Hope and Reality

Our mail carriers might think that I use books for insulation, and perhaps I do. Better if they were all the same size; then stacks could go floor to ceiling along the west-facing wall to reduce wind coming thru. Or in another sense of insulation—getting lost in the dense books provides protection against the storms and distractions of politics, sports, and such like. 

   Trouble is these packages arrive bringing their own difficulties, particularly concerning how to sort them in a findable manner. When Goodreads asks for “shelf” labels for an item read, two terms dominate my choices: mystery and spirituality. Unfortunately, the collection in the latter category overflows shelf availability, even including the new basement library. Items often go missing—walkabout? A good search might find one eventually, usually when looking in a stack of “next” that wasn’t after all. 

   It’s because “next” suffers from the un-anticipate-able. Conditions resemble weather forecasting in Texas where locals say “If you don’t like it, just wait, changes most any minute.” Thus, the next-best-to-read shifts, as it should, depending on the quality of the current text, as well as age-related factors, incoming pressure systems, etc.

   To cope with all this, we might reflect on favorite Charle Brown themes: trusting Lucy to hold the kick-off yet again or Snoopy conjuring cloud formations from the impossible position (except in comic strips) atop the doghouse roof. Can imagination sustain hope? Does hope shape reality? Is hope for Lucy a waste? Notice how “next” overlaps into the “spirituality” classification.

Pause to look out the window...

   New strategy! A book arrived yesterday, well, two actually. Good timing, for I’d just finished Mere Humanity . The new arrival, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality by Ronald Rolheiser, becomes “next” (the other arrival went into some nearby stack). Not only does immediate reading solve the unfindable problem (hmm…hopeful cloud formation), this book also helps with understanding what goes into the category of “spirituality”! Rolheiser writes: 

“Spirituality is not something on the fringes…Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serene, having the luxury of choosing to act or not act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spirituality.” p. 6

“It has to give us energy and fire, so that we do not lose our vitality, and all sense of the beauty and joy of living. . . The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, is to have lost all zest for living—lying on a couch, watching football or sit-coms, taking beer intravenously! [Spirituality’s] other task, and a very vital one it is, is to keep us glued together, integrated so that we do not fall apart and die.” p. 11

So there. This category for spirituality holds the fire and the binding. It’s for a book that sustains the vitality of living and keeps the fire from going out and/or supports the grounding that won’t let us fly apart. Why read anything else…