Incarnational spirituality is to be embodied and respectful of such embodiment. It's how we dwell in this world.
As long as you are subject
To a life bound by force of habit,
You are not free from the
Burden of the body.
- Kuei-Shan (771-854)
In prison this morning Sonny said he wasn't going to surrender his spirituality to anybody, "not even to God, because he don't need it."
Charlie and Les talked to each other attempting to get to the bottom of whether 'respect' was there even if you didn't agree with the opinion of another. (We decided 'respect' really meant 'to look again' at what was being said. In that 'looking again,' respect means not discarding out of hand, but taking another look at it.)
If you took notice of our transgressions, Lord – Lord, who would be left?
But with you is forgiveness, and for this we revere you.
- Psalm 129 (130)
Charlie, wondering about the one universal thing that everybody participates in said, when asked what is is, "I don't know; it's whatever it is."
Andre ends his poem/song entitled "Tough" with the couplet:
it's so much less exhausting not to want,
and not be lost in the emotions I was taught.
The Lord doesn't see our transgressions. The Lord sees us.
Charlie would suggest the fact might be "we believe we believe,” but don't.
We look again. We respect each other. All these bodies around a table, speaking each to each.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
"Prayer is the sense of the source within our beings." That's what Tom R. said at Thursday Evening Conversation. When it was repeated to him what he had said he asked with a laugh, "Did I say that?"
Prayer is the sense of the source within our beings.
Coming to word is relational travel. Often in conversation we are graced with words, not initiated by separate self or small 'I,' but originating within the whole self, or relational 'we.'
Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; from the cloud came a voice,
"This is my beloved Son. Listen to him."
Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them.
As they were coming down from the mountain, he charged them not to relate what
they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what rising from the dead meant.
(cf. Mark 9:2-10)
Jesus alone, with them.
Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices,
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
- Hakuin (1686-1768)
Perhaps mossy crevices are the routes we travel with each other. The gift of conversation is stepping into the flowing water with no idea of stopping up or damming the movement. If we hear each other out we emerge from the burden of hiding, a hiding that weights and clouds our being.
The little stream, quietly, turns clear and transparent. It returns to itself, to its source, with simple surprise.
Prayer is the sense of the source within our beings.
Is this a response to the conversation Jesus, Peter, James, and John were having on a high mountain apart by themselves?
Is the sense of the source within our beings a response to the question about what rising from the dead meant?
Tom, surprised by prayer in conversation, smiled his way out the door to the icy parking lot.
Prayer is the sense of the source within our beings.
Coming to word is relational travel. Often in conversation we are graced with words, not initiated by separate self or small 'I,' but originating within the whole self, or relational 'we.'
Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; from the cloud came a voice,
"This is my beloved Son. Listen to him."
Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them.
As they were coming down from the mountain, he charged them not to relate what
they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what rising from the dead meant.
(cf. Mark 9:2-10)
Jesus alone, with them.
Like the little stream
Making its way
Through the mossy crevices,
I, too, quietly
Turn clear and transparent.
- Hakuin (1686-1768)
Perhaps mossy crevices are the routes we travel with each other. The gift of conversation is stepping into the flowing water with no idea of stopping up or damming the movement. If we hear each other out we emerge from the burden of hiding, a hiding that weights and clouds our being.
The little stream, quietly, turns clear and transparent. It returns to itself, to its source, with simple surprise.
Prayer is the sense of the source within our beings.
Is this a response to the conversation Jesus, Peter, James, and John were having on a high mountain apart by themselves?
Is the sense of the source within our beings a response to the question about what rising from the dead meant?
Tom, surprised by prayer in conversation, smiled his way out the door to the icy parking lot.
Tuesday, March 11, 2003
The fear is that our words have no power.
When there is no communication between us, there is no power in our words. When we are angry and lash out at others, words are razors. When we promise something and fail to intend what is promised, words are spoiled and rotten food. When we decide to say something is when that something is not, when we presume to deceive and distort what we are saying, words are broken mirrors holding no recognizable images of us, nor semblance of truth.
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.
(Is 55:11)
This is why we long for the word of God. We long for words to replicate and embody what they say. We hunger for the Body of Christ (or, the Thusness of Being) to be what it is, to be the self-same reality with the One pronouncing it.
Just don’t seek from another
Or you’ll be far estranged from self.
I now go on alone
Meeting it everywhere
It now is just what I am
I now am not it.
You must comprehend in this way
To merge with thusness.
- Dongshan Liangjie (807-869)
So it is we long for Incarnation, Embodiment, Thusness, Things As They Really Are -- this is our pilgrimage alone to the Alone. We long to awaken to and realize mergence.
To emerge from unconsciousness is to merge with consciousness. There we finally see with the mind that sees what is there.
On wooden bench this morning with Cesco stretching himself across my knee on carpet, the position of silent watchfulness is our rite of prayer. Mu-ge watched birds outside front window. Cesco watched Mu-ge from carpet. I watched Cesco from bench. We are all watched by non-void word encircling us in silence. Saskia and Sando visit southern Maine watching cars and numbers pass by.
What is the end of Isaiah's word?
Completing what is -- this is Isaiah's word.
How do we complete what is?
We complete what is as no other, by no othering, by whole sighting what is there.
You ask me, "What does that mean?" I respond, That means when we pray we are the prayer we open to with full heart and mind. The one we call God is the one calling us.
The word of God is one calling one. It cannot be other than it is. The word in prayer wills, wants, what is God. Between you and me, when in prayer, no other longing exists but God as what is, the dwelling place of you and me. We long to be what we already are. We are what we are. But we forget. And forgetting, we hear no calling.
We only exist when words have power. Words only exist when we have the power of now. It is root silence that nourishes words, nourishes us, nourishes now.
Silence is the dwelling place of word. Sacred word dwells in sacred silence. The resonance of now is the power of each within God, God within each, within each now, God.
We go forth in the power of this resonance.
Thusness, merging longing, unafraid.
We are our word.
When there is no communication between us, there is no power in our words. When we are angry and lash out at others, words are razors. When we promise something and fail to intend what is promised, words are spoiled and rotten food. When we decide to say something is when that something is not, when we presume to deceive and distort what we are saying, words are broken mirrors holding no recognizable images of us, nor semblance of truth.
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.
(Is 55:11)
This is why we long for the word of God. We long for words to replicate and embody what they say. We hunger for the Body of Christ (or, the Thusness of Being) to be what it is, to be the self-same reality with the One pronouncing it.
Just don’t seek from another
Or you’ll be far estranged from self.
I now go on alone
Meeting it everywhere
It now is just what I am
I now am not it.
You must comprehend in this way
To merge with thusness.
- Dongshan Liangjie (807-869)
So it is we long for Incarnation, Embodiment, Thusness, Things As They Really Are -- this is our pilgrimage alone to the Alone. We long to awaken to and realize mergence.
To emerge from unconsciousness is to merge with consciousness. There we finally see with the mind that sees what is there.
On wooden bench this morning with Cesco stretching himself across my knee on carpet, the position of silent watchfulness is our rite of prayer. Mu-ge watched birds outside front window. Cesco watched Mu-ge from carpet. I watched Cesco from bench. We are all watched by non-void word encircling us in silence. Saskia and Sando visit southern Maine watching cars and numbers pass by.
What is the end of Isaiah's word?
Completing what is -- this is Isaiah's word.
How do we complete what is?
We complete what is as no other, by no othering, by whole sighting what is there.
You ask me, "What does that mean?" I respond, That means when we pray we are the prayer we open to with full heart and mind. The one we call God is the one calling us.
The word of God is one calling one. It cannot be other than it is. The word in prayer wills, wants, what is God. Between you and me, when in prayer, no other longing exists but God as what is, the dwelling place of you and me. We long to be what we already are. We are what we are. But we forget. And forgetting, we hear no calling.
We only exist when words have power. Words only exist when we have the power of now. It is root silence that nourishes words, nourishes us, nourishes now.
Silence is the dwelling place of word. Sacred word dwells in sacred silence. The resonance of now is the power of each within God, God within each, within each now, God.
We go forth in the power of this resonance.
Thusness, merging longing, unafraid.
We are our word.
Monday, March 10, 2003
When do we see the face of God? And how do we live with what we are seeing?
Mu-ge purrs on stomach and chest as sun comes through opaque iced window. He is well tuned. His young exhalation and inhalation the smoothness of morning sun melting crystal patterns formed by winter night's frozen artistry.
Zazen with sunrise melting drip!
Chanting melody of black & white coon cat-eared sage!
You will see then that
both your body and mind,
together with the mountains,
rivers, space, and earth
of the outward world,
are all within the
wonderful, illumined, and true Mind.
(- Surangama Sutra, dailyzen)
The whole outward world awaits the command to begin invasion of Arabic country by American military. There is, I suspect, room in the true Mind for one more war.
The ‘what is’ of all there is might find itself under screaming bombs and lamenting mothers wailing for their children.
It is equally possible the ‘what is of all there is’ could find itself in earnest deliberations, diplomatically resolving the interests of two nations to satisfaction without disturbing the prepared ennui of men and women with loaded guns and bombs.
At breakfast tables in both desert and city individual minds take toast and cereal in distracted wonder.
When do we see the face of God? And how do we live with what we are seeing?
‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’. (Matthew 25)
The mind, like the world, is a dangerous place. More accommodating is tea and toast, or coffee and soymilk alongside banana slices.
If we placed our minds on breakfast with the same unswerving attention of a self-licking cat or the single concentration of warriors readying pre-dawn attack – perhaps breakfast with true Mind would throw everyone and everything into original creation. Once there, in a complete realization of “do to one, do to me,” dangerous mind might just yield to awakened heart, and all would return to dwell within their true home.
At my window, night cold chiseled patterns of ice disappear and clear light moves through grime of accumulated dust and wind soil. Cat has run to other room sound of drapes pulled back.
Bells take wind’s passing and turn it to tolling sound. Mountain sits still. Pond makes thick ice its unmoving meditation. Broken open shells on frozen snow under birdfeeder hold emptiness as their new exclosure.
No one knows the mind of God. There are only faces. Billions of faces! And we are those faces. We look from those faces. We look at those faces. We face what we are seeing.
This is our prayer: May we see what we are looking at!
As such, our life is prayer.
And so, when we see the face of God, we live with what we are, seeing.
Mu-ge purrs on stomach and chest as sun comes through opaque iced window. He is well tuned. His young exhalation and inhalation the smoothness of morning sun melting crystal patterns formed by winter night's frozen artistry.
Zazen with sunrise melting drip!
Chanting melody of black & white coon cat-eared sage!
You will see then that
both your body and mind,
together with the mountains,
rivers, space, and earth
of the outward world,
are all within the
wonderful, illumined, and true Mind.
(- Surangama Sutra, dailyzen)
The whole outward world awaits the command to begin invasion of Arabic country by American military. There is, I suspect, room in the true Mind for one more war.
The ‘what is’ of all there is might find itself under screaming bombs and lamenting mothers wailing for their children.
It is equally possible the ‘what is of all there is’ could find itself in earnest deliberations, diplomatically resolving the interests of two nations to satisfaction without disturbing the prepared ennui of men and women with loaded guns and bombs.
At breakfast tables in both desert and city individual minds take toast and cereal in distracted wonder.
When do we see the face of God? And how do we live with what we are seeing?
‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me’. Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me’. (Matthew 25)
The mind, like the world, is a dangerous place. More accommodating is tea and toast, or coffee and soymilk alongside banana slices.
If we placed our minds on breakfast with the same unswerving attention of a self-licking cat or the single concentration of warriors readying pre-dawn attack – perhaps breakfast with true Mind would throw everyone and everything into original creation. Once there, in a complete realization of “do to one, do to me,” dangerous mind might just yield to awakened heart, and all would return to dwell within their true home.
At my window, night cold chiseled patterns of ice disappear and clear light moves through grime of accumulated dust and wind soil. Cat has run to other room sound of drapes pulled back.
Bells take wind’s passing and turn it to tolling sound. Mountain sits still. Pond makes thick ice its unmoving meditation. Broken open shells on frozen snow under birdfeeder hold emptiness as their new exclosure.
No one knows the mind of God. There are only faces. Billions of faces! And we are those faces. We look from those faces. We look at those faces. We face what we are seeing.
This is our prayer: May we see what we are looking at!
As such, our life is prayer.
And so, when we see the face of God, we live with what we are, seeing.
Saturday, March 08, 2003
Saturday morning sun. Room tidied after years of debris. Dust motes laze about cleared spaces. Floating in beams of sunlight through dormer window.
Settling into breath. A change of heart? The exchange of the dust we are with each other. Dust to dust. Breath to breath. Heart to heart.
Is Christ the intersection, the thin place, the connection?
Dust motes float this morning. This desk. This silence. This looking.
Settling into breath. A change of heart? The exchange of the dust we are with each other. Dust to dust. Breath to breath. Heart to heart.
Is Christ the intersection, the thin place, the connection?
Dust motes float this morning. This desk. This silence. This looking.
Friday, March 07, 2003
Lent.
40 days of intentional stillness (whether at rest or in motion), intentional prayer (whether listening or speaking), and intentional service (with one’s self or with Oneself Itself).
The Hermitage attempts to settle into itself and move through itself with stillness, prayer, and service. Meetingbrook intends to look into and through these 40 days. We meet each and all who visit one another in God’s dwelling place.
It is now time to tie together earth and heaven. We, each of us in prayer, enter into the connection, and move through the inseparable sacred reality of earth/heaven.
May all dwell in peace during these days! May we overcome war, which divides, and surrender into the connection with prayer and lives of prayer!
40 days of intentional stillness (whether at rest or in motion), intentional prayer (whether listening or speaking), and intentional service (with one’s self or with Oneself Itself).
The Hermitage attempts to settle into itself and move through itself with stillness, prayer, and service. Meetingbrook intends to look into and through these 40 days. We meet each and all who visit one another in God’s dwelling place.
It is now time to tie together earth and heaven. We, each of us in prayer, enter into the connection, and move through the inseparable sacred reality of earth/heaven.
May all dwell in peace during these days! May we overcome war, which divides, and surrender into the connection with prayer and lives of prayer!
Monday, February 24, 2003
Letter to Esther from Ragged Mountain:
You write about family members dying, that all would be grateful for prayer.
This Monday I am trying to remember something. I am trying to remember who I am.
Prayer, now, is looking.
How amazing, how amazing!
Hard to comprehend that
Nonsentient beings expound Dharma.
It simply cannot be heard with the ear,
But when sound is heard with the eye,
Then it is understood.
- Tung-shan (807-869)
It is the thin place that crosses between fear and love.
Visiting that thin place is a journey through disbelief, uncertainty, and unknowing. The journey to that thin place is both unnerving and uncharted. While there are some rough maps others have drawn to help us approach that place, it remains an individual and idiosyncratic journey for each one of us. Prayer is dwelling at home. Hence prayer, for many of us, is never really entered.
Perhaps we can only hope for, or actually experience, arrival at that thin place. It is in this crossing/touching place we approach home. It is not dwelling in the clutch of fear, and not yet dwelling in the full embrace of love.
Prayer, now, is looking.
In this time of the world, this time of my life, it all seems dim and distressing. Perhaps, as someone suggested to me, it is better I look, but keep silence. The temptation, even here, is to attempt what many find absurd in theological/spiritual study/practice -- namely, to allow silence become word, and word flesh -- to embody silence in all its expression.
To look, to glimpse, to see – these designations do not necessarily mean to understand, to forgive, and to actually love. To look is to merely look, there and intimate, with another.
The thin place of prayer is open eyes, open ears -- to, and with, all taking place. And when does ‘all’ take place? This is our question. Is ‘all’ taking place right now?
What is "all?”
