The film about Mike Judge,
Saint of 9/11, was made in 2006. I watched it today. The Franciscan friar, AA member, chaplain to the fire department, resource to AIDS sufferers, homeless street people's friend, gay celibate, kind and good man, the first listed casualty of 9/11.
Mind has no color,
Is neither long nor short,
Doesn't appear or disappear;
It is free from both purity and impurity;
It was never born and can never die;
It is utterly serene.
This is the form of our
Original mind,
Which is also our original body.
- Hui-hai (8th cent)
Traditional simple piety in complicated times.
Today, it seems, the root faith of Catholic Christianity goes through re-translation and reconfiguration until the concepts of early times bear some resemblance to contemporary thinking.
Or, are we still trying to imagine how elements of matter and nature are able by attentive word and recollection to become what they originally are -- the very stuff, material and spiritual, of that which we call God, Christ, Holy Spirit -- the inspiration of Oneness and Truth into Being experienced as Love?
Religious mystical reality is not for the faint-hearted, the frightened, the subservient. Rather, it is the feeling soul of innocence seen through degraded experience that longs for the wholeness it knows to be its true self. In other words, it is life keeping on with itself, moving through every experience, until it sees nothing else but the luminous very instant within which it stands completely on its own while completely embraced by a Love that cannot be grasped or explained.
Let go of your worries
and be completely clear-hearted,
like the face of a mirror
that contains no images.
If you want a clear mirror,
behold yourself
and see the shameless truth,
which the mirror reflects.
If metal can be polished
to a mirror-like finish,
what polishing might the mirror
of the heart require?
Between the mirror and the heart
is this single difference:
the heart conceals secrets,
while the mirror does not.
(--Rumi, The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XIII)
In 1945 Isidore O'Brien wrote the book
Mirror of Christ: St. Francis of Assisi.I'm sure Mychal Judge read it.
I did.
And will again.