Posted on by Kurt Bodling

on reading about contemplation

“If, then, you are intent on ‘becoming a contemplative’ you will probably waste your time and do yourself considerable harm by reading this book. But if in some sense you are already a contemplative (whether you know it or not makes little difference), you will perhaps not only read the book with a kind of obscure awareness that it is meant for you, but you may even find yourself having to read the thing whether it fits in with your plans or not. In that event, just read it. Do not watch for results, for they will already have been produced long before you will be capable of seeing them. And pray for me, because from now on we are, in some strange way, good friends.”

Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003 (NOTE: Merton wrote this in 1959!), pp. 2-3

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

lectio’s depths

"Lectio is a practice in which you slow down, creating space in which you can gently learn to seek, and discern, God’s presence hidden in the sacred text and in the subtle stirrings of your heart and mind.

“By opening up to the divine presence through the written word, you simultaneously open yourself up to the deeply relational nature of the Christian contemplative life, which is indeed the heart of the mystical path.”

McColman, Carl. The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism: an Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality. Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2023, pp. 256-257.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

no books in the woods

“If one takes anything to the woods to read, he seldom reads it; it does not taste good with such primitive air.”

Burroughs, John. “A Bed of Boughs” in “Locusts and Wild Honey” Volume 4 of The Writings of John Burroughs. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1907, p. 176.

Comment: I’ve read of new hikers taking along a weight of books and not reading them. One thinks one will have all the time in the world to read, but doesn’t reckon on being weary at the end of the day and still needing to collect water, prepare a meal, and so on. Burroughs, I think, was reaching back to something even more basic: that the idea of books clashes with the raw vibrancy of the woods. Maybe it was the idea of paper – the remnants of dead trees – up against the throbbing life of still standing trees.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Bible reading and being in nature

“By the reading of Scripture I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green, light is sharper on the outlines of the forest and the hills and the whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music in the earth beneath my feet.” (8 August 1949)

Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981. (originally published 1953), p. 115-116.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

texts and the student

“The student who fears God earnestly seeks his will in the holy scriptures. Holiness makes him gentle, so that he does not revel in controversy; a knowledge of languages protects him from uncertainty over unfamiliar words or phrases, and a knowledge of certain essential things protects him from ignorance of the significance and detail of what is used by way of imagery. Thus equipped, and with the assistance of reliable texts derived from the manuscripts with careful attention to the need for emendation, he should approach the task of analysing and resolving the ambiguities of scriptures.”

St Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Teaching Book 3, paragraph 1. Translated by R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), page 68.

Augustine thought it important for students (especially students of Holy Scripture) to have ready access to good quality texts. This is really a foreshadowing of the Renaissance humanists’ call to return to the sources (ad fontes).

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Commonplaces, part 3 of 3

(In which we take a whack at translating this topic to the digital age.)

I suppose that most of you have been thinking “Yeah, but this app …” or “If you just scanned that …” or something along those lines. True. There’s always “an app for that.” (Sidenote: I just learned that, while Apple trademarked the phrase from their commercial, the trademark only covers using “the phrase in relation to retail store services featuring computer software and services.” Brian X. Chen, in “Wired” 11 October 2010, link.)

I mentioned Obsidian in an earlier post. I got there by way of paper-based note systems I learned in school. Then a long period of just making marks in the margins of my books as I read them. (Really interesting today when I come across a dated marginal note and I think to myself “I read this book 20 years ago? Got no memory of that happening.” But it also tells me that certain themes have been in my thinking for a long time.) Next, there were the years of laptops and my knowing that there had to be a way to use the computer to help with this, but not wanting to start down a path of, say, creating a database and having the software company die or – possibly worse – finding a simpler, better solution and feeling I had to copy everything over. Some time back, I thought I’d found the solution in Evernote.

Evernote does all kinds of great things for note-takers. One thing that really grabbed me was that it would sync my notes between devices. At one time users could sync several devices for free, say your work computer, your home laptop, and your phone. Same notes anywhere! Then, of course, the company saw it needed more income and cut free syncing down to two devices (which also kept larger groups of people, say a company or family, from doing this with a pile of devices). That was still okay with me because I wasn’t using Evernote for work or to share notes with anyone. And I could always copy and paste notes into email on my phone to send myself something at work, if need be. Clunky, but it worked. Finally, Evernote just started to get too feature-filled for me, the antipodes of their target power users.

I added Simplenote to my app collection. Also free. And I could sync my couple of devices. It is, as the name implies, simple. I use it to make shopping lists on my way to the hardware store or to make quick reminders to myself. Basically, I use it as a mid-term memory adjunct. Then I delete these notes. After finding that Simplenote was working for me, I started copying my reading notes out of Evernote to Simplenote.