In the thin place our journey wavers between holding onto what is and letting go what is not mere presence. There are no dreams, hopes, fears, and distress dwelling there. No completed anything there. Only stark presence. Also stark absence. This starkness is bare and unadorned wholeness. Can we comprehend joy without images? Can we begin to understand the wholeness and integrity of true reality -- of God -- devoid of thought, full of clear light?
Existentialists might call this the absurd. This incongruous, not conforming clear light. In that place we are neither this form nor that form. We merely are in that place between. Buddhists might call this the formless.
Prayer.
Is prayer the presence of no other? (How absurd does that sound?) If there is no presence is there any prayer? (Yes, we can 'say' prayers, and even find comfort from feelings associated with those prayers. We can sit in silence and find meaning there.) And yet it occurs to me this Monday morning that we might not have yet entered prayer. We might not have entered the thin place where there are no sides, no other to suppose or oppose. If prayer is the thin place where all meets, or, where each meets each in all, then have I ever entered prayer? Have I ever been (within) the heart beating? The heart that beats the whole of creation, the very pulse of life itself?
The sentence of an inmate in Maine State Prison goes, "We are not God, but God is us." That is, in an ambiguous way, his sentence in prison. It is the comma between "God" "but" that interests me. Else it reads, "We are not God but God is us." There is a subtle but interesting change in the sentence. I hear the sound of the Moslem, "There is no God but God." Perhaps our thin place is in the comma. In that pause, in that interval, in what grammarians would call the 'separation.'
Is this the first time I am willing to consider anew that I dwell in separation? I have often quoted (someone's) words that 'Sin is separation.' Is the thin place that interval and pause that brooks no separation, practices no-barrier, sees no-boundaries?
Is 'sin' the conscious choice to encourage separation? And is prayer simple dwelling in the midst, in the thin place between what some call 'both sides,' but which is actually a wholeness that has no sides? (Our calculative, dimensional thinking is perhaps not yet capable of receiving what is whole without fragmenting and dividing it.)
Prayer is now looking.
Not looking at. Not looking from. Not looking to.
Rather, looking as.
Looking as is a looking that merely looks. In times past we have described looking as in words specifically attributing a God at some distance from us
Has our view of God neared? How near?.
· 'God is all-seeing.'
· 'God sees all'
· 'God is all seeing all.'
Many of the descriptions thinkers have attempted of God include the prefix ‘omni,’ (i.e. 'all'). We've said God is all present, all knowing, all holy, all mighty, all-powerful, and all loving. I take nothing away from our thought of God. (I can’t.) Those who think of God have already said whatever can be said of God. My question has to do with looking ourselves as all.
What can be said of ourselves? Are we able to look as all? And if we did, would we conceive ourselves between all? Behind all? Beneath all? Within all? Beyond all?
Is that which has been attributed to God an attribution, a potentiality and capability, or even a current capacity of humankind?
Dying is prayer realizing itself. The capacity to be 'itself' involves letting go of what is not itself. (The "Itself," capitalized, in Keiji Nishitani's philosophy, is not other than what we in the west call "God.")
The ‘itself,’ the undivided and true reality of Being, is the dwelling place of all of us. It is the thin place where nothing is left out.
Prayer is nothing left out. Nothing is prayer but as itself. Looking is prayer as nothing other.
To live a life of prayer is to live journeying to the thin place where all is as all in all.
As we live, and as we die, everything and we look to look as each looks. Thus:
· This person is dying. We look.
· This address is changing. We look.
· This means of earning a living is ending. We look.
· This friend is no longer friend. We look.
· This war is coming. We look.
· This feeling is arising. We look.
· This day is arriving. We look.
· This color is appearing. We look.
· This love is flowering. We look.
· This moment is all. We look.
· This person is smiling. We look.
To look is to enter, engage, and intimately be what we are seeing, who we are looking. There is no distance, no separation, and no boundary. There is no other. We are merely and wonderfully (even if disturbingly) in the thin place of prayer with and as the one there.
There are so many ways to forget prayer.
There is only one-way – (it has been called a narrow way, but is actually the broadest possible way) – to remember prayer. That way is the unceasing inquiry, “Who am I?” “What am I?” “Where am I?” In this inquiry, (for those who worry), God is not left out.
In that inquiry, in that journey, we are already in prayer. We are already in the thin place. We are already in all there is to be within.
Cry if we wish to. Laugh if we wish to. Despair if we wish to. Dance if we wish to. But, remember. Remember. It is no surprise Jesus asks us to remember him and remember love. It is no surprise Buddha asks us to remember enlightenment and remember compassion.
And we must remember. Prayer is remembrance.
May we look and see family members living! May we look and see family members dying! May we be the family we look as and see!
And, with love and compassion, may we realize that all would be grateful for prayer. May we realize that all is grateful in prayer!
Therefore, friend, we visit you and yours in the thin place of prayer. May ours be yours, and yours ours, now in this space and time.
We wish each well -- here, home.
You write about family members dying, that all would be grateful for prayer.
This Monday I am trying to remember something. I am trying to remember who I am.
Prayer, now, is looking.
How amazing, how amazing!
Hard to comprehend that
Nonsentient beings expound Dharma.
It simply cannot be heard with the ear,
But when sound is heard with the eye,
Then it is understood.
- Tung-shan (807-869)
It is the thin place that crosses between fear and love.
Visiting that thin place is a journey through disbelief, uncertainty, and unknowing. The journey to that thin place is both unnerving and uncharted. While there are some rough maps others have drawn to help us approach that place, it remains an individual and idiosyncratic journey for each one of us. Prayer is dwelling at home. Hence prayer, for many of us, is never really entered.
Perhaps we can only hope for, or actually experience, arrival at that thin place. It is in this crossing/touching place we approach home. It is not dwelling in the clutch of fear, and not yet dwelling in the full embrace of love.
Prayer, now, is looking.
In this time of the world, this time of my life, it all seems dim and distressing. Perhaps, as someone suggested to me, it is better I look, but keep silence. The temptation, even here, is to attempt what many find absurd in theological/spiritual study/practice -- namely, to allow silence become word, and word flesh -- to embody silence in all its expression.
To look, to glimpse, to see – these designations do not necessarily mean to understand, to forgive, and to actually love. To look is to merely look, there and intimate, with another.
The thin place of prayer is open eyes, open ears -- to, and with, all taking place. And when does ‘all’ take place? This is our question. Is ‘all’ taking place right now?
What is "all?”
In the thin place our journey wavers between holding onto what is and letting go what is not mere presence. There are no dreams, hopes, fears, and distress dwelling there. No completed anything there. Only stark presence. Also stark absence. This starkness is bare and unadorned wholeness. Can we comprehend joy without images? Can we begin to understand the wholeness and integrity of true reality -- of God -- devoid of thought, full of clear light?
Existentialists might call this the absurd. This incongruous, not conforming clear light. In that place we are neither this form nor that form. We merely are in that place between. Buddhists might call this the formless.
Prayer.
Is prayer the presence of no other? (How absurd does that sound?) If there is no presence is there any prayer? (Yes, we can 'say' prayers, and even find comfort from feelings associated with those prayers. We can sit in silence and find meaning there.) And yet it occurs to me this Monday morning that we might not have yet entered prayer. We might not have entered the thin place where there are no sides, no other to suppose or oppose. If prayer is the thin place where all meets, or, where each meets each in all, then have I ever entered prayer? Have I ever been (within) the heart beating? The heart that beats the whole of creation, the very pulse of life itself?
The sentence of an inmate in Maine State Prison goes, "We are not God, but God is us." That is, in an ambiguous way, his sentence in prison. It is the comma between "God" "but" that interests me. Else it reads, "We are not God but God is us." There is a subtle but interesting change in the sentence. I hear the sound of the Moslem, "There is no God but God." Perhaps our thin place is in the comma. In that pause, in that interval, in what grammarians would call the 'separation.'
Is this the first time I am willing to consider anew that I dwell in separation? I have often quoted (someone's) words that 'Sin is separation.' Is the thin place that interval and pause that brooks no separation, practices no-barrier, sees no-boundaries?
Is 'sin' the conscious choice to encourage separation? And is prayer simple dwelling in the midst, in the thin place between what some call 'both sides,' but which is actually a wholeness that has no sides? (Our calculative, dimensional thinking is perhaps not yet capable of receiving what is whole without fragmenting and dividing it.)
Prayer is now looking.
Not looking at. Not looking from. Not looking to.
Rather, looking as.
Looking as is a looking that merely looks. In times past we have described looking as in words specifically attributing a God at some distance from us
Has our view of God neared? How near?.
· 'God is all-seeing.'
· 'God sees all'
· 'God is all seeing all.'
Many of the descriptions thinkers have attempted of God include the prefix ‘omni,’ (i.e. 'all'). We've said God is all present, all knowing, all holy, all mighty, all-powerful, and all loving. I take nothing away from our thought of God. (I can’t.) Those who think of God have already said whatever can be said of God. My question has to do with looking ourselves as all.
What can be said of ourselves? Are we able to look as all? And if we did, would we conceive ourselves between all? Behind all? Beneath all? Within all? Beyond all?
Is that which has been attributed to God an attribution, a potentiality and capability, or even a current capacity of humankind?
Dying is prayer realizing itself. The capacity to be 'itself' involves letting go of what is not itself. (The "Itself," capitalized, in Keiji Nishitani's philosophy, is not other than what we in the west call "God.")
The ‘itself,’ the undivided and true reality of Being, is the dwelling place of all of us. It is the thin place where nothing is left out.
Prayer is nothing left out. Nothing is prayer but as itself. Looking is prayer as nothing other.
To live a life of prayer is to live journeying to the thin place where all is as all in all.
As we live, and as we die, everything and we look to look as each looks. Thus:
· This person is dying. We look.
· This address is changing. We look.
· This means of earning a living is ending. We look.
· This friend is no longer friend. We look.
· This war is coming. We look.
· This feeling is arising. We look.
· This day is arriving. We look.
· This color is appearing. We look.
· This love is flowering. We look.
· This moment is all. We look.
· This person is smiling. We look.
To look is to enter, engage, and intimately be what we are seeing, who we are looking. There is no distance, no separation, and no boundary. There is no other. We are merely and wonderfully (even if disturbingly) in the thin place of prayer with and as the one there.
There are so many ways to forget prayer.
There is only one-way – (it has been called a narrow way, but is actually the broadest possible way) – to remember prayer. That way is the unceasing inquiry, “Who am I?” “What am I?” “Where am I?” In this inquiry, (for those who worry), God is not left out.
In that inquiry, in that journey, we are already in prayer. We are already in the thin place. We are already in all there is to be within.
Cry if we wish to. Laugh if we wish to. Despair if we wish to. Dance if we wish to. But, remember. Remember. It is no surprise Jesus asks us to remember him and remember love. It is no surprise Buddha asks us to remember enlightenment and remember compassion.
And we must remember. Prayer is remembrance.
May we look and see family members living! May we look and see family members dying! May we be the family we look as and see!
And, with love and compassion, may we realize that all would be grateful for prayer. May we realize that all is grateful in prayer!
Therefore, friend, we visit you and yours in the thin place of prayer. May ours be yours, and yours ours, now in this space and time.
We wish each well -- here, home.
Friday, February 21, 2003
Learning is now with uncertainty.
The day is warm. Skiers slap turns on trails beyond brook. Cabin woodstove finally expands breath, reaching loft. Squirrels leap from branch to branch, so tells their snow shadow below. Birds have feeder back, chirp, crack seed, and fly off.
Solitude in cabin. "Schola vacation," we say. In Meetingbrook terms, "schola vacation" means the empty conversation. Silence looks at itself, finds itself looking as well, and listens to what is unsaid there.
Neighbor’s dogs penned up hill bark at what they hear. Cars scurry Barnestown like busy mice enroute elsewhere. Planks of rough wood lay across ribs fastened to ridgepole. In spring two windows will follow sawsall cuts into Bald-side and brook-side gables.
February gives respite. Nearly three weeks of zero degree temperatures, wind chill to 30 below. Harbors ice over. Furnaces groan, puff, and pant reminding houses there is a thin membrane between being chilly and freezing to death. Automobile engines, like hoboes in refrigerator cars rousted by train yard cops, are shocked into complaining when hit with ignition sticks and told it is time to go.
The thought of enlightenment has many names but they all refer to one and the same mind. Nagarjuna said, “The mind that fully sees into the uncertain world of birth and death is called the thought of enlightenment.” Thus if we maintain this mind, this mind can become the thought of enlightenment.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
Prayer is awkward these days. War is afoot. There is little trust in proclamations of governments that urge war or delay war. Politics take off kid gloves and puts on gauntlet. So great is the longing to believe and trust in what seems to be taking place that ordinary people are beside themselves stuttering in anger or pontificating with secret intelligence. The gut says no one can be trusted. We know that. Its realization desolates. Apocalyptic voices sound like embezzling executives locking up their pronouncements in secret and secure deposit boxes guaranteed by federal insurance.
So much of the world is beyond our comprehension. So much of the noise of justification and analysis is fingernail on slate board. We are a population of guess and hunch, fear and paranoia. We lay bets on opinions like bookies at racetracks. The horse we back takes on patriotic significance as we defend our pick with fervor and blind conviction.
Things feel dark, even as daylight lengthens. So, prayer. What is seen there?
They shall see the Lord face to face and bear his name on their foreheads. The night shall be no more. They will need no light from lamps or the sun, for the Lord God shall give them light, and they shall reign forever. (Revelation 22: 4-5)
On the mountain beyond the brook squeals of delight and play echo through trees. It is winter vacation. Tubes, toboggans, skis, snowboards, fresh deep snow and warm sun brighten the afternoon. We are a people at work and play, needing to make enough money to pay for necessities, needing to engage in enough play to relieve the strain of being human.
Prayer is the thin place between work and play.
What is necessary is balance. The willingness to hold uncertainty in the thin place of prayer. This is a chance to see what cannot be seen elsewhere. Not by those certain of their opinions. Not by those certain they will win. Nor by those certain they are right and on a mission to call God back for judgment.
Has God ever gone? What are they calling back? And if we look as they call, what is it we think we will see?
What is our prayer?
Birth and death are reasonable bets. But they only get you to starting lines. Everything appears equal at the sound of the bell and the first lunge forward. Maintaining balance is the only readiness we can afford.
One thing is certain.
What is this one thing?
What is this one thing!
The words, "What is this one thing" -- are both question and exhortation.
Are we certain we know the difference?
Are we willing to learn now with uncertainty?
The day is warm. Skiers slap turns on trails beyond brook. Cabin woodstove finally expands breath, reaching loft. Squirrels leap from branch to branch, so tells their snow shadow below. Birds have feeder back, chirp, crack seed, and fly off.
Solitude in cabin. "Schola vacation," we say. In Meetingbrook terms, "schola vacation" means the empty conversation. Silence looks at itself, finds itself looking as well, and listens to what is unsaid there.
Neighbor’s dogs penned up hill bark at what they hear. Cars scurry Barnestown like busy mice enroute elsewhere. Planks of rough wood lay across ribs fastened to ridgepole. In spring two windows will follow sawsall cuts into Bald-side and brook-side gables.
February gives respite. Nearly three weeks of zero degree temperatures, wind chill to 30 below. Harbors ice over. Furnaces groan, puff, and pant reminding houses there is a thin membrane between being chilly and freezing to death. Automobile engines, like hoboes in refrigerator cars rousted by train yard cops, are shocked into complaining when hit with ignition sticks and told it is time to go.
The thought of enlightenment has many names but they all refer to one and the same mind. Nagarjuna said, “The mind that fully sees into the uncertain world of birth and death is called the thought of enlightenment.” Thus if we maintain this mind, this mind can become the thought of enlightenment.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
Prayer is awkward these days. War is afoot. There is little trust in proclamations of governments that urge war or delay war. Politics take off kid gloves and puts on gauntlet. So great is the longing to believe and trust in what seems to be taking place that ordinary people are beside themselves stuttering in anger or pontificating with secret intelligence. The gut says no one can be trusted. We know that. Its realization desolates. Apocalyptic voices sound like embezzling executives locking up their pronouncements in secret and secure deposit boxes guaranteed by federal insurance.
