Perhaps the self-as-itself is the constant repetition of the sacred in the present moment. (I don't know.)
Sitting on this frosty seat,
No further dream of fame.
The forest, the mountain follow their ancient ways,
And through the long spring day,
Not even the shadow of a bird.
- Reizan (-1411)
Maria, Tom, Saskia, Delia, Jesse and I read Thomas Sheehan, John O'Donahue, and Robert E. Kennedy during conversation tonight. We like the loving gaze, vital inquiry, and don't-know mind.
To accept the gift of not knowing and to live it implies risk and a sense of feeling abandoned. For his part, the poet Stephen Dunn warns us that the loss of any cherished way of looking at God, any shift in emphasis, is painful. When we put aside the certitudes that have upheld us, we always face the risk of total doubt. When he changed his gaze from looking at the known, Dunn writes of the risk he knew he was taking. As if to convince himself to shift, he tells us he talked to himself: "I'm saying this to myself: the sacred cannot be found unless you give up some old version of it. And when you do, mon semblable, mon frere, I swear there'll be an emptiness it'll take a lifetime to fill."
(Robert Kennedy, noting Stephen Dunn's "Riffs and Reciprocities" (New York: W.W. Norton) cited in AP Review, March/April 1998, V27, 15. From Santa Clara Lecture, Santa Clara University, April 9, 2000, "Zen's Gift to Christianity," by Robert E. Kennedy, S.J.)
To do this, to give up some old version of the sacred, places us in the dwelling place of the itself-sacred. This dwelling place is what is revealing itself now, always.
We don't disappear. The world doesn't disappear. Each is merely seen through. Each is present. Each is accounted with esteem. Perhaps faith is affirmation of what is yet not obvious. It is sacred "yes."
William McDonald writes in "Kierkegaard's Religion":
But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. One's very selfhood depends upon this repetition, for according to Anti-Climacus, the self "is a relation which relates itself to itself" (The Sickness Unto Death). But unless this self acknowledges a "power which constituted it," it falls into a despair which undoes its selfhood. Therefore, in order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in "the power which posited it." There is no mediation between the individual self and God by priest or by logical system (contra Catholicism and Hegelianism respectively). There is only the individual's own repetition of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i.e. the repetition of faith is the self.
(William McDonald, "Soren Kierkegaard," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/)
Seeing itself with the sacred-itself.
A lovely emptiness -- one clear...seeing another.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The gaze, especially the loving gaze, evokes life, light, and love. It is startling awareness something has changed -- consciousness has transfigured.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
(Poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Hologram of transfigured awareness awakens new and reverential sight.
Any genuine story, authentic myth, or profound metaphor seen or heard with open awareness is seen to say: "Now you are practicing learning to look, 'You must change your life.'"
Resurrection shifts from one man shattering death's chains to invitation for anyone to realize presence of what-is-called God pervading physical universe, much the way traditional believers hold Jesus incarnated the very Word of creation.
When we look, we are looked at. Seeing loving gaze invites vision of God.
Be careful what we look at -- we might get it.
We are being...looked at with love.
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
(Poem "Archaic Torso of Apollo" by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Hologram of transfigured awareness awakens new and reverential sight.
Any genuine story, authentic myth, or profound metaphor seen or heard with open awareness is seen to say: "Now you are practicing learning to look, 'You must change your life.'"
Resurrection shifts from one man shattering death's chains to invitation for anyone to realize presence of what-is-called God pervading physical universe, much the way traditional believers hold Jesus incarnated the very Word of creation.
When we look, we are looked at. Seeing loving gaze invites vision of God.
Be careful what we look at -- we might get it.
We are being...looked at with love.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Our broken and disjointed phrases uttered to and about one another are signs of a depth not yet clarified.
If you meet a fencing master on the road,
You may give him your sword,
If you meet a poet,
You may offer him your poem.
When you meet others,
Say only a part of what you intend.
Never give the whole thing at once.
- Mu-mon 1228 (dailyzen.com)
While silence might be at ground of being, it took us as human beings a long time to come to word. It still does.
The truth is that Easter is awkward. The stories themselves are angular and strange -- a tormented saga about a judicial murder and a horrific public execution is followed by a series of events that challenge not only our assumptions about how the natural world works, but also our desire to read a story with a good strong ending. Jesus returns from death, but he is not a ghost or a resuscitated corpse -- so what is it we are talking about? (Williams)
That's how Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, began a Saturday 26 March 2005 article for the Daily Telegraph.
Do the Gospel writers wording their narratives about the resurrection say only part of what they intend? Are they unable to give the whole thing at once because the whole thing remains only remotely discernible, then and now?
John has the poignant story of Mary Magdalene, alone in tears at the deserted grave hearing her name spoken in a voice she knows. People hurry between the tomb and the city and the Galilean mountains, sharing baffling incidents, sometimes interrupted by Jesus inexplicably being there among them. Finally Jesus is seen no more; what is left is the fellowship of disciples trying to put it all into words.
When someone stumbles and searches for words, especially someone who is otherwise fluent and coherent, you may well conclude that something has happened for which their experience hasn't prepared them.
Shakespeare famously gives Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, a speech of frighteningly disjointed words and phrases when he first suspects his wife of unfaithfulness. Something has crossed his horizon for which nothing beforehand has provided a structure. The new feelings are utterly real, utterly painful and chaotic. The broken and disjointed phrases show how deep they go.
And we know that this is literature reflecting life. We can all think of those times when we feel we have nothing to say that will help or make sense -- not because there is literally nothing to say but because there is too much. (Williams)
In an unlikely metaphor grounded in my Easter Vigil experience -- the whole creation story was told while I was unconscious. To all intents, I was there. Ears functional. But the light was out. I'd gone irreceptive. Something happened -- as told in the reading, and undergone with me -- that bypasses understanding. When I walked wraithfully through abbey's darkened cloister sighting up ahead burning new-fire still dance-glowing from library hearth, I pass an equally wraith-like monk in white choir-robe along moonlit glassed-in portico walking other way. My fainting was an event that had never happened before. I could not think about it -- I could only walk through it.
The resurrection isn't a happy ending to a sad story. It is the beginning of a new story, a new phase in the life of the disciples -- potentially a new phase for the reader too.
That seems to be what the abrupt end of Mark's gospel suggests. The women ran away in terror, and... "Well?" we ask impatiently. And the writer lifts his head and says, "Why do you think I'm writing this? And what are you going to do about it? Because nothing is the same now."?
So it is natural enough that the Easter stories don't settle as comfortably in the mind and imagination as the Christmas ones. But when someone moistens their lips and looks at us awkwardly and says, "I don't quite know how to tell you this", we are right to suspect that what's coming is not just an interesting bit of information or a mere historical anecdote. And we listen that bit harder.
Faith is not, after all, about getting to the point where everything is clear and settled. It is about stepping into a disorienting new world: the stories you know how to tell about yourself and your world may need to be interrupted and questioned. Familiar things and persons have to be looked at with a new depth of attention.
If Easter is awkward, it is because it is always a shock to be told who we really are and what we really might be.
(from, "Easter - the awkward time of year": article by Rowan Williams) http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2005/050326.htm
At Southwick Easter Sunday afternoon, several of us cut and carried wood from felled trees for Erica. Michael took the electric chainsaw to a severed trunk and -- after saying what his options were -- decided to carve a cross out of the top the six foot stump. He surprised everybody, especially, no doubt, hisself. Cross immediately gathered surroundings to itself. Surpise transposed Easter into icon gazing out through silence.
It is a disorienting new world
If you meet a fencing master on the road,
You may give him your sword,
If you meet a poet,
You may offer him your poem.
When you meet others,
Say only a part of what you intend.
Never give the whole thing at once.
- Mu-mon 1228 (dailyzen.com)
While silence might be at ground of being, it took us as human beings a long time to come to word. It still does.
The truth is that Easter is awkward. The stories themselves are angular and strange -- a tormented saga about a judicial murder and a horrific public execution is followed by a series of events that challenge not only our assumptions about how the natural world works, but also our desire to read a story with a good strong ending. Jesus returns from death, but he is not a ghost or a resuscitated corpse -- so what is it we are talking about? (Williams)
That's how Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, began a Saturday 26 March 2005 article for the Daily Telegraph.
Do the Gospel writers wording their narratives about the resurrection say only part of what they intend? Are they unable to give the whole thing at once because the whole thing remains only remotely discernible, then and now?
John has the poignant story of Mary Magdalene, alone in tears at the deserted grave hearing her name spoken in a voice she knows. People hurry between the tomb and the city and the Galilean mountains, sharing baffling incidents, sometimes interrupted by Jesus inexplicably being there among them. Finally Jesus is seen no more; what is left is the fellowship of disciples trying to put it all into words.
When someone stumbles and searches for words, especially someone who is otherwise fluent and coherent, you may well conclude that something has happened for which their experience hasn't prepared them.
Shakespeare famously gives Leontes, in The Winter's Tale, a speech of frighteningly disjointed words and phrases when he first suspects his wife of unfaithfulness. Something has crossed his horizon for which nothing beforehand has provided a structure. The new feelings are utterly real, utterly painful and chaotic. The broken and disjointed phrases show how deep they go.
And we know that this is literature reflecting life. We can all think of those times when we feel we have nothing to say that will help or make sense -- not because there is literally nothing to say but because there is too much. (Williams)
In an unlikely metaphor grounded in my Easter Vigil experience -- the whole creation story was told while I was unconscious. To all intents, I was there. Ears functional. But the light was out. I'd gone irreceptive. Something happened -- as told in the reading, and undergone with me -- that bypasses understanding. When I walked wraithfully through abbey's darkened cloister sighting up ahead burning new-fire still dance-glowing from library hearth, I pass an equally wraith-like monk in white choir-robe along moonlit glassed-in portico walking other way. My fainting was an event that had never happened before. I could not think about it -- I could only walk through it.
The resurrection isn't a happy ending to a sad story. It is the beginning of a new story, a new phase in the life of the disciples -- potentially a new phase for the reader too.
That seems to be what the abrupt end of Mark's gospel suggests. The women ran away in terror, and... "Well?" we ask impatiently. And the writer lifts his head and says, "Why do you think I'm writing this? And what are you going to do about it? Because nothing is the same now."?
So it is natural enough that the Easter stories don't settle as comfortably in the mind and imagination as the Christmas ones. But when someone moistens their lips and looks at us awkwardly and says, "I don't quite know how to tell you this", we are right to suspect that what's coming is not just an interesting bit of information or a mere historical anecdote. And we listen that bit harder.
Faith is not, after all, about getting to the point where everything is clear and settled. It is about stepping into a disorienting new world: the stories you know how to tell about yourself and your world may need to be interrupted and questioned. Familiar things and persons have to be looked at with a new depth of attention.
If Easter is awkward, it is because it is always a shock to be told who we really are and what we really might be.
(from, "Easter - the awkward time of year": article by Rowan Williams) http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2005/050326.htm
At Southwick Easter Sunday afternoon, several of us cut and carried wood from felled trees for Erica. Michael took the electric chainsaw to a severed trunk and -- after saying what his options were -- decided to carve a cross out of the top the six foot stump. He surprised everybody, especially, no doubt, hisself. Cross immediately gathered surroundings to itself. Surpise transposed Easter into icon gazing out through silence.
It is a disorienting new world
Monday, April 17, 2006
I faint during first reading at Easter vigil. Luckily I was sitting. I come to and realize something was different. The dizziness that had come over me was gone. So were the beads from my hand. I'd heard about the second day of creation, now the abbot, after what seemed like an odd silence, was saying "Let us pray!" And my head was against the choir stall. I get up and leave for a while. The flu has caught up to me.
Lodging in the world, the body is like a dream,
If one lives in peace, a day can be like a year.
Trying to sleep, I toss and turn on the worn out mat,
And pace around and around
In my tattered monk’s shawl.
The Master suggests I make my bed
Among the wind and bamboo,
And have a drink beside the waters of the rocky spring.
A nod of the head, and all worldly affairs seem wrong.
Laughing at myself,
I understand the wisdom of the Master.
- Su Shih 1073
I went back to retreat house to bed for some minutes, then take long slow walk back from my room to abbey church. One kind gentlemen had come to find me. A second, when back in rear seat, brings some losanges to occupy my mouth. The night passes with no other surprise than a new view of resurrection.
I'd brought Thomas Sheehan's book given by Sylvia into retreat at Trappists. I note the words about Simon's (i.e. Peter's) denial:
Simon had learned one major lesson from the preaching of Jesus: The apocalyptic line had been crossed, the dead past was over, God's future had already begun. As we have seen, the name for the crossing of that apocalyptic line was "forgiveness": the gift of God himself to his people, his arrival among them. Therefore, the entire point of the kingdom was to live God's future now. But this did not mean looking up ahead toward the future in an effort to glimpse the imminent arrival of God, for he was no longer up ahead in time, any more than he was up above in heaven. He was with his people, in their very midst: "The kingdom of God is among you." In that sense there was no more waiting, for forgiveness meant that the future--God himself--was becoming present among those who opened a space for him. Crossing the line into the future meant no longer searching for God in the great Beyond, but living the present-future with one simple rule: "Be merciful as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36).
Simon's sin, his denial of Jesus, consisted in fleeing from and forgetting what he and all Jesus' followers had become: the place where the future becomes present. His sin lay not in abandoning Jesus but in abandoning himself. If anything, he did not deny Jesus enough.
Simon's sin was to have momentarily forgotten where Jesus dwelled, in fact where Simon himself had dwelled. Simon put his hopes on Jesus rather than on what Jesus was about. "Follow me," the prophet had said, and he meant " ... into God's present-future." But Simon was a literalist. As the soldiers dragged his master away, he got up his courage and "followed at a distance" (Luke 22:54). In so doing he began walking back into the past. The Gospel records Jesus as saying: "No one who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). Ironically, Simon was doing just that--looking back toward the dead past--when he followed Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane through the dark streets of Jerusalem.
Simon's sin did not lie in abandoning Jesus in Gethsemane or in denying him a few hours later but in following Jesus to the courtyard of the Sanhedrin. His fault was not that he denied Jesus but that he affirmed him too much and feared that if Jesus died, God's kingdom would come undone. Simon had focused his attention so intensely on Jesus that he ended up taking Jesus for the kingdom and thereby mistaking the kingdom itself. In his desperate effort not to lose Jesus, Simon lost himself and his grip on the presence of God.
