Monday, April 26, 2010

Welcome to Silentium Altum

All this began innocently enough when I offered to do reviews for Raven's Bread. (I described myself to Fredettes as a "voracious" reader.) Then I realized that the world of publishing and information was, in large part, electronic now. Duh!

While not exactly a Luddite, I'm not real crazy about anything more complicated than the our toaster oven or the Mr. Coffee next to it. So it is in this spirit that I offer my talents as a collector and disperser of information among us. If you allow for some growth on my part, I'm sure things will be work out.

The readership of RB is a select population. I want to honor that in a special way. I'm guessing that many of us are alumni of SCHOLA, that wonderful effort of Beatrice Bruteau and Jim Somerville, and/or MONOS. I will attempt to serve in that spirit.

This blog will be a special discipline for me -- a spiritual opportunity to stay out of the way of the sacred "work" we are doing together in the world. I'm happy to share aspects of my personal history privately through my email given in the profile or the RB newsletter. We are all people who respect privacy. That's why we're here.

I co-moderate a Yahoo group called Monasterion if you are interested. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Bishop John, a scholar/hermit in South Africa. I fill in as needed and offer gems of wisdom from time to time. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/monasterion/

I'm sure many of you know the www.hermitary.com, a great resource and forum for sharing from many of the world's great traditions.

I'm happy to allow our reflections in any direction you might want to go. My personal prejudices lean toward kenosis, the way of emptiness in the Christian tradition. I'm especially taken with Simone Weil's brief but powerful corpus of writing. I keep wondering what it means to be an ascetic in today's world. There's a long history of self purgation attached to this. How do we, to use her language, "attend" to a life that serves the world?

There's a starting point. Blessings, David