Nancy Nordenson

726. Attending to hope, faith, and love

Lately I've been revisiting what St. Ignatius referred to as consolations and desolations. Thinking about and identifying occurrences of each over the course of a day is suggested as a spiritual practice to help a person understand how God is moving in his or her life. Some instruction I've heard on this practice, however, makes it seem like nothing more than taking a minute at the end of a day to write down what made you feel good and what made you feel bad, as if God has the same work in you as would an overindulgent grandparent whose only goal was to make you happy.

It always helps to go to the source.

Here's what Ignatius wrote about distinguishing the two "movements which are caused in the soul."

On consolation:

"I call consolation every increase of hope, faith and charity [love], and all interior joy which calls and attracts to heavenly things and to the salvation of one's soul, quieting it and giving it peace in its Creator and Lord."

On desolation:

"I call desolation all the contrary of the [above], such as darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to things low and earthly, the unquiet of different agitations and temptations, moving to want of confidence, without hope, without love, when one finds oneself all lazy, tepid, sad, and as if separated from his Creator and Lord."

 

Hope, faith, and love–oh, and interior joy. Yes, please; more of those.

 

~~~

[Photo: taken several years ago of a statue depicting St. Loyola's "Examen" at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut (sculptors: Jeremy Leichman and Joan Benefiel).

 

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725. Modus operandi of the attentive person

A couple days ago something jumped out at me from an email. The email was from Poets & Writers website/magazine and identified stories of interest to click through and read. The thing that jumped was in the paragraph about the first story, in which Parul Sehgal, senior editor and columnist at the New York Times Book Review, was being interviewed.

Here’s what she said:

"There's something Cezanne said that I think about a lot, something like, 'I know what I am looking at, but what am I seeing?' That's what reviewing feels like to me. It's very much to 're-view,' to see again, to try to see farther and see deeper."

Sehgal was speaking there as a book reviewer, but what she said seems to me a habit for living as an attentive person, regardless of occupation: to try to see and not just look, to try to see farther, to try to see deeper.

You can read the full interview here.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a sign I saw while in Orlando this winter for a work trip. I thought it fitting for a post about paying attention.]

 

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719. Brian Volck on Attending Others

My friend Brian Volck has a new book out, his third: Attending Others: A Doctor's Education in Bodies and Words (Cascade Books). I finished it early this week and the last few days I’ve been pondering what I want to say about it, trying to boil down one main impression to send you. That’s not an easy task given what a rich and beautiful memoir this is.

Brian is a pediatrician, which means you could read this book for a view into how physicians think and learn. Of course, that wouldn’t be an incorrect approach. Read Attending Others and you’ll discover much about how clinicians make diagnoses and treatment decisions as well as the things they think about before opening the door to meet a new patient – or more interestingly, what they think about after they leave the room. If you’re a physician yourself or an aspiring physician, you will be in the presence of a fine tutor. But read it for that alone and you’ll miss much of what this book offers.

No one is left out of the activity suggested by the book’s main title, regardless of what kind of diploma or post-nominal initials you do or don't have. Attending others is the education written of on these pages. It is the education that develops across 15 chapters, across decades, across a continent and a hemisphere. This book is a journey of the practice of attending others and the hope that emerges from such practice. Even though such attending would look different for each of us depending on who we are and what we do, few of this book's readers will be able to close the book without feeling drawn to look at those around us in a new way.

I copied out six pages of passages from this book and, after looking through them just now, choose these to pass along to you:

"I use my body and senses to diagnose, treat, and reassure. Placing the diaphragm of my stethoscope on the chest of the febrile child, I listen for the rustle of breath, the murmur of a heart. I touch the pads of my fingers to a frightened adolescent’s wrist, taking her pulse. I watch amazed at the ferocity with which a hungry infant nurses at his mother’s breast. I stir with passions that, despite Dr. Osler’s warning, ground my compassion. I am an embodied creature working among other such creatures. It took years to learn that only by nurturing affection for these others can I rightly serve them, much less understand what it means to be healthy."

And,

"They bless me with fierce hope."

~~~

[Photo: taken of a swath from the book cover. Click here to have a look at the whole cover, "Pillar," designed by Tim Lowly, about whom Brian writes in the book.]

 

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718. New Year's Eve: intentions for 2017

Here it is again, on the eve of 2017: the list of intentions that I've posted a couple times before on previous New Year's Eves – although slightly edited. I'm posting it again because there are readers for whom this list has meaning, because this blog has new readers for whom this list might be of interest, and because I need to put it in front of myself once again as a reminder of a chosen way of being.

I've done poorly at many things on this list and done well – or maybe okay – at others, but that's why I like the word "intention" rather than "resolution." It implies something to work toward, move toward, rather than something at which you either succeed or fail.

 

Here's the list:

Experiment more.
Create more; consume less.
Trust more; worry less.
Read more; write more; watch less.
Write more of what lasts longer.
Waste less time.
Spend more time in "creative idleness".
Spend less; save more.
Pray more, including for the people who read the words I write.
Use more paper, lots of paper.
Use a pen more, a keyboard less.
Love more.
Talk less but say more.
Figure out how patience and urgency co-exist.
Hope always.
Cook more; eat less.
Play the piano more.
Pursue truth, beauty, and goodness at every opportunity; realize every moment is an opportunity.
Stand up straighter.
Speak more often in the strength of my own voice.
Find the way to do what needs to be done; sit quietly and wait for the Lord.
Accept paradox.
Pray more, pray without ceasing.
Hope more absolutely.
Be more available to and vulnerable with God and others.
See the signs, ask for signs; be more willing to step into the unknown.
Use less; have less; give more away.
Shorten my to-do lists.
More intentionally be a conduit for the flow of God's grace to the world.
Be silent more often.
Pray more fervently for safety coast to coast but live less fearfully.
Remind myself as often as needed where true hope lies.
Start fewer projects but finish more of those I start.
Be encouraged.
Be excited.
Hope more purely.
Be more attuned to the burdens of the people I pass on the street as well as those with whom I share a table or a home.
Pray for the world and its leaders.
Love God with ever more of my heart, soul, strength, and mind.
Thank more.
Eat less sugar but more dark chocolate.

