“The {man} who loves for the sake of love only—{he is} completely free.”
(Thomas Merton, May 4, 1963)
Become that person. Be born as such today, tonight, in the middle of the falling hours into dawn.
Be complete, and thereby, completely free.
Nativity is beyond historical.
It is what you are…
doing now.
A good day to remember that
fiction is the fodder for faith —
that we create what is meaningful from
the longing that what is true
will become evidently true.
May it be so!
The conversation circled around prison, monasticism, military, corporations, structure, intentional communities, and the neutral zone where longing to belong has no localized expression.
In final circle I concluded my preference. That preference is for an accidental, unintentional, haphazard, and non-localized disassembled coterie of irregulars passing (recognized by subtle eye, but unacknowledged, but for a covert synchronous nod in passing).
There’s no community but that of the nature of shared existence.
The Ontic/Cosmo/Theo/Andric community everything shares in, accepting and allowing idiosyncratic and idiorhythmic insouciant participation by dint of being an existent entity appearing and arriving and accommodating.
I pledge and troth myself to such a manifestation when and if and as it occurs.
There are no membership fees.
All is free.
All is safe.
All is happy even when sorrow accompanies.
All are dwelling in their and our true home.
Un buon natale a tutti noi.
The temptation used to be to only look in temple, church, mosque, meditation hall, or sacred grove.
No more.
I always liked that Saint Kateri Tekakwitha’s name “Tekakwitha” means “she who bumps into things.” What if holiness is a contact sport and we are meant to bump into things? This is what it means to embrace a contemplative, mystical way of seeing wholeness. It gives a window into complexity and keeps us from judging and scapegoating and demonizing. If we allow ourselves to “bump into things,” then we quit measuring. We cease to Bubble-Wrap ourselves against reality. We stop trying to “homeschool” our way through the world so that the world won’t touch us. Hard to embrace the world . . . if we are so protective and defensively shielded from it. A homie told me once, “It’s taken me all these years to see the real world. And once ya see it—there’s only God there.”
—Gregory Boyle, The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness (New York: Avid Reader Press, https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-zjyjkld-tlkridklo-v
If we elide one word from the opening line of William Wordsworth’s poem:
The world is … much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—Little we see in Nature that is ours;
The world is not “too” much with us. “Nature” is our core reality. Nature is much.
But we are not much when we erase or eliminate our “Nature” in favor of artificial constructs and selective beliefs that partialize us into categories of separation and erroneous comparison.
What-is “with-us” is the mystery of the mystical life.
When we began to elide “God” from “Nature” we began to pretend we had control over “Reality” its manifestation, definition, and meaning.
We don’t. Never have, nor ever will.
The only gift worth receiving is “with-us”.
Always and everywhere, as and in, everyone.
Ours.
With-us.
Not what we think, but who and what we are.
Only God there!
Bump, bump, bump . . .
(hai, Vietnamese for “two”. For Vinnie who died in Vietnam 20dec1968)
Too many
words
Only
One
Is necessary
Go ahead
Say it
The bleating
from unsound
voices
fill airways
with absurd
quarrels
like school-
children
bullying
it was too
good to be
true
mature
democracy
and justice
There is a poem that, on second look, reveals itself as the perfect poem for the mystery of creation, incarnation, and the transparent pervasive wholeness of endurance.
The name of origin and enduring presence is I Am.
The name of what-is-being-revealed is Not-I.
The name of this essence, existence, and endurance which evokes and encompasses un-ending diaphaneity of pervasive perseverance is This One.
Here is the meditation:
I Am Not I
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.(Poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez, 23dec1881– 29may1956: translated by Robert Bly)
For me, this year, this poem is the celebration of Christmas.
Yo No SoyYo
Yo no soy yo
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo,
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedará en pie cuando yo muera.
- Juan Ramón Jiménez
For 24 hours I could not figure out the koan “Disappointment is giving acceptance."
Then, suddenly, it looked at me.
Everything’s not OK. It’s much better than that: everything is falling apart around us, within us. But this is great, good news, for in Christ we have been grasped by the love of God and drawn irrevocably into the fullness of his desire for us. For God has, at last, heeded the lonely cry of his creatures, “Please surrender yourself! Lower the heavens. Come down to us.” And he begs for us to surrender to him in return, even as he astounds us, perhaps even disappoints us, with his unpretentiousness and weakness. A Rose has blossomed from Mary’s tender stem. And from this altar we receive his self-surrender to us in a scrap of bread, rose-red with his precious blood.
http://spencerabbey1098.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-rose-has-blossomed.html
And I was seen.
nothing
(I recall)
satisfies
only your
eyes seeing
this emerge
satisfies
(I recall)
nothing
It’s Monday before Christmas.
We’re uncertain
What is
Being born
To us
This
Week
Yes
The monk said that confusion is grace.
That maybe
disappointment is
giving
acceptance
(whatever
that means)