Confessions and Friendships

Throughout Augustine's conversion narrative in his Confessions, his friend Alypius was with him. At first, Alypius listened silently as Augustine cried out his agony, then followed his friend 'step by step' into the garden. At his time of decision, Augustine confessed that Alypius stood quietly beside him. Augustine separated himself from Alypius momentarily and threw himself down under a fig tree. After hearing a child's voice saying, "Pick up and read..." he went back to where Alypius was sitting and 'seized' the book of Romans and read 13:13-14.

Then Augustine poured out his whole heart to his friend. Alypius noticed that the passage went on further and spoke about those who were weak in faith and applied it to himself. Without any hesitation, Alypius made a clear decision for Christ as well. The two changed men went and told Monica, Augustine's mother, the whole story.

This is an example of intentionally recorded spiritual friendship.

In Leap Over a Wall, Eugene Peterson notes that David and Jonathan's friendship "bracketed and contained the evil..." of Saul's hatred of and plotting against David. True friends push through the hardest of circumstances together, and sometimes, like Alypius and Jonathan, they just sit quietly and listen. Eventually, and inevitably, friends enter into each other's passion, embrace and weep (I Sam. 20:41).

In the introduction to Eelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship, Douglas Roby notes, "Benedict's Rule says nothing about friendship explicitly... All this hardly encourages the sort of intense personal relationships which Augustine and Anselm occasionally celebrated."

Alered was a good friend of Stephen of Citeaux and Bernard of Clairvaux. Citeaux Abbey, full of reformed Benedictines (wanting to return to a strict observance of Benedict's Rule) birthed the supernova of the Cistercian legacy. Amidst the liturgy of their abbeys, the Cistercians were men and women of intentional and well-documented friendships.

As I ponder words and experiences between spiritual friends I wonder about Dostoevsky's epilepsy; Nietzsche's stroke; Van Gogh's breakdown; and Hemingway's shock therapy.

The more intentional the crafting of spiritual friendships, the less fateful the tragedy of lonely isolation.

Memories and Covenants

Three years ago, a friend and I wrote this for a troubled team we were both on at the time. I'm not sure I'd write it the same today. Circumstances somewhat dictate covenants and creeds. You'll notice the document is highly Trinitarian, and each of the three points begins with Remember (which is the premise of God's perpetual engagements with God's people, always appealing to their memories).

In loving-kindness, God alone initiates, confirms and satisfies all his covenant obligations toward his people. Within this staff team covenant, each signatory willingly yields to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. To participate here below each one must faithfully live to die for the others.

Remember, the Father lives within and blesses a unified family.
We will be trustworthy and loving friends.
We will strive to understand before was ask to be understood.
We will become more interdependent; relationally and vocationally.
We will earn the respect of others and keep confidences.

Remember, the Son stoops to serve and judge humanity personally.
We will wash each other's feet with humility and grace.
We will defend each other here and within the greater community.
We will honestly challenge each other with mercy, truth, and integrity.
We will allow each other permission to weep and pound the table.

Remember, the Spirit gives life and seals our eternal inheritance in Christ.
We will faithfully spend time on our knees together.
We will see the best in each other and acknowledge every dream.
We will advocate for and share each other's burdens.
We will continue to speak words of life to one another.

Signed by a number of leaders. Sealed in Romans 8:1.

Circles of Quiet

That is a temperate and righteous love which practices self-denial in order to minister to a brother’s necessity. So our selfish love grows truly social, when it includes our neighbors in its circle.
Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God, Chapter VIII

Well, think again, you idiots, fools—how long before you get smart? Do you think Ear-Maker doesn't hear, Eye-Shaper doesn't see? Do you think the trainer of nations doesn't correct, the teacher of Adam doesn't know? God knows, all right— knows your stupidity, sees your shallowness.

