Flunking Sainthood Read online

  Yes, I am aware that the Cadfael mysteries are set several centuries earlier than Brother Lawrence, and that they take place in England, not France. So please don’t send me e-mails correcting me about it.

  I’m drawing here from Margaret Kim Peterson, Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 13, 37–39, 127. Also, if you are interested in someday cleaning an oven, the book I consulted is Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House (New York: Scribner, 1999), 119. Mendelson’s book is beautifully written and makes for fascinating reading, even if it will make you feel totally guilty about having a less-than-perfect house.

  Chapter 4: lectio divination

  The epigraph from Eugene Peterson is found in Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 66. Peterson’s story of his dog with the bone opens the book and is found on pages 1-2. The quote about “a way of reading that guards against depersonalizing the text into an affair of questions and answers, definitions and dogmas” is on page 90.

  The quote from St. Caesarius of Arles is found in Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Liguori, MO: Liguori/Triumph, 1996), 28–29. Debbie Blue’s is in From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2008), 35.

  The T. S. Eliot quote about prayer being “to concentrate, to forget self, to attain union with God” is found in Philip and Carol Zaleski’s book Prayer: A History (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 288.

  Michael Casey’s quote about being “brought face to face with the superficiality of our existing commitment” is in Sacred Reading, 97. “Lifelong exposure” is found on page 80.

  Chapter 5: nixing shoppertainment

  The chapter epigraph is from Richard Foster, The Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World, rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1981, 2005), 104. Other Foster quotes are found on pages 109 and 215.

  The thoughts on “coveting” in the Hebrew Bible come from Richard Elliott Friedman, Commentary on the Torah: With a New English Translation and the Hebrew Text (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2003), 618. This observation also pops up in Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book The Sabbath, which even gives such repetition for emphasis a fancy name: epizeuxis. So now we know. Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 90.

  Sheena Iyengar’s research is reviewed in “To Choose Or Not to Choose,” The Chronicle Review in The Chronicle of Higher of Education, March 19, 2010, B7–B9, and in her book The Art of Choosing (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2010). The experiments on religion are described in detail on pages 28–30.

  Chapter 6: look, a squirrel!

  The chapter epigraph is from St. John Chrysostom as quoted in The Philokalia, “Directions to Hesychasts” 21. The edition I used was translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (New York: Faber and Faber, 1979, 1995), 193-4.

  The first quote from Thomas Keating about what Centering Prayer is designed to achieve is found in Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel in Foundations for Centering Prayer and the Christian Contemplative Life: Thomas Keating’s Three Most Popular Books Compiled into One Volume (New York: Continuum, 2009), 31. See also 55, 142.

  Cynthia Bourgeault’s quote about how to undertake Centering Prayer can be found in Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2004), 6.

  “Coloring the air to resemble light” is in The Philokalia, Callistos’s “Texts on Prayer,” item 13, 273.

  The idea that we “inhale divinity and exhale sin” is from Zaleski, Prayer, 143.

  An excellent introductory resource to the Jesus Prayer is Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009). She points out that these simple sayings we commit to memory have a profound hold on us at unexpected times: “The things we lay down firmly in our memories matter. They endure. If you take the words of the Jesus Prayer and ‘write them on the tablet of your heart’ (Prov. 3:3), on the day when you are far away on the gray sea of Alzheimer’s the Prayer will still be there, keeping your hand clasped in the hand of the Lord” (p. 59). I hope she’s right, because when I’m in a nursing home and no longer recall the names of my loved ones, I have a sneaking suspicion that the only thing left to me will be all of the commercial television jingles of my childhood. The Jesus Prayer would be a marked improvement over “Big Mac, Filet of Fish, Quarter Pounder, French Fries. . . .”

  Chapter 7: unorthodox sabbath

  Readers should be aware that the kind of Orthodox Jewish Sabbath I’m attempting here is hardly the norm among American Jewry. According to the 2000 National Jewish Population Survey, of the 46 percent of Jews who belong to a synagogue, only 21 percent are Orthodox. So it’s a small minority who feel they have to preshred their toilet paper or refrain from flicking a light switch on the Sabbath. Among the majority (being Reform, at 39 percent, and Conservative, at 33 percent), there’s considerable variation on questions of Sabbath observance.

  You can learn about Heschel’s life in Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, a thorough and fascinating biography by Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  Heschel’s own quotations are from his book The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 13, 23.

  For a fascinating cultural study of how various communities of Christians have observed the Sabbath through history, check out Craig Harline’s book Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

  Marva Dawn’s thoughts are in Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 19. The ideas from Walter Brueggemann are paraphrased from a lecture he gave at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 24, 2010.

  Chapter 8: thanksgiving every day

  The study that found that people who recorded their blessings were 25 percent happier than those who recorded daily annoyances is found in Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, “Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 2 (2004): 379–89, esp. 380–81.

  “How can any of us ever be grateful enough for our mothers?” In asking this question I am influenced by Robert Thurman’s book Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). He devotes a surprising amount of time to the issue of gratitude to the women who bore and raised us.

