world be enlarged by the presence of others who think, act, and interpret reality in ways radically different from our own (23).

Sacks talks about the benefits of and problems with globalism, capitalism, universalism and particularity. He’s fair and level-headed, sober about the problems our world is facing. If you think about it, he wrote soon after 9/11, an event which underscored just how destructive our lack of understanding one another can be. “Inequalities within and between countries has existed before. What is new in our situation is our consciousness of it” (30).

My recommendation is that you read the prologue, and see if that sparks a desire to dig into the meat of the book. Bafflingly, this book is not available electronically (not on the Kindle Store, Google Books, Kobo). Enter Open Library, which magically has it available to borrow. Or just take my word for it, order it, and know that you’ll be underlining it from start to finish.

Speaking of the finish, the final chapter is solid gold, tying his entire argument together. I sent a picture of the final two pages to my family, so that they could read this closing parable about faith:

Many years ago I had the privilege of meeting one of the great religious leaders of the Jewish world. He was the head of a large group of Jewish mystics. I was inspired by his teachings and impressed by the spirituality of his followers. But I had a question about the way of life he advocated. It seemed exclusive. In its intense and segregated piety it shut out the rest of the world. Was there not—I asked him—beauty and value outside the narrow walls in which he lived? He answered me with a parable.

Imagine, he said, two people who spend their lives transporting stones. One carries bags of diamonds. The other hauls sacks of rocks. Each is now asked to take a consignment of rubies. Which of the two understands what he is now to carry? The man who is used to diamonds knows that stones can be precious, even those that are not diamonds. But the man who has carried only rocks thinks of stones as a mere burden. They have weight but not worth. Rubies are beyond his comprehension.

So it is, he said, with faith. If we cherish our own, then we will understand the value of others. We may regard ours as a diamond and another faith as a ruby, but we know that both are precious stones. But if faith is a mere burden, not only will we not value ours. Neither will we value the faith of someone else. We will see both as equally useless. True tolerance, he implied, comes not from the absence of faith but from its living presence. Understanding the particularity of what matters to us is the best way of coming to appreciate what matters to others.

Difference does not diminish; it enlarges the sphere of human possibilities. Our last best hope is to recall the classic statement of John Donne and the more ancient story of Noah after the Flood and hear, in the midst of our hypermodernity, an old-new call to a global covenant of human responsibility and hope. Only when we realize the danger of wishing that everyone should be the same…will we prevent the clash of civilizations, born of the sense of threat and fear. We will learn to live with diversity once we understand the God-given, world-enhancing dignity of difference.

In short, start with the episode of On Being (🎧 Overcast), then move on to the book.

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How to Be Grateful in Every Moment (But Not for Everything) →

Here are two quotes that I want to hold onto and think about. From this episode of On Being with David Steindl-Rast:

Mysticism is the experience of limitless belonging…The mystic is not a special human being. Every human being is a special kind of mystic.

And, when Krista Tippet asked him what he is grateful for now, what gives him hope in light of the world’s mess and despair:

Well, one thing I have already said that’s on a larger scale: looking back and seeing that all the most difficult experiences always lead to something new and even something better, if we trust.

In order to keep us going, it is enough to be grateful for the next breath, because it’s not to be taken for granted that I can take another breath. And if I think of the millions of people who have breathing difficulties, and here I can breathe — just to remember that. Just be grateful for the next breath.

(🎧 Overcast)

Marvelous Spatuletail →

I came about this hummingbird thanks to my 7 year-old daughter’s class project on flora and fauna endemic to Peru. From wikipedia:

The marvelous spatuletail (Loddigesia mirabilis) is an Endangered species of hummingbird in the “brilliants,” tribe Heliantheini in subfamily Lesbiinae. It is endemic to northern Peru.

Here’s a 1-minute clip of this bird in action.

What a world.

