Today at Meetingbrook

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

tierce aporia

Listen to chant — such

Quiet panegyric — tells

of no uncertain

leaning spire of tacked cross

Does it matter whether there is God? Whether a theological construct based on scripture and tradition, or an astrophysical emergence from the intellectual intuition of interested minds?

I look out through glass doors of wohnkuche at yew bush, jewell weed, and hibiscus tree. Two sets of rubber books hang askew from leaning spire of tacked cross spouting moss in dooryard slope bottom of mountain as rain begins flecking leaves and petals.

And so, there is earth.

There are planets. There are stars. Galaxies. Dimensions. The unknown.

How important is it that there be an intelligent intentional interpreter creating reality for all sentient and inanimate beings in the universe?

We brought home some Italiano bagels from the Bagel Cafe yesterday. And there's fresh coffee.

Thunder rolls in from the Bay and rain falls down mountainside. Darkness at late morning.

What is life like without the thought of God? Without threat of punishment in hell? Without the frantic or fanciful preaching of pastors, priests, mullahs, and rabbis about our deviant natures and need to belong to their congregations?

Rain on embedded stones where car and truck prattle forward to parking spots outside barn complaining about dirt on their floor mats and scratches along sides.

I have always loved the God beyond the officials of institutions claiming to own God.

The God approached by poetry and mysticism, speculative theology and phenomenological philosophy.

In the eyes of those saying goodbye.

In the hearts of those hurting and uncertain.

God help us all!

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

turn around

There is no God, not

there. Here is where God shows up

from middle of us

a different theological tradition here

After lovely colloquy with Jack, an Episcopal priest, this interview from The Christian Century comes across my desk. It is an interview with theologian David Bentley Hart, by CC contributing editor Ross Allen.

An excerpt:

I think for most Christians this will sound radical, but you’re suggesting that the end result of grace is that we, ourselves, become one—truly unified—with God.

Yes, and again, this is directly from Maximus the Confessor and Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa and the book of Acts: “In him we live and move and have our being.” Maximus says the whole purpose of creation is the calling forth of creatures from nothingness to enter into the infinity of God directly and to be perfectly united in the Logos in Christ.
As the patristic formula put it, God became man so that man might become God. To say “become” is a bit misleading, though. Every little Logos of everything is itself a modality of the divine presence already. We don’t have to mollify the shockingness of that language—for patristic and medieval theologians it’s simply obvious.
You go so far, in the book, as to suggest that we “become uncreated.” Readers familiar with radical theology might hear this and think you’re talking about a kind of ego death, destruction of the self as it is collapsed into the apophatic ultimate. But you’re drawing on a different theological tradition here.
I am. Becoming uncreated is not the same as becoming nothing. God, recall, is uncreated, and he’s hardly nothing. Uncreation is not the destruction of personality but the fulfillment of personality in each of us—in our becoming utterly transparent to the Logos that’s the ground of our own personalities already. It’s theosis: it’s to become God with a capital G.
Paul teaches this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now seeing only is in a glass darkly but then . . . face to face.” Remember that in the ancient world, looking directly into the face of another is not a privilege you enjoy with your superior. If he reaches down and lifts you by the chin and raises your face to his, this is an act of extraordinary grace. Paul is talking about a state of union between equals.
(—What we think we know about God, by Ross M. Allen in the September 2023 issue The Christian Century). “Anyone who thinks he knows the orthodox consensus can always be shown to be wrong,” says David Bentley Hart.

Theological thought becomes more interesting than a lot of other formulations about the difficult to explain.

Good company, this.

this bright awareness

I'm glad to know people who travel, go sailing, climb mountains, attend festivals and parades, sign up for workshops, stand in crowds when candidates speak and make promises. They do it for me. I look out window at retired tea kettles hanging from iron wind vane listening to the audiobook The Barn at the End of the World: The Apprenticeship of a Quaker, Buddhist Shepherd by Mary Rose O'Reilley.

