Consider investing in and supporting Meetingbrook

Something taking shape takes time.

Mu-ge walks down path from brook. It sings with flow from torrential rainfall two days gone. Sando and Cesco are stretched out on cabin floor. Sandalwood incense burns before altar. Saskia sails out Rockport Harbor. Sunny late afternoon. Breeze.

We've been talking about Cape Breton and Katy and Joe's property. A woman from Lincolnville wonders if some in the area will eat crow. Nancy comes in after loading and moving a half-cord of wood to her off-the-grid house. She likes what she hears of the property and is happy Buzz has said he’d be of assistance -- his firm consults with corporate businesses and nonprofits, and he has offered to help design Meetingbrook's intent to acquire and utilize the property in Cape Breton. (For years. between snacking on French pastry puffs and telling stories of commanding naval vessels on high seas, he's been watching and most likely waiting for us to ask for help.) Three couples mull how they might be part of the project. Visitors from away (Stamford and Saratoga Springs) animatedly expressed their desire to follow the process and stay in contact.

Locals, even the skeptical and dubious, have come to suspect there's something different about the conversation and the property. They listen with interest to the announcement I proclaim -- That I will not look at another property in Nova Scotia should this prospect fail to happen -- and they believe it to be a true statement. It seems so -- this one or none other. They wonder out loud – In Maine then?

We've not made an offer yet. We plan to soon, once things fall in line. We've communicated intent. There's a strong sense that what happens next is important. The time is ripe. Curiously, even should someone claim the property out from under us, what happens next is important. I trust the owners will understand our interest and follow our process. We move deeper.

Many here tell us they don't want to see us leave Maine. If our intent were simple -- just to move there -- we'd sell the house and the business and transplant. But other options are being considered, a bit more complex at first sight -- to retain hermitage and shop, and negotiate with interested members of the wider community to partner in establishing Meetingbrook Hermitage's Center for Skillful Means and Engaged Service. This creation would span Barnestown Road in Camden to the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton.

Meetingbrook is conceived as a Hermitage for prayer, meditation, and contemplation; a Schola for conversation and study; and a Center for eco-spirituality, community learning & service.

The vision includes serving as a contribution and resource for retreat and respite for individuals requiring a safe and reflective place because of illness, life re-evaluation, or personal time-out.

We also aspire to serve as an adventure based alternative and continuing education center for individuals needing to update professional certification or licensure in their work fields. Our offerings would include a balance of intellectual, spiritual, physical, and practice integration. This would be experienced in a setting intended to foster healthy equilibrium and flexibility of mind and spirit in personal life and work environment.

One further focus is end of life attention and safe navigation of that journey. There are far too few places that nurture and encourage conversation and reflection on the full expanse of personal life, relational life, near-death, nearing-death, and death. The Center at Meetingbrook will present an environment where ongoing attention is given to the open integration of heart and mind, practice and theory, silent contemplation and supportive conversation about our ways of living and dying. The solid principles of hospice, life affirming psychology, and death acknowledging concerns will be honored.

Our original creation of Meetingbrook Hermitage's Schola Gratiae et Contemplationis intends to be a place at the intersection of four distinct templates: monastery, library, university, and retreat house. A fifth addition to the crossing paths would be hospice lodge.

Anyone interested in supporting this intersection?

Anyone interested in investing his or her life, however you wish, to this crossing path?

Anyone interested in contributing donations of money, time, labor, or materials to this idiorhythmic rebuilding of human spirit/divine spirit?

Anyone interested in praying us into and through this vision?

Please.

Do.

Do we need a great philosophy?

I've been watching the ugly things said by operators for and supporters of George Bush about the war record and person of John Kerry. I've watched the sorrowful conduct of the unfortunate war in Iraq. I watch the rigid dismantling of any civil discourse or authentic conversation by our political leaders -- especially the two men seeking the top administrative position in the executive branch of American government.

I also watch many in town who wish to say anything critical about the President, Vice-President, or Attorney General, drop their voices, look around, and lean in -- as if being heard by anyone else would bring on them fearful consequences. To experience the nervous upset of these people, their fright and caution, is itself unnerving.

It reminds me of something I learned years ago. When I worked with adolescents in residential treatment centers, I noticed that other residents gave a wide berth to what they considered particularly disturbed individuals. It was easy to find out whom the others considered genuinely 'crazy' -- there was a reluctance and fear about saying anything about them or coming close to them. This dynamic, unfortunately, feels familiar. Instead of 'crazy' perhaps the signals sent out are: unquestioning certainty they are right and all others wrong; changing the meaning of words to fit their view of the world; and single minded repetitive phrases responding to inquiries asking light of thought and explanation be given as to why particular actions, decisions, and policies are put in place.

Charles Peguy said that when a person dies he or she does not die of a disease, but of all of life. Some die years before they are buried.
(p.1260, "Meditation for Spiritual Growth," in The Vatican II Weekday Missal, c.1975)

There is a fear of life that results in disease. There is a fear of death that results in making of life a thing to fear.

Why are so many frightened of this president and his associates? Is it because more and more people believe American leaders want fear, that these leaders do not share a common mind with the majority of people in this country and the world who long for honest peace, that these leaders wish to destroy whatever is not their idea of the way things should be?

A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.
(- Charles Peguy, 1873-1914, French poet and essayist)

We need a great philosophy because of the experience many relate. These people say what they see. They say that we are being bludgeoned by narrow ideology and self-serving arrogance by leaders of the current government of the United States. There is a palpable uneasiness and despondence.

We must always tell what we see. Above all, and this is more difficult, we must always see what we see. (Peguy)

It is sad to see so many frightened and angry people. They feel torn apart by mean-spirited and virulent lack of kindness in matters of politics and patriotism. The teaching behavior of partisan aggression is a hard learning. As a model for how to make one's way in the world, it is difficult to imagine any parent or teacher thinking it appropriate as lesson for children and youth. Yet, it is becoming the norm inundating the population as a whole. How could we possibly disclaim that our way is not hostile dissembling of reputation and character, destruction of identified enemy, and winner take all?

Terrorism is terrorism by any other name. No matter what name is pinned on the behavior that blindsides and destroys the other for one's personal ideology and belief -- everyone recognizes the seeding of fear when it occurs. Can the harvesting of this misshapen and mutant crop be far away?

To love anyone, especially to love one's country, once entailed keeping a close eye on things, saying what you see, and offering help to correct what might be going wrong. These days, more and more people have come to feel that any critical comment might get you placed on a watch-list, detained for questioning, or beaten by militarized upholders of the peace.

Critical thinking and informed dissenting opinion become more and more rare. Public discourse these days seems to favor derisive putdown and shut-your-mouth scornful one-line slogans. We become discouraged by disdain and derision. What is needed is authentic, respectful, and responsive conversation.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors. (Charles Peguy)

We've forgotten an important consideration -- that we might be wrong. We deny we could be missing the mark. We posture and pose as know-it-all's who can cause a world of harm to anyone who thinks otherwise.

Who walks humbly anymore? Rather, swagger, strutting, and smirking are the runway fashion of the day.

Where is Church in all of this?

There are two sayings I like about the Church, from opposite poles. One is: “At the heart of Christianity is the sinner.” The poet Charles Peguy said that; he is thought to have become a Catholic just days before he was called up for the defense of France in 1914, and shot through the head on his first day in battle. Christianity came into being because of the sinner, for the sinner; everything begins there, returns there, works there. The other saying, by a French colleague of Peguy’s, a crotchety “prophet of the Absolute” named Leon Bloy (who once opened a novel with the line: “This place stinks of God!”), runs as follows: “The only tragedy in life is not to have been a saint.”
Between those two poles, pulled this way and that, each Christian struggles.
(Michael Novak, U.S. Ambassador, Theologian, and Author)

Is a 'saint' someone who sees something as it is, engages what is taking place with kindness and genuine assistance, and does it all in the open presence/name of the One God who is as is for all?

The idea that we are a Christian nation is becoming a sniggering back-story for a different strain of heresy, a heresy unlike those of the early days of the church. What does this heresy look like?