Pursuing Geography and Making Worlds →

This is a tremendous interview, and, somehow, the first time I’ve become aware of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work. Geography began to fascinate me over ten years ago as we drove through the uninhabited Zambian countryside with Harding in Zambia, only to come across a small village in what seemed to me like the middle of nowhere. This excerpt on the why of geography reframes a question I’ve been trying to engage for the last decade:

Studying geography and studying therefore, as I like to put it, not “where” is Nebraska, but “why” is Nebraska? We have the same series of questions and problems and excitement, which is that in organizing ourselves with one another, with external materials and the environment, humans make places. And they make them and enhance them and destroy them. And those places have relations to other places; some are antagonistic, some are different. And there are the various forces that we’re trying so hard to come to terms with today. Such as the forces of global capitalism, the forces of racial capitalism, the forces of patriarchy, and so forth, all have a spatial expression — or I should say really a series of spatial expressions that we should, must be mindful of if we want to change that.

All of these “-isms” are located in time and space which makes wrestling with them as important as ever.

Next steps for me? I want to check out some of the essays in her book Abolition Geography.

(🎧 Overcast)

“Life as Protest” and Opting Out of Idiocy-Induced Paralysis

Craig Mod on November 2, 2020:

I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.

I’ve held this belief in my pocket these past four years. Wrapped my fingers around it as needed. Along with sane, productive, brilliant friends, a therapist, and a loving partner, it keeps me from seizing up. Who knows what this week or month will bring, but please remember: The very act of living, moving forward, not seizing up, is a protest, and a damn strong one at that. And, shit, if our collective brains are, by chance, uncoupled from the eternal low-level Doom Vibe of Unkindness in Power, use that as a boost to go even further. Take that energy and run with it. It’ll be a gift more now, than ever before. You know what to do with it.

Craig Mod is my favorite writer and I’m so thankful for his work. Coming back to this three months later and I can’t help but be deeply grateful for where we are now, finally, with a new US president. Things are far from perfect and it was a mess to get to and through January 21. But Craig’s words inspire to continue working hard and offering that work as a gift to the world no matter who is in office.

How to Think About Black History Month →

Clint Smith, from the latest issue of his excellent, new-ish monthly newsletter:

Black History Month is a chance to remember those who have made enormous contributions to this country, but it's also an opportunity to remember that those contributions did not just come from major figures. They also came from millions of Black folks whose names we’ll never know. It's the stories of ordinary Black people, those still living and those who have passed, that I think of most when we reflect on this country's history. It’s the story of Frederick Douglass, yes, but also the story of the millions of other enslaved people whose voices we don't hear. It's the story of Dr. King and of Rosa Parks, certainly, but also the story of the millions of Black people across the country and across generations who fought for civil rights in their local towns, communities, and neighborhoods—the stories that didn't make the front page of the paper. It’s the stories that take seriously the impact that centuries of oppression have had on Black people, while not limiting conceptions of Blackness singularly to a history of violence. It is a recognition of all that Black folks have done and continue to do in spite of that violence. And perhaps most of all, it’s essential to remember, acknowledge, and commemorate the exceptional contributions Black people have made to America, but also important to remember that Black people don’t need to do anything "exceptional” to justify or legitimate their place in this country.

My freshman year of college—15 years ago (!)—was my first exposure to Black History Month. Honestly, shamefully, I didn’t get it. I didn’t see its importance.

But things change. You grow up. The world forces you to open your eyes. And the last several years have been significant for me in terms of my own growth and grappling with US American history and US America today. I owe a significant part of that growth and challenge to Clint Smith’s voice.

Endless Creativity

Sometimes I am in awe of the sheer infiniteness of the creative process. When I think about new songs being written, new genres of music coming into being over time, the sheer number of new songs in every genre under the sun, I’m overwhelmed.

Similarly, when I see authors I follow on Twitter celebrating other authors’ publishing days, I think—wow. We’re still writing books. It’s the same feeling when I get to step into a library. Humans are still coming up with new things to say. To sing. To paint. To sculpt.

To create.

It’s easy to get sucked into the never-ending spiral of the human capacity for evil. Today I take a moment to celebrate the seemingly never-ending human capacity to create. Thank you, creators, for showing us what it means to be human.

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Wil Gafney on Hagar and Smashing the Biblical Patriarchy →

Wil Gafney, writing at Bible Odyssey:

Hagar is perhaps more epithet than name, ha “the,” gar “resident alien.” She is an African (Egyptian) woman or girl of childbearing age held in slavery by Sarah (Gen 16:1). Was the Hebrew-speaking audience who first heard her tale (and those of us who follow) supposed to believe that her Egyptian name just happened to sound like a Hebrew expression labeling her as other? Should we imagine that her enslavers didn’t bother with the name she had been given and called her that epithet so much it became her name as far as they were concerned? However much agency Hagar has—and it is substantial—her story is an element of someone else’s story. So no one bothers to ask, learn, remember, or record her (true) name. Her story appears in Gen 16 and Gen 21:1-21.

