Male Spirituality

Classes are going along very well. There is a whole bunch more reading here than at Tuks, and if I don't keep up with the work each day, then it gets too overwhelming. I mentioned the course i'm doing on Men in Ministry (all the lady students are jealous), here is the great reading list:

• Confessions - Augustine
• From Wild Man to Wise Man - Rohr and Martos
• The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
• The River Why - Duncan
• Boundary Leaders - Gunderson
• Redeeming Men - Boyd and et. al.
• Calling and Character - Willimon
• Brother to a Dragonfly - Campbell
• The Spirituality of Men - Culbertson
• Jayber Crow - Wendell Berry
• Wherever you go, there you are - Jon Kabat-Zinn

I had a paper due yesterday entitled 'Man Enough? What it meant to be a man.' It was okay. Tomorrow I'm playing Ultimate for the fall league team i'm on (no name for us yet). Some seminary folks are coming over to the house to watch college football as well. Sunday I'm going church hopping. Elizabeth and I may try the Society of Friends (Quakers) and see what they do.

Here are some hot quotes that I read last night in The Spirituality of Men. For some reason they appeal to me.

Discernment is a way of life. To live a discerned life is a commitment to a way of being. It is to stand before God and other persons somehow holding what I value most from what I have learned from life in such a firm and gentle grasp that it does its work for me; yet I can let it go to be fashioned further. Discernment is not something to be turned on and off- to be pulled out at decision time and then filed away again. Commitment to discernment is fidelity to a way of life in which I sift through the movements I feel within myself. Through this process I gradually experience a congruity which I recognise.

Rosemary Roner, Discernment.

There is a truth within the self which yearns to be known, and the expression of this truth makes a person exist, be real, in her own eyes, ultimately in the eyes of others. The collective wisdom of [hu]mankind holds a deep and abiding belief in the idea that there is, within each person, some substantive truth waiting to be known, waiting to be expressed. When psychologists speak about someone as having an 'authentic personality,' they mean that the individual has managed to express what is genuine, truthful and real about himself to others.

Marsha Sinetar, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics