Here and how

I thought about a craigslist purchase. But how do you establish trust with pictures and words?
The aesthetic must be sensed, felt, and seen.
There is no abstract spirituality. No theoretical intimate.
It is the near that we need.
The near and now. 

Slow walking, slow talking

Fifty years later!
What a great idea Vatican II was in 1963.
There's a wonderful Zen saying: "Better to see the face than hear the name."
I'd prefer seeing the face of Christ in the body of creation. More than exegetical ecclesial documentation, perhaps a half-century (this time) of deliberations might give way to the Christian of "now" Rahner spoke about when he called it the "future" -- “a genuine experience of God emerging from the very heart of our existence.” Rahner was saying, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all” (Theol. Invent. XX, 149).
The embarrassment, a word well chosen, is the church's attempt to own Christ rather than embodying Christ in the emergence.
Fifty years contemplation!
Let's face it!

Addendum: Lyrics from "My Fair Lady" apply here:

Show me! Show me! Don't talk of love lasting through time.Make me no undying vow. Show me now!Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme!
Don't waste my time, Show me!

(Lyrics and music by Lerner and Loewe)

Waiting to be seen through

Hermit says: I am good alone.

God says: I am "hier mit allein."

Become what God is: here, with, alone.

Solitude includes
              seeing through
                                     all...

Ecological mind

Singer wrote something to the effect that we might be moving from ethical argument to aesthetic judgment.

To feel, rather than intellectualize.

To sense, rather than compare concepts.

To be alive, not merely listed as a number.

Try love

Violence is not love.

War is violence.

Try something different.

Don't say more than asked

Maybe the world is a vale (or, veil) of tears. I don't know. At times I think that might be so.
There's some talk.

     An hour is not a house

An hour is not a house,

a life is not a house,

you do not go through them as if

they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,

four walls, a ceiling.

An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.

Some want sleep.

My eyes went

to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

         (Poem by Jane Hirshfield, Source: Poetry April 2013).

Have we? been, left, alone?

It's ok if we have.

It does account for the busyness.

The attempts to explain.

Resolving nothing; ending the illusion

How distressing -- there's no trust!
Nonviolent anarchism, peaceful auto-didacticism, caring hospitality -- these are antidotes.
Try these!

Not-yet; spoken

I'd rather be alive while alive. But, when dead, who knows? It hasn't been worded yet.

I've walked through playwright's literary Grover's Corners and heard the words of the cemetery residents about the living. (TW)
I've read the words of Harvard biblical scholar saying that "The language of a people is its fate." (AW)
I've read both of them over a forty five year period. Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder were brothers. I didn't know that until recently.

And even when Wilder bases a play (or its title anyway) on an overtly religious text, “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead”—from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer for burial at sea—he challenges conventional piety. The dead, in a clear precursor of Our Town, lose their personalities at the Last Judgment. The Empress reflects:

We still cling obstinately to our identity, as though there were something valuable in it. This very moment I feel relics of pleasure in the fact that I am myself and no one else. Yet in a moment, if there is a moment, we shall all be reduced to our quintessential matter, and you, Mr. Nissem, will be exactly indistinguishable from me. God himself will not be able to tell the Empress of Newfoundland from the Reverend Dr. Cosroe. (CP, 39) 

The souls are "panic-stricken." This does not mean that the collection as a whole denies an afterlife: the plays of Malchus and Childe Roland imply the immortality of the individual soul. Nor is the idea that the soul dissolves into the cosmos a particularly new one. Edgar Allan Poe in Eureka (1848) rhapsodizes about just such an event: “Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness—that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.”65 That is, the universe, both man and matter, is the diffused God, and God will cyclically reunite in one supreme consciousness.  

     Nevertheless, it is a painful idea for many.Tennyson is horrified in In Memoriam to think that his dear friend A. H. H. might be swallowed up in some oversoul: “Remerging in the general Soul / Is faith as vague as all unsweet” (Section 47). And the great Catholic existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, whose work Wilder knew, dismissed the entire idea: “All this talk of a man surviving in his children, or in his works, or in the universal consciousness, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who suffer from affective stupidity, and who, for the rest, may be persons of cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile.”66 “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead” may well provoke religious meditation, but it is not of a comforting sort. Of course, if the world is only material, then the ego is extinguished in death. But this playlet suggests that even if the world is not reducible to the material, the ego may still be extinguished  

(--pp.25-26 Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder, Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America, by Christopher J. Wheatley, University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, IN.)   http://www3.undpress.nd.edu/excerpts/P01489-ex.pdf

Heidegger said that language is the house of being. Words, then, might form rooms, phrases sketch horizons of dwelling possibilities for our future

Let's put this in context. I am listening to the 9/11 WTC Debate: collapse by fire or explosive controlled demolition?

"On Sunday afternoon, March 6th, [2011] at the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado, Colorado 9/11 Visibility hosted a debate between Richard Gage, AIA (American Institute of Architects), and Chris Mohr, Denver investigative journalist and nondenominational minister.  This is the audo of that historic debate."http://visibility911.libsyn.com/9-11-wtc-debate-collapse-by-fire-or-explosive-controlled-demolition

 It is intelligent and cogent.

The most significant change in world political landscape is also a religious iconography of shifting belief and doubt. It  remains troubling and definitive for the advance of terrorism into the household of being. Some say the United States is becoming the most surveilled, imprisoned, as well as the largest exporter of mercenaries to the world. Warfare, black-ops, assassinations, and coups are ready weapons of this fearful mindset. It is a difficult evolution to understand.

While the questions from 2001 will still be there to be looked at for generations to come, the fright is concealed caprice. The mood of terror permeates corridors of institutions from school to bank, government to train station. Every communication is under surveillance. (Will we find a way to make the dead suspects too?) Is Grover's Corners a dangerous group to be infiltrated? Anyone can be assassinated by a vigilant patriot. No one is beyond suspicion. That's the fear. It is being legislated.

It is about our town. One day in one life -- choose that -- and Emily chooses her birthday. She wonders if anybody ever appreciates their life while they are alive. It passes so swiftly. Each moment, experienced fully, would collapse us, so it seems.

A man we know phoned from prison this morning. He wondered about and wished to prove wrong the statement: "This present moment is all there is." The mistake, (if you could call it that), I told him he was making was Cartesian. By thinking that the sentence suggests that the present moment is separated from "all that is" would be something to diminish its import. But if you see the sentence as suggesting that "all that is" impregnates this present moment with itself, then there is no separation, never could be. It is all here. Everyone is. Each event as well. Hence, to experience fully the present moment fully without trying to grasp, enclose, isolate, push away, or comprehend all that is there, is to see one's way through without collapse or devastation.

"We are poor passing facts" wrote Robert Lowell.

Longing for our living name.

Not yet spoken.

Is this why the One-we-call-God has no name?

Yet? And yet, and yet, and yet.