Despite “Bible Odyssey’s” weird name and ugly website I just stumbled across, this is an excellent resource from the Society of Biblical Literature with world class contributors. Just goes to show how many resources are out there, at least for the English speaking world, easy to access, but unknown to me.

If you’re interested to read a bit more from Gafney, start here: Smashing the Biblical Patriarchy. She doesn’t glaze over the raw, provocative details (e.g. rape, incest, violence) that are somehow easy to overlook if you grew up with a childish fairy-tale version of the Abraham and Sarah story.

See also: this thought-provoking lecture for Evolving Faith: A “Willingness to be Disturbed.” (Overcast)

The Myth of the American Dream

D. L. Mayfield kills it. Her book is prophetic.

What do I mean by “prophetic”? First, a quick overview of the entire story of the Hebrew Bible.

God called a family and then a tribe to be different than the rest of the world, so that God could bless the world through this tribe. God freed a whole nation of enslaved people so that they could be a different sort of presence in the world, a sort of priesthood whose purpose was to bring the experience of the divine to every family on the earth.

Fast forward a few centuries and this people became an empire. They abused their power in order to enslave others to build a temple to the God who liberates enslaved peoples—all under a religious façade. In the following centuries a group of people rose up from within this nation and articulated the first clear vision of social justice in human history. They called oppressive kings to account. They said you can’t worship the God who liberates while you are actively oppressing others. Their goal was to get this nation back on track with the original mission: be a different kind of tribe in the world so that the world can know what God is like. This was the prophetic imagination, calling power to account for the sake of wellbeing.

Back to the book: Mayfield’s voice in this book is prophetic in challenging the faux-religious mythology that surrounds the founding of the United States of America. She challenges the current narrative of US exceptionalism that is only exceptional for some.

Her empathy shines through her bristling critique. She’s not just interested in deconstructing the myth. Her life and relationships are hinging on being able to reconstruct, to build something new. She’s asking Christians to love their neighbors, especially the global neighbors who have sought refuge within the US.

Those who have grown up in Christian evangelical circles in the US will identity with Mayfield’s story. She is deeply uncomfortable with the state of Christianity in the US, especially the last four years. This discomfort moves her to action. Those who see this particular expression of US Christianity from the outside will come away with more history behind the hypocrisy.

From the introduction:

The myth of the American Dream not only baptizes the actions and desires of the privileged but also places the blame of inequality on those who are already disadvantaged, instead of turning the focus on changing the unjust systems.

In this book I will consider the narratives lying beneath the surface of so many easy answers that both American culture and American evangelicalism have given to the problem of suffering in an unequal and unjust world. I will attempt to show what it has been like to learn to practice the discipline of lament and how I am being changed by my relationship to people who are exiles from the American Dream—those who have no way to win or who have been excluded from the very beginning. I will share how I have tried, and failed and keep trying to live in opposition to what I’ve been told (even by the church) is best for me. The more I try to follow Jesus, the more I realize that if the gospel isn’t good news for the poor, the imprisoned, the brokenhearted, and the oppressed, then it isn’t good news for me either (6-7).

The book is divided into four parts: affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. I’ll share a favorite passage from each.

On the White Savior Complex (in part 1, affluence):

The people in my neighborhood who have experienced forced migration don’t need a hug from a strange woman. What they need are good neighbors. They need people to live next door to them, to send their kids to school with theirs, to vote for policies that protect instead of harm them. They need people whose lives are intricately bound up with their flourishing (18).

From part 2, autonomy:

Someone’s kids have to attend the worst school in your city. In your mind whose kids should that be? I think our answers to that question reveal a great deal about how deeply the American value of autonomy has been lodged in our hearts. We will fight to ensure that our kids get the best, and we try to forget about everyone else—unless perhaps, every once in a while, there’s an opportunity for charity, to give back, or to “love on” that fits our needs and maintains the status quo of the hierarchy (and makes us feel better, to boot) (77).

