Part 2: Sacred Space Notebook

A few years ago I purchased an A6 notebook cover from Little Mountain Bindery, a small business in Fayetteville, Arkansas, that makes custom notebook covers and offers book rebinding services. As a fellow Arkansan, I felt compelled to support this local stationery business. Since I mostly use A5 covers, I thought I’d try a different size this time. For Americans who don’t understand random paper size callouts, here’s a quick overview:

A4 is the popular standard sized document, sized slightly longer and skinnier than our 8.5x11 standard sized document. If you fold an A4 in half on the long edge, you get A5, which is used predominantly for notebooks and planners. A6, as you can guess, is half the size of A5. Since I had a few A5 covers, I decided to go for the A6 cover for pocket notebooks. I tend to use pocket notebooks for jotting down notes and keeping any other scribbles that don’t require large amounts of writing. Many users today find them a useful means to stave off doomscrolling.

I also find myself gravitating toward smaller notebooks for Mass. They’re compact enough to slip in and out during times in the service when I want to jot down a quick reflection from the homily, or a prayer that comes to me that I want to reflect on more deeply. Since Mass is an interactive experience, I don’t have many opportunities to sit and reflect for too long, so a small form factor is most useful for me in those situations. For a long time I used this A6 brown trifold cover for my Mass notes, and then put it aside for a while. However, I decided to push it to its limit to see how I could make this simple notebook cover a reflection of my interactivity in Mass. I didn’t just want to create a place for words, but a sacred space that incorporated reflection, images, and scripture passages. I’m still figuring out what works best for me, but I’m pleased so far with what I’ve created.

This A6 journal is similar to the Traveler’s Notebook system I discussed in Part 1 of this series on personal operating systems. It’s a brown leather cover with cords to place three pocket A6 notebooks. This design, however, incorporates a trifold cover instead of the bifold of the Traveler’s. The first part of my Mass cover is my reflection journal. This is my go-to for journaling and reflecting on anything that pops into my mind. This practice helps me focus on the present moment and not let my mind wander too much during the homily or other quiet moments in the Mass. The second cord holds a handmade pocket iconostasis made by DoorNumber9 on Etsy. The iconostasis is a small sewn book that shows all 12 Great Feasts of the Church. Each scene can be flipped through in a book form or expanded in an accordion style.

It’s such a clever way to meditate on the major stories outlined in the New Testament in a visual way. I’ve written some about the philosophy of Iconography in past articles and how meld them into my spiritual life. The iconostasis fits perfectly in this A6 cover, and I love the ability to create a compact notebook shrine that’s easy to take with me. It’s another tool for me to disconnect with my phone and focus on the constraints of the objects in front of me, with the visual interactivity to keep me engaged in a unique way.

The third cord holds a Field Notes pocket notebook for traditional rote prayers and chaplets. I used to keep this in my Plotter I wrote about in a previous article. But I decided to move it over to this cover since it fits well in this A6 cover. This size is perfect for chaplets that I don’t know from memory, such as the St. Michael chaplet. Housing prayers in a simple pocket notebook keeps these items more organized than digital means, or even in a pre-made book, as it allows me to curate my own on prayers that are meaningful to me.

So to recap, this cover houses three main components:

• personal reflection

• iconostasis for visual prayer and meditation

• commonplace pocket notebook for traditional rote prayers and chaplets

These three components housed in one cover provides a unique experience that allows me to slow down and engage in practices that actively help me grow as a person. I hope this inspires you to reflect on how you can create your own personal physical system.

My Spiritual EDC Notebook System

https://youtu.be/Ha9x069KXoM

In the midst of the confusing cyber world we live in, many people have turned to pocket notebook systems to keep them from social media doomscrolling. The irony, of course, is that the internet has been good to the analog community, fueling desire for pretty notebooks and stationery. But I think a lot of good can come from turning people back to pocket notebooks and pens. If the internet can inspire people to have hobbies away from the internet and learn to use social media moderately, then it’s a win for me.

