This summer I baked lots of bread. I have this pesky idea that if I am in the process of being ordain as a priest, who will be sharing bread in a sacred manner, then it is important for me to be experience the sacredness of bread from the very act of baking it.
(Christine Valters Paintner, The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom, 2001, 173 pages.)
“… how you do anything is probably how you do everything.” – Richard Rohr
Raimundo Panikkar in his book Blessed Simplicity: The Monk as Universal Archetype, describes the monk (be it male or female, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist et cetera) as that “person who aspire to reach the ultimate goal in life with all his [sic] being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it.” While not contradictory to it, but better yet complementary to Panikar’s definition, Valters Paintner’s book is about the monk (be it male or female) embracing all that which in necessary to reach that ultimate goal, in a way that is wholesome, harmonious, life-giving and creative. The Artist Rule: Nurturing your creative soul with Monastic Wisdom is a catapathic book about life affirmation and celebration.
This book came to my hands at perfect timing. As I am on summer break from my studies and I like to always take my breaks for some unhurried creative expressions.
The book is a 12-week journey in which the author will be a companion in the artistic creative process sharing wisdom and practices from the Benedictine Monastic tradition. As I am working my way through the book, I realized that what I am finding meaningful at this moment, is not what the author has written but somehow the vibes of how it is written. The book is engaging in a roomy way. Coming from a monastic perspective in which time is a gift, it is not a surprise that the spirit of the book is calm and open. I find myself pondering quite a bit, writing on its margins and grabbing my journal to delve deep in those provoked thoughts. Yet because it comes from a monastic approach, the author emphasizes the words from St. Benedict, “ora et labora” (pray and work), making this a book of practices, not just warm thoughts. Done in a generous way the author aspire to move the reader from the passive consumption of words into the incarnational act of being creative.
The gem of this book, in my opinion, is that the approach to the creative life is not done from a fragmented perspective, but it accentuates that the “primary creative act is the living of our daily lives, making it a work of art.” (p.16) It seeks to ground the creative process in the overall life experience of the person, the monk, the artist.
(This book review is part of a Roundtable on The Artist’s Rule at the Patheos Book Club.)
The “we” is because Ricci and I will make the pilgrimage together to the Wild Goose Festival, June 23-26. We have decided that this pilgrimage will be our 11th wedding anniversary gift to each other.
We are very aware that it will not be the perfect gathering of people that will solve the entire cadre world’s problems and bring ultimate cosmic transformation, where candy cotton flowers will bloom and angels will be putting us to sleep with holy lullabies. But because we know the Sacred have this way of seeping through the crevices of our broken humanity and ill treated nature, we’ll be wide-eyed looking for bright manifestations of joy and hope.
We are going because for us it would be a practice in sacramental living. What do I mean by that? I mean that we in our specific places live in a dialectical relationship with the immanent and the transcendent presence of God. God’s grace allows our finite embodiment, in the particularity of place, to enter into the unfathomable reality of God’s life in this world. God’s intervention, the Incarnation, evokes a historical reality. It testifies to a concrete expression of some new way of living in the world. Therefore, gatherings in place and space, like Wild Goose Festival, are holy places where the Sacred is present and can be encountered.
Because of the reality of Creation and Incarnation humans are able to bring a sense of transformation that honors “placeness” in the world. In the light of such reality human response must not be a private one, but one that intervenes and makes public God’s presence in the world. With this understanding, human activities and relationships in particular localities have the blessed opportunity to be sacraments pointing to God’s loving relationship and activity in the world. Therefore, for Ricci and I, the Festival can be a humble and fragile but vibrant sacrament of God-space (a.k.a. God’s Kingdom).
At the Wild Goose we will join others in dreaming up and cracking open new neuro-pathways that will help us imagine “what if…” Aware of own limitations and brokenness, we would take serious the sacramentality of presence and space; and dare for sometime break the ground, plant seeds and humbly cultivate a liberate space. To cultivate is an intentional act: the seeds are not just thrown around, and the gardener live in hope that choreography between action (ploughing, planting, watering, feeding with compost, pruning, etc) and hope would bring delicious fruit. And then back to cultivating again. I believe our time at Wild Goose in less than 2 months will be a large apprenticeship gathering, not that we have already arrived, but a sacramental space to learn crafts and experience new movements to keep cultivating the soul, nature and communities.
I recommend you download and read Brian Ammons article/chapter. Read more below.
Reposting from Homebrewed Theology:
Brian Ammons’ got his chapter banned from the Baptimergent book & here it is for you and your friends for FREE!! Here’s the story….
Smyth & Helwys, the press whose primary market is the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, published the first book of a hyphenated emergent collection - Baptimergent. It was an excellent book with all types of Baptists collected together including Southern, American, Alliance, Cooperative, Liberal, Conservative, Dudes, Ladies, Black, White, Democrats, Republicans, and even Hauerwasians!!! For some reason Smyth & Helwys thought it would be ok for them to have a chapter calling out most Baptist churches as having an idolatrous love of our country or economic blinders to the message of justice in scripture and other such seemingly controversial issues BUT should an ordained gay baptist minister tell his story without obligating the reader to agree with him it gets cut for being ‘Too Gay.’
That banned chapter was written by Brian Ammons whose Big Tent legend continues to grow! When those of us who also contributed chapters found out his chapter wasn’t going to be published we were very disappointed and considered dropping the project all together. That said I guess we weren’t surprised. Being a very proud Baptist, one of the things that continuously embarrasses me is NOT our fundamentalist cousins in the SBC but the uber-wussy “moderate” Baptists who basically pretend to be radically different than their SBC friends because they ordain women (and hire very few of them). I have long hoped for a Baptist community that is a big enough fellowship to permit every disciple of Jesus to be present, honest, and then encouraged to take the next step in their faith. When issues intimately connected to the heart of faith for us more progressive baptists comes up we are usually told by leaders two things….1)we agree with you! 2)don’t speak so loud… I get how this is pragmatic if you want to keep a bunch of people in your churches, denominational fellowship, giving money, supporting ministries, and such. I just find this pragmatic muzzle burdensome and only an expectation of us more progressive types. I don’t see Jesus using a muzzle to get a bigger audience, John the BAPTIST (lol) didn’t, Clarence Jordan sure didn’t, Walter Rauschenbusch didn’t…..any way.
I hope you download THIS ARTICLE, read it, enjoy it, discuss it, and share it! Of course it would be awesome if you got the Baptimergent book too but I can’t say I wouldn’t be thrilled to think even more people got the banned article and enjoyed it.
Previous Brian Ammons posts…. Big Tent Sexuality with Richard Rohr & Reframing Sexuality
Last year I tried to read mostly fiction – that beside school assigned books. I was somewhat successful, but there was some non-fiction that made it way to my reading pile.
This year I would like to get into poetry. I read quite a bit of Latin American poetry in the 90′s. Finding then a soul companion in Fr. Ernesto Cardenal.
So what are your recommendations?