Call it the Heresy of Nominal Appropriation. The aim -- to Keep Christ Out of Christianity. The teaching is simple -- Say the name "Jesus" over and over, bait people to believe you are actually praying to and follow Jesus, then switch to adding your own narrow interpretation of how things are going to be instead of the Gospel mandate of love, forgiveness, and redemptive compassion. Steal the word "compassion," redefine it to mean your own brand of control and willfulness, and sell it in place of genuine compassion. Call dirty water clean. Name bad as good. Say that despotic rule is democracy. Call ordinary men and women suspects perpetrating evil. Change the rules and hold that some facts are merely not facts and lobby that lies are now more valuable than truth. Do not encourage the practice that looks into the hearts and minds of people for the purpose of discovering what good and trustworthiness reside there, but rather instill fear and mistrust, encourage suspicion and call for a patriotic duty to inform and betray one another in the name of freedom, in the name of God. Steal the name and believe you possess what the name signifies.

This heresy of Nominal Appropriation is theological and secular. Identity theft is the new crime against God and human beings.

It is, some would say, diabolical. (In Greek, 'dia'= twice, through, and 'bol'= to throw, toss). Hence, here, diabolical could mean being tossed twice through one word or name, second-guessing, double-dealing, turning upside-down, inverting meaning, changing truth, revising history, or, diverting attention.

Instead of propaganda or dogma, we need a great philosophy. Many among us once believed that the teaching words and kind acts of Jesus were fine signposts on the long path toward final understanding and generous behavior. These days there is a severe threat to that once held belief.

Is there a great philosophy to either retrieve or replace the original constructs of love, compassion, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice? Is the teaching of current secular government in this country strong enough to supplant, in name or in act, the philosophy formerly known as Christianity?

What would it be called? Is there even a name we might give it? Or have all names become vulnerable to exploitation and plundering?

MARGARETA. ... Do you believe in God?

FAUST. Sweet, who can dare
To say that he believes?
Ask anywhere -
A sage or priest - and you will see
The answer seems like mockery
Upon the asking.

MARGARETA. Then you don’t believe?

FAUST. Nay, darling girl, no need to misconceive.
For who can say that name
And claim
A very certain faith?
Or where is he with feeling
Of some revealing
Who dares to say it is a wraith?
He that’s upholding
All and enfolding,
Holds he not,
Folds he not
You, me, himself?
Towers not the vault of heaven above us?
Does not earth’s fabric bear us bravely up?
Do not the friendly eyes of timeless stars
Still gleam upon our sight?
Gaze we for nought in one another’s eyes?
Is not life teeming
Around the head and heart of you,
Weaving eternal mysteries
Seen and unseen, even at your side?
Oh, let them fill your heart, your generous heart,
And, when you lose your being in that bliss,
Give it what name you will -
Your joy, love, heart, your God.
For me, I have no name
To give it: feeling’s surely all.
Names are but noise and smoke,
Obscuring heavenly light.
(Dialogue in Faust I, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Without names, where would we look? Without names, how will we recognize one another?

Without beginning or ending, your original wisdom has been shining forever, like the sun. To know whether or not this is true, look inside your own mind.
(- Padmasambhava, 8th cent)

Look there.

Look here.

Carefully, approach a great philosophy.

Watch and pray.

They stand in prayer and vigil outside a woman's house. She is undergoing a change in health. Some things are dropping away. Speech, movement, length of days.

She is facing what all standing outside will face. This is why so many faces turn toward her in her house. Vigil holds her gently with light in the space she now finds herself.

Your true nature is not lost in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of enlightenment. It was never born and can never die. It shines through the whole universe, filling emptiness, one with emptiness. It is without time or space, and has no passions, no people, and no buddhas; it contains not the smallest hairbreadth of anything that exists objectively; it depends on nothing and is attached to nothing. It is all-pervading, radiant beauty: absolute reality, self-existent and uncreated. How then can you doubt that the Buddha has no mouth to speak with and nothing to teach, or that the truth is learned without learning, for who is there to learn? It is a jewel beyond all price.
- Huang-po (d. 849)

For several years I sat vigil in hospice. I learned much of nothing through the night at bedside. Nor can I remember a more powerful gift than the grace to be with someone as they went within.

I told the woman in the house something a few years ago. I said we'd always share a bit of awkwardness. We have done that, a bit from an inconsequential exchange over a passing moment. I also find that awkwardness with what many say of God. It is an unimportant and fleeting moment that is anything other than vigil.

The exchange being made now crosses edges and borders and stands silent and open, maybe empty, at each courageous movement made toward the next breath, next glance, or next stillness.

I stand with you, here, awkwardly, in this your next step.

I greet you. With love.

As you are.

We begrudge generosity.

A family sat on patio sipping tea Tuesday. The man stood by the bakery case and spoke of his Chinese mother-in-law who accompanied the family to her birthplace small village in rural China. She was there long before Communism, when sharing with neighbor was polite and useful, not rule of law. “Did we live over the shop?” he asked. I said, “No, not yet.” He said he and his wife would like such an arrangement. He listened to the economic tightrope and juggling routine we employ – asking only donations for guests upstairs, coffee and tea by donation, grilled bratwurst by donation only -- hospitality without expectation.

What obstructs us from sharing everything we have with everyone – with no motive other than sharing goods benefits all?
Though they liberate their minds directly and develop to this state, they still are unwilling to dwell there. They sense the slightest thing as mountainous; anything that seems to cause obstruction they immediately push away.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

This morning after morning practice in the cabin, a visit to church. The outside swarmed with workers pulling siding, stretching Tyvek, setting scaffolding, and doing other details that was a marvel to see – a dozen or so blending into a pattern or repair without knocking each other over. It was one of those crews donated by a parishioner to do fast and needed work like a rolling thunder cloud on a sultry summer’s afternoon. They fell quiet at 8am, when Mass began.

Inside the priest read the Gospel: Matthew 20:1 - 16
“For the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the labourers for a denarius a day, he sent them into his vineyard. And going out about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place; and to them he said, ‘You go into the vineyard too, and whatever is right I will give you’. So they went. Going out again about the sixth hour and the ninth hour, he did the same. And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing; and he said to them, ‘Why do you stand here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us’. He said to them, ‘You go into the vineyard too’. And when evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his steward, ‘Call the labourers and pay them their wages, beginning with the last, up to the first’. And when those hired about the eleventh hour came, each of them received a denarius. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received a denarius. And on receiving it they grumbled at the householder, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat’. But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you, and go; I choose to give to this last as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?’ So the last will be first, and the first last”.

I wondered if the final sentences had to do with the difficulty we have accepting our life as our own. Would a present day worker’s union allow the guy employed at the 11th hour to receive wages equal to the guys taken on at the first hour? Do we rebel against someone getting what we get – even as we want to get what someone else gets? Someone with millions of dollars receives the same rain and the same sun as does the man with nothing. Some woman with five homes in five states faces the threat of encroaching death, as does the woman calculating her food stamps while looking at her cupboard. Nature doesn’t distinguish.

My life, we think, is mine – for now. Is that the sum of it? Is that, conversely, the naught of it?

At 8:25am the priest exited the middle aisle out front doors to send off the attendees. The work began again. The crew re-appeared as though from another dimension, air-compressors started, ladders mounted, and choreographed ballet-dancers interweaving the staging.

“So the last will be first, and the first last”. The line could parallel the Heart Sutra – ‘First is first, last is last; no first, no last; first is last, last in first.’ It is like the line in the film Solaris when the man asks the woman, “And I alive, or dead?” She answers him, “There’s no need to think like that anymore.”

She goes on to say, “We’re together. Everything we’ve done is forgiven. Everything.”

So…will we have to wait a while longer to enter the baffling experience of life beyond expectations?

Allowing our own life to be what it is – completely drenched with generosity – with no counting the cost or measuring outcome?

Is this why we are angry with God and each other? Is this why we fear God and each other? Are we terrified about what we are?

Is it possible we are loving, generous, hospitable, enlightened, and compassionate beings -- and we are afraid of our true nature?

Unless we become, completely and generously, what we are – we will remain strangers and hostile combatants against God, each other, and ourselves.

How will we ever come to dwell in our true home? Happy? And, safe?

No pushing away.

Un-begrudge.

I worry about Messer's Bush and Cheney the way I worry about unidirectional thought and emotion.

Zen is omnidirectional.

In those who attain Zen, mental machinations disappear,
vision and action are forgotten, and there are no
subjective views. Zen adepts just remain free, and are
imperceptible to anyone, either would-be supporters or
would-be antagonists. They walk on the bottom of the
deepest ocean, uncontaminated, with free minds, acting
normally, indistinguishable from the average person.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

Learning to pray is learning to read. It requires learning to see the words as spoken from every direction at once.

This morning’s psalm gave me pause. Were the words pointing to and from “O Lord,” or about and for the reader? Words point to and from the speaker and reader at the same time.

