note to attendees at Friday evening conversation

I was wrong.

The lyric I tried to quote was not from “Golden Boy.” Rather, it is from Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass," 

—b

¢ 5. Trope: ‘I Believe in God’ Three Soli and Street Chorus 

Amen! Amen! Amen!

Rock Singer

I believe in God, 

But does God believe in me?  

I’ll believe in any god

If any god there be. 

That’s a pact. 

Shake on that. 

No taking back. 

I believe in one God, 

But then I believe in three. 

 I’ll believe in twenty gods  

If they’ll believe in me.  

That’s a pact. 

Shake on that.  

I’ll believe in you and you and you 

And who... 

Who’ll believe in me? 

how many days and nights

In prison today

Men learning

The dynamics

A poem

Taking life

Within —

Themselves

who would dare to go nameless

Something by Thomas Merton:

Whoever is nowhere is nobody

A Stellar Shell. This massive bubble in space is the result of gas that is being 
shocked by the expanding blast wave from a supernova. Called SNR 0509-67.5, 
the sphere is the visible remnant of a powerful stellar explosion 
in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 
a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth.

From NASA 2019 Advent Calendar

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place
     and there
You do not enter except without a story.
To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is there is homeless for he has no door     
and no identity
with which to go out and to come in. 

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist     
except as unborn:
No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are     
     securely established!

They find themselves in streets.  
They are licensed
To proceed from place to place
They now know their own names
They can name several friends and know
Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, 
if all names are shouted at     
     once and
all cars crash at one crossing:
If all cities explode and fly away in dust
Yet identities refuse to be lost.  
There is a name and number     
     for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes     
     for ashes:
Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?
Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn     
     flower of nothing:
This is the paradise tree.  
It must remain unseen until words     
     end and arguments are silent.

—Thomas Merton, "The Fall",  In the Dark Before Dawn, pp. 184-185 , in louie,louie

make no, mistake

Something

In the soul

Knows

What is

Right

And what

Is not,

Right?

and the opposite is also true

What happens now

Is anybody’s

Guess —

Handsome is

As handsome does

reading on impeachment day

It just seems that some descriptions fit. No judgment intended. Just descriptive. These from Fr. Alfred Delp. (In louie,louie)

"A Godless life is one delivered up to a vast army of kill-joys.   

"When man loses touch with the eternal truths he gets submerged in the weeds that sprout all over the garden of his life. They are senseless trivialities that assume an air of real importance. Though they pretend to have a purpose they are quite futile, and merely add obscurity and confusion to a life which is gradually engulfed in a sort of eternal twilight without light or direction. … 

"Hunted and driven, and bewitched he is no longer master of his own fate, no longer a free man.   

"It is hard enough to meet the ordinary hazards incidental to every existence; but the Godless man has no defenses and is delivered up, bound and disarmed. Left to cope with them in this defenseless fashion he falls back on the excuse that fate is against him and the world is all wrong.    

"He is a failure and it takes very little to keep him bogged down in depression and despair. The world becomes a cheerless place, not worth living in, although there seems to be no way out of it.   

"Or, on the other hand, he may persuade himself that a flippant attitude is the right one to adopt, and he seeks a cheap way out of his troubles by various forms of escapism.  The great illusion begins, the age of noise and mass mentality and organized animation - 'circuses' - for crowds.    

"Till at last the earth begins to quake and underground rumblings, which have been more or less effectively drowned by the surface uproar, imperatively assert themselves.   

"Thunder crashes proclaiming the day of judgement." (pp. 37-38)

- Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder New York

feed on your dreams

Impeachment eve

Student feels beginning of civil war

I play “teach your children”

We must have a code to live by

to a student

You point me to your phrase if God is the origin. 

Nor do I know what God wants, or criteria for (what we call) judging. But you suggest a hint. What is the origin of behavior? Why act, however we act, toward another? 

If God is (we’re just talking here!) — origin — then, how far are we from origin? By that I mean, can we begin to see what it is that is calling to us to respond to in any of our interactions? The source of our actions and responses, I think, must be the ground we stand on. We are at the origin of things every time we open our mouths to say anything, or lift our hand to do anything.

