I-YOUniverse

I’m currently reading 12 books—actually, 11. One “book” on my list is the Sacred Text Archive online, which contains hundreds of scripture-type books. But Internet reading ain’t the same, is it?

You see, I’ve got all this time on my hands. Due to chronic pain, I have to rest my joints and muscles a lot; my brain keeps going 100 mph, however.

Maybe I should memorize the DSM IV, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 4^th ed. This 1000+ page tome contains all the quirks, defense mechanisms, and mental disorders a psychiatrist can dream up.

Believe me, you’re in there. (Me, too.) And your insurance company has your number, the code which stands for the emotional or mental problem you want them to pay for the treatment of. It goes in a box on a form in a computer file. And it’s public knowledge. Ain’t no such thing as privacy where your insurance company’s money is concerned.

I like the classics: Shakespeare. I have all the plays on CDs, so I listen to one or two a week. I can’t keep up with the President, who read three Shakespeares.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKiWWi8rdJQ

Oh, I failed to mention how much I enjoy teaching DVDs: Shakespeare survey, history of Africa, Greek myths, Greek tragedy, surveys of Russian literature and existentialism.

Bitten by the used book bug, I find essential used books on Amazon and eBay; there’s always some book I, y’know, got to have. I’m careful, though.

For instance, C.F. Andrews, my current rage, referred to The Hidden Life of the Soul by Jean Nicolas Grou, a French Catholic writing at the time of the French Revolution. I found it on Amazon for $1777.00.

At that moment I got very nervous about the buy-it-with-one-click button.

Alibris had The Spiritual Life by Grou for $3.95, which’ll have to do for now.

Yesterday I became aware how I’m racing internally from one spiritual aid to another, trying to get better being still, better being for others, etc. It’s like all this popcorn’s exploding in my brain, and I’m compulsively consuming.

As a Nursing Home chaplain, I got a beautiful leather gilt-edged 1928 Book of Common Prayer to read with residents. I decided to start reading from that the Gospel and Epistle each week. Today the gospel was Luke 15, the waiting Father.

I’m into lectio divina. I have four or five essays on how to do that, and a small book somewhere on my shelves. I haven’t seen it in about five years.

Anyway I was lectio-ing away at the exquisite King James Version (naturally, because I’m in my Elizabethan English phase—y’know, the beauty of the language!) And these words hit home:

“And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” Luke 15:16 (KJV)

Dead bang! The Spirit uses scripture like a shrink uses the DSM IV.

Here I am, cramming anything and everything into my intellectual spiritual maw, like a whale engulfing krill by the millions.

What’s up?

Last week I jet read through Andrews’ Christ in the Silence; now I’m reading him one or two paragraphs aloud. Take this morning:

There was evidently a suppurating disease at the heart of Western civilization, draining its life-blood, which only the infusion of a life-giving spirit could staunch and heal.

C. F. Andrews, Christ in the Silence (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1933), p. 31.

Suppurating – causing to generate pus. I guess he’d seen many a suppurating wound on bodies in Calcutta. In the West he saw suppurating souls.

The earthquake, tornado, and lightning strikes passed, and finally, finally I got still. I realized, both Sandy and I have some run ins with medical types in the next few weeks. These are supposed to be fairly routine. But I’ve had more than once, a medical appointment rip up my life, shred my planner, implode my future. Even so called routine ones give me the heevie jeebies.

“You’re skittish about these appointments,” the Spirit said. No scolding. “Don’t be afraid.”

Lectio divina. That means reading only six books at once, huh?

Well, I’ll stick to 10, at least until we get the all clear from the docs.