This is the second recommendation list that I’ve compiled since Miracle Sunday. The first list (My Recommendations) was a 37-item list of movies, podcasts, books, and soundtracks compiled from friends recommendations. I wanted the list before I left on My Adventure, my six-month exploration of New Zealand and Australia. While I was on this adventure, I started collecting recommendations from the current media I experienced, or from people I was interacting with down under.
The result was my 37-item NZ Recommendation list. I have already started this list, but I wanted to give you the entirety of what I will be experiencing. If you want to read (or listen or watch) along with me, just get in contact with me and we can figure something out. I really enjoyed my first experience, and I know this will only build on the things I encountered and learned. Unlike last time, however, rather than a completing a review of each recommendation, I will include a few quotes or links to hopefully catch your interest.
NZ RECOMMENDATIONS (Name, Creator, Recommender)
1) The Wall the movie – Pink Floyd – Gary in Dunedin
“I’m waiting in this cell because I have to know… have I been guilty all this time?”
2) Unbroken movie – Coen Brothers & Angelina Jolie – Jono in Dunedin
“If I can take it, I can make it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh8EDt9rkms
3) Velvet Rage – Blue Babies Pink Podcast says “Bible for Gay People”
“The skill of creating and prolonging joy has three parts: Make yourself vulnerable to joy, Notice when you feel joy, Repeat behaviors that create joy. The first step in creating joy is to put yourself in the most likely state for joy to occur. For most of us, this state includes having plenty of rest, appropriate nutrition, and a safe environment.”
“Passion is the repeated experience of joy in doing something. When one discovers passion, it is usually because an activity seems to produce joy each time it is performed. Normally, there is a diminishing return on the joy associated with an activity. Not so when passion is present. The activity produces a surprising and satisfying amount of joy, again and again.“
“The learning and practice of passion, love, and integrity is what crates meaningful contentment in our lives. Once we have shed the shackles of shame, and seek to create a life worth living, these three become the ultimate goals of our lives.”
4) The Oak Tree – Walt Whitman – The Art of Fielding
https://poets.org/poem/i-saw-louisiana-live-oak-growing
5) Moby Dick – Herman Melville – The Art of Fielding
“Ignorance is the parent of fear”
“…and Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.”
6) Sound of Science Anthology – Beastie Boys – Jasmine in Dunedin
7) Virtually Normal – Andrew Sullivan – Lost Connections
“It is as if [homosexuals] have learned that life is fickle; that there are parts of it that cannot be understood, let alone solved; that some things lead nowhere and mean nothing; that the ultimate exercise in freedom is not a programmatic journey but a spontaneous one…The seeds of homosexual wisdom are the seeds of human wisdom. They contain truth that order is in fact a euphemism for disorder; that problems are often more sanely enjoyed than solved; that there is reason in mystery; that there is beauty in the wild flowers that grow randomly among our wheat.”
8) Sacred Romance – Curtis & Eldridge – My post-Lent email
“So much of the journey forward involves a letting go of all that once brought us life. We turn away from the familiar abiding places of the heart, the false selves we have lived out, the strengths we have used to make a place for ourselves and all our false loves, and we venture forth in our hearts to trace the steps of the One who said, “Follow me.” In a way, it means we stop pretending: that life is better than it is, that we are happier than we are, that the false selves we present to the world are really us. We respond to the haunting, the wooing, the longing for another life. Pilgrim begins his adventure towards redemption with a twofold desire: a turning away from attachment and a turning toward desire.
9) The Daily Stoic – Ryan Holiday – Kath from the UK
“If real self-improvement is what we’re after, why do we leave our reading until those few minutes before we shut off the lights and go to bed? Why do we block off eight to ten hours in the middle of the day to be at the office or to go to meetings but block out no time for thinking about the big questions? The average person somehow manages to squeeze in twenty-eight hours of television per week-but ask them if they had time to study philosophy, and they will probably tell you they’re too busy.”
“Acceptance isn’t passive. It’s the first step in an active process toward self-improvement.”
10) Being Mortal – Atul Gawande – Alison in Christchurch
“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes you and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding.”
11) The Book of Forgiving – Desmond Tutu – Rising Strong
“All of us must walk our own paths, at our own pace. All of us write our own books of forgiving every single day. What will be in your book? Will it be a story of hope and redemption, or misery and resentment? In the end, the forgiveness you seek, whether it’s for another or for yourself, will never be found in a book. You carry it with you in your heart. It is described by your humanity. You just need to look inside and discover it — discover the power it has to change your life and to change our world.”
12) Take this bread – Sarah Miller – Sarah in Christchurch
“My way was through the struggles of the world. It meant wrestling with the unavoidably political Gospel of incarnation and murder, and a Jesus who died at the hands of an empire. Yet it proclaimed a risen Christ, alive in what I knew was the repeating, beating heart of the story-that the face of the stranger is God’s face, and all people are one body: God’s.