A few years ago I discovered Plotter, the Japanese ring bound system that has a ton of customizable options. It’s like the old Filofaxes but much smaller. You can’t go into this thinking you can stuff every aspect of your life into it like a Filofax. You have to consciously decide what you need in this present moment in your notebook. That may stress people out. It certainly stressed me out at the beginning. Paper in, paper out.

You have to think about this notebook in a systematic approach. It’s not just a stack of paper glued together in a book. It’s a notebook cover that allows you to implement different sections, folders, and dividers for specific reasons. It’s like in school when your teachers made you have three-ring binders (are those required anymore?) with specific section dividers. But in a Plotter system, you have to determine what those sections are used for. And it took me a while to figure out what sections of my life would be important for me to divide. Maybe that’s why analog systems are popular today—it’s a physical manifestation of what you think is important in life.

Plotter provides accessories, such as paper pads, folders, pouches, and section dividers, to help you create your own flexible system. Unfortunately, the covers are expensive. But if you didn’t want to throw down the money for one of theirs, the accessories are reasonable enough to purchase for an alternative cover. My specific cover is called the “bible size,” which is what we called “personal size” in the west.

But I don’t want to focus so much on what I’m using but how I’m using it. I don’t want this to turn into some type of popular influencer content where I’m trying to sell an expensive notebook system. What fascinates me is not the brand but the systematic approach to journaling and how analog tools can help us discover what’s important to us in ways digital systems can’t. It took me a long time to discover what my system looks like, but it’s slowly coming to fruition to reflect who I am in my mid-30s.

My spiritual EDC system

I use my Bible-size Plotter for personal and spiritual reflection. It’s nice to have a physical manifestation of components in my life that help me focus throughout the day. Due to its size, I call this my “Spiritual EDC (every day carry) System.”

The first part of my system is a zipper pouch, which holds holy cards, a Padre Pio coin (randomly given to me by someone at Starbucks after a conversation. He didn’t know Padre Pio was my confirmation saint), and a green scapular, because I need all the help I can get for my conversion. The back of the zipper pouch holds my business cards and a Field Notes pocket notebook with specific chaplet prayers that I can’t remember.

After the pouch, the planner is the first section of the notebook. Right before the planning pages is a note I wrote on the components of the First Saturday Devotion from Our Lady of Fatima. I decided to start this devotion a few months ago, and is what I ground myself with throughout the year. Having this note at the beginning of the planner section reflects that truth about my goal.

The monthly planner section doesn’t include any work-related tasks or meetings, just personal and spiritual items to pay attention to.

The cool thing about a flexible binder system is you can move pages around as needed. Some users like to place individual note pages between the monthly spread pages. I need to spreads clean, though to see the full month. So any notes for the month go behind the current monthly spread. For this area, I have a note page with questions that my spiritual director gives me to reflect on before our monthly meetings.

The next section contains brainstorming notes that pertain to my business and a personal to-do list. Right now, I mostly have sections on my business plan and online store layouts.

Last, I use the Project Manager folders as an archive of sorts. The first folder holds swatches from my inks. It’s a nice reference to have to quickly see which inks I have and what would go well with my pens. The other Project Manager folder holds small journal entries I’ve written at Mass and the Adoration Chapel. It’s important to have space to quickly write out prayers and thoughts on my heart. I like placing them in the folder in the back because it’s not easily seen the first time you open the notebook.

Overall I’m pleased with the system, even if it is a bit small. I think you could create something much less expensive with more room. But if you have the means, the Plotter is an excellent system to help organize your life. My goal is not to pressure you to buy a Plotter, but to investigate your own needs and create your own external analog system that reflects who you are, what’s important to you, and what you need to accomplish. We can all do this on our phones, but I’ve never been able to fully replicate the ease of jotting thoughts down on paper.

I’d love to hear what you use if you have an analog system.

Silence, Desolation, and Typewriters

I have been horrible at keeping silence lately. It’s probably one of the reasons why I slipped down into the desolate hole I’ve been swimming in this summer. But I know God is swimming there with me in the murky water. And I’ll come out stronger after this trial. Struggling with silence doesn’t necessarily mean I talk a lot. As I began struggling, I bombarded my senses with Google searches, determined to find a solution to my problems. But all I found was more desolation and worst-case scenarios.

Looking back, I know I should have paid attention to what was in front of me (making doctor appointments) and waited in silence in the meantime, letting God give me strength and wisdom. But like the stubborn person I am, I wanted to use my own will to hack my way into a healthy future. But that mindset always leads to a crash. God didn’t cause the crash to happen, but he allowed me to learn a difficult lesson.

My experience is one drop in an ocean of overstimulated internet users determined to doom-scroll their way to a hopeless future. But that’s not how we’re wired. Before the Web 2.0 phenomenon, we lived with more boundaries. I’m only going back to Web 2.0, because life was still vastly different when the internet was ported through a 56k modem. As someone born in 1989, I feel like I uniquely have one foot planted in the old ways and another foot in the new. I remember the natural boundaries set by limitations of our technology.

Our bodies and souls long for silence. We think we can find peace and consolation in the noise, as I did, but God is nowhere to be found in that space. Most of the time, the noise you hear is filled with anger, anxiety, and fear. It’s full of opinions that most of the time don’t apply to you. And if they do, you shouldn’t pay attention to them most of the time. The external stimulus can then overstimulate your soul to where it’s constantly agitated, continually questioning who you are, what you need to do, why you’re in the situation you’re in, and on and on and on. Once you get to that point, your ability to hear the voice of Love itself diminishes.

“In order to hear the voice of God, one has to have silence in one’s soul to keep silence; not a gloomy silence, but an interior silence; that is to say, recollection in God. One can speak little and be constantly breaking silence.” -St. Faustina

The noise in your soul will then affect your thoughts and actions in life, as it becomes more difficult to discern what choices you need to make in the present moment.

“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence...we need silence to be able to touch souls.” -St. John Paul II

Popular typewriter YouTuber Joe Van Cleave ended his recent video with the observation that we now have an abundance of tools to create and write, but now we are struggling with the lack of mental space to sit down and produce. As a writer in the 21st-century, I agree with his statement. The issue is not finding ways to produce, but creating boundaries to free up space in our minds to write what is on our heart. Being a writer, even when you know deep in your heart that it’s a vocation that you bear responsibly to carry out, is a difficult job that taxes your mind and body. You write because there’s no means of escape for the thoughts in your soul. It’s embedded in you and must come out. But you have to recognize the truth of yourself before you can write. And it’s much easier to distract yourself from than confront that truth. The tools we use to write are also the tools we use to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable truths inside of us. We have the enormous responsibility of disciplining ourselves against the enormity of information and distractions that bombard us in a way no other generation has had to deal with before.

This is part of the reason why I love typewriters and pen and paper. You have no means of escape to confront what is in front of you. You must write. You must look into yourself to discover how you fill up the page. Because the page must be filled. And you can edit later. But you can’t edit on command like you can with modern technology. You must contemplate what you want to say, and have the courage to pound it onto the page, knowing it’s staying there. Then you can contemplate your words again and ask yourself how it can be edited. And you can’t click to the next tab, because no digital metaphors of entertainment exist in these tools. Of course you can look at your phone, but as you do, the tools are still there staring at you, waiting for you to complete your task. This discipline strengthens your ability to be a writer.

So what do we do about this? How do we create boundaries to fulfill our calls? After this season, I will have to ask myself some hard questions about how I use tools in my daily life. I have prided myself on asking myself these questions for the past several years, especially during the pandemic, but I am human like everyone else and can slip into the portal of endless noise that rattles my soul. My soul and mind faltered. Pride comes before the fall. But I am overcoming even stronger than before.

Faith and Contemplation in the 2020s

In Joseph Ratzinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI’s) book, Introduction to Christianity, written in 1968, he pointedly asks an important question that has stuck with me this year. Even though 1968 was 56 years ago, his question seems even more relevant today.

“What is the meaning and significance of the Christian profession, ‘I believe’ today, in the context of our present attitude to reality as a whole?” (Ratzinger, 47).

This question seems timely for our society today, and it encompasses a framework I think about as a Catholic in the 2020’s. I live in a saturated world filled with curated algorithms, comment boxes, and short-form video—a world so vastly different than my childhood not too long ago in the 1990s and early 2000s. I also live in a world where deconstructing faith and religion seem to be the norm. I’m not oblivious enough to not know that I’m a bit of an anomaly, a Catholic convert who attempts to practice their faith in the 21st century in an old traditional religion.

Oh, I also live in the Bible Belt where our Catholic diocese is so small that it’s considered a mission diocese. How did I end up in this spot? It’s a grand mystery for sure, but I’ll say that I’m partly where I am today due to contemplation, a practice that allows us to think long and deeply about life and what we do. Creativity brought me to this spot. Allowing myself space to create art allows me to move into the deeper spaces and contemplate what is true and what is false in the world. I think deeply in the same way people think deeply about deconstructing their religious experiences. It’s not bad to contemplate why you believe what you do, whether you currently believe or not.  The point is to be honest with yourself and open your heart to what could be. It is not about what originates from inside, but from how you respond and ruminate over external messages:

“It becomes evident that belief is not the result of lonely meditation in which the ‘I,’ freed from all ties and reflecting alone on the truth, thinks something out of itself; on the contrary, it is the result of a dialogue, the expression of a hearing, receiving, and answering that guides man through the changes of ‘I’ and ‘you’ to the ‘we’ of those who all believe in the same way” (Ratzinger, 90).

I’m viewing all of this the lens of my Catholic faith, which was not an easy decision when I was first introduced to the religion. It’s not like God struck me with a stained glass window and I suddenly believed everything all at once. It was a gradual introduction into specific concepts that I had to slowly open my heart to. That’s the key to all of this. How do I open my heart? Discernment is all about deep reflection and judgments of the heart.

So going back to Ratzinger’s question: what does it mean for me to say, “I believe” in 2024? This blog will explore this question. This blog is a reflection of my theodrama, a term coined by Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. The theodrama is a metaphor that pictures God as a playwright and we as actors in his grand story. This blog is a reflection of my little scenes in his grand story. I will post fortnight (bi-weekly) reflections about discernment, my creative musings, and how the daily vocation of an artist and writer tries to unravel the mystery of belief in the 21st century. You can anticipate posts about philosophy, theology, and the random creative tangents I have. One week may be about fountain pen inks, and another may be about photography and typewriters. But all these reflections play a part in my little role in this grand scheme.

The Book of Kells and Visual Prayer

Recently I’ve become fascinated by the Book of Kells—a visual interpretation of the four Gospels based on the Latin Vulgate translation by St. Jerome. The book was created by Irish monks in Iona around the year 800. When the Vikings raided the area, the monks moved to Kells and brought the manuscript with them. The Vikings would later raid Iona, but amazingly the book was kept in tact and safe. Finally, in 1661, the book was sent to Trinity College in Dublin, where it still remains to this day. 

The book itself is a gorgeous compilation of bold, illuminated imagery along with small, intricate details. The celtic knots are easily seen throughout these intricate details, showcasing how God can easily plant himself within the confines of unique cultures and show himself in a way that everyone can understand. 

