love is the question

1.

Question God.

No, really — I think that’s God’s name.

“Question” is the first name.

“God” is the family name.

When we question god we acknowledge a reality beyond ordinary understanding.

2.

Here’s a theory about everything:

All there is, is love.

That’s it. Love is “all there is.”

3.

The question of existence is

the question of love:

“Who am I?” “What is this?”

4.

I believe in nothing but the question

This is who I am

Love everyone ...

You can

love in this disturbing time.

When is one and one not two?

But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence.  

(-- from Disputed Questions, by Thomas Merton)

When we realize our fully integrated human reality in this existence.

One and one becomes the description and definition of love in this disturbing time.

yes you were

Where were you? The Lord God asked Job. Where were you when I created the world and everything in it?

Job was silent.

The Lord God waited. Waits. Still waits.

When, the Lord God wonders, will Job come to the koan response?

When will Job realize and respond —- I was there.

I was there.

At which point the Lord God will stare at Job, then, suddenly, soften, lighten gaze, and say — Yes!

Yes you were!

Yes you are!

let it be yours

A saint is someone with no opinion separating them from seeing, hearing, touching, scenting, or tasting the permeating yet beyond-detectable reality of God in the presence of another and others wherever and however they appear within immediate experience.

And engaging with care.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day.

Let it be yours!

dark indictment

Chris Hedges, talking in Waterloo, Ontario, sends me to Engels.

— 1 — What is Communism? 

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. 

— 2 —
What is the proletariat?
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.^[1] 

— 3 —
Proletarians, then, have not always existed?
No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions. 

(— by Frederick Engels, from The Principles of Communism,) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Elsewhere from a review in The Washington Post, the following:

A relentlessly dark indictment of global capitalism
     By Thomas Carothers, September 14 

Thomas Carothers is senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Building on several previous books presenting damning critiques of American society, in “America: The Farewell Tour,” Chris Hedges lays out his full manifesto: a comprehensive account of what he believes to be the devastating effects of capitalism on the United States and in fact the entire world. The book stands more vividly as a window into one of the renewed tribes of American politics in the Trump years than as a persuasive, cogent argument based on careful deployment of evidence and analysis. 

The tribe in question is the anti-capitalist left, enjoying something of a moment these days in response to the political gains of the populist right. Its main tenets are the same as in the last heyday of this outlook, the 1960s and 1970s, updated to match today’s socioeconomic and political conditions. Central among these is the argument that capitalism is an inherently destructive force that rots and ruins every arena of American life. 

The corporate state that presides over this destructive capitalist economic system is ruthless and relentless. “It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as forms of social control while it cannibalizes the nation and the globe for profits.”   

This scourge is all-consuming. Once-liberal institutions, including “the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” have all “collapsed under sustained assault during the past forty years of corporate power.” Today, there are “no institutions left in America that can authentically be called democratic.” 

It is terminal. “Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two.” 

And it is worldwide. “The malaise that infects Americans is global.” Global capitalism is responsible for all misery and the metastasizing of violent rage from many different sides, from jihadists and neofascists to far-right militias and antifa. 

Hedges portrays this nightmarish situation as the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s prediction of the eventual end of capitalism. This vision of capitalism’s demise is slightly puzzling, given that in his account, capitalism seems to be steamrollering everything in its path. 

But he argues that all this winning is only serving to make clear capitalism’s fundamental hollowness and deceit, which represent the seeds of its ultimate destruction. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-relentlessly-dark-indictment-of-global-capitalism/2018/09/13/ab8cbe98-ac84-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html?nid&utm_term=.cefc0f23e59e

What is the tipping point for us? 

What is the unpredictable thing that will push the America’s people over the edge? 

What event will find the elite, the politicians, and the generals, finally, to walk away and allow what next must happen to, indeed, happen. 

Here is hedges’ talk:  The Collapse of the American Empire. It was held at Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2, Waterloo, Canada

https://youtu.be/csI8JLJ15Ak

Stark and sobering.

Not unlike death and poetry. 

and weep

America’s president sends military to southern border to stop poor migrants from crossing into this country.

The prophetic tradition implores us to welcome the stranger and show compassion to those needing help avoiding harm and danger.

Worshippers are gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Political ignorance, politician and right wing media hatred, contribute fear and paranoia to a people ripe for racist and bigoted response to the cynical provocations of president and his political crony cowards.

And for Christians, Jesus has died in their churches.
Three days later, three weeks, three months, three decades later, the stone is fixed solidly in place and no emergence has taken place. They have sealed the wise one in to a catafalque of complicit complacency aligned with a deeply flawed and critically disturbed pattern of expedient thinking and acting completely antithetical to supposed mission statement and human decency needed.

Hope has retreated into desolate hiding place.

The nation’s capital — both financial and human — has been turned to self-aggrandizing self-import hoarding, leaving out in the damp and cold night the vast and uncertain majority who once believed in a loving, inclusive, and neighborly promise and potentiality.

Behold what is within without!

Look upon what has been made of us, and weep!

with another towards no other.

If what we call “God” is what may be, possible — then when we dream to create an expression of what is coming after God, perhaps the God-reality beyond concept and formulation, we move with another towards no other.

I learn that Thomas Keating OCSO died last Thursday.

Silence is the primary language. We must learn this expression.

game, series, over

Boston

שְׁמַע...why can we not hear

(Silence)

Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" 

(Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד׃)