Teaser Tuesday- May 6

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

And a day late...

In the middle of the trip
he picked some ripe lemons
and was throwing them at the water
until the water seemed golden.
And in the middle of the trip,
under the branches of an oak treee
the police came along and took him away.

Another from The Journals of Thomas Merton 'Run to the Mountain' - a bit of a cheat as here Merton is quoting from Lorca's poem The Arrest - Prendimiento de Antoñito el Camborio - here's the whole poem. Difficult in view of the circumstances of Lorca's own death.

Teaser Tuesday - April 8

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Then we cross the river, and up the hill between high banks, and high over the road a metal suspension footbridge joins the halves of the estate the road, in its deep cut, divides. A the top of the hill Feltonfleet School [flowery font]

well that's what the text says and you have to imagine it! This is The Journals of Thomas Merton 'Run to the Mountain' the diaries of the Trappist monk. I'm currently in 1939 and deep in Merton's reflection on the start of the war.

Teaser Tuesday - August 13

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

I had become and Episcopalian in the first place because the Anglican way cared more for common prayer than right belief, but under stress even Episcopalians began vetting one another on the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. Both in Clarkesville and elsewhere, the poets began drifting away from the churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

Barbara Brown Taylor in Leaving Church. I picked this up at a garden party bookstall a few weeks back -a story of a spiritual journey and so far I think it's rather good. She's speaking at Greenbelt at the end of this month...

Advent Reflections

DSCF8721, a photo by rajmarshall on Flickr.

For the second year, our church has produced a book of relections for Advent. Church members were given a Bible passage and asked to reflect and write their thoughts on it. You can read the complete booklet here.
I had the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24:43) and mine took the form of a meditation:

Weeds cover the churchyard
Moss and lichen blur the tidy sharp lines of old gravestones
Untidiness, a Hindrance? Protection? Comfort?
Green softening the old outlines.

Guy ropes snaking across the paving stones - a barrier or a support?
Bright tension and opportunity, challenging our moral tidiness
The tents of the ungodly are where? freedom? church? money?
Those with little, seeing riches on every side.

First the blade and then the ear,
Then the full corn shall appear;
And the fruitful ears to store -
But in the fire the tares to cast;

Thank God we are not the final judges
help us to live with untidyness,
but always growing into that fruitfulness.

Teaser Tuesday - 20 September

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Not everyone is comfortable talking about the saints or the next world, but most people love the classic statement of life's meaning by St Augustine, which really says the same thing but more powerfully:

The thought of you stirs us so deeply that we cannot be content unless we praise you, because you have made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.

A re-read, for me, of Margaret Hebblethwaite's Finding God in All Things (no relevant internet review that I could find - which is a pity as I found it pretty helpful last time I read it!

Tea after the Quiet day

Tea after the Quiet day, a photo by rajmarshall on Flickr.

After last night's dinner, I didn't stay up much longer and an early start of 6am I drove up to Great Hucklow and the Nightingale Centre for a parish quiet day led by Robert Atwell (the bishop of Stockport). lovely setting and very helpful looking back on life in the light of prayer. Around 50 of us were there from across the Macc Team Ministry.
I might have nodded briefly but I was kept pretty well awake!

Teaser Tuesday - 21 June

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The soul is, in any case, in shadow in this life because it is 'covered' by the body. The overall sense of this richly allusive passage seems to be that, since knowledge in this life is necessarily of shadows and images only, God's grace has set in the world of shadows the shadow of his own truth, so that human beings may know him, even if only indirectly, in this 'mirror and enigma' which is Christ.

Rowan Williams musing on Origen in The Wound of Knowledge there, that (quoting Williams) ought to annoy the good folk heading over here from OCICBW - this was the book I was going to use anyway - I didn't change it! This is a re-re-read (or maybe a re-re-re-read) it was initially recommended to me by Denise on the Scargill community who had spent time as a novice with the Sisters of the Love of God and presumably she got the original talks. Everyone quotes this summary, so I shall be no different:

The goal of a Christian life, according to Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is not enlightenment but wholeness

maybe the Anglican Church could use a little wholeness rather than speeding off in the vain pursuit of certainties!

Teaser Tuesday - 7 June

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

The television may be going, but we don't have to watch it. In this way distractions cases to be so distracting. If we let them be, we can see that they appear in something deeper: the vastness of our own awareness. This vastness is God's cloak, what the author calls the cloud of unknowing, "the dark cloud where God was" (Ex 20:21)

.. taking a few extra sentences, this is from Martin Laird's Into the Silent Land a book on contemplative prayer which our study group is currently reading, I've found it pretty helpful. Here's a review of the book.

Music and Silence

In his Musica Callada, the Catalan composer Federico Mompou prefaces book 2 with the following comment:

It is difficult to translate and express the true sense of "Musica Callada" in a language other than Spanish. St John of the Cross the great mystic poet writes/sings in one of his most beautiful poems: "La Musica Callada, la Soledad Sonora"seeking to express a music which at the same time is the voice of silence. Music keeeps its own "Callada" voice, i.e. "that which is silent" whilst in its solitude making music.

(my translation from the French)
Here's no 26 from the set of 28 pieces:

Contemplation and Music

Via the Silence email list - accessible at gmane.music.john-cage

Instead Cage's work offers us the invitation to see the world as a blessing. And that is surely the first step towards making it whole. Cage suggests that viewed properly each movement we make is part of a dance, each breath the catch of a song, each thing we see a thing of wondrous beauty. If we understand the world's beauty how could do anything but cherish it? As Cage himself would say, "Everyday is a beautiful day." Let us make it so.

from a sermon, more about Cage than faith but lots on spirituality, well worth the read IMHO.

Musica Callada

I was given the score of Mompou's Musica Callada for Christmas. Spare transparent music about which Stephen Hough blogged recently. Spiritual, minimalism before minimalism. Here's book 1 no 1

Especially for those walking with or remembering dogs on a Boxing day walk tomorrow.
I must try recording some of these myself, but maybe this week is a little early!

Listening

More from Parker Palmer's book on vocation - Let your Life Speak:

Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here", calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God

.
And while in thoughtful mood, here is Stephen Hough on Advent and Mompou:

We are dealing here with the most intense contemplation – even a metaphysical depiction of reality: the accidents have disappeared and we are left only with the substance. It is as if the person watching the fountain or hearing the bell is being evoked, his or her soul at rest in harmony with the vibration, or purified in the cleansing water.

writing about the composer's 'The Fountain and the Bell’ contrasting it with Liszt or Ravel. I need to be a lot more reflective when playing Mompou..

Ink Stone

Another Advent Sunday, another poem and again from Chase Twichell's The Snow Watcher -

It's a green river stone,
without adornment
except for a single
twig of pine
in an empty pool.

I like to scramble up the hill
in the summer dusk,
sit on a long stone left by the ice,
and watch the sky go dark
in a puddle of yesterday's rain.