Blog
As always, be sure and look up the words that you don’t know; don’t guess. Father Andrew sweated those words, so we need to make sure we understand exactly what he’s saying. Speaking of that topic, in the first chapter, Disassociation of Sensibility, Father Andrew lays out the basic problem that he wants to address: the gap between our hearts and our minds.
So, mindfulness is apparently, once again, a thing. I wasn’t aware that it had made a comeback until last month when I saw a story promoting a network news anchor’s books on the subject. But the comeback is a big one: Google, Aetna, and Goldman Sachs have all had mindfulness programs for a while—in fact, several sources report that mindfulness training is now a billion dollar industry. That means this method is going to eventually filter down to the level of school districts and municipalities and hospitals and big-box retailers, and that, for the next decade or so, any group that needs to fill up a few hours with some sort of ‘professional/personal development’ will be taught how this technique can help them achieve “calm, focus, and happiness.”
So, the first thing you need to do in order to get the most of our Great Lent Reading Project is to buy the book. That may seem fairly obvious, but, hey, you’d be surprised how many people attend the Pascha Book Study without having read any of the material—and we always love to have folks participate whether they’ve actually read the book or not, but you really do get a whole lot more out of the experience if you have done your best to get through the book.