So much of the world is beyond our comprehension. So much of the noise of justification and analysis is fingernail on slate board. We are a population of guess and hunch, fear and paranoia. We lay bets on opinions like bookies at racetracks. The horse we back takes on patriotic significance as we defend our pick with fervor and blind conviction.
Things feel dark, even as daylight lengthens. So, prayer. What is seen there?
They shall see the Lord face to face and bear his name on their foreheads. The night shall be no more. They will need no light from lamps or the sun, for the Lord God shall give them light, and they shall reign forever. (Revelation 22: 4-5)
On the mountain beyond the brook squeals of delight and play echo through trees. It is winter vacation. Tubes, toboggans, skis, snowboards, fresh deep snow and warm sun brighten the afternoon. We are a people at work and play, needing to make enough money to pay for necessities, needing to engage in enough play to relieve the strain of being human.
Prayer is the thin place between work and play.
What is necessary is balance. The willingness to hold uncertainty in the thin place of prayer. This is a chance to see what cannot be seen elsewhere. Not by those certain of their opinions. Not by those certain they will win. Nor by those certain they are right and on a mission to call God back for judgment.
Has God ever gone? What are they calling back? And if we look as they call, what is it we think we will see?
What is our prayer?
Birth and death are reasonable bets. But they only get you to starting lines. Everything appears equal at the sound of the bell and the first lunge forward. Maintaining balance is the only readiness we can afford.
One thing is certain.
What is this one thing?
What is this one thing!
The words, "What is this one thing" -- are both question and exhortation.
Are we certain we know the difference?
Are we willing to learn now with uncertainty?
Thursday, February 20, 2003
What is the sign and instrument of the unity of humankind?
Night holds no terrors for me sleeping under God’s wings. (Antiphon, Sunday Compline)
This is a farewell for all who'll die in the war between America and Iraq. All men and women of every nationality, all youthful boys and girls, all children and infants, all living beings caught in the fire and noise of war and destruction.
I find myself anticipating grief. War will rage, massacre will bloody the sands, and power will temporarily shift. Lives will be taken. Yours. Mine. And time will go on.
The universal body of reality
Is so subtle that you do not
Hear it when you deliberately listen for it,
And you do not see it when you look at it.
As for the pure knowledge
That has no teacher,
How can it be attained by thought or study?
- Huanglong
I greet you on our way to death. We are caught in a time when government officials in Iraq and America are riveted in a stalemate of intransigence. One controls his desert subjects with stranglehold singularity. The other paralyzes elected representatives and the people who did not elect him with laser-focused certainty and disconcertion stemming from 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both these men are arrogant. They are unwilling or unable to ask or answer questions about our lives. They are about themselves.
I'm not sure what the reason is we will die. The drawing room response given is to uphold the dignity of the United Nations resolution to disarm Iraq. The dirty cellar suspicion is to loot oil and begin to colonize Arab Middle East. Perhaps our deaths will be seen as further revenge for three thousand dead in New York's World Trade Towers collapse. Iraqis are easy targets. You and I have as little chance of escaping missiles and bombs as those who died on September 11th.
We will be killed because human beings are fools and sinners. Fools because we don't yet know better than murder and killing to resolve differences. Sinners because we do know better, yet refuse to follow the dictates and teachings of the God we try to leash to our standards.
Some say we'll live beyond death because being a fool and sinner isn't enough to permanently delete life in all its dimensions. Some say God's life does not exclude fools and sinners. Profound life, they say, changes, but it doesn't end. Dictators and fundamentalists, some suggest, can only make natural human life miserable and terrible.
Still...
We die because those who believe in peace, compassion, and love lack power. We might not lack courage and conviction, but we remain bystanders and observers, hoping that molecular atomic matter is changed by our participant-observer attentiveness. We have words to give but withhold our bodies. Dan Berrigan once wrote, "Bodies belong where words are." Our bodies should be in front of the insane leaders lighting the fuse of war, and under falling bombs next to the suffering innocent.
We organize protests in safe places but do not travel to harm's way to protest with our valuable lives. We aver, saying we are only human. If someone must die to illustrate the dark danger of war, it will be some of us who need no illustration. Does God die? Does the unillustrated God disappear in the klieg lights of horrible intention to maim, torture, harm, and disable one another in war?
We know God is dying with us. We know it is no beneficent ideal kills us. It is not freedom they fight for, not motherland, not our children, not democracy or liberation or justice, nor is it for a religious faith they so easily tout as our bedrock. No, it is none of these.
What kills us is lies and deceit, maleficent motivation that deludes their minds into thinking God and our way of life are synonymous. This kind of thinking has used, and will continue to use, people and power to fashion an illusory proprietary and self-serving model of ideology that values nothing but "this is mine," and "you can't have it."
What kills us is stupidity and ignorance, false ideals and selfish will, perversion of truth and failure to comprehend love.
The one we call Christ enters and attempts to transfigure our reality. The one we call Bodhisattva emerges and attempts to enlighten our reality. The angel of the Great One stands at dusk and dawn in constant prayer for those living in these times. Each of them dedicates their lives to relieving suffering and presencing love with compassion. They are wandering near the targets where the killing will begin, they are near our whispers of war, they stay with us who are about to die, they cannot stop the wrong and evil we propose and do.
I ready for war. I dress my body for battle. I look down at my wounds. I open my body to let blood seep. I have a mouthful of sand sopped with spittle. I have a leg blown off. I scream in pain at a bullet through my face. I cannot hear anything. I remember a minute of childhood. I release my stomach in retching. My bladder and bowels explode. I receive no last rites. I have no sound on my tongue. My eyes are blind. The din of dismay pervades the land. I think of an angel who, surely, will reach me. Now...
Now, Lord, you may dismiss your servant, in peace, according to your word. (Canticle, Compline)
May the Almighty and Merciful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death!
Sign? Instrument? Unity?
How live, together?
Water! Holy, water, please?
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Reading Don DeLillo's Libra and listening to NPR's Talk of the Nation during snowfall. Fictional assassination by default and factual dissidence by popular anti-war gathering. Over it all white flakes that mute and cover the middle ground.
It is not easy listening to the president's unwavering belief that the United States is going ahead into Iraq. Also not easy is the staunch optimism of Win Without War and Move On in their efforts to slow the roaring train of bellicosity.
Troops and wartime munitions gather at Iraq's border. E-mails, faxes, and phone call messages gather on desks of elected representatives of the people. The storm of power darkens both Iraq's future and the future of America. Death and terrorism are feared consequences of actions -- whether to be taken or not taken.
The teaching of the mind ground
Is the basis of Zen study.
The mind ground is the
Great awareness of being as is.
- Fayan
Debate finds no middle ground. Sides are seen migrating to extreme edges away from middle ground. When did we forget middle ground? Who was it painted middle ground the color gray? Who spun the place where all things meet into epithets like wishy-washy, compromise, and appeasement?
Middle ground is where all things meet. It is the Middle Way of Buddha. It is "In medio stat virtus" (In the middle stands strength/truth) of philosophical wisdom. It is the Celtic notion of the "Thin Place" where dwells authentic conversation and exchange of dimensions.
Middle ground is where earth and sea touch. It is where all opposites are nearest to each other. It is where hell and heaven negotiate a path to walk along without falling away from our human nature.
We need to re-find middle ground.
Bush and company are far out in front of themselves having in their minds fought the war in Iraq, eliminated Saddam Hussein, secured the weapons of mass destruction the West feels they alone should have, and taken administration of oil reserves that, along with a democratic prop in the Arab world, will secure the world for the foreseeable future.
And what vision does the anti-war people espouse? Do they see a time of rearranged priorities in America? Equitable distribution of our substantial comfort as compared with deprivation throughout the world? A dismantling of a system of rule that purchases power and influence and calls it Republic and Participatory Democracy? The resurrection of community, common sense, and shared reverence as hallmarks of our human interaction throughout the world?
Deep in the night monks sit in darkness holding still with silence the prayer that all might be surrendered to God.
Eventually, this is the only prayer -- that all might be surrendered to God.
Leaving us.
Humbled.
It is not easy listening to the president's unwavering belief that the United States is going ahead into Iraq. Also not easy is the staunch optimism of Win Without War and Move On in their efforts to slow the roaring train of bellicosity.
Troops and wartime munitions gather at Iraq's border. E-mails, faxes, and phone call messages gather on desks of elected representatives of the people. The storm of power darkens both Iraq's future and the future of America. Death and terrorism are feared consequences of actions -- whether to be taken or not taken.
The teaching of the mind ground
Is the basis of Zen study.
The mind ground is the
Great awareness of being as is.
- Fayan
Debate finds no middle ground. Sides are seen migrating to extreme edges away from middle ground. When did we forget middle ground? Who was it painted middle ground the color gray? Who spun the place where all things meet into epithets like wishy-washy, compromise, and appeasement?
Middle ground is where all things meet. It is the Middle Way of Buddha. It is "In medio stat virtus" (In the middle stands strength/truth) of philosophical wisdom. It is the Celtic notion of the "Thin Place" where dwells authentic conversation and exchange of dimensions.
Middle ground is where earth and sea touch. It is where all opposites are nearest to each other. It is where hell and heaven negotiate a path to walk along without falling away from our human nature.
We need to re-find middle ground.
Bush and company are far out in front of themselves having in their minds fought the war in Iraq, eliminated Saddam Hussein, secured the weapons of mass destruction the West feels they alone should have, and taken administration of oil reserves that, along with a democratic prop in the Arab world, will secure the world for the foreseeable future.
And what vision does the anti-war people espouse? Do they see a time of rearranged priorities in America? Equitable distribution of our substantial comfort as compared with deprivation throughout the world? A dismantling of a system of rule that purchases power and influence and calls it Republic and Participatory Democracy? The resurrection of community, common sense, and shared reverence as hallmarks of our human interaction throughout the world?
Deep in the night monks sit in darkness holding still with silence the prayer that all might be surrendered to God.
Eventually, this is the only prayer -- that all might be surrendered to God.
Leaving us.
Humbled.
Monday, February 17, 2003
Tom suggested the horizontal extension of what we call the cross is infinite. Therefore at any place transcendent awareness penetrates the extension, it serves as vertical dimension of the cross. Wayne Teasdale's words inform Sunday Evening Practice.
Like the cosmos whose age is 13.7 billion years and whose expansion is unending, the vertical/horizontal axis is the reflection of divine-in-matter co-operative wholeness.
If awareness is soul, and if deepening awareness makes sacred dwelling place of attentive presence, then the work of Christic love suffuses and deifies awakening of soul within each being.
I explain to you matters
Pertaining to enlightenment,
But don’t try to keep
Your mind on them.
Just turn to the ocean
Of your own essence
And develop practical accord with its nature.
- Yangshan
Comes the question: Is it possible that war is in any way the path of God in this existence?
The name of God is the presence of God.
God’s name and the name of each being might be pronounced differently, but call the same reality.
When we say, “Not in my name!” – We are saying the presence of God cannot hear the call for death and destruction of beings, not for any purpose reasoned by the minds of men.
But we are mere moments on the extension of infinite being. We can barely recognize our passing faces in the morning mirror.
God watches there. Our passing. Naming us. God’s own.
Calling, “This is my child. This one is not forsaken. This one dwelling the cross.”
God voices silence, asking, “And your name?”
And you hear, and you respond, “My name is…”
And you pronounce your name.
And no war sounds in your name.
Like the cosmos whose age is 13.7 billion years and whose expansion is unending, the vertical/horizontal axis is the reflection of divine-in-matter co-operative wholeness.
If awareness is soul, and if deepening awareness makes sacred dwelling place of attentive presence, then the work of Christic love suffuses and deifies awakening of soul within each being.
I explain to you matters
Pertaining to enlightenment,
But don’t try to keep
Your mind on them.
Just turn to the ocean
Of your own essence
And develop practical accord with its nature.
- Yangshan
Comes the question: Is it possible that war is in any way the path of God in this existence?
The name of God is the presence of God.
God’s name and the name of each being might be pronounced differently, but call the same reality.
When we say, “Not in my name!” – We are saying the presence of God cannot hear the call for death and destruction of beings, not for any purpose reasoned by the minds of men.
But we are mere moments on the extension of infinite being. We can barely recognize our passing faces in the morning mirror.
God watches there. Our passing. Naming us. God’s own.
Calling, “This is my child. This one is not forsaken. This one dwelling the cross.”
God voices silence, asking, “And your name?”
And you hear, and you respond, “My name is…”
And you pronounce your name.
And no war sounds in your name.
Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Forgetfulness is the face of war.
Who sees we are each one? Who comprehends sin as the ignorant will to make other and attack with mind to destroy the other as cause of our own unhappiness?
Who is capable of accepting the truth of God -- not Gott mit uns as if God were a cheerleader in international scrums marching downfield to goal line uprights -- but the truth of God as the mystery of peace at center of each and every person and thing.
At center, where each is itself. Itself, where God breathes within one and all.
God's breath, where you and I dwell as no other.
There is a new axis of dualistic foolishness. From George Bush to Osama bin Laden, from Saddam Hussein to Kim Jong Il, from Tony Blair to Ariel Sharon -- the dos e dos of war rhetoric and foolishness of mired dualistic thinking continues.
"All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive....What is, does not become; what becomes, is not." (-- Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.)
Acquisition, greed, and illusory-self love are clues to mummified concepts paraded in public wrapped in nationalistic and corporate flags for mass consumption & patriotic fervor. It is terrifying to think our leaders are aware they shill the dead and mummified knowingly for some benefit only they and a few with them accrue.
Nietzsche asks us to consider that we will not become a peaceful people after this or that evil is eliminated. Rather, we are a peaceful people that refuse to be what we are. That is our sin. There is no evil that takes away our good. We refuse the good we are. We cannot become what we are -- we can, though, desist denying what we are. If we deny what we are, we don't become something else -- we are not.
The sin of war-makers, if we can still make sense of the word 'sin', that Nietzsche might wish us to consider, is convincing us to deny who we are, forget what we are, and become murderers and plunderers. Then, these war-makers would have us believe, we would then strive to be what we are really becoming, namely, peaceful, loving, good citizens of our communities.
There are those who wish to claim we are good and evil, an amalgam of opposites battling to emerge authentically as shadows with light or light with shadows. Even here are seeds of understanding longing to flower.
We are not one or the other.
We are not one and the other.
We are one another.
There is no other.
Heidegger, after Kierkegaard, spoke of repetition. The German "Wiederholung" (retrieval, repetition).
By virtue of repetition the individual is able to press forward, not toward a sheer novelty which is discontinuous with the past, but into the being which he himself is. By repetition the individual becomes himself, circling back on the being which he has been all along. Repeating the Aristotelian ' to ti en einai' (that which a thing was to be), repetition is that by which the existing individual becomes what he was to be, that by which he returns to himself. (p.12, Radical Hermeneutics -- Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, by John D. Caputo, c.1987)
War is forgetfulness. It is the acting out of a primal mythology pitting one against the other. This mythology hurts, but has, in Richard Hugo's phrase, "compensations too lovely to leave."
The compensations of forgetfulness are power, wealth, and deceitful use of the other for benefit of the one. War is the delivery system of spoils to the spoilers.
War is the lie forgetfulness fails to recognize.
How do we return to "what a thing was to be?" How return to ones' self?
Try, try, and try to remember.
Look deeply into the face right there in front of us.
Gaze, long and carefully.
This, this, is our prayer.
Who sees we are each one? Who comprehends sin as the ignorant will to make other and attack with mind to destroy the other as cause of our own unhappiness?
