We look at another. We drink. To our health!

How clear is it to us that whatever is done to or for another is done to and for oneself?

Contemplation practices looking. With heart/mind engaging what appears before it, contemplative looking is the practice of seeing no barriers.

Contemplative life sees no other.

Keep your heart clear and transparent
And you will never be bound.
A single disturbed thought, though,
Creates ten thousand distractions.
Let myriad things captivate you
And you'll go further and further astray.
How painful to see people
All wrapped up in themselves.
- Ryokan

If contemplative life is seeing everything in true relational context with, and as, everything else -- then to be a contemplative is to practice whole sight.

Contemplation is often misunderstood. Contemplation enters and engages what is taking place with all the chaos and uncertainty experienced there. But with a difference.
The contemplative doesn’t finally despair, (although interim despondency occurs). Nor does the contemplative turn inward and away from what is actually occurring in the world, (although the need to escape often calls.)

The odd response of the contemplative is to not separate himself or herself from the actual reality found there. That reality might be war. Or a small boy playing with wood flute. That reality might be laughter with friends. Or two dogs snoozing in meditation cabin. (Or cat stealing banana from counter in kitchen.)

The odd response might be to drink what is at root, the wellspring water of life, prayerfully touching ground, toasting the health of each and everyone now and once in the world.

It is for others to kill and destroy what is not understood. Contemplatives correspond with what is incomprehensible, taking libation of simple silent presence, looking into empty cup of confusing unexplainable absence.

It is, perhaps, for others to argue opinions and forward agendas to shape the world (or another person) according to designs forged by ideology and mental constructs. Contemplatives will, perhaps, also argue and shape a vision of the world, but will (more often than not) fall back to a more basic and profound task.

Namely, to advocate no path, in poverty, emptiness, and deep listening – to practice the ground of being, clear and transparent, as dwelling place and home for all in peace.

Raven's Bread, a quarterly newsletter for hermits and those interested in the eremitical life published by Paul and Karen Fredette, had in its February 2003 issue Excerpts from Thomas Merton Uncensored, By: Rev. Patrick W. Collins, Ph.D., Douglas, MI:

One question which Merton addressed many times is the extent of God's call to contemplation. Is it a vocation for a few favored persons? Or are all of the baptized called to contemplation? The answer depends upon what one means by contemplation. Depending upon the context of the correspondence, the Trappist says it is a special gift and yet he also says all persons are called to contemplative living. In fact he wrote in one place: "Christ came on earth to form contemplatives."

One of his frequent correspondents on the topic was an Anglican laywoman, Etta Gullick, who apparently wrote to Merton frequently about contemplation. Contemplation, the Trappist contended, cannot be explained. It can only be hinted at or suggested. It is only "known" in the doing of contemplative praying and living. He wrote to Gullick in 1962 of the inadequacy of all explanatory words. "The nothingness and emptiness (of contemplation) are more important than their explanations, and I think you will find eventually that explanations are not needed. Yet, of course, you do need to communicate with someone and feel yourself understood. But you are understood by Christ and that is the great thing; the least thing is to understand oneself."

How does one measure one's growth in prayer? In 1965 Merton answered Etta Gullick's question on this point. He warned her about the danger of too much self-focus in this matter of measuring one's prayer. "Progress in prayer: it is a ticklish subject because the chief obstacle to progress is too much self-awareness and to talk about "how to make progress" is a good way to make people too aware of themselves. In the long run, I think progress in prayer comes from the Cross and humiliation and whatever makes us really experience our total poverty and nothingness; and also gets our mind off ourselves."

In 1964 the Trappist wrote to Gullick: "I have greater and greater confidence in the reality of the path that is no path at all, and to see people following it in spite of everything is comforting. By rights, they should all have forgotten and lost their way long ago. If they keep on it without really knowing what it is, this is because God keeps them there."

Always grateful for Merton. Sometimes it feels that I have forgotten and lost my way long ago.

A friend writes: “You sound so like you are struggling, like a man gasping to get enough air. I can't breathe for you, but I can send you my loving support -- and a poem. “
(Poem: "Widows," by Louise Gluck from Ararat (Ecco Press), sent from The Writer's Almanac®, a daily program of poetry and history hosted by Garrison Keillor)

Widows

My mother's playing cards with my aunt,
Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game
my grandmother taught all her daughters.

Midsummer: too hot to go out.
Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.
My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.
She can't get used to her own bed this summer.
She had no trouble last summer,
getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there
to be near my father.
He was dying; he got a special bed.

My aunt doesn't give an inch, doesn't make
allowance for my mother's weariness.
It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting.
To let up insults the opponent.

Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand.
It's good to stay inside on days like this,
to stay where it's cool.
And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.

My grandmother thought ahead; she prepared her daughters.
They have cards; they have each other.
They don't need any more companionship.

All afternoon the game goes on but the sun doesn't move.
It just keeps beating down, turning the grass yellow.
That's how it must seem to my mother.
And then, suddenly, something is over.

My aunt's been at it longer; maybe that's why she's playing better.
Her cards evaporate: that's what you want, that's the object: in the
end,
the one who has nothing wins.
(by Louise Gluck )

In chapel/zendo this morning after sitting during psalms small candle goes out, smoke rising. Rising in brief wake curling past white draped wood cross. Outside windows Bald Mountain sits unseen in grey fog low clouds rain dripping meditation.

We all have something.

There is no winning.

Nothing, it might be said, pairs us perfectly.

Loving support is a profound pairing.

Correspondence.

So, what happened?

There’s this Jesus, this Christ. Gone absent. Sealed in tomb.

Then it’s all story about angels, presence itself gone absent, appearances flitting through locked doors, on roads to other towns, in the way someone breaks a piece of bread.

Really? It’s the stuff of Invisibility playing with what it is not, perception. It’s “Yes, but…” all the way down to wordless look into your eyes with no explanation, at least none that has any capacity to satisfy.

What about Mary?

Jean Guitton, French poet & philosopher, writing in his book on Mary says about the moment Invisibility came to be in her,
There would be nothing human in this act of generation. To Mary such a miracle could not have been utterly astounding, transcending though it did the ordinary limitations and potentialities of life, for it was somehow congruous with the very mystery of woman, whose fruit seems to come from the breath of God, rather than human intervention. Mary saw in it a correspondence with her vow. She had wanted to remain pure, not to ‘know,’ so that her consecration might be all the more complete. She had been resigned to sterility, in so far as that was involved in the purity she rated higher. (pp.30-31, in The Blessed Virgin, by Jean Guitton, c.1949))

Is ‘knowing’ a ‘human intervention’?

I went to a funeral mass yesterday morning. The woman’s name was Gwendolyn. I did not know her. It was at 10AM in Rockland. I sat in the back of church. Some facts were spoken by the priest. The woman at the piano sang ‘Ave Maria’ with loveliness. The woman playing harp did ‘Danny Boy’ with sweet simplicity. A final blessing, and they turned the casket holding the body once alive with Gwen, exiting the main aisle.

I didn’t need to know Gwen. It was every family member, relative, friend, and stranger in that casket. It was my casket as well. So, I pray for her, all of us, myself. It was Easter Monday. Something, it is said, changed on Easter.

What had been outside became inside, inside became outside, so that the mystery of Christ no longer had an inside or outside as obstacle or barrier to the invisible breath of God.

We don’t find another person inside their body. Nor outside. Sure, there are details and data, personality and pieces of history that fall like breadcrumbs from the passing of someone’s life near our life. These bits and statistics are fodder for anthropologists and clerks, something to fill ledgers and satisfy mail carrier's hands busy with envelopes to deliver. I barely look at my mail now. When dead, that too will fall into invisibility.

And what did Mary know, at birth, and death?
Except in the matter of his birth, in which her testimony is necessarily unique, she knew no more than the others: she had received no special illumination. I know there are many who think differently, but as far as I can see they produce no proofs. From the point of view from which I describe her in her passage through time, the Blessed Virgin is a type of the Church itself in the world. The Church, this growing Christ, knows no more than is contained in the revelation of the Father; but, under the influence of the Spirit, it penetrates the meaning of truths and the way they are related to another.
The Blessed Virgin had held the Word in her arms; but perhaps the Word was silent. Was it fitting It should tell her what had still to be revealed to others? One thing is given, one truth propounded to all. There are some who can understand it better than others. It was she who penetrated its meaning completely. (pp.65-66, Guitton)

I walked the breakwater out to lighthouse in Rockland after the service. One hundred years ago, after over a dozen years work, they completed the placement of stones protecting the harbor, extending a distance just shy of a mile out from shore. Sitting on the edge, water sloshing below in rising tide, looking at lobster boat and North Haven ferry working their trade, I finger beads in unknowing prayer. Not only don’t I know what to say, anything formed into words is mere transient wave rising from body ocean for mere instant before dropping back.

I leave it to fingers and beads to permeate what meaning arises without my intervention. It is a prayer beyond me. As that happens I walk back over huge flat blocks, raising hand saluting each passing person on his or her way out.

