Tag: #charleslafond

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Got Lucky

December and January are months in which I enjoy tucking in to movies and books. When the snow is here. When it’s cold. When the sun sets at 5:00.

Some of those movies and books are really compelling. They stay with me. Like I’ve welcomed them as renters in a particular neighborhood of my psyche. I enjoy seeing them in the morning and having tea together. Some of them are just so so. I’m not really drawn into the movie but I’m curious where they are going to go with it. I want to know how the director, etc. is going to get themselves out of the jam that is this unengaging story. Or if it’s a book, I tend to read faster, skimming sentences at the beginning of paragraphs and making it an exercise in speed reading. I’d rather have the compelling tea together, to be clear.

The “got lucky” part is that I’ve just watched a movie and am almost done reading a book that I’m guessing will be on my “best of” lists for 2017. The book is “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame). It’s a book given to me by a friend a bit more than a year ago with a really lovely and inviting inscription. It’s been sitting on my reading table most of the time since then. I’ve known where it was. The moment for reading it arrived three days ago. I wanted to treat myself to something on a Friday afternoon, 3:30. It was this book. Big Magic has fantastic and accessible gems of wisdom (my pages are very dog-eared) all around the theme of creativity and living a creative life. This book supposes that we humans are creative beings by nature and that our creativity is fundamental need. Further, that ideas live as a life form and are looking for human hosts so as to be born. This is good, right. If I had a nickel for every good idea that came my way that I loved but didn’t give enough attention to such that it “moved on,” yup, I’d have a wheelbarrow full of nickels. This book is compelling and inspiring and inviting. And I found, honest. I can’t wait to see the friend who gave me the copy and catch up together.

The movie is called Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortensen, with outstanding roles by his on-screen children. This movie was also recommended to me by a good friend (the most enjoyable books and movies come from friends, hmm….). There are many important and compelling themes to me, embedded in the story. The relationship between nature and civilization. The perpetuated myths and habits that are numbing the crap out of much of western society. Need for village and need for forest — that’s how my friend described it. It’s sweet. It’s tender. It’s bad-assed. It’s intelligent. It’s confrontational. It’s enough to stir much in me and call forth in me courage to challenge systems and beliefs, most of them residing deeply in me, but let’s be honest, being enacted in many contemporary organizations and systems.

And so it is, 2017 arrives. After two weeks off from writing, I’m at it again. I got lucky with a great book and a great movie out the gate. Plenty to carry me into the year with some heart, some meaning, and some honesty. Glad for friends. And yes, some luck to0.

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John and Farouk in Advent

This is such a beautiful and thoughtful post by my friend Charles LaFond, a minister in the Episcopal tradition. It is about stuck patterns. It is about wildly different perceptions. It is about common heart. Reading it made me involuntarily stop in my day to be still.

Here’s a snippet. Read the whole thing on Charles’ blog post.

Let’s say that the average, run-of-the-mill guy in Iraq were given a pen and paper and asked to write about the average run-of-the-mill American.  As an American man, I expect that when I read what the Iraqi guy wrote I would disagree.  I would read his writing and I would say “no!”  I would say “That is not an accurate picture of the average American man!”

The Iraqi man, Farouk, let’s call him,  is writing from his perspective.  He is wiring from his cinder-block house half-built and partly exposed to the elements, but with parts covered with metal sheets he found by a road and a blue tarp.  His anger at the death of his two sons and his daughter’s undiagnosed disease would enflame his writing.  His wife’s bent exhaustion from trying to keep his other four children and their parents and his brother and her three sisters fed would further exhaust and enrage him.  His work moving rocks for a local construction company would anger his hard, cracked hands as he wrote his angry words.  This is not the life he wants….

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Horizons

horizon

It’s hard not to be attracted to a horizon, right. There is something inviting. Something that pulls not only eyesight, but an inner imagination beyond the edges. Horizons open many of us. Even, if just for a moment, to lift our sight, and again, our imagination, beyond that task list and those deadlines on the paper or screen in front of us.

I snapped the horizon in the picture above, just yesterday. I was flying from Denver in to Salt Lake City. This picture faces south and east, about fifteen minutes from landing in Salt Lake City. I love the clouds as layer. I love the sky underneath. I love the two ranges that bound a valley. Miles and miles.

In Denver, this weekend I worked with the Vestry of the Saint John’s Cathedral, Bishop, and two local clergy. My friend and colleague, Father Charles LaFond and I hosted this group of thirteen people, that was very much a day of looking at horizons. In this case, the horizon included growing and building upon a practice of discernment. This vestry is in some significant decision-making, which includes recommending a next dean of the cathedral, which will of course impact much of the future.

“Discernment,” Charles reminds me and us, “is not just decision making. They are related, but not the same.” Discernment is more, right. And sometimes something that we need to reminded of both individually and collectively. Discernment, to me, digs deeper. It utilizes our good brains and good thinking. It welcomes our good hearts and honest feeling. It requires our good bellies, a knowing that reaches to deep places and is often only heard in a whisper.

Epistemology is a rather big word, isn’t it. I remember learning it in college and tripping over how to say it. I learned it as “ways of knowing.” It is the study of where knowing comes from. What I loved with the Denver group is there commitment to knowing from many layers, and, their welcoming of not just the task in front of them — “ready, go, let’s get to it” — but also, their willingness to look into the horizon. Up from the paper. Out through the window. Over to the mountains, and further to the next range. To see the awe, pause and stay with it, and then recognize that awe, in an among us, arising from being willing to engage with one another in the horizon that is just a bit of learning and few important questions together.

What a great day. It’s hard not to be attracted to that, too, right.

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Human Depth

I had intended to write about something else today. I was actually choosing between four or five things that arrived with me on the weekend. About projection (the gift of it). About choice (an inherent contradiction). About kindness (children helping children). Those will come, likely.

What moves me this morning is this 19 minute video, a sermon offered by my friend and colleague Charles LaFond. He is an Episcopal Priest, a potter, and a I writer. In the video is humor (“…who needs a savior when you have post-it notes…”), a personal voice that discloses frailty and even bitchiness, story (marine rescue, coaxed into fulfillment, and the deeply spiritual (“…you are going to be ok, this soft and fleshy self…”).

To marry all of these together is mad skill and honesty. Thank you Charles. It’s a call to human depth in all of us.

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