I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
This is a shameless plug for my own book! I’m so excited that Angelico Press has published Souls at Work, and I have high hopes that it will be a blessing to readers. Someone has asked “What kind of book is this?” and it’s hard to put it into a typical category.
It is ‘self-help,’ because I enjoy talking to people who enjoy self-improvement. It is ‘educational,’ because I look at the world through the lens of the classical Trivium and suggest this as a model for self-educators and for teachers. It is ‘Catholic spiritual direction,’ because I strongly believe that your interior life will be much improved by taking on reality in all its forms – art, persons, subjects, buildings and more.
It is ‘poetic,’ because it is meant to give you entrance into my own lived experience, and so is written with a richness of vocabulary and diction that is sadly missing from many 10-bullet-point books. It is ‘hard,’ because it invites you into the adventure of working out your salvation in the rough and tumble tensions of things that are difficult for you. It is a ‘workbook,’ because I ask you to do the work of writing it for yourself (!), or, at least, responding to its questions to make it truly your own.
It is ‘dangerous,’ because there is no true growth or education possible apart from venturing into the unknown territory of the Real World with only our imperfect realization of Christ to guide us. It is ‘Catholic,’ because it is deeply indebted to and respectful of the Faith, and is predicated on my own love for Christ and His teaching magisterium…without being at all a work of theology.
What else? A fountain of youth? Yes. A great conversation starter? Yes. A fun romp through science, art, literature, architecture, and more with, not an expert, but an interested fellow student? Yes. A help in understanding relationship dynamics? Yes. A new perspective on the new evangelization? Yes!
So, as one who is obviously totally unbiased about this book, I highly recommend you get a copy and share the news that it is available. THANKS to all who take the plunge and wade into this ‘invitation to freedom’. Together, Catholic writers and readers must discover what it means for an artist to be, not a law unto herself, but a member of the Body of Christ. I so look forward to your response to this book. Please tell me what kind of book it is when you know!
Thanks to Jill Stanek, pro-life activist, for publishing this Guest Post about the 50 Million Names Project!
50,000,000! When we reached that abortion toll, I woke up, in a way, to the horror of this ongoing holocaust. I wished then, before Internet, email, and computers in every home, there was a way to give names for all those babies. No way!
[Read more…]
“Angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly.”One of my all-time favorite G.K. Chesterton quotes, this has grown into an important part of my ‘philosophy of life.’
To take myself lightly is not to disrespect, or dismiss myself. I must take myself seriously enough that others may also respect and benefit from my existence. But if I hold self lightly, I’ll have the humility to let the bubble of illusion pop, or the balloon of reputation fly off, without whimpering.
Flying is about light. Not just being light enough to rise, but about seeing clearly – through the lens of truth, in a way that corresponds with reality and is unclouded by self-delusion, sin, or selfishness. Lightness is about detachment – from my comfort, from my demands being met, from the promise of outcomes or progress.
Flying like this requires real gravitas – real and deep connection to the ground of being, to place, history, virtue, reality. Angel flight is about high humor – the Divine sense of comedy in which we stumbling, fumbling heroes turn out all right and even save the day. Perhaps angels can fly, mostly, because they know that in the end (as St. Juliana of Norwich said) “All manner of things shall be well.”
I happened into the desert – place strange to me – unwelcoming, forbidding, barren. Sent by God to dwell for a time among children of the Church whose experience of it, and of the world, seemed alien to my own, I recoiled from the task set before me: to open my heart to people who are at least so alienated and frustrated by, and at worst so contemptuous and hateful of the Church I love; to be willing to see in them what is dear to God’s own heart; to let down buzz-word barriers and hear their stories, their fears of people like me, their reasons for conclusions antithetical to my own. [Read more…]
After a baby’s birth, Mom becomes the ‘womb’, the context for his continuing development. This is so much more than just making a safe home, or choosing the best food for him. The womb and placenta, like Mom, are mediating structures meant to link the child to his wider environment through a bulky, messy, murky mass that impedes flow even as it facilitates flow. I’m not calling Mom names here, just pointing out that all attempts to do away with this design, this ‘inefficient’, personal, slow, messy process are dis-integrated, wrong-headed, dangerous.
