Desert Ecumenism

                                                                                                                                                                                                           ©MAAB

I was wondering what I'd be reading for Lent. I'm always reading something, but there is a different kind of attention to be brought at this time. To read at Lectio pace with that lovely, loose, unclenched openness is a luxury one always dreams of importing to The Work That Must Be Done. Late last week I retrieved from my shelves a book I have dipped into and after reading the Introduction, I have found this to be the One. It is David Jasper's The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture. The line quoted above is from this. The photograph is one of my father's.

Deserts for C21st Urbanites

What are deserts for 21st century urbanites?  A romantic, if rugged, getaway? Desert spirituality is all the more fascinating the further away from a desert I get, I note.

I was thrilled to get out into the desert during my travels in India one summer (Rajasthan, '95). Rode on a camel for a couple of days, slept under the stars, enjoyed the company of our good-natured Muslim guides (the slow, beautiful dance of their evening prayers on a nearby horizon was quietly and deeply moving). Under the stars that suddenly cold night, from out of the darkest blue, came a turbaned piper who played for us an hour or two sitting by the embers of our fire. Was not the time a memory of something simpler and more beautiful; or was it just as it was, a gift for that particular time and place?

 Jesus' desert experiences might have had these elements of beauty and nostalgia, too; but the drive of the Lenten narrative urges us toward the more challenging confrontation with the self. One has to enter the chaos in order to attain a deeper awareness of the obstacles & wounds: that is the way to liberation.

To believe one is liberated is not the same as to live as if one is.

Alessandro Pronzato, a wise man he must be, wrote in his book called "Meditations on the Sand"that

The crowded bus, the long queue, the railway platform, the traffic jam, the neighbor’s television sets, the heavy-footed people on the floor above you, the person who still keeps getting the wrong number on your phone. These are the real conditions of your desert. Do not allow yourself to be irritated. Do not try to escape. Do not postpone your prayer. Kneel down. Enter that disturbed solitude. Let your silence be spoiled by those sounds. It is the beginning of your desert.

This came to me at a time of great chaos; it was a bitter pill. It was prophetic.

Strength and courage!

Winter Garden

1. Tiny bud 'knots'
2. Earth-toned palette
3. Crow Castle (can you spot the golden robed Crow?)
4. Pluto's Calling Card:
'Hello, Persephone?'
5. Plum Trees, mid-sway
6. Evergreen Halo?
7. The other side of the moat (Azaleas-in-waiting).
8. Robai, or, Wintersweet, fragrant harbingers of spring, came over from China in the 17th century. Robai means candle plum, or waxwork plum.
               *
All that's missing from this series are the voluptuous camellias!

A Lenten Project: The Oxherding Askesis

Images by Tokuriki Tomikichiro (1902-1999)

Odd perhaps to approach this solemn Christian observance from this angle, but I like the story presented here and find a number of points that tell a similar story about facing yourself to free yourself (which is what the Desert is about, isn't it?). For a lovely commentary by Kubota Ji'un Roshi , use this link and scroll down to the pictures which you can open one by one and use for your contemplation.

Freeing the self is not, as Foucault objects (with a mischeivous characterisation of Christian askesis) a means of abandoning the self or detaching from the world. Indeed this is just what Digital Nun objected to in her post on False Asceticism in which she rues the connections between asceticism, flesh-hating and punishment. No, she says,

True asceticism has nothing whatever to do with punishment, but everything to do with training and discipline. The Greek origins of the word are enough to show that (askesis means practice, athletic training). It is not to be identified with austerity, although a certain restraint is necessary since what we aim at is mastery over our appetites and any bad habits they may have led us into.
    . . .
     Asceticism is always ethical, both in origin and in scope. There is nothing mystical about it, although some modern writers seem to confuse the two. Nor is there anything sad or heavy about it. Like all exercise, it is meant to invigorate, only for Christians it is a spiritual invigoration that we seek.

Freeing the self involves a shedding and a kenosis and for directions we turn, in all traditions I believe, to the saints and the true sages. I do not really know how an renunciation of self would look in any healthy way -- its unhealthy modes are easy to see. But on this sticky point, I find myself drawn to the notion of kenosis for

the saints embody something of Christ's kenosis: making themselves nothing, they make room for God. But this yielding of the self to God does not mean a sheer 'immersion' of the saint in the Other . . . Holiness is not the self's erasure but its intensification. (Myers, 75)

Rather than ignoring or ill-treating the flesh or the self this Lent, make space and make time for self-care that you might emerge with greater understanding and compassion and altogether better-connected.

Until next time, may you make a good Lent.

無 ('moo')