Ask me no questions
I’ll tell you no lies.
No foolin’!
Definition of koan
: a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.Merriam-Webster
koan (n.)
Zen paradox meant to stimulate the mind, 1918, from Japanese ko "public" + an "matter for thought." Online Etymology Dictionary
I have a question for you.
Go ahead, ask.
No, you ask.
Ok — you mean now?
Well done!
Yurt
Quiet air
In thru window
Our through door
Brown and white dog
Brief stand in disappearing brook
This hot edge end of june
Someone pointed out that the quote attributed to St. Augustine (354-430 CE) has been wrongly translated.
That instead of --
"Love and do what you will,"
It should read --
"Love do what you will."
What difference 'and'?
Such a change does shift things.
It is from his Sermon on Love, his commentary on 1 John 4:4-12
(Here from New International Version)
4 You, dear children, are from God and have overcome them, because the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us; but whoever is not from God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the Spirit[a] of truth and the spirit of falsehood.
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God;but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1 John 4:4-12Love, we might suggest, is in itself invisible -- only made visible by the action or activity of love.
Evelyn Underhill writes in her work Mysticism that "When St Paul saw God he saw nothing."
Vladimir Putin on 16june21 at a news conference said "In this life there is no happiness, there is only the specter of happiness."
Do we see happiness? Or do we look through the illusion of happiness?
Or is it the looking itself that is what we are looking at, from, with, for, and as?
The poet writes:
Primary Wonder
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
- from Denise Levertov: Selected Poems, by Denise Levertov (photo by saskia) Turtle holds up earth and cosmos by each measured step on its way here |
I'd rather be alive because I am alive.
The Catholic Church no longer claims that opposition to abortion is scriptural. It is not a religious issue. It is called a matter of natural law, which should be discernible by natural reason. Yet as the Catholic judge John T. Noonan said, the most recognized experts on natural law, in universities, human rights organizations, medical and psychological bodies, do not generally oppose abortion. Nor, according to polls, do a majority of American citizens, even Catholic citizens. Some women of my own extended family have had abortions and still consider themselves Catholics. President Biden seems to be on their side, as is Pope Francis. This, of course, does not affect the American bishops. They hate this pope and this president anyway.
(--from, The Bishops Are Wrong About Biden — and Abortion, NYTimes, June 27, 2021, by Gary Wills)
And when time comes, I'd rather be dead because I will be dead.
Either way, no one need tell me what I ought to be or do.
Except that I ought to be what I am when I am just that.
There’s nothing left but compassion
No hope, no trust better angels will prevail
No optimism democracy is stronger than self promotion
No belief there’s a greater plan for a return to sanity
Only this
There is suffering and distress
Everybody hurts in their own way
No rhyme, reason, or justified wherewithal
What’s left
Is compassion
Plain and simple
Kindness and empathy
The one thing remaining
When all is lost
When justice flees
Stupidity and mindlessness moves in
Forget about any plan to reconstruct civility
Or appeals to crossing aisles, or decency rhetoric —
Forget slogans, advertisements, or placard philosophy
There’s no diversity in singularity
There’s only compassion
Sympathetic consciousness
Caring attention
What once was called
Love
Action and attitude of authentic respect
There — As you are
As each is — alone with one another
After everything collapses
Nothing resembles what has been known
Just broken glass and fallen debris —
I look for you to see what I am
Agreement rarely involves love, and love does not necessarily
entail agreement. Most of my books are not about Nietzsche, and
over the years I have developed my own views on many of the
problems with which Nietzsche dealt. …Whoever digs for gold must clear away a lot of rubbish.
(—Walter Kaufman, in Preface to Third Edition, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 1968)
Reading Nietzsche in
morning requires Lao-Tzu’s
earlier balance
Supreme Court says federal judges trump legislative branch in determining personal rights.
Mitch McConnell is overheard wondering: Who knew my stopping Obama federal appointees and flooding Trump era appointees plus two Justices would yield such benefit?
Mirabile dictu!
Those final interviews with Christopher Hitchens before his death are compelling. His formidable articulate opinions against religion are worth hearing.