How blessed the man you train, God, the woman you instruct in your Word, providing a circle of quiet within the clamor of evil, while a jail is being built for the wicked. God will never walk away from his people, never desert his precious people. Rest assured that justice is on its way and every good heart put right.
Psalm 94:8:15 (The Message)

This morning I was sharing with Darlene how tired I've been the past three days. It is an unusual kind of tiredness, the kind of fatigue that drags every cell of your being you down into the earth. Dar said it was probably due to all the stress I've been under lately, writing a book, launching a company, pushing through some heavy duty issues for nine solid months. As she spoke, I gazed outside at the sunshine, rising creek, thickening green of the forest floor, watching dozens of finches and sparrows peck at seed in the feeder.

I got thinking of all I had to do today. Preparing a presentation for a broker on Bay Street; studying two executive strategies of two companies needing funding; responding to emails from other executives in other settings; realizing as I respond to those emails it affects everything I'm reading in these strategies and presentations... As we plan our course everything depends on character, humility, integrity, accountability, responsibility, trust, friendship, and the ever plodding will of God (Proverbs 16:9).

Feeling the weight of things I replied to Dar, "It has taken me all this time to learn how to respond to God out of a place of quiet. This home on this creek in this forest is our circle of quiet within the clamor of evil. When I walk this land and clear the forest floor of dead fall and wild Alberta roses (so the kids can run barefoot under the trees), I spend so much intentional time in the quiet of God. It is a discipline to work from this place of quiet, to respond to what's put before us here in this place. Too many leaders work from a place of fear and anxiety. They have to fight to know everything. They are unwilling not to know. Where are the reverent agnostics? If we don't leave the mist in mystery we end up with something eerie... It is all the more important that we cultivate a circle of quiet."

Dar responded, "That reminds me of what I read last night in Jim Elliot's Journal." Last night, while I was working out some emails on my laptop, Dar was reading. She got the book off the shelf for me and began reading a journal entry dated, November 29, 1949:

I think there is nothing so starling in all the graces of God as His quietness. When men have raged untruths in His Name, when they have used the assumed authority of the Son of God to put to death His real children, when they have with calloused art twisted the Scriptures into fables and lies, when they have explained the order of His creations in unfounded theories while boasting the support of rational science, when they, using powers He grants them, claim universal autonomy and independence, He, this great silent God, says nothing!...

...O God, what shall be the first tones of Your voice again on earth? And what their effect? Wonder and fear, denizens of dust, for the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a battle cry, with the voice of the archangel, and the trumpet blast of God Himself - made more terrible, if that could be, by the long suffering of His silence.

On Sunday, I discovered that the still pond to the right of our home (strong flowing creek to the left) is not as still as I assumed. As I was clearing brush to make a place for out kids to play in the pebbles of the pond, I noticed that a spring was flowing from the bank, from beneath two trees and their shoreline mossy roots. I dug away all the obstructions and was overjoyed at the reality of a natural spring gurgling pure life a few steps from our home. The not-so-still pond drains into the stronger currents of spring creek a few hundred feet behind our house (water on three sides of us).

Now, two days later, the water level of the placid pond is high enough that a passerby would never know a spring is flowing, but it feeds the pond beneath the surface none the less. If you sat on the roots on shore and put your bare feet in the chilly waters on those clean pebbles, you'd feel the flow coming from under you, passing by your ankles and between your toes.

This summer, I'll carve the stations of the cross out of stone, and place them in such locations on the land around our home.

The land was quiet for forty years.
Judges 3:11 (The Message)

Hope...

Of all the quotes inscribed in the Cannongate Wall of Scottish Parliament, I made sure to remember this one:

There is hope in honest error;
None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.

As the peaks melt, their icy waters are rising in our creeks and rivers.

Yesterday was a gorgeous day. Dar worked for a few hours at Encounter Earth.

