John, looking over glasses, said final words at Thursday Evening Conversation. He said, "I see God through other people."
As will happen, his sentence transformed itself with a comma.
"I see God through, other people."
No one, it is said, has ever seen God. That's because God is not there to be seen. God is there to be seen through.
Seeing through God is abandoning viewing the world with a point of view that is other than what is being viewed through.
Seeing God through. Not possessing God. Not seeing God. Not even knowing God. But seeing God through.
And when we do see God through, only then do we, can we, see other people. Not our intention or will for other people. Not our image in other people. Not even some hierarchic or hieratic othering of people. But seeing God through, other people.
This, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, is not about seeing God. It is about seeing what God sees through and through.
Common, (comma), life itself!
Thursday, May 08, 2003
Before black flies, mosquitoes, flowers, and tourists, we travel to Cape Breton.
Rounding Cape Smokey from Sonny and Kay's place on north Cabot Trail, Ingonish stretches out into North Atlantic, lobster traps stacked on wharf for this week's season start. Bleak and warm, sparse and friendly solitude, hiking land above sea before night's blowy storm crosses from Cheticamp.
My hut settled among neighbors,
I ignore the noise of horses and carts.
You ask how I get along;
My mind remains wide,
So my place is naturally remote.
- Tao Yuan Ming (365 – 427)
Away these days. Back.
The naturally remote exhausts.
Moose scat underfoot.
Word’s land.
Rounding Cape Smokey from Sonny and Kay's place on north Cabot Trail, Ingonish stretches out into North Atlantic, lobster traps stacked on wharf for this week's season start. Bleak and warm, sparse and friendly solitude, hiking land above sea before night's blowy storm crosses from Cheticamp.
My hut settled among neighbors,
I ignore the noise of horses and carts.
You ask how I get along;
My mind remains wide,
So my place is naturally remote.
- Tao Yuan Ming (365 – 427)
Away these days. Back.
The naturally remote exhausts.
Moose scat underfoot.
Word’s land.
Sunday, May 04, 2003
Concresence is a growing together.
Perfection is making do with what moves through.
No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. (1John 4:12)
Not at any time.
...its own being for it
is infinite, inapprehensible,
unintrospective, pure, like its outgazing.
Where we see future, it sees Everything
itself in Everything, forever healed.
(- Rilke, in Eighth Duino Elegy)
What about now?
Perfection is making do with what moves through.
No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. (1John 4:12)
Not at any time.
...its own being for it
is infinite, inapprehensible,
unintrospective, pure, like its outgazing.
Where we see future, it sees Everything
itself in Everything, forever healed.
(- Rilke, in Eighth Duino Elegy)
What about now?
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