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.

transformation and continuation.

Saturday Morning Practice.

With Thay's teaching, Is There Life After Death?

He says: no birth, no death. Only transformation and continuation.

When was it ever simpler?

remembering a sad day

St. Cecilia,

John Fitzgerald,

the 22nd of November.

The music.

The heartbreak.

We don’t ever condone assassinations by a country of someone over disagreement.

With appreciation for Gounod and his Mass of St. Cecilia.

seriatim

I redound to all mr. djt’s tweets with: I disparage this characterization.

they did not know, nor do they

Who wrote this back then about these current days?

31 Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them, “We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. 32 He will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him and spit on him; 33 they will flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again.”
34 The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.—Luke18

Nobody understands then is now. 

way of being here

Everyone longs for kindness and compassion.

We do not have that in the American president.

Nor in his unthinking defenders.

Here’s my ask — will you please choose kindness and compassion? And a person who embodies truthfulness?

Let’s choose to be wholehearted.

Let’s choose to be free of false saviors and arrogant poseurs.

And be true to our truest way of being here.

where has it hidden

all that is

We are not yet thinking, Heidegger said.

To think is the attempt to see things whole.

Not to think is to fragment and separate into unrelated pieces.

Eichmann did not think, Arendt said.

Life is vital, moving, progressing.

Evil is moribund, stagnant, regressive.

The banality of evil is permitted by nobodies, Arendt asserts.

Not to completely feel is thinking, E.E. Cummings wrote.

Authentic thinking is thinking/feeling.

Authentic feeling is feeling/thinking.

What do you, think?

What do you, feel?

We do what we are.

What are you, thinking?

What are you, feeling?

Denken ist danken— said Heidegger — to think is to thank.

Is gratitude connected to thoughtfulness?

Don’t be deceived — be with what is revealing itself — looking into, asking “what is this?” — risking one’s life to preserve and protect one another’s life.

What then is evil?

Evil is incomplete, unfeeling, thoughtlessness.

And good?

See for yourself.

And your self is all that is.

no elsewhere

Try this:

Transform

Transcend

Include

Continue.

Like the cosmos itself, this process mirrors the life of every created atom and molecule.

So too the human journey.

Samsara

Samadhi

Shunyata

Anicca.

We are what we have tried to believe was elsewhere.

It is not.

There is no elsewhere.

Fall and rise.

Die and grow.

Listen and be still.