The question of God, the whys and wherefores of divine life, and the ways religions either narrow or expand human freedom — these are hotly debated and significant matters.
“When the unexpected happens it goes a long distance.” (Kerry Sanders, nbc news, from site of Surfside condominium collapse in Florida, 25june21)
Such occurrences are unnerving and full of sorrow for families and friends.
So, too, in a collateral sense, God and religion.
And, yet, so many find joy and solace in God and religion.
It’s a day to day consideration.
I’m grateful to both Christopher Hitchens and Martin Heidegger, Richard Rohr and Abraham Joshua Heschel.
For those who deeply question and those who dare to move through faith.
They are good companions through both proximate intimacy and unexpected long distances.
People worry they do not grasp christianity, or, perhaps, that they've dismissed it for its failures.
Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed.
- 1 Peter 1:13
Perhaps fretting is premature.
Christianity has not yet been revealed.
Hence, there is nothing yet to be grasped. There is nothing yet to be dismissed.
Jesus, the man of history, you might say, is the beginning of the transformation of the has-been and the coming-to-be of humanity on the way to something we are not yet certain what.
We are, as Jesus is, in process -- a continual and perennial process toward a coming-to-be as yet unsuspected and perhaps inconceivable.
The movement of it all invites an ongoing realization that the movement itself is the urge and the vital energy of one thing becoming another becoming the thing-itself only to continue on into realms of unimaginable creative processes of coming-to-be.
There are, yes, those who try to nail time to clouds. Those who try to box up and sell pieces of the process as knickknacks trademarked and patented for proprietary consumption. These are entrepreneurs of contained and controlled sect and lore.
The truth, I submit, is something else.
So the question becomes: What is being revealed in its becoming itself?
Try this on as a spiritual inquiry!
I note the ship sinks
Foot by foot water streams in —
Face it, you can’t swim
The dead are only dead to those who believe in death.
To the rest of us the dead are just on the other side of disappearance.
Where is that?
In the middle of all action, that still point where everything revolves around unseen unheard origin.
Ever with us.
As potential emergence.
Hidden under perception, just before manifestation, evanescent surmise.
Not yet born, just after death, in midst if life.
Some dialogues, like this one between Thomas á Becket and King Henry IV, never disappear from mind:
B: You have a different task to do.
You have to steer the ship.
H: And you - what do you have to do?
B: To resist you with all my might
when you steer against the Lord God.
H: What do you expect of me then?
Are you hoping I'll weaken?
B: No.
I'm afraid we must only do,
absurdly,
what it has been given to us to do
right to the end.
(--from filmscript of Becket, 1964, from play Becket; ou, l'honneur de Dieu, [Becket; or, The Honor of God], 1959, by Jean Anouih)
There!
Practice your lines.
Continue the play.
How do you know your life is meaningful?
In fact, there are even less complex approaches to meaningfulness. In Philosophy Now, Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, provides an extremely simple answer: “The meaning of life is not being dead.”
While that may sound coy, many philosophers offer similar responses, although few as pithy. Philosopher Richard Taylor proposes that efforts and accomplishments aren’t what make life matter, writing in the 1970 book Good and Evil, “the day was sufficient to itself, and so was the life.” In other words, because we live, life matters.
It can be disconcerting, perhaps, to have such an easy answer. And detractors might argue that nothing can matter, given the immensity of the universe and the brevity of our lives. But this assumes our purpose is fixed, rigid and assigned externally, and not flexible or a product of the mind.
(--from, The Secret to a Meaningful life is simpler than you think, Quartz, by
June 24, 2018)
- Ephrat Livni,
Mind, like spirit, comes and goes as it pleases when and where it pleases.
For now, I'm good with that.
He said: It’s like an opening occurs, we emerge, and we’re a part of this. Then, at end, another opening happens, we go through, and we’re not apart from this.
He said: So this guy suddenly becomes enlightened. Next day, he and his wife disagree on something, maybe dishes weren’t done, and they squabble, unpleasant things are said. Enlightenment? Squabble? What’s the difference?
So too, is occurs, time before birth, time after birth — time before death, time after death — what’s the difference?
MU!
We are a part of this.
We are not apart from this.
Can we emerge into this and, still, at final absorption, be no different than this, at the same instant?
(Distinguishing no distinction.)
There’s no knowing. So, don’t know.
Well, well,
we’ll — look here —
evening passes and morning comes, this lovely Juneteenth!
You can cast your vote.
But we will count the votes. Yeah.
Right’s new strategy
A time will come when this will change.
You know, it’s funny, when it rains it pours / They got money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.
- 2Pac, “Keep Ya Head Up”
It will change because inane insanity is a tired way of living in the world.
It will change because decency will wear down indecency.
It will change because we will tire of hiding love and will become transparent.
“Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love”
(― Rabindranath Tagore)
We will tire of the ugliness of aggression, cynicism, and unkindness.
Perhaps love is God is love.
We'll drop our fear.
We'll simply see.
two minutes she says
water boiling, something in
frying pan gurgling
What is hidden is not the unhidden.
The journalists Griffin and Moffitt both recognized the importance of Say’s original negatives. They agreed the photograph must be kept secret and never shown. This conspiracy of silence could only have been because they knew full well that the photographs undermined the accidental electrocution story.
(Ch17, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, by Hugh Turley and David Martin)
Truth cannot remain hidden forever.
Right?
I have no suicidal thoughts
I doubt I have been born
The cable station tells me there’s
a pill staving suicidal ideation
It’s good to know. My mind
Debates toast or sleeping in
Wonders if elections are passé
Or democracy’s funeral has flowers.
Some hands swing cleavers,
Some minds are split
Right wing chicken wingers
Pronounce inanities with aplomb
As lefties anguish over lunch money
(feeling for billy club in back pocket)
If we can’t stand unified
Be the last one standing and smile
It saddens that so
many do not feel the freedom
kindness offers all
the blind pettiness
of elected congressfolk
their obstructing sneer
so easy to see
the empty hearted dryness
power drains by scorn
Friend asks if I'm familiar with Vine Deloria.
I wasn't.
There are serious questions whether Indian tribes actually had any conception of religion or of a deity at all. Wherever we find Indians and whenever we inquire about their idea of God, they tell us that beneath the surface of the physical universe is a mysterious spiritual power which cannot be described in human images that must remain always the “Great Mystery.”20(--from, Commentary by Thomas J. Hoffman, "Vine and the Divine: Vine DeLoria Jr and the Holy, embedded quote from God is Red: A Native View of Religion, c.1972, by Vine Deloria Jr., in AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 33:2 (2009) 103-112)
There are, on the other hand, many other entities with spiritual powers comparable to those generally attributed to one deity alone. So many in fact that they must simply be encountered and appeased, they cannot be counted. In addition all inanimate entities have spirit and personality so that the mountains, rivers, waterfalls, even the continents and the earth itself have intelligence, knowledge, and the ability to communicate ideas. 21
Then this by the Brussats:
God Is Red
A Native View of Religion
By Vine Deloria
Offers Native American spirituality as an alternative to Christianity.
Book Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
In the 30th anniversary edition of this controversial volume, Native American scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., offers readers a salutary overview of Native American spirituality as an alternative to Christianity. After tracing a brief history of the "Indian Movement" and making reference to novels, anthologies ,and books on Indian religion, this lawyer, who once attended the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois, faults Christians for (1) their inability to think in terms of space (hence they do not have a good natural theology), (2) their cramped concepts of history focused on the story of the Jews and the life of Jesus, (3) their fear of death, (4) their failure to integrate faith into every aspect of life, (5) their lack of community, and (6) their internal dissension.
Deloria points to the religious hunger in America and sees interest in the occult as a manifestation of the search for a more refreshing and meaningful spirituality. The red man, he says, offers people a religion of community, reverence for the earth, continuity between death and life, a rich treasurehouse of myth and ritual, and a way of understanding the spirit of life on all continents. This edition of God Is Red includes new forewords by Leslie Marmon Silko and George E. Tinker.