Who is capable of accepting the truth of God -- not Gott mit uns as if God were a cheerleader in international scrums marching downfield to goal line uprights -- but the truth of God as the mystery of peace at center of each and every person and thing.
At center, where each is itself. Itself, where God breathes within one and all.
God's breath, where you and I dwell as no other.
There is a new axis of dualistic foolishness. From George Bush to Osama bin Laden, from Saddam Hussein to Kim Jong Il, from Tony Blair to Ariel Sharon -- the dos e dos of war rhetoric and foolishness of mired dualistic thinking continues.
"All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive....What is, does not become; what becomes, is not." (-- Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.)
Acquisition, greed, and illusory-self love are clues to mummified concepts paraded in public wrapped in nationalistic and corporate flags for mass consumption & patriotic fervor. It is terrifying to think our leaders are aware they shill the dead and mummified knowingly for some benefit only they and a few with them accrue.
Nietzsche asks us to consider that we will not become a peaceful people after this or that evil is eliminated. Rather, we are a peaceful people that refuse to be what we are. That is our sin. There is no evil that takes away our good. We refuse the good we are. We cannot become what we are -- we can, though, desist denying what we are. If we deny what we are, we don't become something else -- we are not.
The sin of war-makers, if we can still make sense of the word 'sin', that Nietzsche might wish us to consider, is convincing us to deny who we are, forget what we are, and become murderers and plunderers. Then, these war-makers would have us believe, we would then strive to be what we are really becoming, namely, peaceful, loving, good citizens of our communities.
There are those who wish to claim we are good and evil, an amalgam of opposites battling to emerge authentically as shadows with light or light with shadows. Even here are seeds of understanding longing to flower.
We are not one or the other.
We are not one and the other.
We are one another.
There is no other.
Heidegger, after Kierkegaard, spoke of repetition. The German "Wiederholung" (retrieval, repetition).
By virtue of repetition the individual is able to press forward, not toward a sheer novelty which is discontinuous with the past, but into the being which he himself is. By repetition the individual becomes himself, circling back on the being which he has been all along. Repeating the Aristotelian ' to ti en einai' (that which a thing was to be), repetition is that by which the existing individual becomes what he was to be, that by which he returns to himself. (p.12, Radical Hermeneutics -- Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, by John D. Caputo, c.1987)
War is forgetfulness. It is the acting out of a primal mythology pitting one against the other. This mythology hurts, but has, in Richard Hugo's phrase, "compensations too lovely to leave."
The compensations of forgetfulness are power, wealth, and deceitful use of the other for benefit of the one. War is the delivery system of spoils to the spoilers.
War is the lie forgetfulness fails to recognize.
How do we return to "what a thing was to be?" How return to ones' self?
Try, try, and try to remember.
Look deeply into the face right there in front of us.
Gaze, long and carefully.
This, this, is our prayer.
Monday, February 10, 2003
In the shop around the fire of a Sunday morning, Pat, an older woman, tells of her sister dying. A young man, Jonathan, listens. One other makes three.
Perfect and clear by nature
Is the Bodhi ocean;
Pure and faultless,
Bodhi is in essence wonderful.
Its fundamental brightness shone,
So by chance creating
An object which then
Obscured its radiant nature.
Thus in delusion there
Appeared one-sided emptiness
In which an imaginary world
Arbitrarily was built.
Steadying itself,
The thinking process made the continents
While the illusory knower
Became a living being.
- Manjusri’s Gatha
In their conversation, illusion, grandiosity, and separate selves dissolve. Remaining in their midst was a living being. That living being found its soul between them.
February 10 remembers Scholastica. Scholastica was Benedict's sister. They visited. She was, it seems, in her final days, dying. She wanted to talk for the duration.
Their spiritual conversation went on and the hour grew late. The holy nun said to her brother: “Please do not leave me tonight; let us go on until morning talking about the delights of the spiritual life”. “Sister”, he replied, “what are you saying? I simply cannot stay outside my cell”.
When she heard her brother refuse her request, the holy woman joined her hands on the table, laid her head on them and began to pray. As she raised her head from the table, there were such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated. Sadly he began to complain: “May God forgive you, sister. What have you done?” “Well”, she answered, “I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen. So now go off, if you can, leave me and return to your monastery”. (--From the books of Dialogues by Saint Gregory the Great, pope)
Benedict stayed despite worrying he'd broken his will to return to his cell. They spoke. Then he went back to his cell. Three days later, she died. "Looking up to the sky, he saw his sister’s soul leave her body in the form of a dove, and fly up to the secret places of heaven."
Pat said she'd died once after an operation in the recovery room. Her mother bringing flowers found her unbreathing and flatline. When the medical people called her back, she lived to tell the story. Jonathan asked, "So you actually died and came back?" Pat looked at him, smiled, and said, "Look at this face; can't you tell?" All laughed.
We visit each other to visit the "between." It is there, in that "thin place," we engage each other while still remaining free of attachment and grasping. Engaged yet free -- a lovely phrase read from Wayne Teasdale's book A Monk in the World.
Benedict and Scholastica experienced "...such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated." Jonathan and Pat experienced intergenerational warmth from each other and fireplace telling their stories -- she of her brother dead and dying sister -- he of playing his synthesizer piano for his grandmother when he arrived just after she had died. "She heard you," says Pat. And Jonathan’s face is bright.
Staying a while with each other, letting fall the walls of our will and imagined separate egos, moving beyond barriers into the shared spaciousness of the between -- we dissolve into each other, into the between, for the duration.
No longer obscuring our radiant nature, we are of service to one-another. We are -- simply, silently, transparently -- there.
As Pat visits her sister today, we pray for that presence -- with each and all of us everywhere.
Friday, February 07, 2003
To war, these words: No, not now!
To peace, these words: Yes, now!
War is illusion with clenched bloody hand and closed mind.
Peace is reality with tender touching hand and open heart.
Those who have seen and known war understand No to war.
Those who see and feel peace innerstand Yes to peace.
Calm and contemplation
has in itself a
clarity and tranquility
beyond anything known to
earlier generations.
- Kuan-ting
God has learned from war. God weeps with this knowledge.
God is now here. God is now peace.
What are we learning? Where are we now?
To peace, these words: Yes, now!
War is illusion with clenched bloody hand and closed mind.
Peace is reality with tender touching hand and open heart.
Those who have seen and known war understand No to war.
Those who see and feel peace innerstand Yes to peace.
Calm and contemplation
has in itself a
clarity and tranquility
beyond anything known to
earlier generations.
- Kuan-ting
God has learned from war. God weeps with this knowledge.
God is now here. God is now peace.
What are we learning? Where are we now?
Thursday, February 06, 2003
Do we ask? Where?
What choice do we have in the face of contemporary world events?
"The choice in the midst of suffering is either bitterness or compassion." (--said to radio host 6Feb03 by Monsignor Thomas Hartman, co-author with Rabbi Marc Gellman of Religion For Dummies®)
Suffering these days entails a long list. You can hear it almost anywhere. It is heard in the bookshop. For some it almost seems too much. Their suffering goes far beyond their singular self. It stretches to the prospect of war, the failure of technology, the corruption of corporations, the deceits of governments, the harm done to trust in secular and church institutions, and the perpetuation of beliefs willing to amputate whole groups of people from the embrace of common support and economic safety.
Individuals reach for understanding. In last night’s conversation, after reading from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain, it happens that someone suggests that stone matter was less substantial during placement of ancient stones or construction of pyramids, that sound assisted the moving of massive objects, that there were technologies used far beyond our imagination that would seem very odd to our linear, left-brain computations.
These ideas seem eccentric.
Eccentric also the ideas of those suggesting conspiracy in deaths of notable people like Paul Wellstone, Ron Brown, and countless others. The initial response might be to wince and move mentally to dismissal of insubstantial evidence. Questions of the space shuttle disintegration might lay side by side with questions of JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations in the 60’s.
Since 9/11 our certitude and trust are sounding shaky and insubstantial. Voices attempting to sound strong and sternly resolute with arguments for decisive action against evil and foes, on the contrary, have a tin-like whine of suspect bravado not unlike bullying commands anywhere.
Where turn for certainty? The options diminish. Pema Chodron’s book suggests in its title we might consider becoming Comfortable With Uncertainty. Can we?
As a people, we seek either evidence or faith following death or significant events of destruction and suffering. Evidence is sometimes not forthcoming or is easily manipulated. So too, faith. What do we do when external voices and established structures no longer speak truth to the suffering?
While the ignorant only talk,
The wise apply their minds to practice.
There are also ignorant people
Who sit in meditation
With an empty mind and
Without thinking of anything
And who call themselves great.
It is useless to talk to them
Because of their views.
- Altar Sutra
Part of the practice of conversation is paying attention to ideas that, on first hearing, seem unlikely or absurd. Another practice of conversation is paying attention to the feelings and intuitions that arise within you listening to what is being said. The attention we devote to what is taking place has value when it is an attentive presence allowing transformation to take place. This transformation includes the one speaking, the one listening, the matter spoken about, and all the possible ramifications and consequences towards which attentive presence extends.
If we learned anything from Sept. 11, surely it is that there is a reason to worry when politicians hijack religion — just as we've learned from the church's scandal of the dangers that abound when religious leaders value political self-preservation over protecting the defenseless in their flock. ( NYT, Religion for Dummies, op ed piece by Frank Rich, 27Apr02)
The proper response these times might not be religion. What then? Ideologies not yet tried or semi-abandoned?
The practice of conversation is the practice of silence. We must begin again to listen to the sound of what is being said, within and without us.
If the true sound of what is being said is attended to, might the heaviness of our world become lighter? Might the oppressive weight of the false and untrustworthy become the insubstantial illusion it is? And might we return to a trust and confidence, faith and compassion the world so desperately needs in our time?
Real practice is to do what is true. Real presence is to be no opposite -- to be what is here.
When we are absent, when we are unwilling to pay attention, we have forgotten wonder. No wonder -- (and) we have forgotten God.
Do we ask? Where?
Do we dare?
What choice do we have in the face of contemporary world events?
"The choice in the midst of suffering is either bitterness or compassion." (--said to radio host 6Feb03 by Monsignor Thomas Hartman, co-author with Rabbi Marc Gellman of Religion For Dummies®)
Suffering these days entails a long list. You can hear it almost anywhere. It is heard in the bookshop. For some it almost seems too much. Their suffering goes far beyond their singular self. It stretches to the prospect of war, the failure of technology, the corruption of corporations, the deceits of governments, the harm done to trust in secular and church institutions, and the perpetuation of beliefs willing to amputate whole groups of people from the embrace of common support and economic safety.
Individuals reach for understanding. In last night’s conversation, after reading from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain, it happens that someone suggests that stone matter was less substantial during placement of ancient stones or construction of pyramids, that sound assisted the moving of massive objects, that there were technologies used far beyond our imagination that would seem very odd to our linear, left-brain computations.
These ideas seem eccentric.
Eccentric also the ideas of those suggesting conspiracy in deaths of notable people like Paul Wellstone, Ron Brown, and countless others. The initial response might be to wince and move mentally to dismissal of insubstantial evidence. Questions of the space shuttle disintegration might lay side by side with questions of JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations in the 60’s.
Since 9/11 our certitude and trust are sounding shaky and insubstantial. Voices attempting to sound strong and sternly resolute with arguments for decisive action against evil and foes, on the contrary, have a tin-like whine of suspect bravado not unlike bullying commands anywhere.
Where turn for certainty? The options diminish. Pema Chodron’s book suggests in its title we might consider becoming Comfortable With Uncertainty. Can we?
As a people, we seek either evidence or faith following death or significant events of destruction and suffering. Evidence is sometimes not forthcoming or is easily manipulated. So too, faith. What do we do when external voices and established structures no longer speak truth to the suffering?
While the ignorant only talk,
The wise apply their minds to practice.
There are also ignorant people
Who sit in meditation
With an empty mind and
Without thinking of anything
And who call themselves great.
It is useless to talk to them
Because of their views.
- Altar Sutra
Part of the practice of conversation is paying attention to ideas that, on first hearing, seem unlikely or absurd. Another practice of conversation is paying attention to the feelings and intuitions that arise within you listening to what is being said. The attention we devote to what is taking place has value when it is an attentive presence allowing transformation to take place. This transformation includes the one speaking, the one listening, the matter spoken about, and all the possible ramifications and consequences towards which attentive presence extends.
If we learned anything from Sept. 11, surely it is that there is a reason to worry when politicians hijack religion — just as we've learned from the church's scandal of the dangers that abound when religious leaders value political self-preservation over protecting the defenseless in their flock. ( NYT, Religion for Dummies, op ed piece by Frank Rich, 27Apr02)
The proper response these times might not be religion. What then? Ideologies not yet tried or semi-abandoned?
The practice of conversation is the practice of silence. We must begin again to listen to the sound of what is being said, within and without us.
If the true sound of what is being said is attended to, might the heaviness of our world become lighter? Might the oppressive weight of the false and untrustworthy become the insubstantial illusion it is? And might we return to a trust and confidence, faith and compassion the world so desperately needs in our time?
Real practice is to do what is true. Real presence is to be no opposite -- to be what is here.
When we are absent, when we are unwilling to pay attention, we have forgotten wonder. No wonder -- (and) we have forgotten God.
Do we ask? Where?
Do we dare?
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
Time changes hands. Before to after midnight. Yet, it is still Now.
Standing alone beneath a solitary pine
Quickly the time passes.
Overhead the endless sky
Who can I call to join me on this path?
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
Reading articles about deaths that trouble credulity and justice takes hours away.
Not-knowing is the conclusion and beginning of thinking.
I think of political figures that die and disappear. It is a theater of farce and fantasy too frightening to stage.
Returning to earth, leaving the sub-soil of political night crawling, bell outside window laments in wind.
Cesco's former mistress, Ky, left us license plates. The Volkswagen van wears them as of February first. They are question, prayer, name of God, and statement of faith in what matters --- NOW.
With Ryokan I ask: "Who can I call to join me on this path?"
Standing alone beneath a solitary pine
Quickly the time passes.
Overhead the endless sky
Who can I call to join me on this path?
- Ryokan (1758-1831)
Reading articles about deaths that trouble credulity and justice takes hours away.
Not-knowing is the conclusion and beginning of thinking.
I think of political figures that die and disappear. It is a theater of farce and fantasy too frightening to stage.
Returning to earth, leaving the sub-soil of political night crawling, bell outside window laments in wind.
Cesco's former mistress, Ky, left us license plates. The Volkswagen van wears them as of February first. They are question, prayer, name of God, and statement of faith in what matters --- NOW.
With Ryokan I ask: "Who can I call to join me on this path?"
Sunday, February 02, 2003
Blizzard.
Earlier, Tom, Barbara, and David spoke of omens and location. Why over Texas? Is Columbia, the ancient appellation of America, warned by this microcosmic sign?
The three stand in front of counter as Sam and Saskia play harmonica and flute. The talk of the country's leaders, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, is filled with wary worry. The music seems to get louder as voices increase in passion. I am looking up books on psalms and reverence.
The perfect Way’s like boundless space
Nothing lacking, nothing extra
It is because of choice
That its absolute truth is lost.
Don’t pursue externals;
Don’t dally in the interior void.
When the spirit remains serene
In the unity of things
Dualism vanishes by itself;
When that unity is not clear
There is loss in both directions.
- Seng-ts'an (d.606)
Tom leaves with soups and Mabinogian Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton. Barbara goes afterwards with soup. David sits with musicians.
It seems a sin to forget the agreement between all things, all peoples, the All-God and All-God's no opposite. The agreement, like water in glass with glass around water, is to be for each other a place of integrity. As places of integrity we allow the other to be no other, rather, to dwell as neighbor each to each holding in reverence the agreement.
Unity is clear. No murdering, no stealing, no dishonoring.
