It is the intention to live aware of the movement of God through the distortions, distractions, and diversions which occur to the contemplative in the midst of the matrix seething with seeming and dissimilation. That intention is the heart of the spiritual life.
That intention is what some have called 'faith' without knowing that their term 'faith' might not be faith at all, but control in costume and disguise.
There is only uncertainty. That's where faith resides undetected by policy, police, and authority in any guise.
Evening mountains veiled in somber mist,
One path entering the wooded hill:
The monk has gone off, locking his pine door.
From a bamboo pipe a lonely trickle of water flows.
- Ishikawa Jozan (1583-1672)
In the Benedictine tradition seven times a day there is a stopping to remember the intention to live in God even through chaos and even though creeds and critics say, "No, not here, somewhere else, look there, wherever that is."
As I ponder Merwin, a collaborating student sends me Eliot:
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
Not a moment too soon.
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
(--from poem, East Coker, by T.S. Eliot)
New and shocking valuation. Every moment. We refuse God when we try to sit God in some place we can explain.
TERM
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do
(Poem by W.S. Merwin)
I remember poet Richard Hugo's valediction: "Take my word, it's been fun."
He never said which word. But we took it, whichever it was.
And are grateful for it.
Poetry, like our life, is...in a word, periphrastic.
(Dictionary: ORIGIN early 19th cent.: from Greek periphrastikos, from periphrazein ‘declare in a roundabout way.’)
Do you think?