Still so much to think about.
So much as yet unread.
There's probably less of a mystery why poverty endures so noticeably in America and elsewhere than we might suspect.
The American economy runs on poverty, or at least the constant threat of it. Americans like their goods cheap and their services plentiful and the two of them, together, require a sprawling labor force willing to work tough jobs at crummy wages. On the right, the barest glimmer of worker power is treated as a policy emergency, and the whip of poverty, not the lure of higher wages, is the appropriate response.
(--from, What the Rich Don’t Want to Admit About the Poor, June 13, 2021, NYTimes, by Ezra Klein)
The poor are necessary.
Without the poor how would we continue as those not materially poor?
Why else do we saturate and cultivate advertisers, influencers, life coaches, psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, spiritual counselors, investment associates, lawyers, loan officers, priests, rabbis, imams, pastors, and facebook groups?
There are enough resources and enough money to clothe, feed, house, and provide goods and services to every person and family in the world.
Why, then, do so many suffer, do without, languish?
I'm afraid
I know
why.
As do
you.
Where is God?
mysticism
noun
1. the beliefs, ideas, or mode of thought of mystics.2. a doctrine of an immediate spiritual intuition of truths believed to transcend ordinary understanding, or of a direct, intimate union of the soul with God through contemplation or ecstasy.3. obscure thought or speculation.
Where are you looking?
Look under your feet.
So much of contem-
porary culture and pol-
itics is both una-
ttractive and disheart-
ening. No, I cannot a-
bide cynicism
It's ok to break down
Just be willing to be built up.
To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.
-- Ecclesiastes ch.3, v.3 and v. 7.
And the leaves of the tree?
These are pages on which those who inquire write their journeys and findings to share with us.
And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
-- Revelations ch. 22, v.2.
Be silent.
Until you speak.
Then, listen to your own voice.
Sounding through what is longing to be heard.
The name Sertillange popped up. Some fifty years ago I'd read his book (in translation), La Vie Intellectuelle, son Esprit, ses Conditions, ses Méthodes. (1934)
Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P. (French: [sɛʁtijɑ̃ʒ]; 16 November 1863 – 26 July 1948), was a French Catholic philosopher and spiritual writer.(cf, Wikipedia)
For Sertillanges, the intellectual vocation is a calling to discover, articulate, and transmit truth. How far this is from the understanding and practice of the intellectual life in contemporary academia, in which one’s soul becomes grist for the collective academic mill, the function of which is to recuperate a perpetually dying, artificial, stillborn “intellectual life” of truth-indifferent and jargon-ridden journals, ruthless career-worship, status-quo opportunism, and inner-circle gossip-mongering. Try to live a genuinely intellectual life in the midst of that!
But there is hope, for Sertillanges notes more than once that the intellectual’s best and most essential friend is solitude, though isolation is to be avoided: “The man with too much solitude, “grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: he stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you were a ‘proposition’ to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook” (59). The intellectual’s worst and most dangerous associate is the world, especially a world like contemporary academia!
When the world does not like you it takes its revenge on you; if it happens to like you, it takes its revenge still by corrupting you. Your only resource is to work far from the world, as indifferent to its judgments as you are ready to serve it. . . . Do not busy yourself with the sayings and doings of the world, that is with such that have no moral and intellectual bearing; avoid useless comings and goings which waste hours and fill the mind with wandering thoughts. These are the conditions of that sacred thing, quiet recollection (xxiii, 47).
Of course, most of us have no choice but to dwell in the vengeful, worldly and wordy halls of academia, where much thought is “wandering,” and where bureaucratic “useless comings and goings” are endless. What Sertillanges counsels is not a flight from the world but, simply, balance. For example, the intellectual desperately needs the support of a robust and authentic community of fellow intellectuals, but sometimes it is enough, he says, just to know there are others laboring at the same task, whether or not there is face-to-face or close proximity to such a community. Perhaps blog communities fulfill this purpose in our community-starved day!