Mayfield tells the story of the school her kids go to. She wanted to show how she intended to help the school out. And the busy principal pointed out that there were a lot of good things happening at the school. There were already a lot of good families there, and her family was welcome to be a part of it.

The book is filled with stories that are challenging and encouraging. Mayfield is raw and honest about her attitude, privilege, and preconceived notions. She asks questions that are thought-provoking and step on your toes. But you welcome her to step on your toes because you know she’s had her toes stepped on too.

On the illusion of safety and what true peace would look like (part 3, safety):

Aisha made it to safety, just barely. She had to flee her town when it was set on fire, when people targeted her city due to their ethnicity. She has one badly damaged book of photographs, pictures from her wedding where she should look gorgeous, radiant, full of possibility. But instead the photos are warped almost beyond recognition. Still, she shows it to me one day because it is all she has. The day she shows it to me is a day that Donald Trump is holding a press conference about the need to build a larger wall on the US-Mexican border. I think about walls as metaphors, how the problem isn’t the concrete or the steel being used to secure a border but the reasoning behind it. Everyone wants to be safe, both the people who voted for the wall and people like Aisha. Who should we listen to the most? Who is truly in danger?

I think of Aisha and her son. Her son, born in a new land, one where her mother cannot visit. And yet she gave him a name that means “peace” as an act of defiance. Do we really want safety? Or do we want true peace? As Aisha and countless prophets and poets in the Scriptures will tell us, there is no way to guarantee safety in the world. The only way to move forward is with righteousness—true justice and equality for all. Then, and only then, will we ever experience a measure of peace that will ripple forth into the next generations, reminding them that they once were the ones in need and could be again someday (122-123).

Finally, on power and empire and myth:

I see the tendrils of these viewpoints in my own mind. Today I can see fractures both big and local in the American evangelical church, and still I won’t believe in an ending. American evangelicalism will live on, it will weather the storm of attaching itself to the pursuit of power at the cost of loving their neighbors. It cannot end. This stubborn thought remains, and the quiet belief behind it is where the real power of empire lies: America, and more specifically White evangelical expressions of Christianity in America, cannot die because it is inherently blessed by God. This is ingrained in my brain, where this vicious myth has taken root and made itself true. This is how empire always works, by convincing us there is no other path forward except the one where we are always victorious. And this is how the narrative of empire is working, even now, in my own heart and soul and mind.

It isn’t that I am anti-American, not really. As James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any country in the world, and exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Empires are complicated structures; no matter where we live on this earth, we live with some sort of relationship to empire—and we need to figure out how to live as disciples of Christ right where we are. As a middle-class White American female, the dominant culture of the United States has been pretty good for me, which is important to articulate. I am someone who benefits from the empire at work around me, which means I have a spiritual and moral responsibility to interrogate the narratives that surround me. I need to seek out those who have experienced exodus and exile, and I need to contemplate what life beyond or in spite of empire might look like: contemplating the end of how everything always has been and supposedly always will be. There is nothing in Scripture, nothing in Jesus, that says my proud and terrible and interesting country is particularly blessed, has some special favor, has some special reason for existence (145-146).

Thinking back, maybe most of the book is devoted to deconstruction. It’s hard to get through that when the mythology is so ingrained. But the epilogue, in particular, shares beautiful stories of something new:

All of these people find they are changing, shifting, as their worlds expand outward. It looks a lot like the joy of welcoming a new baby into the family—the gift of the unexpected, the birth of new possibilities.

There’s the librarian who sings the name of each child at the weekly story time, a silly little song that repeats the name of the child over and over again and makes the children all beam with happiness. He tells me he sings this song not just as a way to learn their names but as a way to combat the negativity they might hear in their own life. He tells me studies show that saying a child’s name in a positive tone eight times a day can help undo the damage of only hearing their name when they’re in trouble for something. I think about this, about a man in a small library’s multipurpose room, singing and clapping and saying each child’s name with love and joy, his own little ministry of naming (191).

Beautiful.

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My one pushback to this book would be questioning Mayfield’s authenticity. It only came up once, when I asked myself: Can anyone really be so bound up in God’s vision for the marginalized that they can’t be content until that vision becomes a reality? Of course, I can’t answer that because I don’t know her.

