1
At my Thursday night Spirituality Book Club, we’re a gloriously jumbled group of men. There’s an electrical engineer and a financial advisor. A teacher and a security system installer. A retired insurance adjuster and a young rehab facility supervisor. Others are unemployed, and for some, god only knows. But we’re all reading Simon Critchley’s Mysticism and practicing lectio divina.
Early mystics like Origen and Saint Ambrose developed lectio divina as a Christian ritual, but this practice belongs to all traditions. It probably began the moment we invented writing and thought words were imbued with magic.
1. Lectio: Read
2. Meditatio: Reflect
3. Oratio: Respond
4. Contemplatio: Rest
Each week, one of us volunteers to offer a text. The schoolteacher gave us three versions of Christ curing a leper, which led to a lively discussion about whether the leper should have told everyone what happened. The retired insurance adjuster delivered a slow and careful reading of the complete Serenity Prayer.
2
For my part, I wanted to track down a bizarro deep cut, some gnarly bit of psychedelic outsider mythos. Instead, an unexpected sentence entered my head with the force of fact. It's from Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel I haven't thought about in some time—and so, lectio:
The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.
Meditatio. Why do I remember this sentence after all these years? Yes, the cadence is sleek and clinical, even a little badass, but I think it resonates because my mind is likewise inclined to strip this world's magic down to studs. Perhaps I inherited my cynicism. Or maybe this is a time of disenchantment.
I know the bush is always burning, but it's so easy to believe otherwise.
There are two movements to Atwood's sentence. First: this world is beautiful despite its apparent indifference, even hostility, towards us. But the second turn is more subtle and requires me to squint a little, like a shift in the light that triggers an unexpected memory or jolt of déjà vu: this world is beautiful because of its apparent indifference, even hostility, towards us.
Oratio. Which is more magical: the ancient belief that a rabbit lived on the moon or that it was the literal cause of lunacy—or that there's an enormous rock suspended above our heads that controls the seas?
Most of all, I admire the effortlessness of this sentence, how it captures a wonder that comes naturally and therefore gratefully.
Now it's time to contemplatio.
3
I'm writing this on a Vienna-bound airplane. A full moon shines over the Atlantic, which is roiling away down there in the dark, and I suppose I'm inside a piece of deadly hardware.
I've been keeping a simple journal where I try to write a sentence about my life each day even though I sometimes forget. But I'm hoping to remember in Vienna, where C. and I will visit the Venus of Willendorf, Bruegel's Tower of Babel, Freud's office, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo's 16th-century fever dreams.
I love flying at night, cocooned in a netherworld beyond space and time, and tonight we'll listen to the music that has been soundtracking this sensation. This hour-long installment kicks off with a synthesizer chorus from Richie Hawtin's 1993 debut as F.U.S.E. Then comes a soulful slab of dub techno that my friend Earl casually sent me the other day, which bleeds into a wonderfully fuzzy track from A New Line (Related)—the territory between cozy and spectral is tough to locate, but these two songs live in its downtown. Then we'll take a cold plunge into some deep winter chug with slow-motion glaciers from Monolake, cv313, and the Field (god, those drums at the 41:40 mark).
- F.U.S.E. - Night Drive
Dimension Intrusion | Plus 8, 1993 | Bandcamp - My Friend Earl - Snowblow
2026 | Bandcamp - A New Line (Related) - Crewe Away
Crewe Away | Sound in Silence, 2025 | Bandcamp - Monolake - Cyan (44% slower)
Hong Kong | Chain Reaction, 1997 | Bandcamp - Tropic of Cancer - Dive (Wheel of the Law)
The Sorrow Of Two Blooms | Blackest Ever Black, 2014 | Boomkat - The Field - Leave It (31% slower)
Yesterday and Today | Kompakt, 2009 | Bandcamp - cv313 - Beyond the Clouds Reprise II (19% slower)
Beyond the Clouds (Reprised) | Echospace [Detroit], 2011 | Bandcamp
We return to land with a brief pitched-down snippet of Duran Duran's "Ordinary World" because I really enjoyed The Bone Temple.
A quick shout-out to M for introducing me to Critchley, the lectio divina, and many other new flows of intensity. And a tremendous thank you to everybody who has been testing Spite and taking time to send such helpful feedback. I'm genuinely shocked and delighted by the interest in this grouchy mp3 player—there are 38 beta testers now (!) and it will be available in Apple's app store by the end of the week.
Thank you for listening.