Take the words from Psalm 90:
So we are destroyed in your anger,
struck with terror in your fury.
Our guilt lies open before you;
our secrets in the light of your face.

All our days pass away in your anger.
Our life is over like a sigh.
Our span is seventy years
or eighty for those who are strong.

And most of these are emptiness and pain.
They pass swiftly and we are gone.
Who understands the power of your anger
and fears the strength of your fury?
(from Psalm 90)

I felt it in the gait of the man leaving the chapel – 'Enough with this angry God who has us on pins and needles like some drunk terrorizing his family!'

Then the words shifted. This is not about God. This is about humankind. Like all naïve beliefs that are unidirectional, this writer throws onto ‘God’ what he sees around him, what he perhaps feels within him.

Days that pass away in anger, in blame, or in hostile behavior toward an object of anger, blame, or hostility, are days of delusion. We have fooled ourselves into believing ‘they’ are the cause of our anger. We engage in erroneous thinking when we set ourselves up as the targets of another’s hatred or hold others in contempt for their disagreement with our thinking.

Here is where I worry about Messer's Bush and Cheney in the same way I worry about our inability to read the Psalm with wisdom.

So we are destroyed in our anger,
struck with terror in our fury.
Our guilt lies open before us;
our secrets in the light of our face.

All our days pass away in our anger.
Our life is over like a sigh.
Our span is seventy years
or eighty for those who are strong.

And most of these are emptiness and pain.
They pass swiftly and we are gone.
Who understands the power of our anger
and fears the strength of our fury?

The psalm is not about anyone other. A more profound reading is required. It is a unidirectional mistake to make God other, make enemy other, make terrorist other, and make us other. That mistake pits us as unaware adversaries whose prime response is to defeat and eliminate the other. Every 'other' is enemy. This realization haunts Western politics, theology, and philosophy. This dualistic misreading is the history of millennia -- the scourge of illiterate violence committed in the name of God, country, flag, or narrow interest.

Is anger uni-directional? Would a willingness to dwell omni-directionally change anger into compassion?

To see something from every side, as well as from below, above, outside in and inside out -- is Zen seeing. Zen seeing is transparency. We see through, and are seen through, all at once.

We live in dangerous times. Some would want to convince us there is only one way to see things, usually their way. Anyone who sees things from a different perspective is considered disloyal and a threat. Anyone willing to engage the complexity of omnidirectionality is branded indecisive and untrustworthy.

Hence, I pray for Messer’s Bush and Cheney. Like the man who walked down the path this morning mulling God’s anger, these two servants of the people must come to a more honest and profound reading of themselves and the world.

Anger points fingers and weapons. Compassion surrounds with help and hope.

We all must begin anew.

To learn to read.

And.

Pray.

We write to Cape Breton property owners and their agent saying we wish to purchase the mountain property in the valley, bordered by pond and river, sprinkled by brooks, between warm Northumberland Strait and salty Bras d’Or Lake.

The intent is serious. We wish to have a Meetingbrook Hermitage on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. It is now time to line up and step forward to commit to this project.

What will it entail? This is an excerpt sent to the owners:
It is obvious to us that the place would make a wonderful Meetingbrook Hermitage in Cape Breton. We have begun to resurrect plans we've been sketching out for several years. We're quietly optimistic this can happen. It would be a place of prayer, meditation, and retreat (Hermitage); a place of shared learning and study with a focus on ecological and spiritual interdependence (Schola); and a place of hospitality, creativity, and a community business, ultimately on the Cabot Trail footage -- (a Center for Skillful Means and Engaged Service) -- e.g. bookshop, bakery/cafe, and community resource.

The house and property are both simple and lovely. Large acreage. House only ten years old. Quiet, with a monastic feel to it. It would be a resource for local and visiting folk. A place of respite, reflection, and recollection.

It is time to welcome the Buddha and all the Buddha-hearts to reveal their innate wisdom about how to live in these difficult times.

It is also time to invite a plunge through the surface of our lives and find at center the Christ and all the Christ-minds to engage one another in service and hospitality.

When a buddha appears in the world
And expounds various teachings
According to people’s inclinations,
All of the teachings are expedients,
Just for the purpose of breaking through
Obsessions, doubts, intellectual interpretations,
And egocentric ideas.
If there were no such false consciousness
And false views, there would be no need
For buddhas to appear
And expound so many teachings.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

At Lectio Divina yesterday morning we chanted and read the Heart Sutra. A fragment of it lighted up:
No ignorance and also no extinction of it,
and so forth until no old age and death
and also no extinction of them.
No suffering, no origination,
no stopping, no path, no cognition,
also no attainment with nothing to attain.
(from The Maha Prajna Paramita Hrdaya Sutra)

Each moment, each event, is of itself. We, with our minds, place everything in context – quantifying and locating, explaining and justifying. But, if we see each person, moment, or occurrence as in-and-of-itself, each is unique and distinct, not attached nor detached, yet completely with one another.

One of our tasks is learning how to dwell in the reality of all beings that sees, accepts, respects, and serves each person, place, and thing as if they were what they are – present and real beings: full of sangha strength, enlightenment, and compassion; mystically embodied incarnations in the community of God made human, God within creation.

This task takes skillful means and engaged service. It takes practice and study, meditation and prayer.

One of the most colorful and illuminating representations of skillful means in Mahayana Buddhism is the bodhisattva of compassion, called Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, Chenrezig in Tibetan, Kuan-yin in Chinese, Kwanseum in Korean, and Kannon or Kanzeon in Japanese. As the bodhisattva who hears and responds to the cries of the world, the great variety of iconographic forms of this bodhisattva exemplifies skillful means responding to diverse suffering beings. One of the most memorable of the numerous forms of this bodhisattva has a thousand arms and hands, many of the hands with implements such as flowers, vases of ambrosia, musical instruments, ropes, daggers, hatchets, and wish-fulfilling gems. Each of these tools may be useful in specific situations with different beings. In addition to multiple hands, some forms of the bodhisattva have eleven heads, to observe beings from different viewpoints and respond effectively with different guises.

The practice of skillful means reminds us to listen to others respectfully, honor their differences, and recognize that others may have different needs and benefit from different teachings and practices. Following the model of the bodhisattva of compassion, we must not self-righteously cling to any particular method. We can learn various useful approaches, and as we learn to trust and respond with whatever is at hand, our skillfulness can develop.
("An Introduction to Skillful Means" -Taigen Dan Leighton, http://www.mtsource.org/articles/skillful.htm)

It is August 15. We remember our early elder, Janet, who died on this day a few years ago.

The Feast of the Assumption is an important day in the Catholic religion. It is the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin, the mother of Jesus Christ. This feast commemorates two events - the departure of Mary from this life and the assumption of her body into heaven.
The Church's official doctrine of the Assumption says that at the end of her life on earth Mary was assumed, body and soul, into heaven.
Some mistakenly believe Mary "ascended" into heaven, which is incorrect. It was Jesus Christ who ascended into heaven, by his own power. But Mary was assumed or taken up into heaven by God.
Pope Pius Xll, in 1950, defined that Mary "after the completion of her earthly life...was assumed body and soul into the glory of Heaven." Her body wasn't allowed to corrupt nor was it allowed to remain in a tomb. http://www.holidays.net/dailys/holidays/assumption.htm

Fr. Andrew Greeley has written:
Story:
Once upon a time the Lord God went out on patrol of heaven just to make sure that it was still a city that worked. Everything was fine, the hedges trimmed, the grass cut, the fountains clean, the gold and silver and ivory polished, the mall neat (Of course they have a mall in heaven. Where else would they put the teenagers!). He stopped by to listen to the angel choirs sing and they were in great form. Then on one of the side streets he encountered people who had no business being in heaven, at all, at all. Some of them should have been serving a long sentence in purgatory, others would not get out until the day before the Last Judgement, still others would make it into heaven only on very special appeal. So he went out to complain to St. Peter. You've let me down again, he said and yourself with the keys of the kingdom of heaven. I have not said St. Peter. Well, how did they get in? I didn't let them in. Well, who did? You won't like it. I have a right to know how they got in. Well, I turned them down and didn't they go around to the back door and didn't your mother let them in!
(Theologically this story of course is nonsense. But as a story it reflects Mary's role as reflecting the maternal love of God).
(Andrew Greeley, August 15th, Feast of the Assumption of Mary (Lady Day in Harvest), http://www.agreeley.com/homilies99/aug1599.html)

We’re getting ready to make an offer.

Aware of uncertainty.

Yet, quietly confident.

We’ll try skillful means.