Once, when Jesus had told his disciples that his death was inevitable, Simon took him aside and tried to argue him out of it. But Jesus rebuked him: "Get behind me, Satan! You are on the side of men, not the side of God" (Mark 8:33). The point was clear: The only way to save Jesus was to let him die, and then to go on living the kind of life that Jesus had led, a life set entirely on the present-future, on God-with-man. For the rest, "Leave the dead to bury their dead" (Matthew 8:22).
This, I believe, was the real denial: Simon forgot that the kingdom of God-with-man was not any one person, no matter how extraordinary that person might be, that the kingdom could not be incarnated in any hero, not even in Jesus. By following his master to the courtyard of the Sanhedrin, Simon was setting his heart on Jesus rather than on the kingdom. He was turning Jesus into the last thing the prophet wanted to be: a hero and an idol, an obstacle to God-with-man. Simon failed to see that the future had been given unconditionally and could not collapse with the death of one man--because the kingdom was not Jesus but God.
(from pp. 122-124, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986--electronic edition 2000), by Thomas Sheehan.
Returning home tonight, two weaknesses of my body have been invaded and compromised. Teeth hurt; and acute pain in lower back leaves me unable to walk.
Just that, and the experience of a lovely retreat.
Noting a number of unexceptional absurdities during long, quiet, look these two weeks.
I laugh at myself.
The wisdom of the master has been missed.
Lodging in the world, the body is like a dream,
If one lives in peace, a day can be like a year.
Trying to sleep, I toss and turn on the worn out mat,
And pace around and around
In my tattered monk’s shawl.
The Master suggests I make my bed
Among the wind and bamboo,
And have a drink beside the waters of the rocky spring.
A nod of the head, and all worldly affairs seem wrong.
Laughing at myself,
I understand the wisdom of the Master.
- Su Shih 1073
I went back to retreat house to bed for some minutes, then take long slow walk back from my room to abbey church. One kind gentlemen had come to find me. A second, when back in rear seat, brings some losanges to occupy my mouth. The night passes with no other surprise than a new view of resurrection.
I'd brought Thomas Sheehan's book given by Sylvia into retreat at Trappists. I note the words about Simon's (i.e. Peter's) denial:
Simon had learned one major lesson from the preaching of Jesus: The apocalyptic line had been crossed, the dead past was over, God's future had already begun. As we have seen, the name for the crossing of that apocalyptic line was "forgiveness": the gift of God himself to his people, his arrival among them. Therefore, the entire point of the kingdom was to live God's future now. But this did not mean looking up ahead toward the future in an effort to glimpse the imminent arrival of God, for he was no longer up ahead in time, any more than he was up above in heaven. He was with his people, in their very midst: "The kingdom of God is among you." In that sense there was no more waiting, for forgiveness meant that the future--God himself--was becoming present among those who opened a space for him. Crossing the line into the future meant no longer searching for God in the great Beyond, but living the present-future with one simple rule: "Be merciful as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36).
Simon's sin, his denial of Jesus, consisted in fleeing from and forgetting what he and all Jesus' followers had become: the place where the future becomes present. His sin lay not in abandoning Jesus but in abandoning himself. If anything, he did not deny Jesus enough.
Simon's sin was to have momentarily forgotten where Jesus dwelled, in fact where Simon himself had dwelled. Simon put his hopes on Jesus rather than on what Jesus was about. "Follow me," the prophet had said, and he meant " ... into God's present-future." But Simon was a literalist. As the soldiers dragged his master away, he got up his courage and "followed at a distance" (Luke 22:54). In so doing he began walking back into the past. The Gospel records Jesus as saying: "No one who puts his hand to the plow and then looks back is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62). Ironically, Simon was doing just that--looking back toward the dead past--when he followed Jesus from the Garden of Gethsemane through the dark streets of Jerusalem.
Simon's sin did not lie in abandoning Jesus in Gethsemane or in denying him a few hours later but in following Jesus to the courtyard of the Sanhedrin. His fault was not that he denied Jesus but that he affirmed him too much and feared that if Jesus died, God's kingdom would come undone. Simon had focused his attention so intensely on Jesus that he ended up taking Jesus for the kingdom and thereby mistaking the kingdom itself. In his desperate effort not to lose Jesus, Simon lost himself and his grip on the presence of God.
Once, when Jesus had told his disciples that his death was inevitable, Simon took him aside and tried to argue him out of it. But Jesus rebuked him: "Get behind me, Satan! You are on the side of men, not the side of God" (Mark 8:33). The point was clear: The only way to save Jesus was to let him die, and then to go on living the kind of life that Jesus had led, a life set entirely on the present-future, on God-with-man. For the rest, "Leave the dead to bury their dead" (Matthew 8:22).
This, I believe, was the real denial: Simon forgot that the kingdom of God-with-man was not any one person, no matter how extraordinary that person might be, that the kingdom could not be incarnated in any hero, not even in Jesus. By following his master to the courtyard of the Sanhedrin, Simon was setting his heart on Jesus rather than on the kingdom. He was turning Jesus into the last thing the prophet wanted to be: a hero and an idol, an obstacle to God-with-man. Simon failed to see that the future had been given unconditionally and could not collapse with the death of one man--because the kingdom was not Jesus but God.
(from pp. 122-124, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986--electronic edition 2000), by Thomas Sheehan.
Returning home tonight, two weaknesses of my body have been invaded and compromised. Teeth hurt; and acute pain in lower back leaves me unable to walk.
Just that, and the experience of a lovely retreat.
Noting a number of unexceptional absurdities during long, quiet, look these two weeks.
I laugh at myself.
The wisdom of the master has been missed.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Contemplate the domain of God, here, on earth.
Here is my servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom my soul delights.
I have endowed him with my spirit
that he may bring true justice to the nations.
He does not cry out or shout aloud,
or make his voice heard in the streets.
He does not break the crushed reed,
nor quench the wavering flame.
Faithfully he brings true justice;
he will neither waver, nor be crushed
until true justice is established on earth,
for the islands are awaiting his law.
Thus says God, the Lord,
he who created the heavens and spread them out,
who gave shape to the earth and what comes from it,
who gave breath to its people
and life to the creatures that move in it:
I, the Lord, have called you to serve the cause of right;
I have taken you by the hand and formed you;
I have appointed you as covenant of the people and light of the nations,
to open the eyes of the blind,
to free captives from prison,
and those who live in darkness from the dungeon.
(--Isaiah 42:1 - 7)
This holy week.
Look through Jesus.
Called "Christ."
For the dwelling-place.
Of God.
Where you are.
Here is my servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom my soul delights.
I have endowed him with my spirit
that he may bring true justice to the nations.
He does not cry out or shout aloud,
or make his voice heard in the streets.
He does not break the crushed reed,
nor quench the wavering flame.
Faithfully he brings true justice;
he will neither waver, nor be crushed
until true justice is established on earth,
for the islands are awaiting his law.
Thus says God, the Lord,
he who created the heavens and spread them out,
who gave shape to the earth and what comes from it,
who gave breath to its people
and life to the creatures that move in it:
I, the Lord, have called you to serve the cause of right;
I have taken you by the hand and formed you;
I have appointed you as covenant of the people and light of the nations,
to open the eyes of the blind,
to free captives from prison,
and those who live in darkness from the dungeon.
(--Isaiah 42:1 - 7)
This holy week.
Look through Jesus.
Called "Christ."
For the dwelling-place.
Of God.
Where you are.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Note: We're on retreat. Until Easter, Saskia and I are taking refuge in quiet and seclusion. It is time for retreat and rest. (Incarnation recollects resurrection as earth retrieves resurgence.) This solitude will keep us away from the bookshop/bakery. No formal practice times at hermitage. We're back Easter Tuesday. (Others might/may have shop open. You'll have to call there to find out.)
..........
We are made of word.
Silence is ground, but word and act are what silence reveals through itself.
Our name is word. Words and names are not only "noise and smoke, obscuring heavenly light," (Goethe, Faust I), words and names also make us what we are. Words constantly create and continuously re-create the world.
The Passion reading at St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic church in Belfast, Maine this morning was from Mark's gospel. The translation most familiar is:
"And they crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left." (Mark 15:27) What I heard read as I stood by loft stairs at rear of church was: "And they crucified two revolutionaries with him...". The reading might have read (and perhaps will in a future translation) -- "two other revolutionaries with him."
When the moon
Of your mind becomes
Clouded over with confusion,
You are searching
Around for the light outside.
- Hozoin Gakuzengo Inye
Institutions, both political and religious, do not like revolutionaries. A revolutionary is engaged in "constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change."
To revolve, to roll back, "to turn over at length in the mind", is a subversive act. It is where contemplation might lead. Contemplation is dangerous. As is the Gospel. As is Jesus. That's why he is killed. That's why his story usually goes through a re-education, a taming and leashing by authorities before presented to the polis/faithful for consideration. We're told not to fret about Jesus. He'll be just fine in three days. What a sweet countenance here in this picture of him, don't you think?
The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. ... Jesus said to him, "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal."
-- The Gospel of Judas
What in the Gospel of Judas, published this week by the National Geographic Society..., goes back to Jesus' actual teaching, and how would we know? And what else was there in the early Christian movement that we had not known before? These are some of the difficult questions that the discoveries raise for us -- issues that historians are already debating. What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.
Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. Those of us who go to church may find our Easter reflections more mysterious than ever.
(from OpEd piece, "The Gospel Truth," By Elaine Pagels, Published: April 8, 2006, The New York Times)
What will we learn next? Brown's "The DaVinci Code" has Jesus and Mary Magdelene marrying with off-spring. The Church doesn't like such novel fiction. Neo-conservatives are dusting off the Second Coming and helping pave way for apocalypse by fomenting violence and unrest in the Middle East, greasing the skids (so to speak) for the roller coaster ride to come. Hierarchy issues mandates to churches: no more pedophilia or sex of any kind in the ranks of priesthood; and, women still are not welcome to pronounce and elevate our Christ. The modern mind deteriorates and declines into a Toynbee-like bunker remnant -- feet slipping away, hands clutching desperately for any hold -- frightened of its own thoughts.
The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.
It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.
Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: "Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah" (Matthew 23:8-10).
(from OpEd piece, "Christ Among the Partisans," By Garry Wills, Published: April 9, 2006, The New York Times)
Jesus was, and is, annoying. The mysterious paradox prevails -- they couldn't kill him once and for all -- but he died, once, and for all.
After psalms had been sung they left for the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, "You will all lose faith, for the scripture says: 'I shall strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered', however after my resurrection I shall go before you to Galilee". Peter said, "Even if all lose faith, I will not". And Jesus said to him, "I tell you solemnly, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will have disowned me three times". But he repeated still more earnestly, "If I have to die with you, I will never disown you". And they all said the same.
[Mark 14:26-31, from the Jerusalem Bible, c. 1968]
We lose faith. Jesus dies and disappears. If someone has spirited him away, we don't know where. Some claim to know where he is hidden, some claim to own him. Like some enemy combatant Jesus is held without representation, review, or release. His image and message languish in the hands of conquering procurators and complicit religiosity. The image of Jesus in their hands is traipsed out in videos and pamphlets to imprimatur a version of Gospel consistent with the ideology of his handlers.
It's Palm Sunday. Earlier this morning I am content to leave church as final hymn begins, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" I have no frond. I drive to Chase's Daily for coffee and muffin(s). From parking lot I hear loud calls from front of Congregational Church across street, "Hosanna, Glory," someone calls out leading youngsters to front door three minutes before their 10am service. I watch for some seconds. It's a procession. It's all good. Inside Chase's I choose pear/pecan, cranberry/apple. I drive to river flowing past footbridge reconstruction at harbor head.
Tomorrow begins retreat in Trappist monastery. I hate leaving where I am. It's taken days to do laundry, think about travel, resolving not to find cabin in Cape Breton Highlands. I will go to a source of disturbing nourishment in contemplative silence.
I will maintain a distance from "Today at Meetingbrook" for the week.
A going to ground. Silence is ground. After this past week of near-solitude, I place myself for a week in the midst of a more common silence.
I'll stay with what is hidden. If there is any unconcealment, it will be only itself revealed on home ground.
I take note of meetingbrook's meditation: "Embodying the dwelling-place of the Alone; Stepping aside to make room for Another."
Can I look at my disowning? Will the hearing of the second sacred sound made by cock-crow cause me to understand Peter in Matthew's Passion: "Und er ging hinaus und weinte bitterlich" -- (And he went out and wept bitterly). To find my disowning, do similarly, and still find way to stagger on?
That line in German always catches me up. It surprises me each time. It bypasses sentries and insinuates my imagination.
Mircea Eliade wrote : "All that essential and indescribable part of man that is called imagination dwells in realms of symbolism and still lives upon archaic myths and theologies. It depends upon modern man to 'reawaken' the inestimable treasures of images that he bears within him and to reawaken the images so as to contemplate them in their purity and assimilate their message." (--in Myths and Symbols.)
It is time to retreat. My prayer for all of us -- is -- for the grace of a good retreat.
Reawakening.
In a word.
..........
We are made of word.
Silence is ground, but word and act are what silence reveals through itself.
Our name is word. Words and names are not only "noise and smoke, obscuring heavenly light," (Goethe, Faust I), words and names also make us what we are. Words constantly create and continuously re-create the world.
The Passion reading at St. Francis of Assisi, the Catholic church in Belfast, Maine this morning was from Mark's gospel. The translation most familiar is:
"And they crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left." (Mark 15:27) What I heard read as I stood by loft stairs at rear of church was: "And they crucified two revolutionaries with him...". The reading might have read (and perhaps will in a future translation) -- "two other revolutionaries with him."
When the moon
Of your mind becomes
Clouded over with confusion,
You are searching
Around for the light outside.
- Hozoin Gakuzengo Inye
Institutions, both political and religious, do not like revolutionaries. A revolutionary is engaged in "constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change."
To revolve, to roll back, "to turn over at length in the mind", is a subversive act. It is where contemplation might lead. Contemplation is dangerous. As is the Gospel. As is Jesus. That's why he is killed. That's why his story usually goes through a re-education, a taming and leashing by authorities before presented to the polis/faithful for consideration. We're told not to fret about Jesus. He'll be just fine in three days. What a sweet countenance here in this picture of him, don't you think?
The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. ... Jesus said to him, "Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal."
-- The Gospel of Judas
What in the Gospel of Judas, published this week by the National Geographic Society..., goes back to Jesus' actual teaching, and how would we know? And what else was there in the early Christian movement that we had not known before? These are some of the difficult questions that the discoveries raise for us -- issues that historians are already debating. What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.
Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. Those of us who go to church may find our Easter reflections more mysterious than ever.
(from OpEd piece, "The Gospel Truth," By Elaine Pagels, Published: April 8, 2006, The New York Times)
What will we learn next? Brown's "The DaVinci Code" has Jesus and Mary Magdelene marrying with off-spring. The Church doesn't like such novel fiction. Neo-conservatives are dusting off the Second Coming and helping pave way for apocalypse by fomenting violence and unrest in the Middle East, greasing the skids (so to speak) for the roller coaster ride to come. Hierarchy issues mandates to churches: no more pedophilia or sex of any kind in the ranks of priesthood; and, women still are not welcome to pronounce and elevate our Christ. The modern mind deteriorates and declines into a Toynbee-like bunker remnant -- feet slipping away, hands clutching desperately for any hold -- frightened of its own thoughts.
The Gospels are scary, dark and demanding. It is not surprising that people want to tame them, dilute them, make them into generic encouragements to be loving and peaceful and fair. If that is all they are, then we may as well make Socrates our redeemer.
It is true that the tamed Gospels can be put to humanitarian purposes, and religious institutions have long done this, in defiance of what Jesus said in the Gospels.
Jesus was the victim of every institutional authority in his life and death. He said: "Do not be called Rabbi, since you have only one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no one on earth your father, since you have only one Father, the one in heaven. And do not be called leaders, since you have only one leader, the Messiah" (Matthew 23:8-10).
(from OpEd piece, "Christ Among the Partisans," By Garry Wills, Published: April 9, 2006, The New York Times)
Jesus was, and is, annoying. The mysterious paradox prevails -- they couldn't kill him once and for all -- but he died, once, and for all.
After psalms had been sung they left for the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, "You will all lose faith, for the scripture says: 'I shall strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered', however after my resurrection I shall go before you to Galilee". Peter said, "Even if all lose faith, I will not". And Jesus said to him, "I tell you solemnly, this day, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will have disowned me three times". But he repeated still more earnestly, "If I have to die with you, I will never disown you". And they all said the same.
[Mark 14:26-31, from the Jerusalem Bible, c. 1968]
We lose faith. Jesus dies and disappears. If someone has spirited him away, we don't know where. Some claim to know where he is hidden, some claim to own him. Like some enemy combatant Jesus is held without representation, review, or release. His image and message languish in the hands of conquering procurators and complicit religiosity. The image of Jesus in their hands is traipsed out in videos and pamphlets to imprimatur a version of Gospel consistent with the ideology of his handlers.
It's Palm Sunday. Earlier this morning I am content to leave church as final hymn begins, "Were you there when they crucified my Lord?" I have no frond. I drive to Chase's Daily for coffee and muffin(s). From parking lot I hear loud calls from front of Congregational Church across street, "Hosanna, Glory," someone calls out leading youngsters to front door three minutes before their 10am service. I watch for some seconds. It's a procession. It's all good. Inside Chase's I choose pear/pecan, cranberry/apple. I drive to river flowing past footbridge reconstruction at harbor head.
Tomorrow begins retreat in Trappist monastery. I hate leaving where I am. It's taken days to do laundry, think about travel, resolving not to find cabin in Cape Breton Highlands. I will go to a source of disturbing nourishment in contemplative silence.
I will maintain a distance from "Today at Meetingbrook" for the week.
A going to ground. Silence is ground. After this past week of near-solitude, I place myself for a week in the midst of a more common silence.
I'll stay with what is hidden. If there is any unconcealment, it will be only itself revealed on home ground.
I take note of meetingbrook's meditation: "Embodying the dwelling-place of the Alone; Stepping aside to make room for Another."
Can I look at my disowning? Will the hearing of the second sacred sound made by cock-crow cause me to understand Peter in Matthew's Passion: "Und er ging hinaus und weinte bitterlich" -- (And he went out and wept bitterly). To find my disowning, do similarly, and still find way to stagger on?
That line in German always catches me up. It surprises me each time. It bypasses sentries and insinuates my imagination.
Mircea Eliade wrote : "All that essential and indescribable part of man that is called imagination dwells in realms of symbolism and still lives upon archaic myths and theologies. It depends upon modern man to 'reawaken' the inestimable treasures of images that he bears within him and to reawaken the images so as to contemplate them in their purity and assimilate their message." (--in Myths and Symbols.)
It is time to retreat. My prayer for all of us -- is -- for the grace of a good retreat.
Reawakening.
In a word.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Circus comes to town.
Even if just the town of our psyche -- it is festival time -- at nexus of winter into spring in New England, Lent into Easter (in Christian metaphor) through that glorious center ring of Holy Week. Add personal emergence, from appearance through illusion, a sweet and unfathomable solitude transfixed by silence collapsing into befuddling stillness. We have no idea what is happening.
The rare gaze from clown hermit heart sees aloneness without circumference.
For penetrating to the depths
Of one's own true self-nature,
And for attaining a vitality
Valid on all occasions,
Nothing can surpass
Meditation in the midst of activity.
- Hakuin (1686-1769)
Both coffee grounds and pipe tobacco fall outside kitchen window. Some impulse to light "Smooth Dutch Cavendish" in new Italian Briar picked up unbidden in Brunswick before falling ill last week brings decades to an old fragrance. Cat jumps to kitchen roof as smoke from chimney wood fire and Sail Regular rises height of barn. Cool breeze.
The Jewish Passover drew near, and many of the country people who had gone up to Jerusalem to purify themselves looked out for Jesus, saying to one another as they stood about in the Temple, "What do you think? Will he come to the festival or not?"
(--from John 11:45 - 56)
Who could miss the festival? Who doesn't want to attend the circus? Walking into and through center ring is price of admission. Don't mind the distractions. The bells and whistles, tumblers and trapezist, trainers and trombonist -- they are distracting prelude. The spotlight will show you the one to watch. "Will he come?" He'll show.
The Waitresses
The waitresses
At the restaurant
Have to keep reminding
The schizophrenic man
That if he keeps acting
Like a schizophrenic man
They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant.
But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man,
So they have to keep reminding him.
(Poem: "The Waitresses" by Matt Cook from Eavesdrop Soup)
We're a bit schizophrenic about Jesus, Judas, Jeremiah, and Jehovah. We want to follow the show, listen to the story, but we're uncertain how it ends. Like some garishly costumed midnight feature with spooks and ghouls mouthing lines everyone recites by tingling rote in unison, the story of the man from Nazareth (by contrast) is played out throughout Christendom in muted tones with plaintive chant by devoted players in somber attire. How does it end?
Upstake, fold canvas, lower wires, wash vases, wipe counter, rake ground, don white, race to emptiness. The circus tells it all, but like that spinster poet, tells it slant. There's a clown lingering at the edge of our awareness, one foot lifting as if something was there to receive it.
Never did I have the slightest doubt, not even at age nine, when I joined my friends at the railroad station at dawn to meet the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train and actually got to water the elephants, never (and especially not then) did I ever have the slightest doubt that the circus was about Something Big, that it asked and answered Large Questions. The greatest show on earth -- had I known the word -- was metaphysical.
That lower-case curmudgeon, American poet e e cummings, put the matter succinctly in the opening moments of his play "Him," when the main character, Him, hurls a burning, contradictory curse to the heavens: 'Damn everything but the circus!' The circus, an oasis of sanity, goes un-damned because it represents an alternative to the spoiled, moronically contaminated world at large. It seems to me, however, that the circus is infinitely more a compression and crystallization of our large world than any kind of momentary relief from it. Poor old Him is hoist on the horns of a tautology. Mind you, he gets closer to the truth when he muses to himself, 'And here am I, patiently squeezing fourdimensional ideas into a twodimensional stage, when all of me that's anyone or anything is in the top of a circustent...' Why in 'the top of a circustent?' Because that's where the aerialists are, the angels of the metaphysical circus.
...The sad and beautiful Auguste, tragic hero of Henry Miller's "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder" (1948), is a useful emblem for this vertical division into levels of rarefication and breeding. Auguste, descended from the ancient and noble white-faced clown of the "Commedia dell'arte," stands throughout much of his act at the foot of a ladder -- the stairway to paradise, the essential symbol of human aspiration. The knockabout laughter of the ordinary street clowns has given way to an 'extraordinary smile which was engraved on Auguste's sad countenance. In the ring,' writes Miller,
"...this smile took on a quality of its own, detached, magnified, expressing the ineffable. At the foot of the ladder reaching to the moon, Auguste would sit in contemplation, his smile fixed, his thoughts far away. This simulation of ecstasy, which he had brought to perfection, always impressed the audience as the summation of the incongruous... Never had a buffoon thought to depict the miracle of ascension."
(from article by Gary Michael Dault, "The Clowns" -- in BorderCrossings, Vol. 13 #4, Fall 1994. http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/d/dault/dau012t.html)
Something, someone, is rising from the earth, perhaps rising through the earth. We're unsure. What clownish enterprise is it that walks straight into a wall -- once, twice, three times -- then (of a sudden and incalculable surprise) must have passed through without notice while we were wincing or laughing. We were expecting another thud. Only disappearance instead.
Poet T.S. Eliot wondered what is seen when what is seen is difficult to count or measure:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-- But who is that on the other side of you?
(Lines 359-365, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), in poem "The Waste Land." 1922.)
We do not know yet how to count. That's why we're so in debt. There's a place left open at table, even though everyone coming has arrived. An additional umbrella leans by door even though everyone has left. There's a conversation unfinished even though it's impossible to figure what's being said, by whom, where, and (absent the realization you are remarkably alone) how?
The smile both infuriates and seduces. Someone knows something. Nothing's being told.
So it is with the circus. So too the clown. When we step right up to see the show -- we are certain, this time, we'll pay attention. We'll watch, this time, where he goes. We won't be seduced by the smile that intimates it doesn't matter our eyes can't follow. Some seeing is beyond image and icon, beyond vision.
Whatever the trick, it's a good one. The smile is legacy. What treasure it transmits, we cannot grasp. But we'll reach out. Fingers wide in handshake or gassho. If not this time, next time. We're intent on touching -- on being touched.
Even though we doubt...we hope. Briefly. Then hope crumbles. And when the 'h' abandons its lead spot and loses its head and runs to the end of the word, we find ourselves open.
There we are.
In the open.
We'll see.
Even if just the town of our psyche -- it is festival time -- at nexus of winter into spring in New England, Lent into Easter (in Christian metaphor) through that glorious center ring of Holy Week. Add personal emergence, from appearance through illusion, a sweet and unfathomable solitude transfixed by silence collapsing into befuddling stillness. We have no idea what is happening.
The rare gaze from clown hermit heart sees aloneness without circumference.
For penetrating to the depths
Of one's own true self-nature,
And for attaining a vitality
Valid on all occasions,
Nothing can surpass
Meditation in the midst of activity.
- Hakuin (1686-1769)
Both coffee grounds and pipe tobacco fall outside kitchen window. Some impulse to light "Smooth Dutch Cavendish" in new Italian Briar picked up unbidden in Brunswick before falling ill last week brings decades to an old fragrance. Cat jumps to kitchen roof as smoke from chimney wood fire and Sail Regular rises height of barn. Cool breeze.
The Jewish Passover drew near, and many of the country people who had gone up to Jerusalem to purify themselves looked out for Jesus, saying to one another as they stood about in the Temple, "What do you think? Will he come to the festival or not?"
(--from John 11:45 - 56)
Who could miss the festival? Who doesn't want to attend the circus? Walking into and through center ring is price of admission. Don't mind the distractions. The bells and whistles, tumblers and trapezist, trainers and trombonist -- they are distracting prelude. The spotlight will show you the one to watch. "Will he come?" He'll show.
The Waitresses
The waitresses
At the restaurant
Have to keep reminding
The schizophrenic man
That if he keeps acting
Like a schizophrenic man
They'll have to ask him to leave the restaurant.
But he keeps forgetting that he's a schizophrenic man,
So they have to keep reminding him.
(Poem: "The Waitresses" by Matt Cook from Eavesdrop Soup)
We're a bit schizophrenic about Jesus, Judas, Jeremiah, and Jehovah. We want to follow the show, listen to the story, but we're uncertain how it ends. Like some garishly costumed midnight feature with spooks and ghouls mouthing lines everyone recites by tingling rote in unison, the story of the man from Nazareth (by contrast) is played out throughout Christendom in muted tones with plaintive chant by devoted players in somber attire. How does it end?
Upstake, fold canvas, lower wires, wash vases, wipe counter, rake ground, don white, race to emptiness. The circus tells it all, but like that spinster poet, tells it slant. There's a clown lingering at the edge of our awareness, one foot lifting as if something was there to receive it.
Never did I have the slightest doubt, not even at age nine, when I joined my friends at the railroad station at dawn to meet the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train and actually got to water the elephants, never (and especially not then) did I ever have the slightest doubt that the circus was about Something Big, that it asked and answered Large Questions. The greatest show on earth -- had I known the word -- was metaphysical.
That lower-case curmudgeon, American poet e e cummings, put the matter succinctly in the opening moments of his play "Him," when the main character, Him, hurls a burning, contradictory curse to the heavens: 'Damn everything but the circus!' The circus, an oasis of sanity, goes un-damned because it represents an alternative to the spoiled, moronically contaminated world at large. It seems to me, however, that the circus is infinitely more a compression and crystallization of our large world than any kind of momentary relief from it. Poor old Him is hoist on the horns of a tautology. Mind you, he gets closer to the truth when he muses to himself, 'And here am I, patiently squeezing fourdimensional ideas into a twodimensional stage, when all of me that's anyone or anything is in the top of a circustent...' Why in 'the top of a circustent?' Because that's where the aerialists are, the angels of the metaphysical circus.
...The sad and beautiful Auguste, tragic hero of Henry Miller's "The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder" (1948), is a useful emblem for this vertical division into levels of rarefication and breeding. Auguste, descended from the ancient and noble white-faced clown of the "Commedia dell'arte," stands throughout much of his act at the foot of a ladder -- the stairway to paradise, the essential symbol of human aspiration. The knockabout laughter of the ordinary street clowns has given way to an 'extraordinary smile which was engraved on Auguste's sad countenance. In the ring,' writes Miller,
"...this smile took on a quality of its own, detached, magnified, expressing the ineffable. At the foot of the ladder reaching to the moon, Auguste would sit in contemplation, his smile fixed, his thoughts far away. This simulation of ecstasy, which he had brought to perfection, always impressed the audience as the summation of the incongruous... Never had a buffoon thought to depict the miracle of ascension."
