Tag: Contemplation

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Collecting Quotes – On Keeping a Commonplace Book

For the last few years, I’ve been using the Bullet Journal system with my notebooks to organize tasks, keep my calendar, take sermon notes, write down interesting things, jot down books to find and music to listen to, etc. In every notebook I always reserve ten pages or so in the back as a commonplace book where I can collect striking quotes, phrases, and ideas. Sometimes those quotes turn into a blog post. Sometimes they make their way into sermons or other writing. But sometimes they simply sit there, waiting for me find them, to be struck again by their beauty, to ponder their strangeness, to be challenged, or to wonder what possessed me to write it down in the first place!

As I’ve written before, a commonplace book is a great way to collect and capture quotations in one place. It also provides a snapshot of recurring themes and preoccupations over the lifespan of the notebook. If you look at the tags for this blog, you will not be surprised to see that the quotes are often about contemplation, beauty, the vocation of theology, and the necessity of Christian holiness.

This is what this looks like in my notebook. Good luck reading it! I like to write with nice pens, but that doesn’t mean that my handwriting is worthy of the pens I use!

Here is a picture of my commonplace book from my latest bullet journal.

(In case you are interested, I typically use the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook with the dot grid. These notebooks are especially suited for strict users of the Bullet Journal system, because the pages are numbered and there is a table of contents in the front where you can “index” your entries. But I have not been very diligent about keeping an index, and I like writing with fountain pens, so I am switching to this Rhodia notebook. The Leuchtturm works well with fountain pens, but Rhodia paper offers a completely other level of quality. If you want a great starter fountain pen, I especially like the Kaweco Sport. If I’m going to take the time to write things in my commonplace book, I want a good writing experience.)

When I finish each notebook, I like to also capture some of the best quotes here on the blog. Here are a few highlights from the notebook I just finished:

First, some obligatory Balthasar quotes:

“Let us go forth to behold ourselves in your beauty.” HUvB, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 3

“I have to say that for me the only truly interesting theologians are the saints: from Irenaeus through Augustine to Anselm to Bonaventure or figures that allow the radiation of holiness to show forth, such as Dante or Newman; one could also mention Kierkegaard or Soloyvov. I have actually never written because I wanted to achieve results, but in order to show individuals something that I think must be seen.” HUvB, from the interview “Spirit and Fire”

“Only an eye serenely at rest sees eternal patterns and intimations in earth’s passing forms, and only such an artistic eye can show in symbol what the world is capable of revealing to the gaze of contemplation.” HUvB, “On the Christian’s Capacity to See”

Other quotes on theology:

“A theologian is most highly honored and most ably put to use when named as a doctor of the sacred page.” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“Not all is Christology!” Katherine Sonderegger, Doctrine of God

“If writing is a mode of exposure to truth, then even failure can be exemplary.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“God is the grammar of holy lives, their dark and dazzling intelligibility.” Ben Myers, Christ the Stranger

“Only if there is…astonishment…can there be serious, fruitful, and edifying Christian thought and utterance.” Barth, CD IV/3

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On Feeling “Useless” in a Pandemic

“The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet is that both are concerned with wonder…” St. Thomas Aquinas

So goes the epigraph to the extraordinary chapter “The Philosophical Act” in Josef Pieper’s Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

Pieper’s book has been an absolute balm to me over the past few months. I will remember it, along with The Power and the Glory, as a book that helped me get through COVID-Tide. As I’ve written before, his discussion of the classical distinction between ratio and intellectus helped me name my own tendency, not to mention the broader cultural tendency, to not only privilege, but to live as if there is nothing but ratio, nothing but discourse, logic, practicality, nothing but total work. But Pieper’s book reminds us that not only is there something more than ratio, and the world of total work it brings in its wake, but that the contemplation and the leisure and the festivity of intellectus is what truly nourishes, what truly establishes culture.

There is indeed another “logic”, the logic of intellectus, which is the logic of wonder, the logic that fuels prayer, poetry, and philosophy, what Pieper collects together as the Philosophical Act.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

Feeling Useless

Though a balm the book has also caused more than a little of what Pieper calls “existential disturbance”, mostly because I didn’t realize the extent to which I am myself under the sway of “total work”. Until any sense of normal working hours/conditions was taken away from me, until the normal metrics of success were suddenly unavailable (and, yes, this is true for a minister too. Imagine that), I had not known my own tendency to measure myself in terms of usefulness. In fact, early in the pandemic a friend asked me how I was feeling and I said, “I feel useless.” Pieper helped me understand that what on the face of it seems like a totally irrational and overly dramatic thought was in fact a sign that I had surrendered to the “logic” of total work. It is in fact rational, in the sense of ratio, for me to measure myself in terms of usefulness.

Importantly, Pieper is not arguing that we should do away with ratio . He is rather arguing for the recovery of and primacy of intellectus. By primacy I mean that for Pieper, intellectus is both the beginning place—it must come first—and the source of what really matters in life. And this is important because the things that intellectus brings are in a sense “useless” too, in that they ultimately do not produce value, rather they have value in and of themselves. (I’ve written previously in praise of useless things, but I had not yet connected that thought to my own sense of uselessness.)

Prayer, Poetry, and Philosophy

Such “useless” things come to those who attend to the world and to those who cultivate the sense of wonder, in a word to those who contemplate. Pieper numbers prayer, poetry, and philosophy among these “useless” things. They are useless yet indispensable, and when engaged in as acts of wonder are means of transcending the everyday, the working world, the world that recognizes only ratio.