Page from the Book of Kells

Researching this book makes me think about how images affect our understanding of the world around us and our faith. In our modern, highly literate age, we search for hard truth about situations. In the western culture, the battles line are drawn using well-crafted rhetorical arguments with a firm knowledge of grammar and sentence structure. While our world is becoming increasingly multimodal with through social media, memes, images, colors, and design, our instinct is to seek as much detail as possible through the written and spoken argument. 

And mostly that is a good thing. Written and spoken arguments are the best way to show others who we are and what is important to us. However...when it comes to our faith, I think it's easy to put too much importance on that type of expression.

For example, when it comes to figuring out what God wants us to do with our lives, it's easy to desire God to give us an answer in a well-crafted written or audible argument with beautiful grammar, bells, and angels. When God doesn’t do that, it seems like He isn’t paying attention to us. The more likely scenario, however, is that we aren’t paying attention to Him. God can show the goodness of His truth in a myriad of ways besides words and sentences. He can speak to us through His creation, in colors, shapes, movements, smells, sounds, and textures. God speaks to us through the rational and the abstract.

Another example of visual prayer is the gorgeous iconography that is showcased throughout the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches. These churches have emphasized the importance of praying and listening to God through visual media for thousands of years. They believe that icons are windows into the mystery of heaven, which further emphasize the mysterious nature of the Kingdom of God. Sometimes the greatest form of peace is just sitting in silence and being in awe of the mysteries of God. Sometimes the best thing we can do is stare at a picture of the gospel messages and see where we fit in those pictures. Without words. Without speaking. One of the greastest penance’s a priest gave me after confession was to sit in front of a picture of the Divine Mercy image of Jesus. That’s it. Sit and stare at a picture of Jesus. 

Icon depicting Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem

The Book of Kells and Eastern Iconography remind us that the gospels are not only imperative to read and hear, but also see through shapes, colors, and visual metaphors. Language is the best means of producing a message to the world, but sometimes people will not truly understand the meaning of purpose to your words without further elements such as the visual art form.  

Marshall McLuhan

I can’t think of a better example to begin the blogging process of design, media theory, and theology with than Marshall McLuhan. He is renowned for his contribution to media theory in the 20th century, and is best known for the iconic phrase, “the medium is the message.”

Essentially, McLuhan argues that the medium in which content and ideas are delivered on frames one’s perception over the actual message itself. For example, when we read an article in the newspaper, we are more influenced by the structure of the newspaper itself than the content of the article. While I don’t completely agree with the extremity of that notion, I do wholeheartedly agree that the medium in which we consume content plays a huge role in the way we perceive and understand a message being delivered. Design, good and bad, influences the way we view the world. 

Another fascinating contribution was his prediction of what we now know as the internet. In the 1960s, he predicted that traditional print culture would be replaced by a “global village” that relied on “electronic interdependence” and would turn humanity from an individualistic culture to a global tribal system. Looking to how our world has changed so much over the past few decades, it’s interesting to sit and read his predictions. And I think it takes a while to answer whether his predictions are correct or not. 

Not only was he an influential media scholar, but he was also a devout Catholic convert! While studying at Cambridge, he stumbled onto the writings of GK Chesterton (a great choice). He later wrote that if it wasn’t for Chesterton’s writings, he probably would have still been agnostic.

It makes me wonder how his faith transition influenced his perception of media theory and design. The Mass is full of imagery that has all kinds of special meaning, even in the smallest details. In a way I can see how the term, “the medium is the message” can fit into the rhythm of the Mass. While faith and belief manifest in a number of ways individually, it is, Catholics believe, the structure of the Mass that brings us to the source and summit of our faith.

It has taken generations to compile an intricate system of design, from the movements of the priests, deacons, and parishioners, to the words that are spoken at every moment, to the type of music sung at each point,  to the images that are presented at specific points in the sanctuary. Those elements together form what we believe to be the “magnum opus” of our faith. While reading scripture is important, it is only one element to the vast sensory experience that brings us to calvary. Surely, that experience had some influence to McLuhan’s thought process.