mountains and hills

What is wanted is good theology.

"Bad theology is like pornography -- the imagination of a real relationship without the risk of one. It tends to be transactional and propositional rather than relational and mysterious."
"It dehumanizes God and turns the wonder and the messy mystery of intimate relationship into a centerfold to be used and discarded." 

(William Paul Young, in foreword to Ricard Rohr and Mike Morrell's Divine Dance, the Trinity and your transformation, c.2016)

Not the demented pornography of power and wealth pretending to be other than what they are.

The word "humanizes" attracts. To be human is to embrace the sanctity of the ordinary and participate in the clarity of emerging awareness of our true interrelational intimacy honoring one another's solitude and distinctiveness.

This is a morning prayer of early October with Thérèse, Angels, Francis, and Bruno.

Through window where two good dogs practice what we humans need to be trained into.

Please note -- weekend of 7Oct--10Oct

There will be no formal practice at the hermitage this weekend.
The meditation cabin remains available for your use.
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving from Cape Breton!

St John River, Thursday evening

A contemplative, like Bruno, in 11th century, would silently affirm this umwelt.

Outside Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada 

to "reveal" the veil

Here’s a thought, primordial wisdom has no author.

Nor any mind which has thought such wisdom.

Raimon Panikkar’s words:

We refer, first, to the traditional notion of the apauruseya or non-authorship, either humanor divine, of the Vedas. This theory is often been ridiculed as a contradiction of commonsense and as a denial of causal thinking; or it has been taken as simply holding that theVedas have no “author" who has written them and no "mind" that has thought them. Without entering into the almost endless subtleties of the Mimamsa, we can simply say that at the core of this conception there is a desire to purify our relationship with the text and to avoid any kind of idolatry. Any one of us is the author of the Vedas when we read, pray, and understand them. Nobody is the author of living words except the one who utters them. The Vedas are living words, and the word is not an instrument of Man but his supreme form of expression. What has no author, according to the apauruseya insight, is the relation between the word and its meaning or object. The relationship is not an artificial or extrinsic relation caused by somebody. There is no author to posit the type of relationship which exists between the word and its meaning. To do this we would require another relationship and so on ad infinitum. When a word ceases to be a living word, when it ceases to convey meaning, when it is not a word for me, it is not Veda, it does not convey real or saving knowledge. This conception, paradoxically enough, rescues the Vedas from the grip not only of a certain God functioning as a primal scribe, but also of the Hindu tradition, which cannot be said to be the author of the Vedas. The Vedas without an author cease to be an authoritative book. Only when you become their “author,” when through assimilation you are able to utter them, when you yourself are the proper origin, the author of the text, do the Vedas disclose their authentic "authority." 

The Vedic Revelation is not the voice of an anthropomorphic Revealer nor the unveiling of the veil that covers reality. In point of fact, the shruti * is that which is heard (rather than seen), so that the metaphor of unveiling may sometimes be misleading, because it is not by lifting up the veil (and thus seeing the naked reality) that we are going to discover the real, but by realizing that the veil covers and conceals and that the discovery of this fact constitutes the actual revelation. To reveal in this sense is not to unveil, to lift up the veil, but to “ reveal” the veil, to make us aware that what we see and all we can see is the veil, and that it is left to us to “guess”--or, as we would say, to “think"-- reality, which is made manifest precisely by the veil that covers it. We cannot separate the veil from the thing that is veiled, just as we cannot separate a word from its meaning, or what is heard from what is understood. If I were to lift up the veil of maya I would see nothing. We can see only if we see the veil of maya and recognize it for what it is. The shruti is shruti when that which is actually heard is not merely the sound but all that there is to be heard, perceived, understood, realized. Our own discovery, our process of discovery, is part of the revelation itself. Only in the spirit are the Vedas Vedas. And now we can understand why for centuries they were neither written down nor expounded to outsiders.  

(--pp.10-11, from The Vedic Experience, Hinduism’s Contemporary Holy Bible, By Raimon Panikkar) 
* (Shruti, ( Sanskrit: “What Is Heard”) in Hinduism,  cf. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Shruti)

If this is so, then what we do is think through the veil.

So many I speak with might be interested in this view.

I am.

This chilly October morning.

Francis, this, 4Oct

Yes

He was grounded

As Christ was,

Ground

In a cosmos

Mostly empty

Where being is

what is

And non-being

is what is not --

Francis walked earth

echoing old appraisal

This, this is good

(Not not-bad, but

as it is, this

is good)

Locating peace there

side by each

--pace e bene--

this variation of

("è" is, & "e" and --

the small accent that

matters)

Earth

In

Itself

(wait for it)

revealing

perfect joy

רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה

L'Shanah Tovah!

tutti gli angeli

thinking about angels is

 thinking about intimations

the suggestions wandering through

barely attentive consciousness

messages, some say, on cusp of

sunlight and shadow, calling

here I am

here I am

here I am

where are you