following the threads of synchronicity, dreams and serendipity

During the on-going sheltering-in-place of the semi-lock-down for people like myself, I have been reading my way through a variety of unknown books that have gathered on my shelves over the years. In the middle of March, I slipped into the garage to forage through boxes once destined for donation. Then I combed the bounty of the bookcases lining the walls of my study. To date I have made it through two of Karen Armstrong's theological histories, a few volumes of Wendell Berry poetry, Malcolm Bell's new edition of The Attica Turkey Shoot, two works by Christine Valters Paintner, the male initiation trilogy from Richard Rohr, and a valiant albeit unsuccessful attempt at Neil Douglas-Klotz's The Hidden Gospel of the Aramaic Jesus. (It just doesn't hang together with any depth or zip for me.) As summer ripens, there is still a T.S. Eliot anthology to embrace, what will be my second savoring of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead as well as Noman MacLean's A River Runs Through It and John O'Donohue's Anam Cara.

At present I am enjoying Christine Valters Paintner's The Soul's Slow Ripening from 2018 re: Celtic spiritual practices and a slim overview of spiritual direction from 1981 by Katherine Marie Dykman and. Patrick Carroll entitled Inviting the Mystic, Supporting the Prophet. Both have heart and soul with a tone of intellectual gravitas and time-tested wisdom, too. Dyckman and Carroll have served as spiritual directors for decades. They have helped seminarians construct grounded practices of spiritual formation and trained hundreds of lay leaders in the art of spiritual friendship. And Valters-Paintner keeps unearthing new ways to take general readers deeper into the ancient wisdom of embodied Celtic spirituality. She does her homework. She finds fresh ways to share the mystical tradition with 21st century souls. And she does this with a degree of humor and humility that encourages us to let the words become flesh. 

Like me, Paintner appreciates the systematic approach to the spiritual journey

offered through Ignatian exercises, but prefers the more "organic " way of Celtic monastics. "There hopefully comes a time when we have to admit," she writes, "that our own plans for our lives are not nearly as interesting as how our lives long to unfold - that these plans are indeed too small for us to live. That when we follow the threads of synchronicity, dreams, and serendipity, we are each led to a life that is rich and honoring of the soul's rhythms, which is a slow ripening rather than a fast tract to discernment." To that end, she offers this poem by David Whyte that rings oh so true for me: "What to Remember When Waking."

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?