Thursday, July 30, 2015

On Sanctification

[I am in a reading phase for the next chapter of my book on Sontag; it covers her second collection of essays, Styles of Radical Will, which I am finding increasingly indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre's major philosophical works Being and Nothingness and St. Genet, so I am studying these along with Sontag's collection and a wonderful book on apophatic theology in contemporary literature by Christopher J. Knight.  So in the meantime I will be giving my thoughts to the blog to keep the writing flowing.  Enjoy, dear friends!]

I love the following quotation from Benedictine brother David Steindl-Rast that I recently found; he writes: "What is truly a part of our spiritual path is that which brings us alive.  If gardening brings us alive, that is part of our path, if it is music, if it is conversation...we must follow what brings us alive."  I realize that for me as an Anglican Christian and non-sectarian contemplative, the process Steindl-Rast addresses here is what I would label (theologically-speaking) as sanctification. If we prayerfully do that which "brings us alive," we do it in the Spirit and with gratitude; we are becoming sanctified via Christ's agency in us and He through us sanctifies the activity we are doing. It is that simple and that profound at the same time.

Reading and studying the works of May Sarton and Thomas Merton are what first taught me this valuable lesson that Steindl-Rast has reminded me of today.  Sarton believed that writing itself was a spiritual practice, especially poetry, and that we set aside the routine time of writing as a sacred and uninterrupted period of each one of our days. Sarton is completely correct, and she occasionally had to be quite gruff with people who wanted to disrupt that important time.  I tend to feel the same way; I like to keep mornings for writing and I get very upset when, especially during the semester, someone wants my Saturday mornings, which is often the only sustained time I have to write all week during term.  So if I too am gruff to keep that time sacred, I apologize but am not really sorry.

As writers and contemplatives, we have to keep our "alive" time and practices, whatever they are, sacrosanct so that the processes that restore and renew us and bring us more in line with what God wants for and through us can happen.  Yes, I am an introvert, and probably on the extreme side of that spectrum of extrovert/introvert.  Indeed, my blog probably reads strangely to those who are truly or extremely extroverts, but then again, aren't most writers who find their best fellowship with their notebooks (paper and virtual) introverts?

Which brings me to another practice which keeps me alive (apart from worship on our Sabbath, which is its sacred space and deserves another space and time to discuss more fully), and that is the time I devote to exercise.  I have learned through ill health and particularly being hospitalized twice with pancreatitis (a potentially deadly disorder) that my time at the gym exercising with my trainer has to be set aside and made a kind of sacred space as well.  I sometimes pray before or during my exercise time to sanctify that activity, although I am not always or consistently prayerful while working out at a gym.  I know that God has put people like my trainer Aaron Newman and my gym Catalyst Fitness in my life for the reason to keep me healthy in body as well as mind and soul.  For that, I am truly grateful.

Happy reading and exploring what acts bring you alive today and always!

Friday, July 3, 2015

Thoughts on Wollstonecraft & Stravinsky

Dear Readers,

Today, I find myself thinking a bit about Mary Wollstonecraft and her battles with depression, particularly after being left destitute by her lover, the painter Gilbert Imlay.  I have never been quite sure why William Godwin, her future husband, who after her death penned his infamous Memoirs of the Writer of Vindications of the Rights of Woman (1797), felt the need to go into such detail about Wollstonecraft's two suicide attempts, once in October of 1795 and once earlier.  Wollstonecraft at the time was a single and somewhat pennyless mother of an infant, alone Scandanavia at one point and not much better situated when she returned to England.  What I find even more interesting in that in that period of fall of 1795 is that Wollstonecraft began writing a series of lessons for her daughter Fanny to be used after she was gone (she describes them as directed at a motherless child).  I am beginning to consider the larger ramifications of her depression (a depression shared, not incidentally, by her protagonist in her final, incomplete novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1797)).  I wonder if Wollstonecraft's much-derided suicide attempts can be read within their historical contexts as, yes, cries for help, but also for the result that she dreamed of a kind of a utopian social equality for women that could never be realized in her time.  Perhaps her realization that it was just not going to come about for her and women in her times was just too much knowledge and insight for her to bear.

[The reflections above are not only written in relation to my own reading and rereading of Wollstonecraft, one of the authors I turn to again and again in my teaching and thinking, but also in relation to Rebecca Davis's Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book, which I am reviewing for the academic journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction. It is an important book and one I hope to celebrate in my review.]

I also wanted to share my response to a recent recording I received of Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird, performed by the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Gerard Schwartz and available on Naxos. (I had actually ordered an earlier and better recording of this work that has recently come out on LP at our local Barnes and Nobles and carelessly the cashier placed an order for this other edition.  I decided to keep it when it came in, for can you really have too many copies of a favored classical work?)  The sound quality on this recording is in dire need of assistance.  While I love the ballet (I am in general less thrilled with the "filler" work Naxos included, his Fireworks, but then again I don't like fireworks much anyhow), the softer parts are set at a recording level that is too quiet to hear them unless the volume is way up; then the louder parts become too loud.  This is a problem with some classical recordings that just does not happen in a concert hall.  With much modernist music that I like, such as that by Stravinsky and Shostakovich (my favorite modern composer; check out his symphony 13), the soft lyrical portions are achingly beautiful and, like much in life, achieved with great angst and dexterity.  It is a shame to lose them in a weakly-balanced post-production product.

Cheers!