Saskia returns. Solitude shifts. At Compline in cabin all candles are lighted. The words say, Protect us, Lord, while awake; watch over us as we sleep. That awake, we might keep watch with Christ; and asleep, rest in his peace.

This Jesus, this Christ -- invisibility itself -- who appeared and disappeared, appears and disappears in each passing prayer, each breaking of bread, and each recounting of how we’ve come to be here.

I asked Millie to play the harp at my funeral, to just show up. She said sure, adding that she hopes I live a thousand years. That’s too long. The miniature chocolate donuts had with Belgian nut coffee earlier for breakfast are a hedge against such extravagance.

For now, I pray.

I pray for the living, and the dead.

I do this because I am alive, and dead.

With longing to penetrate the meaning of the Word completely.

We thirst for resurrection.

Trembling and astonishment!

And saying nothing.

We are afraid.

The small candle in stained glass holder was still dancing flame this morning just after sunrise. It had been lighted after return from Easter Vigil at St. Bernard's in Rockland. Ten hours later, what was half burned candle at lighting, continued watching in flickering solitude the bare cross.

It's not that we are not worthy to receive Christ in forms unrecognizable. It's more that worthiness is no longer an issue. We are worthy because no worthiness is necessary.
We're worthy because we're not worthy. We're not worthy because we're worthy. (Buddhists have more practice with this view, form being emptiness, emptiness form.)

In Janet's small anchor carved box, soil and leaf this Easter morning, the sacred earth formed by breath, word, fire, and grace of God. The Holy surrounds and permeates us.

We thirst for what is real.

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime. (Martin Luther)

At liturgy this morning, the thought while watching people move forward and returning -- Do not take the life of anyone. Reflecting back now, is it because we cannot take the life of anyone? Rather, we suffer the delusion and crippling division in heart/mind that we take the life of someone for some worthy reason. Like war? Or retributive justice? This odd attachment to worthiness can be seen after the deaths of what are called 'enemies' in war, or death row inmates in capital punishment. There is much to ponder here. 'It is not right to glory in the slain.' --Homer.

Orchid

Deep in the valley, a beauty hides:
Serene, peerless, incomparably sweet.
In the still shade of the bamboo thicket
It seems to sigh softly. - Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831)

Beauty is often hidden too deep for easy recognition. Often profoundly hidden. Perhaps only at core of each one's being.

We thirst for realization.

1 All you who are thirsty, come to the water! You who have no money, come, receive grain and eat; Come, without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!
2
Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy? Heed me, and you shall eat well, you shall delight in rich fare.
3
Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life. (Isaiah Chapter 55)

We thirst for what is unrecognizable to be recognized.

He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you”. And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid. (Mark 16)

We thirst for what we are.

Christós Anésti, Alithós Anésti, Kaló Páscha!
Christ is risen, Truly he is risen, Happy Easter!

Heedfully.

Hell, said Jean-Paul Sartre, is other people.

I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. (--from Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday)

We create hell for ourselves and for each self we consign there whenever we separate in our mind/heart what is inseparable.

Holy Week is a tale of primary seduction. The seduction says destroy what we perceive as other. War is that seduction. So too ideas of otherness, ideas of division that separate us each from each, from the earth, from God.

In this tale Jesus is no other. But as the tale is told Jesus is made other and murdered. End of story? And whose story is it?

What kind of place do we create when we fashion other? It is a place long thought of as hell. Falling into that place are individuals and whole peoples numbed and asleep to a reality available to them.

Asleep and numbed, that place is named war, bigotry, greed, power madness, unkindness, ignorance, and unawareness of who and what each really is. It is a terrible place. It is a place people who distort love want us to occupy. Do we recognize that place? Have we placed ourselves there?

Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated. (Ancient Homily)

This Holy Saturday, the days and weeks following, it is vital that our numbness and sleepy souls find themselves roused and slowly, carefully, clearly awake.

My life is poor
But my mind is so clear
As I pass
Day after day
In this grass hut.
- Hakuin (1686-1768)

The hardest step to take is the core one. It is the one saying, “I must take a step.” The realization comes, most times, with felt presence of someone -- some one – whose kindness and love has gone through hell and invites us to leave that place. Step by step, leaving that place, with peace.

By some grace, way too far beyond my comprehension, a hand is there, just at the nearside of that realization.

Today, we watch. We pray. We clear our mind. We clear our heart.

We sit in darkness. That darkness is death and separation. It's where we are. Don't be afraid. Be alert.

We listen for a new sound, faintly audible and coming clearer.

It sounds through a new light. In flickering fire we can almost hear, “Together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.” (God help us!)

Are we listening?

Bong!

………….

In its entirety:
Reading From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday: The Lord's descent into the underworld

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory. At the sight of him Adam, the first man he had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all”. Christ answered him: “And with your spirit”. He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light”.

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated. For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in my image. On my back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See my hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity. (cf, Universalis.com)

The tomb was nearby. They took him there after he opened not his mouth. It is finished.

A long emptiness follows. Confusion scatters intimates. Opposing powers gloat and sneer their success.

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.
He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory.
(From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday)

Dust settles. Women weep. Men weep. Soldier goes home with unrended cloak. Monasteries and churches go vacant afterwards. We're left to ponder.

Nothing makes sense. Murder is like that. Some sorrow. Some party. And some have already planned the next move.

When Jesus died it was not hard to well up frustration and loss. Consider America defeating itself in Iraq. Some jeer derisively. Some bend disbelieving.

An ancient homily, which could have been written just today as a prayer, says, Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. (http://www.universalis.com/USA/20030419/readings.htm)

America 's lost paradise was last seen just before its leaders grinned at each other and said "Let's go!" -- and then went into war.

War is a place where unnecessity replicates itself, feeding cells that have no purpose but to destroy what remains of life.

It is a desolate night. Tabernacle doors stare fallow absence.

Like a party that suddenly goes blank with disastrous news, the world watches slack-eyed someone who hasn’t realized yet he is poisoned, and knifed, and in the center of a circle that widens away from him. O my people, what has he done to you?

The current liturgy performed in Iraq has no rubric of resurrection.

Stone rolls tight shut.

It's over.

Wait.

Jesus!

“…und weinte bitterlich.”

All night not knowing.

Intrigue whispers in shadows. Questions of how to insure peace in a hostile environment are heard everywhere. And who cares what happens in backwater Middle East courts of public opinion? State has power, and money. Forgetfulness comes soon enough.

Redwing blackbird, brown-white chipmunk, and white-throated sparrow furrow broken seed shells off corner of house under feeder for one not yet broken. Out behind chapel/zendo squirrel perches on green feeder until someone (could I deny it?) throws piece of wood in its direction. Immediately a dark sense raises question -- why not feed all?

Rain, hail, snow, and ice:
All are different,
But when they fall
They become the same water
As the valley stream.
- Ikkyu (1394-1481)

Forget Zen Masters, Orthodox Rabbis, or Ecclesiastical Bishops.

Roosters! That’s what wakes us.

Matthaeus 26
75 Und Petrus gedachte des Wortes Jesu, der gesagt hatte: Ehe der Hahn kräht, wirst du mich dreimal verleugnen. Und er ging hinaus und weinte bitterlich.
Matthew 26
75 Immediately a rooster crowed. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: "Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times." And he went outside and wept bitterly

This impulse to separate ourselves, to rub preserving oil onto dualistic thinking, is what makes this Friday ironically good.

Disown?

Peter spent the night trying to grasp who he was and what he had been told. He spent the night not knowing what to make of either. Who he was baffled him. What he had been told was unthinkable.

Peter was friend who failed friendship.
He caught himself denying the one he loved.

He wept bitterly.

Rooster call.

Awake!

Eat.

Be one’s own.

Jesus?

Note: Meetingbrook is on retreat. The bookshop/bakery will re-open Easter Wednesday, 23 April. We hold each and all in prayer during this time of solitude, stillness, and silence.
.....

Tonight in the garden of Gethsemane innocence will be kissed by clever connivance and sent into torture. This ritual takes place in real time in Iraq.

Some things are overlooked in war – especially by those not there:
· Military men and women kill other men and women, boys and girls, infants.
· Very few understand what that feels like to the soul.

A pilot of an Apache attack gunship spoke into a mounted video camera in his cockpit during a time and space of grounded solitude. “I don’t want to go home and tell my family and friends what I’ve seen here. Those are images I’ll take away from here and keep with me the rest of my life. I’ve never really been one to take anything for granted, but I’ll tell you what – I will be different when I go home. It will…this will change me. It already has.”

Most revealing are his eyes, his tone, and the sorrowful sigh he breathes and releases after ending his words.

