Just three things on my Must Read list this week:

Masha Gessen, One Year After Trump’s Election, Revisiting “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”  (Ed.: From Nov. 2017):

Trump has moved faster, assaulting our senses in more ways and more often than I (and, I think, most other people) expected. The sun still rises every morning, but an early-morning barrage of Trump’s tweets might obscure it. The word “Presidential” has gradually faded from the conversation: no one expects the President to live up to the standards of speech and behavior that his office would seem to demand. Instead, we have settled into constant low-level dread: a state in which a person can function, but can hardly be creative or look into the future. A Russian writer who blogs under the name Alexander Ivanov-Petrov, writing of a different time and place, has called this state of living “provincial time.” It is a time in which people continue to think and create, but “in some fundamental way lack agency or the ability to be fully aware of themselves.”

Fred Bahnson, The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere:

Like the Kardashians, the American Christian family has become obsessed with its own profile. It has become faith as public spectacle, faith as political engagement, as party affiliation, as reputation—anything but faith as paradox, as mystery, as the hidden and seductive dance between spiritual desire and satiation, the prolonging of a hunger so alarmingly vast and yet so subtle that it disappears the moment it’s made public.

In early monastic Christianity, that hunger was acknowledged and channeled, given shape and form and expression. It went by different names—contemplatio (silent prayer) or hesychia (stillness)—which led first to an inner union with Christ, and then to a deep engagement with the suffering of the world. The order was important. In John Cassian’s Conferences, a fifth-century account of the early Christian monastic movement in the deserts of Egypt, a certain Abba Isaac describes how the monks modeled their prayer on Jesus’ practice of going up a mountain alone to pray; those who wished to pray “must withdraw from all the worry and turbulence of the crowd.” In that state of spiritual yearning, God’s presence would become known. “He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for,” Abba Isaac said. “He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath.”

What the early monks and the Christian mystics who followed sought was union—an intense experience of inwardness that is glaringly absent in what many of us get from American Christianity today. Perhaps this absence is the real reason for the mass exodus from churches. Perhaps it is not Christianity that many followers are disappointed in, but Christendom…

A significant fraction of Bahnson’s essay is centered on his experience at a conference organized by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest.  Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 in the interest of reviving the Christian contemplative tradition:

“My definition for mysticism,” Rohr said, “is experiential knowledge of the Holy, the transcendent, the divine, God—if you want to use that word, but I’m not tied to it.” Experiential knowledge, which differs from textbook knowledge, “will always be spoken humbly, because true spiritual knowledge is always partial. You know you don’t know the whole mystery. But even one little peek into one little corner of the mystery is more than enough.”

Rohr’s experiential knowledge of the Holy came one summer evening at age ten. While visiting his cousin’s farm in western Kansas, he lay on a little patch of velvety grass hidden behind some chokecherry bushes. He was there alone, just looking up at the stars, when he felt the world open up. “It doesn’t sound very original at all,” he said and laughed, “but I knew the world was good, that I was good, and that I somehow belonged to that good world. It was what the Buddhists would call waking up, overcoming your separateness.” He had no words for it as a ten-year-old boy, but he credits the experience with giving him the psychic self-confidence that would later carry him through thirteen years of formation, the training in theology and philosophy required to become a Franciscan priest.

Noreen Malone wrote a long essay for Slate on the issues Brookline has had with public schools and COVID, How the School Reopening Debate Is Tearing One of America’s Most Elite Suburbs Apart.  The essay is long because the conflicts are complex.  They’re not easily summarized.  That stated, this paragraph jumped out at me:

“What’s very clear is that many teachers are distrustful because they have been in deeply unsafe situations for a very long time.” Teachers are asked to deal with school shootings, violent children, aggressive adults, poverty, online bullying—a host of complex social problems that aren’t part of their job description, [former Brookline School Committee member Sharon Abramowitz] said. “Educators are so abandoned, they no longer trust in their own system to protect them. In Brookline, they are questioning whether or not core educational functions should be delivered even in conditions, as in Brookline, where public health risks are being highly, highly mitigated.”

Ending on a Positive Note

Marcus Westberg, Wintry Scenes from a Swedish Wonderland:

With his foreign assignments canceled for the year, a photographer refocuses on his homeland — and finds plenty to admire.