Category: Mystagogy
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The Trees of August
It’s impossible to walk this path and not wonder what the trees are thinking. Are they able to “live in the present moment”? This moment, to be fully this moment, is not a means to any end. It is not used to prepare for the next nor regret the last. It just is. In some…
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Alienation and the feeling of time
Activity slows the sense of time; passivity speeds it up. Spend a day making a craft you love and you enter a state described by artists, athletes, and saints in different terms, but is a contemplative state. This state is hyper-aware. The rush of passing time is suspended. It feels like finding one’s purpose and…
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Conversation: Liturgy as Form, Toward Ecstasy
[Preliminary notes] To choose the random is the point of the post-modern, and is essence of the demonic. Chosen un-relation is the world that Adam created when he hid his ass behind the bush, choosing a place un-related to God. People cannot touch each other without structures, and un-relatedness is death. The mood…
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Self As Cosmos
Since Freud, the psyche is complicated, both to oneself and to others. It may have been C.S. Lewis who observed that pre-modern man looked out upon a universe peopled with powers and personalities and mysteries, and modernity supposedly erased these forces, only to have them descend into the soul. The world is disenchanted and stripped…
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Conversation: Pericopes Shorten
Of course our talks have gotten shorter. And even our sentences are shorter. Your one sentence charms my thoughts for week, and mine, yours. This is language at home, in the garden of paradise. Words are food. Think of the desert, and how the monks were not silent but were succinct. The cenobitic rule of…
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Conversation: Sweetness Moves Toward Liturgy
Conversation in new truth takes on formal voices. The room feels hushed.Formality, you see, is not the mode of distance, but of preciousness. It is the courtliness of the lord and the lady on the hidden stairs. Formality is real when the gestures are stylized and the eyes are moist. “Liturgist”. To some,…
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Conversation Is Always Sweet
Conversation tends to the unbearably Sweet. Do you notice how, when you remember our conversation now, it feels sweet? Your heart aches to talk again. It is like the feeling of being in love. But, unlike infatuations, it need never go away. Don’t spend the sweetness on yourselves. The friends will…
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Conversation: You Are Canon To Me
“Canon” means one thing in religious studies, but its primordial, organic, even mystical meaning is the commitment one Friend makes to another, in real time, as they talk. Canonicity is the entrance into Conversation. Because I love you, your words are canon to me. My responses will embrace your thought, affirm it, subsume it,…
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Conversation: Each Pericope Advances Upon the Last
Any comment that could make sense without the context of its predecessor is not in a conversation. My thought will embrace yours, subsume it, affirm it, and build on it. This is the order and structure of talk; all else is disorder and anti-talk.
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Conversation: Nothing in Your Heart Matters
Say something about what I said. Anything, as long as what you say is not about your own thoughts or feelings. Instead, add the next sentence to my sentence. About a thing or subject. Take the attitude that nothing in your heart is important. There is a certain type of person who talks…