Overnight At a Mountain Monastery

Massed peaks pierce
The sky’s cold colors;
Here, the trail junctions
With the temple path.
Shooting stars pass
Into sparse-branched trees;
The moon travels one way,
Clouds the other.
Few people come
To this mountaintop;
Cranes do not flock
In the tall pines.
One Buddhist monk,
Eighty years old,
Has never heard
Of the world’s affairs. - Chia Tao (779-843)

We betray our service men and women when we forget their sacrifice. They know what war does to psyche and soul. They are kissed by thirty pieces of silver and sent to murder and maim. The official propaganda uses words like free and liberate. But the men and women releasing death and destruction know better. Their eyes have seen what their bullets and bombs have done. They are sent into the desert with the sins of ignorance war planners place on their backs. They sacrifice themselves – their innocence, their sanity, and some their very lives. They do with bodies what the minds of war planners do with ideologies – take life, destroy property, and call it a name that hides what has really happened.

Gethsemane innocence will be kissed and sent into torture. A man who came to realize peace and sanctity is beaten and bloodied. Lies are told. Deals are made. Soldiers dispatched to do the bidding of clever men. Trial without representation and without pretense of justice is executed. And the common people are whipped into patriotic and fundamentalist fervor to assent the will of commander in chief and chief religious spokesmen. Year 33AD and 2003AD coincide in a kiss.

“The art of literature, vocal or written, is to adjust the language so that it embodies what it indicates.” (A.N. Whitehead)

There is not much speech in this time of war that fleshes out the horror of war. Almost religious obsession with cheerful proclamation of positive acquisition of goals numbs minds and hurts ears.

As Auden said repeatedly, almost obsessively, “Orthodoxy is reticence”; orthodoxy is knowing when to shut up. This is not a teaching that many Christian readers want to hear from their poets. But Auden knew what poetry can’t do, and always felt the need to put himself and other poets in their proper place. Thus the wittily self-deflating question in “Compline”: “Can poets (can men in television) / Be saved?”

Late in his life, he said in a lecture that he and his fellow-citizens of “The Republic of Letters”—a phrase coined by Voltaire—had but one “political duty”: “To love the Word and defend it against its enemies.” And who or what are those enemies? The “principal enemies of the True Word are two: the Idle Word and the Black Magician.” On the one hand, he came to see much of his early poetry as intolerably careless not only in its technique but in its disregard for whether it meant what it said. It was full of idle words. But the other enemy was more dangerous still. The Black Magician encourages poets to believe that they can be prophets and redeemers. Or, as Auden put it once in a review, he tries to make a person attempt “to do for himself or others by the writing of poetry what can only be done in some other way, by action, or study, or prayer.” Auden uses poetry to remind us of what poetry can never give us. But, in the end, this assigns poetry a genuine and important role, as it points always beyond itself in a strangely mute witness to that of which it is unable definitively to speak. As Auden wrote in one of his later poems,

We can only
do what it seems to us we were made for, look at
this world with a happy eye
but from a sober perspective.
(Alan Jacobs, in “Auden and the Limits of Poetry, Part II,” Copyright © 2001 First Things 115 (August/September 2001): 26–32.. )

At end of his video reflection, the Apache pilot had no more words. He sighed. What he’d seen had become his flesh.

He embodies what he indicates.

He looks at us.

We take his body. We feel his blood.

We become what he is.

Mute witness.

If three thousand died in the WTC/Pentagon attacks on 9/11, and six thousand died in Afghanistan and Iraq attacks, have we yet found a balance for justice to weigh?

AUTOTOMY

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two:
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly become two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don't move.
If there is justice, this is it.

To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what's needed from what's left.

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar -
just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.

The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us
(poem by Wislawa Szymborska)


I can’t bring myself to leave where I am. There is now no other place to go. This room, this cell seems too big. I can barely find my way across the 12x10 floor where the cat underfoot instructs mindful walking. The ideas of justice are too small. If I leave this house somebody might put an automatic rifle in my hands and salute. There are several brownies left, and elseneni torte on the washing machine. I can hold out. It is Passover. Holy Thursday. The hermitage is just that.

Song of the Diamond Heart

The pine tree’s voice is always whispering,
Yet how many pause to listen?
For when the churning mind is still,
The Diamond Heart within
Reflects even the falling dusk that
Shrouds every eye and branch,
And hears, but listens not.

Walking, then, with Courage and Kindness,
Never ceasing to walk in Wonder,
We follow our ancient path.
For the Way of the sword is folded two;
Like the rose we have thorns,
And like the rose, we unfold.
( - Jo Aoi Isshi)

It is solitude keeps sanity near. The wind. Stretch of words like bristles of sumie brush touch and go.

"Life that no one dares to appraise, like that gift horse's mouth, bears its teeth in a grin at each encounter. What gets left of a man amounts to a part, to his spoken part, to a part of speech." (Joseph Brodsky)

Saskia writes from mother’s her morning meditation.
"When you find that your soul, your heart, every wisp of inspiration, every speck of the vast blue sky and its shining star-blossoms, the mountains, the earth, the whippoorwill, and the bluebells are all tied together with one cord of rhythm, one cord of joy, one cord of unity, one cord of Spirit, then you shall know that all are but waves in His cosmic sea." (Paramahansa Yogananda)

Karl Shapiro writes in an essay, “that poetry is a way of seeing things, not a way of saying things…it is a way of seeing things differently.” (in “What Is Not Poetry?”)

How do we see these days? What inspiration enters and leaves our body, stranger passing in and through us, without recognition? Is something lost if never found?

I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself. When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
(Wislawa Szymborska – Nobel Lecture "The Poet and the World")

I don’t know. There is no monastery the equal of solitude. No religious services to compare with stillness. There is no celebration as resonant as silence.

To begin with Szymborska. In her Nobel lecture (1996), "The Poet and the World", she said, "quite besides the blessings of this inner impulse," what inspired her was a continuous "I don't know." What emerged was a pervasive sense of uncertainty, a view of the human condition that was tragicomic as in The Century's Decline (1976):

Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.

Too many things have happened
that weren't supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.

Happiness and spring, among other things,
Were supposed to be getting closer.

Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.

A couple of problems weren't going
to come up any more:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.

There was going to be respect
For helpless people's helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.

Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.

Stupidity isn't funny
Wisdom isn't gay.
Hope
isn't that young girl any more
et cetera, alas.

God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.

"How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.

Again, as ever,
as may be seen above,
The most pressing questions
are naïve ones.
(Two Polish poets, by Ravi Vyas, in The Hindu, Online edition of India's National Newspaper Sunday, Oct 06, 2002)

It comes to desolation. Followed by emptiness. Arriving at simple presence.

But this is silly: one could go one to quote every poem ever written; and it would be a poem because it created the reality of whatever it happened to be about. Whenever the poet is not "oned" with the experience we can always detect the forcing, the insincerity. (Karl Shapiro, p.101, in The Poet's Work)

The poem of Passover is the difference of this night.

The poem of Sacred Triduum is the creation of reality retrieving our sight.

Needing nothing other than what is here,

Passover arrives. Holy Week climbs down Ragged Mountain. Water tumbles along stones dug open slit earth drop by falling drop in early spring.

Bless the Lord, mountains and hills; all growing things, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, seas and rivers; springs and fountains, bless the Lord. (Daniel 3)

Walking alone. Where softened hillside earth is dazed with moist memory of departing snow.

The sky is filled with ultimate truth;
Other and self are both forgotten.
Having a mind like iron,
Why care that my hair’s grey as frost?
A clear spring follows the valley far,
An old cottage lies deep in the clouds.
This is where I’m at peace,
Blissful delight without end.
- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

Both forgotten. Deer tracks -- sign of passing life.

Now on the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Where will you have us prepare for you to eat the passover?” He said, “Go into the city to a certain one, and say to him, ‘The Teacher says, My time is at hand; I will keep the passover at your house with my disciples’”. And the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the passover. (Matthew 26)

Take away theatrical plot and script at table that night, and what is left? They gather, they sit, they eat, and they talk. One is told to go do what he has to do. Everyone else takes in what is broken, blessed, and distributed to him or her.

There is intelligence in each moment, in each act, and in every passing movement.

Jesus, there with his friends, disappeared into that intelligence. He became bread. He was wine. He found them in the place they were and embodied nothing other.

The world begins this way.

Compline in cabin. Wind ruffles Open flag by screen door.

Excessive thinking
Weakens the will.
The more you know,
The more your mind
Is confused.
A confused mind gives
Rise to vexation.
The weakened will obstructs the Tao.
- Shih Wang Ming (6th century)

Moon has mere piece to round it full. Bell under icon strikes itself through silence following Ave Regina.

There is veiled talk of expanding war to another country.

Protect us, awake, keeping watch with Christ; asleep, resting in his peace.

The world feels so dangerous this week.
Absent long view comforts of theological spin, this is the week of Passover and Crucifixion. An angel of death murders innocent children. Imperial rulers, collaborating with religious fundamentalists, murder Jesus.

The Middle East again murders innocents. Imperious men with religious fervor mindlessly set on murdering a Christ they cannot abide.

It is said Jesus, dead and risen, became Christ. What will Christ, killed by Christian arrogance, become?

Vexation. Very troubling.

Following Passover, freedom to begin wandering home. Following the commended spirit of a dead man, darkness and emptiness in the souls of those shocked with disbelief and anguish.

