A poem of Jacopone of Todi

What Poverty Has

Poverty has nothing in her hand,

nothing craved, in sea, or sky, or land;

she has the Universe at her command.

In the heart of freedom ever-dwelling.

This is my own translation, taken from The St. Clare Prayer Book.

Learning can get in the way of prayer

I know this tendency/weakness in/from my own work, and so sometimes when I come across a source such as this, I’m chastened.

Francis of Assisi wrote in a letter to Anthony of Padua:

“It pleases me that you should read sacred theology to the brothers so long as on account of this study they do not extinguish the spirit of holy prayer as is ordained in the Rule.”

Bob Dylan’s spiritual appeal

I’ve been lately listening to Bob Dylan’s most recent released recording: Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Number 8. In what we used to call the “liner notes” to Tell Tale Signs, Larry Sloman quotes Dylan as saying:

“Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book. You can find all my philosophy in those old songs. Hank Williams singing ‘I Saw The Light’ or all the Luke The Drifter songs. That would be pretty close to my religion. The rabbis, priests, and ministers all do very well. But my belief system is more rugged and comes more from out of the old spiritual songs than from any of the established religious attempts at overcoming the devil.”

This man actually believes in the devil! No wonder he draws us with curiosity over and over again. And he knows sin—both its power and personal reality, but also release from it. You get the sin even in his voice: that famous rasp communicates a soul as much as it does a message. Yes, it’s true, the voice no longer sounds particularly good; it is, in Larry Sloman’s words, “in its shattered glory.”

Questions answered, questions gone

As a continuation of my post from yesterday, I offer you this — taken from my book, Cloister Talks:

A Trappist monk friend of mine — let’s call him Ambrose — once wrote to me: “After more than fifty years in the monastery, the questions seem even greater, and the answers, mostly more tentative. Life, I’ve discovered, is fascinating but coquettish. Still, my fascination tempts me and draws me on like the rueful, ever hopeful, lover, longing to know and despairing to understand my Beloved more deeply.”

I carried that letter around with me for several years, referring to it often.

It seems to me that my life has gone through four stages thus far. These steps have marked my progress as a boy growing into a man and as a child with faith into a mature adult. Stage one I would call the received tradition. I received the Word and what it said; I did not challenge it. Simultaneously, I was the son of good parents and I was taught, as hopefully all kids are, to obey mommy and daddy, to do what they say. For the most part, I did that and that was good. Some people probably remain at this sort of stage for their entire lives and it’s not necessarily wrong.

But I would call stage two the rebel stage. Some wise person once told me that spiritual maturity is impossible for a man without at some point rebelling against his father. This was true for me. My rebellions were relatively mild compared to those of many of my friends, but still, I rebelled in important ways. I challenged that earlier Word, calling it nonsense at times, and I left the church, wandering around through other traditions and figuring that I knew what was right. Again, some people probably remain at this stage for their entire lives.

Stage three is the one that I’m mostly in, right now. I would call it the spirituality stage, when practice and ritual have become vital in my life, and I have rewoven connections to the religion of my youth as well as to some religious practices that were never a part of my youth but that I’ve decided are important. The patchwork I’ve been creating makes a different pattern from the received tradition of my first stage, and I think, it makes a better one.

But stage four is where I have been led by the monks. It is where they are right now and where I try to be when I can. At this stage in my life, I am moving beyond spirituality and its program of self by becoming more contemplative. The questions and issues of my earlier rebellions are not answered any more than they were when I was in stage two, but I also don’t fight them as much anymore. The answer to many of the questions of life comes when the questions themselves fade away as less important.

Stop Buying Spiritual Books

A few years ago I had just returned from another weekend retreat at Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers, Georgia and the last thing on my mind was that I might be wasting my time. Nevertheless, having visited monasteries for many years, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I was doing. I was in my late thirties, still feeling like I hadn’t figured out who I was. For years I had been searching for spiritual adventure, vaguely dissatisfied with what I had at home and in church. I sought out beautiful vistas, the most unusual, intriguing, or ascetical teachers, and did my share of spiritual experimentation.

Each intriguing ascetical teacher would say quixotic things to me and my mind would almost literally “pop” with excitement. I would run home and for a week be obsessed with the idea, Now that just might be the key to my life! He might have the answers! I would think…for the umpteenth time.

Then I would buy all of the teacher’s books or tapes and the books that he recommended. And I’d read them—or at least the first few pages of them. This may be familiar to you, too…many of my books have lonely bookmarks on about page twelve! Because by about that point in the book I’d begin thinking to myself, Why again was I all excited about this?