Then there is Hung Chih Cheng Chueh:

Silently and serenely, one forgets all words,
Clearly and vividly, it appears before you.
When one realizes it, time has no limits.
When experienced, your surroundings come to life.
Singularly illuminating is this bright awareness,
Full of wonder is the pure illumination.
--Hung Chih Cheng Chueh (1092-1157). (dialyzen)

O'Reilley is saying that in Plum Village, in the meditation community, there is no place to hide. I know she means this as an always being out there in practice and job duties, saying what you mean, meaning what you say. But I hear it in an additional way.

That "no place" is a good place to hide.

Where is no place?

No place is where no self occupies. It is where everything is itself and nothing other.

Nothing other is an invisibility of sorts wherein one becomes one and completely with what is there.

Being with what is there is the elimination of the illusion of separate self and the realization of an isomorphic resonance, an unwelt, with the surrounding environment.

This is not, in the language of psychology and sociology, a fitting in, as though our mental health depends on our ability to navigate the patterns and demands of interactive societal necessities.

Rather, it is a disappearing into the core of care, a presencing of presence, an embodying of the dwelling-place of the Alone, accompanied by an awareness of being able to step aside to make room for Another.

A being-there of there-being, a being-with, an action of inaction, effortless activity surrounding the uncontainable openness of inner wholeness.

The cat and the dog face toward the Waterford wood stove. The other cat sniffs the footrest of the light blue recliner.

Haiku

(ex nihilo)

It is a wonder
there is anything at all
with one noticing

Monday, August 28, 2023

humani nihil a me alienum puto

Augustine is ripped over the doctrine of original sin.

I’m wondering if we’ve gotten it wrong.

“Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto”.
It means: “I am human: I consider nothing human is alien to me”. The quote expresses the fundamental unity of humankind. It is probably not a coincidence that the quote is from Heauton Timorumenos, a play by Publius Terentius Afer, who was a North-African (Amazigh) immigrant to Rome. He was a cosmopolitan who was familiar with Amazigh (North-African), Carthaginian (Phoenician), Latin and Greek cultures. Today, we would say that he hails from a “multicultural” background. (Quora)

We are born into not-yet humanity.

This not-yet human is prelude to becoming human.

Some have called that not-yetness sin. As if some failing has taken place.

Not so.

We are enroute to becoming human.

We’re not yet there.

We trust, some day, we will be.

The fully human is sin no more.

Jesus, it is said, became human.

And so might we.

Sunday, August 27, 2023

ride the possibilities

Between us.

What is taking place between us. . .

You can only see what you know unless you are willing to look with another’s eyes, rub your tusk or horn against another’s to communicate the Imaginary. How queer, to be unseeable until typification evolves to include one of your subject positions. My bone could sense other males before I was caged by words, even when I couldn’t imagine it. Sometimes when you look you can only see what others and acceptable as scenery.

It’s this accepting other’s names and words for you that fence in, domesticate, and delineate the Imaginary. It’s what drives near threatened species to extinction’s edge. When we can’t see ourselves is when we’ve completely disappeared.

For me, writing poems is a way of breaking that cage, a way to have the unicorn become the narwhal become the speaker become the writer become the reader all at once. It is a resistance to colonial forms of Imaginary takeover—a rebuke of having my dream space occupied by measures that insure that what the United States calls a chair is a chair Sometimes a chair is a kursi, a pirha, a golposh, a saddle, a chariot. I want to ride the possibilities of what a chair can be into the darkest shadow of Lemuria, or across the galaxies.
(--from, Unicorns, Narwhals, and Poets, by Rajiv Mohabir)

When does nothing become something? When does something become nothing?

What is between something and nothing. . .

Let's consider it possible that what is between us is what is real and only to the extent we step into and inhabit that between, that middle space, do we begin to become real, do we begin to move from not-yet human to human (anthropos). ((ἄνθρωπος) is Greek for human.)

It is more than possible that those who designate their fellow creatures as "only human" or as human are, in fact, not-yet human, or, on the way to becoming human.

It is also more than possible that the historical misunderstanding of the one called Jesus the Christ is due to the misunderstanding of what it means to become human.

What does it mean to completely disappear?

To step out of ourself into the empty space between you and another?

That place wherein a completely new being is formulated, an interrelational place one might call engaged, nuptial, human?

Go ahead, ride the possibilities.

What can we be. . .

together?