At Sunday Evening Practice, at table, we read:
We were sitting in front of a blazing fire when Thomas Merton again took up this theme of growing. “The main theme of time is that of inner growth. It’s a theme to which we should all return frequently in prayer. There is a great thing in my life – Christ wants me to grow. Move this around a little bit in meditation. Instead of worrying – Where am I going? What kind of resolution should I make? – I should simply let this growing unfold in my prayer. I should see what is holding me back from it. What is it? What kind of compromises have I made? Am I substituting activity for growth? (I have often asked myself, is this writing getting in the way? For me writing is so satisfying an activity that it is hard to say.) In someone else it is easier to see this process of growing and to see what hinders it. But when it comes to ourselves, all we can do is try to honestly be ourselves.
“One of the greatest obstacles to your growing is the fear of making a fool of yourself. Any real step forward implies the risk of failure. And the really important steps imply the risk of complete failure. Yet we must make them, trusting in Christ. If I take this step, everything I have done so far might go down the drain. In a situation like that we need a shot of Buddhist mentality. Then we see, down what drain? So what? (So that’s perhaps one of the valuable things about this Asian trip.) We have to have the courage to make fools of ourselves, and at the same time be awfully careful not to make fools of ourselves.
“The great temptation is to fear going it alone, wanting to be ‘with it’ at any cost. But each one of us has to be able to go it alone somehow. You don’t want to repudiate the community, but you have to go it alone at times. If the community is made up of a little group of people who always try to support one another, and nobody ever gets out of this little block, nothing happens and all growth is being stifled. This is possibly one of the greatest dangers we face in the future, because we are getting more and more to be that kind of society. We will need those who have the courage to do the opposite of everybody else. If you have this courage you will effect change. Of course they will say, ‘this guy is crazy’; but you have to do it.
(--from, Recollections of Thomas Merton’s Last Days in the West, BY BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB) http://gratefulness.org/resource/recollections-of-thomas-mertons-last-days-in-the-west/
We admit to being weird, “in the good way,” one practitioner allowed, after telling the story of deciding to remain outside the structures of the organized expressions of religious groups. We are not idiosyncratic and idiorrhythmic -- (Late Greek idiorrhythmos (from Greek idio- + rhythmos measured motion, measure) -- to be those things. We are that way because that’s the way we are. There’s no intent to be that way; we are that way.
“It’s all a matter of rethinking the identity of institutions so that everything is oriented to people. The institution must serve the development of the individual person. And once you’ve got fully developed people, they can do anything. What counts are people and their vocations, not structures and ideas. Let us make room for idiosyncrasies. The danger is that the institution becomes an end in itself. What we need are people-centered communities, not institution-centered ones. This is the direction in which renewal must move.“
Maybe new structures are not that necessary. Perhaps you already do know what you want. I believe that what we want to do is to pray. After all, why did any of us become religious if we didn’t want to pray? What do we want, if not to pray? Okay, now, pray. This is the whole doctrine of prayer in the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s all summed up in one phrase: ‘If a man wants to pray, let him go and pray.’ That is all St. Benedict feels it is necessary to say about the subject. He doesn’t’ say, let us go in and start with a little introductory prayer, etc, etc. If you want to pray, pray. (--ibid, http://gratefulness.org/resource/recollections-of-thomas-mertons-last-days-in-the-west/ )
Every piece of rye bread and kombucha green tea is eucharist by any other liturgy or hermeneutic.
On this month’s mailing from Friends of Silence, this quote:
“Being prophetic means, first and foremost, being a dangerous listener.” (--Robert J. Wicks)
Some listen clearer. These might know what prayer might be -- something without object. Something in itself seeing into itself.
The sound of a tree forming one syllable every ten years readying to recite the entire oral mythology of ground and root, leaf and seed -- a billion year recitation of a billion year excursion -- one syllable at a very very long time.
The Great Correction (by Eliza Gilkyson)
Everyone tied to the turning wheel
Everyone hiding from the things they feel
Well the truth’s so hard it just don’t seem real
The shadow across this land
People ’round here don’t know what it means
To suffer at the hands of our American dreams
They turn their backs on the grisly scenes
Traced to the privileged sons
Down through the ages lovers of the mystery
Been saying people let your love light shine
Poets and sages all throughout history
Say the light burns brightest in the darkest times
It’s the bitter end we’ve come down to
The eye of the needle that we gotta get through
But the end could be the start of something new
When the great correction comes
Down to the wire running out of time
Still got hope in this heart of mine
But the future waits on the horizon line
For our daughters and our sons
I don’t know where this train’s bound
Whole lotta people trying to turn it around
Gonna shout ’til the walls come tumbling down
And the great correction comes
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/purple-america/the-great-correction-song
Prayer knows nothing of piety.
It is goulash and lentil soups side by side on stove. Shakuhachi flute before and after zazen. White dog chasing green frisbee over snow-covered path after final circle with woman wearing hoodie. The carousel of practice onto which one steps without brass ring or ticket stub. A car leaves dooryard for Augusta.
May all beings be the way they are with acceptance and blessing after breath extinguishing candles, gone 8pm.
Gone where nothing goes when deep in prayer.
Curving rails through wooded stretch of empty tracks where faintest echo of train gone by makes no sound on star white snow.