Do not be fooled. War is not a fairy tale of good defeating evil. War is failure to emerge from bloody screams and murderous pain. Smiles, cheerful colors, and salvific rhetoric cannot pull the magic glow of something glorious from fetid contaminating lies of war.

Love without reproof of error is no love. He who judges his neighbor leniently will himself be judged leniently by God. Let man always be intelligent and affable in his God-fearing. Let him answer softly, curb his wrath, and let him live in peace with his brethern and his kin and with every man, yes, even with the pagan on the street, in order that he be beloved in heaven and on earth, and be acceptable to all men. The kindly man is the truly God-fearing man. (Lines from the Talmud, quoted by rabbi Emil Bernhard Cohn, p.310 in Constantine's Sword, by James Carroll)

Where, this week, are the kindly ones? Who will help allow all men and women their acceptable selves, wrath curbed, peace gifting, kin to all?

We need what is holy.

What is written in our heart?

Can we see, hear, or feel what is there?

Deborah and I sat Saturday morning talking about personal views of Christ and Christ-Mind before reading from The Grace in Dying of the woman who said she heard the color red as she was deep in the process of dying.
She was propped in a chair with pillows, wrapped in a robe and blankets -- quiet, enjoying the air. A beautiful birdsong filled the summer morning and she said, "Ahhh, the sound of red." She had already entered into a consciousness of greater depth, of life unfolding, the consciousness of the Witness, of increasingly pure Presence. (pp.234-5)

Presence is here, but ungraspable.

Jesus Christ, although he shared God’s nature, did not try to seize equality with God for himself; but emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and became like a man – not in appearance only, for he humbled himself by accepting death – even death on a cross.
(Philippians 2) (Universalis.com)

This is the koan of contemporary awareness. How be what you are, without seizing or grasping what you are for yourself? Put differently, how do who you are in complete relational awareness? Or, thirdly, where does letting go of who and what you are, and who and what you are not, leave you?

The Mountains in the Dawn

The moon is already hidden
Behind the western peak.
The sun is rising above the summit.
The frosty sky awaits
Dawn in cold silence.
One thousand mountains
Afar and ten thousand rocks near.
All enter into one eye.
- Jakushitsu Genko Zenji (1290–1368)

Whose eye?

Seeing what?

The prophet Jeremiah caught a glimpse of this state of wholeness when he wrote twenty five hundred years ago:
The days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers the day I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the LORD. All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Thus says the LORD, He who gives the sun to light the day, moon and stars to light the night; Who stirs up the sea till its waves roar, whose name is LORD of hosts:
(Jeremiah 31: 31-35)

Have those days that were coming -- come?

Jesus the liberator rode triumphantly into Jerusalem with palms waving and voices praising the idea of liberation the people had in their minds. Five days later he was murdered by those who feared what true liberation of the heart really meant. That murdering solution continues these days.

Jeremiah and the woman who heard the color red have another meditation for this week. We are invited to vacate all beliefs for experience. We are invited to abandon all knowledge for moment-to-moment awareness. And we are invited to relinquish whatever image of self we hold onto for bare empty presence, as is – or -- is as.

There's a line Diane called up to me for reconsideration a while ago -- her voice the color of early spring melting blue through ground surrendering brown:

Loving Christ is living uninhabited. (wfh)

The days are coming.

Who shows the real world?

A pine fragrance
Fresh from meditation
Raise the curtain
Receive the evening’s cool
Exquisite, nestled in green bamboo,
The moon, wordless
Crossing the eastern wall.
- Ts’an Liao Tzu (c. 1077)(dailyzen)

Many invoke ‘the real world.’ They say -- In the real world it takes strong military and moral leadership to subdue evil and what is wrong.

For Heidegger the ultimately real world is not a massive, undifferentiated in-itself which inspires nausea; it is rather the world of the artist and the poet – a richer and more luminous world than the skeletal world of steel and glass which man has invented; a world of flashy elements such as air, fire, water, and earth; a world which speaks to man, imperiously perhaps and obscurely, but also inspiringly. On the other hand, the level of consciousness by which man has access to the real world is not a pure nothingness which creates its own meanings out of whole cloth. It is rather a level of consciousness which harkens to the voice of Being and which consents to be “the shepherd of Being.”(pp.137-8, in An Invitation to Existentialism, by Robert G. Olson, c.1962)

Heidegger said the authentic human being is ultimately a person who has been illuminated by Being and who has made himself/herself the shepherd of Being.

As Iraq comes under United States military control there is relief the killing and destruction will be coming to an end.

It is still difficult to comprehend that ‘the real world’ requires murder, maiming, indiscriminate bombing, and terrible choices of destroy or be destroyed – to bring peace and end cruel dictatorship.

When Jesus encountered the woman caught in adultery he replicated Daniel’s intervention with Susannah and her accusers.
Jesus’ words not only save a woman but [also] defuse a potential explosion. Nobody dies that day. Instead, everyone goes home considerably more attuned to humility and truth.
Nonviolent efforts for justice and peace work that way. Like Jesus, they do not turn the crowd against anyone, innocent or guilty. Rather they gently touch that part of the conscience that is still soft and inviolate, where truth still rings true and where peace is still a tender longing.
(pp.183-4, in The Holy Longing, by Ronald Rolheiser, c.1999)


We’ve looked at the world these last weeks and months presented us by dictators and missionary slayers of evil regimes with their weapons of mass destruction.

Now that our world and spirits are shattered with violence and injustice, it is time for poets and artists to help us find a richer and more luminous world.

The Holy Longing
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.

In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.

Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.

Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
(Translated from the German by Robert Bly)

We welcome troubled guests.
We share with them a tender longing.

We are losing.

We are way off.

Think again. Perhaps you mistakenly think it is the war we are losing. No. It is something else we are losing. We all feel it. What is it we are losing? Is there a way to find what is lost?

Today sick at heart expands to sick in body. Mu-ge, Cesco, and Sando surround Saskia. Lemon tea, cranberry juice, phone call from mother. Her sore throat, shivers, and headache group under blankets.

Solitude of troubled mind and spirit engulfs the hermitage. Redwing blackbirds arrive back. Saw-whet owl stops by at 2AM. Stillness bereft of consolation haunts dooryard.

War backs up to barn unloading wounded, shocked children, shorn legs, and decapitated corpses smelling of burnt flesh and urine. Mouths open in soundless scream haunt barn and basement. Confused spirits pass close by; their sorrowing eyes ask questions not able to be held by words. No part of the world is exempt from the questions they carry. No house is soundproofed against their mute lament and grief. There is no homeland security against the questions of conscience posed by the dead and displaced among us.

Elsewhere, a smiling president commander in chief in photo-op news conference from Belfast, Northern Ireland, says no longer are ten fingers of a dictator strangling Iraqi people. They are being cut off, one by one, he says.

It is hard to balance his belief he is God’s right hand with the severed hands and eviscerated bowels of soldiers, news reporters, women, children. Onlookers wince from all points of planet’s circumference.

Prayer, I suspect, becomes unnecessary for the proud fathers of this rape insemination of cloning democracy. Their smashed test-tube testosterone creation suckle bitter gunpowder and shrapnel swizzle from male breasts demurring they are only doing their job making the world safe for their control.

Derangement, suspicion of being way off, is a constant suspicion.

The monk Thomas Merton upset many by opposing war and administration during the 1960s. Merton’s voice was scripted in Anthony Padovano’s play about him:
O.K. So I’m ill at ease with myself. The problem with a lot of people around here is that they try to keep me from becoming what I’m supposed to be. The abbot does, and most of my readers do. They want a monk who’s very – monkish. Monkey business. That’s what they want. A performance

Well, I won’t perform. It’s not the schedule or the routine or the fasting or the celibacy or the prayers that make a good monk. It’s what you do with who you are. That’s what makes you good – period. I won’t be good on schedule or perform in a monastic circus for an audience that looks in on my life but doesn’t really know or care about the inner me, the person God has given a vocation to, a vocation to be himself.
(p. 16 in Conscience and Conflict, A Trilogy of One-Actor Plays, 1st section, “Winter Rain” about Thomas Merton, by Anthony Padovano, c.1988)

It is both comforting and puzzling to consider that each person’s vocation is to be oneself, himself or herself.

Dense, soundless,
Falling through azure emptiness
Swirling clouds sing and
Dance in the soft breeze.
As the recluse hums a line
In praise of hidden places
Vagrant flakes drift in and
Stain his inkstone black.
- Tzu Lan (c 890)(dailyzen)

Up the path, chapel/zendo flag blows “Open” white against purple along brown earth mulling its own decision whether to spring this year. There, inside the rough wood silence, is found souls of the living and the dead. In stillness they gather. In language of watchful presence they sit side by side below sound of black/white chickadee breaking seed on roof.

These souls wary of words come to sit inside the word of life. They cannot hear the explanations and arguments of those taking sides arguing who’s right and who’s wrong. They know war and they know death. War and death have brought them into another way of hearing. They now hear only what is life. Anything not merely, simply, life is outside their comprehension, outside their capability. They are inside. They are inside everything, inside where no one is right or wrong, where opposites do not exist separate from each other. They are in that place where way gives way to opening for passage.

