This was a big year for Contemplative in the Mud. For one thing, the blog restarted. After six years of inactivity (did you miss me?), I picked things up where they left off. All the same influences are here. Yet it’s also fair, I think, to say that this is not just CitM but rather CitM 2.0. I’ve come a long way personally in the past decade. Restarting the blog meant taking account of the big changes in my life and catching up with some of the important developments in the life of the Church. I’d like to think the quality of the content has seen a jump this year, too.
After the relaunch of CitM at the end of July, which I marked by saying that I didn’t plan where I’d be going with the new era of the blog, August ended up being a period of re-establishing firm foundations. The fact of the matter is, Pope Francis teaches a lot about Christian contemplation. This had to be the foundation to build on. Beginning with a quick survey of how contemplation of Christ in and through others appears in the Magisterium, I rapidly shifted to showing the influence of Charles de Foucauld and René Voillaume on Pope Francis, then to highlighting the way the Holy Father defines and discusses contemplation more generally. First came exposition of that key phrase of Francis’: “our God-given aesthetic and contemplative sense.” Next came finding the decomposition and background of the same. Finally, I presented Pope Francis’ ideas about Nazareth, before giving a little soapbox talk on the fact that contemplation requires dispositions of docility, and if a Catholic were to break docility to the papal teaching office, you surely couldn’t expect a healthy contemplative life.
With Pope Francis’ teaching on contemplative themes set up as the new cornerstone of CitM 2.0, I used September to delve into that area of Christian contemplation that was both seasonally appropriate and seeing the most active development in Francis’ pontificate. September 1st through to the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi is the ecumenical Season of Creation, and thanks to papal catecheses and greater recent magisterial documents, there has been a lot of parsing of the notion of contemplation of the natural world in a spirit of gratitude to the Father. My own favourite piece from this month was the one on the eighth work of mercy. Pope Francis has proposed “grateful contemplation of God’s world” as a spiritual work of mercy, and actions taken to care for our common home as corporal works of mercy. This is huge. It’s the first time contemplative prayer has been a work of mercy, and it’s the first time a spiritual work of mercy directly corresponded to a corporal one. I also discussed Hildegard of Bingen (one of Pope Benedict XVI’s favs), some local effects of climate change, and the papal trip to Mongolia. The summary post on the place of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in different Christian contemplative experiences—of God in himself, in the mysteries of Jesus, of Christ in our neighbour, and of the natural world in gratitude—took all this into one bundle.
Throughout September, I also published some side pieces on Charles de Foucauld and his spiritual family. First, there was the journalistic story of transgender people visiting the Pope at Wednesday General Audiences; I did the research to show how this news-breaking series of events comes through the Little Sisters of Jesus in Ostia. Then, I teased out the metaphor of “contemplative in the mud” with texts from Brother Charles. Next, I spoke about transfiguration of the body in the case of Little Sister Magdeleine. Finally, I gave a complete English translation of the “book” by René Voillaume that the Holy Father gave the priests of the Diocese of Rome this past Holy Week, then another of the address Pope Francis gave to the Little Sisters of Jesus gathered in Rome for their General Chapter.
The rest of October was a mixed bag. The apostolic exhortation on the climate crisis, Laudate Deum, was published just as the Season of Creation finished, so I gave a contemplative reading of that. I did roughly the same thing for the apostolic exhortation on Thérèse of Lisieux, C’est la Confiance, that came out less than two weeks later. Charles de Foucauld’s presence in Synod documents and in a papal catechesis caught my eye, as did contemplation in Pope Francis’ foreword to a Bible commentary. Nazareth wasn’t out of my sight in all this; a two-part study of the theme in Marcel Văn’s Conversations and notebooks added dimensions to the topic that complemented the aspects common to the spiritual family of Charles de Foucauld that CitM 1.0 had known. During this month, my biggest post—both in terms of popularity and in terms of the future direction I would take—was on how Marcel Văn, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila might be considered heralds of a contemplative spirituality for survivors of clerical abuse.
November was the month of exploring Marcel Văn and clerical abuse. This is a topic dear to my heart, and the timing is appropriate to my own life. October had been the tenth anniversary of the preparatory grace that Văn gave me to weather the storm that hit in December (of ten years ago). It seemed like the right time to give the fruit of a decade of maturation, meditation, and experience. I wanted to start with Marcel’s dedication to Jesus in the tabernacle. But after that, it was ten articles on clerical abuse. The whole ten-part series can be accessed from this post. I will simply say, this means a lot to me. If there is anyone who could be a Doctor of the Universal Church in the abuse crisis, it is Marcel Văn. The sheer breadth and depth of his writing on abuse has, as far as I’m aware, no parallel among persons proposed as candidates for sainthood.
Before getting to a new theme for December, I wanted to commemorate a day of great significance to me, December 2nd, the day John of the Cross was abducted to be tortured. This is actually the same day that a priest gave me an order that changed my life like no other. We certainly wouldn’t have the series on Marcel Văn and clerical abuse without it. Let’s leave it at that.
December’s theme was getting back to Pope Francis, but bringing in how he dovetails with Carmelite teaching saints. One strong emphasis of my posts this month was ideology—and how contemplation in a Christian sense is not one. Rather, it is a relationship, love, communion, experience of beauty. Regarding the Holy Father in particular I gave details on another of his addresses about contemplative prayer, and I detailed how the Pope’s detractors, who seem convinced that he is anti-contemplative, are actually the ones deviating from traditional sources on Christian contemplation. Little posts on Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and poetry in large part connected to themes of Pope Francis, especially the fact that ideology is not what we’re after.
The last big post of the year was about the Holy Father’s non-magisterial discussion of tactile phenomenology and metaphors for faith and contemplation. This is something that I could never have addressed without first having shown the Pope’s teaching on what contemplation is, the link between beauty and contemplation, and the importance of contemplation, but also the non-negotiable place of the abuse crisis in the relaunched version of this blog. Without all these dimensions firmly established, no one could write very well about how touch is so human, communicative, and religious—and a basis for thinking about Christian contemplation. After all the developments and musings of the past five months, though, I finally got there. You could say this was the capstone for the whole annual endeavour of restarting the blog. It is indeed one of my favourite posts from the last twelve years.
Of course, there are other things I’ve been up to, too. There are all the quotes—which I now present on social media as memes. Not to mention my little poems—my small practical assurances of the importance of beauty to a contemplative soul, even when their quality is lacking. While the latter might be at the same level as in CitM 1.0, I would like to think the former are much better and more digestible now than they were in the past.
What does the next year hold? I have no idea. I relaunched the blog with zero preparation and forethought. Somehow, it all worked out. I’ll leave it in the hands of Anyone who might direct things and bring all the developments together better than my little brain could.
I appreciate you sticking with me. Thank you especially if you have given Pope Francis a chance to teach you what Christian contemplation is and how it is going in the 21st century. I am doubly grateful if you have given Marcel Văn and the abuse crisis time and concern and care.
See you in 2024! May God keep us all small enough to fit in his hands and carry us where he needs us to go.
Contemplative in the Mud 