Where I am/reading Part One

Where I am and What I am Reading

As Lent came to an End

Part One – Where I am

            This is the first of two or probably three blogs this week on where I am in life and what I am reading. I hope you will find it as much about life as it is about what books I am reading, as my recent renaissance in reading is connected to what has been happening in my life.

            I discovered a few days before the traditional Lenten season that my life had become disoriented. I was going through the motions of life with little purpose and almost without any self-discipline. I guess everyone can discover that is where they are in life, but I think for those of us who are single that can be a problem aggravated by our being alone. If you find yourself at that place in life, you have my understanding and prayers for “all the lonely people”. If you don’t struggle with this, watch for those who do. Don’t make them a project but don’t ignore them.

            The Lenten season proved to be a good time for me to begin dealing with where I had found myself at this point in life. During the Lenten season, in addition to going through some of those ordinary strange eating changes one takes on in the season, I sought to focus on two areas where I would give myself to seek change in habits, so as to increase my opportunities to grow in grace, as a I grow in age. I was especially feeling called to place a priority during the Lenten season on consistent morning and evening devotions, and also to becoming a more consistent reader. When one is sick and seeks to recover, a first place to begin is often in eating to acquire the nutrition of life. Thus, devotions, prayers, and reading seemed a natural place to begin on the road to recovery.

            In one of my most recent blogs I wrote about how there were a couple of books I was interested in reading. My practice had been to focus on reading just one book at a time. I had started Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island several times but never got through it, and Michael Wear had asked me to read and express how I viewed his book Reclaiming Hope. I enjoyed it and blogged about it. I am scheduled to attend an arts conference (including writing, basically a being creative conference) called the Glen Workshop later this summer. I decided to begin preparing myself for this event by reading a book by Gregory Wolfe entitled How Beauty Will Save the World. Wolfe was the founder of Image, an arts journal; and the Glen Workshops in Santa Fe are an offshoot of the creative mindset of the journal. I discovered in reading all three books at the same time that instead of each of the different styles and messages of the books distracting me, the variety helped keep me more interested in each and all of the books. Reading multiple books has also helped me avoid becoming the ardent advocate of whatever has been my latest book to read. All this is old hat and review, but I tell it because it seems to be part of a life changing discovery for this old man.

            I will speak in today’s blog only of a couple of new things. The first is that I have a whole new batch of books I am reading. They are the ones shown in the picture. I have a meditative book I am reading a few pages from after morning devotions entitled Let Your Life Speak by Parker J. Palmer. I have decided to start reading more fiction. So I am reading Wise Blood from Flannery O’Connor’s collected works. This is also connected to the upcoming Glen Workshops since Karen Swallow Pryor will be one of the speakers and she will be conducting workshops on Flannery O’Connor’s writings. How to Survive the Apocalypse by Robert Joustra and Alissa Wilkinson also has a workshop connection as Alissa Wilkinson will lead workshops on writing movie reviews. I enjoy writing about the movies I see, but I am looking forward to honing my skills at knowing how to critique movies. There is so much to consider when one is looking at a movie. How is the script? How is the acting? How about the photography? There is so much more that as I have begun writing about movies I realize that my mind is not trained to see more than a glimpse of what is taking place in a film. The other two books I am reading are The Benedict Option which I have decidedly double-minded opinions of, and an interesting book from a rare perspective on the holocaust – Himmler Brothers written by Katrin Himmler, a grand-daughter of Heinrich Himmler’s youngest brother. She writes tracing how three brothers became Nazis, who were the offspring of a conservative Catholic family, whose father was the headmaster of a school. Katrin Himmler’s book is especially interesting when you realize she married a Jewish man, and part of her reason for deciding to publish her research into her family history was her felt need to tell her son the horrible story of the holocaust as a representative of a family that contributed so much evil to the world and history into which he was born. I knew when I discovered that part of the story that I had to read this one. I will write more about these books I am reading as the week goes on.

            The last thing I want to say in today’s blog is that we are now in the Easter season. He has risen. My life is more than reading books (sigh and relief flow mingled together). Having discovered my life to be disordered I needed to get down to the basics of feeding myself through devotions and reading and prayers. Now that Easter has come up, a new emphasis is about to start. The phrase I am using for this season in my life is “Rise and Walk.” It is a good Easter theme. It means I start putting an emphasis on things like my work attitude and taking care of my house which is located under the piles I have let build up because I have been disordered. We are works in progress. We all have clutter at least metaphorically and some of us quite extraordinarily in the ordinary sense of the word. Look for some blogging on the books I am reading later in the week. Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts today. I hope there was something you could extract from the post to enrich your own life.