If that is so, and if your observation about origin is so, then — we just might know what God is thinking — because it will be what we are thinking. 

If we make no attempt to separate God from us, or us from God, nor any other kind of dualistic cutting away — then a new view of who we are where we are emerges for us.

—bh

welcome max-manjushri to meetingbrook

Three year old from new england border collie rescue brought up to hermitage Saturday 14dec19 from foster home in gray maine on a rainy day.

Rokie keeps eye on him

Yes, the world could be other-wise. 

So much wisdom and compassion in the eyes and faces of brother-sister earth, animals, and humans.

Thank you, Virginia and Tod, for your care and handoff of Max.

We are delighted to have this gentle glory bodhisattva as our new teacher and confidant!

bobbing for leaves under water at Hosmer Pond (in our back yard)

 exploring foot of Ragged Mtn where early snow making has battled two torrential days of rain (in our back yard)

so much mountain, so much life to be sniffed and categorized, and wondered at

hosmer brook tumbling down ragged mountain with new eyes ears and nose on duty.

about afterthought, dialogue with student

JH,

  

Final Discussion

COLLAPSE

I still find Four Thousand Days and Nights to be the most fascinating poem. I still think there is supposed to be a kind of inverted irony. Instead of a poem coming from the deaths of so many, so many died for the poem. And even further, it was only for one child, one bird, and one dog. 

The final stanza:

To give birth to one poem
we must kill the things we love
This is the only road to take to resurrect the dead
This is the road we have to take

Reminds me of the final lines of one of Shakespeare's sonnets: "so long lives this, and this gives life to thee". The only way we can keep those we love among us is through art. This is the only way to "resurrect the dead". The poem exists to keep those we lost alive by not forgetting them. 

...   ...   ...

William Halpin INSTRUCTOR MANAGER 

RE: Final Discussion

COLLAPSE

"...so many died for the poem"
"The only way we can keep those we love among us is through art."(jh)

...

Yes, I agree. There is something that holds my attention about the poem and those four lines.

It is intriguing what you say.  So what is it?  Are we killing the idea we have of things? The idea we have of people? And only when that "killing" takes place are we left with the stark and unadorned thing-itself? The un-opinioned and un-categorized person-themselves? And in that starkness is revealed a bare reality looking at us, asking, "what will you do?"

And is that potential doing which arises from barrier-less presence the prelude to art?

And, finally, is the poem that which arises after? As well as the core of ethical action -- that which is thought about afterthought, that action which arises of itself from our bare attention?

--bh

incarnation emerges

I hereby announce the creation of a new revolutionary movement: Stat Virtus.

Derived from the saying In medio stat virtus (virtue stands in the middle).

For members of Congress, the Executive, and the Judiciary, the invitation to engage in revolutionary behavior and wander to Stat Virtus.

There, away from separated edges, in the focused surround of centered middle, work will be done to pragmatically attend to problems and questions related to citizens of their country and citizens of the world.

There, transformation takes root.

A new birth occurs.

Incarnation emerges.

We are saved from unthinking ideology.

A heartbeat of necessary creation is felt.

This feeling-thinking is how truth moves within us transforming everything it touches in extension.

transforming mind

Happy unbirthday!

...when we talk of nirvana we imagine that there is such a thing...as in the case of a table or a book. Nirvana, however, is no more than a state of mind or consciousness when we actually transcend relativity—the world of birth and death. 

.- D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966)

Happy undying 

life! 

are we nearly there

“When you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

qui tacet consentire videtur

 The value of words in the world of this administration has mouths uncertain whether or what to pronounce.

I should never have learned words
how much better off I’d be
if I lived in a world
where meanings didn’t matter,
the world with no words 

(-Ryūichi Tamura in poem “On my Way Home”)

So it is when mendacity is the weapon of top officers in any branch of government.

No words suffice...

But I might be out of touch.

There was a time when facts were considered to be truth. Then it became that interpretation of facts might be considered accurate or inaccurate, hence, truthful or untruthful. Now, it seems, that truth is dependent upon the forceful persuasive opinion of those espousing a particular point of view.

The zen master says that "Truth...is just like this." But the meditation of the practitioner is asking the question, "What is this?"

Things are further compounded by the realization that things are seldom what we think they are.