But the pull of total work is so powerful, its promises so seductive, that there are also false forms of each of these. There is pseudo-prayer which is concerned with self and not with God, pseudo-poetry which merely follows trends or is nothing more than eloquent narcissism, and pseudo-philosophy which has no sense of wonder. We all must beware of these.

So if you too have felt useless, allow yourself to reimagine that feeling as an opportunity or as invitation back to wonder. In service of such wonder, might I recommend The Overstory by Richard Powers. It is a book that deeply rewards attentive wonder. Here is a passage that captures that dynamic beautifully:

“Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same. Or as the nurse to the Union dead writes: Stand cool and composed before a million universes. As cool and composed as wood.”

Richard Powers, The Overstory

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In Praise of Useless Things: Another Post on Contemplation

One recurring theme on this blog is the necessity of contemplation. In my study of Balthasar especially, and in encountering the tradition through him, I have been struck again and again by the central place of contemplation not just in Christian spirituality but also in Christian theology. If the statement that theology grows out of contemplation does not seem immediately apparent to you, you are not alone. One of Balthasar’s continual laments is the bifurcation of theology from spirituality and the resulting expulsion of contemplation from theology. But Balthasar’s own work and his re-presentation of the Christian theological tradition shows again and again that the really meaningful theology of the church has been forged in the crucible of adoration and obedience, in word it has been birthed from contemplation.

Balthasar’s contention is that there is no truly deep and meaningful theology which does not come from a place of prayer, particularly contemplative prayer. But his argument is deeper than that because contemplation isn’t meant for just the “Spiritually” and “Theologically” inclined. No, Balthasar insists, in his book on prayer, contemplation is the birthright of everyone. So while I have come to see that contemplation is vital for the theological task, I want to make this broader point too. I have come to see that quite apart from theology, contemplation is central to being human, whether one is formally engaged in studying theology or not.

Another guide who has helped me realize this is Josef Pieper. Over the past few months, during the lockdown, I have been slowly reading Josef Pieper’s book Leisure, the Basis of Culture . It is in many ways the most helpful thing I have read in a long time, and most certainly the most helpful thing I have read in quarantine. Working from the Latin for the psalm, Pieper renders the famous phrase “Be still and know that I am God,” in this way: “Be at leisure and know that I am God.” Leisure is the contemplative stance, an openness to receive what is as it is, to receive the goodness of creation as a gift. This is perhaps always counterintuitive, but it is especially so in a time when I want to control things, to make things happen. Stillness, leisure, contemplation are all of a piece and are all aspects of intellectus (which Pieper, along with the Medieval tradition, distinguishes from ratio). Both intellectus and ratio are necessary and healthy aspects of the human mind, but Pieper’s concern is that we have surrendered ourselves to “total work” because we have come to believe that it is only ratio that matters.

But we need intellectus because it is through intellectus, through contemplation, that we experience the “useless” things of the world, that is things that are valuable in and of themselves, rather than things that are instrumental for getting me something I want. The “useless” ’things are what I actually need to live with integrity and with wisdom. Without such useless things, I have no chance of loving my neighbor, because after all my neighbor is never a means to an end, but someone to love.

Contemplation is a letting be and an openness to the goodness of Being, and ultimately to the one who is Goodness in himself. I have no time, I say. I have no space. I cannot. Oh but I may, and I must, if I want to receive what matters. There is a silence that must proceed any speaking that bears any weight at all.

Austin Farrer too holds up the necessity of contemplation while lamenting its loss. (Iit is not a unique problem of the internet age!), and reminds

“The chief impediment to religion in this age, I often think, is that no one ever looks at anything all: not so as to contemplate it, to apprehend what it is to be that thing, and plumb, if he can, the deep fact of its individual existence. The mind rises from the knowledge of creatures to the knowledge of their creator, but this does no happen through the sort of knowledge which can analyse things into factors or manipulate them with technical skill or classify them into groups. It comes from the appreciation of things which we have when we love them and fill our minds and senses with them, and feel something of the silent force and great mystery of their existence. For it is in this that the creative power is displayed of an existence higher and richer and more intense than all.” Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology

The truth is that the contemplative stance, the space within from which to truly see and to truly receive, is already within us. Yes, that room may have fallen into disrepair, but it is still there, and by grace it can restored and inhabited again. Or so says Balthasar:

“Man is the creature with a mystery in his heart that is bigger than himself. He is built like a tabernacle around a most sacred mystery. When God’s word desires to live in him, man does not need first of all to take deliberate action to open up his innermost self. It is already there, its very nature is readiness, receptivity, the will to surrender to what is greater, to acknowledge the deeper truth, to cease hostilities in the face of the more constant love. Certainly, in the sinner, this sanctuary is neglected and forgotten, like an overgrown tomb or an attic choked with rubbish, and it needs an effort—the effort of contemplative prayer—to clean it up and make it habitable for the divine Guest. But the room itself does not need to be built: it is already there and always has been, at the very center of man.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer

For a helpful discussion of some of these issues, I would recommend this episode of the Word on Fire podcast called “Distraction and Useless Things”.

For a more general introduction to Christian contemplative practice, I would recommend, Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird. It was given to me by a dear friend who was a man of prayer, if I have ever met one.