where we are going

Each religion is a distinct personality.

We are looking for the true self.

It is found only in communal milieu.

No separate religion is enough for

a future spirituality.

No separate egos

only empty wholeness

arising moment to moment

new and again new and this

moment arising 

open hearted

On porch

Conversation —

Friday evening

Summer cooling

get rid of it

What to do with cynicism?

In others: fight it.

In myself: look more closely at my fears and resentments.

Cynicism cannot abide.

by your lonesome

Friend’s wife died a recluse thirteen years after his death. He’d had a private service. She’d had no service.

Sounds right, in a lonely sort of way.

Fact is, alone is alone, no matter how crowded you try to make it.

Somehow this matters nine years and twenty two years later.

No hermit wants company.

Everybody’s already with you when you’re by your lonesome.

behind bamboo slats

cross in morning

sun leafy birdsong

burning through fog

face looked through, for Dennis

What evil doesn’t realize is good is everybody’s business.

Drega instead stood over Dennis as he had Scott Phillips. “You should’ve minded your own fucking business,” he said. Holding the rifle as if it were a pistol, he drilled, in rapid succession, four bullets into Dennis’s back. Then he changed the ammo clip on his rifle in motions that struck Susan as “very controlled, well practiced.”
(Excerpt from: "In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town" by Richard Adams Carey. Scribd.)

Whereas evil is narrow, secluded, cowering, and very very lonely in its execution and thinking, it fears good, yet cannot be rid of it.

Twenty two years ago yesterday Scott, Les, Vickie, and Dennis were shot and killed in Colebrook NH by a man entrapped by evil.

When someone acts and believes that they alone control the fate of others, we see the face of evil in that person's face.

Absence.

Be frightened with such a sight.

But when someone sees the good of others intermixed with one's own good, making no act nor holding no belief that excludes, eliminates, or deprives another nor anyone from compassion or inclusion — we look into the face of good, our face is looked through with good.

Presence.

Thank you Dennis.

Good be on you!

library named for a friend closes

“Poor is the nation that has no heroes; shameful the nation, that having, forgets.” (on plaque in library dedicated to Dennis Joos) 

STEWARTSTOWN — Saying there has been “little to no use” of it in recent years, voters at Town Meeting on Tuesday agreed to close the Dennis Joos Memorial Library, which is named after a hero-victim of the 1997 mass murder in nearby Colebrook.  (New Hampshire Union Leader, 15mar19)

 The new version of library, Scribd, I'm surprised to find, has the book In the Evil Day: Violence Comes to One Small Town, By Richard Adams Carey.   (2015)

So this will be my day. Dennis, I recall, is the second schoolmate (that I know of) to be shot and killed. Bob Coles was killed in Mexico on a beach in the late 1970s trying to stop someone from stealing his backpack. Then Dennis, newspaper editor, trying to stop a man with a gun who killed two law enforcement officers, a lawyer, and him.

The morning mutes.

I read.

And remember the stories Dennis wrote in 1963-64 in the Franciscan college alongside the Delaware River.

Somewhere, in some box, piled on by other boxes, in a hallway, some pages, yellowed and creased, no doubt buried deep, sleeping words, a Joos story, hibernates.  

asking now not i

When did I become a contemplative mendicant?

About the time the Staten Island ferry from Brooklyn across gave way to the 13august59 beginning of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge which was opened on 21nov64. 

High school wasn’t early enough. More likely, without knowing it, it was the early days of being an altar boy in Grammer School, at 6:30am mass at st a’s between 61st and 62nd street. The early mid-50’s bicycling the variegated ten blocks in the quiet of early morning, the choreographed movements at foot of altar, the words in Latin/English, the incomprehensible meaning of the ritual, the gestures, the transsubstantiated  simplicity of wafer and wine into cosmic mythological-theological integrality. A not yet teenager wandering within a philosophical metaphysic intersecting human personality and spiritual esoteric hermeneutical emptiness — while cycling my Schwinn past Denny Chin’s Hand Laundry, Stein’s Deli, PS 205, 20th Avenue BMT Sea Beach line station, John Lazarus’ and Howie Ablin’s houses. The Brooklyn Dodgers hadn’t been shanghied yet. 

That’s where, I suspect, it began.

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent. 

ALL LIGHT MUST BE INFORMED BY DARKNESS, and all success by suffering. St. John of the Cross called this Luminous Darkness, St. Augustine, the Paschal Mystery or the necessary Passover, and Catholics proclaim it loudly as the mystery of faith at every Eucharist. Yet it is seldom an axiom at the heart of our lives. 

  The early but learned pattern of dualistic thinking can get us only so far; so all religions at the more mature levels have discovered another “software” for processing the really big questions, like death, love, infinity, suffering, and God. Many of us call this access “contemplation.” It is a nondualistic way of seeing the moment. Originally, the word was simply “prayer.”
[...]
Excerpt from: "The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See" by Richard Rohr. Scribd. Read this book on Scribd.: https://www.scribd.com/book/268080969

The sewer tops, the curb-side cars, the wooden steps, the silence of journeying through porous realms of reason and mythology, the corn muffins and egg creams, Daily News and Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
Harold Tribune and The Tablet, Tommy my first boss, the vacant lot with infield stones we played baseball on Saturday mornings. All of it a surreal fog of nescience and wonder spanning then til now faces and names forming what looks back looking out, birdsong and lawnmower, mountains and passing cars, han and shikentaza, coffee and psalms, this Sunday morning.

The interior life took root.

I think I asked for it. It separated me out. I looked into distances. I knew nothing.

Nor

Now

Do

I