(from article by Gary Michael Dault, "The Clowns" -- in BorderCrossings, Vol. 13 #4, Fall 1994. http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/d/dault/dau012t.html)
Something, someone, is rising from the earth, perhaps rising through the earth. We're unsure. What clownish enterprise is it that walks straight into a wall -- once, twice, three times -- then (of a sudden and incalculable surprise) must have passed through without notice while we were wincing or laughing. We were expecting another thud. Only disappearance instead.
Poet T.S. Eliot wondered what is seen when what is seen is difficult to count or measure:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-- But who is that on the other side of you?
(Lines 359-365, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), in poem "The Waste Land." 1922.)
We do not know yet how to count. That's why we're so in debt. There's a place left open at table, even though everyone coming has arrived. An additional umbrella leans by door even though everyone has left. There's a conversation unfinished even though it's impossible to figure what's being said, by whom, where, and (absent the realization you are remarkably alone) how?
The smile both infuriates and seduces. Someone knows something. Nothing's being told.
So it is with the circus. So too the clown. When we step right up to see the show -- we are certain, this time, we'll pay attention. We'll watch, this time, where he goes. We won't be seduced by the smile that intimates it doesn't matter our eyes can't follow. Some seeing is beyond image and icon, beyond vision.
Whatever the trick, it's a good one. The smile is legacy. What treasure it transmits, we cannot grasp. But we'll reach out. Fingers wide in handshake or gassho. If not this time, next time. We're intent on touching -- on being touched.
Even though we doubt...we hope. Briefly. Then hope crumbles. And when the 'h' abandons its lead spot and loses its head and runs to the end of the word, we find ourselves open.
There we are.
In the open.
We'll see.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Prayer is one's being.
If prayer is one's being, this one is idiorhythmic. It's all over the place, at the same time, nowhere to be found.
"When I was visiting the monastic republic of Mount Athos on the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece in 1998 to learn what I could about the manuscript collections that have been maintained there for a thousand years, I ran across a lovely word, idiorhythmic, which describes a kind of relaxed monasticism no longer in favor in which adherents could more or less follow their own rules, not those of an inflexible abbot. Translated from the Greek, idiorhythmic means "living by one's own life patterns," and it suggests for me a way to go about the business of scouting out books."
-- Nicholas A. Basbanes, from, "Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century" c.2002)
My life pattern went into prison this morning, escorted to education, finding out it was indeed true the one staff person there was elsewhere; then catching another escort back across the portico, through corridors, collecting keys, signing out, and leaving into parking lot.
Like a cipher riding the droll edge of senseless chatter, in and out, I regard my life encapsuled in this morning's wonderful errant.
Meditation is not
A way to enlightenment,
Nor is it a method
Of achieving anything at all.
It is peace and blessedness itself.
It is the actualization of wisdom,
The ultimate truth
Of the oneness of all things.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
There's actually nothing I enjoy more than a cancelled appointment, conversation, class, or practice session. Similarly, I sometimes purchase a megabucks lottery ticket -- but hardly ever look to see if it was a winner. I might apply for a position, as recently done, but prefer not to hear that (yes, or, no) my name seems suitable, but, "ah, the small matter of" (fill in the blank) perhaps, "the idiorhythmia of your being...so...unordinary, or, shall I say, dis-affiliated?" It's a less annoying quality than disaffection -- one might not be...that), but hermits, especially idiorhythmic hermits (the worse kind: they don't follow the ordinary ways of the unordinary way), are rain in April, which, (being the cruelest month), does not even ask rain to do anything specific, like make flowers grow in Maine while it's still thirty degrees. No, rain is expected to merely fall.
We Bring Democracy To The Fish
It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.
Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.)
Everyone thought they knew Judas' purpose -- to be the betraying scapegoat. Turns out, not so. Judas conspired with Jesus so that Jesus could break the pattern. Kazantzakis had it.
We are blest with so many who know our purpose. The world is full of patterns with remarkable programming designed to relieve the lot of us from having to dive headlong into chaos and God. We're saved from both God and chaos, given programs to bide time, fret completion, fasten credential, smile for the camera..."oh, you didn't have any questions, did you?"
Dogen is on to something -- what's there to be achieved? Judas smiled and cried and couldn't bear his friend's choice. And Schopenhauer's drifting suggestion about our becoming what is not achieved:
5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence:
Schopenhauer's violence-filled vision of the daily world leads him on a quest for tranquility, and he pursues this end by retracing the path through which the will is objectified. Schopenhauer discovers more peaceful states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence that a person experiences, is proportional to the degree to which that person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. He believes that with less individuation and objectification, there is less conflict, less pain and more peace.
One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, according to Schopenhauer, is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness, where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the Platonic Idea that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this special form of perception, Schopenhauer maintains, we lose ourselves in the object, we forget about our individuality, and we become the clear mirror of the object. For example, through the aesthetic perception of an individual tree, we perceive shining through it, the archetype of all trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it).
Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience, he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects are universal, the subject of experience must likewise become universal (WWR, Section 33). Aesthetic perception thus raises a person into a pure will-less, painless, and timeless subject of knowledge (WWR, Section 34).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.1
The idiorhythmic achieves nothing worth describing.
Being what she or he is, seems like going nowhere.
There's no order, not there, not anywhere.
Only orderly confidence shilling promises what it cannot produce.
Don't go there.
Be every-here.
Be prayer.
If prayer is one's being, this one is idiorhythmic. It's all over the place, at the same time, nowhere to be found.
"When I was visiting the monastic republic of Mount Athos on the Chalkidiki Peninsula of northern Greece in 1998 to learn what I could about the manuscript collections that have been maintained there for a thousand years, I ran across a lovely word, idiorhythmic, which describes a kind of relaxed monasticism no longer in favor in which adherents could more or less follow their own rules, not those of an inflexible abbot. Translated from the Greek, idiorhythmic means "living by one's own life patterns," and it suggests for me a way to go about the business of scouting out books."
-- Nicholas A. Basbanes, from, "Among the Gently Mad: Strategies and Perspectives for the Book Hunter in the Twenty-First Century" c.2002)
My life pattern went into prison this morning, escorted to education, finding out it was indeed true the one staff person there was elsewhere; then catching another escort back across the portico, through corridors, collecting keys, signing out, and leaving into parking lot.
Like a cipher riding the droll edge of senseless chatter, in and out, I regard my life encapsuled in this morning's wonderful errant.
Meditation is not
A way to enlightenment,
Nor is it a method
Of achieving anything at all.
It is peace and blessedness itself.
It is the actualization of wisdom,
The ultimate truth
Of the oneness of all things.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
There's actually nothing I enjoy more than a cancelled appointment, conversation, class, or practice session. Similarly, I sometimes purchase a megabucks lottery ticket -- but hardly ever look to see if it was a winner. I might apply for a position, as recently done, but prefer not to hear that (yes, or, no) my name seems suitable, but, "ah, the small matter of" (fill in the blank) perhaps, "the idiorhythmia of your being...so...unordinary, or, shall I say, dis-affiliated?" It's a less annoying quality than disaffection -- one might not be...that), but hermits, especially idiorhythmic hermits (the worse kind: they don't follow the ordinary ways of the unordinary way), are rain in April, which, (being the cruelest month), does not even ask rain to do anything specific, like make flowers grow in Maine while it's still thirty degrees. No, rain is expected to merely fall.
We Bring Democracy To The Fish
It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.
Poem: "We Bring Democracy To The Fish" by Donald Hall, from, White Apples and the Taste of Stone.)
Everyone thought they knew Judas' purpose -- to be the betraying scapegoat. Turns out, not so. Judas conspired with Jesus so that Jesus could break the pattern. Kazantzakis had it.
We are blest with so many who know our purpose. The world is full of patterns with remarkable programming designed to relieve the lot of us from having to dive headlong into chaos and God. We're saved from both God and chaos, given programs to bide time, fret completion, fasten credential, smile for the camera..."oh, you didn't have any questions, did you?"
Dogen is on to something -- what's there to be achieved? Judas smiled and cried and couldn't bear his friend's choice. And Schopenhauer's drifting suggestion about our becoming what is not achieved:
5.1 Aesthetic Perception as a Mode of Transcendence:
Schopenhauer's violence-filled vision of the daily world leads him on a quest for tranquility, and he pursues this end by retracing the path through which the will is objectified. Schopenhauer discovers more peaceful states of mind by directing his everyday, practically-oriented consciousness towards more extraordinary, universal and less-individuated states of mind, since he believes that the violence that a person experiences, is proportional to the degree to which that person's consciousness is individuated and objectifying. He believes that with less individuation and objectification, there is less conflict, less pain and more peace.
One way to achieve a more tranquil state of consciousness, according to Schopenhauer, is through aesthetic perception. This is a special state of perceptual consciousness, where we apprehend some spatio-temporal object and discern through this object, the Platonic Idea that corresponds to the type of object in question. In this special form of perception, Schopenhauer maintains, we lose ourselves in the object, we forget about our individuality, and we become the clear mirror of the object. For example, through the aesthetic perception of an individual tree, we perceive shining through it, the archetype of all trees (i.e., the Ur-phenomenon, as Goethe would describe it).
Since Schopenhauer assumes that the quality of the subject of experience must correspond to the quality of the object of experience, he infers that in the state of aesthetic perception, where the objects are universal, the subject of experience must likewise become universal (WWR, Section 33). Aesthetic perception thus raises a person into a pure will-less, painless, and timeless subject of knowledge (WWR, Section 34).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/#5.1
The idiorhythmic achieves nothing worth describing.
Being what she or he is, seems like going nowhere.
There's no order, not there, not anywhere.
Only orderly confidence shilling promises what it cannot produce.
Don't go there.
Be every-here.
Be prayer.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Time to think about home. Where it is. Where it isn't.
The grief of injustice and assassination, its power-lust and heartless stare, is contemporary mediation this season toward Holy Week. In the secular church, the liturgy of Final Four and Opening Day are celebrated with great spirit and verve. Off to the side, in what might be a new version of the Underground Church, Underground Railroad, other iconic images, from Jesus to Martin, fill this Lent. The underground, like that of Maine's weeping waking earth, tries to remember how to emerge from suspended awareness, evolve through sun-inviting surface into new being,
More than his birthday, Martin Luther King Jr's deathday, his transition day, takes my attention. In Washington DC to study philosophy and theology in 1968, I felt the pulsing grief, disbelief, and anger of a city and a people. Driving bus filled with franciscan absurd ethos of presence, we felt the riot of despair, even sharp sound of bullet against metal in middle of night. Later, sitting in sanctuary with front page report of troops and fire and sorrow, David S. is captured in photo with Washington Post open, tabernacle in relief to the other mystery of assassination and its emptiness.
Will M. sends a piece from Aurobindo. It strikes me as a sun-invitation to consider, in new wording, the perennial story which, in the Christian metaphor, we call "resurrection":
The strife was over, the respite lay in front.
Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers
And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,
And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,
Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,
And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,
And with the glory of the noons were one.
Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
All time-made difference they overcame;
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
[Page 382]
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
[From Book Four, Canto IV, "The Quest". Savitri travels the countryside, in search of her soul's mate. In Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol By Sri Aurobindo, Pp. 379, 382)
To loosen the knot. The wide untroubled witness gaze. Are these signs of resurrection?
Are we evolving?
Play with the etymology pronouncing the presence and movement of spirit through being-itself. "For the willingness to love" -- [e; vol; love]
The Latin helps: volo (1) velle volui (vin = visne; sis = si vis; sultis = si vultis); [to be willing , to wish, want; to will, ordain; to suppose, maintain that]; 'sibi velle', [to mean, signify]. Hence partic. volens -entis, [willing, favorable].
No wonder there is so much difficulty with the word "evolve" and its maligned cousin, "evolution."
The willingness to love would entail an encircling surrender to the whole of life/being/itself.
This, I submit, in contrast to thought/determining/our-(my)-way-is-right.
Life is not what we think it is. Life is what it is. The difficulty we face at this current level of rational consciousness is the knot of thought/belief that attempts to hold everything in suspended isolation, fixed fast according to our lights, our arbitrary level of understanding. In moments of brief clarity, we suspect life is beyond thought and beyond belief. At those moments we ourselves are suspended somewhere at a distance from our fixed thought and belief, open to what is being revealed.
Learning opens. Going beyond traditional measurements of worth and success, helps.
Recognizing knots, and loosening them, helps. Being astounded, helps. As does wording oneself through resurrecting sound.
It occurs to me that the way we evolve is awareness of the astonishment involving being-itself. This "Oh!" -- this opening vowel, world rhyme, inserts itself into the very word "evolve" and becomes "evolove".
This neologism, the word, "evolove" is not just a misspelling of "evolve" -- it is the addition ("Oh!") of wonder, astonishment, at what is revealing itself in our midst.
The word "evolove" is a palindrome. Etymology: Greek palindromos running back again, from palin back, again + dramein to run; akin to Greek polos axis, pole. (Merriam-Webster Online)
A palindrome is a word or phrase which reads the same in both directions.
I submit we have a need for palindromic consciousness, namely, one that arrives at core (at care?), at center, the middle reality of inquiry that bypasses, and possibly dissolves the exclusive mechanistic duality and twoness of our contemporary mind.
An inclusive ecologic wholeness would be the invitation of consciousness.
Such a consciousness would begin to experience, practice, and declare interdependence. Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach. "Compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; institutions influence the development of compassion in individuals. In connection with a form of political liberalism going for overlapping consensus." (Nussbaum 2001, quoted in "Reflection on Martha Nussbaum's Work on Compassion from a Buddhist Perspective", by Maria Vanden Eynde, in "Journal of Buddhist Ethics", Volume 11, 2004)
Retrieving Aurobindo:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
Sheer wonder!
Silences.
The grief of injustice and assassination, its power-lust and heartless stare, is contemporary mediation this season toward Holy Week. In the secular church, the liturgy of Final Four and Opening Day are celebrated with great spirit and verve. Off to the side, in what might be a new version of the Underground Church, Underground Railroad, other iconic images, from Jesus to Martin, fill this Lent. The underground, like that of Maine's weeping waking earth, tries to remember how to emerge from suspended awareness, evolve through sun-inviting surface into new being,
More than his birthday, Martin Luther King Jr's deathday, his transition day, takes my attention. In Washington DC to study philosophy and theology in 1968, I felt the pulsing grief, disbelief, and anger of a city and a people. Driving bus filled with franciscan absurd ethos of presence, we felt the riot of despair, even sharp sound of bullet against metal in middle of night. Later, sitting in sanctuary with front page report of troops and fire and sorrow, David S. is captured in photo with Washington Post open, tabernacle in relief to the other mystery of assassination and its emptiness.