What am I left with?

No words suffice!

thanks louie

Thomas Merton died 51 years ago today.

"[A publisher asked me to write something on 'The Secret of Success,' and I refused.]
If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves."

(--from posthumous publication, 1980 Love and Living, Thomas Merton, a collection from his writings.

We're no longer certain about the circumstances of his death.

Recently he's been called a martyr.

 As Bob Dylan wrote: "There's no success like failure / and that failure's no succes at all." (in Love Minus Zero/No Limit, 1965)

cages, where our morality has disappeared

This on twitter today:

This is the Nativity display outside the Claremont United Methodist Church in California.
It's making some people very upset. And it should.

https://twitter.com/breznican/status/1203762299653128192

Now.

It’s all happening now.

monday morning, advent, this poem

 For a New Beginning,

            by John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

https://thevalueofsparrows.com/2012/12/12/poetry-for-a-new-beginning-by-john-odonohue/

nothing’s gonna change my world

👏🏽   Και συνάγεται, (And, it is gathered!)

This mendicant day begging for interconnection.

Buddha’s enlightenment day...and the immaculate conception of Mary.

Two wonderful examples of being free from barrier and boundary.

Mary conceived as such.

Buddha becoming suchness.

👏🏽

And, with equal note, the anniversary of John Lennon’s sudden and shocking moving through perceived barrier and boundary at the hands of a very harsh teacher in 1980. such as it was.

How remarkably and unexpectedly beneficial, beyond our comprehension, that we have been given the ability to both remember and re-member such gifts as these along our expansion across time and across the universe!

OM...

For our teachers...

✨

With profound gratitude!

mum

Having nothing
Good
To say about
The president,
I’ll say nothing.

do us part

Four AM walk to winter zendo to bump heat. They make snow all night next door at Snow Bowl.

Carry wood in from barn for embers in brown wood stove.

When we speak to one another Karl Stern’s words return to mind: “All being is nuptial!”

There we are, then, at the altar of one-another, eucharistic communing, until

Death

Do us

Part?

Ah — there is

No part of us

Done by death

Within true

Marriage.

someone asked tonight

If a woman going to court to testify against two men who raped her is attacked by those two men enroute, is there a reason to forget about an incompetent president and rail against such a derogation of decency there?

on the way out the door

It is Advent.

The time prefacing an inter-relational phenomenology of an appearing reality so original as to be the silent emptiness prior to anything-at-all coming to be in this vast and infinite Kosmos.

It is, correspondingly, that which each one of us is in our most intimate being.

  

icon of Salus Populi Romani in the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. 

Recounted by pious tradition to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist.

"That God should have condescended to become a human mother's son;  that one woman whose womb was sanctified as the holy temple and tabernacle of the living God should have been permitted to walk the earth -- these wonders make up the sum total of the earth's actual purpose and they are the fulfillment of all its expectations." (pp. 25-26)

- Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder New York. See also: The Prison Meditations of Father Delp

(--from louie, louie)

haiku

                 (thursday onto-relationality)

Dawn light over hill

Through bamboo curtain, shapes...trees

I am, this, morning

might as well ask

 Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) in subject in M.M. Davis’ work.

The doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance rests on the fundamental methodological axiom that knowledge is developed according to the nature (kata physin) of the object of scientific inquiry. To know God through the incarnate Son, who is ‘of one nature with the Father’, is to know God in strict accordance with God’s nature and hence in a theologically scientific way. In Torrance’s kataphysical method, a priori knowledge of God is excluded, for epistemology follows ontology. Because the fundamental aspects of reality are relational rather than atomistic, a scientific theological approach to the doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ requires that he be investigated within the nexuses of ‘being- constituting’ interrelations, or ‘onto-relations’, which disclose his identity as incarnate Saviour of the world. Following the principle of logical simplicity, the vast and scattered array of Torrance’s thought can be reduced to a minimal number of elemental forms that succinctly describe in a unitary, non-dualist manner the onto-relations that constitute the identity of the incarnate Son. The primary elemental forms of Torrance’s doctrine of mediation are the Nicene homoousion and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the hypostatic union. Two additional elemental forms that readily arise as corollaries of the doctrine of the hypostatic union are the doctrines of incarnational redemption and the ‘vicarious humanity’ of Jesus Christ. These elemental forms provide a conceptual lens for a theologically holistic view of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance.