13) Hunt for the wilder people – Movie – Kieran in Christchurch
“Trees. Birds. Rivers. Sky. / Running with my Uncle Hec / Living forever.”
“I didn’t choose the skuxx life, the skuxx life chose me.”
14) Your name – Genki Kawamura – Ted’s in Portland
“I feel like I’m always searching for someone, or something.”
“Musubi is the old way of calling the local guardian god. This word has profound meaning. Typing thread is Musubi. Connecting people is Musubi. The flow of time is Musubi. These are all the god’s power. So the braided cords that we make are the god’s art and represent the flow of time itself. They converge and take shape. They twist, tangle, sometimes unravel, break, and then connect again. Musubi – knotting. That’s time.“
15) The Book – Alan Watts – Liam in Bendigo
“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society.”
“Peace can be made only by those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love. No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
16) Conversations with God (Book 3) – Neil Walsh – Marilyn in Bendigo
“All your life you have been told that God created you. I come now to tell you this: You are creating God. That is a massive rearrangement of your understanding, I know. And yet it is a necessary one if you are to go about the true work for which you came. This is holy work We are up to, you and I. This is sacred ground We walk. This is The Path.”
17) Sapiens – Noah Uvol Herrary – Jeff from Canada (and Liam)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and a pursuit of pleasure.”
“Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are constantly wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
18) The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel Van Der Kolk – Kayleigh from Canada
“The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being. (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the brain and body, through such basic activities such as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.
“I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world, your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income’s, family structures, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, and widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.”
19) The Founder – Movie – Ben from Brisbane
“Persistence. Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent won’t. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius won’t. Unrewarded genius is practically a cliché. Education won’t. The world is full of educated fools. Persistence and determination alone are all powerful. Show that you don’t have to be defeated by anything. That you can have peace of mind, improved health and a never ceasing flow of energy. If you attempt each and every day to achieve these things, the results will make themselves obvious to you. While it may sound like a magical notion, it is in you to create your own future. The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.”
20) The State of Affairs – Esther Perez – Bookstore info desk in Sydney
“We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.”
“When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.:
21) Where do we begin? Podcast – Esther Perez from State of Affairs
https://www.estherperel.com/podcast
22) Molokai: The Story of Father Damien – YouTube Movie – Alex from Brisbane
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZEKSHBJtdc
“The Eucharist is the bread that gives strength… It is at once the most eloquent proof of His love and the most powerful means of fostering His love in us. He gives Himself every day so that our hearts as burning coals may set afire the hearts of the faithful.”
23) Dharma Punx – Noah Levine – Alvin in SF
“The more I practiced kindness and humility, the more the world seemed to appear friendly and manageable.”
“The practice of celibacy alone was opening me up to a deeper sense of the way the mind-body connection works. I saw over and over that my mind and body could be filled with desire and that no matter how intense the craving was it would always pass. I didn’t have to satisfy every desire that arose in my mind. I began to understand impermanence through direct experience rather than just intellectual theory.”
24) A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf – Queer Phenomenology
“See human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves.
“We go alone and if our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down.”
25) IQ84 – Murakami – Kimberley in NY
“Whatever world we’re in now, I’m sure this is where I will stay. Where WE will stay. This world must have its own threats, its own dangers, must be filled with it own riddles and contradictions. We may have to travel down dark paths, leading who knows where. But that’s okay. It’s not a problem. I’ll just have to accept it. I’m not going anywhere. Come what may, this is where we’ll remain, in this world with one moon.”
“Everything ended in silence. The beasts and spirits heaved a deep breath, broke up their encirclement, and returned to the depths of a forest that had lost its heart.”
26) Long Days of Small Things – Catherine McNiel – personal friend from college
“The more silver linings I saw, the more I became conscious of them…One of the underlying convictions of the spiritual life is that God is in our midst, and we carry out our lives in his loving, sustaining presence. Our challenge is to awaken to this reality, to remember it, to keep company with him even in our busyness and darkness. To practice the daily presence of God.
27) The Last Week – Marcus Borg / John Dominick Crossin – Jolyon in Sydney
“Holy Week and the journey of Lent are about an alternative process and alternative journey. The alternative procession is what we see on Palm Sunday, an anti-imperial and nonviolent procession. Now as then, that procession leads to a capital city, an imperial center, and a place for collaboration between religion and violence. Now as then, the alternative journey is the path of personal transformation that leads to journeying with the risen Jesus, just as it did for his followers on the road to Emmaus. Holy Week as the annual remembrance of Jesus’s last week presents us with the always relevant questions: Which journey are we on? Which procession are we in?”