Getting opposites together. That’s what I need now in my life.

You’re a Buddhist and I’m a Christian. You’re Dr. Suzuki, the famous scholar from the east, and I’m Tom Merton, the writer from the west. I want to know why I find a compatibility between things my church tells me I should find incompatible. Do I find this because I’m arrogant or because I’m spiritual? Because I’m narrow or because I have vision? I feel as though I’m going to confession – to a Buddhist.

I went to to Gethsemane to find simplicity and freedom. Now I’m complicated and confined. Part of the reason why I’m here is because I went there. So the road I have taken has not been the wrong one.

Yes, I agree. There are no wrong roads. I once thought there were, that the whole world was a wrong road and most of the people in the world were misdirected.

I see God now as an inner gyroscope in each life – as a compass that directs the human heart safely.
(p.19, Act Three, “White Rain,” Padovano)

What is it we are losing? Is it our way, or way itself?

Not the American way. Not the Iraqi way. Not the British way. Not the way of governments that arrogantly refuse to ask anyone else about their way. What way are we losing?

The character Merton says, “I see God now as an inner gyroscope in each life – as a compass that directs the human heart safely.”

Is it “God now,” God’s way we are losing? Is it God’s way that we, each of us, find and live one’s own true way? And if we lose that, are we lost?

If the human heart loses its compass and direction to safely live in this existence with each other, has it lost its vocation to be itself?

Not being oneself is no way to live.

Pray, now -- to find way!

Susannah's prayer to God was, “O Eternal God, Reader of secrets, who know all things before they come to be.” (Book of Daniel)

We need such a reader and listener. The words spoken and written about this war, this invasion of Iraq, must be heard intelligently and read insightfully.

Staying at Bamboo Lodge

An evening sitting under
The eaves of the pines;
At night sleeping in Bamboo Lodge;
The sky so clear you’d
Say it was due to wine
Meditation so deep,
Thought I’d gone home to the hills
But Clever can’t beat Stupid
And Quick won’t match
Quiet Untoiling-ness!
You just can’t pave the Way
That’s it, the Gate of Mystery!
- Po Chu-I (772–846)

No excess of smooth explanation can cover an illegitimate act. Even if victory comes with ribbon and self-congratulation, this war has been a terrible example of clever not beating stupid.

It is a rare spectacle to watch a country overthrown, murders committed, motivations mangled, rhetoric doubted, and propaganda spouted. Ultimately, greater power has its way with lesser power and thoughtful consideration. This April is a month of fooling fools.

It happened in a garden in the Biblical story. Two disreputable men lying accuse a woman of adultery. They proceed to engineer her death because she would not satisfy their lust.

Daniel unmasked the elders as they executed a scam against Susannah. So, too, our elders perpetrate a false action against the American people and Iraqi people. They, too, will be unmasked.

All America is being accused of cruel, flagrant excess of power in what is being called an illegitimate invasion of a Middle Eastern sovereignty. Is there a Daniel to forestall the terror and anger response that seethes under the surface of world opinion?

Is anyone innocent in this accusation of war? Is there a prayer to be said?

Christians have been particularly impressed that Susannah, when falsely accused, spoke not a word to defend herself. Moreover, in Theodotion’s version, which differs in this respect from the Septuagint, she did not even raise her voice in prayer until after her condemnation. Rather, she prayed silently during her accusation and trial. As she was being accused, the text says, she simply “looked up with tears to heaven, because her heart trusted in the Lord.” “By her tears,” wrote Hippolytus, “she drew the Word from heaven, who himself was with tears able to raise the dead Lazarus.” As Origen observed, this devout gesture of Susannah is graced with a great literary irony, for it is to be contrasted with the description of her two lustful accusers: “Thus they perverted their own minds and turned away their eyes from looking up to heaven, and they rendered not just judgments.”

So Susannah, said Ambrose, did not attempt to justify herself, but sought in prayer the justice of God. The Church Fathers never ceased to praise Susannah’s silent prayer. The Lord heard her petition, wrote Hippolytus, because “God hears those who call upon Him from a pure heart.”

According to Ambrose, “She kept silence and conquered.” And again: “Susannah bent her knee to pray and triumphed over the adulterers”; “keeping silence among men, she spoke to God.” And Augustine: “She kept silence and cried out with her heart”; “Her mouth closed, her lips unmoved, Susannah cried out with this voice.”

And Jerome: “Great was this voice, not by the movement of the air nor the cry from the jaws, but by the greatness of her modesty, through which she cried out to the Lord.” And again: “The affection of the heart, and the pure confession of the mind, and the good of her conscience rendered her voice the clearer, so great was her shout to God that was not heard by men.” There were similar observations by Maximus the Confessor and others.
(--in Again Magazine, by Patrick Henry Reardon, pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and Senior Editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity.)

Today there are shouts to God unheard by men. “STOP THIS WAR,” they cry.

Prayer and innocence appear helpless. The believers in war practice their faith with cluster bombs, tomahawk missiles, and precision weapons that dismember and maim those not killed. What equivalent capacity is practiced by those who believe in peaceful means of resolving differences, even non-murderous ways of disarming and ending the reign of awful people?

We may summarize the traditional treatment of this aspect of the story by quoting Leander of Seville, who speaks of the most virtuous Susannah, who did not reply with words of justice to those who accused her of adultery, although she had that justice in her heart; nor did she repel the adulterers by any claims of her own, but with a pure conscience she entrusted herself to God alone with sighs and groans, for He is the One who sees within our minds; and thus she who did not wish to be defended by her own words was defended by the divine judgment, so that God was witness for her of the guiltless conscience that she bore and as she was being led to punishment, revealed the fact of her innocence.
(SUSANNAH, The Lost Heroine of the Old Testament, by Patrick Henry Reardon)

Our conscience is laid open before everyone. Is it pure? Are we able to entrust ourselves to God alone with sighs and groans?

There will be judgment following this war.
When we are on our way to punishment, what will reveal the fact of our innocence?

Look hard! Watch out! A trial is coming.

Susannah had Daniel to save her.
And us? Is there anyone left us to speak truth to power?
I, with so many today, am speechless. I cannot acquit myself.

As with Susannah, God is my judge.
Unlike Susannah, who was innocent, I am ashamed.

Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed Wednesday, 2 April, through Tuesday, 8 April. No Events will take place at shop or hermitage until Wednesday, 9 April.

.....
Is what we can't see not there?

Tonight the moon is nowhere to be seen. Clouds, cold darkness, and snow obscure a brilliant jewel.

See the moon’s bright blaze of light,
A shining lamp, above the world
Full glistening and hanging in vast void.
That brilliant jewel,
Its brightness, through the mist.
Some people say it waxes, wanes
Theirs may but mine remains
As steady as the Main Pearl
This light knows neither day or night.
- Shih Te (c 730)

In Iraq, an odd war of sorrowful stories, grit sand, and death blood. Words wearing cloaks of slithering deception issue from ministers of information in Baath party and Bush party. Spring snow surprises Maine. Like news of war snow falls unwelcome after too long a winter's icy occupation.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. (John 12)

Love life, lose it. Have we not yet understood Jesus on this? When you love you let go, relinquish, abrogate. Love does this; it relinquishes itself to ground of being, source, home.

Hate life, hold it fast and forever. What is Jesus saying? Do we cling to that which we hate? Are we stuck with false notions, false beliefs, and false actions -- forever? Hate binds the one who hates to that which is hated. Hate keeps, and it keeps a lonely possession of something not shared, not intimately included, not opened and invitatory.

These paradoxes!

So too, war. The hateful destruction and false belief that war is a good and godly thing. Kill to let live. Destroy to reconstruct. Lie to achieve truth.

War is not a paradox. Not this war. This war is a sorrowful achievement of death. So many Iraqis. So many Americans. And British. And others who breathe no longer.

People world over watch with skepticism. Even those seemingly whole hog for war -- they too watch. Each harbors a secret and unspoken hope. They hope that this war will rise from deceptive rationale at its inception. They hope that it is not about oil, or power, or fundamentalist religious millennial obsession. People want Messer’s. Bush, Cheney, and Blair not to be liars and arrogant cowboys. People hope that weapons of mass destruction are found in hidden depots so as to justify reasons given for aggressive pre-emptive invasion of another country. These hopes are odd hopes.

But the deaths! The killings and murders! These are not odd. These are real. The deep losses felt by families on both sides of the conflict.

The grain of wheat falls and dies.

Is ground ready? Is sand and soil willing to recognize this death as worthy gift? Can we come to seed with attentive and restorative care? Will eternal life reveal itself there?

"Now is the judgement of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself”. He said this to show by what death he was to die. (John 12:33)

Now, we hope beyond skepticism. Now, we long to be drawn to life itself!

Can we see what is here?

Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed Wednesday, 2 April, through Tuesday, 8 April. No Events will take place at shop or hermitage until Wednesday, 9 April.