I helped the kids rope a small boat to a tree overhanging the creek so they could let themselves float down stream and then pull themselves back upstream. They giggled for an hour with that.... While they did that, I got a big bucket and lifted water from the stream to water various trees and plants around our home. Then the three soaking wet gigglers wanted to jump on their big trampoline for an hour. And of course, Dad had to provide frigid buckets of water from the creek to their slippery bouncing glee. Another hour... Then the boys ran to the nearby foot bridge to dangle their feet, toss stones, and watch the waters gurgle by, as my daughter curled up in a towel on my knee, listening to the birds sing. Another hour.

Then we had steaks on a grill over an open fire at a friend's place... The guy has amazing stories. We listened to him talk for an hour. He is a Paris trained chef who, among many other things, opened a famous chain of restaurants all around the world. We laughed as he told us funny stories of all his celebrity babysitting. He's guest chef at a ritzy local golf course all summer.

All smiles he says, "You and me, four free hours of golf this week. Brand new TalyorMades!?"

All smiles back, "Ok, just make sure you have a box of 24 balls. I'd rather play from the forest."

5:54 a.m. now... From my vantage point, sunlight is providing rosy ambiance in the far peaks of Mt. Lawrence Grassi. It'll be a while yet before the Sun appears behind me over Grotto Mountain.

Let's see here, I guess I'll thumb through a bit of Annie Dillard's "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" and Belden C. Lane's "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality"

Endings and Beginnings

This pic was the desktop shot on my laptop for years. It was taken during a spiritual retreat on the West Coast of Vancouver Island during storm season (waters are relatively quiet here).

With Russia and Asia across the sea, it's the edge of the Western world; where everything ends and begins.

Signed a contract with a PR and Marketing agency yesterday. Creatives are on board with cover design and interior layout. Editor already walked through a few initial edits this morning. Publisher contract next in line. Video Joe carving up a bit of promo...

Clairvaux Manifesto now has a life of its own...

Basilicas and Vernaculars

This pic was taken the day after Ash Wednesday, 2008... which was a Thursday ;) Joe and I sat through Angels & Demons last night... What I'll write in response is two separate paragraphs from my upcoming Clairvaux Manifesto.

I wrote this in a Part III journal entry:

Amidst the liturgy of mass, with ashes on my head, I was filled with peace. I was the last one's out of the Basilica that night, escorted by the Swiss Guard. Actually, I think they were just being polite and I was quite clueless, gawking at everything. I was all alone in the largest church in the world with a dozen security escorts. It was nice to walk out the doors with guardians of the church, viewing the darkening square beyond the steps. It was quite an honor to close out Ash Wednesday with a quiet, unrushed, and solitary walk through those big old doors.

I currently have this in the Appendix:

In the coming days, we must carry on with inter-disciplinary conversations about what it means to be left and right brained, calculative and creative, and even masculine and feminine. For example, if science and religion start arguing between “God” and “no-god” the conversation is already stale, mute, and even gelded. From philosophical forms to earthy tones, we must be careful to avoid over-simplified dualism (faith and reason). We must dialogue from within the primal core of what makes us human, and it doesn’t take science or religion to prove that we all grow through healthy interrelation and procreation. Maybe a male theist and female atheist could begin their conversation there, waxing eloquent about what it means to be a lovesick man and woman, an ecopsychological debate gone romantic. They may not have kids together, but they will adopt a whole new vernacular along the way.

Left Right Left Right Left

(free live album download)

Paulo showed me his Twitter on iPhone.

John Mayer tweeted these lyrics earlier,

Come out angels/come out ghosts/come out darkness, bring everyone you know/i’m not running/i’m not scared/I am waiting/and well prepared. I’m in the war of my life/at the door of my life/out of time and there’s nowhere to run. I’m in the war of my life/ at the core of my life/ got no choice but to fight til it’s won.

A paragraph I'm playing with in the intro to Clairvaux Manifesto,

Wisdom, as cartographer of the heart, understands words and sounds as inlets and portals. That’s why musicians and word bearers hoist the sails as one. I’m just one soul in the armada scrambling into the crows-nest of a ship, calling toward the horizon. Confined to being a writer experimenting with form, I attempt to lead words in certain directions and often deconstruct those very directions with other words, like adjusting snapping sails. Expressing my perspective of a wide open sea, this canvas might just tear away in the wind. Like Jazz notes, which are often like marshmallows and kids jumping together on a trampoline (having fun falling into each other), these words are like penciled dots scribbled along the bars of an unfinished symphony. In framing epiphanies of an uncharted shoreline, I understand the reader might be raising more questions than receiving answers.