If I wanted to teach a child, I’d give his mother rich opportunities to learn, to ingest great materials, to practice skills, to discuss whatever she finds delightful, wondrous, or interesting. I imagine she’d do the mediating for that particular child better than any artificial womb I could create. Fr. Luigi Giussani wrote, “I am an educator if I communicate myself.” Unless I can be a real part of your child’s context, mediated to him through his mother’s wisdom and discernment about his needs and capabilities, I cannot truly communicate my self, or anything else, to him.
We need more people in children’s REAL LIVES and fewer contrived, artificial kiddie activities, classes, and play-spaces. It does take a village, but that village better grow up organically around the home to serve the child and his parents in truth. I’m hoping to be part of the village for the families I love, but I don’t want to abstract the children from those wombs in order to give myself to them.
Does this make sense to you? I’d love to hear your feedback on this one!
One of my favorite talks is about Mom understanding herself as this sort of continuing context for the child: Building the Bridge.
To learn to turn ideas into works of art, we must indulge a bit – not recklessly, but with some daring – in wasting art supplies. Give a kid the kind of art supplies you don’t care if he wastes, and I’ll bet they’re also not satisfying to use, either. Interest will wane. To learn to cook, we need to take some risks with foods.
No skill at words is acquired without long practice tossing away and rewriting ‘wasted’ words. No friendship is strengthened without great ‘waste’ of time together. No love is proved by other than life poured out in service. To turn feasts into practice for the Eucharist, we need to taste the finest wine (Note: the ‘finest wine’ I’ve ever been able to afford cost $26 a bottle, but it’s the thought that counts, and paisano is great for most meals. As fans of Rumpole, we call ours ‘Chateau Kaw Embankment’!)
We must learn to value and to give what is of highest value. There’s the paradox. Only a child can give, or use up, or waste with complete abandon, and only an adult can rightly value things. It is the work of growing up to become able to bear the tension of doing both. To give without knowing the value does nothing to honor the recipient, and to value without giving communicates no actual good.
A priest once counseled that if time is our greatest asset, the best gift we can give Him is to waste it. Since I write and speak about Holy Leisure, this was great reinforcement! Sabbath rest is all about learning to be, to be acted upon, to be whole and offer that wholeness to Christ. It can be very, very hard in our goal-oriented, product-producing, efficiency-loving culture to let go and give God some simple leisure time. Even our Christian culture tends toward purpose-driven lives and accomplishing great things for God.
I hope you’ll learn to waste boldly where the great thing being accomplished is YOU!
Thankfully, I don’t live intimately among people who choose quite differently. So, there’s not really much overt argument about my life choices. Every now and then, I realize that my very presence – because of these choices, not because I’m constantly mouthing off about my decisions – is a challenge to someone else.
I know how they feel. I’ve felt it myself – a little defensive in the presence even of someone who has chosen to dress nicer for this party, or go ahead and buy from that company. They might feel a bit wary that their choice for something I clearly chose against might be grounds for exile from my heart, my community, or my regard for them.
Their remedy – if my experience is any indicator – is to be much more clear than people usually are about the whys and wherefores of their own choices. The real challenge is to see that it’s me who needs to shift course when I feel defensive. I need to go over my own reasoning with a teachable spirit (not a combative, internal, self-righteous rehearsal) and then take a calm stand based on my own judgment.
Most important, I need to ‘own my own stuff’ and not attribute my discomfort to the other person, as though he were forcing me to defend myself.
I can stand my high ground, but need to stay free while doing it. Read some surprising reasons why you should argue.
Like an exercise in which you pull a rubber band away from a wall, escapism guarantees you’ll need more and more oomph to pull away from the pain, the need, the person, the issue that needs attention. Of course, the more powerful it seems to get, the more you want to get away from it!
