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!
Archives for October 2014
Living the Sabbath Ideal
It often surprises people to find out that I do not prescribe or proscribe activities for the Sabbath. As the author of ‘the Catholic Sabbath book,’ I’m expected to tell people what to do, or not do, to keep the ideal Sabbath. The problem is, my whole approach is exactly opposite – strongly rooted in the real instead of in an abstract ideal.
I’ve found that, in every area of life, Sabbath-keeping included, people need help understanding how ideas get realized – how to move from the Ideal to the Real, or from theory to practice. In this talk, I focus on that process, discussing the role of symbols, of freedom, of gestures, and of leisure in the development of one’s own approach to Sabbath-keeping.
I love the way this process parallels artistic accomplishment. An artist must learn to realize ideas, and so must every individual, garden-variety Catholic. I believe that attention to the design of an authentic and personal Sabbath is the key to making our lives works of art. If I can help open this door for others, I’ll be very happy!
Filling Your Net
Just as day was breaking, Jesus stood on the beach; yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to the, “Children, have you any fish?” They answered him, “No.” He said to them, “Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.” So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in, for the quantity of fish. John 21: 4-7
The fishermen had been going through all the motions, and were drained of strength and disappointed and hungry. In obedience to Him, they rehearsed those motions one last time: gather the heavy, sodden net just so; heave together to lift and throw it; pull against the enormous drag of deep water and haul it back in to the boat with calloused hands and aching muscles.
What they had been doing all night in their own strength finally brought an abundant reward when the motions became acts of obedience. If you have been going through the motions at Mass, and bringing up an ’empty net’ over and over, you can revitalize your experience and start to take home a full catch!
In this talk I gave practical helps for the common experience of dryness, dullness, emptiness in the lives of Mass-goers. I created it for an evening of reflection led by the Apostles of the Interior Life, when they invited members of their Collaborator Family to contribute to their parish mission work. The Apostles, my Family, are something of a ‘sending community’ for me – rooting my speaking and writing in the practice of their charism and the sharing of their goal to lead people deeper into the interior life of union with Christ.
Living Poems
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 you see here relate to this theme). I’ve also used my own poems as lenses through which to view aspects of the spiritual life.
For several years, I hosted a Living Poem Society get-together during which we poets shared our current works and discussed the motivation, layers of meaning, word choices and life experiences that helped form each poem.
I hope to re-animate that group one of these days, but, until then, I’m working on a small volume of my poetry, for which I’ll include notes about that sort of background material that can help readers understand each poem more deeply. The title for that work-in-progress is A Destiny to Burn. Here’s the story behind that:
Artist Rose Shopen Klassen gave me an intricately carved candle and, when I said I’d never light it (because it was so beautiful), she told me “A candle has a destiny to burn that will not be fulfilled unless you light it.” That phrase became a poem of mine (Destiny to Burn), and I still love to say it over and over, it so resonated with me!
If an artist has to learn anything, it is how to be utterly spent on the doing of one’s work. Granted the skill to do it, there is still the mountain to climb of learning to pour out the self into works of art, most of which will be given away freely. This candle (I did and do light it, briefly…still hard to let it disappear completely!) reminds me to let myself be burned away in the living of my life, in order that Christ might somehow shine through all that is me, all that I do, whatever I create.
Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
Putting Down Sabbath Roots
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 able to balance all the demands of life.
Caution – one of my ‘theories,’ is that part of what makes your Sabbath practice effective in developing your capacity for Christ is conscious design of that practice. You can hear what might be done (and get some good ideas, see what resonates with you, be stimulated to overhaul your Sabbath day), but you still must choose what you will, or won’t do, freely. In that freedom is your authentic consideration of the ways you tend to get unbalanced, lose equanimity, wobble.
Sabbath is tonic – it brings you back to a clear, centered ‘tone’ from disintegration that has taken you in any number of different directions. Sabbath brings you home, if you’ll learn to practice it without legalism, without license – freely. And I’d like to help you do that!
Here are some other ways I’ve spoken about Sabbath over the years.
Sabbath is a Woman
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 into the home each Friday evening with prayers and candle-lighting. I love the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where all the women’s voices rise to bless their families on a Friday evening. Sabbath was thought of, like Holy Wisdom, as a woman – even as a Queen. The Sabbath gives us some fascinating insights into the characteristically feminine movement of the Holy Spirit into the lives of the faithful.
If you enjoy discussing the ‘genius of women,’ you’ll enjoy this talk.
Here are a few other Sabbath-related talks.
Fr. Paul got a great recording of my whole Sabbath is a Woman talk….just ask!
Man as Icon of the Prosopon
If, as artists, we hope to recall man to himself, to set him free, to draw him toward God, then we must understand the human person as an icon and icon-writer. The more we understand about icons, the more fully we can enter into the treasury of prayer they open to us.
There are four main types of icon (per St. John Damascene) that unfold from the very Essence of God, right on through – without discontinuity – to the painted icons we can touch and hold. If we take the idea of ‘icon’ further, to see man as ‘image of God,’ or ‘icon of the essence of God,’ we see the human person in a new light – as a work of art that is meant to be a place of encounter with ‘that which it depicts’.
The icon that is painted within us as we encounter reality – the image of what we see, what we know, what we love – is, likewise a form through which that reality is re-presented, made present, in a human person. It’s not too much to say that man, as steward of Creation, was meant to have Creation made present within his own being to such a degree that he would know it intimately and so steward it well. If we can look at what it means to take in something so much greater than oneself and then to be responsible for communicating that something to others, we learn a lot about how to be Christ-bearers in the world.