Meditatively.

In prayer.

To see.

Whatever we think of God, God is no doubt a simpler and stranger reality.

The composer wanted to talk about Cape Breton. So too the educator, and the film administrator. Others are just watching. Many are unsure what to think.

What does Maha mean?
Maha means great.
The capacity of the mind
Is broad and great, like space;
It has no boundaries;
It is neither square nor round
Neither great nor small;
Neither blue nor yellow;
Neither long nor short;
Neither anger nor joy;
Neither right nor wrong;
It has neither head nor tail.
All Buddha lands are like space.
The wondrous nature of all is
Fundamentally void and does
Not contain a single thing.
- Altar Sutra

We rise at 5:55am, sit for 40 minutes, walk for 10, chant or recite. Today tea and toast with man who brought Bolivian incense.

At conversation tonight reading about love and peace in Islam.

In the film Solaris there is a question as to what constitutes a human being, and the curious aspect of repetition.

If we are grounded in love, not a single thing can split or separate us.

Does the word 'element' really mean 'God out of mind'?

No mind sees God.

As it is.

Wandering Cape Breton was wonderful.

Dinner with Katy and Joe a feast of Italian cooking and generous hospitality.

As rivers flowing into the ocean find their final peace,
and their name and form disappear,
even so the wise become free from name and form
and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit
who is greater than all greatness.
(Mundaka Upanishad 3.2.8)

When the right combination is found, tumblers tumble open.

The sound we hear right now is the sound of the open.

We taste, and see.

Sacred sensuous.

To unsay oneself.

To allow the breeze to be the voice that flows through you. To be unpronouncing. To unanounce yourself.

In prison yesterday, Wendell spoke of passive awareness. Charlie, Craig, Jared, Joe, Ryan, Saskia and I listened.

French poet, Simone Weil (1909-1943) wrote, "Love is abdication. God is abdication". Abdication is the formal relinquishment of one's claims, rights, responsibilities and power.

Talk included Robert Nozick, Krishnamurti, John O'Donohue, Eckhart Tolle, Francis Thompson, and the Zen Master's dry shit on stick.

The truth is, had God not abdicated, there would be no hope for creation, if in fact there would have been a creation at all. None. Zero. There would have been no incarnation, no crucifixion and no resurrection. And there would be no new creation. There would only be hopelessness and despair in everything we do and say everywhere we turn. The cries of Ecclesiastes would be our cries. "Meaningless! Meaningless! . . . Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaning- less" (Ecclesiastes 1:2 NIV). Life would be filled with nothing but unrelenting emptiness, sorrow and woe. There would be no Romans 8:28. There would be no redemption. Praise God this is not the way is is.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified" (Romans 8:28-30 NIV).

It was for but a moment in time, but can we even begin to take hold of the gravity of God's abdication? Can we comprehend the astonishment of the angels at such a sacrifice? We can only humble ourselves and accept it by faith. Clearly, the abdication of God was an act of purest selflessness and, as it can only be with God, abdication demonstrates for us what brokenness looks like. We can only begin to take it in by the grace of God. And O the wonder of it all.
(from "The Brokenness of God, A Biblical Look at the Humility and Brokenness of God," by Anne Murchison, http://www.annemurchison.com/brokennessofgod.htm)

The words 'this' and 'here' and 'now' riveted attention. Even with, as Craig said, the life so many men lived in the prison. He was saddened by the plight of his brothers.

We remembered Thompson's words:
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come !"
(from poem "The Hound of Heaven", by Francis Thompson, 1859 - 1907)

So we go.

On.

Being said.

Jesus on Tabor studied Zen. On Golgotha he studied Zen.

In Hiroshima 59 years ago today, at 8:15am, one of the darkest days in world history, the world's first A-bomb attack took place. The bomb, dropped by a U.S. plane on August 6, 1945, caused the deaths of an estimated 80,000 people. Eighty thousand died right away; perhaps as many died from radiation or injuries. President Harry S Truman, announcing the news from the cruiser, Augusta, in the mid-Atlantic, said the device contained 20,000 tons of TNT and was more than 2,000 times more powerful than the largest bomb used to date. (from bbc.co.uk)

At that hour of 8:15am many Japanese people beginning their day studied Zen.

When your original reason
For studying Zen is not right,
You wind up having labored
Without accomplishment.
This is why ancients used
To urge people to study Zen
As if they were on the brink of death.
- Yuan wu (1063-1135)

When Jesus was seen through at his Transfiguration, no one could figure what it meant.

Now about eight days after these sayings he took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And as he was praying, the appearance of his countenance was altered, and his raiment became dazzling white. And behold, two men talked with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep, and when they wakened they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. And as the men were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah” – not knowing what he said. As he said this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” And when the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silence and told no one in those days anything of what they had seen.
Luke 9:28 - 36

Of course they were afraid as they entered the cloud.

Listen! And keep silence.

If someone could tell what was seen at the Transfiguration, if someone could tell what was seen at Hiroshima, they would surely be deemed crazy.

Who can be seen through? Who can see through the actions and events of men and history and retain sanity, hope, or compassion?

Today is that day.

Becoming transparent.

We pray with, in, and through each one and all of us.

Eternal life is now.

It is no-time -- like the present.

Meanwhile, the priest takes the host and breaks it over the paten. He places a small piece in the chalice, saying quietly:
"May this mingling of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ bring eternal life to us who receive it."
(Breaking of the Bread, Communion Rite, Catholic Mass, Weekday Missal)

Bring now to us. That's what we pray.

Is 'now' the body of Christ?

Receive it!

Breathe.

Each and all of us.

It is not merely a matter of having a personal relationship with Jesus. Isn't it a matter of personifying Christ as well? Or, embodying enroute?

Is the divine energy of the Original Logos the very impulse that enlivens each and all of us toward realizing the true direction of our lives?

Jesus wondered aloud why God had not appeared to prevent his death, asking: "Why have you forsaken me?"

Night sitting
The hermit doesn’t sleep at night:
In love with the blue of the vacant moon.
The cool of the breeze
That rustles the trees
Rustles him too.
- Ching An (1841–1920)

There is no "me" in divinity. Divinity constitutes all of us. The kindness of God is allowing the dissolution of any idea, belief, or behavior which makes an "other" of each and all of us.

God is not to be seen face-to-face nor possessed as one might a person or a favored thing. God resides in the intimacy, engagement, and transparent compassion each extends to each and all of us long for in our lives.

No one was forsaken.

Separateness dissolved.

Christ arose in the wholeness.

Some bread? Wine? One another?

Converse. This is how what is lost is found.

Exhale. Inhale.

Soon, distinctions disappear.

By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
(Prayer during preparation of the altar and the gifts)

Water in wine, one in the other, is symbol enough to throw us into the reality.

We touch one another, wish Peace of Christ, suspecting, pretending, actually enacting what we really are.

Walking forward. Small bow. Open hands. Host. Tilting cup. Sip.

Returning consecrated.

Sitting still.

Sitting.

Still.

Would moving to Cape Breton Island be same or different?

(It's a trick question. "Same" or "different," say Zen folk, exist only in the mind.) Moving to Cape Breton Island, to follow that way of seeing, would only be moving to Cape Breton Island. No more. No less. Just that.

Everything feels not quite "just that."

There’s a stream, and there’s bamboo,
There’s mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hidden, clouded hamlet,
A mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
Have to live, to get that
Simple.
- Yuan Mei (1716–1798)

Still, we'd like to think everything is what it is, no matter what story we tell about it.

People may not know, for instance, that the Morning Star is the Evening Star and so their beliefs about and their reactions to what is in fact one and the same planet can be quite different according to the description under which it is considered.
(p.202, entry "Leibnitz Law" in A Dictionary of Philosophy, by Antony Flew, c.1979)

There are times it is painful to hear one more explanation, warning, narrative description, or apologia for things as they take place in the world. It is a curious time when even dire alerts about possible terrorist attacks are based on planning information begun four years ago, only recently discovered, and released at this time. It is all beyond understanding.

Leibnitz law is the principle that if one thing is identical with another then anything that is true of the one must also be true of the other.

The political parties, Democrat and Republican, seem identical. The names Bush and Kerry have become targets of abusive and negative statements. People seem to actually believe that by trashing one of them the other comes out smelling of roses. That's not the law.