Long Histories and Weekends

Took this pic a year and a half ago, on top of a windswept Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh - four storms brewing in all four directions. I think this view is toward Rosslyn Chapel, where I would be the next day...

Have had three long conversations on the phone today already with publisher, agency and potential creatives on "Clairvaux Manifesto: a personal odyssey of prayer and work" - some fun ideas surfacing, contracts starting to firm up. As some things come clear, it's now about finding an editor who comes to know my heart and understand the scope of this unfolding vision.

Been listening to U2's "No Line on the Horizon" this morning. There are the long drawn out confessions and the geniuses of compression. I'm not sure which I'll end up with, but here are three paragraphs of compressed historical narrative I was working on this morning:

As Holy War developed into a continental corporation, the Germanic Teutonic Knights became an official Order in 1198, operating under the Hospitallers. By 1215, in an age of King’s ransoms, troubadour’s songs, knightly orders, praying saints, clashing civilizations, and mountains of debt, the Magna Carta was crafted by barons in England and presented to King John at Runnymede. A century later, the indebted and desperate King Philip IV of France exterminated and plundered the Knights Templar. Later that same generation, amidst the pandemic of the Black Death, and the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War, John Wycliffe began translating the Latin Vulgate into English. By the 1380’s, the Gospels could finally be read and pondered by those few bewildered survivors on the continent who could actually read English; they have to plod through the awkward translation for themselves. Amidst Joan of Arc’s faith seeking understanding, it seemed that when a House of Lords was in debt, it was best to demonize and overpower those with knowledge and wealth who would not, or could no longer, use either to fight back.

As a cloud of unknowing further enveloped a continent, Isabella and Ferdinand (following in the historic footsteps of the Visigoth’s endless Councils of Toledo) expelled Jews and Muslims from Granada, consolidated Spain, and endorsed Christopher Columbus’ Atlantic voyage. As Henry VII of England raised John Cabot’s sails, it seemed Italian navigators were finally free to aim their sextants westward beyond Gibraltar. During the ensuing Age of Discovery (or Age of Desperation, depending on how one reads history), while Crowns of Europe attempted to maintain central and financial control of their nations, hundreds of abbeys of prayer and work held the moral and strategic high ground. However, whenever the Crown lost central financial control, the prosperous abbey lands were susceptible to confiscation and plundering, as is somewhat evident in England’s 1534 Act of Supremacy and subsequent Dissolution of Monasteries. At the same time, French explorer Jacques Cartier (with the help of First Nations guides), mapped the gulf of a massive river gate flowing from the heart of an uncharted Kanata (Canada), on the feast day of St. Lawrence.

In 1565, as the teachings of Copernicus, Tyndale, Calvin, Luther, and Ignatius further destabilized the Western Church, 500 Knights Hospitaller and 5,500 soldiers on the island of Malta strained under the siege of 40,000 Ottoman Turks at Fort St. Elmo. After four harsh months of battle over the island, the Turks sailed back to Constantinople defeated. As a millennium of Holy War diminished, the battered Knights of Malta received legendary status throughout Europe, while the New Atlantis continued to beckon across the Atlantic to loyal soldiers of the cross.

From Star Wars, to Wolverine, to Terminator Salvation, to Star Trek... it's becoming a trend, to look back to find our bearings. I guess it depends how far we're willing to look back, and how much fantasy is involved.

I'm looking forward to enjoying this long weekend. Lunch time now, phone just rang...gotta run.

