Let’s call this Invocation -- A Beginning Silence

There are some who say that our true language is SILENCE, that the language of God is SILENCE, a SILENCE that is intimate, compassionate, and deeply relational.

So I invite us — for 20 seconds — into SILENCE, into a conversation in the language of silence.

      

...   ...   ...

[Thank you]

The poet e.e.cummings (1894-1962) in his i: six non lectures said the following:

Better worlds (I suggest) are born,
not made; and their birthdays are 
the birthdays of individuals. Let us 
pray always for individuals; never
for worlds. 

(—e.e.cummings, in i & their son, NONLECTURE TWO, from i: six nonlectures, Harvard University Press, 1953. the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in poetry, delivered 1952)

As we call ourselves out into presence this afternoon, calling ourselves into this celebration, let’s 

keep in mind our earlier conversation and remember one thing, without a doubt, we share today, in

this place, and everyplace we find ourselves — the extraordinary realization — that we’ve been born 

— that we are here — that this day in ways we can hardly imagine — is our birthday — that each day 

is our first day — our beginning day.                

And so, here’s a prayer for today:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!          HAPPY BIRTHDAY!              HAPPY BIRTHDAY!  

...
(--for University College at Rockland, 7May2016)

all that has grown

Yesterday was the feast of the Ascension.

It follows the tumultuous events of Holy Week, Easter, and forty days wandering in and out of recognition.

                                               "All That Has Grown"

After the storm
And the lightning fires
And the last bird
Has flown from the wire
After the rain
The wind dries us cold
After the storm
Just you and me growing old

After the storm
And the skies are blue
After everything
We put each other through
The dust and the mud
Have become stone
After the storm
Just you and me on our own

Our choices and our words
Like that bird have flown
After the storm
Look at all that has grown

(--song by Ben Harper)

Today is the first day of who-was-it entering what we call heaven. It becomes a time of who’s on first, I don’t know what’s on second.

Gone to heaven?

We don’t know what nor where heaven is.

Nor do we know who nor what Jesus was. Appearance, phenomena, and revision all make for iffy understanding.

Something has disappeared from sight.

Become bread.

Rising.

nowhere

 Between two other nowheres...

Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego -- summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s — is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls — and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them — does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.

(--from The Life of the Mind, by Hannah Arendt)                                    https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/12/02/hannah-arendt-the-life-of-the-mind-time-thinking/ 

...There’s really nothing to being finite. 

Tuesday morning with Chase’s Daily muffin

RE: Learning is relational

COLLAPSE

"Even without speaking, we share so much on our bodies and on our faces. If we are open minded and trusting, there is so much to offer and to receive."(MK)

...

This morning at Belfast Harbor I listened to a Philosophy Bites podcast titled "Katherine Morris on Merleau-Ponty on the Body." Your reference to 'body' sent me to an article titled "Merleau-Ponty and the Bodily Subject of Learning" by Maria Talero.

Here's the abstract of the article:

ABSTRACT: In the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, learning is not a paradox, as suggested by Plato’s Meno, but the fundamental form of experience. To experience is precisely to be permeable and open to being reshaped by one’s experiences. I explore the reconceptualization of the human subject within Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that allows us to understand how the body-subject can be a learning subject. Fundamentally this involves consideration of the nature of habit, and the way in which habit simultaneously locks us into a repressive attachment to a specific past and opens us up to the possibilities of meaningful engagement with the world. Through an analysis of the temporality of habit, I conclude that understanding habit as the fundamental launching-place of learning also allows us to see how essential learning is to the experience of human freedom. 

 https://www.academia.edu/1147474/Merleau-ponty_and_the_bodily_subject_of_learning

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908—1961) suggests the body has its own intelligence that we often overlook.

I agree with you that "If we are open minded and trusting, there is so much to offer and to receive." There is so much to learn. 

In another article, there are these words:

Embodied Consciousness

According to Merleau-Ponty, there is no hard separation between bodily conduct and intelligent conduct; rather, there is a unity of behavior that expresses the intentionality and hence the meaning of this conduct. In habits, the body adapts to the intended meaning, thus giving itself a form of embodied consciousness. Indeed, for our author, corporeal existence constitutes a third category that unifies and transcends the physiological and psychological (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012; see also Merleau-Ponty, 1964).

For this reason, Gallagher and Zahavi hold that the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty incorporates the body as “a constitutive or transcendental principle, precisely because it is involved in the very possibility of experience” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008). From the perspective of cognitive science, they propose that “the notion of an embodied mind or a minded body, is meant to replace the ordinary notions of mind and body, both of which are derivations and abstractions” (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).

(--from, Habit and embodiment in Merleau-Ponty, by Patricia Moya, Philosophy Department, Universidad de los Andes, Santiago, Chile) http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00542/full

--bh

first sight, then insight, finally -- whole sight

Let’s look at this differently.

What if Christ is what Jesus says Christ is? Coequal feeling presence.

Strolling friendship wherein you and the friend are not two.

The one you think about, the friend, is what you are ... thinking.

What you feel for is what you are ... feeling.

Religion has never been about belief. It is only about realizing the true nature of your existence.

Faith has never been about being born again or accepting Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior. It is only about trusting the origin of reality to be good and true and ever-present.

If you separate anything from anything else you separate God from everything. This is why the holy person sees God in humanity and humanity in God. Cosmos in plant and animal life and life-itself in the vast universe.

Hence, Jesus is true God and true Man.

You, as well.

Earth too -- truly itself.

Isomorphic coequality dependent co-origination perichoresis circumincessional interpenetration.

Or, as my mother would say, "in other words" -- finally -- whole sight.

Fr Daniel Berrigan S.J. (May 9, 1921 – April 30, 2016)

In the wind

He won’t be missed.
Poet, prophet, philosopher of burnt draft records,
dented metal, and scorched oppressive scraps
and screeds of injustice.
He was annoying and he turned to and loved
annoying mystical simple liturgy.
He was an ex-con, wore handcuffs, did time, thought about God,
wrote about smelly fish and sour milk and failed promises
and those who let us down.
Nah, we can do without his kind.
Maybe not well, but we’ll adjust. No more attempting
to tell us what scripture really says. No more trying to tell us
with poetry what only poetry can divulge.
We won’t miss him.
We won’t.
Not me.
I’ll even forget I walked beside him
in Norristown PA. Ash Wednesday
in nineteen eighty one outside Court building.
Him carrying ashes in metal top of garbage can
Blowing away, uncontainable
Thirty five years later.