That’s the trap. Not only does your distraction ratchet up the level of tension, it also slowly narrows your focus to a point as getting away from The Thing takes more and more of your effort to focus your attention away, away, away.
Jim Robbins, in The Open Focus Brain, discusses ways he helped patients in chronic pain avoid this trap and thereby eased their pain. These are lessons worth remembering and passing on:
I’ve had tremendous improvement in migraine headaches following his advice, but I also recommend it for any situation that pushes your ‘Escape!’ button. Relax, diffuse, engage your senses, contemplate negative spaces. There are more things that are REAL than The Thing! Don’t try so hard to avoid it that you see it alone in your narrow focusing. Staying distracted is a symptom of being tensed away from something you’d do better to face, resolve, accept.
I’d like to know if you take this advice. Please let me hear your story!
According to security expert Gavin De Becker, who wrote The Gift of Fear, the best thing you can do to protect yourself against unforseen danger is to be keenly aware, in the present moment, of your own response to a situation. [Read more…]
When God says, “Be still,” He doesn’t mean, “Be immoveable.” We’ve got to have an interior stillness that can be moved forward toward our own destiny, toward the reality we encounter – a dynamic centeredness that is very different from a rigid, or inert ‘stopping’.
When He says, “Be not afraid,” He doesn’t mean, “Your fears are groundless, stupid, psychological.” Fear inside is a response to something outside. We are affected by something, or by imagining something, and that causes a wave of the emotion that is ‘fear’. That emotion is not ridiculous, or crazy, but because it’s sometimes hard to discern what it was we were affected by, it can seem like He’s telling us to pooh-pooh it. In fact, He wants to cast it out for us – to send in buckets of perfect love to wash over us in a cleansing, healing wave.
We can turn toward our fear, knowing it is an emotional response to something, and ask Him for that love to come and calm its storm. We don’t have to ignore it, distract ourselves from it, or violate ourselves by toughening up against it. We may realize what caused it, and we may not. We may need to stop watching scary movies, reading scary news, having scary conversations, or allowing scary imaginations if we find ourselves frequently needing help with fears. Or, we may be amazed to find that the fears we thought we’d just have to deal with indefinitely, are simply gone – their originating events so deeply buried, and so profoundly healed that we cannot see what just happened!
When God says, “Be quiet,” He doesn’t mean, “Shut up!” He doesn’t violate us, doesn’t silence us, doesn’t ask us to ignore what we need to say, and doesn’t hate the sound of our voices, no matter how long we pray (or how angry, whiny, self-pitying, ungrammatical, or snarky those prayers are!). Quiet is a gift, and if He shushes us, it’s so that we can find out what our deepest needs really are and express those to Him. He’s waiting just to be with me in that interior chamber of my soul, and “Shhhhh” is to remind us that it’s a holy, hallowed, quiet place.
When He says, “Wait,” He doesn’t mean, “Never.”
When He says, “Be perfect,” He doesn’t mean, “Or else I’ll hate you.”
When He says, “Have self-control,” He doesn’t mean, “Be in control.”
When He says, “Be strong,” He doesn’t mean, “Be impervious.”
When He says, “No,” He doesn’t mean, “You were wrong to ask.”
I’m sure you get the idea. Sometimes it has taken me a while to figure out what message I was actually getting from God’s ‘transmitter’, and then fine-tune my ‘receiver’ so that I could hear an ungarbled message.
Here’s a talk I’ve given about having a great conversation with God.
Did you miss Part 1?
Tuition includes swim lessons, piano and other instrument lessons, various physical training and sport options, art lessons in every media, and several foreign languages. Fundraisers and grants-in-aid pay not only for direct expenses of the school, but for placement of pianos, computers, pottery wheels, woodworking equipment, and more in the homes of the students! Talk about ‘homework’! Sit down, there’s more: travel grants are made to families and small groups for field trips to the seashore (oceanography), Rome (religion, history, art, Italian), Mexico (missions work, Spanish), Civil War battle fields, folk art camps, and a number of other wow destinations. [Read more…]
Take a few tips from a school so costly most people don’t even dream of affording it!
