mum

Having nothing
Good
To say about
The president,
I’ll say nothing.

do us part

Four AM walk to winter zendo to bump heat. They make snow all night next door at Snow Bowl.

Carry wood in from barn for embers in brown wood stove.

When we speak to one another Karl Stern’s words return to mind: “All being is nuptial!”

There we are, then, at the altar of one-another, eucharistic communing, until

Death

Do us

Part?

Ah — there is

No part of us

Done by death

Within true

Marriage.

someone asked tonight

If a woman going to court to testify against two men who raped her is attacked by those two men enroute, is there a reason to forget about an incompetent president and rail against such a derogation of decency there?

on the way out the door

It is Advent.

The time prefacing an inter-relational phenomenology of an appearing reality so original as to be the silent emptiness prior to anything-at-all coming to be in this vast and infinite Kosmos.

It is, correspondingly, that which each one of us is in our most intimate being.

  

icon of Salus Populi Romani in the Santa Maria Maggiore Basilica in Rome. 

Recounted by pious tradition to have been painted by St. Luke the Evangelist.

"That God should have condescended to become a human mother's son;  that one woman whose womb was sanctified as the holy temple and tabernacle of the living God should have been permitted to walk the earth -- these wonders make up the sum total of the earth's actual purpose and they are the fulfillment of all its expectations." (pp. 25-26)

- Fr. Alfred Delp SJ, “The Prison Meditations of Father Alfred Delp”, 1963 Herder and Herder New York. See also: The Prison Meditations of Father Delp

(--from louie, louie)

haiku

                 (thursday onto-relationality)

Dawn light over hill

Through bamboo curtain, shapes...trees

I am, this, morning

might as well ask

 Thomas F. Torrance (1913-2007) in subject in M.M. Davis’ work.

The doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance rests on the fundamental methodological axiom that knowledge is developed according to the nature (kata physin) of the object of scientific inquiry. To know God through the incarnate Son, who is ‘of one nature with the Father’, is to know God in strict accordance with God’s nature and hence in a theologically scientific way. In Torrance’s kataphysical method, a priori knowledge of God is excluded, for epistemology follows ontology. Because the fundamental aspects of reality are relational rather than atomistic, a scientific theological approach to the doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ requires that he be investigated within the nexuses of ‘being- constituting’ interrelations, or ‘onto-relations’, which disclose his identity as incarnate Saviour of the world. Following the principle of logical simplicity, the vast and scattered array of Torrance’s thought can be reduced to a minimal number of elemental forms that succinctly describe in a unitary, non-dualist manner the onto-relations that constitute the identity of the incarnate Son. The primary elemental forms of Torrance’s doctrine of mediation are the Nicene homoousion and the Chalcedonian doctrine of the hypostatic union. Two additional elemental forms that readily arise as corollaries of the doctrine of the hypostatic union are the doctrines of incarnational redemption and the ‘vicarious humanity’ of Jesus Christ. These elemental forms provide a conceptual lens for a theologically holistic view of the mediation of Jesus Christ in the scientific theology of T.F. Torrance.

Davis, M.M., 2013, ‘Kataphysical inquiry, onto- relationality, and elemental forms in T.F. Torrance’s doctrine of the mediation of Jesus Christ’, In die Skriflig/ In Luce Verbi 47(1), Art. #100, 9 pages, © 2013. https://academia.edu/resource/work/19840695

Is faith a thing, an ontological reality, to be studied as one might any elemental material particle-in-relationship occupying a phenomenal field?

We might as well ask what is real.

Ok — what is, real?

And what is it

that I am not

seeing?

impeachment hearings

History

will

judge

and not

a moment

too soon 

while there

is still

history 

these, by thomas merton -- on snowy advent tuesday

When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and she saw that, in containing Him, she contained the world besides. 

The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and the end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. 

And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm Mary slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. 

And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence. 

-- Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951, p 317)

...   ...   ...

Song: If you seek

If you seek a heavenly light 

I, Solitude, am your professor! 

I go before you into emptiness, 

Raise strange suns for your new mornings, 

Opening the windows 

Of your innermost apartment. 

When I, loneliness, give my special signal 

Follow my silence, follow where I beckon! 

Fear not, little beast, little spirit 

(Thou word and animal) 

I, Solitude, am angel 

And have prayed in your name. 

Look at the empty, wealthy night 

The pilgrim moon! 

I am the appointed hour,  

The "now" that cuts 

Time like a blade. 

I am the unexpected flash 

Beyond "yes," beyond "no," 

The forerunner of the Word of God. 

Follow my ways and I will lead you 

To golden-haired suns, 

Logos and music, blameless joys, 

Innocent of questions 

And beyond answers: 

For I, Solitude, am thine own self: 

I, Nothingness, am thy All, 

I, Silence, am thy Amen! 

(-Poem, Song: If you seek, by Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, pp. 340-34i)   

(from louie, louie, blog by beth cioffoletti)

snow

Falling everywhere

University closed Tuesday

Online assignment sent to students —

Eco-spirituality and cosmological internexus

wants nothing, knows nothing, has nothing

Looking here and there, finding nothing,  wind howls saying, “I’m on my way through here heading elsewhere taking nothing with me.”

‘There is nothing so unknown to the soul as herself.’ Meister Eckhart 

Detachment — The detached soul 

By calling for the soul to ‘naught itself for an instant’, in order to find the ‘strange and desert place’1 of oneness with God, Meister Eckhart’s mystical vision is one of self abandonment, a desertion that constitutes an apophatic ontology that he calls 

• 1Both of these citations are from Sermon 28, Ego elegi vos de mundo, cited in Meister Eckhart, (vol. 1, Sermon 17), 1979, p. 144. © The Eckhart Society 2015 DOI 10.1179/2046572615Z.00000000030 detachment 

( Abgeschiedenheit). 2 Eckhart tirelessly tells his listener: ‘go completely out of yourself’. 3. Though he uses many metaphors for this desertion, they all portray this single medieval mystical theology, 

Vol. 24 No. 1, May 2015, 23–44 If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious Arianne Conty American University of Sharjah, UAE  

departure or evasion, leaving the ground of the soul as empty as, to use his own words, a vacuum or a void. He tells us in Sermon 15 that‘anyone who had so to himself’.4 In The Book of Benedictus, he uses the term virgin or free (ledic) to reiterate this same theme, and in his Councils on Discernment he focuses on the idea of emptiness: What is an empty spirit? An empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing, has not attached its best to any fixed way of acting, and has no concern whatever in anything for its own gain, for it is all sunk deep down into God’s dearest will and has forsaken its own.5 In Sermon 52 he privileges the concept of poverty ( Armut), and specifies that the soul must become poor of will, of knowledge, and of possessions: ‘A poor man wants nothing, and knows nothing, and has nothing’.6 A man who is poor of will must be poor even of the will to do God’s will, for true poverty is to will nothing: So long as a man has this as his will, that he wants to fulfil God ’s dearest will, he has not the poverty about which we want to talk. Such a person has a will with which he wants to fulfil God’s will, and that is not true poverty. For if a person wants really to have poverty, he ought to be as free of his own created will as he was when he did not exist. For I tell you by the truth that is eternal, so long as you have a will to fulfil God’s will, and a longing for God and for eternity, then you are not poor; for a poor man is one who has a will and longing for nothing.7

(—from, medieval mystical theology, Vol. 24 No. 1, May 2015, 23–44 If you Could Naught Yourself for an Instant: Meister Eckhart and the Mystical Unconscious Arianne Conty American University of Sharjah, UAE)

It is Advent.

We don’t know what is coming.

Unknown to the soul, as herself.