Will M. sends a piece from Aurobindo. It strikes me as a sun-invitation to consider, in new wording, the perennial story which, in the Christian metaphor, we call "resurrection":
The strife was over, the respite lay in front.
Happy they lived with birds and beasts and flowers
And sunlight and the rustle of the leaves,
And heard the wild winds wandering in the night,
Mused with the stars in their mute constant ranks,
And lodged in the mornings as in azure tents,
And with the glory of the noons were one.
Some deeper plunged; from life's external clasp
Beckoned into a fiery privacy
In the soul's unprofaned star-white recess
They sojourned with an everliving Bliss;
A Voice profound in the ecstasy and the hush
They heard, beheld an all-revealing Light.
All time-made difference they overcame;
The world was fibred with their own heart-strings;
Close drawn to the heart that beats in every breast,
They reached the one self in all through boundless love.
Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
[Page 382]
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature's great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
[From Book Four, Canto IV, "The Quest". Savitri travels the countryside, in search of her soul's mate. In Savitri -- A Legend and a Symbol By Sri Aurobindo, Pp. 379, 382)
To loosen the knot. The wide untroubled witness gaze. Are these signs of resurrection?
Are we evolving?
Play with the etymology pronouncing the presence and movement of spirit through being-itself. "For the willingness to love" -- [e; vol; love]
The Latin helps: volo (1) velle volui (vin = visne; sis = si vis; sultis = si vultis); [to be willing , to wish, want; to will, ordain; to suppose, maintain that]; 'sibi velle', [to mean, signify]. Hence partic. volens -entis, [willing, favorable].
No wonder there is so much difficulty with the word "evolve" and its maligned cousin, "evolution."
The willingness to love would entail an encircling surrender to the whole of life/being/itself.
This, I submit, in contrast to thought/determining/our-(my)-way-is-right.
Life is not what we think it is. Life is what it is. The difficulty we face at this current level of rational consciousness is the knot of thought/belief that attempts to hold everything in suspended isolation, fixed fast according to our lights, our arbitrary level of understanding. In moments of brief clarity, we suspect life is beyond thought and beyond belief. At those moments we ourselves are suspended somewhere at a distance from our fixed thought and belief, open to what is being revealed.
Learning opens. Going beyond traditional measurements of worth and success, helps.
Recognizing knots, and loosening them, helps. Being astounded, helps. As does wording oneself through resurrecting sound.
It occurs to me that the way we evolve is awareness of the astonishment involving being-itself. This "Oh!" -- this opening vowel, world rhyme, inserts itself into the very word "evolve" and becomes "evolove".
This neologism, the word, "evolove" is not just a misspelling of "evolve" -- it is the addition ("Oh!") of wonder, astonishment, at what is revealing itself in our midst.
The word "evolove" is a palindrome. Etymology: Greek palindromos running back again, from palin back, again + dramein to run; akin to Greek polos axis, pole. (Merriam-Webster Online)
A palindrome is a word or phrase which reads the same in both directions.
I submit we have a need for palindromic consciousness, namely, one that arrives at core (at care?), at center, the middle reality of inquiry that bypasses, and possibly dissolves the exclusive mechanistic duality and twoness of our contemporary mind.
An inclusive ecologic wholeness would be the invitation of consciousness.
Such a consciousness would begin to experience, practice, and declare interdependence. Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach. "Compassionate individuals construct institutions that embody what they imagine; institutions influence the development of compassion in individuals. In connection with a form of political liberalism going for overlapping consensus." (Nussbaum 2001, quoted in "Reflection on Martha Nussbaum's Work on Compassion from a Buddhist Perspective", by Maria Vanden Eynde, in "Journal of Buddhist Ethics", Volume 11, 2004)
Retrieving Aurobindo:
Truth leaned to them from her supernal realm;
Above them blazed eternity's mystic suns.
Nameless the austere ascetics without home
Abandoning speech and motion and desire ...
Sheer wonder!
Silences.
Monday, April 03, 2006
At footbridge on lower trail along Mt. Megunticook east toward Lincolnville from Camden, psalm of tumbling water telling of its joy falling, falling, falling.
Every sentient being is
Ready to be enlightened
At every moment.
The only hindrance
Is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings
Of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused
On the relative I, the self.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? -- 1366)
No self in water. Only wet, only cool, only song of abandon going God knows where.
On either side and everywhere on the mountain, a billion fallen leaves -- earthen, winter worn, ready for soil, given wood to tree -- feel urge beneath them, root lust to green not yet bud-born branch.
The child grew up; one day he went out to his father who was with the reapers, and exclaimed to his father, "Oh, my head! My head!" The father told a servant to carry him to his mother. He lifted him up and took him to his mother, and the boy sat on her knee until midday, when he died. She went upstairs, laid him on the bed of the man of God, shut the door on him and went out.
Elisha then went to the house, and there on his bed lay the child, dead. He went in and shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he climbed on to the bed and stretched himself on top of the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes to his eyes, and his hands on his hands, and as he lowered himself on to him, the child's flesh grew warm. Then he got up and walked to and fro inside the house, and then climbed on to the bed again and lowered himself on to the child seven times in all; then the child sneezed -- and opened his eyes. He then summoned Gehazi. "Call our Shunammitess" he said; and he called her. When she came to him, he said, "Take up your son". She went in and, falling at his feet, bowed down to the ground; and taking up her son went out.
(2 Kings 4:18 - 37)
Yogananda says Elisha will reincarnate as Jesus. Green lust rooting life.
After silence after mass after coffee after donuts I climb Beech Hill to see the sea its beauty. From that lovely vantage I call Saskia who tucks in monastery later in day.
Two mice in zendo watch me watch them.
Sharing root greening practing.
Bell chant. Follows. Silence.
Every sentient being is
Ready to be enlightened
At every moment.
The only hindrance
Is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings
Of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused
On the relative I, the self.
- Tesshu Tokusai (? -- 1366)
No self in water. Only wet, only cool, only song of abandon going God knows where.
On either side and everywhere on the mountain, a billion fallen leaves -- earthen, winter worn, ready for soil, given wood to tree -- feel urge beneath them, root lust to green not yet bud-born branch.
The child grew up; one day he went out to his father who was with the reapers, and exclaimed to his father, "Oh, my head! My head!" The father told a servant to carry him to his mother. He lifted him up and took him to his mother, and the boy sat on her knee until midday, when he died. She went upstairs, laid him on the bed of the man of God, shut the door on him and went out.
Elisha then went to the house, and there on his bed lay the child, dead. He went in and shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he climbed on to the bed and stretched himself on top of the child, putting his mouth on his mouth, his eyes to his eyes, and his hands on his hands, and as he lowered himself on to him, the child's flesh grew warm. Then he got up and walked to and fro inside the house, and then climbed on to the bed again and lowered himself on to the child seven times in all; then the child sneezed -- and opened his eyes. He then summoned Gehazi. "Call our Shunammitess" he said; and he called her. When she came to him, he said, "Take up your son". She went in and, falling at his feet, bowed down to the ground; and taking up her son went out.
(2 Kings 4:18 - 37)
Yogananda says Elisha will reincarnate as Jesus. Green lust rooting life.
After silence after mass after coffee after donuts I climb Beech Hill to see the sea its beauty. From that lovely vantage I call Saskia who tucks in monastery later in day.
Two mice in zendo watch me watch them.
Sharing root greening practing.
Bell chant. Follows. Silence.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Holy Week approaches. Easter approaches.
What does silence call for? What does solitude look for? What-is-called itself?
Does it matter that Jesus be God? God and Man? Man only?
What matters is kindness. What also matters is seeing and treating each person, each sentient being, and each moment of creation as sacred moment, sacred being, sacred person.
Long ago, with a shift in consciousness, Jeremiah was led to realize and reveal:
Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know the Lord!" No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest -- it is the Lord who speaks -- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.
(from Jeremiah 31: 31 -)
Not to mind sin. If sin is separation, pay it no mind. The divisive, the worries, the fretting, goals and dreams, attachment to outcomes, the anxiety of grasping for security -- these are ways the mind refuses to trust. If we pay sin no mind, will trust, will faith emerge?
I sometimes look hard at this. The word "faith" needs reviewing. It is not owned, does belong to anyone or anything claiming sole rights. It belongs only to itself.
Sometimes I think I've faith but no belief. I'm not sure what to say when asked what I believe. I want to shift the conversation, the way Jeremiah did. I want to say it doesn't matter what I believe. Rather, call it what you will, what I'd call "faith" is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of life. This unknowing trust surrounds all and permeates all. Not one thing is excluded. Faith is open-handed. My faith doesn't cling to a particular set of beliefs, denomination, master, guru, bishop, administrator, or understanding of (what is called) God. This faith is what-is-called.
What-is-called by us -- by our presence? What-is-called by another -- by their presence? If not God -- why not...God?
"The kingdom of God comes...to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals...." (Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) from What is Christianity? c.1901; quoted in The First Coming, How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, p.14, by Thomas Sheehan, c.1986)
God is either in the heart, the heart of everything, or there is no God. God in the heart of each piece of creation, each angle of face, each turn of phrase. Or, nowhere. It is hard to understand the thinking that puts God outside creation. It is equally difficult to comprehend how particular people, particular church, or particular individual(s) constitute the exclusive domain of God -- all others bow, genuflect, tithe, alms-give, sacrifice, revere, devote, surrender, deny themselves, defer, or allow themselves to be told (or believe) they are separated from that which they cannot be separated from.
Now my soul is troubled. (Jesus, in John 12)
He was troubled, the writer suggests, because he intuited his imminent death. He probably was frightened in the same way we all become frightened at the thought of our own death. Did the fear of separation suddenly enter his mind? Did he experience that fear which pervades the minds of so many? Did he own it? Hold it? Did he realize that such a fear, and such a mind that welcomes and cultivates it, is a great death? Is that why, exhausted by the awful fear others scourged him with, he came to the dropping-off point, saying: "Your will, not mine;" saying, "Into your hands I commend my spirit."? He'd been completely human. At his dropping-off point (of mind, of body) Jesus realizes what-is-called God and lets-go wholly into that Itself.
So it is. The vague despondency that haunts us like sudden April wind crossing hillside passes. We go on, and/or, we die. What carries us through is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of existence and life that passes us on to the next thing we find ourselves doing, the next thing we choose to do. Anything. Like swaying trees in early afternoon breeze. Sunlight giving dignity to tired brown leaves on loosening soil. Or lives, like clouds, passing. We go on.
Some Clouds
Now that I've unplugged the phone
no one can reach me --
At least for this one afternoon
they will have to get by without my advice or opinion.
Now nobody else is going to call
& ask in a tentative voice
if I haven't yet heard that she's dead,
that woman I once loved --
nothing but ashes scattered over a city
that barely itself any longer exists.
Yes, thank you, I've heard.
It had been too lovely a morning.
That in itself should have warned me.
The sun lit up the tangerines
& the blazing poinsettias
like so many candles.
For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.
I am busy watching things happen again
that happened a long time ago,
as I lean back in Josephine's lawn chair
under a sky of incredible blue,
broken -- if that is the word for it --
by a few billowing clouds,
all white & unspeakably lovely,
drifting out of one nothingness into another.
(Poem: "Some Clouds" by Steve Kowit from The Dumbbell Nebula. The Roundhouse Press.)
Part of taking time for a retreat is loosening oneself from the tight freezing survival demands of winter. Retrieving resurgence of spirit. The heart longs to rest away from the cacophony of dissident views about who's right who's wrong; who's a disgrace, who's going to triumph; whose God is more powerful, whose God is really truly God?
I like this piece. It is Krishnamurti's secret.
There's a story about J. Krishnamurti that speaks reams about what it means to be free of this limiting, fear-based pattern of thinking. Every spring he used to give talks in a beautiful oak grove in Ojai, in southern California. He had been speaking there for over sixty years. On this particular occasion when I went to hear him, in the late nineteen-seventies, there must have been close to two thousand people in attendance, sitting on the grass, or in their folding chairs.
It was always an extraordinary experience, hearing Krishnamurti in person. Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Krishnamurti's, described it as: "Like listening to a discourse of the Buddha—such authority, such intrinsic power."
Part way through this particular talk, Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, "Do you want to know what my secret is?" Almost as though we were one body we sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.
Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! He was in many ways a mountaintop teacher—somewhat distant, aloof, seemingly unapproachable, unless you were part of his inner circle. Yet that's why we came to Ojai every spring, to see if we could find out just what his secret was. We wanted to know how he managed to be so aware and enlightened, while we struggled with conflict and our numerous problems.
There was a silence. Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, "You see, I don't mind what happens."
I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, and—deep inside yourself—you'll feel good no matter what. You’ll feel good because you are connected to, one with, the energy of the universe, the beauty and power of creation itself. Or, as Krishnamurti himself put it:
‘When you live with this awareness, this sensitivity, life has an astonishing way of taking care of you. Then there is no problem of security, of what people say or do not say, and that is the beauty of life.’
(c. Jim Dreaver, 2005, www.jimdreaver.com, http://www.geocities.com/thereisonlynow/kirishnamurtissecret.html)
And so, we're on retreat. We're following winter, going off into spring, thawing in solitude, stopping a while, turning off the engine, walking out back, a monastic quiet -- watching, contemplating, and engaging whatever service the authentic will reveal.
We're not waiting. Waiting implies expectation. We aren't expecting anything.
Does it matter that God is not found separate from creation?
Itself. Each is called to be itself. Is this another side of the mystery of resurrection?
Such a beautiful day!
Yes?
Go on!
What does silence call for? What does solitude look for? What-is-called itself?
Does it matter that Jesus be God? God and Man? Man only?
What matters is kindness. What also matters is seeing and treating each person, each sentient being, and each moment of creation as sacred moment, sacred being, sacred person.
Long ago, with a shift in consciousness, Jeremiah was led to realize and reveal:
Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people. There will be no further need for neighbour to try to teach neighbour, or brother to say to brother, "Learn to know the Lord!" No, they will all know me, the least no less than the greatest -- it is the Lord who speaks -- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.
(from Jeremiah 31: 31 -)
Not to mind sin. If sin is separation, pay it no mind. The divisive, the worries, the fretting, goals and dreams, attachment to outcomes, the anxiety of grasping for security -- these are ways the mind refuses to trust. If we pay sin no mind, will trust, will faith emerge?