In Contrast to Spinoza's view that there is only one substance, Leibnitz declares that there is an infinity of substances, created and maintained in existence by God. The world that these substances compose is the best possible, created by God precisely because it is the best possible world. Each substance is simple, that is without parts, and for this reason Leibnitz calls it a 'monad', a term that means 'unit' or 'unity'. A substance is also immaterial, and therefore may be called a soul.
(p.199, "Leibnitz", ibid)

The words 'unity' and 'soul' seem anachronisms in the fierce rhetoric of denunciation and denigration.

Some consider the upcoming election a bellwether. The man whose bell leads the sheep of the flock come election results that first Tuesday in November will poise us at open grazing field or precipice tumbling drop.

An alarming sentiment grows -- it augurs an end of trust in the electoral process. We enter an age of blasts and bombast. Decisions by fiat and proclamation will replace, some say, plebiscite and popular choice. Those who know best will decide what is right for this country. And those who know best trust in power and explosives, hostile aggression and preemptive retaliation for possible future hostilities. Sucker-punches and blind-side hits are the new ungentlemanly and indecorous strategies replacing conflict resolution and negotiation.

A mild, tranquil place?

To get that simple...

Which field?

What bell?

Forget my pain, cause your pain.

Banks, financial center, lower Manhattan, will be hit. So say government spokesmen for terrorist warnings. They have specific and credible information that an attack is immanent. The director of homeland security also says even if a building or two are lost they will never disrupt the business of finance and economic strength the United States represents.

So, there. Sticks and stones may shatter our bones but wealth, our ground, will always charm us.

No one wants a terrorist attack. No one wanted the Spanish Inquisition. Attacks and inquisitions happen because whoever “no one” is, they get what they want.

Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Complete in itself?
Who would have expected that the
Self nature is fundamentally
Immutable?
Who would have expected that the
Self nature can create all things?
- Altar Sutra

I’ve begun to suspect that calling upon “God” is an act intending to defeat Self nature. When the republican or democratic politicians say “God bless you, and God bless America” they continually hypnotize listeners into a subtle state of misidentification, a sort of schizoid distance from their own Self nature. I don’t think they suspect they are divisive and disuniting – they think it's a time-proven strategy for getting them something they do not want the other to have. That might be power, wealth, or position – but the dynamic is the same: negate the other, become the one. So they think.

When they become ‘the one” or “number one” or “the only one” – there is a curious shift that occurs. As the “one” they become the “other.” “One” has to say “no” to every contender to their position, power, or wealth. They become their opposite. Their “no” attaches them to “the other.” It might be thus that for those claiming to be “the one,” God is made “the other.”

Is the opposite of “one” -- “the other?” Is the negation of “one”-- “two?”

The opposite of “one” is “no one.”

The curious shift that occurs is “one” cuts off “two,” “many” and “all of us,” by taking claim to “the one” and ignoring whatever is not “one” with them.

Disagreement goes, as does dissent. Others who do not fall into the camp of the one are believed to deserve the poverty or disempowerment occurring in their lives. Their lack of living wage, medical benefits, social assistance, or any real say in the choice, participation in matters of governance, and stance toward the rest of the world is dismissed and disinvited.

The ugliness of terrorism and the ugliness of ruthless response by war – both done in the name of causing pain to the other – is the remarkable insensitivity and unawareness on both parts for the pain each carries within.

The main question is “Do you own your pain?” As long as you do not own your pain – that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world – the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. When you speak to others about your pain without fully owning it, you expect something from them that they cannot give. As a result you will feel frustrated, and those you wanted to help will feel confused, disappointed, or even further burdened.
(p.72 in The Inner Voice of Love, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, by Henri J.M. Nouwen, c.1996)

When the man in prison said, “Spirituality is how we carry ourselves,” he spoke well. We shred spirituality by implying God will assist in any plot to terrorize or decimate any people.

Owning our own pain is not blaming or punishing anyone else for it.

Philosopher John Caputo, in the introduction to his book, said,
We have it from Aristotle himself that life is hard. There are many ways to miss the mark of virtue, he said, but only one way to hit it, and so the former is easy but the latter is difficult (Nic. Ethics 1106 b 28ff.).
(Opening line in Introduction, “Restoring Life to Its Original Difficulty,” in Radical Hermeneutics, Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, by John D. Caputo, c.1987)

Buddha made it the first noble truth – There is suffering in life.

Jesus embodied it so as not to deny it, but to transform it.

And we – what do we do with the original difficulty of life?

(Off in distance, thunder. It travels closer. Dogs and cat make their way back into the house.)

Let’s come home.

Dwell true.

All of us.

We are a country in the middle of a war.

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to share the inheritance with me." He replied to him, "Friend, who appointed me as your judge and arbitrator?" Then he said to the crowd, "Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one's life does not consist of possessions." Then he told them a parable. "There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest. He asked himself, 'What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?' And he said, 'This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, "Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!"' But God said to him, 'You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong?' Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God."
(Luke 12:13-21)

Yes, there's a war in Iraq.

Bullets, bombs, and billions.

An inmate in Maine State Prison said on Friday that spirituality is how we carry ourselves.

What matters to God?

Carry this question!

In prison in the morning we'll talk about spirituality
 
If everyone is already enlightened, teachers show up when anyone shows up. However unknowing we might be, the light resides at center.

If everyone has that of Christ-reality within them, incarnations of that reality find themselves revealed when invited or prompted by circumstance or attentive being.
 
From the passions arise worry,
And from worry arises fear.
Away with the passions, and no fear,
No worry.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

Brennan Manning in his book A Glimpse of Jesus : The Stranger to Self-Hatred says something close to the following: Jesus was not compassionate because he was the Christ; he was the Christ because he was compassionate.

We'll speak about spirituality because spirituality is about finding a way to compassion through all the diversions and dispersions leading to something other than compassion.

Prison might seem like a difficult place to embody compassion.

No fear. No worry. Will we ever see their absence?

We'll see it. Any day now.

We will.

See. 

In cabin chapel/zendo statue of Francis moves from corner to under loft ladder.

There's something agnostic about July.

In corner where Francis was, small wood box with anchor carving on top.

I tell someone it is a tabernacle.

It holds nothing.

Home of God.

Sitting.

Within.

No thing.

Political convention begins.

Jimmy Carter spoke tonight in Boston at the Democratic gathering. He said: Ultimately, the issue is whether America will provide global leadership that springs from the unity and integrity of the American people or whether extremist doctrines and the manipulation of truth will define America's role in the world.
 
He's 80 years old, been president of the US, won a Nobel Prize, built houses for the poor, and monitored elections worldwide. Jimmy Carter thinks that in this upcoming election, "At stake is nothing less than our nation's soul."
 
I’ve finished the pavillion
On the pond’s west bank
Cleared out the trees
Across to the east
And this
No one understands
But I just wanted a place
To wait on the moon.
- Po Chu-I (772–846)

Hillary Clinton introduces her husband Bill Clinton who rouses the crowd. It's been a long slog from a ruptured vote in November 2000 to this official beginning to restore voter will in November 2004.

Neither too far to the right nor too far to the left, Americans will have a new chance to decide where the middle resides.

In an article published on Monday, July 26, 2004, Steven Laffoley from Nova Scotia, writes "Dissent is Now Dangerous" on CommonDreams.org about conversations he had in Maine. He says, In the local newspaper, buried on page twelve, I read that the Bush administration is test flying the conditions necessary for postponing the November election. A terrorist attack? A hurricane? An earthquake, perhaps?
I find myself wondering: is the "dissent" of pastors, landscapers, and filmmakers enough?
It is then that I realize: I am scared. After all, in America, dissent is now dangerous.

It is an odd thought that in America dissent is now dangerous.

To make now safe again.

We need an election.

A change.

The experiment of Meetingbrook is the intuition that enlightened ordinary individuals serve as unknowing teachers to us.

They don't know who they are. Nor do we try to determine who is or is not teacher. Meetingbrook holds as true that each person, each being, and each situation is itself a teaching.

Those who are following the Way should behave like a piece of timber which is drifting along a stream. If the log is neither held by the banks, nor seized by people, nor obstructed by gods, nor kept in the whirlpool, nor itself goes to decay, I assure you that this log will finally reach the ocean. If monks walking on the Way are neither tempted by the passions, nor led astray by some evil influences, but steadily pursue their course for Nirvana, I assure you that these monks will finally attain enlightenment.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

We're grateful there are beloved Zen Masters with devoted followers who call themselves students of the master.

We're ever further grateful there are so many ordinary non-masters who devote themselves unknowingly to be teacher and guiding examples of learning needing to be integrated within one's being.

Not to choose specific teachers, but to attend alertly to each person/being/situation is to exercise no-choice in the practice of mindful presence.