Lost in Translation and Transylvania

Verum videns me longa satis hujuscemodi exspectatione frustratum, ne jam magis nolle, quam non posse viderer, tandem ego quidem quod potui feci: lector judicet, an satisfeci. Quanquam etsi cui forte aut minime placeat, aut non sufficiat; non tamen interest mea, qui tuae pro meo sapere non defui voluntati.
Bernardi Liber ad Milites Templi: De Laude Novae Militae

Having waited thus for quite some time to no purpose, I have now done what I could, lest my inability should be mistaken for unwillingness. It is for the reader to judge the result. If some perhaps find my work unsatisfactory or short of the mark, I shall be nonetheless content, since I have not failed to give you my best.
Bernard's In Praise of the New Knighthood

Today, I've been researching the history and geography of Hospitaller, Templar and Teutonic Knights in various online and book sources. I keep ending up in Transylvania.

Yesterday morning, I faxed some forms and a printout of my Linked In profile, to the nominating committee of a global organization, asking for my name to stand as a potential member of their Canadian board. We'll know by the end of the month about the nominating committee's decisions. Either way, it was quite an honor to be approached.

Morocco and Kashmir

Just got in from seeing Star Trek with Paul and Jared - an interesting twist on history, full of emotional character nuances and one liners from the original series, plus a romantic twist, red matter, and a black hole or two...

Last night, Joe (here for two days helping Dar and I put pens to napkins on all things related to Clairvaux Manifesto) asked me to play a tune on my guitar which I've been toying with for two years; he'd never heard the tune. As I played, he said it sounded a bit like Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. We listened to Kashmir together and I was impressed by one similarity in particular.

As we discussed it more, I told Joe, that since he and his wife Nancy were first in our home (in between their work stints to Morocco) I played this particular tune thinking a lot about them in Morocco (there is a bit of an Arabic, Jewish, First Nations correlation growing into the music). That's when Joe told me that Zeppelin's Kashmir was written in Morocco. That was fascinating, and reminded me of U2 recording in Fez. Last night, Joe and I started researching other artists' music that has been influenced by Morocco, especially Essaouira.

Researching Kashmir today, I see they're in the middle of elections.

Spring Marché

This evening Darlene's Global Friends are hosting a Spring Marché at the kids school. Dar sits on the parent teacher council and earlier this year launched Global Friends, bringing our kids school here in the mountains into relationship with a school in Sierra Leone.

From their website regarding tonight's event:

In addition to the family dance, this year’s event will feature an Art Auction and Marketplace. If dancing isn’t your thing, come and enjoy a cup of coffee with friends from your school community, while your kids whoop it up on the dance floor!! In our Marketplace, fresh baking from Canmore’s best cafes will be on offer, as well as handicrafts from Sierra Leone and bucket draws for locally donated goods. Check out the paintings created by each class in the school and place a bid on your favorite!

From their website about Global Friends:

In November, ERS students voted on how the money raised at the two movie nights and the Spring Dance would be used to help our friends in Kabala. Students were presented with the following five options: purchasing art supplies; oxen to farm school gardens; breakfast lunches and snacks for their students; building a library structure; or school fees. They decided that Oxen, School Fees, and Breakfast, Lunches and Snacks would be the best choices. Well done!

Thank-you to everyone who contributed to the BOOK DRIVE for the schools in Kabala. With your help over 500 books were sent in a shipping container already bound for this region. In February we received a heart-warming letter of thanks from the school in Kabala. Thanks to local NGO, Cause Canada, ERS students watched a video of the students in Sierra Leone receiving the books and got a visual tour of their school, at our assembly in March.

What is this initiative all about?:

This year’s educational plan acknowledges the desire to see “Students model the characteristics of active citizenship”. To engage the students in this process, the question:

“How do we make the world a better place to live?”, is being integrated into curriculum, social events and fundraising activities.

Each year students will chose a local or global topic to explore this fundamental question. This year the students are learning about the lives of children in Kabala, Sierra Leone. Each teacher decides age appropriate ways to incorporate this into her classes learning experiences.

Way to go Dar and Friends!