What is itself before God? Ha!

 What is your original face, show it to me, the one you had before your mother and father were born?

Meister Eckhart said, “God is a great underground river than no one can dam up and no one can stop." God is a great underground river, and there are many wells into that river. There's a Taoist well, a Buddhist well, a Jewish well, a Muslim well, a Christian well, a Goddess well, the Native wells—many wells that humans have dug to get into that river, but friends, there s only one river: the living waters of wisdom. All of us have to go down a well today; we all have to do spiritual practice to find divinity. But whether your well be Buddhist or Christian or Sufi or Jewish, when you do your work you will come to the same source of wisdom. Dr. Thurman said, “A strange necessity has been laid upon me, to devote my life to the central concern that transcends the walls that divide. Human life is one, and all people are members one of another. And this insight is spiritual, and it is a hard core of religious experience.” ...God is totally biased in favor of diversity. We better get into that stream, because the ethnic divisions, the racial divisions, the sexual divisions, the sexual preference divisions, the class divisions are eating up the human soul and literally eating up this planet. Howard Thurman says, “ It is my belief that in the presence of God there is neither male nor female, White nor Black, Gentile nor Jew, Protestant nor Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist nor Muslim, but a human spirit stripped to the literal substance of itself before God." That is our basic identity, who we are before God. And he predicts that some day our species will discover this very same truth. He says, "Community cannot feed for long on itself. It can only flourish where always the boundaries are giving way to the coming of others from beyond them, unknown and undiscovered brothers and sisters." Community itself is not an enclave, it’s not a defense, it's not a castle with moats and thick walls of dogma and differentiation, and segregation. True community melts the walls, because true community warms the heart, and the heart's first effect is melting. When the heart learns to love, the first gift is melting.  

(--from p.24, In Honor of Dr. Howard Thurman by Matthew Fox,1997, Creation Spirituality) http://creationspiritualitymag.org/wp-content/uploads/1997/02/vol-13-howard-thurman.pdf

Sit. Have a think.

May I have this one with you?

A morning's meander.

God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere.  (--Thomas Merton (1915-1968), New Seeds of Contemplation)

Then, referencing from whence the words appeared:

Jason Gardner (@Gardnerblurb) tweeted at 3:44pm - 26 Nov 13: 
'God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of himself' mind and heart blown! Thanks Thomas Merton (https://twitter.com/Gardnerblurb/status/405437021004390402) 
...
Marcus Honeysett (@marcushoneysett) tweeted at 4:23pm - 26 Nov 13: 
@Gardnerblurb our joy is not that of having woken from a pleasant dream but awoken to the fact that we are a dream. & real reality is ahead (https://twitter.com/marcushoneysett/status/405446662174146560) 

 I am made of words. 

Speak me, or hold me silently. 

Either way, we dance.

From here to nowhere.

graced dance

We love reading fiction.

It could be said that one of the ways we learn about (what-we-call) ourselves is by "reading" the fictional narratives presented by others about ourselves.

What I mean by fiction is that the story told is told about "something" not there.

My "self" is not mine, not contained in the form of this body, nor is it

separate from you and you and you.

By learning how to read we similarly learn how to deconstruct what is being read. By hearing clearly the narrative we learn about transcending the data and moving into the place between what is considered self and what is considered other. This between space, this middle ground, is what is interesting.

Interesting, inter-esse, to be between. 

It is in this between space that the dance dances itself.

What we have called God is the graced dance of life turning and moving as living being.

This is love with itself without exclusion.

We are outsiders.

No system, no mechanism, no technology encloses us without our complicit involvement.

As outsiders we drift in and through and with the one we call God in formless poetry of movement.

We are what happens in the empty reflective place between two mirrors.

We are the door that closes nothing in and holds nothing out. The door itself. Opening and closing as itself.

Fiction is not not true; it is true only as itself.

Woman working all through night; as we all are, in a sense, in essence

Everything

That is

Is

Living 

Being.

Evening practice

Low-lit solitude.

Bell rings to begin.

No end.

Living beings -- a new trinity

A trinity to consider:

 Gaston Bachelard, the late twentieth century French philosopher, comments on what happens when cosmos and psyche reconnect. In the Poetics of Space he talks of the holy trinity of Immensity, Intensity and Intimacy. When you have an experience of Immensity—in Thomas’ words, an experience of the cosmos, or relationship to it, it is an intense experience. All awe is both an intense and intimate experience. Humans cannot separate the immense, intense and intimate experience and Thomas Berry by leading us into a cosmic awareness again, an awareness as important for our hearts as for our minds, is bathing us anew in Immensity, Intensity and Intimacy far beyond any mere anthropocentric relationship could ever do for us.   

