each one, everyone — can we hear this

Puer natus est nobis

Ein Kind ist uns geboren

Un niño nos ha nacido

Un enfant nous est né,

Een kind is ons geboren

A child is born for us

since her dory-mate died

...she rows alone.

who will rid me of these meddlesome thoughts

There are these words: "His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused."

Then, these:

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

(--Christianity Today, Dec. 19, 2019 

Editorial, Trump Should Be Removed from Office,  Mark Galli is editor in chief of Christianity Today.)

It is with bemused concern I look upon the mixed reactions of Christian evangelicals to the obscene and insulting manner this man operates as role model and leader of the United States. He has become inspiration and permission giver to the racist, the angry white people, and the uncouth frenzied who would like to eliminate people of color, different nationality, and other religious persuations.

I'm lingering between an amorphous hope this will pass -- and the more likely apprehension this will ignite more violent and murderous activity.

I take only minimal consolation we are about to celebrate the invitation to emulate the incarnation of the prince of peace.

in

For me, these days, there is nothing outside itself.

Aseitas—the English equivalent is a transliteration: aseity—simply means the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, not as caused by itself, but as requiring no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such Being: that is God. And to say that God exists a se, of and by and by reason of Himself, is merely to say that God is Being Itself. Ego sum qui sum. And this means that God must enjoy “complete independence not only as regards everything outside but also as regards everything within Himself”
(—Excerpt from: "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. Scribd.
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/249309404)

In the metaphor of the Christmas narrative, the phrase is written:

“And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Luke 2:7). 

If we drop the final “n” from the final word, we read “no place for them in the in.”

“In” — or within, is where God is.

In everything. In every place. In each instant and all time. In itself.

Throughout history people look for Jesus, look for God, in the obvious outside. The obvious outside is the radiating reflection of the emerging and expanding reality which is God-Itself.

The invisible inner is the eternal dwelling place of what we call God.

THE MANIFESTATION  

Many arrivals make us live: the tree becoming
Green, a bird tipping the topmost bough,
A seed pushing itself beyond itself,
The mole making its way through darkest ground,
The worm, intrepid scholar of the soil—
Do these analogies perplex? A sky with clouds,
The motion of the moon, and waves at play,
A sea-wind pausing in a summer tree.  

What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.

(—Poem, The Manifestation, by Theodore Roethke) 

Today, they say, we come to see what is within itself.

What is

Within --

Itself.

connecting with everyone

Walking mountain

Max-manjushri looks back

a billion years, ten billion family members

returning light

First night of Hanukkah

First night of winter solstice

Returning light

Diminishing night

you are coming to be

“If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”   (-- Joseph Campbell) 

        room one, hospice house, Saturday evening 

He holds my hand for over an hour
His wife dancing love at other side of bed holds his
“I’ve never sat with someone dying,” he said
He says some scripture, he calls me pastor
He closes his eyes to rest, squeezes my hand,
At door his wife takes my hands, gives me
Her dancing eyes, full of what is silent said --
 I leave, going nowhere
                                             (—wfh)

“Division is the opposite of God” (—Greg Boyle, Homeboy Industries)

out of darkness

It is that time of Advent. It is that time of darkness pausing to allow return of light to shake itself and step into this coordinate of an infinite and indefinite cosmos.

In 1980, on a meditation retreat with a Carthusian monk and a priest from England, we were taught a mantra-ditty that began with the strains of a Tchaikovsky Vogel :

Out of darkness lead us to your light 

From illusion free us for your truth

Still our stormy mind

And calm all our striving

Present to us

With life 

Make us one

 It was a Buddhist--Christian Vipassana Liturgical intensive which culminated with an on-cushion sit from 4AM to noon with no getting up from cushion for any reason. So, reason gave up and something broke within, and time disappeared, and a piece of grapefruit like the eucharist itself was received into an uncomprehending mouth.

Today, darkness and light bow to each other, turn arm in arm, and dance through the room of vast unknowing in homage to what is arriving into an uncomprehending humanity in a perfectly balanced universe.

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!