a spiritual practice for wandering...

Whenever we travel throughout Montreal and the Eastern Townships, I find myself journaling here often. It has become my spiritual discipline for wandering. Not only does intentionally sitting down to write give me a container to explore thoughts, feelings, and experiences, but it also affords me a way to insert quotes and wisdom from the various sources that fill my days. Along with a highly fluid use of A Book of Hours that summarizes some of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin's insights into bite-sized morsels that I can digest, this practice encourages me to synthesize each day's encounters in pursuit of what poet William Stafford calls those "small strands of synchronicity woven through my life."

Yesterday we strolled down Mount Royal from our current digs to the always lively and never serene Avenue Ste. Catherine. If you have read any of Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novels, you know that Ste. Catherine is where the wild side exists in all its splendor and sadness. It's currently enduring a six-year renovation and renewal project that has turned the center of the avenue into an open pit filled with jackhammers, hydraulic drills, and brain-breaking metallic screams as concrete and piping are destroyed and replaced. By 2030, city officials promise a return to its former "walk on the wild side" ambiance, but currently it's a mess. Still, Ste. Catherine's sidewalks are filled with all types of hard souls. 

We were out to find Montreal's oldest Anglophone book shop: Argo. Our journeys are defined by a quest to find a city's best independent bookstores, jazz clubs, and old churches. Argo is a gem surrounded by an eclectic morass of Vietnamese soup shops, hair salons, doner kebob vendors, and weary children of God sleeping rough on benches, in doorways, or discarded mats. I came away with a Can-Lit mystery (always a fav) and a collection of homilies by the Rev. Maggie Helwig, which she calls Instructions for the End of the World.  

Holy synchronicity, Batman! On this sojourn, I also brought with me David Bentley Hart's retranslation of the New Testament, in which he strives to literally return the koine Greek of Christ's first disciples into the fury and angst of the original fractured syntax of men and women who also found themselves teetering on the edge of the apocalypse. Hart writes that after finding himself retranslating passages of the New Testament for students in lecture halls... because whatever translations they were using:

... obscured aspects of the original text I thought extremely important... I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most of them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance for understanding how the texts' authors thought... what perhaps (impressed me most) with an unexpected force was a new sense of the utter strangeness of the Christian vision of life in its first dawning - by which I mean, precisely, its strangeness in respect to the Christianity of later centuries,. When one truly ventures into the world of the first Christians, one enters a company of "radicals" (for want of a better word), an association of men and women guided by faith in a world-altering revelation, and hence in values almost absolutely inverse to the recognized social, political, economic, and religious truths not only of their own age, but of almost every age of human culture. (The New Testament: A Translation, second edition, David Bentley Hart, revised introduction)

In other words, believers crafting instructions for how to live into the way of Jesus at the end of the world. Candidly, this simple truth knocked me on my butt. For while knowing this abstractly and accepting that my faith has long been shaped by the wisdom and biases of bourgeois, white, male Reformed theology, I never fully grasped that my ancestors in faith believed their end was imminent. I've been aided by various liberation insights, including second-wave feminists, people of color, the sociological analysis of Latin American believers, the wisdom of the indigenous people of the Americas, and those accompanying people with intellectual and physical disabilities, only to discover that once again, "I once was blind, but now I see."  Or more accurately, "only when the student is ready does the Buddha appear." Perhaps the ever encroaching wildfires, political corruption, cultural chaos, and jarring dualities of this era woke me up. All I know this morning is that that still small strand of silent synchronicity once again emerges, yes? 

After Easter this year, I started spending time with the apophatic wisdom-keepers of Christianity. Seeking the God Beyond by J.P. Williams continues to be a useful guide. He writes: "The goal of the spiritual life is to meet God and to keep meeting god, walking together as friend with friend. Knowing about God isn't the goal." And so the journey continues just as Rumi said:

Who makes these changes?

I shoot an arrow right.

It lands left.

I ride after a deer and find myself

chased by a hog.

I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

and fall in.

I should be suspicious

of what I want.