Davis, M.M., 2013, ‘Kataphysical inquiry, onto- relationality, and elemental forms in T.F. Torrance’s doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ’, In die Skriflig/ In Luce Verbi 47(1), Art. #100, 9 pages, © 2013. https://academia.edu/resource/work/19840695

Is faith a thing, an ontological reality, to be studied as one might any elemental material particle-in-relationship occupying a phenomenal field?

We might as well ask what is real.

Ok — what is, real?

And what is it

that I am not

seeing?

impeachment hearings

History

will

judge

and not

a moment

too soon 

while there

is still

history 

these, by thomas merton -- on snowy advent tuesday

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and she saw that, in containing Him, she contained the world besides. 

The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and the end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. 

And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm Mary slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. 

And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence. 

-- Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951, p 317)

...   ...   ...

Song: If you seek

If you seek a heavenly light 

I, Solitude, am your professor! 

I go before you into emptiness, 

Raise strange suns for your new mornings, 

Opening the windows 

Of your innermost apartment. 

When I, loneliness, give my special signal 

Follow my silence, follow where I beckon! 

Fear not, little beast, little spirit 

(Thou word and animal) 

I, Solitude, am angel 

And have prayed in your name. 

Look at the empty, wealthy night 

The pilgrim moon! 

I am the appointed hour,  

The "now" that cuts 

Time like a blade. 

I am the unexpected flash 

Beyond "yes," beyond "no," 

The forerunner of the Word of God. 

Follow my ways and I will lead you 

To golden-haired suns, 

Logos and music, blameless joys, 

Innocent of questions 

And beyond answers: 

For I, Solitude, am thine own self: 

I, Nothingness, am thy All, 

I, Silence, am thy Amen! 

(-Poem, Song: If you seek, by Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pp. 340-34i)   

(from louie, louie, blog by beth cioffoletti)

snow

Falling everywhere

University closed Tuesday

Online assignment sent to students —

Eco-spirituality and cosmological internexus

wants nothing, knows nothing, has nothing

Looking here and there, finding nothing,  wind howls saying, “I’m on my way through here heading elsewhere taking nothing with me.”

‘There is nothing so unknown to the soul as herself.’ Meister Eckhart 

Detachment — The detached soul 

By calling for the soul to ‘naught itself for an instant’, in order to find the ‘strange and desert place’1 of oneness with God, Meister Eckhart’s mystical vision is one of self abandonment, a desertion that constitutes an apophatic ontology that he calls 

• 1Both of these citations are from Sermon 28, Ego elegi vos de mundo, cited in Meister Eckhart, (vol. 1, Sermon 17), 1979, p. 144. © The Eckhart Society 2015 DOI 10.1179/2046572615Z.00000000030 detachment 

( Abgeschiedenheit). 2 Eckhart tirelessly tells his listener: ‘go completely out of yourself’. 3. Though he uses many metaphors for this desertion, they all portray this single medieval mystical theology, 

Vol. 24 No. 1, May 2015, 23–44 If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious Arianne Conty American University of Sharjah, UAE  

departure or evasion, leaving the ground of the soul as empty as, to use his own words, a vacuum or a void. He tells us in Sermon 15 that‘anyone who had so to himself’.4 In The Book of Benedictus, he uses the term virgin or free (ledic) to reiterate this same theme, and in his Councils on Discernment he focuses on the idea of emptiness: What is an empty spirit? An empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing, has not attached its best to any fixed way of acting, and has no concern whatever in anything for its own gain, for it is all sunk deep down into God’s dearest will and has forsaken its own.5 In Sermon 52 he privileges the concept of poverty ( Armut), and specifies that the soul must become poor of will, of knowledge, and of possessions: ‘A poor man wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing’.6 A man who is poor of will must be poor even of the will to do God’s will, for true poverty is to will nothing: So long as a man has this as his will, that he wants to fulfil God ’s dearest will, he has not the poverty about which we want to talk. Such a person has a will with which he wants to fulfil God’s will, and that is not true poverty. For if a person wants really to have poverty, he ought to be as free of his own created will as he was when he did not exist. For I tell you by the truth that is eternal, so long as you have a will to fulfil God’s will, and a longing for God and for eternity, then you are not poor; for a poor man is one who has a will and longing for nothing.7

(—from, medieval mystical theology, Vol. 24 No. 1, May 2015, 23–44 If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious Arianne Conty American University of Sharjah, UAE)

It is Advent.