Remember this -- agree to be this with each and all.
Hanging on bakery counter lamp is cross-made one evening conversation by David's son Forrest with two sticks and piece of string. All three items have kept their agreement with each other these six years. So have we with them. It is the way of the cross that remembers for us the agreement holding us together that we so easily forget.
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyaev in his "The Part of Imagination in the Moral Life" wrote,
The Ethics of creativeness presupposes that the task which confronts man is infinite and that the world is not completed.
May we be delivered from men intent on destroying another's face!
May we learn, forgetting self, to open to boundless space!
May we agree to dwell with all upholding grace!
Earlier, Tom, Barbara, and David spoke of omens and location. Why over Texas? Is Columbia, the ancient appellation of America, warned by this microcosmic sign?
The three stand in front of counter as Sam and Saskia play harmonica and flute. The talk of the country's leaders, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, is filled with wary worry. The music seems to get louder as voices increase in passion. I am looking up books on psalms and reverence.
The perfect Way’s like boundless space
Nothing lacking, nothing extra
It is because of choice
That its absolute truth is lost.
Don’t pursue externals;
Don’t dally in the interior void.
When the spirit remains serene
In the unity of things
Dualism vanishes by itself;
When that unity is not clear
There is loss in both directions.
- Seng-ts'an (d.606)
Tom leaves with soups and Mabinogian Tetralogy by Evangeline Walton. Barbara goes afterwards with soup. David sits with musicians.
It seems a sin to forget the agreement between all things, all peoples, the All-God and All-God's no opposite. The agreement, like water in glass with glass around water, is to be for each other a place of integrity. As places of integrity we allow the other to be no other, rather, to dwell as neighbor each to each holding in reverence the agreement.
Unity is clear. No murdering, no stealing, no dishonoring.
Remember this -- agree to be this with each and all.
Hanging on bakery counter lamp is cross-made one evening conversation by David's son Forrest with two sticks and piece of string. All three items have kept their agreement with each other these six years. So have we with them. It is the way of the cross that remembers for us the agreement holding us together that we so easily forget.
Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyaev in his "The Part of Imagination in the Moral Life" wrote,
The Ethics of creativeness presupposes that the task which confronts man is infinite and that the world is not completed.
May we be delivered from men intent on destroying another's face!
May we learn, forgetting self, to open to boundless space!
May we agree to dwell with all upholding grace!
Saturday, February 01, 2003
Cold rain.
Because there are no words to say, conversation doesn't cease.
Because there is death, life is living itself.
Enlightenment is like the
moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet,
nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
the moon is reflected even
in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
are reflected in dewdrops on the grass,
or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we finally hear ourselves beneath words in silence, we let fall all unnecessary noise.
No one has ever failed to be listened to who listens to themselves. We are the ones unhearing ourselves. When we listen and hear who we are and what we are saying, no one is abandoned, no one homeless.
In the sight of, in the presence of all the peoples, said Simeon:
It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. He came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform the custom of the law in regard to him, he took him into his arms and blessed God, saying: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.” (Luke 2)
When we see who is there within listening and watching, we are alone.
With the Alone.
Unbroken, reflected, whole, and entire – even in one drop of water.
Because there are no words to say, conversation doesn't cease.
Because there is death, life is living itself.
Enlightenment is like the
moon reflected on the water.
The moon does not get wet,
nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
the moon is reflected even
in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
are reflected in dewdrops on the grass,
or even in one drop of water.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
When we finally hear ourselves beneath words in silence, we let fall all unnecessary noise.
No one has ever failed to be listened to who listens to themselves. We are the ones unhearing ourselves. When we listen and hear who we are and what we are saying, no one is abandoned, no one homeless.
In the sight of, in the presence of all the peoples, said Simeon:
It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord. He came in the Spirit into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to perform the custom of the law in regard to him, he took him into his arms and blessed God, saying: “Now, Master, you may let your servant go in peace, according to your word, for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and glory for your people Israel.” (Luke 2)
When we see who is there within listening and watching, we are alone.
With the Alone.
Unbroken, reflected, whole, and entire – even in one drop of water.
Thursday, January 30, 2003
Utterance and reflective responsive utterance -- what we call conversation -- is what is needed to emerge from univocal and unilateral pronouncement and denial in world politics, national policy, and personal life.
Will we finally come to real conversation as a model of humankind’s willingness and ability to live authentically?
Here are three translations of an excerpt from Goethe's Fairy Tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily:
1.
"What is nobler than gold?" asked the King.
"Light," replied the Dragon.
"And what is more vivid than light?" continued the Monarch.
"Speech," said the Serpent.
(--from translation by Thomas Carlyle and R.D. Boylan, of Goethe's Fairy Tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.)
2.
No sooner had the snake beheld this venerable image than the king began to speak and asked:
"Whence comest thou?"
"From the crevices where the gold dwells."
"What is more glorious than gold?" asked the king.
"Light," answered the snake.
"What is more refreshing than light?" asked the former.
"Conversation," replied the latter.
(Translator unknown)
3.
Elsewhere the wording is presented in the following:
Steiner introduced children to Goethe's Fairy Tale of "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily" because of it's important message. This magical tale tells of a group of people whose world has turned upside down and who must bring about spiritual and social renewal. When the Green Snake is asked by the Gold King, What is more precious than light? she replies, Conversation! We come to life when we really meet one another in true dialogue... (-- from Waldorf Home Schooling Website, about "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily," Hawthorn Press Version)
Conversation, true dialogue, is what is missing in the precipice pronouncements heard daily. It seems most media can only provide shouting match or copy with loud snarl intended to intimidate the unbelieving into agreement with a formulated opinion. Models of reliable renewal and open consideration are hidden behind defensive denial and provocative accusation. Scant are examples of engaged conversation.
In the beginning was the word. And the word emerged from silence. True word and root silence are united in sacredness of conversation.
If so, then faith (that elusive virtue) is trust in abiding resonance between silence and reciprocal response. This interaction is emitted from the word in flesh, in action, in conversation.
We co-respond only when there is faith something worthwhile might emerge. Not to recognize or allow faith and true conversation is to grow brambles around self-importance and the one-view/my-view rule of dictatorship.
“I’ll tell you what to do!” is the sentence that describes the destruction of true faith.
Brambles should be cut away,
Removing even the sprouts.
Within essence there naturally blooms
A beautiful lotus blossom.
One day there will suddenly appear
An image of light;
When you know that,
You yourself are it.
- Sun Bu-er
Following light is conversation with silence.
It is what we are.
Suddenly!
Will we finally come to real conversation as a model of humankind’s willingness and ability to live authentically?
Here are three translations of an excerpt from Goethe's Fairy Tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily:
1.
"What is nobler than gold?" asked the King.
"Light," replied the Dragon.
"And what is more vivid than light?" continued the Monarch.
"Speech," said the Serpent.
(--from translation by Thomas Carlyle and R.D. Boylan, of Goethe's Fairy Tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.)
2.
No sooner had the snake beheld this venerable image than the king began to speak and asked:
"Whence comest thou?"
"From the crevices where the gold dwells."
"What is more glorious than gold?" asked the king.
"Light," answered the snake.
"What is more refreshing than light?" asked the former.
"Conversation," replied the latter.
(Translator unknown)
3.
Elsewhere the wording is presented in the following:
Steiner introduced children to Goethe's Fairy Tale of "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily" because of it's important message. This magical tale tells of a group of people whose world has turned upside down and who must bring about spiritual and social renewal. When the Green Snake is asked by the Gold King, What is more precious than light? she replies, Conversation! We come to life when we really meet one another in true dialogue... (-- from Waldorf Home Schooling Website, about "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily," Hawthorn Press Version)
Conversation, true dialogue, is what is missing in the precipice pronouncements heard daily. It seems most media can only provide shouting match or copy with loud snarl intended to intimidate the unbelieving into agreement with a formulated opinion. Models of reliable renewal and open consideration are hidden behind defensive denial and provocative accusation. Scant are examples of engaged conversation.
In the beginning was the word. And the word emerged from silence. True word and root silence are united in sacredness of conversation.
If so, then faith (that elusive virtue) is trust in abiding resonance between silence and reciprocal response. This interaction is emitted from the word in flesh, in action, in conversation.
We co-respond only when there is faith something worthwhile might emerge. Not to recognize or allow faith and true conversation is to grow brambles around self-importance and the one-view/my-view rule of dictatorship.
“I’ll tell you what to do!” is the sentence that describes the destruction of true faith.
Brambles should be cut away,
Removing even the sprouts.
Within essence there naturally blooms
A beautiful lotus blossom.
One day there will suddenly appear
An image of light;
When you know that,
You yourself are it.
- Sun Bu-er
Following light is conversation with silence.
It is what we are.
Suddenly!
Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Cherryfield with windswept snow and below zero chill on Tuesday.
I chauffer and read novel waiting in car about son finding 3 million dollars in his dead father's study. Walking earlier, dogs know as we walk road we'll have to turn back into the wind. They count my steps and shake their heads. We each have icicles on muzzles.
The story is told of one young man coming for instruction and Macarius told him to go to a burial place and insult the dead. After that he was to praise them. The young man did as he was told and when he returned Macarius asked what the dead had answered. The man replied, "nothing," and Macarius then encouraged him to do the same when anyone hurled abuse or flattery on him.
( - about St. Macarius the Elder, January 29) (Monastery of Christ in the Desert)
After dusk we are in Seal Harbor walking the closed carriage path snow below tall pine below the enormity of heavens with illimitable stars and planets. The four of us walk in silence. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
The dead keep silent. Macarius (born about the year 300) counted on that for the lesson at hand. I think of this fact each time I pass or walk in a cemetery. If the dead are with God it is no surprise their silence.
This is why some bow. This is why some genuflect. This is why the body hunches, head to ground, hands with palms upraised.
No words convey what the body senses.
Reverence with silence.
I chauffer and read novel waiting in car about son finding 3 million dollars in his dead father's study. Walking earlier, dogs know as we walk road we'll have to turn back into the wind. They count my steps and shake their heads. We each have icicles on muzzles.
The story is told of one young man coming for instruction and Macarius told him to go to a burial place and insult the dead. After that he was to praise them. The young man did as he was told and when he returned Macarius asked what the dead had answered. The man replied, "nothing," and Macarius then encouraged him to do the same when anyone hurled abuse or flattery on him.
( - about St. Macarius the Elder, January 29) (Monastery of Christ in the Desert)
After dusk we are in Seal Harbor walking the closed carriage path snow below tall pine below the enormity of heavens with illimitable stars and planets. The four of us walk in silence. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
The dead keep silent. Macarius (born about the year 300) counted on that for the lesson at hand. I think of this fact each time I pass or walk in a cemetery. If the dead are with God it is no surprise their silence.
This is why some bow. This is why some genuflect. This is why the body hunches, head to ground, hands with palms upraised.
No words convey what the body senses.
Reverence with silence.
Monday, January 27, 2003
Maybe it is the persistence of the "let's go to war" crowd, or the passion of the "let's be careful about hastily going to war" crowd.
Whichever it is, a shift is taking place as we near war. I can't be certain what war we are actually engaged in. Is it a war for civilization? Are we at one of those perennial historical cusps where geography and grotesque behavior coincide to erupt into massive movements of munitions, political ambition, and spiritual/religious principles?
Last night's snow makes everything brighter along the mountain.
My treasure is the cloud on the peak
The moon over the valley
Traveling east or west
Light and free on the one road
I don’t know whether I’m on the way
Or at home.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Virginia writes, "This is Andrew Sullivan about the case for a military action against Iraq and the anti-war movement."
The Sullivan piece is impressive and passionate. His Monday, January 27, 2003 ends with:
I keep thinking that this obsession with Bush is a way of avoiding the awful choices in front of us. But the choices are still there. And Bush's speech tomorrow night represents his terrible duty to lead us to the right one. (Andrew Sullivan, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/)
I respond to Virginia, writing the following:
I've inured myself to the fact we are going in.
As with all wars, I shudder.
As to the oddity that it is George Bush leading the charge, I can only shake my head at the sequence of events positioning him in the presidency and the equally curious political positions and profile of this our president.
I'm from Brooklyn. Silver spoons tucked in family privilege and right-wing patronage does not sit easily with kids from Bay Ridge Avenue. But so what.
Beneath all the surface hoopla I know that bad guys should be rooted out. In Brooklyn it was difficult to sort the hitmen from holy men, the perverts from politicians. Now in the larger world, it still is difficult. Everyone seems to read from the same script and prompter. It's our world. We're not much different then from now, Bensonhurst to Baghdad. Self-interest, local politics, and global mores are seldom separable.
When the war begins I will sorrow. When Iraqis are killed, I'll sorrow. When Americans and allies are killed, I'll sorrow.
And when oil flows freely through liberated pipes to a new coalition of allied ships to McDucks and the Stop & Go in Camden, I'll buy it and drive onto Elm Street with a certain but vague forgetfulness about a lot of things. One of which will be war.
Thanks for the Sullivan perspective. I'll tuck it into my sitting and prayer.
About the coming days I include Sir Kenneth Clark's ending to the book and video Civilisation series,
I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W. B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it damn nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough. One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
-- from ending, Chapter 13 - Heroic Materialism in Civilisation: a personal view Lord Kenneth Clark: 1903 - 1983 (Harper & Row in 1970.)
I'm part of the "lack of confidence" crowd Clark cites.
With Clark, I am optimistic, but not joyful.
Still, with Muso Soseki,
I don’t know whether I’m on the way
Or at home.
“Home,” here, suggests what I think some might be referring to when they protest the upcoming war, or any war. It is the tension felt when we are reminded we are not living yet in a shared sphere of awareness and action that would benefit all life on earth.
Finally, it is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s view that clarifies what is taking place for me:
In 1925, Teilhard wrote in an essay entitled Hominization: "And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)" (1966, p. 63) It was a neologism employing the Greek word noos for "mind."
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard posits: "In truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the Mediterranean for the last six thousand years" (1961, p. 212) He thought that a "new layer of the noosphere" would soon be formed. "The proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the world to the other, all peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them." Teilhard was convinced that the shape of the noosphere's future would be determined by those developments he saw taking place in the Europe and the U.S.
In midst of a particularly ghastly fulfillment of the dictum "War is hell," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin struggled to hold on to a hope for the human future. Ultimately, he found it in noogenesis and in the future of the noosphere. However, to view his thought as no more than an exercise in science or metaphysics, is to fail to reach the core of Teilhard's vision. At the conclusion of The Phenomenon of Man is an Appendix added in 1948. The final line is: "In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross." (1961, p. 313)
(- from, Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham, C.S.P. http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html)
What cheers, Virginia, is the exchange of these words with you and Hugh.
I’ll sit, and pray, with this.
Whichever it is, a shift is taking place as we near war. I can't be certain what war we are actually engaged in. Is it a war for civilization? Are we at one of those perennial historical cusps where geography and grotesque behavior coincide to erupt into massive movements of munitions, political ambition, and spiritual/religious principles?
Last night's snow makes everything brighter along the mountain.
My treasure is the cloud on the peak
The moon over the valley
Traveling east or west
Light and free on the one road
I don’t know whether I’m on the way
Or at home.
- Muso Soseki (1275-1351)
Virginia writes, "This is Andrew Sullivan about the case for a military action against Iraq and the anti-war movement."
The Sullivan piece is impressive and passionate. His Monday, January 27, 2003 ends with:
I keep thinking that this obsession with Bush is a way of avoiding the awful choices in front of us. But the choices are still there. And Bush's speech tomorrow night represents his terrible duty to lead us to the right one. (Andrew Sullivan, http://www.andrewsullivan.com/)
I respond to Virginia, writing the following:
I've inured myself to the fact we are going in.
As with all wars, I shudder.