With regard to solitude, specifically, the amount of concentrated intellectual work that is required in the intellectual vocation, Sertillanges’ prescription is quite surprising:
Have you two hours a day? Can you undertake to guard them jealously, to use them ardently, and then, being of those who have authority in the Kingdom of God, can you drink the chalice of which these pages would wish you to make you savor the exquisite and bitter taste? If so, have confidence. Nay, rest in quiet certainty (11).
Two hours a day, when one thinks of it, is not an inconsiderable amount, especially when we consider the difficulty of engaging in even a few minutes of genuine, contemplative intellectual activity in a culture “distracted from distraction by distraction” to use T.S. Eliot’s incredibly apt phrase. For Sertillanges, the fundamental virtue required of the intellectual is attention, and two hours a day of it is plenty. Here he is in accord with Simone Weil in her fantastic essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”: “Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”
(--from, On the Intellectual Life, by Sertillange, Scribd, Uploaded by tjkozinski on Dec 03, 2013)
I have two hours a day.
The distraction of it!
Ask him
Ask his name
I did
I asked him
And
And what did he say
He said it is Harry
Harry’s my name
So you know his name
That’s something, isn’t it
Yeah
I suppose
Hallucinations aren’t at all what they appear to be.
In fact, they’re more than appearance.
They’re what sanity used to be before socially collective amnesia and apprehension forced people to pretend there’s a singular reality and our best interests reside in agreeing and affirming we all dwell within its protective custody.
“There is no trustworthy standard by which we can separate the 'real' from the 'unreal' aspects of phenomena. Such standards as exist are conventional: and correspond to convenience, not to truth. It is no argument to say that most men see the world in much the same way, and that this “way” is the true standard of reality: though for practical purposes we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors.”
(― Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, 1911)
That’s the thing about both democracy and authentic spirituality — their expression is diverse and multivalent.
Do not buy into nor share your neighbor’s hallucinations.
Have, or be, your own.
When this week started, I was a hermit.
Before that I was an idiorhythmic monastic.
Now I am a recluse without anything resembling what a neighbor might recognize as kith, kin, or kindred.
Still, I water plants, spray the garden, feed the cats, seed the birds, and listen to all that sounds in my surround.
Looking around for what-is a-round:
Chongsan, the Second Head Dharma Master of Won Buddhism, said, “Il Won Sang is the blueprint of all things in the universe, the symbol of the realm of universal truth, the Truth Buddha. It is a koan for seeing into our original nature and realizing buddhahood. It is the object of faith and the standard of daily practice.” (The Dharma Words of Master Chongsan, Chapter 6, v. 3)
“If you are given only the name of someone you don’t know, it would be difficult to believe that anyone by that name really exists. Just as the picture of someone you don’t know can help you figure out what that person looks like, the picture of the Truth, can help you see what that could be like. Master Sotaesan, by using Il Won Sang as the picture of the Truth, made it easier for us to comprehend the realm of Truth. Il Won Sang is the picture of the totality of Truth, therefore anyone who takes this picture as the object of sincere inquiry will be enlightened to the realm of Truth easily. Thus, Master Sotaesan said, Shakyamuni Buddha’s order in the past was that of one buddha with a thousand bodhisattvas. In the future one thousand buddhas and one hundred thousand bodhisattvas will arise in this order.”
(Dharma Words of Master Chongsan, Chapter 5, v. 6)
(—from website on Won-Buddhism)
Il Won Sang is something to look into.
Perhaps we will come ‘round to it.
This arrived in email box at 1:41AM:
I remember a meeting in which a friend asked a strange and unexpected question: “What do you think is the most valuable land in the world?”
Several people threw out guesses, such as Manhattan, the oil fields of the Middle East, and the gold mines of South Africa, before our friend indicated that we were way off track. He paused for a moment, and said, “You’re all wrong. The most valuable land in the world is the graveyard. In the graveyard are buried all of the unwritten novels, never-launched businesses, unreconciled relationships, and all of the other things that people thought, ‘I’ll get around to that tomorrow.’ One day, however, their tomorrows ran out.”
That day I went back to my office and I wrote down two words in my notebook and on the wall of my office that have been my primary operating ethic for the last several years: Die Empty.
