Contemplify

Each solstice and equinox Contemplify offers a public Lo-Fi & Hushed contemplative practice session for both free and supporting subscribers of the Non-Required Reading List. For those interested, go tell it on the mountain…

The third week of Advent salted on joy. Not because of the circumstances, but despite them. The work remains to create the conditions for the gift of joy to emerge. The candlelight had built around the Advent wreath and solstice was breaking into a light jog. The arms of Advent and winter solstice were outstretched, reaching towards embrace. We were so close to completing the circle. Our own sweet darkness yields in a protected and patient trust. Let us welcome the gift.

Wendell Berry’s “To Know the Dark” was the vessel for the Winter Solstice Lo-Fi & Hushed Practice Session. You can follow the link to peek at the entire poem.

Welcome this dark knowing into practice.
May we show up with expectation under its seamless cloak.
Advent rejoices within the crackles of reality.
Let us slow our pace to hear this joyful song.

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"Oshida’s life and legacy is an experience of the spiritual senses knowing the mystical voice. Biblical in sources and Buddhist in form, reading this book took me as a reader to the great pause of silence."

— Sister Meg Funk, OSB

Lucien Miller received his PhD in comparative literature from Berkely and taught Comparative Literature and Chinese at the University of Massachusetts. He is a deacon, spiritual director, and author. 

Lucien and I talk about his book, Jesus in the Hands of Buddha: The Life and Legacy of Shigeto Vincent Oshida, OP. Fr. Oshida taught with a clarity born of mystical devotion, bent towards right action, flowing from community.  Lucien regales me with stories about Fr. Oshida; his memorable first visit traveling to Takamori Hermitage that landed him in jail, Fr. Oshida’s elemental fire-mass, the foundational difference between word-idea and word-event, and much more.

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"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

— 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver

Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD, is an author, teacher, poet, and award-winning translator of spiritual texts. Today Carmen and I talk about the importance of practice; chanting, lectio divina,walking meditation, poetry, drawing, and other customized pecularily particular practices. Carmen models what her practices looks, sounds, and feels like shares the impact on her life. This conversation is a reminder that in times of anguish, joy, or suffering, practices keep our heart pumping and our internal hearth fired.

Visit Carmen at carmenbutcher.com | IG: @cab_phd |

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Looking for a live practice with a dispersed community? A few options...

• Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative practice every Wednesday with Contemplify (virtual)
• Center for Spiritual Imagination (virtual and in-person)

Dr. Kim Haines-Eitzen is a Professor of Religious Studies with specialties in Early Christianity, Early Judaism, and other ancient Mediterranean Religions at Cornell University. Her book Sonorous Desert: What Deep Listening Taught Early Christian Monks—and What It Can Teach Us explores the dynamic relationships between ambient environmental landscapes and the religious imagination, especially in the case of desert monasticism. Dr. Haines-Eitzen was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Nazareth. Exploring the Negev and Sinai deserts in her formative years has shaped her interest in deserts and solitude. She now divides her time between the lush Finger Lakes Region of New York State and the high desert of Southeastern Arizona.

Dr. Haines-Eitzen and I talk about the Mennonite hymnal, learning to listen more deeply to our surroundings, the sounds of the desert monasticism, mediocrity, slow thinking, and practicing the cello in the dark, and much more.

Visit Kim Haines-Eitzen at kimhaineseitzen.wordpress.com

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"I highly recommend What Makes You Come Alive to churches, religious and educational institutions, and spiritual seekers everywhere who are looking for an inward journey that finds its home in the world of nature, people, and things."

— Walter Earl Fluker - Editor and Director of the Howard Thurman Papers Project

Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown is a retreat leader, speaker, spiritual companion, and professor emerita of psychology at Agnes Scott College. Professor Brown frequently speaks on contemplative spirituality and Howard Thurman. She is the author of What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman and When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom. She has been featured in PBS documentaries about Howard Thurman and the Black church. She lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

In our conversation, Professor Brown and I talk about the life, mysticism, and work of Howard Thurman, as well as his affinity to emperor penguins. We talk about the contemplative imagination and depth of Thurman, his trust of the Spirit’s activity, and what he called “Working Papers”. Professor Brown has embodied the teachings of Howard Thurman and breathes them out in her own styling and language. More than once in this conversation, Professor Brown opened a window for me that I had painted shut. That is a rare gift.

Visit leritacolemanbrown.com

Visit contemplify.com for shownotes, NonRequired Reading List, Lo-Fi & Hushed Contemplative Practices Sessions.

Lo-Fi & Hushed is weekly space for the contemplative practice of lectio divina with poetry. This practice is graceful, transformative, and subdued. Lo-Fi & Hushed is available worldwide, on Riverside livestream, and you can participate from the hallows of your own home.

“I do not complain of suffering for love,
it becomes me always to submit to her,
whether she commands in storm or stillness,
one can know her only in herself.
This is an unconceivable wonder.
Which has thus filled my heart
and makes me stray in a wild desert.”

— Hadewijch of Antwerp

Visit https://contemplify.com/hushnow/ to learn more.

"David Shumate's High Water Mark is absolutely fresh and unpredictable. . . . You will be surprised by your confrontation with the utterly first rate."

