Alleluia! Christ is risen! I hope you all had a blessed Lent, impactful Holy Week, and beautiful Easter.
My Lent was excellent, but between writing daily posts here, a busy time at work, and having the great medieval theologian St. Bonaventure as my Lenten companion, it was also very ‘heady’. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I get a lot out of stretching my intellectual and mostly dormant academic muscles. But, as any theologian worthy of the title would tell you — St. Bonaventure most definitely included — time spent in the head needs to be leavened with time spent in the heart. Time spent on the surface, the sparkly realm of new ideas and intellectual discovery needs to be balanced by time in the depths, the interior self that can be at times warm and cozy and at others cold and shadowy and filled with monsters. (As Richard Zimler wrote: “Beware of men who see no mystery when they look at their reflection.”)
This is true generally, but is especially true in matters of faith. After all, the goal is not to know about God, but to know God. And paradoxically, one of the best places we can encounter God is within our own self. At the same time, neither do we want to be like the young C.G. Jung, who felt his academic persona and inner self so disconnected that he called them “Personality 1” and “Personality 2.” After some shocking mystical experiences, Jung sought to integrate his personality by spending more intentional time in his inner life, and documenting these experiences — visions, dreams, coincidences, and so on — in a journal, his famous Red Book. And in a small way, that’s what I hope to do in this Easter season here on the blog: Spend some intentional time in the inner life and reflecting upon it. Not to share the details my own experiences, but to talk about practices we can undertake in order to let the soul’s voice be heard amidst the din of thoughts, ideas, and anxieties that so often get the loudest and last word.
To some extent this will revisit the first series I ever did here, on sacred practices. It will also touch on themes from my series on the sanctified imagination. But I hope to bring these all together in a different way: not as discrete practices, but as a tool kit or box of crayons to help us explore the inner life. I hope you come along for the journey with me.
Matthew Root 