Practice

[zvi]

I feel like I've made real progress with my body prayer practice. I don't get to it every day, but I do most days, and more importantly, I go back to it.

I why to expand my practice to something more...intellectual? wordy? thoughtful?

Anyway, I've been reading this book on spiritual practice, and one of the practices described is a reading practice:

1) Read aloud
2) Memorize the text
3) Meditate on the text

I don't know if I'm really the sort of person who memorizes and reads aloud, but the idea of wrestling with a text appeals to me greatly. I have the idea that I would maybe copy, by hand, into a notebook, the text and my meditations. Either that, or just journal here about what I was thinking, but in a close reading, page by page way.

I don't think it would work in my life to make it a daily practice, not the writing party, but a weekly practice, something I did on Saturday while the laundry was running, I could see that.

The question becomes, of course, 'what should I read?' We don't have a single text, as Unitarian Universalists. We claim by name the Christian bible, but I don't know if we have any texts on understanding the books through our contemporary philosophy/theology. And there's many more texts I could imagine as appropriate, but I have no idea where to start.

+ Rumi
+ Thoreau and the transcendentalists
+ Qur'an
+ Dao te ching
+ Singing the Living Tradition (grey hymnal)
+ Confucius
+ Martin Luther King
+ Gandhi
+ Augustine
+ Dickinson
+ Plath
+ Dorothy Parker
+ bell hooks
+ Cambridge Platform
+ Humanist Manifestos

If one can learn from anyone and everything, picking a starting place is so hard. I don't know what to do with myself.