Wake-up

I found the book to be a wake-up call.  Our sudden dislocation from India, in combo with needing to work across time zones and finding it difficult to establish ourselves in community again after a decade focused elsewhere, has surfaced emotional vulnerabilities — while ‘contemplative spirituality’ easily becomes something of a faded photo.  I need a re-set.  Once upon a time I articulated, prayerfully and annually, my ‘rocks’ (like a ‘Rule of Life’, or trellis, for me) — but I haven’t done it recently.  Some features come easier than others — like solitude, waiting, simplicity and even blogging (emerging from a desire to share and to serve others).  But things like community, sabbath and prayer often remain a challenge…

Wondering

Reading the book with people from Canada, Bolivia, England, Ghana, Bosnia and Indonesia highlighted how some stuff does not cross-cultures that well at all (like the material on conflict) — and yet it was interesting how many of the issues were more universal.

The book does wander over into pop psychology every now and then.  ‘True freedom comes when we no longer need to be somebody special in other peoples’s eyes because we know we are lovable and good enough’ (53). Yikes.  Methinks a little dose of that supreme line in the hymnbook would help here: ‘make me a captive, and then I shall be free’.

It is my blog (!), so permit me to say that I wish people would stop using the Iceberg Model (17).  Why?  The iceberg cannot even illustrate the key point wanting to be made — namely, that what lies beneath determines so much of what lies above.  With an iceberg what lies beneath is just more ice.  The frigid blob is all the same stuff.  We need to trade in the iceberg for a newer model — like the model of a tree because, with its roots and fruits, it provides the perfect illustration of what is being affirmed.