meditate on this

"The days of killing are over. We do not kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong."    (-John Dear, Ankeny, Iowa, Catholic Peace Ministry, Bishop Dingman Peace Award ceremony, 2016, 55seconds in) 

Peace now.

Sanity now.

Damn the fools and unbelievers, the power hungry and narcissists who fail miserably with their unfeeling unloving arrogance. They have nothing of value to teach us.

two by adrienne rich, one by robert creeley

Both at Friday afternoon Quarry Hill’s Poetry, Tea, and Thee, and Friday Evening Conversation at the hermitage, these poems took us far and deep.

What Kind of Times Are These

BY ADRIENNE RICH

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

(--Adrienne Rich, "What Kind of Times are These" from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.  Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich.)

...   ...   ...

The Mirror

Seeing is believing.

Whatever was thought or said,

these persistent, inexorable deaths

make faith as such absent,

our humanness a question,

a disgust for what we are.

Whatever the hope,

here it is lost.

Because we coveted our difference,

here is the cost. 

(—Poem by Robert Creeley)

...   ...   ...

MY HEART IS MOVED BY ALL I CANNOT SAVE

By Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

(--#463, Singing the Living Tradition

Original source: From Dream of a Common Language, 1978)

the coming war with anybody

Assassinations

Are in

The air...

Like a

Coin trick

Disappearing

Anything

Right in

Front of

Our eyes

leonard and thomas sound us

Ring the bells that still can ring.*

"Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good, that we belong to Him, that we are not living for this world.  

"They break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and that our preoccupations are not important.  

"They speak to us of our freedom, which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget. 

"They are the voice of our alliance with the God of heaven.  

"They tell us that we are His true temple. They call us to peace with Him within ourselves."                

  (-- Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 67) in louie,louie

Thats how the light gets in.*

...   ...   ...

The future is no excuse for an abdication of your own personal responsibilities towards yourself and your job and your love. “Ring the bells that still can ring”: they’re few and far between but you can find them. 

This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. 

And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: Physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.

* Leonard Cohen, in The Anthem. See LIGHT IN THE DARK

something else

Is that it? Is “the kingdom of god” our willingness and active undertaking to create and dwell as a community of caring, one that leaves no one out, inviting in, attending to?

Lonergan stressed that to the apostles had been given the mystery of the kingdom of God: “The gospel is the good news, and the good news is the kingdom of God.”¹ One of our aims is to find effective ways to read and live Lonergan’s message in light of the sixth beatitude, “Happy are the pure of heart” (Matt 5:8). For us, Lonergan’s profound views on community are rooted in kingdom-of-God ideals—ideals that have been challenging Christians for centuries. We shall argue that the heart (interiority) affects Lonergan’s views on ethics. By doing so, we hope to help readers identify in their own personal experience their own conscious and intentional operations and the dynamic relations linking them together.² This sentence gets to the core of what Lonergan discovered over his years of teaching. Our aim is to apply this dynamic, relational focus to the challenge of what it is to be a caring Christian. Following Jesus, Lonergan helps us interiorize religious values. How can we Christians today share the depth of our interior life, our inner self,³ with others so as to build better, viable communities? How may we empower one another? The various facets of our inner and outer lives call for a realistic optimism of the type Lonergan offers us.
[...]
Excerpt from: "Bringing Bernard Lonergan Down to Earth and into Our Hearts and Communities" by John Raymaker. Scribd.
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/399747294

 At meetingbrook we think this is assisted by promises of contemplation (interiority), conversation (deep listening and loving speech), and correspondence (mindful relationality). These foci are inherent in the within and without of a human being in the world.

Thus it is more easily understood why Christianity has never taken in the West. The centrifugal impulse to spin off and away any and all who do not fit the pattern of “us” — banishing the “they” into pograms, detention facilities, prisons, red-lined ghettoes, and permanent migrant status — indicates the sophistication with which our culture avoids the hard work and intentional movement into inclusive community or the kingdom of god.

 Those words, “ How can we Christians today share the depth of our interior life, our inner self,³ with others so as to build better, viable communities? How may we empower one another? The various facets of our inner and outer lives call for a realistic optimism of the type Lonergan offers us,” suggest a task. Beginning at the most basic level, that task is what the whole of scripture (Hebrew, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Vedic, Shinto, Confucian, Taoist et al) conveys in its inner wisdom.

It is what poetry calls to.

It is what the human heart and mind unbeknownst long for.

There is no other hope.

And since hope has died in our ignorant, greedy, and angry world — the reality of what has been called the kingdom of god might have to be called something else.

We need something else.

ad adjuvandum me festina

The world

Is too much

With us

(Ignorance, greed, anger)

Need

To disappear

ok

I’d rather not

Say

I’d rather not

first, morning

He’s found his forever home.

It could be tidier.

Nah.

It’s fine.

As he is.

zzzzz, when you awake you will remember everything

I was not awake at midnight.

Maybe this year.

become a question

 If you ask...

Dasein. In ordinary German, Dasein (literally, “being-there” or “being-here”) means existence, usually in the sense of the existence rather than non-existence of some particular thing. Heidegger, however, uses this word in an idiosyncratic way to designate one being in particular: the human being, the being for whom its own existence can become a question. In designating human beings as Dasein, Heidegger is rejecting philosophical conceptions that treat the essence of the human as something independent of historical place and time. Instead, he wants to emphasize that human existence is rooted in a “here”; our distinct way of Being is enmeshed in a particular history and connected to a unique but transient place with all the filiations of language, cultural practices, and traditions that are our own. As human beings, for Heidegger, we are here. We follow the established tradition in leaving the term Dasein untranslated
(—Excerpt from: "Being and Truth" by Martin Heidegger. Scribd.
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/148936287)

...you are here. 

due to illness

No New Year’s Eve

practice

conversation

tonight.

when does never end

You say

You have

Something

To say

About God

Now...

If you’ll

Excuse me

I have

To go

For Christ

(It seems)

Is never

Ending

it had not yet

First it was the mystical presence. Then it was the idea of. Finally it is the indecipherable sound of sheer absence.

So it is with what I have called God.

By the time the summer was over, I was to become conscious of the fact that the only way to live was to live in a world that was charged with the presence and reality of God.
To say that, is to say a great deal: and I don’t want to say it in a way that conveys more than the truth. I will have to limit the statement by saying that it was still, for me, more an intellectual realization than anything else: and it had not yet   .struck down into the roots of my will. The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings—by which man becomes one with God.
[...]
(—Excerpt from: "The Seven Storey Mountain" by Thomas Merton. Scribd.
Read this book on Scribd: https://www.scribd.com/book/249309404)

So it is with what I call my self.

just monday morning

Must be

feeling more

at home...

free access 

up and down

beds and sofas

max-manjushri, 16 days here

When papers

read, graded,

returned to university

Email sent

informing students,

posting grades.

remembering when poetry saves

This from Robert Creeley:

       A Step

       Things 

             

                    come and go.  

       Then 

       

                    let them.  

       (--from Pieces, 1969)