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!
How Can I Be Loved?
This talk starts and ends with a mystery, so I can’t tell all without spoiling that surprise. In the middle, I talk about why it can be so hard to receive the love of God. Can you think of two different ways to avoid each of these ways of being loved?
1. Know Yourself
2. Receive the Person
3. Accept Loving Discipline
4. Rest
I can! And those two ways help show us the way back to that Love who awaits us full courteously (as Juliana of Norwich would say). The first group to hear this talk got a poem from me, in addition to that mystery substance. Here’s a taste of “Let Yourself be Loved” :
Like sweet sap yearning out from root to branch, let Love rise in and remain in me. Like patient minerals petrifying wood, let Love transform my substance into love. Like insistent blood prevailing over numbed limbs, let Love awaken me to living pain. Like unimpeded torrents condescending to the sea, let Love wash past and draw me to deep rest.
There’s more where that came from, if you like poetry. I realize it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but there are things that just can’t be said any other way. Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
Reflections of an Inside-Out, Upside-Down, Backwards Book Publisher
For the National League of American Pen Women, I got to tell the surprising story of my book, Souls at Rest – the inside scoop for fellow writers and artists. People understandably think I’m a bit crazy for self-publishing the first edition of SAR instead of going the more conventional Real Publisher route. (It is now available from a Real Publisher: Angelico Press!)
But, since the whole process had been sort of upside down and backwards already, getting to a Real Publisher in this round-about way was just par for the course. My motivation was not market-based, for instance. I had no idea, when writing, who my audience would be.
So differently from preparing a talk, when I’m avid to know who I’ll have in front of the podium, I wrote this for every Catholic, hoping, actually, that they’d all want to read it – improbable as that is. I’ve spoken with college students, men, women, children, at-home and working moms, teens and old people about Sabbath rest, and we all of us need to think more about it, I can promise you!
Anyway, these ladies weren’t especially interested in the Sabbath content…just the experience of self-publishing. But they understood that my process was upside down when I told ’em how much it cost! Lucky for me, the days of vanity publishers getting authors to shell out upwards of $5,000 for a garage full of their new books are over. I was able to publish Souls at Rest on an as-purchased basis with only the costs of paper, ink, and a lovely professional book cover to add to my hundreds of hours of (free?) labor.
I considered myself well-invested in something I’d have been happy to give away. Again, lucky for me, the print-on-demand publishing option did save me the cost of continually photo-copying my book for my enthusiastic spiritual director. Those gals with vows of poverty are happy to give everyone’s stuff away freely!
As for backwards, I am that part of the equation. God must have a sense of humor to put someone so technically challenged in charge of a word processor, mirrored margins, footers, headers, and FTP uploads! As for ‘platform’ I had zero, and one is told one needs a substantial one of those in order to market one’s books. It has all been a humbling experience, and turned into a surprisingly rollicking sort of talk for these literary ladies.
I’d love to discuss this again, with the more perfect vision of further hindsight, and the Rest of the Story.
Mother Church, Our Role Model
This was one of the first formal talks I ever gave as a Catholic. No wonder it’s all about the Church, where I had just discovered so much richness and beauty and perfection. I loved having her before me as an image of motherhood. Unlike dear Mother Mary, Mother Church has had some seriously wayward children to deal with!
In this talk, I looked at the way the Church teaches and disciplines her children; how she balances their disparate personalities and needs; how her ‘home making’ affects their formation. In all these ways and more, she is a model for mothers.
I gave many examples of practical ways we could emulate her four ‘pillars of character building’:
I. Mother Church prays continuously, systematically, specifically and formally with and for all her children.
II. Mother Church holds high standards and both helps and expects her children to live up to them.
III. Mother Church is organized, creating a life-support structure for her family and for others.
IV. Mother Church looks beyond the present day and generation, creating a rich cultural heritage over time.
It’s delightful to look back at this (as I go through all my past talks to tell a bit more about each one here) and realize how everything I’ve accomplished since becoming a Catholic is due to the example of this wonderful mother of ours.
The Poetic Reader
Poetic Reading is not just reading poetry! Poetic Reading cultivates the wholeness of the reader, because it engages her whole being. Instead of a (sometimes disconnected) verbal intellect operating on words (a narrow slice of our interior capacity), it is an integrated sensory-intellectual-affective person focused to receive experience and tuned to resonate with it!
I know that’s a lot to take in, but when you do get the connection between wholeness and humanity and poetry, you’ll find it’s worth working to digest. Poetic reading is, first of all, ordered to leisure, to freedom, to the context rather than the content of reading. It’s not enough to read good things, but we must read well and whole-ly. To do that, we need our senses and our delight and an integrated approach to all different kinds of reading material.
Since I gave this talk, I’ve read Josef Pieper’s book In Tune with the World, about festivity as a preparation for the Eucharistic Feast. In the talk, I did compare Poetic Reading to feasting, instead of mere feeding, and now would strengthen that section even more with some of Pieper’s insights. That’s the wonderful thing about these talks – every time I get to give one a new airing, it takes on new life from everything I’ve been reading and learning and speaking about since its first run.
I hope this talk will win the lottery again soon!
Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
A Prayer, A Poem, A Person, A Place
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.
That same leisure that is so necessary to the formation of persons is also a critical component of artistry. Just try writing poetry without a good bit of leisure time in which to hold the contrary elements in juxtaposition. A mind jangled and busy and distracted is probably not writing poetry.
Enter my own poem, The Race, about my own tendency to jump out of bed and let necessity drive me through a day of must-dos and can’t-not-dos and distractions. Actually, that was really the old me, as I’m much less inclined to let that happen after these wonderful years of growth and holy leisure.
But I know that gal, and she’s a mess! Every woman at the retreat knows her, too, and so they moved through that poem with real interest, seeing themselves and elbowing one another.
Next we discussed how a poet writes a poem – in the context of Ephesians 2:10, where we are told that WE are poema – God’s workmanship, carefully crafted in much the same way. We all see ourselves imaged in the woman who ‘races past herself’ and sometimes past her loved ones, past her own needs and longings, past her Lord. But we may not see ourselves as works of art, as a place of encounter with Christ, as living prayers.
A poem has the capacity to be a place of encounter, and as such mirrors the human person in his fullness.
Holy leisure is the key – to being, to freedom, and to creativity. When I wrote Souls at Rest, I saw how much more needed to be said about the gift of holy leisure…hence, the trilogy that, after Souls at Work, will be finished with Souls at Play. My talks aren’t plugs for these books, and the books aren’t plugs for my talks, but somehow they all go together organically and keep enriching each other.
I’m so enjoying the adventure of watching it all happen. I wonder what’s next??
Here’s a collection of my talks that feature poetry, poems, or poetic formation.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- Next Page »
You must be logged in to post a comment.