A long process, yes, but it gave me a chance to do some typo fixing and to add keywords, or tags. It had occurred to me that the way Evernote seemed to be trending, they could either decide that everybody had to ante up for a monthly subscription, or they could be sold to another company that would take the whole thing in some other direction, or – worst case – they could just die and take my notes with them. In short, I was making a backup. At some point I got that done, but then needed to double enter any reading notes in order to keep the Evernote original and the Simplenote backup in step. This would have been easier if Simplenote had an API that could be used by IFTTT or Zapier or some other service that automates actions on the web. (If you don’t know those tools [both companies were founded back in 2011], here’s a sketch of how they work: say you are out hiking the Appalachian Trail and want your Instagram photos also to show up on your WordPress blog … rather than posting twice, you enter some information into, e.g., IFTTT about the two sites you want to connect; then describe the thing you want to happen; and from then on when you send a pic to Instagram it will automagically also show up on your blog. I’ve heard of somebody actually doing that.)

Anyway, the short of it is that a) my process was still taking up too much time; b) I was still concerned about a company making radical and precipitous changes (Anybody like me still sending out Tweets? No, I didn’t think so.); c) I was/am still nervous about putting the work into making all these reading notes and not having control over where they are stored somewhere out there “in the cloud”; d) I’m still concerned about software updates rendering my notes no longer readable or accessible; and e) I’m still cheap enough to think there must be free options available, or at least as free as making paper notes was.

That’s where Obsidian comes in.

It’s free software. Instead of storing your notes up on their servers somewhere, they’re stored on your own computer (so making the regular backup is on you). Your notes aren’t kept in some format that’ll be difficult to move to another platform, they’re text files – specifically Markdown files so you can easily input basic formatting that plain text files don’t allow for. If you need syncing, that’s possible. Linking notes to each other is really simple. Searching for that one note you need is also very simple. And, yes, you can use tags to collate notes (this is the 21st century after all). You don’t need an Internet connection to use it. Obsidian is one of those apps that can be either simple or complex, depending on what you need it to do.

My bibliographic references go into a note, each of the reading notes goes into its own Obsidian note. They’re linked to each other. No indexing needed, because it’s all searchable. Which means I can do this: search my whole commonplace collection for a term; among the results I spot a reading note that’s particularly apt; click back to the source bibliography info; see a list of all my reading notes taken from that source. And then click backwards through those steps to check other results. Or jump ahead with another search.

And in the end, for me, it’s just the tool I need to keep my Commonplaces handy, sortable, searchable, copyable … usable.

Commonplaces. Notes from your universe of sources kept in one common place.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Commonplaces, part 2 of 3

(In which we continue to extract text from Theodore Graebner’s The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker.)

“The commonplace book may vary in size according to the purpose which it is to serve. Any note-book will do if the literary task is limited to a single object. … Since, however, the preacher and theologian does a great amount of reading which has no immediate objective; and since it is impossible even for the best memory to retain the vast array of facts and data that, in the course of systematic reading, pass through consciousness; and since not only the facts but the sources and authorities from which they are derived are frequently of the highest importance,–it is an absolute requisite of fruitful reading that significant data be retained by means of some mechanical device. And the mechanical device which will serve every literary purpose, whatever it may be, is the commonplace book. … Its single purpose is that of serving as a repository of facts which, though we have no present intention of embodying them in a paper, essay, etc., yet appear worthy of preservation in such a form that they will be available whenever the occasion arises.” (pages 98-99)

So, what’s the process? Graebner explains his well-thought-out technique:

“Get a large blank-book bound in stout boards. It may have its pages lined, if the owner so prefers. On the title-page write: ‘Excerpts A,’ or any other title which will render easy later references to it in your Index Rerum [index of things]. Write only on the right hand pages, leaving each opposite page blank. What shall go into this book? Anything that occurs to you as possessing such value that you can imagine some future necessity of reference to it.” (page 99)

A little later he describes the book this way: “A common-place book should not be too small, nor, again, too bulky. A volume of one to two hundred pages, about 8×10 inches in size, will prove most convenient. Needless to say, the paper should be good enough to permit the use of pen and ink.” (page 100)

“Take the time to copy out the portions that are of value, writing at the head the complete title of the book, and opposite each extract the page on which it is found.” (page 100) Copy them out of whatever resource, book, article, and so on is at hand. Copy these extracts out in whatever order you read them.

It’s notable that Graebner directs his readers to use their commonplace books to extract information from books that they do not own. This is for books you borrow from a library, a friend, a co-worker. If the book is on your own shelf, if the journal article is in your own filing cabinet, you don’t need to spend the time copying it out. How then do you capture information from your own books? You use your “Index Rerum.” Let Graebner explain:

“All lines of literary endeavor meet in the Index Rerum. Proper indexing alone preserves for future usefulness the results of study and research. What the most powerful mind is unable to do,–to record the data of any department of knowledge and their sources,–the Index Rerum will do, and do it unfailingly.” (page 122)

“Our object must be to index every volume to which we have devoted study, and to index it with a minimum expenditure of time and energy. The most practical method is not that of continuous indexing. By this I mean the making of entries during the reading of a book.” (page 124)

He then goes on to discuss the comparative advantages of using a card index or a blank book. Using a blank book as your Index Rerum of course means that it’s impossible to interfile terms in absolute alphabetical order, but Graebner assumes that it won’t be a heavy time burden to scan down a page of references – such as: Grace; Gospel; God, Attributes of; Government; Greed; Grief; Glory; … to find where you’ve indexed the concept of Gentleness.

