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!
The Veiled Self
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 reduction from an ideal – a flattening of the fullness of story, or of person.
Lewis retells the myth in the inescapable light of the Incarnation, and in doing so, illuminates and revivifies the notion of personhood, as expressed through its characters. It’s fascinating to note that Lewis wrote this book at about the same time as his autobiographical Surprised by Joy. Peter Schakel, author of Reason and Imagination in C.S. Lewis, believed these two books actually tell one story:
Orual’s account of her life, like Lewis’ account of his own in Surprised by Joy, is retrospective, subjective, and selective. It is striking, then, that suddenly he is able to complete successfully two stories he had long sought to tell but had been unable to: his own story and that of Cupid and Psyche. …Each is a story of consciousness, and of the achievement of wholeness through sacrificial death; and each is the story of Lewis himself.
Add to all that a discussion of the imagery of the veil in the life of a woman – her need for modesty, for beauty, for privacy, for mystery, and for self-revelation to God, and you have one of my favorite talks to give!
Here’s my take on The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.
Grow Up In All Things
This was one long talk! I gave it as three separate one-hour talks for an all-day RCIA retreat, and felt a real excitement about the adventure of growing up ‘unto Christ’ among those new Catholics and their sponsors.
What does it mean to ‘grow up unto Christ’, and how do we actually accomplish it? How do we deal with Scripture’s admonition to ‘become like little children’, while growing more mature? What does freedom look like, and why don’t more people desire it?
How is the spiritual life connected with all the other things we must learn as we grow up? I presented a simple, 1-2-3 model for the Turning, Engaging, and Acting we must do continually in order to participate in the work God does to raise us up.
I based this on the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, about whose approach to prayer I had written.
Though it is simple, it’s quite rich in metaphors and cross-connections. I may have to turn this one into a book one of these days! I’m sure it informed Souls at Work, and was certainly informed by Souls at Rest, but isn’t the same as either one. It is fascinating to me to watch God write books in my life, and then write life into my books. It makes me wonder how anyone does write without also having opportunities like this to talk, as well.
Sabbath – Easy as ABC
I gave this talk as a retreat for the Daughters of Isabella during their Day of Reflection. Later on, when I was asked to contribute to the Catholic Truth Society’s Deeper Christianity Series, I was so thankful to have this structure to draw on for that booklet.
Without this talk, Making Sunday Special could not have been written in the amazingly short time I had available to give that project. It’s one of so many examples of the way God has developed me and my work by the Body’s call upon me for these talks.
I loved creating an easy-peasy version of Souls at Rest for these ladies, and creating a book from the talk was just icing on that sweet cake. I gave them three ‘building blocks’ for creating their own Sabbath-keeping plans:
Desiring His Sabbath
Designing Your Sabbath
Dwelling in the Eucharistic Sabbath
I love helping others discover the 7+ weeks of vacation God has made possible for us! I look forward to giving this talk again.
Three-Dimensional Transcendentals
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.
We need writers and artists who can translate Truth, Beauty and Goodness into form. In that academic environment, leaders are trying to keep students from becoming flat, one-dimensional eggheads by having conferences like this where ideas are pushed down into the ground of reality and practice.
In that light, my approach was to call listeners to the messy and non-ivory-tower world of actually engaging in the work of making art. You don’t have to be a great artist to get a great deal of good from learning to draw, write poetry, play an instrument. What those struggles do for you is prevent idea-olatry – the substitution of knowledge about art for the actual experience of trying to communicate ideas in real (and often inept, frustrating, messy) form.
The greatest moment was when my own pastor said, “I want to get back to painting,” after sitting in on my session!
Here’s an article I wrote for the great Tuscany Press site, based on this talk: Tapping Into the 3D Imagination – Realizing Person Through Art.
High Resolution Beauty
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 little more info about them has made me remember them all fondly.
In this one, I talked about the word ‘resolution’ and all its wonderful synonyms and nuances and applications to the becoming-beautiful process. There’s a surprise I bring to this one, so no spoiler here, but it’s part of what I love about it.
What do you suppose is the one-and-only way to really get how beautiful you are? I can tell you that without spoiling the surprise: Look into a mirror that tells the truth. Hint: it’s got to be a person.
We’ll also talk about what it means to realize your own being, and what your beauty contributes to the realization of Christ in the world. I always pray for my audiences before I prepare to speak to them, but this talk IS my prayer for all the women I meet!
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