I sometimes look hard at this. The word "faith" needs reviewing. It is not owned, does belong to anyone or anything claiming sole rights. It belongs only to itself.
Sometimes I think I've faith but no belief. I'm not sure what to say when asked what I believe. I want to shift the conversation, the way Jeremiah did. I want to say it doesn't matter what I believe. Rather, call it what you will, what I'd call "faith" is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of life. This unknowing trust surrounds all and permeates all. Not one thing is excluded. Faith is open-handed. My faith doesn't cling to a particular set of beliefs, denomination, master, guru, bishop, administrator, or understanding of (what is called) God. This faith is what-is-called.
What-is-called by us -- by our presence? What-is-called by another -- by their presence? If not God -- why not...God?
"The kingdom of God comes...to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals...." (Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) from What is Christianity? c.1901; quoted in The First Coming, How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, p.14, by Thomas Sheehan, c.1986)
God is either in the heart, the heart of everything, or there is no God. God in the heart of each piece of creation, each angle of face, each turn of phrase. Or, nowhere. It is hard to understand the thinking that puts God outside creation. It is equally difficult to comprehend how particular people, particular church, or particular individual(s) constitute the exclusive domain of God -- all others bow, genuflect, tithe, alms-give, sacrifice, revere, devote, surrender, deny themselves, defer, or allow themselves to be told (or believe) they are separated from that which they cannot be separated from.
Now my soul is troubled. (Jesus, in John 12)
He was troubled, the writer suggests, because he intuited his imminent death. He probably was frightened in the same way we all become frightened at the thought of our own death. Did the fear of separation suddenly enter his mind? Did he experience that fear which pervades the minds of so many? Did he own it? Hold it? Did he realize that such a fear, and such a mind that welcomes and cultivates it, is a great death? Is that why, exhausted by the awful fear others scourged him with, he came to the dropping-off point, saying: "Your will, not mine;" saying, "Into your hands I commend my spirit."? He'd been completely human. At his dropping-off point (of mind, of body) Jesus realizes what-is-called God and lets-go wholly into that Itself.
So it is. The vague despondency that haunts us like sudden April wind crossing hillside passes. We go on, and/or, we die. What carries us through is an unknowing trust in the benevolence of existence and life that passes us on to the next thing we find ourselves doing, the next thing we choose to do. Anything. Like swaying trees in early afternoon breeze. Sunlight giving dignity to tired brown leaves on loosening soil. Or lives, like clouds, passing. We go on.
Some Clouds
Now that I've unplugged the phone
no one can reach me --
At least for this one afternoon
they will have to get by without my advice or opinion.
Now nobody else is going to call
& ask in a tentative voice
if I haven't yet heard that she's dead,
that woman I once loved --
nothing but ashes scattered over a city
that barely itself any longer exists.
Yes, thank you, I've heard.
It had been too lovely a morning.
That in itself should have warned me.
The sun lit up the tangerines
& the blazing poinsettias
like so many candles.
For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.
I am busy watching things happen again
that happened a long time ago,
as I lean back in Josephine's lawn chair
under a sky of incredible blue,
broken -- if that is the word for it --
by a few billowing clouds,
all white & unspeakably lovely,
drifting out of one nothingness into another.
(Poem: "Some Clouds" by Steve Kowit from The Dumbbell Nebula. The Roundhouse Press.)
Part of taking time for a retreat is loosening oneself from the tight freezing survival demands of winter. Retrieving resurgence of spirit. The heart longs to rest away from the cacophony of dissident views about who's right who's wrong; who's a disgrace, who's going to triumph; whose God is more powerful, whose God is really truly God?
I like this piece. It is Krishnamurti's secret.
There's a story about J. Krishnamurti that speaks reams about what it means to be free of this limiting, fear-based pattern of thinking. Every spring he used to give talks in a beautiful oak grove in Ojai, in southern California. He had been speaking there for over sixty years. On this particular occasion when I went to hear him, in the late nineteen-seventies, there must have been close to two thousand people in attendance, sitting on the grass, or in their folding chairs.
It was always an extraordinary experience, hearing Krishnamurti in person. Aldous Huxley, who was a friend of Krishnamurti's, described it as: "Like listening to a discourse of the Buddha—such authority, such intrinsic power."
Part way through this particular talk, Krishnamurti suddenly paused, leaned forward, and said, almost conspiratorially, "Do you want to know what my secret is?" Almost as though we were one body we sat up, even more alert than we had been, if that was possible. I could see people all around me lean forward, their ears straining and their mouths slowly opening in hushed anticipation.
Krishnamurti rarely ever talked about himself or his own process, and now he was about to give us his secret! He was in many ways a mountaintop teacher—somewhat distant, aloof, seemingly unapproachable, unless you were part of his inner circle. Yet that's why we came to Ojai every spring, to see if we could find out just what his secret was. We wanted to know how he managed to be so aware and enlightened, while we struggled with conflict and our numerous problems.
There was a silence. Then he said in a soft, almost shy voice, "You see, I don't mind what happens."
I don't mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, and—deep inside yourself—you'll feel good no matter what. You’ll feel good because you are connected to, one with, the energy of the universe, the beauty and power of creation itself. Or, as Krishnamurti himself put it:
‘When you live with this awareness, this sensitivity, life has an astonishing way of taking care of you. Then there is no problem of security, of what people say or do not say, and that is the beauty of life.’
(c. Jim Dreaver, 2005, www.jimdreaver.com, http://www.geocities.com/thereisonlynow/kirishnamurtissecret.html)
And so, we're on retreat. We're following winter, going off into spring, thawing in solitude, stopping a while, turning off the engine, walking out back, a monastic quiet -- watching, contemplating, and engaging whatever service the authentic will reveal.
We're not waiting. Waiting implies expectation. We aren't expecting anything.
Does it matter that God is not found separate from creation?
Itself. Each is called to be itself. Is this another side of the mystery of resurrection?
Such a beautiful day!
Yes?
Go on!
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Compassion, "suffering together," is "green and steep and wild." It is often looked at, but rarely traversed; seldom still, engaged. Just about never embodied.
Magnificent Peak
By its own nature
It towers above
The tangle of rivers
Don't say it's a lot of dirt
Piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
The evening cloud
Draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
You can look up and see it
Green and steep and wild.
- Muso (1275-1351)
Much too much is said of compassion -- as if it were a marketing tool or an election slogan. The saying is not the becoming. As often as not the saying is the deflection.
The police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees who said to them, "Why haven't you brought him?" The police replied, "There has never been anybody who has spoken like him". "So" the Pharisees answered "you have been led astray as well? Have any of the authorities believed in him? Any of the Pharisees? This rabble knows nothing about the Law -- they are damned." One of them, Nicodemus -- the same man who had come to Jesus earlier -- said to them, "But surely the Law does not allow us to pass judgement on a man without giving him a hearing and discovering what he is about?"
(from John 7:40 - 52, Mass Readings, Saturday of the 4th week of Lent)
Since judgement, punishment, and condemnation are easy travel for the afflicted emotions and unenlightened mind, there have been strong attempts throughout history to curb and filter these tendencies. We don't, says law throughout human time, judge a man without giving him a hearing and discovering what he is about. The lie to compassion is the violation of that law.
The danger to our intellect and emotions is in thinking or feeling that the outer law and the inner law are both wrong -- that, suddenly due to someone claiming to have our best interests in mind, we will doubt the perennial wisdom of fairness and justice for others (read, all) and settle with resigned sigh for my own personal protection during a time of danger and duress.
Deception insinuates this sudden doubt in the mind, and treachery walks in on its coattails. Once we have turned face on ourselves, it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to face another with any integrity. We notice the looking away, the blinking nervousness, the mistrusting glare. We cannot face others openly; we hide behind empty husks of words, once ripe, now broken and shattered on stone cold hard floor of ideology and blank stare.
The law of compassion asks us to be of different sight. What the eyes cannot tolerate, the heart must look openly at. What the mind cannot compute, the heart must reason. In the deepest origins of compassion we possess the vision of what is right. That vision longs to surface. It longs to reach our bodies. It longs for incarnation. And when bodies are killed, compassion longs for resurrection. Compassion is patient. It will wait for reincarnation if it must.
When I speak of basic human feeling, I am not only thinking of something fleeting and vague, however. I refer to the capacity we all have to empathize with one another, which, in Tibetan we call shen dug ngal wa la mi so pa. Translated literally, this means "the inability to bear the sight of another's suffering." Given that this is what enables us to enter into, and to some extent participate, in others' pain, it is one of our most significant characteristics. It is what causes us to start at the sound of a cry for help, to recoil at the sight of harm done to another, to suffer when confronted with others' suffering. And it is what compels us to shut our eyes even when we want to ignore others' distress.
...
This characteristic of appreciating others' concern is, I believe, a reflection of our "inability to bear the sight of another's suffering." I say this because alongside our natural ability to empathize with others, we also have a need for others' kindness, which runs like a thread throughout our whole life. It is most apparent when we are young and when we are old. But we have only to fall ill to be reminded of how important it is to be loved and cared about even during our prime years. Though it may seem a virtue to be able to do without affection, in reality a life lacking this precious ingredient must be a miserable one. It is surely not a coincidence that the lives of most criminals turn out to have been lonely and lacking in love.
(--pp.64-66 from Ethics for the New Millennium, by Dalai Lama. August 1999)
I am reminded of that day in prison when with inmates we tried to fathom a formula that would allow retrieval of that love from the lacuna -- from that "blank space; a missing part; a gap." Would it be possible? Only if that lacuna, like the ever-present origin of compassion, were open to the radical eternal now of love, attention, respect, and caring in the present moment. This present moment, with awareness, event, and incidents of compassionate love, becomes itself the healing antidote to what was lacking. We named it on the spot: Radical Retrieval of Origin Conversation.
It is the conversation of compassion.
It cannot be faked.
It is only real.
We know it.
When heard.
And seen.
Embodied.
Magnificent Peak
By its own nature
It towers above
The tangle of rivers
Don't say it's a lot of dirt
Piled high
Without end the mist of dawn
The evening cloud
Draw their shadows across it
From the four directions
You can look up and see it
Green and steep and wild.
- Muso (1275-1351)
Much too much is said of compassion -- as if it were a marketing tool or an election slogan. The saying is not the becoming. As often as not the saying is the deflection.
The police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees who said to them, "Why haven't you brought him?" The police replied, "There has never been anybody who has spoken like him". "So" the Pharisees answered "you have been led astray as well? Have any of the authorities believed in him? Any of the Pharisees? This rabble knows nothing about the Law -- they are damned." One of them, Nicodemus -- the same man who had come to Jesus earlier -- said to them, "But surely the Law does not allow us to pass judgement on a man without giving him a hearing and discovering what he is about?"
(from John 7:40 - 52, Mass Readings, Saturday of the 4th week of Lent)
Since judgement, punishment, and condemnation are easy travel for the afflicted emotions and unenlightened mind, there have been strong attempts throughout history to curb and filter these tendencies. We don't, says law throughout human time, judge a man without giving him a hearing and discovering what he is about. The lie to compassion is the violation of that law.
The danger to our intellect and emotions is in thinking or feeling that the outer law and the inner law are both wrong -- that, suddenly due to someone claiming to have our best interests in mind, we will doubt the perennial wisdom of fairness and justice for others (read, all) and settle with resigned sigh for my own personal protection during a time of danger and duress.
Deception insinuates this sudden doubt in the mind, and treachery walks in on its coattails. Once we have turned face on ourselves, it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to face another with any integrity. We notice the looking away, the blinking nervousness, the mistrusting glare. We cannot face others openly; we hide behind empty husks of words, once ripe, now broken and shattered on stone cold hard floor of ideology and blank stare.
The law of compassion asks us to be of different sight. What the eyes cannot tolerate, the heart must look openly at. What the mind cannot compute, the heart must reason. In the deepest origins of compassion we possess the vision of what is right. That vision longs to surface. It longs to reach our bodies. It longs for incarnation. And when bodies are killed, compassion longs for resurrection. Compassion is patient. It will wait for reincarnation if it must.
When I speak of basic human feeling, I am not only thinking of something fleeting and vague, however. I refer to the capacity we all have to empathize with one another, which, in Tibetan we call shen dug ngal wa la mi so pa. Translated literally, this means "the inability to bear the sight of another's suffering." Given that this is what enables us to enter into, and to some extent participate, in others' pain, it is one of our most significant characteristics. It is what causes us to start at the sound of a cry for help, to recoil at the sight of harm done to another, to suffer when confronted with others' suffering. And it is what compels us to shut our eyes even when we want to ignore others' distress.
...
This characteristic of appreciating others' concern is, I believe, a reflection of our "inability to bear the sight of another's suffering." I say this because alongside our natural ability to empathize with others, we also have a need for others' kindness, which runs like a thread throughout our whole life. It is most apparent when we are young and when we are old. But we have only to fall ill to be reminded of how important it is to be loved and cared about even during our prime years. Though it may seem a virtue to be able to do without affection, in reality a life lacking this precious ingredient must be a miserable one. It is surely not a coincidence that the lives of most criminals turn out to have been lonely and lacking in love.
(--pp.64-66 from Ethics for the New Millennium, by Dalai Lama. August 1999)
I am reminded of that day in prison when with inmates we tried to fathom a formula that would allow retrieval of that love from the lacuna -- from that "blank space; a missing part; a gap." Would it be possible? Only if that lacuna, like the ever-present origin of compassion, were open to the radical eternal now of love, attention, respect, and caring in the present moment. This present moment, with awareness, event, and incidents of compassionate love, becomes itself the healing antidote to what was lacking. We named it on the spot: Radical Retrieval of Origin Conversation.
It is the conversation of compassion.
It cannot be faked.
It is only real.
We know it.
When heard.
And seen.
Embodied.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Recuperating.
The crew from Rockport Marine gaggle on the rise with beers and chat as we drove up from harbour. In Camden, funeral at Opera House was going on for Paul. The owner of the fuel business stammered in reply when told I was happy to be paying him money for the necessity of propane. Tommy pulled in as we exited shop with fax to tell next week the fella in Swanville could look at and work on the van.
Gathering firewood I enter mountain depths,
Mountain depths rising creek beyond creek
Choked with the timbers of bridges in ruin.
Vines tumble low, tangled over cragged paths,
And at dusk, scarce people grow scarcer still.
