WORD

I've been reading some  Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, and Nahman Bialik recently.  The first two authors I was inspired to pick up due to my friend's birthday party.  My friend spoke about the importance of personal identity in Christ and referred to several of these author's works at his party.  I was incredibly refreshed and inspired by Henri Nouwen's writings, Beloved, and , Can you Drink this Cup?.  It seems that Nouwen's perspective on faith is tempered by down to earth experiences and personal life stories.  He tries to de-contextualize faith and view it primarily from a perspective of relationship, with God first and then others.  Nouwen's philosophies can be summed up in one word to me, and that is "relationship."

Thomas Merton's compilation, When the Trees Have Nothing to Say, is a stockpile of his journal entries on nature.  He had a very close relationship with nature and the entries within this journal reflect his abstract yet focussed way of encountering God through moments when he was surrounded by the earth.   His commentaries could also be labelled as aesthetic experiences with nature in my opinion.  Those moments when His person found a nexus between what he was beholding in the reflective, natural, within his body, in juxtaposition to what he viewed in the supernatural.  Moments when something spiritual poked its head through the holes of reality. Reading Merton is like taking a walk through the park, a very long, deep, and contemplative walk!

Lastly I'm still in the midst of reading Bialik, the Father of Zionism and man who single handedly revived the Hebrew language.  I was first captured by Bialik in my University Judaism class, in which I was required to read his poetry.  Picking up one of Bialik's poems was like reading the dripping, metaphorical, passages of Isaiah or the Psalms.  The only accessible work I could find by him was "The Random Harvest."  "The Random Harvest" like Merton's work, is  a compilation of short stories and poems Bialik never published, but which someone else found after his death and released to the public.  Bialik's personal writings are sandwiched between biographical accounts and a lifelong timeline in this piece.  Reading the author's unfinished stories and unreleased poems makes me feel like I have a peek into his living room, or into the inner corridors of his heart and mind. Having this inside perspective on Merton and Bialik is helpful, because it helps me feel like I am surrounded by other like minded mystics.  The fact that they each lived in previous centuries is even cooler, because it let's me know that this spiritual strain was not recently developed, but is something that people have tapped into, in similar fashions for decades.