Jesus and Mary: Finding Our Sacred Center - Henri Nouwen
Alone With God - Dom Jean Leclercq
Queer Theory: A Graphic History - Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele
So we moved into that house where I spotted Lloyd the groundhog. Turns out he has lots of friends! ...one of which likes to hide under our back porch. I call him Germaine. By the way I don't know male from female woodchucks, so why do I name them as males?
We also have plenty of rabbits, squirrels, robins, mocking birds, and starlings. I'm trying to learn the basic backyard bird names. Those house finches must have found a better summer home. Some kind of wren likes to chase insects under the awning, however. I think I saw a woodpecker - a hairy woodpecker? - about the size of a jay, black and white with the little red tuft. A cardinal stopped in the other day, but the robins weren't happy about it. No crows or bigger birds so far. No blue jays like at Richmond Hill.
About these books...I had no idea "queer" could be a verb! To queer something, according to Barker and Scheele, is to destabilize it, to challenge or test it, to play with it, to send it up, or to tease out its fundamental binaries, so on and so forth, much like "deconstruction" with less French. For real, Jesus did a lot of queering, right? Keep Jesus Weird. Is that a t-shirt already?
Underhill and Nouwen really know how to keep the reverent tone going, without being too heavy. How do they do that? Rather than take notes I nearly copied word for word these two little books, especially Underhill's. I hope I can read her big book soon.
Alone with God is a strange book about strange people, hermits. I really enjoyed it. Leclercq summarizes and interprets the writings of Paul Giustiniani, a monk at the hermitage of Camaldoli and founder of a slightly more hermetic association of hermits. Blessed Paul's basic call was to be alone with God in order to "love God in God," which he was convinced would benefit not only himself but the Church, those outside the Church, and all creation. I believe him.
notes - Underhill
- Thou when thou prayest, enter into thy closet - and shut the door...Nearly every one pulls it to and leaves it slightly ajar
- coming downstairs
- that constant struggle with distracting thoughts, that humiliating sense of deadness and incapacity, which always accompany spiritual growth and teach us humility...
- Joy is a fruit of the Spirit, not of our gratified emotions.
- Just because of the vastness of the journey and mighty surrounding forces, there is no hurry, no fuss...
- ...you do not know where those born of the spirit have come from and you do not know where they are going. The path on which they are moving to an appointed end, like the wind's path, is unseen by you...
- patience with ourselves is a duty for Christians and the only real humility
- the fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on
- Do not entertain the notion that you ought to advance in prayer
- Spirit of truth present in all places and filling all things
- that loving and absolute trust in God which is the heart of religion
- "dexterity in casting all thy care on Him" K
- But religion at its full span transcends all these parochial and self-interested ideas, and admits us to a 'world that is unwalled.'
- ...men and women who seem to have no special gift, but the one great gift of the love of God
- There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian's prayer - an absolute dependence on the self-giving charity of God. "As dew shall our God descend on us."
- humble, eager, expectant attitude toward God
- School of Mary
- Behold your mother (to us)
- the false adulthood of our age
- Spirit speaks to Spirit
- Jesus the door to the mystical life which is the life in communion with God
- Stabat Mater
- taken, blessed, broken, given
- who is innocent in front of the innocent one?
- "Jesus makes us descend with him in the tomb, in the weakness, in the darkness, in everything that seems dead in our heart, but always to rectify us, to purify us, to liberate us."
- But here before the rolled away stone, a simple center from which hope radiates, all is very simple.
- Before I am sinful, I am innocent...I have to claim that innocence in me...the place where Jesus chose to live...fashioned in secret and molded in the depths of the earth
- I remember Mother Teresa's words to me twelve years ago: "Write simply," she said, "very simply. People need simple words."
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