Bachelard declares that “grandeur progresses in the world in proportion to the deepening of intimacy…a primal value.” We have to take back immensity as a primal intimate value where “we are no longer shut up in the weight of the prison of our own beings.” The new cosmology helps us to do this and so do solitude and meditation. I honor Thomas and Aquinas and others who are helping us to name the vastness of our souls. Ernest Holmes put it this way: “Spirituality is a word that is often misused.” (He said this 100 years ago!) “From our viewpoint, spirituality is one’s recognition of the universe as a living presence of the good, truth, beauty, peace, power and love.” Holmes recognizes that spirituality is not spirituality if it is psychologized—if it is not about the universe. Holmes was right and Thomas Berry is right. 

(--from, Some Thoughts on Thomas Berry’s Contributions to the Western Spiritual Tradition, by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox) https://www.wisdomuniversity.org/Thomas-Berry.html 

A student in a posting called it “living being.” This might be a new name to umbrella cosmic being, plant being, animal being, human being, and divine being. 

The person you are becoming

Going back through time we meet ourselves before we become who we are going back in time.

What do you say to yourself?

Watch out, you say. You are becoming the person who will ask you what you will say to yourself before realizing you are the answer to the question.

When this happens, see yourself at that moment as the person you are becoming.

How long we wait

All silence, sound, stone, fire, awareness, inter-nexus, journeying...

Day watches the work of God.

Which is inter-nexing, which is the core-center-betweening.

Is the work of God finding ground where each is all and all is each at one?

Does the watching of this work engender the creation of place, both solitary and communal, for stillness and swirling engagement of core center between one and all?

Watching-with, the work of God!

Just walking in drizzle following snow

Farmington-Wilton morning walk.

Time to track down grippers.

Although, dogs don't mind my not having  better traction.

The path is fine as it is.

Humans!

Creative Energy in a proleptic realm of anticipation

In the middle of night.

Hear words as we begin to try to translate the New Testament in more Hebraic terms:          

   In the beginning was the DABHAR the Creative Energy:            The Creative Energy was with God            And the Creative Energy was God.            It was with God in the beginning.            Through it all things came to be,            Not one thing had its being but through it,            All that came to be had life in it            And that life was the light of persons,            A light that shines in the dark,            A light that darkness could not overpower…            The DABHAR, the Creative Energy was the true light            That enlightens all people;            And it was coming into the world.            It was in the world            That had its being through it,            And the world did not know it…            But to all who did accept it            It gave power to become children of God…            The Creative Energy was made flesh,            It pitched its tent among us,            And we saw its glory,            the glory that is its as the only Child of the Creator,            full of grace and full of truth.  

Creation itself is a sacrament.  Creation itself is the primary sacrament. 

(--from, DABHAR and the ISNESS of GOD, blog of pastor dawn, 21st Century Progressive Christian Pastor) http://pastordawn.com/2012/06/12/dabhar-and-the-isness-of-god/ 

(cf. John 1:1)

In the middle of night I hear your name.

Thus all of creation contains the living wisdom and word of God, and all of it is for all of us. The human word is only one among billions of words that God has spoken and that therefore emanate from the divine splendor. To make contact with wisdom is to go beyond human words, which have, after all, existed for only about four million years -- and have appeared on paper for only a few thousand years and in print for only five hundred. We are invited to return to the many billions of years of ongoing creation that also constitute god’s talking. 

What happens when when we let go of a chauvinistic control of words, which means exclusively the human word, and return to Dabhar as the creative energy of God? According to [Gerhard] Von Rad, truth happens; and affection happens; and God happens. For “creation not only exists, it also discharges truth.” 

(p.37, in Original Blessing, A Primer in Creation Spirituality, by Matthew Fox, c.1983)

And that name is night itself.

At dawn, it is dawn itself.

And you, friend, when you appear, that name is your name. 

Unhollowed heart; following Dabhar

Here is, remarkably, hopeless.

No need for hope here.

Abandon hope, the poet says, all ye who enter here.

Not an admonishment; rather, wise directive reminder.

Here is its own present.

The playwright reminds us to remember to leave the wall. An ambiguous, and invitatory, koan.

Are you expecting?

There is no outside.

This is the intimation of the new liturgical consciousness.

Everything is within everything else.

It has been a long, long pregnancy.

Advent, 2013

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

(--from poem, Mending Wall, by Robert Frost) 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173530