Compassion and humility are harmonious sounds in this practice.

Listening reveals dissonance and obedience encourages clear resonance as response to what is heard.

We assume enlightenment -- everyone's.

We practice to pass through.

To remember.

One's sound. 

Together.

Practice helps us pass through. The word ‘practice’ comes from Greek, praktikos, passein to pass over, fare, do; akin to Gk peran to pass through – more at FARE. (Webster’s Seventh)
 
Prepositions and pronouns. That’s what we talk about Tuesday evening after conversation. We read Finding Freedom, Writings from Death Row, by Jarvis Jay Masters. Do we pray to, with, in, for, or as God? Do we use you, he, she, it, I, they, or us when referring to God?
 
Some do not believe anything about God. Belief, they say, disperses direct experience.
 
“Beliefs about anything limit our experience and cause us not to be able to perceive what’s in front of our eyes and nose.” (Pema Chodron, on tape Pure Meditation)
 
That which we call the world is the result of a host of errors and fantasies which have gradually arisen In the course of the total evolution of organic nature, have become entwined with one another and are inherited by us as the accumulated treasure of the entire past – as a treasure: for the value of our humanity depends on it. Rigorous science is in fact able to detach us from this ideational world only to a slight extent… but it can gradually and step by step illuminate the history of how this world as idea arose…
(Epigraph by Nietzsche, in Joan of Arc, The Image of Female Heroism, by Marina Warner, c.1999)
 
The idea emerges and takes root that only those who currently are in power deserve to be and remain in power. The belief grows that to criticize those in power is unpatriotic and hateful – even if the criticism is accurate, factual, and true. A great number of Americans actually believe the distorting rhetoric and misleading behavior on the part of the ruling administration has been good for the country and is excusable because the leaders are in power.

The story goes like this: our enemies hate us because we love freedom; some Americans criticize freedom-loving leaders who will do almost anything to defeat and eliminate our enemies; therefore, critics are enemies who hate freedom and hate their own country.
 
A story lives in relation to its tellers and its receivers; it continues because people want to hear it again, and it changes according to their tastes and needs. (Prologue, Warner)
 
We are asked to believe that there is only one truth – namely, that whatever we are told is the truth.
 
Mr. Joachim, who has considered very carefully the whole question of error, comes to the conclusion – which seems the only possible one for a monistic theory of truth – that the essential characteristic of error is the claim to express truth unqualified (p.143). He says: The erring subject’s confident belief in the truth of his knowledge distinctively characterizes error, and converts a partial apprehension of the truth into falsity’ (p.162).
(p.135, “The Monistic Theory of Truth” in Bertrand Russell’s Philosophical Essays, c. 1966) referring to book The Nature of Truth (c.1966) by Harold H. Joachim)
 
We need to deepen our practice. Our practice is to pass through the barriers and boundaries thrown up around us, distortions of truth that cloud perception and inhibit authentic inquiry. We are in danger from those claiming to “express truth unqualified.” Arrogance, lack of humility, and smug exclusionary certitude are clues to detect the danger.

Spirituality involves the practice of no barriers and prayer of no boundaries. This practice must stretch through theological and political aspects of life. Spiritual practice threads the disparate into a wholesome unity allowing what is true to pass through.

When pulled together
And bound, there stands
A hut well thatched:
But take it apart,
And we have the wilderness eternal.
- Anon

We need a new civil compact and social contract, one where we include everyone in a network of care and response. The tune we hear from the current breed of believers in the might and rights of the few is startlingly painful to the ear.

The World Is Too Much with Us
 
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.---Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.
(poem by William Wordsworth)
 
To get through this, to pass through a dark time, takes practice.
 
What is practice?
 
Love this question.
 
See it through.

What if middle way and middle trinity shared a secret?
 
Michael is concerned seven Carrier Strike Force Groups will be on maneuvers off the coast of China. Jean talks of 'walk-ins' to the planet the way one might walk-in to a hair dresser. Pia points out a blockage in throat of someone not acting on his intuition. The other Michael remembers when he did well as a healer. Dick has fleeting passing doubt about a Fox News Irish guy who might not be fair and balanced. Buzz holds an undistributed belief that to act is better than to think. Joanie says she didn't have a date on Sunday. Lola brought her dog in the car to meet Saskia who was off in her rowboat. Sylvia had lunch with someone who spoke to her mood. Jory liked Adyashanti's poem about "Here." Nancy is wondering about narrative and naming. Lloyd decides to leave early Saturday afternoon when there are too many unspecific words being read. Kristin performs her one woman show in Belfast. Sam plays harmonica. Susan wears swap shop hat. Betty sits a spell.   
 
Charlie is confident when he sings:
Man, they said we'd better
Accentuate the positive,
Eliminate the negative,
Latch on to the affirmative,
Don't mess with Mr. Inbetween.
No, don't mess with Mr. Inbetween!
(Transcribed from vocals by lyricist Johnny Mercer with Paul Weston and His Orchestra, recorded December, 1944)
 
I'm not that confident. I think we've lost sight of the between. From Buddha's middle way as silent truth to Jesus' middle say as loving word, from Aristotle's in medio stat virtus to Tolkien's Middle-earth, and to the piquancy of the Middle-East in our minds today -- we are invited to a new centrist philosophy that dwells in-between and acknowledges filiation and sorority with adjacent edges of everything.
 
We are in the middle of it all.
 
You are in our midst, O God.
 
The poet says his secret is silence.
 
Say nothing more.

Suddenly sun after night of rain. Brook tumbles Ragged as dogs drink and immerse up from crossing footbridge on morning mountain circle.
 
The Sun
 
 Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
 
than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
 
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again
 
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
 
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
 
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
 
as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--
 
or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?
(poem by Mary Oliver )
 
We walk with a question. Is Ganz Anderer, (German for ‘wholly other’), of a piece with ‘no other?’ I’d been reading John Caputo’s Against Ethics. He writes about Abraham’s “Me voici.” He is making the point that in the French the ‘Me’ is the accusative case, the object of speech, addressed by an ‘other.’
 
The dogs don’t have this question. Cesco doesn’t even seem interested in responding to being addressed by my voice saying, ‘Cesco, come here!’ when he trots away to another dog or follows a car to the other end of the Snow Bowl parking lot from which a tan dog named Admiral emerges to a wagging tail. 
  
Jesus entered a village where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
She had a sister named Mary who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening
to him speak.  Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
"Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me by myself to do the
serving?  Tell her to help me."  The Lord said to her in reply, "Martha,
Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.  There is need of
only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken
from her."
(Luke 10:38-42)
 
Can we be serving and listening and yet maintain there is no object, no other being served or listened to? Martha and Mary perform this theatrical piece with the one many have come to call the Christ. “Tell her to help me,” says Martha to Jesus. Mary says nothing.
 
In the shop today Chicken is cooked on the grill, salad plucked, podded peas shelled, strawberries sliced, goat cheese crumbled, and lettuce torn into wooden bowl. Cesco lays near where Buzz sat. Sando burrows in dirt under deck. Joanie sits quietly by fireplace. Therese calls from shop out front about remaining pickings. Earlier Alease calls from Maryland and we catch up the years. An artist from Rockland comes by and goes back with his sketch/paintings.
 
If there is only here, if there’s no time like or but the present, then the question about wholly other or no other  falls between the asking and the response. It is the ‘between’ that holds everything together.
 
What is between Martha and Mary? What is between serving and listening? What is between any of us?
 
Jesus’ answer is a trick answer. He tells Martha, “Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her." The trick is in the wording comes down to us in translation.
 
Jesus says, “It will not be” – is what is “taken from her.” Mary does not have “it will not be.” She does have what is, the part that will not be.
 
There’s something imbedded here that neither the dogs nor I comprehend as the afternoon lengthens. Saskia returns from her row out to sailboat in Rockport to secure lines for the blow someone says will come tonight.
 
Do not let anything come between you and what you consider not-you. Let nothing, what "will not be," rest between each and everything. The “better part” that Jesus refers to is listening/serving, each in each, wholly other/no other, as it is, on earth/in heaven.
 
Wholly no/wholly yes.
 
Otherless child.
 
Sometimes we feel.
 
So.  

To unknow is to allow the intelligence of the situation to reveal itself.
 
THE GOOD MAN HAS NO SHAPE
 
Through centuries he lived in poverty.
God only was his only elegance.
 
Then generation by generation he grew
Stronger and freer, a little better off.
 
He lived each life because, if it was bad,
He said a good life would be possible.
 