.......

Is there a monastic view of war?

What does war foreshadow? What will we come to see clearly?

The more you talk and think about it,
The further astray you
Wander from the truth.
Stop talking and thinking,
And there is nothing you
Will not be able to know.
To return to the root
Is to find the meaning,
But to pursue appearances
Is to miss the source.
At the moment of inner enlightenment
There is a going beyond
Appearance and emptiness.
- Seng Ts’an (d. 606)

What if Jesus truly saw clearly; what if he actually embodied what he was saying:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself, and has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of man. Do not marvel at this; for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come forth, those who have done good, to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil, to the resurrection of judgment.
“I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me”.(--John 5 25-30)

War sickens. It should, and it does.

Translating Sutras
We go on unwinding the woof
From the web of their meaning.
Words of the Sutras
Day by day leap forth.
Head-on we’ve chased the miracle
Of Dharma:
Here are no mere scholars
- Hui Yung (332- 414) (dailyzen)

Politics sees the benefits of war. Philosophy looks at war and longs to see something better.

Paul Weiss in his book Beyond All Appearances, writes:
Philosophy is myth sobered and universalized, allowing one to see how, despite their irreducible differences, realities are always together, and could be together in better ways than they are now. (p.xviii)

What is the one continuous reality of this world? If it is war, a future of facts devoid of compassion is foreshadowed. If it is God, a transparence, unforeseen and unable to be seen, is suddenly possible as what-is seeing itself.

Monastics long for a life where reflection and prayer never cease. They are no mere scholars. Chasing the miracle of Dharma, the chaste wholeness of transparence, God in every movement, every glance, and every moment – monastic life is one with presence.

Here is the monastic view of war: We must stop war. We must end belief in war.

Living as monastics in the world we are asked to begin, end, and dwell one continuous now the reality of God.

Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed Wednesday, 2 April, through Tuesday, 8 April. No Events will take place at shop or hermitage until Wednesday, 9 April.

Chocolate tapioca and light snow this Tuesday night.

It's not that a mighty military will not win the war. The war of blood and body count is easy to win. What's hard is history. So many eyes looking at the facts. Not the spin, not the rhetoric -- the facts.

As the moon slips from
Behind a cloud and shines,
So the master comes out
From behind ignorance and shines.
Swans rise and fly toward the sun.
What magic!
So do the pure conquer
The armies of illusion
And rise to fly.
( - Buddha in the Dhammapada, dailyzen)

Who's are the armies of illusion?

What is to be loved about any country is the spaciousness of its heart. This country has its heart broken in this war. The longing for freedom. The willingness to trust leaders who say it is all about liberation. The 19 and 20 year olds who place their bodies in the way of pain and metal fragments.

In Iraq, too, so many whose hearts long for what is difficult to attain and sustain. The ability to not fear. The hope of happiness.

For all the longing and the liberation!

Tonight we pray for light to shine through the somber shadows.

Some sounds are hard to recognize.

I thought it was Morse code, or a malfunctioning electrical connection. Every night. Then on the Owl Pages website, the following:
The Northern Saw-whet Owl vocalises during the breeding season only (usually between March and May). They are silent at other times of the year. The primary courtship call is a monotonous, whistled "hoop", emitted at about 1½ notes per second which may last for several hours without a break.

Some sounds are haunting distress.
This sound I hear is that of war ripping life out of women and children at checkpoint in Iraq.

Outside our window the Owl repeats the call.

Inside our heart's sobbing the dead stay silent.

This war with Iraq is a koan.

A koan is a question no mind can answer.

A dilemma haunts America’s psyche. How do you support what you love and bring to an end what you hate? How let live that which is life and how let dissolve that which is death?

This koan takes place in many places: between parents and children, police and general population; between invading military and cruel leadership; it takes place between those who support troops and do not support the war; it takes place with loving one’s country but distrusting its leaders; it takes place with loathing a dictator’s stranglehold but seeming to impose our own death rope on the same people he binds.

The koan asks – If wisdom is letting go that which will naturally go, and foolishness is killing that which is already dead, then, how do you make murder and destruction look like loving liberation and creative transformation?

The birds have vanished into the sky,
And now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
Until only the mountain remains.
-- Li T’ai-po (701-?)

Our koan confuses us:
- On every street in America we’re trying to figure out whether we should rush into our next door neighbor’s house if he has behaviors we dislike, has something we want, does not believe or live as we do;

- In every business on our town main streets we are trying to decide if we should take it over in a hostile way, burn down our competition, or murder the nasty proprietor and put our sales clerk in to run the shop;

- In every worshipping church throughout our nation each congregation is trying to determine whether and how begin to discredit the belief system of other denominations, strip tabernacles of species of sacred bread, burn hymnals and smash icons of prayer and devotion;

- In every soul and psyche of each one of us walking the ground we call homeland, each of us is attempting to discern whether to commit suicide or say we’re sorry to someone we’ve disappointed, gouge out eyes or amputate our hands and genitalia because once or more we’ve feigned love and deceived another person, burn down our mother’s house because she failed to tell us she would one day become ill and die.

Our minds cannot answer the difficulties this war asks us to consider in our own everyday lives. Something deeper must be engaged. It is a matter of heart, of spirit, of soul, and the body itself.

No mind can answer this koan.

This war with Iraq is our koan.

Only the mountain remains.

“God perceived the world,” Sonny said in prison. This is a change from “God created the world.”

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is
In the very here and now,
The practitioner dwells
In stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows
How to dwell in mindfulness
Night and day
“One who knows the better way to live.”
( - Bhaddekaratta Sutra)

From prison, an alternative to creation spirituality, creatio ex nihilo, or even creationism. Instead, now, attention out of awareness. Now, “And the world is seen manifest,” resides alternatively alongside the phrase, “And the word is made flesh.”

God is seeing through what is.
God is what is seeing through.

There is a variation of the question, “Which came first the chicken or the egg? That question asks, “What is seeing what is?” Or, it can also be stated as a declarative, “What is seeing what is.”

Can the world be transformed by re-wording it?
Can our words be transformed by seeing the world new now?

Our deepest natural instinctive intuition sees the world in its true being.
Without adding or subtracting, are we willing or able to see the world as what is seeing the world?

Is the heart of God transformation of the world by fullness of word?

Transformation heals what is whole.
The whole of what is sees healing transformation.

Then, as everybody listens and watches with care, Andre reads his poem.

“Sun is warm,” Saskia says standing half in front of kitchen window half in front of stove stirring orange chocolate in saucepan for almond torte in oven.

Cesco stretches between worktable and cold iron wood stove watching me pass, rubbing flank of his sensitive hindquarter. It has been lovely having him come to live with us. Sando heavy-lids on daybed.

Mu-ge intent on windowsill in upstairs study marveling at open airing through screen at birds below on this sweet spring morning. He takes calculations on height and distance to ground, torque to break through screen, probability of snatching bird in flight, and remaining time to right his legs landing on broken open seed shell below feeder. It’s a long deliberation hardly distracted by triangle wind chime tolling in his ear 16 inches away. He flattens down, at ease. The sun is rounding corner of old farmhouse to window brightening white spot on nose. He jumps back into room. Paw steps descending stairs.

Gale and Tom led Laura Soul-Friend Circle last evening. There was talk of being a community of one, that of the individual willing in love to be the one they are and open to each other. A community of two might result with this foundation. So, also, a community of twenty or two hundred. All in love.

The person realizing a community of one does not give herself or himself away. Rather, they open themselves to another. A community of two does not restrict themselves to only the other, but opens their love to allow others the radiance of their love, inspiring them to deepen their own love.

When something is open there is no giving or taking. When someone opens himself or herself there is nothing of them there to be given or taken. How, we might ask, is this love?

In some introductory comments in his book The Word as Truth (A Critical Examination of the Christian Doctrine of Revelation in the Writings of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth), c.1944, A.A. Fairweather writes,
Barth insists that only the present event of God’s speaking is revelation. The written Word is the witness that God speaks. Despite its inclusion in the threefold form of God’s Word, it in no way expresses the content. (p.viii)

Two pages earlier Fairweather says,
Aquinas conceives revelation as given through intermediaries, an “inner light” elevating the mind of man to perceive with certainty what is thereby revealed. Speech is not the bearer of revelation. (p.vi)

Without written word or spoken word, what is God revealing right now?

War is visceral. No writing or speaking contains its revelation. The revelation of war is opened in the body. It, too, is incarnational.

Embodiment is the revelation of God’s presence. Like some Zen koan, we are asked to present our understanding in exactly who we are at this moment.

A community of one? Open within oneself?
A community of two? Allowing others to share the radiant mind and heart of what is found there?
A community of twenty, two hundred, two million, two billion? All open to the presence of love?

Movement and stillness:
Both are part of the same principle,
Emotions of this dusty world
Are not as important as the Way,
So I endure this thin paper robe
Until the dawn bell,
While pomegranate leaves and mulberry
Branches dance in the north wind.
- Tesshu Tokusai (d.1366)

For Aquinas and Barth there is the problem of sin. What blocks us, what defaces or effaces the revelation of divine truth and love to us? Each had their theories. For us today, what is it that diverts our energies to war and varied versions of narrow interests pitting one against the other instead of one open with and to the other?