So even though Graebner comes down on the side of a blank book over a card index, he allows as how if he were starting over he would use a looseleaf notebook as a way to combine the advantages of both systems while overcoming many disadvantages of either.

Here’s how it would work in a looseleaf notebook. Write the subject word at the top of a page. Under it enter the brief reference to either your commonplace book volume and page number (for extracts from books and pamphlets you don’t own), or the book title and page number (for items you own). The big advantages of the looseleaf notebook are that you can get your index terms in strict alphabetical order, and that you don’t have unused pages wasting space.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

Commonplaces, part 1 of 3

(In which we define “Commonplace” in the context of reading and study.)

What are “commonplaces”? Why do I tag the quotations that I post here “commonplaces”?

Wikipedia can tell you that: “Commonplace books (or commonplaces) are a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They have been kept from antiquity, and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: sententiae (often with the compiler’s responses), notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes. Entries are most often organized under systematic subject headings and differ functionally from journals or diaries, which are chronological and introspective.” Source in Wikipedia

I’ve read various explanations for why the word “commonplace” is used this way. The simplest is that hereby you gather all your reading notes into a single location – a common place – rather than spreading them out over several locations.

But, wait! There’s more!!

A little over a century ago, beginning in 1916, Professor Theodore Graebner (of Concordia Seminary, Saint Louis, MO) began a series of lectures to the seminarians on the topic of their self-directed continuing education after they entered parish ministry. Mainly at the students’ request, his lectures were published in 1921 under the title The Pastor as Student and Literary Worker. I came across the 2nd edition (1925) around the time I graduated from seminary. Graebner’s system for capturing useful information really caught my eye.

But as the personal computer era was dawning, I never really used his paper-based system in any sustained way. I’ve recently begun using a free app called “Obsidian” to organize reading notes on my laptop. It seems to provide me with the things Graebner laid out all those years ago, with the addition of hyperlinks between notes. Obsidian also brings all the advantages and disadvantages of working in digital media that we’ve learned to enjoy or struggle with. As this post isn’t about Obsidian, but about Commonplaces I want to copy out some of Graebner’s words. I think they’re fundamental to any note-taking system, even in the digital age.

"Wide and diversified reading, continued through many years of application, is the essential thing. There is no royal road to literary accomplishment, as little as there is a royal road to knowledge. …

“How to gather, classify and dispose the matter which goes into composition and how to make such matter readily available for elaboration into literary form,–be it a newspaper article, a sermon, a conference paper, a Synodical essay, a treatise, or a book,–and how to perform this work with a minimum of wasted time and fruitless effort, requires, first of all, the application of certain mechanics of authorship, and the keystone to this preliminary work is the commonplace book.” (page 98)

Well, there it is: the reason for the commonplace book is to help you organize notes from your “wide and diversified reading” so you can create your own wide variety of literary works.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the Bible in solitude

“The Psalms are the true garden of the solitary and the Scriptures are his Paradise. They reveal their secrets to him because, in his extreme poverty and humility, he has nothing else to live by except their fruits. For the true solitary the reading of Scripture ceases to be an ‘exercise’ among other exercises, a means of ‘cultivating’ the intellect or ‘the spiritual life’ or ‘appreciating the liturgy.’ To those who read Scripture in an academic or aesthetic or merely devotional way the Bible indeed offers pleasant refreshment and profitable thoughts. But to learn the inner secrets of the Scriptures we must make them our true daily bread, find God in them when we are in greatest need–and usually when we can find Him nowhere else and have nowhere else to look!” (Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), pp. 126-127)

Merton tells us that reading God’s Word changes from a work we do and becomes a refreshment God does for us as we go deeper into solitude. Without other voices telling us “Look, here is Christ” or “There he is” we can become more comfortable and familiar with God through the Bible than before.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the source and norm

“There is only one God, brethren, and we learn about him only from sacred Scripture. It is therefore our duty to become acquainted with what Scripture proclaims and to investigate its teachings thoroughly. We should believe them in the sense that the Father wills, thinking of the Son in the way the Father wills, and accepting the teaching he wills to give us with regard to the Holy Spirit. Sacred Scripture is God’s gift to us and it should be understood in the way that he intends: we should not do violence to it by interpreting it according to our own preconceived ideas.”

Hippolytus. “A treatise against the heresy of Noetus.” Quoted in the Liturgy of the Hours, Office of Readings for December 23 (Vol. 1, p. 370-371) and cited there as: Cap. 9-12: PG 10, 815-819

Note: Saint Hippolytus, who lived in the decades either side of the year 200, writes that people learn about God only from sacred Scripture. Which sounds to me like a sola Scriptura thought. He also here makes clear that interpreters need to get from the Bible what God intends us to get, and not what our preconceived ideas tell us is there.

Holy Scripture is, in other words, the source and norm for all our talk about God. Or it should be.