I'd love to hear some of your intentions. If you want, you can share them in the comments below.

~~~

[Photo: the sky above on this New Year's Eve day.]

 

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717. Thoughts of Mary on this Christmas Eve

At a Christmas Eve service years ago, the church we were then attending did a series of character scenes: a shepherd, Joseph, Mary, and so on. We were late and came in just before Joseph.  Joseph's monologue had him talking about accepting what Mary had told him about carrying God's son, but he got stuck at the "no room in the inn" part.

If this was God's son, and if this was God's plan they were participating in, and if God was providing the way, marking the path, why wasn't there room for them in an inn? Why was God's gift to the world relegated to a manger? He voiced his frustration to Mary.

She responded, "Allow it."

I suppose the rest of the monologue went on to have Joseph reporting Mary's further explanation and encouragement to let God work out his plan in whatever way he wants and to trust him, but I stopped listening at "Allow it" and lingered there.

"Allow it," of course, calls to mind Mary's famous response to the angel Gabriel, ”Let it be to me as you have said,” with its strong note of agency. An unequivocal statement of active passivity. No bracing, straining, or plotting to change or avoid a thing but a nod of the head in assent. "Allow it" conveys a reciprocal arrangement, with the one allowing and the other asking, or not. While there are times to plan and push and knock down doors, there are also times to allow. To be like Mary is to know which time is which. "Allow it" moves in and out with the breath.

This scene was a fiction, not a reporting of a fact. There's no record in the Gospels of Joseph pushing back at staying in a manger and Mary calming him with a two-word response. But like all good stories it rings of truth.

May you be blessed by the many mysteries of Christmas Eve and all that it brought into play.

 

~~~

[Photo: taken of our Christmas tree]

 

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704. Words and Wisdom from Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss

 

I mentioned reading Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer in my newsletter earlier this month and told readers to watch for something more from it the next week here on my blog. Well, life happened. After 4 weeks of nothing at all on this blog, here finally is more from the book.

My Bright Abyss is one of those rare books that can be as little or as much as you want it to be. You can read it through and take it as the journey to and of faith for Wiman, former Poetry editor and now on faculty at Yale University. Or you can savor it in smaller bites. Reading it slowly and stopping–or reading it straight through then going back–to consider the deeper meaning or import of certain sections on your life.

Here are a few of the many sections worthy of further thought. First this:

"Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting out the radical, insurrectionist, aspects of yourself by which you'd been betrayed. No. Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life–which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change."

And...

"Be careful. Be certain that your expressions of regret about your inability to rest in God do not have a tinge of self-satisfaction, even self-exaltation to them, that your complaints about your anxieties are not merely a manifestation of your dependence on them. There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world."

And this...

"It is a strange thing how sometimes merely to talk honestly of God, even if it is only to articulate our feelings of separation and confusion, can bring peace to our spirits. You thought you were unhappy because this or that was put off in your relationship, this or that was wrong in your job, but the reality is that your sadness stemmed from your aversion to, your stalwart avoidance of, God. The other problems may very well be true, and you will have to address them, but what you feel when releasing yourself to speak of the deepest needs of your spirit is the fact that no other needs could be spoken of outside of that context. You cannot work on the structure of your life if the ground of your being is unsure."

~~~

[Photo: taken of a cedar tree earlier this summer.]

 

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702. The duty of delight

The Spring 2016 issue of Comment magazine has an essay by visual artist Christen Borgman Yates, “Justice, Beauty, and Habits of Waiting.” The essay emerges from a review of a new book: The Justice Calling by Bethany Hanke Hoang and Kristen Deede Johnson.

It was an ink and graphite drawing in the piece that first caught my eye, and the pairing of the drawing with its title that held my eye and my thoughts. This image of a woman, head tilted back and to the side, with a smile broad enough to match the finest piece of good news has the title, “Having Considered the Facts.” Usually facing the facts is a grim sort of task, but here Yates reminds us that there are also facts that delight, and perhaps these are the facts that supersede all others.

 

You can see the full image of the drawing at Yate’s website at this link (scroll down). I hope you'll click around on her site and enjoy her other work as well. You can also read her full essay/review in Comment at this link. I particularly liked what she wrote about Dorothy Day and her commitment to “the duty of delight”

~~~

[Photo: Upper: taken of bee balm on the campus of the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota earlier this summer; lower: taken of page from Yate's Comment essay/review.]

 

701. Teach me to number my days

Last week I went to a memorial service of a friend I had known since childhood. She died too young, only a year older than me, and suddenly. And a few days ago I learned that another person from my childhood past, the brother of a dear friend, also just died, also too young, a year younger than me, and suddenly. Writing and delivering a meditation for a funeral or memorial service must be hard enough for any minister but all the harder when the person who died had so much life still ahead. The meditation at the memorial service I attended was spot on, with the spot being that sweet spot where grief meets hope meets how-then-should-we-live encouragement. Teach me, the minister recited from the Psalms, the minister who was choked up herself, the minster who was also saying goodbye to a best friend. "Teach me to number my days, that I may gain a heart of wisdom." The need for mindfulness about our days that have a limit, she said – but more than that. The need for wisdom, she said – but more than that too. Teach me. The need – the plea – to be taught by the Lord God who loves us.

Amen.

~~~

[Photo: taken in a friend's garden.]

 

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