Fairweather ends his study saying,
The witnesses to revelation in the past may warn us to expect a future self-revelation of God to us. But they certainly do warn us that His self-revelation is already abiding in operation; that it is God who awaits our response to it; and that this is the part that falls to us in the consummation of His divine purpose. (p.148)

How devoutly wished is this consummation? How complete is what is open? How unblock and dissolve barriers to love?

Open oneself to the light?

Without written word or spoken word, what is God revealing right now?

The sun is warm.

Breathe!

Wednesday Haiku
Dismal day in Maine,
Raw chill clouds over brown ground,
Rain and tears on way.
(wfh)

We have the word “Breathe” scattered about the shop. Melissa, who teaches Yoga, would post announcements of classes on the wall. When posting a new one I’d take the old one, pare off the word “Breathe” and tack it up in various places.

Names and news of the dead arrive in our homes.

Melissa’s picture is on page B11 of The New York Times, Monday, March 24, 2003. She holds framed photograph of her son, Cpl. Brian Kennedy, in his Marine’s uniform. In the caption, “'He died for all of us,’ his mother said.”

Eighth Station
Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem
Consider how these women wept with compassion at seeing Jesus in such a pitiable plight, streaming with blood as he struggled along. “My children,” said he, “weep not for me, but for yourselves and for your children.”(p.1413, The Roman Missal, 9th Edition, c.1934)

Leaving church after sitting a spell after Mass at St. Bernard’s, picking up cup of coffee and chocolate muffin at convenience store, parking on wharf, looking out at Rockland harbor. In fog beyond breakwater lighthouse two lights move from open Penobscot Bay. Ferry from Vinalhaven angles toward terminal as Democracy Now reports news about the war in Iraq. A piling across the marina has fallen over, hanging from pier by twisted wooden brace.

Weep for Jesus?
No, he said, don’t weep for me. Jesus was never interested in pointing fingers. Not at him. Not at those who’d broken the law. Not at evildoers or good doers.

Women in Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, America, Australia, and Briton are weeping. It’s always that way with war. The weeping goes on, as war goes on, for us and for our children.

Breathe!

Mountain temple rainy,
Dark and gloomy all day,
Plums still half yellow, half green;
On my lone mat,
Still and quiet,
Deep in meditation,
I don’t let birds and blossoms
Into my garden gate.
- Betsugen Enshi (1294–1364)

March exhausts itself. Soon April will reinforce the soil and human spirit. Birds and blossoms will come seeking entrance into our garden gate. They will be lovely. And needed. But for the time being we have only news of war and death arriving in dooryards. The remnant mounds of snow decrease into wet rivulets atop loosening ground-frost waiting to swig into mud.

Melissa’s son did die for all of us. For this we are grateful. And sorrowing.

From Pennsylvania, an email that Esther’s sister “is now at peace. She died about 3 yesterday afternoon. We are glad her suffering is over.” She too, after years of living with deteriorating disease, dies for all of us.

Those women in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, and all women in Jerusalem and Palestine today, weep for themselves, their children, sisters, brothers, mothers and fathers.

Those who have the spontaneous, sincere wish to attain enlightenment for the ultimate benefit of all beings are called bodhisattvas. Through wisdom, they direct their minds to enlightenment, and through their compassion, they have concern for beings. This wish for perfect enlightenment for the sake of others is what we call ‘bodicitta,’ and it is the starting point on the path. By becoming aware of what enlightenment is, one understands not only that there is a goal to accomplish but also that it is possible to do so. Driven by the desire to help beings, one thinks, For their sake, I must attain enlightenment.
(--p.249-50, The Dalai Lama, in Radiant Mind)

We weep because we do not yet see the world longed for in our hearts and minds. We long for what Christ longed for. We long for what Buddha longed for.
What is this we long for?

Breathe!

Can you feel it? Can we find what Brian and all the sons and daughters of women everywhere and at all times have died for?

Here's a metaphor. We are all women in this metaphor. All conceiving, participating in creation, giving birth to instances of truth and beauty. All are women. All is woman. Until love completes its goal we only seem to be a fragmented division of male and female, boy and girl, human and angel, God and non-God.

In this metaphor, we are all Americans, all Australians, Britons, Iraqis, and every ethnic child of every woman throughout the world.

We weep because those who die in war, and those who die in all conflict of unawareness, are stark profound reminders.They die for us.

For us.
Can we get even the smallest glimmer of who we are?

Who are we that someone dies for us? Who are we, died for?
Really, we must ask ourselves, who are we. (No facile answers. Please. No unreflective, unsilent, unstill, or unaware responses – please.)

Until love completes us, we weep.

For all our sake, we must attain enlightenment. We must become who and what we are in love.

Breathe -- that all might live! That 'all' lives within each and every one.

Breathe -- until the metaphor, the transfer bearing us across the divide, comes true.

Breathe -- that our hearts, safely dwelling in love within each one, will be the light we see through.

In the meantime, our hearts go out to those who weep.

A young girl felt in her body the sense of an angel. She didn't know better. She yielded to the invitation to embody what could not be embodied. They say she did not know man. Yet, there she was, saying yes, becoming pregnant.

Young soldiers know her fear.

One’s own nature is great because
It can contain all things.
As all things are contained in
Your own nature,
If good and bad people are
Viewed with neither attachment
Nor repulsion, also without
Contamination, the mind which
Is like space, is called great.
For this reason, it is called maha.
( - Altar Sutra)

In Iraq old men and old women pray "God is great." Children are born of such mystery. The Middle East is full of mystery. God lived once in that desert. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Saddam, have each known the call of the stars in black night to preach water to sand. Yes, even Saddam. He is given us to weave a story about our souls in the early morning of new millennia.

Like Pharaoh's chariots racing toward waiting other side of Eden's rivers, the conquering army will not be dissuaded in their dream of victory. Running after them are billions of eyes and ears accounting for the half-mile and full mile the rocket fired and the bomb dropped. Whole civilizations of gamblers bet their opinions on who will win and what point spread of death and surprise strategy will cover the blowing grains pinging against khaki cloth and mottled steel at mid-day.

Gabriel told Mary she would give birth to a savior. Mary told Joseph he would have to wait his turn and turn his mind over and over deliberating whether God was in the wind that blew over his wife. Joseph told himself there was solace in the emptiness of empty desert night where nothing is yours and that which you do not have is not even yours to give up. Joseph didn't make it into the Magnificat. His soul didn't magnify nor glorify the Lord. His soul was dry as mid-afternoon outside Basra. His mind was as befuddled as drying blood in a stretch of sand near the edge of Nasiriya.

Annunciation to Mary has been windswept bare and clean by flecks of driven sand over twenty centuries of polishing pronouncement. Angel speaks, Mary responds, God silences everything within new residence. Impregnation by annunciation! How perfect. Say it, and it comes to be.

How perfect -- say war and it too comes to be. Like the burning bush that will not be consumed, a new Bush burns with vision of a new desert and a new conception for a new century. Hardly has Gabriel turned head to return to the intuition of God that centuries traverse the dunes arriving at Baghdad as light of day falls under dark blanket of night. Loud explosions and fiery bursts of light make the desert darkness festive.

We are present at the whispering of some other angel between missile and mortar. A crackling of syllables suspended over machine gun spurts and shoulder stinger burps fired at targets just a ways away. Our ears know the sound that insinuates itself between the curses and prayers of frantic faces.

First verse was turmoil. Second is promise of peace. This third stanza is who gives a shit; let's do these mothers to kingdom come. An odd old hymn of human din and discouraging certainty! A cakewalk, some said, as they danced the sexiest theory with sluttish deceit around the propaganda microphone. This lie is going to town tonight!

What travels these nights in the desert? Not Mary. Not Gabriel. Not Joseph. Not a story of miracles and mysteries. Not us. Not tonight. Not, it seems, ever.

"Let it be done to me according to your word," said Mary. She sensed the angel’s message with her yes dropping deep into an ovule's first yawning stir. "Let it be," she said, and it came to be.

Long lines of religious storytellers have disappeared behind extinguished fires and acrid smoke.

Their disappearance blends perfectly with out-breath.

A fool, it is said, can hold an extinguished dream in open hands.

This smoldering invitation to be what God is. Is anyone willing to say yes to life?

Tota pulchra es, Maria!

Note: The Bookshop/Bakery is closed today, Sunday. We will reopen on Wednesday the 26th. Sunday Evening Practice at the Hermitage will take place from 6-8pm

...
With war, death.

Attain the mind of emptiness,
Preserve the utmost quiet:
As myriad things act in concert,
I therefore observe the return.
Things flourish,
Then each returns to its root.
Returning to the root is called stillness:
Stillness is called return to Life,
Return to Life is called the constant;
Knowing the constant is called enlightenment.
( - Lao-tzu)

With death, sorrow.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure: then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
(-poem "Death be not Proud" (Holy Sonnets: X), by John Donne)

With sorrow, prayer.