Mountain wind sweeping through simple robes,
My chant steady, I shoulder a light bundle,
Watch smoke drift across open country home.
- Meng Hao-jan (689-740 C.E.)
Everything slows markedly when ill. We sit in sun outside barn. We drive to town to pay bills. We take slow walk over to toboggan run. The earth softens.
i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to send me a daisy
--E.E. Cummings
I like having no special knowledge. No special talent. No special wealth. Most this life has been unknowing, ordinary, and poor. When there's health, all is well. I bide time until that changes.
The godless say to themselves, with their misguided reasoning:
'Our life is short and dreary,
nor is there any relief when man's end comes,
nor is anyone known who can give release from Hades.
Let us lie in wait for the virtuous man, since he annoys us
and opposes our way of life,
reproaches us for our breaches of the law
and accuses us of playing false to our upbringing.'
(Wisdom 2:1 - )
I learn from over the years that Mary R. has died. At least, there was an "In Memoriam" next to her name in a University of Pittsburgh newsletter from 2003 seen only last night. I'd been thinking of her. We ran the river road along the Wissahickon through Fairmont Park twenty five years ago. A sweet day. Death always surprises.
We seem to be here to be surprised.
I am, constantly.
Nowhere else.
The crew from Rockport Marine gaggle on the rise with beers and chat as we drove up from harbour. In Camden, funeral at Opera House was going on for Paul. The owner of the fuel business stammered in reply when told I was happy to be paying him money for the necessity of propane. Tommy pulled in as we exited shop with fax to tell next week the fella in Swanville could look at and work on the van.
Gathering firewood I enter mountain depths,
Mountain depths rising creek beyond creek
Choked with the timbers of bridges in ruin.
Vines tumble low, tangled over cragged paths,
And at dusk, scarce people grow scarcer still.
Mountain wind sweeping through simple robes,
My chant steady, I shoulder a light bundle,
Watch smoke drift across open country home.
- Meng Hao-jan (689-740 C.E.)
Everything slows markedly when ill. We sit in sun outside barn. We drive to town to pay bills. We take slow walk over to toboggan run. The earth softens.
i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to send me a daisy
--E.E. Cummings
I like having no special knowledge. No special talent. No special wealth. Most this life has been unknowing, ordinary, and poor. When there's health, all is well. I bide time until that changes.
The godless say to themselves, with their misguided reasoning:
'Our life is short and dreary,
nor is there any relief when man's end comes,
nor is anyone known who can give release from Hades.
Let us lie in wait for the virtuous man, since he annoys us
and opposes our way of life,
reproaches us for our breaches of the law
and accuses us of playing false to our upbringing.'
(Wisdom 2:1 - )
I learn from over the years that Mary R. has died. At least, there was an "In Memoriam" next to her name in a University of Pittsburgh newsletter from 2003 seen only last night. I'd been thinking of her. We ran the river road along the Wissahickon through Fairmont Park twenty five years ago. A sweet day. Death always surprises.
We seem to be here to be surprised.
I am, constantly.
Nowhere else.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Sick season. Body pain. Breathe in, out. I imagine Fanny flat in bed before her death -- the mere fact of it. Passing -- maybe it will, maybe I will, yes, she did.
Calming the Mind
Too much knowledge
Leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider,
The greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
- Shih Wang Ming (6th century)(dailyzen)
While helping Saskia with numbers, I go into internet site of my High School. In their parlance, for my graduating class, I am lost. Some have died; some are lost.
It's a familiar theme. I marvel at the ones keeping contact, issuing updates about grandkids, retirement, golfing, and school spirit these many many years later. I was lost in high school.
You have never heard his voice,
you have never seen his shape,
and his word finds no home in you
because you do not believe in the one he has sent. (from John 5: 31 --)
I don't know what to say about belief "in the one...sent."
Tonight, illness fogs silence. Being lost, I suspect, helps unify the mind. No desire to eat. No desire to drive away. Just this voice. It says...nothing.
Joe, Brian, Emil: have died.
I remember them. In prayer.
I am on no list that would have me. Nowhere to be found.
Listless.
Calming the Mind
Too much knowledge
Leads to overactivity;
Better to calm the mind.
The more you consider,
The greater the loss;
Better to unify the mind.
- Shih Wang Ming (6th century)(dailyzen)
While helping Saskia with numbers, I go into internet site of my High School. In their parlance, for my graduating class, I am lost. Some have died; some are lost.
It's a familiar theme. I marvel at the ones keeping contact, issuing updates about grandkids, retirement, golfing, and school spirit these many many years later. I was lost in high school.
You have never heard his voice,
you have never seen his shape,
and his word finds no home in you
because you do not believe in the one he has sent. (from John 5: 31 --)
I don't know what to say about belief "in the one...sent."
Tonight, illness fogs silence. Being lost, I suspect, helps unify the mind. No desire to eat. No desire to drive away. Just this voice. It says...nothing.
Joe, Brian, Emil: have died.
I remember them. In prayer.
I am on no list that would have me. Nowhere to be found.
Listless.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Olives, garlic mushrooms, semolina bread, lemon sparkling water by Royal River. Cesco got early feed in boatyard at low tide.
An ancient master said, "The mountains, the rivers, the whole earth, the entire array of phenomena are all oneself." If you can absorb the essence of this message, there are no activities outside of meditation: you dress in meditation and eat in meditation; you walk, stand, sit, and lie down in meditation; you perceive and cognize in meditation; you experience joy, anger, sadness, and happiness in meditation.
- Muso (1275-1351)
Reading Dalai Lama on Ethics, earlier, sitting on dry grass, leaning against tree, sunlight on book, dog stretched out. I agree -- compassion is the foundation of ethics.
Prayers and Intercessions
Glory and honour to God, who made a new and eternal covenant with his people, sealed with the blood of Christ and renewed today in the sacrament of the altar. We beg him now:
- Bless your people, Lord.
Teach rulers and people to follow your will
and work together for the good of all.
For those who gave up everything to follow Christ: make them faithful servants;
may they be a shining example to men [and women] of the holiness of your Church.
You made all men [and women and all beings] in your image:
give them a horror of unjust discrimination.
For those who have strayed: lead them back to your love and truth:
teach us how to be of help to them.
Let the dead enter into your glory,
let them praise you together, for all eternity.
(from Evening Prayer, Universalis.com)
These are good prayers.
I let them settle. As I do.
For the good of all.
An ancient master said, "The mountains, the rivers, the whole earth, the entire array of phenomena are all oneself." If you can absorb the essence of this message, there are no activities outside of meditation: you dress in meditation and eat in meditation; you walk, stand, sit, and lie down in meditation; you perceive and cognize in meditation; you experience joy, anger, sadness, and happiness in meditation.
- Muso (1275-1351)
Reading Dalai Lama on Ethics, earlier, sitting on dry grass, leaning against tree, sunlight on book, dog stretched out. I agree -- compassion is the foundation of ethics.
Prayers and Intercessions
Glory and honour to God, who made a new and eternal covenant with his people, sealed with the blood of Christ and renewed today in the sacrament of the altar. We beg him now:
- Bless your people, Lord.
Teach rulers and people to follow your will
and work together for the good of all.
For those who gave up everything to follow Christ: make them faithful servants;
may they be a shining example to men [and women] of the holiness of your Church.
You made all men [and women and all beings] in your image:
give them a horror of unjust discrimination.
For those who have strayed: lead them back to your love and truth:
teach us how to be of help to them.
Let the dead enter into your glory,
let them praise you together, for all eternity.
(from Evening Prayer, Universalis.com)
These are good prayers.
I let them settle. As I do.
For the good of all.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
If all there is -- is love, then, what are you doing?
Zen practice is not clarifying
conceptual distinctions,
but throwing away one's
preconceived views
and notions
and the sacred texts
and all the rest,
and piercing through
all the layers of coverings
over the spring of self behind them.
- Daikaku (1213-1279)
No, really, what are you doing?
Because he has looked down from his high sanctuary,
-- the Lord has looked down from heaven to earth --
and heard the groans of prisoners
and freed the children of death
so that they could proclaim the Lord's name in Sion
and sing his praises in Jerusalem,
where people and kingdoms gather together
to serve the Lord.
--Psalm 101 (102)
It's not a testy question. It's merely a factual question.
If all is love, then, what you are doing is love.
The thing, Dick said tonight, is not to misappropriate love. To appropriate (as property entrusted to one's care) fraudulently to one's own use -- is to misappropriate.
Let's perpetrate no fraud.
Let's love, openly.
Owning nothing.
Zen practice is not clarifying
conceptual distinctions,
but throwing away one's
preconceived views
and notions
and the sacred texts
and all the rest,
and piercing through
all the layers of coverings
over the spring of self behind them.
- Daikaku (1213-1279)
No, really, what are you doing?
Because he has looked down from his high sanctuary,
-- the Lord has looked down from heaven to earth --
and heard the groans of prisoners
and freed the children of death
so that they could proclaim the Lord's name in Sion
and sing his praises in Jerusalem,
where people and kingdoms gather together
to serve the Lord.
--Psalm 101 (102)
It's not a testy question. It's merely a factual question.
If all is love, then, what you are doing is love.
The thing, Dick said tonight, is not to misappropriate love. To appropriate (as property entrusted to one's care) fraudulently to one's own use -- is to misappropriate.
Let's perpetrate no fraud.
Let's love, openly.
Owning nothing.
Monday, March 27, 2006
The trick, they say, is to die while still alive. Perhaps that helps ease into the process of entering no-time of life through death.
I've always loved friends of the Way
Always held them dear
Meeting a stranger with silent springs
Greeting a guest talking zen
Talking about mysteries on a moonlit night
Searching for truth until dawn
When the tracks of our inventions disappear
And we see who we really are.
- Cold Mountain
Each death reminds me: I, too, will disappear. I like the thought that "the tracks of our inventions disappear."
At end of practice last evening we mention by name Buzz and Paul (Navy, retired; bookstore owner, psychologist). Saskia says she included Fanny (gentle, church-woman) who graced her dream at table, she adds. We pray for them, and all beings, to be happy, safe, and at home.
The war deaths continue. They are disturbing. Memos emerge telling that invasion and war with Iraq was, indeed, a foregone conclusion months (years?) earlier than the faux drama publicly played out in UN and news outlets. It is curious that ordinary citizens still think well of those who deceive them.
How good God is to the upright,
to those who are pure of heart!
But as for me, my feet nearly stumbled,
my steps were on the point of going astray,
as I envied the boasters and sinners,
envied their comfort and peace.
For them there are no burdens,
their bellies are full and sleek.
They do not labour, like ordinary men;
they do not suffer, like mortals.
They wear their pride like a necklace,
their violence covers them like a robe.
Wickedness oozes from their very being,
the thoughts of their hearts break forth:
they deride, they utter abominations,
and from their heights they proclaim injustice.
They have set their mouth in the heavens,
and their tongue traverses the earth.
Thus they sit in their lofty positions,
and the flood-waters cannot reach them.
They ask, "How can God know?
Does the Most High have any understanding?"
Behold, then, the wicked, always prosperous:
their riches growing for ever.
-- Psalm 72 (73)
Derision is the service given American citizens by its leaders these three years of willful bellicosity. And now derision is what these same people, citizens and military, receive from peoples worldwide. It is a wonder, we, the American people, so blinded by antagonism and spite toward anyone questioning our motives and arrogance, have failed to see the flaw in our fumbling faith. Derision, masquerading as another substitute for the authentic grace of God, is what people seem to prefer from false saviors promoting private ideologies.
It is said prayer is always heard. This is dangerous, especially if a country is praying errantly. Prayer, whether effable or ineffable, is always heard, and is our fate. Better to have prayed with and to God than with and to derisive distractors.
Dogen said: Truth does not negate the false. The crooked does not hide the straight. (3. Dharma Hall Discourse, Eihei Koroku, Vol 1)
The false remains with us. Truth has to make its way through the false. We need to understand this.
The straight is directly before us. The crooked tugs at us to meander left or right away from the straight. We need to return, after our diversions, to true way.
About death -- I will die. And then? Who knows. I don't.
(Maybe that's it -- "I" doesn't know what is true or real. Something else knows. Not "I.")
Ego death precedes true death. Once ego dies -- a long, worrying, fearful death (no doubt) -- the distinction between life and death is erased. We live, not I, but communion of all beings. We die, no I, but passage through and into life-itself. Here (always here) life lives itself through and within us; we live ourselves through and within life itself.
This sunny morning with brisk bright breeze is what is known by its appearance.
"Good morning," Saskia said she responded to the priest as he extended host to her with the words, "Body of Christ."
She (we) laughed telling her gaff as we walked with Cesco the road into Birch State Point Park and Lucia Beach. But, then, we said "good morning" to the trees, the stones, the ocean, the bufflehead, the seal, and the loveliness of being alive this early spring day.
So, too, Saskia says "good morning" to the Christ before, within, and through all things.
Entering no-time of life through death.
I've always loved friends of the Way
Always held them dear
Meeting a stranger with silent springs
Greeting a guest talking zen
Talking about mysteries on a moonlit night
Searching for truth until dawn
When the tracks of our inventions disappear
And we see who we really are.
- Cold Mountain
Each death reminds me: I, too, will disappear. I like the thought that "the tracks of our inventions disappear."
At end of practice last evening we mention by name Buzz and Paul (Navy, retired; bookstore owner, psychologist). Saskia says she included Fanny (gentle, church-woman) who graced her dream at table, she adds. We pray for them, and all beings, to be happy, safe, and at home.
The war deaths continue. They are disturbing. Memos emerge telling that invasion and war with Iraq was, indeed, a foregone conclusion months (years?) earlier than the faux drama publicly played out in UN and news outlets. It is curious that ordinary citizens still think well of those who deceive them.
How good God is to the upright,
to those who are pure of heart!
But as for me, my feet nearly stumbled,
my steps were on the point of going astray,
as I envied the boasters and sinners,
envied their comfort and peace.
For them there are no burdens,
their bellies are full and sleek.
They do not labour, like ordinary men;
they do not suffer, like mortals.
They wear their pride like a necklace,
their violence covers them like a robe.
Wickedness oozes from their very being,
the thoughts of their hearts break forth:
they deride, they utter abominations,
and from their heights they proclaim injustice.
They have set their mouth in the heavens,
and their tongue traverses the earth.
Thus they sit in their lofty positions,
and the flood-waters cannot reach them.
They ask, "How can God know?
Does the Most High have any understanding?"
Behold, then, the wicked, always prosperous:
their riches growing for ever.
