Faith Venture

Finding good sources then returning to read them often allows you to go deeply into the material. The Bible. Shakespeare. Seneca. Thomas Merton. The Desert Fathers.

These, I return to.

I confess to being off my decades-long habit of reading the Book of Proverbs every January as a way to set a foundation for the year. The excuse was spending the first ten days of the month on a cruise to Australia and New Zealand without my usual Bible.

Poor excuse, I know.

Trying to pack light, I did bring along Anam Cara by John O’Donohue and Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton. I’m still slowly going through Contemplative Prayer.

Merton’s primary intended audience focuses on monks. He was a Trappist monk.

He discusses those who enter the contemplative life thinking they already know everything figuring there are spiritual shortcuts to enlightenment. He says, “The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts.”

Continuing, he observes, “One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments.”

Cultivating beginner’s mind is also fundamental to Buddhist meditation practice.

But also, cultivating a beginner’s mind is foundational for developing curiosity.

As an example of my eclectic reading, this week’s MIT Sloan Management Review newsletter pointing to top articles linked to one on Essential Leadership Skills for this year. Not to hold you in suspense, they are fairness (how to treat people), curiosity (open to learning), and sense of humor (not as comedian, but as ability to laugh at yourself).

I can’t think of a better way to set a course for the year than the beginner’s mind. Being open to new experiences. Open to new ideas and information even if it causes you to rethink current positions. Open to God’s leading (rather than prayer as telling God what he ought to be doing).

This entry was posted on January 21, 2025 at 5:43 am and is filed under Disciplines, Wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.