As to the oddity that it is George Bush leading the charge, I can only shake my head at the sequence of events positioning him in the presidency and the equally curious political positions and profile of this our president.
I'm from Brooklyn. Silver spoons tucked in family privilege and right-wing patronage does not sit easily with kids from Bay Ridge Avenue. But so what.
Beneath all the surface hoopla I know that bad guys should be rooted out. In Brooklyn it was difficult to sort the hitmen from holy men, the perverts from politicians. Now in the larger world, it still is difficult. Everyone seems to read from the same script and prompter. It's our world. We're not much different then from now, Bensonhurst to Baghdad. Self-interest, local politics, and global mores are seldom separable.
When the war begins I will sorrow. When Iraqis are killed, I'll sorrow. When Americans and allies are killed, I'll sorrow.
And when oil flows freely through liberated pipes to a new coalition of allied ships to McDucks and the Stop & Go in Camden, I'll buy it and drive onto Elm Street with a certain but vague forgetfulness about a lot of things. One of which will be war.
Thanks for the Sullivan perspective. I'll tuck it into my sitting and prayer.
About the coming days I include Sir Kenneth Clark's ending to the book and video Civilisation series,
I said at the beginning that it is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago W. B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I have ever known, wrote a famous prophetic poem.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Well, that was certainly true between the wars, and it damn nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite, because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough. One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
-- from ending, Chapter 13 - Heroic Materialism in Civilisation: a personal view Lord Kenneth Clark: 1903 - 1983 (Harper & Row in 1970.)
I'm part of the "lack of confidence" crowd Clark cites.
With Clark, I am optimistic, but not joyful.
Still, with Muso Soseki,
I don’t know whether I’m on the way
Or at home.
“Home,” here, suggests what I think some might be referring to when they protest the upcoming war, or any war. It is the tension felt when we are reminded we are not living yet in a shared sphere of awareness and action that would benefit all life on earth.
Finally, it is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s view that clarifies what is taking place for me:
In 1925, Teilhard wrote in an essay entitled Hominization: "And this amounts to imagining, in one way or another, above the animal biosphere a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls (the noosphere, if you will)" (1966, p. 63) It was a neologism employing the Greek word noos for "mind."
In The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard posits: "In truth, a neo-humanity has been germinating round the Mediterranean for the last six thousand years" (1961, p. 212) He thought that a "new layer of the noosphere" would soon be formed. "The proof of this lies in the fact that from one end of the world to the other, all peoples, to remain human or to become more so, are inexorably led to formulate the hopes and problems of the modern earth in the very same terms in which the West has formulated them." Teilhard was convinced that the shape of the noosphere's future would be determined by those developments he saw taking place in the Europe and the U.S.
In midst of a particularly ghastly fulfillment of the dictum "War is hell," Pierre Teilhard de Chardin struggled to hold on to a hope for the human future. Ultimately, he found it in noogenesis and in the future of the noosphere. However, to view his thought as no more than an exercise in science or metaphysics, is to fail to reach the core of Teilhard's vision. At the conclusion of The Phenomenon of Man is an Appendix added in 1948. The final line is: "In one manner or the other it still remains true that, even in the view of a mere biologist, the human epic resembles nothing so much as a way of the Cross." (1961, p. 313)
(- from, Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere, by Rev. Phillip J. Cunningham, C.S.P. http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html)
What cheers, Virginia, is the exchange of these words with you and Hugh.
I’ll sit, and pray, with this.
Sunday, January 26, 2003
I resign from marketplace. I return to hermitage. There, I revert to silence.
Haiku
when sun turned north, long
frozen mountain remembered
lost pine needle scent
-wfh
Who is this "I" that resigns, returns, and reverts? Surely someone knows.
The cat pulled down the thawing chicken in the middle of the night. One of the dogs finished it. The bag on floor and empty paper on rug spilled their guts when interviewed by householders.
Cat got water sprayed in puss when positioned at scene of theft. Dog sat in snow with ears back. Dog got mild reprimand. He was a dupe. Inculpable recipient of stolen goods.
It occurred to that "I," there and then, its chickenless and fruitless presence in the marketplace. The connection must be esoteric. "I" can decipher neither linkage nor lineup of the insight. But there it was: Go home; Shut up.
Maybe it began with John from Owls Head by way of Jersey arriving with Meher Baba pendant, cd, and book. Suddenly I am back in Rockland County listening of a Sunday morning to Lex Hixon interviewing someone about this Indian sage who'd vowed silence and kept it for over 40 years.
I am sitting in the corner office alone wondering why I am there. Children and teenagers from 21 cottages will be walking with counselors to Mass. They'll pass my office as the radio voices tell of the remarkable silence and presence of this Meher Baba. Up in the chapel the priest will be telling of the remarkable silence and presence of Jesus.
I have seldom known why I have been anywhere. It always felt like a diverted walk-about. I'd wandered out of semi-monastic enclosure into a foreign wood and was lost without direction. A ghost in a dream wandering changing scenes.
Thirty years later and several attempts to work in the world's recognized employments, marriage/divorce, a son now 30, long sits on cushions, long visits to sanctuaries, and it is Sunday morning again. It is silent. And presence remains what it has always been, slightly aslant and skewed toward nescience.
It is enough to be alive. And when death arises, it will be enough to die. What does or doesn’t follow what we know as death is of no interest. Whether some kind of Christian judgment, Buddhist reincarnation, or generic nothingness -- I don't know. It doesn't matter. Whatever will be, will be. It’s that kind of Sunday.
For now, there is this. America plans war against Iraq. Catholic Church waits for sexual abuse scandal to pass. Temperature rises above 10 degrees after 10 days of bending around zero. Super bowl will be played and prayed over tonight. Republican executive, legislature, and judiciary will have their way with issues. Stock market will frighten those capable of being frightened by it. Poverty and the nearing of poverty will worry a significant percentage of the world.
Poverty is having to do with what we have. Willingly choosing poverty is wanting nothing other than what is there. The world of marketplace and commerce, advertising and seduction of the more and mores -- that world doesn't choose poverty. Choosing poverty is a freedom that deprivation and want doesn't have.
Many, far too many, are not doing well and seem to have been given deprivation and want as original birthday presents. No choice here -- just deprivation and want.
Curiously, there are many others who have been given free passes to riches and wealth in this world who oddly cry loudly they too suffer deprivation and want. These are the well to do who want to pay lower taxes and want to receive higher dividends from investments and estates.
It is growing more apparent that the voices of the not doing well and the well to do are both heard in antiphonal harmony to the ears of this administration in America. Who to listen to? Who to serve? Who to bestow fiduciary and financial favors on?
The choice of poverty, that is, making do with what is there, making do with what is not there, is a gift. Not a gift is not having a choice.
In some minds given to spiritual thinking, "no choice" is a great gift. They point out that having what you have, or not having what you don't have, is a freedom unlike any other in the spiritual life. It has to do with accepting and surrendering to "what is" -- to things as they are, without wanting anything other than what is here and now.
The wording, "what is," is sometimes cited as synonym for "God" or "Ultimate Reality." This makes the questions, “What is God? or, “What is Ultimate Reality?” redundancies. It is hard to believe in either God or Ultimate Reality when there is no freedom or no choice.
No freedom and no choice are like the lost pine needle scent to the mountain deep in January. It just seems…gone.
The cabin woodstove must be fired. The brook beyond, visited.
In my middle years I love the Tao
And by Deep South Mountain I make my home.
When happy I go alone into the mountains.
Only I understand this joy.
I walk until the water ends, and sit
Waiting for the hour when clouds rise.
If I happen to meet an old woodcutter,
I chat with him, laughing and lost to time.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
About my resignation, return, and reversion – it is now or never.
“I” must go to be lost to time.
Haiku
when sun turned north, long
frozen mountain remembered
lost pine needle scent
-wfh
Who is this "I" that resigns, returns, and reverts? Surely someone knows.
The cat pulled down the thawing chicken in the middle of the night. One of the dogs finished it. The bag on floor and empty paper on rug spilled their guts when interviewed by householders.
Cat got water sprayed in puss when positioned at scene of theft. Dog sat in snow with ears back. Dog got mild reprimand. He was a dupe. Inculpable recipient of stolen goods.
It occurred to that "I," there and then, its chickenless and fruitless presence in the marketplace. The connection must be esoteric. "I" can decipher neither linkage nor lineup of the insight. But there it was: Go home; Shut up.
Maybe it began with John from Owls Head by way of Jersey arriving with Meher Baba pendant, cd, and book. Suddenly I am back in Rockland County listening of a Sunday morning to Lex Hixon interviewing someone about this Indian sage who'd vowed silence and kept it for over 40 years.
I am sitting in the corner office alone wondering why I am there. Children and teenagers from 21 cottages will be walking with counselors to Mass. They'll pass my office as the radio voices tell of the remarkable silence and presence of this Meher Baba. Up in the chapel the priest will be telling of the remarkable silence and presence of Jesus.
I have seldom known why I have been anywhere. It always felt like a diverted walk-about. I'd wandered out of semi-monastic enclosure into a foreign wood and was lost without direction. A ghost in a dream wandering changing scenes.
Thirty years later and several attempts to work in the world's recognized employments, marriage/divorce, a son now 30, long sits on cushions, long visits to sanctuaries, and it is Sunday morning again. It is silent. And presence remains what it has always been, slightly aslant and skewed toward nescience.
It is enough to be alive. And when death arises, it will be enough to die. What does or doesn’t follow what we know as death is of no interest. Whether some kind of Christian judgment, Buddhist reincarnation, or generic nothingness -- I don't know. It doesn't matter. Whatever will be, will be. It’s that kind of Sunday.
For now, there is this. America plans war against Iraq. Catholic Church waits for sexual abuse scandal to pass. Temperature rises above 10 degrees after 10 days of bending around zero. Super bowl will be played and prayed over tonight. Republican executive, legislature, and judiciary will have their way with issues. Stock market will frighten those capable of being frightened by it. Poverty and the nearing of poverty will worry a significant percentage of the world.
Poverty is having to do with what we have. Willingly choosing poverty is wanting nothing other than what is there. The world of marketplace and commerce, advertising and seduction of the more and mores -- that world doesn't choose poverty. Choosing poverty is a freedom that deprivation and want doesn't have.
Many, far too many, are not doing well and seem to have been given deprivation and want as original birthday presents. No choice here -- just deprivation and want.
Curiously, there are many others who have been given free passes to riches and wealth in this world who oddly cry loudly they too suffer deprivation and want. These are the well to do who want to pay lower taxes and want to receive higher dividends from investments and estates.
It is growing more apparent that the voices of the not doing well and the well to do are both heard in antiphonal harmony to the ears of this administration in America. Who to listen to? Who to serve? Who to bestow fiduciary and financial favors on?
The choice of poverty, that is, making do with what is there, making do with what is not there, is a gift. Not a gift is not having a choice.
In some minds given to spiritual thinking, "no choice" is a great gift. They point out that having what you have, or not having what you don't have, is a freedom unlike any other in the spiritual life. It has to do with accepting and surrendering to "what is" -- to things as they are, without wanting anything other than what is here and now.
The wording, "what is," is sometimes cited as synonym for "God" or "Ultimate Reality." This makes the questions, “What is God? or, “What is Ultimate Reality?” redundancies. It is hard to believe in either God or Ultimate Reality when there is no freedom or no choice.
No freedom and no choice are like the lost pine needle scent to the mountain deep in January. It just seems…gone.
The cabin woodstove must be fired. The brook beyond, visited.
In my middle years I love the Tao
And by Deep South Mountain I make my home.
When happy I go alone into the mountains.
Only I understand this joy.
I walk until the water ends, and sit
Waiting for the hour when clouds rise.
If I happen to meet an old woodcutter,
I chat with him, laughing and lost to time.
- Wang Wei (699-759)
About my resignation, return, and reversion – it is now or never.
“I” must go to be lost to time.
Saturday, January 25, 2003
If we are meant to be intimate with the world, we must be intimate without holding or grasping. How is it not to be attached? Not detached?
For the world in its present
form is passing away.
(1Corinthians 7:31)
To live in intimacy with the world is to live in the world in a way that doesn't hold tight to it, but lets go. Not grasping fast to that which is passing on and changing, but surrendering to the transformation of the world.
What is transforming the world?
What Is Itself transforms the world.
Cover your path
With fallen pine needles
So no one will be able
To locate your
True dwelling place.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Our true dwelling place is What Is Itself.
Where is that true dwelling place? Perhaps Ikkyu is suggesting that true dwelling place is not the same for everyone. Each must find their own. There is no duplication.
This is why in a Laura of travellers to their true dwelling places they pause temporarily dwelling in radiant circumference to each other. They see each others' smoke rising from chimney. They hear footsteps crunching cold snow in passing. They greet the other, mostly in the silence of their eyes, when nearing the others' dwelling.
To dwell lightly in this world is to dwell intimately on the earth, near each other, letting go and surrendering to What Is Itself.
Our true dwelling place is right here right now revealing Itself.
For the world in its present
form is passing away.
(1Corinthians 7:31)
To live in intimacy with the world is to live in the world in a way that doesn't hold tight to it, but lets go. Not grasping fast to that which is passing on and changing, but surrendering to the transformation of the world.
What is transforming the world?
What Is Itself transforms the world.
Cover your path
With fallen pine needles
So no one will be able
To locate your
True dwelling place.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Our true dwelling place is What Is Itself.
Where is that true dwelling place? Perhaps Ikkyu is suggesting that true dwelling place is not the same for everyone. Each must find their own. There is no duplication.
This is why in a Laura of travellers to their true dwelling places they pause temporarily dwelling in radiant circumference to each other. They see each others' smoke rising from chimney. They hear footsteps crunching cold snow in passing. They greet the other, mostly in the silence of their eyes, when nearing the others' dwelling.
To dwell lightly in this world is to dwell intimately on the earth, near each other, letting go and surrendering to What Is Itself.
Our true dwelling place is right here right now revealing Itself.
Friday, January 24, 2003
Ed goes to walk dog. He doesn't like what Rumsfeld is doing or saying in Washington. He says he'll send me something from a German paper decrying recent comments by the secretary of defense.
Last night Dick brought in a Peanuts cartoon. Linus is poised to throw a snowball. Lucy approaches with finger raised, saying "Here's a Gentle Reminder...If you throw that snowball at me, I'll break every bone in your stupid body!" The final frame shows Linus dropping the snowball, saying, "Saved by a Gentle Reminder." (Published 1/23/03)
Dick says is sums up perfectly the situation with Iraq.
I let mind and body go
And gained a life of freedom
My old age is taking place
Among ten thousand peaks
I don’t let white clouds
Leave the valley lightly
I escort the moon as far
As my closed gate.
- Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623)(dailyzen.com)
A woman is looking for book by Theodore Roethke. I tell her of my fondness for his poem The Manifestation.
His koan in the final three lines:
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
Many worry what we will come to should war occur with Iraq. It's good Ed and Dick aren't in the shop at the same time. There is something to be said for not having a dictator ruling with iron fist in disregard of his country's people. Ed would refer this statement to Mr. Bush, Dick to Mr. Hussein.
Hughie and Sam talk boats and submersibles with Peter and Joan. Joan opens letter from grandson with a picture from Chateau d' Oex of a cow hot air balloon. Susan reads letters from stepmother and the major in Florida. "Hello everybody --- Life is good in USA," is how he opens the letter.
Wind chill is still below zero. Tom the mailman doesn't remember such a long spell of piercing cold. "It's going to get warmer, right?" he asks. "Don't you think?" is the response.
Laughter and vying to carry the narrative rebound off brick fireplace as Sam pokes and adds wood to stubborn fire.
Life, at least in this small space, carries on in stories, remembering with coffee and tea, the telling of ourselves in the company of others.
"It's always more comfortable to stay where you are more comfortable," says Hughie. Some nodding follows.