I want to know that if I lay my head down tonight and don’t wake up tomorrow, I have emptied myself of whatever creativity is lingering inside, with minimal regrets about how I spent my focus, time, and energy. This doesn’t happen by accident; it takes intentional and sustained effort. But I can say with confidence from my own experience and the experiences of others I’ve worked with that the effort is well worth it.
(—Die Empty, by Todd Henry, Nipun Mehta)
It’s a good day for that.
The birds are in their nave.
Noctem quietam et finem perfectum
concedat nobis Dominus omnipotens.
Empty me,
Find nothing
worth
saving
someone asked, are you
afraid -- I looked at them -- yes
Of course I am, yes
There is a constant undermining of the American tradition of democracy and justice.
It’s been a fragile construct based on privilege and race. But now that white America is experiencing the increase of multi-racial growth of population there is an intentional movement to slow down the vote and disadvantage those neither white nor rich from having too much say over electoral choice and candidates.
The strategy is to take control of elections and reserve power to a ruling elite benefitting from suppression of the vote.
There’s a consequent ignorance afoot.
Consequent ignorance is when we choose, for sinful reasons, to remain ignorant of things we can and ought to know. (D.Q. McInerny, A Course in Thomistic Ethics, 1997, pp. 40-42.)
The opposition to full and fair democracy is rabid and fierce. Who can blame the fear? Fear is where love goes when unable to control everything.
It is the continual decision we have to make — love or fear?
I’m not interested in fear.
I’d rather know love.
Why whisper into the night silhouette of trees at first light of matins?
Because, you might say, that is the transitional space of time where transformation takes place.
Praise, they chant praise, over and over while the rest of us sleep.
Rilke wrote, “Sie sagt für dich, ich bin.”
Someone says for you, I am.
Evelyn Underhill, considering mysticism, wondered, “I am, but who else is?”
Who else, indeed.
The earth turns.
I, alone, hear the first bird’s awakening song with glance toward east, the slow lighting its song awakens.
It’s not that we’re all alone that is significant. It’s that noticing such a thing, such haecceity — the thisness of this moment, this noticing, this one noticing, this bird having performed the introit, the opening antiphon of awareness — presumes the inquiry “who else is?” as primary quest and immediate koan of first light.
The statement and the question — I am! (and) Who else is? — becomes foundational realization and inquiry this early Sunday prayer without ceasing.
This is my body.
No one else is.
The astounding, and stark, haecceity of it!
Who, or what, is that “someone” saying for you...
I am!
If you ask what it is like with mystical spirituality, try this:
semper agens, semper quietus, colligens et non egens, portans et implens et protegens,
creans et nutriens, perficiens, quaerens, cum nihil desit tibi.
(--From the Confessions of Augustine, Book I, Chapter 4
(always working, yet ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing;
sustaining, pervading, and protecting; creating, nourishing, and developing; seeking, and yet possessing all things.
We look for what we already have.
Seldom recognizing.
Always close at hand.
Tonight Bobby Kennedy will be shot. Two months ago Martin Luther King was shot. In six months Thomas Merton will die under curious and suspect circumstances.
It is 1968. Assassinations are difficult truths. America breaks. Lives change. Skepticism deepens.
Mr. Kennedy will die early after midnight at 1:44AM on June 6.
The trauma of 1968 sits deep within the bodies of those living through the shocks and deceits of public executions and murky lies following.
But this is what it costs to be alive.
We know and do not know what takes place everyday in the world of power, politics, and pretense.
Edna st Vincent Millay wrote:
Lament
Listen, children:Your father is dead.From his old coatsI'll make you little jackets;I'll make you little trousersFrom his old pants.There'll be in his pocketsThings he used to put there,Keys and penniesCovered with tobacco;Dan shall have the penniesTo save in his bank;Anne shall have the keysTo make a pretty noise with.Life must go on,And the dead be forgotten;Life must go on,Though good men die;Anne, eat your breakfast;Dan, take your medicine;Life must go on;I forget just why.
As is
justice forgotten.