I will say, from following her on Twitter for the past year (that’s the next best thing to actually knowing someone, right?), she lives and breathes Black Lives Matter, she’s always asking questions, she calls power to account (especially white Christian power), and she’s not afraid of tear gas.

That’s the type of person I’m willing to listen to.

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I mentioned earlier that one of the marks of a good book is the reading list you come away with. Well, here’s my list after this one:

• Willie Jennings - The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race
• Lisa Sharon Harper - The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right
• Martin Luther King Jr. - Strength to Love
• Oscar Romero - Scandal of Redemption: When God Liberates the Poor, Saves Sinners, and Heals Nations
• William T. Cavanaugh - Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire
• Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
• Randy S. Woodley - Shalom and the Community of Creation: An Indigenous Vision
• James H. Cone - The Cross and the Lynching Tree
• Brian Doyle (ed.) - A Sense of Wonder: The World’s Best Writers on the Sacred, the Profane, and the Ordinary
• Walter Brueggemann - Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile

℗

The Warmth of Other Suns

This book is fantastic. It was one of those books where I finished, and then I just lay in bed for half an hour, looking up at the ceiling and letting it soak in. I couldn’t read anything else yesterday because I was still just thinking.

I knew little about the Great Migration before reading it. And reading about changes to the landscape of the US throughout the time period—from World War 1 (1914) through the Civil Rights Movement (around 1970)—there are so many connections to today’s world. This is an important book.

Isabel Wilkerson makes this engaging. It’s a history book that reads like a novel: narrative nonfiction. She tells the story of three individuals and their families who moved to the North, escaping the Jim Crow South, in three consecutive decades: Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi to go to Chicago in 1937; George Starling left Florida to go to New York (Harlem); and Robert Foster moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles. The narrative rotates between these three stories, their lives in the South, the terrifyingly uncertain journey North (or West), and their struggles to make a life. Wilkerson also zooms out throughout the book to give big picture analysis and details.

Heart-wrenching. Emotional. Enlightening. Striking.

It’s long—600+ pages (book length is always obscured on the Kindle. Why is that?). But if you get a chapter or two into the lives of each of the main characters, you won’t want to put it down.

This tweet by Nikole Hannah-Jones—not about the book but still related—captures my thinking throughout:

You ever stop to think what you might have done with your life if you didn’t have to spend it fighting against racism or trying to overcome it?

The suppression of human flourishing because of racist human oppression is devastating. To fight against its effects is the work of a lifetime.

Here are some of my highlights to give you a taste of the book. Big picture:

It was during the First World War that a silent pilgrimage took its first steps within the borders of this country. The fever rose without warning or notice or much in the way of understanding by those outside its reach. It would not end until the 1970s and would set into motion changes in the North and South that no one, not even the people doing the leaving, could have imagined at the start of it or dreamed would take nearly a lifetime to play out. Historians would come to call it the Great Migration. It would become perhaps the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century. It was vast. It was leaderless. It crept along so many thousands of currents over so long a stretch of time as to be difficult for the press truly to capture while it was under way. Over the course of six decades, some six million black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America. The Great Migration would become a turning point in history. It would transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched. It would force the South to search its soul and finally to lay aside a feudal caste system. It grew out of the unmet promises made after the Civil War and, through the sheer weight of it, helped push the country toward the civil rights revolutions of the 1960s.

And:

Its imprint is everywhere in urban life. The configuration of the cities as we know them, the social geography of black and white neighborhoods, the spread of the housing projects as well as the rise of a well-scrubbed black middle class, along with the alternating waves of white flight and suburbanization—all of these grew, directly or indirectly, from the response of everyone touched by the Great Migration.

The three protagonists:

Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster, and George Starling each left different parts of the South during different decades for different reasons and with different outcomes. The three of them would find some measure of happiness, not because their children had been perfect, their own lives without heartache, or because the North had been particularly welcoming. In fact, not a single one of those things had turned out to be true. There had been sickness, disappointment, premature and unexpected losses, and, among their children, more divorces than enduring marriages, but at least the children had tried. The three who had come out of the South were left widowed but solvent, and each found some measure of satisfaction because whatever had happened to them, however things had unfolded, it had been of their own choosing, and they could take comfort in that. They believed with all that was in them that they were better off for having made the Migration, that they may have made many mistakes in their lives, but leaving the South had not been one of them.