The UPS man brings latest issue of Maine Boats & Harbors, The Magazine of the Coast. In the magazine, Peter H. Spectre, in an article "Mal de Mer," ends his story about a ferry crossing with the following:
Or, as the humorist Josh Billings once wrote, "One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs."
The nautical solution to the current winds of war might be an invitation to Mr. Bush and Mr. Hussein to take a ferry ride together and talk about how to humanely and sensibly conclude their uncertain travels with each other.
They, like Roethke’s final line, might come to something without knowing why.
Last night Dick brought in a Peanuts cartoon. Linus is poised to throw a snowball. Lucy approaches with finger raised, saying "Here's a Gentle Reminder...If you throw that snowball at me, I'll break every bone in your stupid body!" The final frame shows Linus dropping the snowball, saying, "Saved by a Gentle Reminder." (Published 1/23/03)
Dick says is sums up perfectly the situation with Iraq.
I let mind and body go
And gained a life of freedom
My old age is taking place
Among ten thousand peaks
I don’t let white clouds
Leave the valley lightly
I escort the moon as far
As my closed gate.
- Han-shan Te-ch’ing (1546-1623)(dailyzen.com)
A woman is looking for book by Theodore Roethke. I tell her of my fondness for his poem The Manifestation.
His koan in the final three lines:
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
Many worry what we will come to should war occur with Iraq. It's good Ed and Dick aren't in the shop at the same time. There is something to be said for not having a dictator ruling with iron fist in disregard of his country's people. Ed would refer this statement to Mr. Bush, Dick to Mr. Hussein.
Hughie and Sam talk boats and submersibles with Peter and Joan. Joan opens letter from grandson with a picture from Chateau d' Oex of a cow hot air balloon. Susan reads letters from stepmother and the major in Florida. "Hello everybody --- Life is good in USA," is how he opens the letter.
Wind chill is still below zero. Tom the mailman doesn't remember such a long spell of piercing cold. "It's going to get warmer, right?" he asks. "Don't you think?" is the response.
Laughter and vying to carry the narrative rebound off brick fireplace as Sam pokes and adds wood to stubborn fire.
Life, at least in this small space, carries on in stories, remembering with coffee and tea, the telling of ourselves in the company of others.
"It's always more comfortable to stay where you are more comfortable," says Hughie. Some nodding follows.
The UPS man brings latest issue of Maine Boats & Harbors, The Magazine of the Coast. In the magazine, Peter H. Spectre, in an article "Mal de Mer," ends his story about a ferry crossing with the following:
Or, as the humorist Josh Billings once wrote, "One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs."
The nautical solution to the current winds of war might be an invitation to Mr. Bush and Mr. Hussein to take a ferry ride together and talk about how to humanely and sensibly conclude their uncertain travels with each other.
They, like Roethke’s final line, might come to something without knowing why.
Thursday, January 23, 2003
Dredging is finished. Harbor is bare. And deeper.
The unwillingness to live sharing who we are and what we have is crippling the human race. This is the Christian secret: God and humankind are not two, not one. Each is itself. The Christ has realized the secret. The Christ shows there is no secret. All is revealed from the beginning. Do we see?
The contemporary view of abundance and the attainment thereof needs revisioning. Intention doesn't accomplish riches.
Rather, abundance is the reality of all creation. It's all there. But for one thing. That thing is the necessity for humankind to let go what they grasp onto as their personal and sole possession and enter empty into the fullness of all things.
Each belongs to itself. No one owns anything. We can only exercise right of use. Proper exercise and use of what is right – this is what keeps us healthy.
For us today, poverty is an enemy to destroy. To Francis and Jesus poverty was a grace. What is ungraceful is our penchant to sequester and hoard what is necessary for the lives of others.
There is nothing wrong with wealth. Many claim much good is accomplished by wealth. And it is.
What always surprises is a belief system that suggests poor people are either undeserving or undesiring of abundance.
Sunlight streams on the river stone.
From high above, the river steadily plunges.
Three thousand feet of sparkling water,
The Milky Way pouring down from heaven.
- Li T’ai-po (701-?)
If tomorrow a catastrophe demolishes with the force of cataclysmic destruction, and all material financial wealth is eradicated in this apocalypse, then who is richer than another? Who is neighbor worth anything? Who shares water? Who shares bread? Who comforts the suffering? Who clothes broken bodies? Who heals splintered spirits? Who has words of solace? Who walks with another to safety? Who pronounces our name with love?
It escapes me how we can so easily forget who we are in each other's lives. Is devastation our only wake-up stick? Are the final gifts we receive following the loss of everything else: 1) our realization we’ve been ignorant, and, 2) our recognition we’ve forgotten why we were born?
Will our realization and recognition result in simplicity of awareness and remembrance at the end?
Allowing each to be itself, acknowledging each as itself – these are gifts.
We can practice now, if we choose, the simplicity of final gifts.
Is this, finally, how heaven pours out from us?
The unwillingness to live sharing who we are and what we have is crippling the human race. This is the Christian secret: God and humankind are not two, not one. Each is itself. The Christ has realized the secret. The Christ shows there is no secret. All is revealed from the beginning. Do we see?
The contemporary view of abundance and the attainment thereof needs revisioning. Intention doesn't accomplish riches.
Rather, abundance is the reality of all creation. It's all there. But for one thing. That thing is the necessity for humankind to let go what they grasp onto as their personal and sole possession and enter empty into the fullness of all things.
Each belongs to itself. No one owns anything. We can only exercise right of use. Proper exercise and use of what is right – this is what keeps us healthy.
For us today, poverty is an enemy to destroy. To Francis and Jesus poverty was a grace. What is ungraceful is our penchant to sequester and hoard what is necessary for the lives of others.
There is nothing wrong with wealth. Many claim much good is accomplished by wealth. And it is.
What always surprises is a belief system that suggests poor people are either undeserving or undesiring of abundance.
Sunlight streams on the river stone.
From high above, the river steadily plunges.
Three thousand feet of sparkling water,
The Milky Way pouring down from heaven.
- Li T’ai-po (701-?)
If tomorrow a catastrophe demolishes with the force of cataclysmic destruction, and all material financial wealth is eradicated in this apocalypse, then who is richer than another? Who is neighbor worth anything? Who shares water? Who shares bread? Who comforts the suffering? Who clothes broken bodies? Who heals splintered spirits? Who has words of solace? Who walks with another to safety? Who pronounces our name with love?
It escapes me how we can so easily forget who we are in each other's lives. Is devastation our only wake-up stick? Are the final gifts we receive following the loss of everything else: 1) our realization we’ve been ignorant, and, 2) our recognition we’ve forgotten why we were born?
Will our realization and recognition result in simplicity of awareness and remembrance at the end?
Allowing each to be itself, acknowledging each as itself – these are gifts.
We can practice now, if we choose, the simplicity of final gifts.
Is this, finally, how heaven pours out from us?
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Wait and see!
Anthem
The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again,
I heard them say,
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
The wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again;
the dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed,
the marriage spent;
the widowhood
of every government--
signs for all to see.
Can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned up
a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
There is no drum.
Every heart
To love will come
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
(-- From: "Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs," by Leonard Cohen
McClelland & Stewart, 1993)
It once seemed that 'wait and see' was a lukewarm delaying tactic phrased by skeptical speaker. Now 'wait and see' means just what it says.
Wait -- be patient, attentive, and willing to sit or stand for a while. In fact, the notion of ‘waiting’ is not really waiting. It is being patient, that is, allowing what is there to be there. It is attentive, which is alert, present, and watchful. And it is willing to be still in mind and/or body, a stillness that does not try to solve or chase away the matter at hand.
See -- just see. Allow the hidden connections to reveal themselves. Permit what is revealing itself to emerge in its own manifestation. Let the fact and reality display its full shape and form inch-by-inch, piece-by-piece.
So, to wait and see is an act of profound faith that what is there is there, and what is not there is not there. No lukewarm delaying, no skeptical doubt. Rather a trust that whatever reveals itself is the will of God at that instant in that form. To wait and see is no longer wary doubt. It is joyful hope at what is coming in our midst.
Some ask whether God wills evil. I don't know. I'd prefer to wait and see whether the evil being done will crack open to reveal a light through it that will heal and transform. Leonard Cohen’s words suggest the crack in everything is how the light gets in.
In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.
- Han-shan Te-Ch'ing
At Meetingbrook, light searches for the crack in our thinking. If we pray, is that the crack? If we wait and see, is that a trusting which reveals what we need to know and do?
Stay where and as we are? Speak with others about a fuller, more consolidated expression of three interests:
1. A Laura Common, (that is, A Loosely Knit Community of Individuals Practicing Spirituality in The Thin Place).
2. A Schola Contemplationis et Gratia, (that is, An Open Ongoing Place of Community and Hospitality of Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence) to practice with others, speak and learn with others, and enter into engaged service with others.
3. A Community Cafe, Bakery, & Bookshop, that is, a meeting place for the intersection of generations (young with older), perspectives (spiritual, intellectual, personal experience and stories), and service (engaged extension into prison, nursing home, shut-ins, and other places of human need and caring.)
Would this place be in a former Inn that could house and serve these and other events? A place with room for chapel, meditation hall, library, cafe, rooms for retreatants, visitors to area? A place for conversation, poetry, music, art, exploring new expressions of healthy meaningful neighborliness? And would there be enough generosity of vision, spirit, and finances to create a solid and simple community resource that is self-sustainable?
Whether war or community, we wait and see. There are so many reasons for human beings to go their own way, grab what they can, and hoard their fears, talents, and loneliness. Is there heart enough to travel together to a still quiet place of joyful engagement and aloneness with each other?
We watch and pray.
Will you too watch and pray, wait and see?
Anthem
The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again,
I heard them say,
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
The wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again;
the dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed,
the marriage spent;
the widowhood
of every government--
signs for all to see.
Can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned up
a thundercloud
They're going to hear from me
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
There is no drum.
Every heart
To love will come
but like a refugee.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
(-- From: "Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs," by Leonard Cohen
McClelland & Stewart, 1993)
It once seemed that 'wait and see' was a lukewarm delaying tactic phrased by skeptical speaker. Now 'wait and see' means just what it says.
Wait -- be patient, attentive, and willing to sit or stand for a while. In fact, the notion of ‘waiting’ is not really waiting. It is being patient, that is, allowing what is there to be there. It is attentive, which is alert, present, and watchful. And it is willing to be still in mind and/or body, a stillness that does not try to solve or chase away the matter at hand.
See -- just see. Allow the hidden connections to reveal themselves. Permit what is revealing itself to emerge in its own manifestation. Let the fact and reality display its full shape and form inch-by-inch, piece-by-piece.
So, to wait and see is an act of profound faith that what is there is there, and what is not there is not there. No lukewarm delaying, no skeptical doubt. Rather a trust that whatever reveals itself is the will of God at that instant in that form. To wait and see is no longer wary doubt. It is joyful hope at what is coming in our midst.
Some ask whether God wills evil. I don't know. I'd prefer to wait and see whether the evil being done will crack open to reveal a light through it that will heal and transform. Leonard Cohen’s words suggest the crack in everything is how the light gets in.
In the ultimate stillness
Light penetrates the whole realm;
In the still illumination,
There pervades pure emptiness.
When I look back on the
Phenomenal world,
Everything is just
Like a dream.
- Han-shan Te-Ch'ing
At Meetingbrook, light searches for the crack in our thinking. If we pray, is that the crack? If we wait and see, is that a trusting which reveals what we need to know and do?
Stay where and as we are? Speak with others about a fuller, more consolidated expression of three interests:
1. A Laura Common, (that is, A Loosely Knit Community of Individuals Practicing Spirituality in The Thin Place).
2. A Schola Contemplationis et Gratia, (that is, An Open Ongoing Place of Community and Hospitality of Contemplation, Conversation, and Correspondence) to practice with others, speak and learn with others, and enter into engaged service with others.
3. A Community Cafe, Bakery, & Bookshop, that is, a meeting place for the intersection of generations (young with older), perspectives (spiritual, intellectual, personal experience and stories), and service (engaged extension into prison, nursing home, shut-ins, and other places of human need and caring.)
Would this place be in a former Inn that could house and serve these and other events? A place with room for chapel, meditation hall, library, cafe, rooms for retreatants, visitors to area? A place for conversation, poetry, music, art, exploring new expressions of healthy meaningful neighborliness? And would there be enough generosity of vision, spirit, and finances to create a solid and simple community resource that is self-sustainable?
Whether war or community, we wait and see. There are so many reasons for human beings to go their own way, grab what they can, and hoard their fears, talents, and loneliness. Is there heart enough to travel together to a still quiet place of joyful engagement and aloneness with each other?
We watch and pray.
Will you too watch and pray, wait and see?
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
A cranky friend writes,
Wrong again. It's not George Bush or Saddam Hussein. It's the thoughts of people that are causing all the problem. The leaders just out picture the
force that's already there. When we as a people can learn to control our thoughts and out picture all that's good then peace will come; meanwhile join
the race, human that is...
D.
Returning from southern Maine it is hard not to be surprised by the crowdedness and busyness there.
Still, one's hermitage is one's heart.
The old timers say, "Don't leave your hermitage!"
I have discarded the world of fame and profit.
How elegant is the morning sun
Shining on the rafters and eaves.
How cool are the terrace and pond after the rain.
I burn incense to break the deep silence,
And drink the spring water and relax in joy.
I penetrate into the wonders of Tao,
And chant ancient sutras.
When my mind is at ease, my spirit is gay.
When understanding is gained,
There is nothing left to comprehend.
Who can say that the realm of Tao is far from us?
How tranquil it is;
As at the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
- Ni T'san (1301-1374)
What howling winds shriek between the mountains! Wind chill will average -25degrees tonight.
Heaven and earth begin in our thoughts and come to reside in our hearts.
It is there we pray. It is there we ponder. It is there we attempt to say, "Father! Mother! My home!"
There may be nothing left to comprehend.
Still, one's heart is one's hermitage.
Wrong again. It's not George Bush or Saddam Hussein. It's the thoughts of people that are causing all the problem. The leaders just out picture the
force that's already there. When we as a people can learn to control our thoughts and out picture all that's good then peace will come; meanwhile join
the race, human that is...
D.
Returning from southern Maine it is hard not to be surprised by the crowdedness and busyness there.
Still, one's hermitage is one's heart.
The old timers say, "Don't leave your hermitage!"
I have discarded the world of fame and profit.
How elegant is the morning sun
Shining on the rafters and eaves.
How cool are the terrace and pond after the rain.
I burn incense to break the deep silence,
And drink the spring water and relax in joy.
I penetrate into the wonders of Tao,
And chant ancient sutras.
When my mind is at ease, my spirit is gay.
When understanding is gained,
There is nothing left to comprehend.
Who can say that the realm of Tao is far from us?
How tranquil it is;
As at the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
- Ni T'san (1301-1374)
What howling winds shriek between the mountains! Wind chill will average -25degrees tonight.
Heaven and earth begin in our thoughts and come to reside in our hearts.
It is there we pray. It is there we ponder. It is there we attempt to say, "Father! Mother! My home!"
There may be nothing left to comprehend.
Still, one's heart is one's hermitage.
Sunday, January 19, 2003
If solitude is the teacher, silence the teaching – then we are students just beginning the practice of learning.
.
If silence is the language of God, creation God's body -- then we are words filled with breath and emptiness.
If we are not deep listening, not loving speech -- then no other prayer can emerge from this human existence to reveal to us the Holy Spirit of Love and Truth.
Divination showed my place
among these bunched cliffs
where faint trails cut off
traces of men and women.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds embracing hidden rocks.
Living here still
after how many years
over and over
I’ve seen spring and winter
change.
Get the word to families
with bells and cauldrons
empty fame has no value.
