ESSAYS
Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings
Wood Lake Books, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55145-597-6
www.woodlakebooks.com/search/find/title:mccaslin
Arousing the Spirit is not just for the religious or for Christians, but also for anyone who is alienated from religion but interested in spirituality… It is even for atheists who can’t accept a theistic God who manipulates things from outside on behalf of ‘his chosen ones’ or tribe of ‘true believers.’
These writings by author-poet Susan McCaslin offer fresh and alternative ways of seeing and understanding our relationship with the Spirit. Christian-based, the 14 pieces that make up this collection (on topics such as perfectionism, paradise, the Beatitudes, Revelation, and presence) range beyond the compass of traditional Christianity to reveal universal wisdom and meaning.
Written in beautifully nuanced language that articulates her clear thinking and captures her poet heart, the book reflects the central passions of McCaslin’s life: “mysticism (or the direct experience of the sacred) and its place in everyday life; peacemaking and justice;…the relation of spirituality and sexuality; and the significance of Jesus of Nazareth once divested of outworn theology and his sappy Hollywood persona.” McCaslin believes that actions speak louder than words or beliefs, and her pieces encourage us to explore ways to live life as a “mystical dance.”
Each chapter is prefaced by one of McCaslin’s exquisite poems, leading the reader into a place of quiet contemplation from which to explore the writing.
"Always intimate, always wise, Susan McCaslin brings alive the depths and heights of spiritual life with a rare persuasiveness. I come away from her writing convinced of the mystical realities she describes so vividly."
--Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun
Sample From Chapter One: The Problem with Perfect
When we think of the legacy of the mystics, we hear much of an ascent through stages of mystical perfection to ultimate unity, fulfillment, or realization. In the east, the quest for unified being has been called enlightenment. Such traditions of “the perfect” can be useful today but they must be re-contextualized.
Perhaps the kind of perfectionism that spoils both art and life is that which rejects the transitory and limited. Great artists know that, as Wallace Stevens states, “the imperfect is our paradise.” Leonard Cohen gets it right when he sings, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” In fact, however much we affirm what Stevens calls the “blessed rage for order,” the universe as we know it is not a neat and tidy place.
Greatness involves giving over our little orderings in the grand Chaos to an order beyond our present comprehension. We are opened to a needful disturbance. In other words, God’s kitchen is a fecund mess that ends in a festive banquet. The vastness of star-strewn space suggests a cosmic order, but not a rigid, fathomable one. This is why poets, artists, city planners, architects, and ecologists feel a part of something larger than their original intent. In the creative process, plots and plans may go askew as newness invades. Perhaps heaven is not a topiary garden but a rain forest with falling trees, rotting nurse logs, and the mysterious activity of microbes.
Perfectionism resists this fertile chaos out of fear: it wants to evade the essential breaking open. The ego likes to keep to the past, to safe strategies that have worked before, while Spirit says, “Behold, I destroy your blunders and pasty efforts and blow them to smithereens to make all things new.”
To enter such a process of kenosis or letting go requires courage, because one never knows what will have to be sacrificed. Sometimes what a writer thinks are the finest bits have to go. Sometimes they seem like clearings of the throat that must be resigned to the waste bin. Perhaps those Tibetan monks who make sand mandalas are closer to the truth of art than those who are too much focused on product. After weeks of painstaking labour, they consign the work of their hands to the sea.
Copyright © Susan McCaslin
Wood Lake Books, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55145-597-6
www.woodlakebooks.com/search/find/title:mccaslin
Arousing the Spirit is not just for the religious or for Christians, but also for anyone who is alienated from religion but interested in spirituality… It is even for atheists who can’t accept a theistic God who manipulates things from outside on behalf of ‘his chosen ones’ or tribe of ‘true believers.’
These writings by author-poet Susan McCaslin offer fresh and alternative ways of seeing and understanding our relationship with the Spirit. Christian-based, the 14 pieces that make up this collection (on topics such as perfectionism, paradise, the Beatitudes, Revelation, and presence) range beyond the compass of traditional Christianity to reveal universal wisdom and meaning.
Written in beautifully nuanced language that articulates her clear thinking and captures her poet heart, the book reflects the central passions of McCaslin’s life: “mysticism (or the direct experience of the sacred) and its place in everyday life; peacemaking and justice;…the relation of spirituality and sexuality; and the significance of Jesus of Nazareth once divested of outworn theology and his sappy Hollywood persona.” McCaslin believes that actions speak louder than words or beliefs, and her pieces encourage us to explore ways to live life as a “mystical dance.”
Each chapter is prefaced by one of McCaslin’s exquisite poems, leading the reader into a place of quiet contemplation from which to explore the writing.
"Always intimate, always wise, Susan McCaslin brings alive the depths and heights of spiritual life with a rare persuasiveness. I come away from her writing convinced of the mystical realities she describes so vividly."
--Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun
Sample From Chapter One: The Problem with Perfect
When we think of the legacy of the mystics, we hear much of an ascent through stages of mystical perfection to ultimate unity, fulfillment, or realization. In the east, the quest for unified being has been called enlightenment. Such traditions of “the perfect” can be useful today but they must be re-contextualized.
Perhaps the kind of perfectionism that spoils both art and life is that which rejects the transitory and limited. Great artists know that, as Wallace Stevens states, “the imperfect is our paradise.” Leonard Cohen gets it right when he sings, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” In fact, however much we affirm what Stevens calls the “blessed rage for order,” the universe as we know it is not a neat and tidy place.
Greatness involves giving over our little orderings in the grand Chaos to an order beyond our present comprehension. We are opened to a needful disturbance. In other words, God’s kitchen is a fecund mess that ends in a festive banquet. The vastness of star-strewn space suggests a cosmic order, but not a rigid, fathomable one. This is why poets, artists, city planners, architects, and ecologists feel a part of something larger than their original intent. In the creative process, plots and plans may go askew as newness invades. Perhaps heaven is not a topiary garden but a rain forest with falling trees, rotting nurse logs, and the mysterious activity of microbes.
Perfectionism resists this fertile chaos out of fear: it wants to evade the essential breaking open. The ego likes to keep to the past, to safe strategies that have worked before, while Spirit says, “Behold, I destroy your blunders and pasty efforts and blow them to smithereens to make all things new.”
To enter such a process of kenosis or letting go requires courage, because one never knows what will have to be sacrificed. Sometimes what a writer thinks are the finest bits have to go. Sometimes they seem like clearings of the throat that must be resigned to the waste bin. Perhaps those Tibetan monks who make sand mandalas are closer to the truth of art than those who are too much focused on product. After weeks of painstaking labour, they consign the work of their hands to the sea.
Copyright © Susan McCaslin