— Jim Harrison

David Shumate is the author of The Floating Bridge and High Water Mark, winner of the 2003 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals and has been anthologized in Good Poems for Hard Times, The Best American Poetry and The Writer’s Almanac. Shumate is poet-in-residence at Marian University and lives in Zionsville, Indiana. David and I talk about poems that surprise you, the elemental essence that gardening, cooking, contemplation, poetry share, what it means to follow the brush, culturing of wisdom is at the heart of the arts, and much more. David also reads a few of his poems including one of my all-time favorites, “Teaching a Child the Art of Confession”.

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Douglas E. Christie, Ph.D., is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is author of The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Early Christian Monasticism; The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology; and The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss and the Common Life. He is the founding editor of the journal Spiritus and served as co-director of the Casa de la Mateada Program in Córdoba, Argentina from 2013-2015. Doug and I talk about why the poetic and apophatic theology of Hadejwich of Antwerp and Jan Van Ruusbroec might be important for our times, incarnational risk and AI, kindness as a spiritual practice and much more.

Listen to Doug's first appearance on Contemplify here.

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Carmen Acevedo Butcher, PhD, is an author, teacher, poet, and award-winning translator of spiritual texts. If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence. Her dynamic work around the evolution of language and the necessity of just and inclusive language has garnered interest from various media, including the BBC and NPR’s Morning Edition. A Carnegie Foundation Professor of the Year and Fulbright Senior Lecturer, Acevedo Butcher teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, in the College Writing Programs. Carmen and I talk about the mystics that allure, the noetic power of language, necessity of compassion and so much more.

Visit contemplfiy.com for shownotes.

Lisa Wells is an author, poet, and co-founder of a small, nonprofit press based in Seattle, Washington called Letter Machine Editions. Her latest work is Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World. In Believers Lisa locates folks who meet the climate catastrophe with a fierce and loving gaze, with their sights on restoring humanity’s relationship with the planet as best they can. With a poetic and engaging pen, Lisa continually asks how then shall we live? Lisa and I talk about despair and love, trash as the shadow of our culture, doing the best we can, dropping out of high school and joining a wilderness school, and much more. 

Visit Lisa at lisawellswriter.com or lettermachine.org.

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Scott Avett is a visual artist, musician, and songwriter. No amount of descriptors quite do him justice. Scott’s work was met by my ears before my eyes. His songs slip into the ear stream, reverberate off the rib cage and remind the heart it was born free. Scott’s paintings hold your gaze in absorption, jostle you awake, and drop you off a block later. In our conversation today Scott and I talk about creativity and contemplation, mysterious inputs that need to be absence of the thought of outputs, the study of sacred texts, parenting and death, and much more. 

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Visit Scott at scottavett.com or theavettbrothers.com | IG: @avettar | T: @ScottAvett

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian descent. Her latest work, is a translation of Rumi poems entitled Gold. I first heard one of her translations of Rumi sitting around a campfire on a Sunday morning in Patagonia, Arizona. I was bit by the passion and this conversation does not disappoint. Haleh and I converse about being raised in a family that celebrates poetry, how a translator’s work is never done alone, what clergy of today might learn from Rumi’s transformation, translating as a spiritual practice, and much more.

Visit Haleh at halehliza.com | @halehliza

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Belden Lane is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, author of numerous books including The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality and Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice. Belden Lane is a true elder, and in our conversation he exhibits that when we  talk about wild places, the rough play and laughter of God, grief after losing a son, what we can learn from trees, and much more.

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Good poetry is inherently spiritual. It is a clown car of interpretation. Once a door of perception is opened, endless and surprising “Ahas” tumble out. When you have a spiritual teacher who embodies a poem, their words become thunder and contemplation soaks you.

Get a taste of Season Four of Contemplify. First full episode is out in a week.

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A musing on practice, desire, and its evolutions

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I was overly giddy, strangely nervous, but above all grateful to be in conversation with James Finley about his breathtaking new book, The Healing Path: A Memoir and an Invitation. Each page is a thousand pages deep, that is how Jim walks about the world, drawing from the depths and teaching with winsome grace, poetics, and of course, wisdom. I have read The Healing Path twice now and I don’t see an end to rereading it, it charts the unfolding of Jim’s life; terrorizing trauma and abuse he endured as a child and at the monastery, graced invitations of transformative amidst the anguish, spiritual guidance from Thomas Merton, the richness of marriage to his beloved late wife, Maureen, and so much more.

Learn more about this episode at contemplify.com.

A musing inspired by Shawn Askinosie's story about Belgium beer brewing monks and the parables of Jesus from Feb 2023

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A musing on Bill Holm's "Horizontal Grandeur" pulled from his book of essays, The Music of Failure.

A musing on the present moment of awareness that holds everything. 

Father Adam Bucko has been a committed voice in the movement for the renewal of Christian Contemplative Spirituality and the growing New Monastic movement. He has taught engaged contemplative spirituality in Europe and the United States and has authored Let Your Heartbreak be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation, and co-authored Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (with Matthew Fox), and The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (with Rory McEntee). His work has been has been featured by ABC News, CBS, NBC, Harper’s Magazine, New York Daily News, and Sojourner Magazine and he currently serves as a director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination and the Cathedral of the Incarnation serving Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island in New York.

Follow Adam on social media: Twitter | Instagram

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