- Han-shan
Who will deeply listen to George Bush as he talks war? Who will lovingly speak to Saddam Hussein as he listens for drones of destruction?
Who knows silence and the ways of silence?
Perhaps if we weep for the imprisoned and terrified peoples everywhere, Saddam Hussein will look off to the distance where our weeping sounds itself.
Perhaps if we weep for the privileged and wealthy elite everywhere, George Bush will pause listening to see where the sound of sorrow faces itself.
We are losing the Catholic Christian Church; it has forgotten Christ. We are losing the United States of America; it has forgotten the unity of we the people.
Christ is not wanted in the church, and is let go. Liberty and justice for all is not wanted in America, and is buried under mounds of money tagged with the words 'private, corporate interest.'
To those who want war rather than justice, and to those who prize institutions over ordinary people, Han-shan says, "empty fame has no value."
Solitude is the body of God. Silence is the language of God.
Stillness reveals what forgetting conceals. It is time to remember.
Pray for remembrance!
.
If silence is the language of God, creation God's body -- then we are words filled with breath and emptiness.
If we are not deep listening, not loving speech -- then no other prayer can emerge from this human existence to reveal to us the Holy Spirit of Love and Truth.
Divination showed my place
among these bunched cliffs
where faint trails cut off
traces of men and women.
What’s beyond the yard?
White clouds embracing hidden rocks.
Living here still
after how many years
over and over
I’ve seen spring and winter
change.
Get the word to families
with bells and cauldrons
empty fame has no value.
- Han-shan
Who will deeply listen to George Bush as he talks war? Who will lovingly speak to Saddam Hussein as he listens for drones of destruction?
Who knows silence and the ways of silence?
Perhaps if we weep for the imprisoned and terrified peoples everywhere, Saddam Hussein will look off to the distance where our weeping sounds itself.
Perhaps if we weep for the privileged and wealthy elite everywhere, George Bush will pause listening to see where the sound of sorrow faces itself.
We are losing the Catholic Christian Church; it has forgotten Christ. We are losing the United States of America; it has forgotten the unity of we the people.
Christ is not wanted in the church, and is let go. Liberty and justice for all is not wanted in America, and is buried under mounds of money tagged with the words 'private, corporate interest.'
To those who want war rather than justice, and to those who prize institutions over ordinary people, Han-shan says, "empty fame has no value."
Solitude is the body of God. Silence is the language of God.
Stillness reveals what forgetting conceals. It is time to remember.
Pray for remembrance!
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Friday, January 17, 2003
Haiku
broken and troubled
sit together in prison
mending and healing
(wfh)
Mist and fog shroud out
the dust of the world.
Mountain and stream embellish
the place where I live.
At a time like this,
should I turn to scribbling poems,
the breeze and moon would surely
look down on me with scorn.
- Tami No Kurohito (unknown)
At prison today,
twelve converse theme "Beauty Within."
And it was, seen
(wfh)
Perhaps the real joy in conversation is simply conversing with one another.
broken and troubled
sit together in prison
mending and healing
(wfh)
Mist and fog shroud out
the dust of the world.
Mountain and stream embellish
the place where I live.
At a time like this,
should I turn to scribbling poems,
the breeze and moon would surely
look down on me with scorn.
- Tami No Kurohito (unknown)
At prison today,
twelve converse theme "Beauty Within."
And it was, seen
(wfh)
Perhaps the real joy in conversation is simply conversing with one another.
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
At Canadian border yesterday we receive yellow card and invited to pull over, "It came up on computer," said customs woman. A brief glance about and we are free to enter Canada for brief pickup of salami, dog biscuits, grapefruit mineral water, and tea.
It is a surprising thought re-entering the United States that someone at the border might say, "You are under arrest, come with us," and be taken away in handcuffs. No lawyer. No charges. No court hearing. Just handcuffs and jail in the name of national security.
A thousand mountains,
Wind and snow,
Stop me in my lonely tracks;
Turning my head to the western sky,
The road a dead end,
I recall the distant event of
Bodhidharma’s arrival in China
An old monkey howls from the highest peak.
- Wu Hsueh Tsu-Yuan (1226 – 1286)
Along with the innumerable email offers received daily to enlarge penis, buy discount viagra, watch barnyard animals and human females do things I can only hope not to imagine, purchase cheap ink replacements for printer, protect my computer from the destructive viruses of people who send out destructive viruses, and those kind requests from Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa to hold millions of dollars for them for a short while --- there are other emails these days.
These emails ask me to sign petitions and circulate telephone and fax numbers of President Bush and assorted Senators. These pleas worry that Mr. Bush only wants war with Iraq, period. They ask to let him know that a significant number of people do not trust he will keep his word and let inspectors inspect, and use force only as a last resort. They worry bellicosity produces bellicosity. They wonder whether the president is being manipulated by less than honorable intentions of other powerful men in his Republican club. These other emails fear deep damage to democracy and painful harm to America's true strength, namely, freedom and justice, tolerance and inclusivity.
Ninety percent of incoming email is about sex, money, viral war, or personal appearance.
Would that the remaining ten percent celebrated the courage to undertake fellowship and neighborly concern in the form, not of war, but of love.
After Mass this morning we sat silently in the empty church. It is Martin Luther King's birthday. In a speech on 4April1967, one year to the day prior to his assassination on 4April1968, he said:
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.
( -- from speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City )
Some people change their email address to avoid the unnecessary and superfluous things they receive. Some change their physical address and residence to avoid those who would cowardly harm them. Some even change their country when the fear of loss of liberty and menace of authoritative police and military tactics begin to encroach. Today I long to change the mind of this country from arrogance and fear to open inquiry and love.
I suspect the more honest change would be to change my own mind, to become closer to the twofold invitations of Christianity and Buddhism. One, to empty myself and allow in the form of Christ-mind, the other to empty myself and allow the form of Buddha-mind. These two forms, kenosis and shunyata, are for us the practice of simplicity, integrity, and faithful engagement. Worded differently, it is the practice of attentive presence, root silence, and transparent service.
Can we live this way?
And allow embodying love?
It is a surprising thought re-entering the United States that someone at the border might say, "You are under arrest, come with us," and be taken away in handcuffs. No lawyer. No charges. No court hearing. Just handcuffs and jail in the name of national security.
A thousand mountains,
Wind and snow,
Stop me in my lonely tracks;
Turning my head to the western sky,
The road a dead end,
I recall the distant event of
Bodhidharma’s arrival in China
An old monkey howls from the highest peak.
- Wu Hsueh Tsu-Yuan (1226 – 1286)
Along with the innumerable email offers received daily to enlarge penis, buy discount viagra, watch barnyard animals and human females do things I can only hope not to imagine, purchase cheap ink replacements for printer, protect my computer from the destructive viruses of people who send out destructive viruses, and those kind requests from Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa to hold millions of dollars for them for a short while --- there are other emails these days.
These emails ask me to sign petitions and circulate telephone and fax numbers of President Bush and assorted Senators. These pleas worry that Mr. Bush only wants war with Iraq, period. They ask to let him know that a significant number of people do not trust he will keep his word and let inspectors inspect, and use force only as a last resort. They worry bellicosity produces bellicosity. They wonder whether the president is being manipulated by less than honorable intentions of other powerful men in his Republican club. These other emails fear deep damage to democracy and painful harm to America's true strength, namely, freedom and justice, tolerance and inclusivity.
Ninety percent of incoming email is about sex, money, viral war, or personal appearance.
Would that the remaining ten percent celebrated the courage to undertake fellowship and neighborly concern in the form, not of war, but of love.
After Mass this morning we sat silently in the empty church. It is Martin Luther King's birthday. In a speech on 4April1967, one year to the day prior to his assassination on 4April1968, he said:
This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:
Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.
Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word."
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.
( -- from speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City )
Some people change their email address to avoid the unnecessary and superfluous things they receive. Some change their physical address and residence to avoid those who would cowardly harm them. Some even change their country when the fear of loss of liberty and menace of authoritative police and military tactics begin to encroach. Today I long to change the mind of this country from arrogance and fear to open inquiry and love.
I suspect the more honest change would be to change my own mind, to become closer to the twofold invitations of Christianity and Buddhism. One, to empty myself and allow in the form of Christ-mind, the other to empty myself and allow the form of Buddha-mind. These two forms, kenosis and shunyata, are for us the practice of simplicity, integrity, and faithful engagement. Worded differently, it is the practice of attentive presence, root silence, and transparent service.
Can we live this way?
And allow embodying love?
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Why pray?
If prayer is opening to God, to the person whose voice comes from across the room, to the chickadee on branch, and cat on stairs – why, and to what purpose is prayer?
I don’t know. I pray to find out.
Eagle Poem
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
(Joy Harjo)
The beauty of this life in this world!
"... until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves, too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."
- Goethe
Men who refuse beauty or who wish its substitute -- power, possessions and wealth -- talk of and plan for war.
Prayer opens to these men in their strategy rooms and uncertainty of heart
Why, and to what purpose?
Begin now prayer.
Begin now peace.
If prayer is opening to God, to the person whose voice comes from across the room, to the chickadee on branch, and cat on stairs – why, and to what purpose is prayer?
I don’t know. I pray to find out.
Eagle Poem
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
(Joy Harjo)
The beauty of this life in this world!
"... until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves, too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."
- Goethe
Men who refuse beauty or who wish its substitute -- power, possessions and wealth -- talk of and plan for war.
Prayer opens to these men in their strategy rooms and uncertainty of heart
Why, and to what purpose?
Begin now prayer.
Begin now peace.
Monday, January 13, 2003
Icicles hang from eave guarding small window in this room as sunrise lengthens light embrace through them. Ice on window melts and drips. January is soft snow and cold freeze.
I live far off in the wild
Where moss and woods
Are thick and plants perfumed
I can see mountains rain or shine
And never hear market noise
I light a few leaves in my stove to heat tea
To patch my robe I cut off a cloud
Lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years
Why suffer for profit and fame?
- Stonehouse (dailyzen.com)
There is no cutting away the human to reach for the divine. Each is in each. They grow together like water and ice. No water, no ice. When season matures, sun comes, melts ice, only water.
But in deep cold of January sun is able only to shine through ice, illuminate it, and reside thereby within and without even in this state of hard encased stillness.
The term [Pleroma] is used in John's gospel...to indicate the perfect presence of divinity in Christ, who is the place where God dwells bodily, but also to indicate Christ as the whole measure of divinity, knowable through the church, his body. (p.698, Encyclopedia of the Early Church, entry by L. Vanyo)
Church, whoever is gathered in the consciousness of Christ, is the body of Christ. Christ is the fullness of the place "where God dwells bodily." Whether zendo, chapel, circle conversation, one-to-one soul-friend meeting, or ever-solitary meander through crunching snow -- it is our good fortune to be body here on earth.
It is not a matter of 'believing' in God. It is the matter of 'being' in God. Being in God as water in ice, as ice in light, and as the slow movement -- lengthening and shortening -- of all three in the world of winter.
There is no need to suffer for profit and fame. We suffer, rather, the coming-to-light of all that is hidden in shadow.
There is no one without the other. Here is one within no other.
Morning! The spirit of birds blur past bright icicles.
I live far off in the wild
Where moss and woods
Are thick and plants perfumed
I can see mountains rain or shine
And never hear market noise
I light a few leaves in my stove to heat tea
To patch my robe I cut off a cloud
Lifetimes seldom fill a hundred years
Why suffer for profit and fame?
- Stonehouse (dailyzen.com)
There is no cutting away the human to reach for the divine. Each is in each. They grow together like water and ice. No water, no ice. When season matures, sun comes, melts ice, only water.
But in deep cold of January sun is able only to shine through ice, illuminate it, and reside thereby within and without even in this state of hard encased stillness.
The term [Pleroma] is used in John's gospel...to indicate the perfect presence of divinity in Christ, who is the place where God dwells bodily, but also to indicate Christ as the whole measure of divinity, knowable through the church, his body. (p.698, Encyclopedia of the Early Church, entry by L. Vanyo)
Church, whoever is gathered in the consciousness of Christ, is the body of Christ. Christ is the fullness of the place "where God dwells bodily." Whether zendo, chapel, circle conversation, one-to-one soul-friend meeting, or ever-solitary meander through crunching snow -- it is our good fortune to be body here on earth.
It is not a matter of 'believing' in God. It is the matter of 'being' in God. Being in God as water in ice, as ice in light, and as the slow movement -- lengthening and shortening -- of all three in the world of winter.
There is no need to suffer for profit and fame. We suffer, rather, the coming-to-light of all that is hidden in shadow.
There is no one without the other. Here is one within no other.
Morning! The spirit of birds blur past bright icicles.
Sunday, January 12, 2003
No water, no life.
The Great Person from time past
Had no fixed abode.
In famed mountains hid his traces,
Grew old amid wind and frost.
From afar, I see your
White-rock hermitage,
Hidden in a haze
Of evergreen trees.
When the moon sets,
It’s mind-watching time;
Clouds arise
In your closed eyes.
Just before dawn, temple bells
Sound from neighboring peaks;
Waterfalls hang thousands of feet
In emptiness.
Moss and lichen
Cover the cliff face;
A narrow, indistinct path
Leads to you.
- Chia Tao (779-843)
It is not distant and separated seclusion the hermit seeks. The hermit seeks pure nature and distinct reality in human nature and the indistinct dispersions of our common everyday experience.
After Saturday Morning Conversation with Richard and Susan it was suggested it is not an oppositional stance the hermit takes, rather a stance in the middle of the values of the society and culture, a stance that dissolves within immediate reality.
Thus says the Lord: All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk! Why spend your money for what is not bread, your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare. Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life. (Isaiah 55)
Salt doesn't lose its flavor after it dissolves in water. It is not pure salt; it is salt water. Hermits do not lose their distinctive quiet presence after they disappear into the marketplace. They are not separated seclusion; they are inclusive immersion.
Baptism immerses us in everyday reality permeated with Christic grace. Jesus came to it with John at Jordan. We must face our own beginningless and endless interpenetration with God in all things, in beings with indistinct meander.
"You," said the voice in the Christ experience of Jesus, "are my beloved son with whom I am well pleased."
Come to the water. Come to life.
They lead to you.
Where else would God be watching?
Be well? Be pleased? Be loved?
The Great Person from time past
Had no fixed abode.
In famed mountains hid his traces,
Grew old amid wind and frost.
From afar, I see your
White-rock hermitage,
Hidden in a haze
Of evergreen trees.
When the moon sets,
It’s mind-watching time;
Clouds arise
In your closed eyes.
Just before dawn, temple bells
Sound from neighboring peaks;
Waterfalls hang thousands of feet
In emptiness.
Moss and lichen
Cover the cliff face;
A narrow, indistinct path
Leads to you.
- Chia Tao (779-843)
It is not distant and separated seclusion the hermit seeks. The hermit seeks pure nature and distinct reality in human nature and the indistinct dispersions of our common everyday experience.
After Saturday Morning Conversation with Richard and Susan it was suggested it is not an oppositional stance the hermit takes, rather a stance in the middle of the values of the society and culture, a stance that dissolves within immediate reality.
Thus says the Lord: All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk! Why spend your money for what is not bread, your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare. Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life. (Isaiah 55)
Salt doesn't lose its flavor after it dissolves in water. It is not pure salt; it is salt water. Hermits do not lose their distinctive quiet presence after they disappear into the marketplace. They are not separated seclusion; they are inclusive immersion.
Baptism immerses us in everyday reality permeated with Christic grace. Jesus came to it with John at Jordan. We must face our own beginningless and endless interpenetration with God in all things, in beings with indistinct meander.
"You," said the voice in the Christ experience of Jesus, "are my beloved son with whom I am well pleased."
Come to the water. Come to life.
They lead to you.
Where else would God be watching?
Be well? Be pleased? Be loved?
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