At last the good life came, good sleep, bright fruit,
And Lazarus betrayed him to the rest,
 
Who killed him, sticking feathers in his flesh
To mock him. They placed with him in his grave
 
Sour wine to warm him, an empty book to read;
And over it they set a jagged sign,
 
Epitaphium to his death, which read,
The Good Man Has No Shape, as if they knew.
(Poem by Wallace Stevens)

They might not know. But they are correct -- the good man has no shape.
 
Shape is not brought by the good person. Shape is given by what is found wherever that person is.
 
There are far too many words about things we know nothing about. All day long chatter and narration, commentary and senseless prattle.
 
Here too.
 
If there is a God, wordlessly that God dwells.
If there is a Christ, the body of Christ's incarnation belongs to you.
If a Holy Spirit has anything to do with this world, it is an allowing reality full of forgiving for the unallowed.
 
Form is not only emptiness, but emptiness is the unshapable loveliness of silence allowing itself our inspiration to sound through it.
 
Even when nothing is heard.
 
We are being spoken.
 
As we are.
 
Known.  

Two mornings two young skunks in Havahart moved up Barnestown Road to Bald Mountain side of road. Third day empty. But the ritual drive is made anyway. 
  
We never know what is trapped under blanket cover until door is open to set it free.
 
Look up to heaven and down on earth, and they will remind you of their impermanency. Look about the world, and it will remind you of its impermanency. But when you gain spiritual enlightenment, you shall then find wisdom. The knowledge thus attained leads you to the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters
 
Separating young ones from mother is not a happy task. Sunday night the conversation was about mother and mothers. Someone suggested to give up the role of mother is what is meant be the sentence, "Mother-love is the only love that loves toward separation."
 
When role is abandoned, person sounds through. We become part of the unfolding reality, parenting (from L. parere=to give birth to) that person or that reality by participating in its appearance or life.
 
At Friday Evening Conversation talk of the need to step out of the game of dualistic stories, of good and evil, right and wrong, the mind games and brain washing of greed and power. There was passion and intelligence in the ad hoc topic of cultural change and the fomenting fear insinuating the country.
 
To stand mind-naked and humbly unknowing, allowing each the unfolding reality of their being, with loving attention, and no agenda.
 
Compassion.
 
For skunks.
 
Alike.
 

"Watch and pray," the saying goes.
 
I think the correct saying is -- "Watching is prayer."
 
Cloudy mountains, fold on fold,
How many thousands of them?
Shady valley road runs deep,
All traces of people gone
Green torrents, pure clear flow,
No place more full of beauty;
Birds sing my own heart’s harmony.
- Shih-Te (c. 730)
 
By looking, or watching, we allow what is unfolding the reverence of attention.
 
Just as the phrase "custody of the eyes" suggests we allow what is there to be seen in its own integrity -- not imposing and not detracting -- we learn to pray by seeing what is there in full alertness.
 
What is there -- full of beauty.
 
Of truth.
 
In itself.

The man from Georgia says that AIDS is God’s punishment on homosexuals. The question on C-Span is whether abstinence or condoms is the best method of preventing AIDS. Each of the three succeeding callers says they cannot believe each preceding call. The moderator smiles.

If you want to learn the Principles,
Don’t study fine bound books.
The True Pearl’s in a hemp sack
The Buddha nature rests in huts.
Many grasp the sack
But few open it.
- Shih Te (c 730)

On the floor of the Senate, Frank Lautenberg, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, is saying he is seeking a special prosecutor to investigate Halliburton and Vice President Dick Cheney and the no-bid 2.5 billion contract awarded for services in Iraq. Was Cheney involved in awarding the contract? Sen. Lautenberg says he was, and that an investigation is needed on this as well as the 160 million overcharge, or profiteering, on the part of Halliburton

The day starts hot. Cesco and Sando return with Saskia from walk to Snow Bowl. The two dogs snooze flat on floor.

I am the escaped one

I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
Never finds me.
(Fernando Pessoa)

The poet does not want to be found. Time was when “soul” flourished desired and revered as essence of a human being’s life. Here the poet, as the escaped one, hopes his soul never finds him. What spiritual stance is this?

[840]
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book,
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
(Fernando Pessoa, from 35 SONNETS, 1918)

Dreams come and go. Fact stays. The dream of a country. The dream for one’s life. The dream of how our lives conform with the theological dream of the life of God.

What fact stays? All of them. A “fact,” (from L. ‘facere’ ‘factus’ = to do, to be done), is a thing done, something that has actual existence.

Whether government or schools of theology – it is not what is dreamt of that matters, it is what is that matters. Facts have a way of staying around long after dreams have wandered off.

“We are ever unapparent,” says Pessoa in his sonnet.

We have escaped our soul.
We look everywhere in desperation.
What fact locates?

What are we, what are you, what am I –- doing?

Look.

Lost?

Mind is maddened by greed.

Greed appropriates the communal. It privatizes to the personal what belongs to no one. What maddens the mind is the belief, and therefore the urge to act on this belief, that land, things, ideas, people, and God can be owned. A more absurd notion, from a spiritual perspective, is hard to find.

There is anther view, namely, that each piece of earth, each thing, each idea, each person, and certainly what-is-called-God belongs completely, and only, to itself.

And yet, the most maddening history of humankind, whether secular or religious, is predicated on wanting for one's own what can only belong to itself. We want power, land, cause of riches, and sole rights to each. We name this want with conventional names -- from materialism to infallibility, from private property to dogma, from capitalism to fatwa, from democracy to tyranny. Whatever name we give it, the message is similar --"This is mine; You owe me."

Is there a way out of the vault of privatized belief? Is the "Way" -- in either Eastern or Western tradition -- something saner for us?

Those who have strong passions are never able to perceive the Way. It is like stirring up clear water with your hands; you may come wishing to find a reflection of your face, but you'll never see clearly in disturbed waters. A mind troubled and vexed with the passions is never able to see the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

We have nearly ceased to listen. We do not listen to each other -- not beyond the surface words to the inner cry. Our capacity to enter the silent plea for recognition transmuted by each being is dulled by dismissive flip belief there is not much there to warrent our attention. This is how we erase God. This is how we yuck it up, hail fellows well met, and place our heads on pillows at night falling asleep to restless dreams reminding us we are missing something very important, waking in the morning to a world securely conforming to our marketable beliefs.

Moses said to the people: "If only you would heed the voice of the LORD,
your God, and keep his commandments and statutes that are written in this
book of the law, when you return to the LORD, your God, with all your
heart and all your soul. "For this command that I enjoin on you today is
not too mysterious and remote for you. It is not up in the sky, that you
should say, 'Who will go up in the sky to get it for us and tell us of it,
that we may carry it out?' Nor is it across the sea, that you should say,
'Who will cross the sea to get it for us and tell us of it, that we may
carry it out?' No, it is something very near to you, already in your
mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out."
(Deuteronomy 30:10-14)

We've nearly lost what is nearest to us. By hurling opinion at each other, by making objects and categories of each other, we have nearly become blind and deaf to what longs to be seen and heard.

God-life, that which is within and surrounding each and every thing, person, idea, and piece of cosmos, longs to be seen and heard. The vital spark that causes everything to be itself is muted by opinion and belief diminishing and denying the specific revelation of God's life is each specific face.

81
True words do not sound beautiful;
beautiful sounding words are not true.
Wise men don't need to debate;
men who need to debate are not wise.

Wise men are not scholars,
and scholars are not wise.
The Master desires no possessions.
Since the things she does are for the people,
she has more than she needs.
The more she gives to others,
the more she has for herself.

The Tao of Heaven nourishes by not forcing.
The Tao of the Wise person acts by not competing.
(from Tao Te Ching - Written by Lao-Tzu, A Translation For the PUBLIC DOMAIN by j.h.mcdonald 1996 )

We have nearly exhausted the Way by claiming to own it, sell it, develop it, auction it, privatize it, and keep it out of view.

But that behavior is madness. It is illusion. It has been elsewhere been called 'sin,' the turning away of (or from) God, the denial of God by denial of God's ever-presence.

What remains for us to do? How forgive and be forgiven for failing or refusing to see or hear God in and through one another?

Madness is belief that has little correspondence with what is real. Not the real we believe is real, but the real beyond belief. We have enclosed belief in our private collection and ownership. Locked away from the light and fresh air of open inquiry, privatized belief suffocates the mind.