This place has teachers carefully screened for character and for a great mesh with the particular needs of the student group they will teach. Parents sign kids up at birth (or before!) and provision begins being made immediately for their ‘individual learning program’. Teachers-in-training (all are trained on the job by this school) begin interacting with, observing, and preparing to meet their individual needs way before first grade begins. Their teaching skills grow with the cohort they teach! [Read more…]
This is my most-requested audio – about how we can educate our children well, despite our own inadequacies. The Problem – We must get kids from where they are, to where they need to be; from ‘uneducated’ to ‘educated’. Given the poverty of our own education, we feel asked to do the impossible: build a […]
Some audiences want to cut right to the chase: “Give us practical applications of all your ideas about Sabbath-keeping.” OK – here you go: In this talk I do just that – give concrete, practical ways to dip into the kind of leisure that brings interior equanimity and leaves you more whole, more human, more […]
I prepared this talk for the Heart of a Woman group, in Kansas City, shortly after the suicide of a Catholic mother of ten. It was a shock to me, but not entirely unexpected, as I had known her during the years she struggled with depression and disintegration, despite her devotion to the Church, Christ, […]
For an Apostles of the Interior Life Women’s Retreat, where the theme was “The King Desires Your Beauty,” I prepared this truly interesting talk. Will you believe me when I say that this is another of my favorites?!?! I know, I’ve said that about a lot of these talks, but revisiting them to give a […]
I once asked a friend who calls herself a Jewish-Catholic if it had been hard for her to accept Mary’s role in Salvation History. She laughed and said, “Heck no! Every Sabbath was begun by a Jewish mama’s prayers! I’d have been suspicious if Lord Sabbaoth hadn’t come through a woman.” Jewish women welcomed Sabbath […]
Differences between the original myth of Cupid and Psyche, and C.S. Lewis’ retelling of the myth in Till We Have Faces have the effect of revealing new dimensionality in the Christian understanding of both myth and of the human person. The pre-Christian myth, like the pre-Christian person, is veiled in a darkness that constitutes a […]
In “Stour Valley and Dedham Church” Constable has painted the Vale of Dedham – a familiar and beloved area of his native England.
“The Merry Drinker,” by Frans Hals This is a portrait of an unnamed man, called in the title only ‘a merry drinker’.
Giotto’s painting, The Wedding Feast at Cana, portrays the literal and spiritual senses of this story.
Berlinghieri’s St. Francis appears behind the altar of San Francesco in Pescia, Italy. It is an excellent example of art ordered to divine worship.
A mom is the caretaker of a huge, wonderful, potentially beautiful, critically important place! She, herself, this actual, unique person, is the single most important ‘environment’ in the lives of her children. Like Mary, like the Church, she is an atmosphere. She is an atmosphere of affection. This is not just warm, fuzzy feelings, but […]
Benedictine College hosted a Symposium for Advancing the New Evangelization in 2014. The theme was Transcendentals as Preambles to Faith, and I got to propose my take on that as a paper. Anyone who knows me could probably have bet good money I’d do something ‘three dimensional’ with that, and they’d have won those bets. […]
I once got a chance to do an all-day retreat with one of the sister Apostles of the Interior Life. Naturally, I wanted to discuss the role of leisure in the formation of persons! As usual, I prayed about the upcoming event, and God brought together several threads of my contemplation to weave this talk. […]
Did you know YOU are a poem? Check out Ephesians 2:10, where the Greek ‘poema’ is usually translated ‘workmanship’. I like ‘poema’ better, as it implies beauty and artistry, but ‘workmanship’ is nice. I’ve discussed the importance of poetry, poetic education, poetic imagination and poetic reading in many different venues (many of the talk topics […]
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