Soul food
January 11, 2012
The month of January is providing a couple different venues that feed my soul. Next week I’ll be attending School for Leadership Training, SLT, at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Virginia. Walter Brueggemann is speaking on “God and mammon: reframing stewardship amidst abundance, scarcity, and conflict.” The following Sunday, January 22, CMF will be having a focus on financial stewardship in worship, so there will be a chance to reflect on those teachings. Brueggemann lives in Cincinnati, so I thought I’d try and see if he needed a ride down to Virginia for the event, but he prefers to fly. Oh well, it was worth a try!
Wednesday evenings in January I am attending teaching sessions at St. Monica St. George given by XU prof. Dr. Chris Pramuk on the spirituality of Thomas Merton. Last week the class was overflowing, which speaks of the continued power of Merton’s life and witness. In the 60’s Merton, a trappist monk, was expanding out into international justice and nonviolence, reflections on the human relationship with the natural world, and interfaith commonalities. While the early part of his monastic life was seen as a ‘fleeing from the world,’ his final decade involved a ‘turning toward the world’ in profound ways. He came to see, more and more, the life of contemplation as being not an escape from reality, but a deeper immersion into reality, the Real, and believed this was not just a monastic calling, but a Christian, human, calling.
These venues enrich my life and feed my soul.
Here is a quote from Merton, writing about an epiphany while traveling away from the monastery:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking up from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness…This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” — from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