Minds stagger under the weight of "my," "mine," and "me." Enclosed and stifling belief holds that the open should be closed, debt is wealth, the few know better than and thereby must dominate the many, to protect freedom it is best to restrict freedom, to champion justice is to hoard and portion it out selectively. It is a heavy belief which leads us to imprison, hold, and terrorize those who long for what we ourselves have, but who have difficulty reaching out for what we hold as ours.

How traverse the minefield and tar pit of greed? Is it still possible to dispel madness and retrieve sanity, to open mind and soul, let flow through us the lightness and freedom of reality beyond belief, the Itself, God-life?

Is greed a death-knell? Is privatized belief an inescapable madness?

Or can we still find a way to set free a saner, more inclusive, and compassionate Way in the world? Is it too late or too far from us?

As far back as Moses, we are told: No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.

Reflection of our true face is seen in the face of each and every being. By letting go the clench-and-grab mind we allow things to fall free to earth with all its idiorhythmic and unoccupying vastness. Freedom necessitates releasing God-life.

All for each. One for one. Itself for everything.

Dare we the Way?

Would it become us?

No one lives in words. We live in self-emptying.

When poet frees an injured hawk in his poem, downy feathers become the written page. When angel tries to live beyond despair, the sound under earth is chanting soil’s unseeing prayer.

Good is to practise the Way
And to follow truth.
Great is the heart that
Is in accord with the Way.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters

1.

Two sentences hang from hermitage bookshelf in dining room: “Contemplation is silent prayer of no-boundary. Zen is engaged practice of no-barrier.” They’re seen at times when passing by that side of table. What they suggest for prayer and practice sometimes seems doable. Most times the words stay on page unread taped to shelf under books unopened.

They are invitations. They’re always there. We don’t often hear each invitation. If we do listen and hear what we are invited into, we might respond, we might enter into the reality; we might become obedient to it.

In Russian spirituality kenosis is a spontaneous way of life centered in participation with the incarnate Christ. Kenosis is simply self-forgetfulness expressed in acts of love toward others. Ippolit in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot expresses an insight into kenosis: “You are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another; a little more effort and you will be rewarded with the knowledge of the most unexpected discoveries.” Kenosis is thought of, not as suffering, but primarily as loving obedience, the appeal to an active fidelity. The Russian word for obedience (poslushanije) suggests hearing and following, as hearing a call and responding to it, or hearing a person or being and responding. The interpreter can hear the call of the poem and obey it in terms of enacting or completing its own creation.

Kenosis involves an asceticism which, for the artist, means that she or he must be emptied of anything that distracts attention from the end of the art. From the viewpoint of the good of the work the artist needs to maintain the virtues of humility and generosity, the chief virtues of the creative personality. Generosity takes the form of self-giving. Keats wrote of the limits to which the self-giving of the poet can go and said that the poetic character is not itself, is everything and nothing, forms itself according to the work: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because [the poet] has no identity [but] is continually…filling some other Body”

…Kenosis as the essence of creativity implies that creativity is self-transcendence. A. H. Maslow views creativity as an elimination of blocks against the matter-at-hand, so that “we let it flow in upon us.” Maslow observes that a person is most integrated, unified, directed, and all of a piece when totally organized in the service of the creative matter-in-hand. He views creativity as systemic – as a Gestalt involving the whole person. In genuine, concentrated creativity there is less dissociation and splitting of facets and more here-now-allness.
(pp.90-91, The Word’s Body, by Alla Bozarth-Campbell)

2.

I often become stuck in the split. The idea stuck in my mind worked like a iron wedge and heavy maul against length of wood that meetingbrook should not be split into two places. That ingrained wedge has remained fastened inside the split but not sundered piece we call meetingbrook – one part leaning at mountain, one part leaning at harbor. This forked two-way is, as an idée fix, a distraction and duplication of meetingbrook. Over the years I’ve tried words to capture the need for me – that we need move to ‘consolidation’ or ‘confluence’ or ‘singularity’ – an attempt to put in one place what is in two. The whole metaphor of singularity spoke to me of non-duality.

The economics of bookshop/bakery in town and hermitage/chapel/zendo at Ragged/Bald seem unwieldy and more than we can hold together. We are not people of independent means. If our energy was not split we might have worked harder to attain and build the hermitage common-cloister on Sally’s land. Even those who love unsparingly the setting for hospitality and conversation we’ve created by the harbor express unsparing humor at the fact that a retail place it is not, but more like a place of sanctuary and welcome for hearts and minds wearily languishing for real inquiry and genuine listening.

These last two days, I broke. I stay away from harbor. I hide in hermitage room with books and thoughts. The animals visit but we remain in silence. Saskia goes by with word or two but I have fallen into somewhere prior to counting to one. The world does its business but I have no commerce, currency, or connection to it. Something breaks. I heard it. What was it?

3.

HURT HAWKS

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.


II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;
but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance.
I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.
What fell was relaxed, Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.
(Poem by Robinson Jeffers)

The life of soaring redtail shifts from air to page. Poet intervenes, moving from lead to letters. An unsheathing from enclosure to unexpected discovery -- the poet has no identity, but fills some other body.

4.

The Guardian Angel

Afloat between lives and stale truths,
he realizes
he's never truly protected one soul,
they all die anyway, and what good
is solace,
solace is cheap. The signs are clear:
the drooping wings, the shameless thinking
about utility
and self. It's time to stop.
The guardian angel lives for a month
with other angels,
sings the angelic songs, is reminded
that he doesn't have a human choice.
The angel of love
lies down with him, and loving
restores him his pure heart.
Yet how hard it is
to descend into sadness once more.
When the poor are evicted, he stands
between them
and the bank, but the bank sees nothing
in it's way. When the meek are overpowered
he's there, the thin air
through which they fall. Without effect
he keeps getting in the way of insults.
He keeps wrapping
his wings around those in the cold.
Even his lamentations are unheard,
though now,
in for the long haul, trying to live
beyond despair, he believes, he needs
to believe
everything he does takes root, hums
beneath the surfaces of the world.
(by Paul Dunn, from New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton).)

It is hard to descend into sadness. Ours is an age where not to be optimistic is to be considered either unpatriotic or off antidepressants. Shrouding rhetoric intent on inducing forgetfulness swiftly skirts the places where sadness occurs. ‘We are a great country,’ the talking point says. ‘We are a holy church,’ it says. ‘Things are not that bad,’ it says. ‘Only negative people, haters, would hold that opinion,’ it says.

Angels guarding sad parts of the world themselves entwine within sadness with no reluctance. Trouble and difficulty exist in this world. Arguments that are made debating guilt or innocence place debaters outside and away from the facticity they skirt. There is a war in Iraq. Sudan is a slaughtering ground. Corporate crime is rife. Governments do deceive. There is a severe divide between those with means and those without means. People in power do abuse power. Priests do sexually abuse boys. Men and women of the cloth do break trust with their flock. And all of us fail and do disappoint by opting for falsity and disingenuity.

The human record of folly and arrogance is well documented. Human life is a curious history. Secular governments and religious institutions have both contributed to raising the quality of life, as well as degrading justice by avoiding compassion in their long histories. Institutions attempt to alleviate suffering. They also hogtie individuals little able to fight through against superior strength.

5.

Albert Camus, fifty-seven years ago, recorded his thoughts about what he saw and felt.

August 1937
Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so-called “vital interests.”
(p.48, Notebook I, in Notebooks 1935-1942, by Albert Camus, trans. by Philip Thody, c.1963)

August
On the way to Paris: this fever beating in my temples. The strange and sudden withdrawal from the world and from men. The struggle with one’s body. Sitting in the wind, emptied and hallowed out inside, I spent all my time thinking of K. Mansfield, about that long, painful, and tender story of a struggle against illness. What awaits me in the Alps is, together with loneliness and the idea that I shall be there to look after myself, the awareness of my illness.

To keep going to the end means not only resisting but also relaxing. I need to be aware of myself, in so far as this is also an awareness of something that goes beyond me as an individual. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
(p.44, Notebooks)

6.

Fog gives way to rain at dusk. Cat now sports bell collar brought by Annie. Saskia wants birds to be warned. He brings string toy into room where two dogs each open eye to clock his whereabouts. It will not be such a shock when cat leaps suddenly to arm of chair then stomach as I write.

We don’t live in words. They only tell something about where we might be. When we tire of them we have the option to try silence. With practice we might even find silence in our normally noisy mind.

Tonight I wander over the foreland hill, begging, not for death and not for life, but for something more singular than that divide.

I become mendicant listener.

Mere sound. Mere silence.

Dwelling there.

Noting.