“Passion is from the Latin noun passio, meaning suffering. But in everyday English, we also use ‘passion’ for any consuming interest, dedicated enthusiasm, or concentrated commitment. In this sense, a person’s passion is what she or he is passionate about. The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of God by demanding for all a fair share of a world belonging to and ruled by the covenantal God of Israel. It was that first passion for God’s distributive justice that led inevitably to the second passion by Pilate’s punitive justice.”
28) The Rule – St. Benedict – Searching for Sunday
“Instrument #1. To love the Lord God with all our heart, soul, mind, strength. Instrument #2. To love one’s neighbor as oneself. Instrument #52. Not to speak much. Instrument #63. To love chastity.” “These are tools of our spiritual craft. If we always remember and use them, and give them up only on Judgement Day, the Lord shall reward us as he promised.”
29) Nathan Seaward Show – podcast – Robin in Christchurch
30) Everyone’s normal until you get to know them – John Ortberg – Clint (The Well Church)
“Then no one will be lonely. No one will be alone. No one will be foollish or fallen or do anything they regret. Then, finally, the human race will no longer be the “as-is” department of the universe. Then, for the first time since Eden, everyone will be the person God intended them to be. Then, we will discover what we call the end of our lives is not the end at all; it is only the beginning of Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before. And we will all be normal at last.”
31) Raising boys – Steve Biddurph – Jamie from the UK
“Three Distinct Stages of development — Birth to Six (the learning to love years), Six to fourteen (the time when fathers count most), fourteen to adult (when boys need mentors and adults who care, in addition to their parents). Please note: These stages do not indicate a sudden or sharp shift from one parent to another…In a sense, it’s about adding on the new ingredients at each stage.”
32) The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective- Richard Rohr – The Liturgists
“The nine Enneagram types are, as we have said, arranged clockwise on the circumference of a circle. They are then clustered together in three groups of three: The group that embraces EIGHT, NINE, and ONE is called the group of ‘gut-people’. Their center of gravity lies in the underbelly, where the ‘raw material’ of our existence if located. It is immediate, spontaneous, felt, and intuitive. (In this sense we also speak of the ‘sexual types.’ They don’t filter reality through the brain or heart first. TWO, THREE, AND FOUR are the ‘heart-people’, or the social types. Finally FIVE, SIX, and SEVEN form the group of the ‘head-people’ or the self-preserving types.”
“Helper syndrome, Messiah complex, martyr fantasies, sex and relationships addictions – all of these typically TWO games sooner or later lead to the experience about which so many members of the helping profession report.”
33) The Enneagram Journey – Podcast – My personal interest in Enneagram
“The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system that identifies Nine Personality Types that are expressed individually and in relationship to others. It acts as a unique tool for understanding and explaining human behavior, and the underlying motivations that drive behavior and the gifts we all have for the transformation of non-productive encounters with others.”
34) The End of Faith – Sam Harris – Emily from college
“Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal’ or they will unmake our world.”
“One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious models are themselves bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
35) The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Diddion – Chris from college
“I could not always take care of her. I could not never leave her. She was no longer a child. She was an adult. Things happened in life that mothers could not prevent or fix. Unless one of those things killed her prematurely, as one had almost done at Beth Israel and another could still do at UCLA, I would die before she did…Could I do this [abandon her, leave her alone]? Did all parents feel this?”
36) The Universal Christ – Richard Rohr – From Miracle Sunday
“What Love Tells Us About God Love, which might be called the attraction of all things toward all things, is a universal language and underlying energy that keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it. It is so simple that it is hard to teach in words, yet we all know it when we see it. After all, there is not a Native, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, or Christian way of loving. There is not a Methodist, Lutheran, or Orthodox way of running a soup kitchen. There is not a gay or straight way of being faithful, nor a Black or Caucasian way of hoping. We all know positive flow when we see it, and we all know resistance and coldness when we feel it. All the rest are mere labels.”
“Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”
37) The Divine Dance – Richard Rohr – From Miracle Sunday
“I once met a psychiatrist who made a statement to me that I thought at first was an overstatement. He’s older than I am, and he said, “Richard, at the end of your life, you’ll realize that every mentally ill person you’ve ever worked with is basically lonely…Every case of non-physiologically-based mental illness stems from a person who has been separated, cut off, living alone, forgetting how to relate. This person does not know intimacy and is starved for communion.
“That’s probably why God created the sexual drive so strong in most of us. It’s an instinct that demands relationship in its healthy manifestation, because when you separate yourself from others you become sick, toxic, and –I’m going to say — even evil. I think we’re back again to this mystery of Trinity. Now we’re prepared to say that God is absolute relatedness. I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship.
Thanks for checking this page out. Hopefully you can take some time out of your busy schedules to read or experience some of these titles. And may you also find some peace of mind and some silence to unwind…