  Research on how quickly we adapt to change is found in Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman, NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children (New York: Twelve/Hachette Book Group, 2009), 228–29. It’s worth noting that Bronson and Merriman state that subsequent researchers have questioned these findings. But, whatever. They work for me.

  Margaret Visser, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 16–17, 58, 226–27. Much of the book discusses the rituals of gift giving, which Visser distinguishes from gratitude: “Gratitude is always about intentions, although it is often expressed through concrete things such as gifts” (158).

  Interestingly, customers’ tips increase when servers write a note of thanks on the bottom of a bill. See B. Rind and P. Bordia, “Effect of Server’s ‘Thank you’ and Personalization on Restaurant Tipping,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25 (1995): 745–51.

  Thomas Merton’s words are quoted in Words of Gratitude, ed. Robert A. Emmons and Joanna Hill (Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001), 14.

  Chapter 9: benedictine hospitality

  The epigraph from Benedict is found in the Rule of Saint Benedict 53:1. There are many versions of the Rule in print and available online, such as the one at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/benedict/rule2/files/rule2.html#ch50. (In the sp
irit of Benedictine hospitality, the Rule’s entire text is free to the site’s visitors. Welcome!)

  Dorothy Day’s quotation is from “Room for Christ,” December 1945, in Robert Ellsberg’s collection Dorothy Day: Selected Writings (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 95.

  The quote that Benedictine hospitality is “not about sipping tea” is from Father Daniel Holman and Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2002), 9.

  The Bonhoeffer quote about staying in a Benedictine monastery in London is from a letter to his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, November 23, 1940.

  There are many other references to Sodom throughout the Bible, one of the most explicit being found in Ezekiel 16:49–50: Sodom’s guilt was enjoying “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease” without sharing with “the poor and needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore, I removed them when I saw it.” There is some discussion of the Sodom and Gomorrah story in Peterson, Keeping House, 13.

  Chapter 10: what would Jesus eat?

  For accounts of St. Francis’s animal miracles and other stories, see Bonaventure’s The Life of St. Francis in the HarperCollins Spiritual Classics series (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2005).

  Stephen Webb’s Good Eating is an excellent book on Christian ethics and animal rights (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001). It profoundly influenced my thinking on Christian vegetarianism, convincing me that it’s an important and biblical idea, even if it’s one I have a hard time putting into practice. See especially pages 128–32.

  The quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer is from the short story “The Letter Writer,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker on January 13, 1968, but is also anthologized in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982).

  Chapter 11: three times a day will I praise you

  An excellent introduction to fixed-hour prayer is Phyllis Tickle’s The Divine Hours series, arranged by season. The one I used primarily was Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime (New York: Doubleday, 2006). The chapter epigraph is taken from page x, while the story of Peter’s noontime vision is on page viii. Fellow insomniacs should check out The Night Offices: Prayers for the Hours from Sunset to Sunrise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  The quote on “having stated times of private prayer” is from Cardinal Newman, quoted in Casey, Sacred Reading, 22.

  The quote from Scot McKnight is from Praying with the Church: Following Jesus Daily, Hourly, Today (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 83.

  In chapter 43 of the Rule, Benedict encouraged monks to “immediately set aside” what they were doing and “go with the utmost speed” when the time came for prayer. In chapter 50, Benedict closed a potential travel loophole by insisting that journeying monks were still to observe their regular prayer times. See http://www.ccel.org/ccel/benedict/rule2/files/rule2.html#ch50.

  “Bettie would say something like, ‘Jesus, help Alan’s back to feel better in the morning,’ ” is from Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008), 5–6. The quote about the world not being our personal oyster is on page 58.

  Readers who are particularly interested in singing, rather than just reciting, the Psalms will want to look at Chanting the Psalms by Cynthia Bourgeault (Boston: New Seeds, 2006), or The Song of Prayer: A Practical Guide to Learning Gregorian Chant from the Community of Jesus (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009). Both books come with a CD to help readers better understand and listen to the chanting.

  Chapter 12: generosity

  The chapter epigraph comes from Dorothy Day’s essay “Room for Christ,” reprinted in Advent devotional I have come to love: Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 185. The quotation about giving charity not because the poor remind us of Christ but because they are Christ is from the same essay, page 186.

  Research on American Christians’ generosity—or lack thereof—is taken from Christian Smith, Michael O. Emerson, and Patricia Snell, Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Don’t Give Away More Money (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44, 12–16.

  Dorothy Day’s quote on voluntary poverty comes from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 187. Day’s quote “you can reach out like an octopus to seek your own comfort” is from her 1953 essay “Little by Little,” in Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 110.

  Epilogue: practice makes imperfect

  Dorothy Day’s quotation is from the 1949 essay “Here and Now,” from The Third Hour, in Ellsberg, Dorothy Day, 102-3.

  A note to readers

  The events described in this book actually happened to me, but I have taken some liberties with chronology to place events in their relevant chapters. As well, I have changed the names of some individuals in the book to protect their identity or, in three cases, created a composite character based on more than one person in order to guard an individual’s privacy.

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