A look at icons helps us do that, whether we formally study iconography, or not.
A Love Poem for Two Voices
In a discussion of my poem by this title, we look at the pain a woman may feel upon being loved by Christ. It is sometimes a very difficult thing to be loved, and to receive love. Many women have related to my example of a woman who fights that love as though her life depends upon keeping Christ at arm’s length. This is a very healing discussion!
This poem was first published in Canticle magazine, then used as a handout for their national women’s conference. When I discuss evangelization, I try to mention how hard it can be to accept Christ’s love. The woman in this poem is like many women I have actually known, and is a page right out of my own pre-conversion story. Christians often feel that the invitation to “Come to Jesus” should, necessarily, be seen as pleasant, wonderful, joyful – like an invitation to a party. For them, who know joy in Christ, it’s hard to imagine it could seem any other way.
But coming to Jesus also exposes wounds, tears away self-protective cover, reveals the utter neediness and brokenness of a soul. In this poem I try to give voice to that which causes someone to avoid Christ as one might avoid poison, and to give Christ’s response to that soul who needs Him so much. This talk stands on its own, or contributes to discussions of evangelism, dialogue, and womanhood.
Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
Tertiary Epic in C.S. Lewis
Gosh, I enjoy giving papers at C.S. Lewis Conferences! But it’s expensive. Most of those who do it have, it seems, college department budgets paying their expenses. For an amateur Lewis ‘scholar,’ it’s hard to get there from here. I’ve been lucky to have a C.S. Lewis studies class nearby so as to become a guest lecturer. That led to a couple of conference opportunities, but I can’t afford to contribute papers to more.
For this one, I extended Lewis’ thoughts about the development of epic form (from his Preface to Paradise Lost) into his own Space Trilogy – the form of epic in the shadow of the Cross. It was tremendously interesting to me, and I hope to write more about it in the future. Meanwhile, holler if you’re interested in hearing more about this paper.
We Will Be Like Trees
I enjoyed creating this talk to fit into a women’s retreat about Christ’s offer of “living water”. They gave me a free hand to choose my topic and approach, and I chose the promise, in Psalm 1, that we “shall be like trees, planted by streams of living water.”
Their focus was on the woman at the well, to whom Christ offered living water. Mine wove in this Old Testament reference, and they worked together beautifully.
God’s grace does ‘rain’ down on the righteous and the unrighteous, but is also cached, for those with taproots, far beneath the surface. To get to this abundant supply, we need to extend those roots and reach deeply into our Catholic heritage, Liturgy, and Divine Office.
We need to cultivate a poetic receptivity that draws in supernatural grace naturally.
I love the tree as a metaphor for me, growing spirally up through round after round of sameness. One begins to love those cycles as soon as it becomes clear they are actually leading upward, onward toward eternal destiny and toward holiness. Without that, we’d just be on the appalling and pointless Hindu wheel of life.
Praise God that we really are like trees!
Spiritual Dialogue
Spiritual friendship begins with unity, and unity begins at the Cross of Christ. We need help learning how to approach and enter into dialogue with people of other faiths, lesser faith, or no faith, without denying our own beliefs. St. Pope John Paul believed this kind of communication is the key to evangelization in our day.
I once gave a version of this talk to Serra Club as “In Conversation with Islam,” and thoroughly enjoyed weaving in insights from Chiara Lubich and the Focolarini who graciously taught me about their charism of unity in Ottmaring, Germany. Focolare is officially known as The Way of Mary, and her way is unity in the Body of Christ – per the prayer of her Son as He faced the sense of being completely forsaken on the Cross. His self-abandonment to the Divine Will, and Mary’s yearning to help us “to be one” with one another are the keys to fruitful dialogue.
Life in Motion
Right now, I’m doing driver training with my next-to-last home-schooled child. The last one is of age, and itching for her turn. In Kansas, we must spend 50 hours on the road with new drivers before releasing them into the wild. I think this is a great idea, as many parents would spend much less time unless it were required.
Good idea, or not, fifty hours is a huge chunk of time! But I’ve been so glad to spend it with each of my kids in their just-before-independence phase of life. Driving turns out to be a fantastic excuse for discussions of the interior life, spirituality, relationship dynamics, and much more. Now, I wonder how parents raise teens without that mandatory chunk of together-time!
Based on my booklet, Life in Motion: Why I Love Driver Education Time with My Teens, this talk can be tailored to the parents, or to teens. Bored with long hours of parent-supervised drive time? Wait till you hear the huge payoff you can earn during those very hours! Better than a savings account, your drive time will pay huge dividends if you know how to invest them instead of spending them!
When I’ve polished off my last safe driver, I’ll get this little booklet on the road to wider distribution. Let me know if you’d like a copy of it meanwhile.
The Intellectual Life
You may not think of yourself (or me!) as ‘an intellectual,’ but you should still read this book! Sertillanges does a great job of proposing intellectual development as a) integral to a Catholic spiritual life, b) within the capacity of most every person, and c) enjoyable. He gives suggestions for life-long learning, self-discipline, balancing study with ‘real life,’ and more.
Good: Give to college students Better: Read, take notes, and give to teens Best: Read slowly with friends and older kids, add refreshments and conversation, linger.
I enjoy any chance to give a synopsis of The Intellectual Life, with recommendations for parents seeking their own educational enrichment, or for parents presenting this topic to teens. The intellectual life is very closely integrated with the spiritual life, and with the life of work and home.
Here is the talk from the 2017 KS Catholic Home Schooling Conference
The Intellectual Life, by Charlotte Ostermann
Handout (quotations from the book)
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