Father Tim Blackwood

I write here because the ordinary objects would not leave me alone.

A watering can with a split rose. A window that sticks in August and sticks again the August after. A wick after the flame has gone, still warm. I hold one up to the light and stay with it until something surfaces, and then I stop. That is the practice. I call it the liturgy of embodiment — a large phrase for a small habit: attending to weight, repetition, fatigue, touch, and the maintenance that never stays done.

I held a religious office once. I do not hold one now. The title remained because the attention did — the listening, the sitting with, the unwillingness to hurry anyone to a conclusion. Not a claim to a pulpit.

What I was taught, and what Teilhard de Chardin confirmed, is that matter and spirit are not two shelves. There is no seam where the physical stops and the sacred starts. So the essays decline the lesson at the end. The window will stick again, and mean no more the second time than the first.

Some of what is here goes further out — to scripts nobody can read, to meanings simply gone. The discipline does not change. Attend to what is in front of you. Leave the unknown intact.

Nothing here is trying to get you past the world. The most I have managed is to learn, slowly and with my hands, how to carry a little of it.

For the longer account of the practice, read The Liturgy of Embodiment. Or begin with the themes — the things the writing keeps returning to.