I wonder...
Why?
Reading Rohr, he says the task is not separation from evil but absorption and transformation of evil within oneself. (Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr, 2007)
It's an annoying aspect of Christian mystagogy.
Incarnational spirituality.
depression is
correct view
of current state
of world
as troubling as
depression is
the mindset
declination
is more stark
more wanting
more frightening
to behold
nevertheless
we keep on looking
and stay willing to
suffer through
We will get over
Vile points of view by cowards —
Dark clouds drop torrents
Yes
Is that your answer
No, it’s my question
What is your answer
Yes
So, your question and answer are the same
There’s a black hole 58 million light years away from our Milky Way galaxy
At foot of mountain birds chant morning praise
In both places at once
Falling into dense emptiness and birdsong
This morning practice
All this time. Off on our own. Distancing.
I’m not sure I want to near again.
The desolate woodland. The vast sea.
We move on. We are migrants. Mendicants.
There it is, again, there it is, sliding in alongside bamboo shade, morning sun.
Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self.
―
Now that it is June I have to try to remember who I was before my father and mother were born.
I recall a glass of orange juice, back stoop, chain link fences, portioned backyards.
The milk box, the clanking bottles, under bedroom window.
Backyard, DeSoto with whitewalls, sun slanting into alley from street with horse drawn vegetable wagon.
Silent ghosts pass under window walking into these words.
Do you speak with the dead?
Do you pray?
Do you despair of the living?
Hold your answer.
Think a while.
Don’t give it away blithely.
Yes
It is June
Changing
Everything
May passes
Spring has
Three weeks
Left
If you
Think about it
Your life
Is juggle ball
Somewhere in
Swoop and fell
Arc oohs & ahs
Launch & descent
Of course
I love you
Sans doute
As I drop
Bit by bit
Withdrawing
Little by little
Disappearing
Where will
Anything be
Found
Once lost
If there is
Nothing but
God, where
Is everything
Now that
It has
All gone
Away
We
Remember
Honor and
Pray for
All dead
And deadened
By
War
Injustice
Cynicism and
Ignorance
. . .
There’s no understanding trinity.
Except as some contemporary Three-In-One-Oikeó.
What is it that “houses” itself where I am?
The final three models of incarnational theology are all instances of incarnational soteriology. The first instance of this model, and the third model overall, is incarnational soteriology through the indwelling of Christ. This model is exemplified in Paul’s words to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Gal. 2:20) Christ is not enfleshed in me, Christ lives in me. There is no generation [ginomai] of flesh [sarx] when one lives by faith. Instead, by faith, Christ lives in me, Christ lives in my flesh.26 A Trinitarian understanding allows us to appreciate the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in believers in a similar way. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16) Through the Spirit, God dwells, or “houses” [oikeo] in you. Paul’s usage of temple language makes an important point in regard to incarnational theology since the Bible consistently portrays God dwelling in the temple found in Eden, in the Tabernacle, in the Temple, in the person of Jesus Christ, and in (as here) the Spirit-filled believer.27
(—from, Christ is the only incarnation: Appropriate use of incarnation language, Sean McGever, ETS Far West Region Meeting April 2018, p.6)
I have an address, wear shoes and knee brace when taking a walk, the rap-tat-tat of hiking sticks, listening to book in my ears, gaze between ground and mountains and pond beyond beaver lodge. I move through. Any place I’ve been I’m no longer there. I’m a movement of consciousness through place and space going nowhere.
A temporary house.
Housing and being housed.
Today is celebrated Trinity. Someone called it Non Sequitur Sunday.
Anything said about it really doesn’t follow. (Ya folla?) It stays where it is pronounced.
Maybe we have to MU any pronouncing.
Unsay. Unask. Neti-neti (not this-not that).
Rather, becoming a passageway, and not being in the way.
There
It is
Again
Invoker bird
Begins
Chant
Goes back
Into
Silence
And day-
Break
Beyond hill
Is no
Longer
Dark
Just so
It begins
Again
Earth
turns to
Morning
We look
Through
Three windows
Love
Us
Here
