Carl McColman's Blog, page 75
August 9, 2012
Journey to the Heart
Journey to the Heart
A relatively new offering from Orbis Books provides a very nice overview of the history of contemplative spirituality within Christianity. Journey to the Heart: Christian Contemplation Through the Centuries, edited by Kim Nataraja, features an anthology of writings by some of the most respected writers on Christian spirituality today: Laurence Freeman, Esther de Waal, Kallistos Ware, Shirley du Boulay, Andrew Louth, among others. Nataraja is a meditation instructor with th...
August 7, 2012
True Peace, False Peace
My latest column on Patheos has just been published, I hope you’ll pop over there and check it out:
July 24, 2012
Atlas and Aurora
Of Gods and Men
Over the past weekend, stunned and saddened like everyone else over the violence in Colorado, I took time to watch the movie Of Gods and Men for the third time. This was in preparation for an upcoming retreat.
Watching that movie, about the monks of Our Lady of the Atlas Mountains, who were martyred during the Algerian Civil War in 1996, gave me a new and, I hope, contemplative perspective on both the shootings and how ordinary people might respond to them. The monks of Atlas li...
July 23, 2012
Nonduality in the Bible … and us
A reader writes:
I love reading your articles but am new to the terminology.What is “non-dualism” and is it compatible with Biblical truth?Also, why did non-dualism get marginalised?
Meister Eckhart, nondual mystic
Great questions, both of them, and both point back to Richard Rohr, one of the most dynamic contemplative teachers alive today. Rohr calls Jesus the first nondual religious teacher in the west, and also speaks of how nondual wisdom teachings have been lost in the west since the late m...
July 20, 2012
The Nondual Writers of Footnote #45
A reader of this blog writes to me:
Hi Carl. I was reading Richard Rohr’sThe Naked Nowand in one of the footnotes he lists a number of “non-dualistic” writers he thinks are worthwhile. Some of the names I know, others I’m not familiar with. For instance: Bede Griffiths, Bruno Barnhart, Laurence Freeman, Ruth Barrows, Bernadette Roberts, Eckhart Tolle, Jean-Yves Leloup, Sebastian Painadath, Hugo Enomiya-Lasalle, and Ken Wilbur (I’ve heard of him, just haven’t read anything by him). Who on this...
July 19, 2012
Practical Discipline
The Practicing Mind
There was a sense of freedom in knowing that I would never run out of room to grow. There was peace in knowing the race was over. Where I was right now was just where I should be, given the amount of effort I had expended. I saw the wake behind my boat for the first time, and I realized I was moving ahead, and pretty quickly, as a matter of fact. But the most important truth revealed to me in that moment was this: My real joy was found in my ability to learn to experience m...
July 18, 2012
Spiritual Orientation
Orient yourself
My latest column has been published on Patheos. It’s called Four Compass Points for the Spiritual Life.
It grew out of an idea I have for this website (www.anamchara.com). It seems to me that there are four key dimensions to the spiritual life, no matter whether we are beginners or seasoned practitioners. And while I wrote the Patheos column specifically with “beginners” (of all ages) in mind, in truth one of the paradoxes of the spiritual life is that the further we travel on t...
July 12, 2012
Insight from a Deep Well
Water from a Deep Well
Mystical spirituality is concerned with one basic question: how can we truly know God? One way of knowing involves learning information about God; it is doctrinal. Another way of knowing leads to union with God; it is mystical. Mystical writing often seems impenetrable and incomprehensible, eluding precise definition, as if it were an unknown and unknowable foreign language. Mystics relish paradox, speak in abstractions and metaphors, and love mystery. They tell us that...
July 11, 2012
Vive la Résistance!
Symbol of France... and the Cistercians
My latest column has been published on Patheos: A Contemplative Revolution. It’s building off of a comment I made at the Wild Goose Festival: that contemplation is like the French Resistance during World War II. That, in turn, is an homage to the French origins on the Cistercian order: but it also speaks to the challenge of living as a contemplative in a not-very-quiet world. Of course, the problems of our world go far deeper than just the decibel level,...
July 2, 2012
After the Goose, a Rough Week, and Simplicity
Sigh...
Dear friends, my apologies for taking such a long time between posts. As you may know, I was at the Wild Goose East Festival June 21-24. Indeed, Jana Riess (author of the delightful book Flunking Sainthood) wrote a very kind piece on her blog about the talk I gave on Sunday morning at the Wild Goose Festival. You can read it by following this link:Five Gifts of Contemplative Prayer.
One of the reasons I didn’t write anything after returning to Georgia (aside from being rather exhausted...