Each section opens with poetry or excerpts from other Black authors. Here are two that stuck with me:

The lazy, laughing South
With blood on its mouth.…
Passionate, cruel,
Honey-lipped, syphilitic—
That is the South.
And I, who am black, would love her
But she spits in my face.…
So now I seek the North—
The cold-faced North,
For she, they say, is a kinder mistress.
— Langston Hughes, “The South”

And:

That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.
— Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family

If you aren’t ready to dive in yet, start by listening to Krista Tippett interview Isabel Wilkerson for On Being (Overcast):

Go to the doctor and they won’t begin to treat you without taking your history — and not just yours, but that of your parents and grandparents before you. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson points this out as she reflects on her epic work of narrative nonfiction, The Warmth of Other Suns. She’s immersed herself in the stories of the Great Migration, the movement of six million African Americans to northern U.S. cities in the 20th century. The book is a carrier of histories and truths that help make sense of human and social challenges at the heart of our life together now.

℗

Renata Flores, Quechua Rapper, Inspires →

Renata Flores came across my radar when a former student saw an article about her in the New York Times. Jason Kottke writing about her is my gauge for her getting traction in the US:

Quechua is an indigenous language family spoken by millions of people in the Andean region of South America, primarily in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. It was the main language of the Inca empire and today is the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language in the Americas. In her music, Peruvian singer/songwriter Renata Flores combines modern forms like hip hop, electronic, and trap music with native instruments and vocals sung in Quechua.

Peru’s 1975 constitution recognized Quechua (and Aymara) as an official language in Peru. Even so, many families in the city aren’t up front about speaking it because of the historic discrimination Quechua-speakers have faced and still face to this day.

Rosa Chávez Yacila, for Vice:

It’s very common for many Quechua speakers to not teach their children or grandchildren the language because they consider this knowledge as a burden. To explain the shortage of active bilingualism in Peru, the linguist Virginia Zavala uses the concept of “linguistic ideologies,” which are the ideas that people have about languages. For example: French is the language of love; German sounds rough; Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish are similar.

Quechua, similarly to other indigenous languages, is associated with poverty, rural life, and illiteracy. These ideas have been shaped by history and society to the point that people hold on to these beliefs as if they were universal truths. And these “truths” are deeply embedded in their conscious thought process. Value hierarchies also exist with languages. Some are “worth” more than others.

The end result is that many native Quechua speakers believe that using Quechua in public is unnecessary after learning Spanish. Either by shyness or shame, they reserve their maternal tongue for private spaces and intimate conversations.

My hope is that artists like Renata Flores can start to change this. It’s a beautiful language that preserves a fascinating history and culture. Maybe her traction outside of Peru will help her gain even more in Peru. Enjoy:

“A Brief Crack of Light Between Two Eternities of Darkness” →

Novelist Ben Dolnick, for NYT Opinion:

Here’s something I used to think about, back in the before-times: A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have strapped on equipment and left the surface behind and you had better, after going to all that trouble, see something interesting down there.

How was it that I had never noticed that this entire taxonomic system of authorial interruptions took for granted that readers would enjoy being plunged into a medium in which they couldn’t take a breath?

John Gruber:

Simultaneously an astute observation on writing and a spot-on assessment of our collective moment.

Back to Dolnick:

But then I happened upon a line by Nabokov (the author, incidentally, of perhaps the only truly famous parentheses in world literature):

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

This majestically depressing sentence worked on me like fresh water in a vase of lilies. At last, the true absurd hopelessness of things, laid out in flawless prose!

“Let’s begin your history lesson” →

Erica Buddington, in a Twitter thread to end all threads:

This #thread is for those of you struggling to comprehend that the recent murders are just a fraction of racial violence in the United States. We are protesting for #GeorgeFloyd #BreonnaTaylor, #AhmaudArbery AND hundreds of years of oppression.

Let’s begin your history lesson.

Powerful thread, 100+ tweets with dates, plaques, pictures, and commentary running from the 1829 Cincinnati Riots to the present day. Additional resource suggestions (books, podcasts, documentaries) start here.

(Via NextDraft)