We don’t know what is coming.

Unknown to the soul, as herself.

he preferred chevys

At Saturday morning practice four letters arise.

But, at night, I cannot remember them.

The man at hospice told me his cardiologist said there’s nothing he can do for him.

He didn’t expect to hear that.

crush and obliterate the image

It is often difficult to discern the figure on the cross. What is the import of this symbol of cruel torture and death?

Is the material cosmos itself disgraced when we supplant grace it’s wholeness by injecting shattering egoistic craving and selfish ambition?

But why dig up all this old scenery and reconstruct the stews of my own mental Pompeii after enough years have covered them up? Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. There is nothing new or strange about the process. But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. 

(—Excerpt from: "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. Scribd.
https://www.scribd.com/book/249309404)

I hold the Irish string of green beads opposited by empty circle at one end and Celtic cross at other. Zero zen itself wholeness at one end. Whole Christ stretched suffering on shorn tree in full sight of unlooking inner conscience on the other end.

I’ve been there. And carry the obliviousness of truncated time and fractured space against a disappearing integrity I’ve refused to acknowledge.

In christian metaphor, I’ve sinned.

In zen metaphor, I’ve seen nothing and not cared.

What now?

Now I hold the empty circle and circle the empty cross wondering where the Christ of that Jesus has been resurrected and made manifest in the ongoing realization of our nascent and latent holiness wandering in the footsteps of our step by step ordinary day by day passage through this moment and this moment and, yes, again and always new, this moment.

Now

Hear

This

knowing nothing

Something about today — the quiet of it.

        15Woe to those who go to great depths

to hide their plans from the Lord,

who do their work in darkness and think,

“Who sees us? Who will know?”

16You turn things upside down, 

as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!

Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,

“You did not make me”?

Can the pot say to the potter,

“You know nothing”?

(—NIV translation)

details

What are you thinking?

In 1925, Einstein went on a walk with a young student named Esther Salaman. As they wandered, he shared his core guiding intellectual principle: "I want to know how God created this world. I'm not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are just details."(—Einstein's Quest to 'Know God's Thoughts' Could Take Millennia, By Don Lincoln June 04, 2019 Strange News)

Quantum thinkers are concluding there is no space, only quantum entanglement.

I hadn’t given it much thought.

Hence, I’m lost in a space that doesn’t exist sharing that emptiness with an interconnected everything.

Thus, as a solitary, periodically delighted to be alone, I am completely with everything, each as itself, universes beyond number, within and without, wholly distinct..

the truth about anything

This is the daze that decries our souls.

The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. 

(—Excerpt from: ch.1, "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. 1948  Scribd.)

 If we were to call it evil, where good is distorted and made absent by lies, then the daze of these days is making stupidity loud and maddeningly perduring and perjuring from the highest podia of the nation’s bad dream.

Please, sir, might we have some morsel of integrity or kindness for which to be grateful?

rain on roof

There are times when silence

Is the only sound

Able to be

Heard

new being interrelationality

I am I no longer.

Nor am I you.

Let's meet between who we thought we were.

And speak ourselves, round and round, into new being interrelationality.

Words — our witnessing — can kill, says Kieslowski, but they can also bring healing and a restoration to life.    - 

-from review of  Dekalog: Eight,  Directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski, in Spirituality and Practice 

We'll meet there.

And see what is coming to be. 

if seeing were prayer

The gaze of the tailor at end of Dekalog VIII by Kieslowski.

Looking through years of mistrust.

At two women's audacity of reconciling interrelationality.

Through his lonely enclosure.

Lockboxed.

Wonder.

not my childhood bicycle

At practice, sitting, these letters:

SHWWIN

Sit here with what is now.

Sit

Here

With

What is

Now.