All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(-- from poem "Epilogue" by Robert Lowell In Day by Day, c,1977)

With prayer, remembrance.

Note: The Bookshop/Bakery is closed today, Saturday, and tomorrow, Sunday. We will reopen on Wednesday the 26th.
…

Surrender to Spring!

Winter has lost its spot on the calendar page. Snow melts into earth. Violent war shudders and shatters all opinion to the contrary. We are crowded with cheerleaders, with righteous acceptance of war, and crowded with disguises that hide a terrifying enemy in our midst. That enemy is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is a crowd that excludes anything but the crowd. We must remember each individual. We must make room for each one of us. In our lives. In this country. In the world.

It is time to look at and listen to Meetingbrook’s motto:
Embodying the dwelling place of the Alone,
Stepping aside to make room for Another.

Keeping Quiet
by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.

Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems to be dead in winter
and later proves to be alive.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

The speech of war is shrill terror. Do not believe soft cadences of explanation. Do not be seduced by confident tones promising beneficial outcomes. The language of war is the extraction of silence from the soul. Replacing it is incessant insinuation of success and “It’s just us, only us,” a signature mantra that numbs heart and mind
“Life is what it is about,” says the poet. Right now it is about war, bombs, bullets, suffering, and death in Iraq.

There is no acceptance of war. It is seen. It is heard. It is grieved over. But it is not accepted. It can’t be accepted.

War appears as “is not,” and takes away what is there.

“Is not,” like non-being, or evil as the absence of good, cannot be accepted. There isn’t anything there. There isn’t anything to accept. War, in this day and age, is failure camouflaging itself as ideology. Ideology is failure dressed for success. .

What is? What is, is. Or, as prayed worldwide, Only God is.

Surrender is what is! Surrender is a great gift. We can only surrender to what is. Being is. The antithesis of war is surrender. The government of Iraq will surrender. Soon, the government of the United States of America will surrender.

Iraq will surrender to war and the demands of war’s agents. America will surrender too. That surrender will be different. America will surrender to an inevitable awareness that war is failure. Ideology, like the one positing one country as model and matrix, is seductive. Like all who have used power to get what they want or believe to be true and profitable, this country too will learn that power and war are seeds of destruction infecting the hand sowing them.

There are deeper seeds to be thrown and cultivated. There is a need to surrender to what is. What is, what some call God, is all there is. No power, no war, no good intention, no blueprint for political success – none of these are capable of surrendering to what is, surrendering to God.

It is a frightening thing to claim to know the mind of God or attempt to bring about someone’s version of the will of God.

We are on fragile ground.

Count to twelve.

Keep quiet.

Surrender to spring.

Note: The bookshop/bakery is closed today, Friday. We'll reopen for Saturday Morning Conversation at 9:AM.

...

The temptation of the desert is strong.

Jesus said to them, ‘Go and learn what the text means, "I require mercy, not sacrifice."
I did not come to invite virtuous people, but sinners.’
(Matthew 9: 13 New English Bible)

Words, diplomacy, and international good faith have been sacrificed in America's action against Iraq.

Open my lips, Lord, and my mouth will proclaim your praise;
for you do not delight in sacrifices: if I offered you a burnt offering, it would not please you.
The true sacrifice is a broken spirit: a contrite and humble heart, O God, you will not refuse.
(--from Psalm 51)

There will be scant sincere praise for the actions of America. There was no praise for Saddam Hussein's rigid hold on his country. There will be little praise for George Bush's incomprehensible motivations for shunting sound and sensible means other than invasion and war.

Those who seek liberation for themselves alone cannot become fully enlightened. Though it may be said that one who is not already liberated cannot liberate others the very process of forgetting oneself to help others is itself liberating. Therefore those who seek to benefit themselves alone actually harm themselves by doing so, while those who help others also help themselves by doing so.
- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)

But we are a poor and foolish voice calling for mercy, longing to praise but stuttering instead invective, and contrite for being overtaken by strong feelings of disgust and mistrust of the perpetrators of fear and violence.

It is an odd sacrifice called for by this war. Respect is bloodied by the steel edge of fear.

It is an odd mercy evoked by this war. With Saddam gone, someone, perhaps the slaying hunter, could very easily inherit his power.

In the Christian metaphor the Lord's Prayer ends with the words, "For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, now and forever." Whoever takes power, appropriating it to himself, has begun the process of deterioration that accompanies something cut off from its source. This is why "power" is best left in the hands of God. When someone says, "I am God," they draw all attention to themselves, like iron-bits to magnet. I fear those who reserve to themselves that which belongs to the participatory gathering of men and women of good will -- that is, to the presence of God felt in the assemblage with faith, trust, and love.

Mere mouthing of those three words 'faith, trust, and love' -- deserves skepticism. We are not meant to spin and finesse rhetoric like a salesman only interested in selling his wares. But we are meant to embody those words until the words themselves disappear from our vocabulary and emerge in clear eyes, serving hands, and feet that are unshod walking with us.

This is how lies are recognized. Lies have eyes that shift and mock, hands that slap and take, and feet that kick then walk away.

We already long for someone to replace the man that has tricked us into thinking he represents us in the world.

In the spiritual desert of Jesus, the struggle of Jesus was not to accept the offer put to him by the tempter.
In the political desert of Messer’s Bush, Cheney et al, our struggle is not to accept the offer put to us by them.

Like Jesus in his Near Eastern desert, ours, too, is not the world, the power, and the adoration of others. Jesus left the desert understanding only God is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. Like Jesus, we'd best not leave the desert before learning to decline the offer being made to us by the leaders of this administration in Washington.

Rather, imperialism must give way to the kingdom paradise that resides within and around each one of us; super-power must give way to participatory-power-of-divinity that includes everyone in the conversation about its use, and; self-congratulations must give way to resplendent and glorious humility that lives, breathes, and has its being in the service of all beings in the world.

The temptation of the desert is strong. We have to decline the temptation of the desert.

Resist sacrificing others. Respond by being merciful to one and all. Refuse to accept the offer of fools. Rather, embrace counter-intuitive wisdom -- rendering to God the transmission rendered to us all.

Let there be 'No' to the sacrifice of integrity for fragments of wealth -- give it back!
Let there be 'Yes' to the rising spirit of conscience and consciousness, mercy for our broken spirits -- share it well!

In the harbor a big gray barge completes replacing mooring blocks for finger floats where dredging took place through the winter. It rounds the outer channel marker buffeted by head seas and increasing wind on its way to Rockland Harbor.

A storm is coming. The cold sea is a deep darkness whose surface locks our attention. Across the planet in a desert country bombs and bullets battle the night in a deep darkness of war. We must learn to penetrate the surface of night, to surrender into the deep darkness, to confront the vast desolation that believes war is just, merely another tool to manipulate human consciousness.

War as tool locks down mind and heart.

Letter to a Wild Monk

Other than the birds,
Who watches over you?
Lordly peaks, your neighbors.
White head held pillowed on a stone.
Grey robe ragged, but not soiled
Chestnuts pile up on your path.
Monkeys circle where you sit.
If you ever set up another Zendo,
I swear I’ll be the one who sweeps the floors.
- Kuan Hsiu (832–912)

We need someone to open the doors and sweep the floors of our thinking and opinion about war. War is mud splattering and cloaking hearts and minds. Miring.

But now you have rejected and disgraced us; you do not march out with our armies.
You make us retreat before the foe; those who hate us plunder us at will.
You hand us over like sheep to be slaughtered, scatter us among the nations.
You sell your people for nothing; you make no profit from their sale.
You make us the reproach of our neighbors, the mockery and scorn of those around us.
You make us a byword among the nations; the peoples shake their heads at us.
All day long my disgrace is before me; shame has covered my face
At the sound of those who taunt and revile, at the sight of the spiteful enemy.
All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, nor been disloyal to your covenant.
Our hearts have not turned back, nor have our steps strayed from your path.
( -- From Psalm 44)

Our hearts and minds lurch toward center ground between meditation and mockery. One by two all day they wander in. Refugees from combating sides of belief and opinion. Our door is open. We were going to close. Business should not continue as usual when so many are falling into deep darkness. But we are not a usual business. There's no need to explain or defend, take or not take sides, be cheery or despondent. Each arrives as, how, and who they are.

(Sign on door of bookshop):

War is terrible.
…
We sorrow with
all suffering the terror of war.
…
We pray for everyone affected by this war
…
Please care for yourselves,
whether active or at rest.
…
Be compassionate with
those with differing opinion.
…
Take some silence and stillness.
…
Our chapel/meditation cabin at the Hermitage is open & available for visiting.
…
Bill & Saskia
20March03

(Should we be closed, we will leave a message on answering machine, 236.6808, and post on www.meetingbrook.org, Today at Meetingbrook the date we’ll reopen)

Out of deep darkness we cry -- unmire our minds, sweep clear our hearts!