soul biographies

Thanks to Dave Ebenhoh for putting me onto soulbiographies.com - a delightful and inspiring collection of short films by Nic Askew.

reflections on calling and gift

John Ortberg's lovely book If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat contains some lovely material on calling and gifts. Here are two quotes he uses:

My calling is 'the place where my deep gladness meets the world's deep need'. (Frederich Buechner)

'There's an electricity associated with giftedness. Give a person the chance, and he'll jolt you.' (Arthur Miller)

the soul is a wild animal

A lovely description of the soul from Parker J Palmer, of the centre for courage and renewal.

'Just like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, savvy, resourceful and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. Many of us learn about these qualities in the darkest moments of our lives when the faculties we normally depend upon utterly fail us—the intellect is useless, the emotions dead, the will impotent, and the ego shattered. But sometimes, way back in the thickets of our inner lives, we sense the presence of something that knows how to stay alive and helps us to keep going. That something, I suggest, is the tough and tenacious soul.

'And yet the soul, despite its toughness, is also essentially shy—just like a wild animal. It will flee from the noisy crowd and seek safety in the deep underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out! But if we will walk into the woods quietly and sit at the base of a tree, breathing with the earth and fading into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek may eventually show up.'

He writes beautifully about how to explore a 'pedagogy of the soul'. Read more here.

Evelyn Underhill

Recently, I went on retreat to an Anglican retreat centre at Pleshey in Essex. There, I discovered Evelyn Underhill, a mystic who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries.

Here are two quotes that I gleaned from her book The Mystics of the Church, while sitting in the wonderfully atmospheric library at Pleshey.

‘We cannot say that there is a separate ‘mystical sense’ which some men have and some men have not, but rather that every human soul has a certain latent capacity for God, and that in some capacity is realised with an astonishing richness.’.

‘We might indeed call mystics the eyes of the Body of Christ. They maintain that awestruck outlook towards the infinite, and that warmly loving sense of God’s indwelling grace, without which all religious institutions quickly become mechanical and cold.’

I am trying to open my eyes, all of the time.

website

I have finally got round to creating a little website about Echosounder. Do you go corporate and try to appeal to business people, or organic and keep the feel as un-corporate as possible? It's hard to know. You want to communicate effectively without sounding like the latest same old same old... Anyway, it's here: echosounder.

Eckhart Tolle

I found Tolle's The Power of Now one of the most profoundly practical, spiritual books I've ever read. You can read the distilled wisdom of that book in its companion Stillness Speaks. Here are just a few words, selected randomly:

'True intelligence operates silently. Stillness is where creativity and solutions to problems are found.'

'The human condition: lost in thought.'

'The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. It wants to draw you attention in completely. Here is a new spiritual practice for you: don't take your thoughts too seriously.'

'When you step into the Now, you step out of the content of your mind. The incessant stream of thinking slows down. Thoughts don't absorb all your attention anymore, don't draw you in totally. Gaps arise in between thoughts - spaciousness, stillness. You begin to realise how much vaster and deeper you are than your thoughts.'

'"Doing one thing at a time" is how one Zen Master defined the essence of Zen. Doing one thing at a time means to be total in what you do, to give it your complete attention. This is surrendered action - empowered action.'

'You don't need to be a Christian to understand the deep universal truth that is contained in symbolic form in the image of the cross. The cross is a torture instrument. It stands for the most extreme suffering, limitation, and helplessness a human being can encounter. Then suddenly that human being surrenders, suffers willingly, consciously, expressed through the words, "Not my will, but Thy will be done." At that moment, the cross, the torture instrument, shows its hidden face: it is also a sacred symbol, a symbol for the divine.

'That which seemed to deny the existence of any transcendental dimension to life, through surrender becomes an opening into that dimension.'

obama speech

It's rare that you wake up with renewed hope in your heart.

'This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes We Can.'