-- Psalm 72 (73)
Derision is the service given American citizens by its leaders these three years of willful bellicosity. And now derision is what these same people, citizens and military, receive from peoples worldwide. It is a wonder, we, the American people, so blinded by antagonism and spite toward anyone questioning our motives and arrogance, have failed to see the flaw in our fumbling faith. Derision, masquerading as another substitute for the authentic grace of God, is what people seem to prefer from false saviors promoting private ideologies.
It is said prayer is always heard. This is dangerous, especially if a country is praying errantly. Prayer, whether effable or ineffable, is always heard, and is our fate. Better to have prayed with and to God than with and to derisive distractors.
Dogen said: Truth does not negate the false. The crooked does not hide the straight. (3. Dharma Hall Discourse, Eihei Koroku, Vol 1)
The false remains with us. Truth has to make its way through the false. We need to understand this.
The straight is directly before us. The crooked tugs at us to meander left or right away from the straight. We need to return, after our diversions, to true way.
About death -- I will die. And then? Who knows. I don't.
(Maybe that's it -- "I" doesn't know what is true or real. Something else knows. Not "I.")
Ego death precedes true death. Once ego dies -- a long, worrying, fearful death (no doubt) -- the distinction between life and death is erased. We live, not I, but communion of all beings. We die, no I, but passage through and into life-itself. Here (always here) life lives itself through and within us; we live ourselves through and within life itself.
This sunny morning with brisk bright breeze is what is known by its appearance.
"Good morning," Saskia said she responded to the priest as he extended host to her with the words, "Body of Christ."
She (we) laughed telling her gaff as we walked with Cesco the road into Birch State Point Park and Lucia Beach. But, then, we said "good morning" to the trees, the stones, the ocean, the bufflehead, the seal, and the loveliness of being alive this early spring day.
So, too, Saskia says "good morning" to the Christ before, within, and through all things.
Entering no-time of life through death.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Wild geese honked over valley between Ragged and Bald as we sat zazen in cabin at dusk.
To shake off the dust of human ambition
I sit on moss in Zen robes of stillness,
While through the window,
In the setting sun of late autumn,
Falling leaves whirl and drop to the stone dais.
- Tesshu Tokusai (d.1366)
Now, it is spring.
Would that the men sending soldiers to be killed and to kill could have sat in that stillness at Sunday Evening Practice.
But they ridiculed the messengers of God, they despised his words, they laughed at his prophets, until at last the wrath of the Lord rose so high against his people that there was no further remedy.
(from 2 Chronicles 36)
An inchworm on blanket along zabuton stayed behind after the sitting.
The remedy for killing is to cease killing.
Mercy is the messenger of God.
Receive and dispatch mercy.
Save the world.
Yourself.
To shake off the dust of human ambition
I sit on moss in Zen robes of stillness,
While through the window,
In the setting sun of late autumn,
Falling leaves whirl and drop to the stone dais.
- Tesshu Tokusai (d.1366)
Now, it is spring.
Would that the men sending soldiers to be killed and to kill could have sat in that stillness at Sunday Evening Practice.
But they ridiculed the messengers of God, they despised his words, they laughed at his prophets, until at last the wrath of the Lord rose so high against his people that there was no further remedy.
(from 2 Chronicles 36)
An inchworm on blanket along zabuton stayed behind after the sitting.
The remedy for killing is to cease killing.
Mercy is the messenger of God.
Receive and dispatch mercy.
Save the world.
Yourself.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Mary, would you? Again, alone?
The "yes" allowing what is true be embodied through you -- isn't that a terribly intimate solitude finding way into ambivalence of community?
Every sentient being is ready
To be enlightened at every moment.
The only hindrance is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused on the relative I, the self.
- The Twelfth Tai Situpa
It is Feast of Annunciation. Mary is asked -- as each is asked -- if she would mother God into and through existence. We imagine her pausing at the question, taking a wide look at what is being asked. She, as is, each, is uncertainty itself poised at edge of now-you-do/now-you-don't. Whichever way you step, you step either into or away from. The remainder of what we consider 'life' follows upon that step.
The Rider
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
(Poem: "The Rider" by Naomi Shihab Nye from Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.)
There's a man I know seems lonely with a private series of steps I can never quite sort out on a map. It often feels some hurt has put thorn in foot and brought him limping to the view his mind carries him to. At times, when we argue, I need to take an aspirin, I want to cycle away from brooding melancholy, such heavy burden of staccato certainty. At those times, edgy, I'm asked to remember. It is of such pause poet Richard Hugo writes in his poem "Villager" --
I almost forget: he'd do anything for you. Love him
for what you might have become
and love him for what you are, not that far
from him. We are never that far. Love
everyone you can. The list gets longer and shorter.
We're seldom better than weather. We're nearly as good
as a woman we met in passing once at Invergarry.
Don't be sorry, for him or for self. Love the last star
broken by storm. And love you. You hold it together.
( -- from poem "Villager" by Richard Hugo, in The Right Madness on Skye)
The list got suddenly shorter this week. As it will continue to do. When I bite into one of Saskia's French Pastry Puffs, I'll think of Buzz, with prayer. Bite by bite prayer. It's a simple way to remember what we are being asked to be in the life of one another.
There is one more truth that the Annunciation teaches us, and it is so appalling that I can think of nothing uplifting to say about it that will take the sting away: perhaps it is best forgotten, because it tells us more about God than we are able to understand. The Almighty Father creates heaven and earth, the sun and all the stars; but when he really wants something done, he comes, the Omnipotent and Omniscient, to one of his poor, weak creatures -- and he asks.
And, day by day, he keeps on asking us.
(-- Martin Kochanski, founder of Universalis.com)
Curiously, no matter how many others are near us, we are alone, always, at the edge of the question asked us.
Standing at that edge, where the spreading-away-far and the drawing-within-near pinpoint presence, we look down at our feet. We wonder which way they will step. As if they, not the whole of us, make way alone.
Again, alone -- would we take the question?
Into one another's life?
Suspecting a sobering response:
Community lives the Alone, together.
The "yes" allowing what is true be embodied through you -- isn't that a terribly intimate solitude finding way into ambivalence of community?
Every sentient being is ready
To be enlightened at every moment.
The only hindrance is not recognizing
The purity and limitlessness
Of buddha nature.
We may have inklings of our limitless quality,
But we don't fully recognize it,
So we become focused on the relative I, the self.
- The Twelfth Tai Situpa
It is Feast of Annunciation. Mary is asked -- as each is asked -- if she would mother God into and through existence. We imagine her pausing at the question, taking a wide look at what is being asked. She, as is, each, is uncertainty itself poised at edge of now-you-do/now-you-don't. Whichever way you step, you step either into or away from. The remainder of what we consider 'life' follows upon that step.
The Rider
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn't catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
(Poem: "The Rider" by Naomi Shihab Nye from Fuel: Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.)
There's a man I know seems lonely with a private series of steps I can never quite sort out on a map. It often feels some hurt has put thorn in foot and brought him limping to the view his mind carries him to. At times, when we argue, I need to take an aspirin, I want to cycle away from brooding melancholy, such heavy burden of staccato certainty. At those times, edgy, I'm asked to remember. It is of such pause poet Richard Hugo writes in his poem "Villager" --
I almost forget: he'd do anything for you. Love him
for what you might have become
and love him for what you are, not that far
from him. We are never that far. Love
everyone you can. The list gets longer and shorter.
We're seldom better than weather. We're nearly as good
as a woman we met in passing once at Invergarry.
Don't be sorry, for him or for self. Love the last star
broken by storm. And love you. You hold it together.
( -- from poem "Villager" by Richard Hugo, in The Right Madness on Skye)
The list got suddenly shorter this week. As it will continue to do. When I bite into one of Saskia's French Pastry Puffs, I'll think of Buzz, with prayer. Bite by bite prayer. It's a simple way to remember what we are being asked to be in the life of one another.
There is one more truth that the Annunciation teaches us, and it is so appalling that I can think of nothing uplifting to say about it that will take the sting away: perhaps it is best forgotten, because it tells us more about God than we are able to understand. The Almighty Father creates heaven and earth, the sun and all the stars; but when he really wants something done, he comes, the Omnipotent and Omniscient, to one of his poor, weak creatures -- and he asks.
And, day by day, he keeps on asking us.
(-- Martin Kochanski, founder of Universalis.com)
Curiously, no matter how many others are near us, we are alone, always, at the edge of the question asked us.
Standing at that edge, where the spreading-away-far and the drawing-within-near pinpoint presence, we look down at our feet. We wonder which way they will step. As if they, not the whole of us, make way alone.
Again, alone -- would we take the question?
Into one another's life?
Suspecting a sobering response:
Community lives the Alone, together.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Tommy tells us Buzz died Tuesday. Tonight I finally get his signature goodbye: "Remember, if your nose is running and your feet smell, you're upside down."
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
The Irish music group at opera house were energetic and entertaining. Earlier in shop upstairs we poured six glasses with ginger ale and toasted Buzz.
Perhaps all we can ever do is invite one another into the open. It's too difficult to live in the open from a hiding place.
"This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." - Jesus
My nose is running. My feet smell. My heart, sad.
My up side feels down.
Do not believe anything on the mere authority of teachers or priests. Accept as true and as the guide to your life only that which accords with your own reason and experience, after thorough investigation. Accept only that which contributes to the well-being of yourself and others.
- Buddha
The Irish music group at opera house were energetic and entertaining. Earlier in shop upstairs we poured six glasses with ginger ale and toasted Buzz.
Perhaps all we can ever do is invite one another into the open. It's too difficult to live in the open from a hiding place.
"This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these." - Jesus
My nose is running. My feet smell. My heart, sad.
My up side feels down.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
As I looked to the house past the pond where a young woman died two winters ago, I said the prayer: "Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace."
If what we call death is that which occurs when there is a dropping out of time and space into eternal life, then the prayer we say is being said at the instant (always) of the person's death. With the eternal, the ever-present origin, now, every act is present-moment act. Everyone is dropping through death right now. Just so, everyone is being born right now.
Having fathomed Tao, you went to dwell
Among simple villages
Where bamboo grows thick,
Opening and closing your gate alone.
This isn't a mission or pilgrimage.
I've come for no real reason:
Just to sit out on your south terrace
And gaze at those mountains.
- Po Chu-I (772-846)
Coming for no real reason is sufficient. Gazing. Talking. Walking the mountain.
That there needs to be purpose and plan in our arrival is less engaging than the haphazard juxtapositioning of leaves blowing in a sudden swirl. What is behind the ballet? Ah! That's the intellect's cue to turn to audience, And speak. And listen.
All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.
(From the treatise On Prayer by Tertullian, priest)
This is where prayer turns.
There is no script to follow. No technique to master. No syllabus to slave. No formula to mouth. No queue to loiter. No letter to read unattended.
What there is, rather, is what is being written, what is being said, what is being seen, what is being read, what is itself unfolding in our midst.
With our involvement. With our inclusion. With our attention. With our blessing.
Eternal rest. Eternal light.
No time.
Like.
The present.
Let us.
If what we call death is that which occurs when there is a dropping out of time and space into eternal life, then the prayer we say is being said at the instant (always) of the person's death. With the eternal, the ever-present origin, now, every act is present-moment act. Everyone is dropping through death right now. Just so, everyone is being born right now.
Having fathomed Tao, you went to dwell
Among simple villages
Where bamboo grows thick,
Opening and closing your gate alone.
This isn't a mission or pilgrimage.
I've come for no real reason:
Just to sit out on your south terrace
And gaze at those mountains.
- Po Chu-I (772-846)
Coming for no real reason is sufficient. Gazing. Talking. Walking the mountain.
That there needs to be purpose and plan in our arrival is less engaging than the haphazard juxtapositioning of leaves blowing in a sudden swirl. What is behind the ballet? Ah! That's the intellect's cue to turn to audience, And speak. And listen.
All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.
(From the treatise On Prayer by Tertullian, priest)
This is where prayer turns.
There is no script to follow. No technique to master. No syllabus to slave. No formula to mouth. No queue to loiter. No letter to read unattended.
What there is, rather, is what is being written, what is being said, what is being seen, what is being read, what is itself unfolding in our midst.
With our involvement. With our inclusion. With our attention. With our blessing.
Eternal rest. Eternal light.
No time.
Like.
The present.
Let us.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Su Sane might be right. After all, eternity is now. She suggests we might all just begin to act the way we feel things should be, and things will come to be that way.
If you don't understand the Way right before you,
How will you know the path as you walk?
Practice is not a matter of far or near,
But if you are confused, mountains and rivers
Block your way.
I respectfully urge you who study the mystery,
Don't pass your days and nights in vain.
- Sekito Kisen (700-790)
Wednesday Evening Conversation was on Swami Beyonananda's "Don't get even, get odd." Good to laugh at what is imaginative and funny.
A woman writes about spring and Maine:
A friend writing to me an email while he flew to Hawaii (for business) tells me that spring in Maine is like rising from a near death and that on other parts of the earth spring is more a renewal. I found that interesting, and cannot put my finger on why exactly, but I think he means that the winters into spring in Maine are so delicate an operation that if one is not as attentive as you then it might go unnoticed.
These days I feel like an undecided near-death experience. Just as all functions cease, there's a pause. To return or not to return? My experience wants to call a committee meeting. They're bound to bury the body if this delay continues.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God
If you say, "Show me your God", I will say to you, "Show me what kind of person you are, and I will show you my God". Show me then whether the eyes of your mind can see, and the ears of your heart hear.
It is like this. Those who can see with the eyes of their bodies are aware of what is happening in this life on earth. They get to know things that are different from each other. They distinguish light and darkness, black and white, ugliness and beauty, elegance and inelegance, proportion and lack of proportion, excess and defect. The same is true of the sounds we hear: high or low or pleasant. So it is with the ears of our heart and the eyes of our mind in their capacity to hear or see God.
God is seen by those who have the capacity to see him, provided that they keep the eyes of their mind open. All have eyes, but some have eyes that are shrouded in darkness, unable to see the light of the sun.
(From the book addressed to Autolycus by Saint Theophilus of Antioch, bishop; Office of Readings)
I realized tonight during conversation I didn't much like any explanation for why things are as they are. Whether traditional or new age, explanations seem tired. Rather an experiential encounter than theorizing. Better a pattern than a rationale.
Tillich was right. We need the courage to be.
Metaphysics is ground of ethics. Aesthetics, the soul.
Maybe I won't come back this time.
Someday dead will be dead.
Odd.
If you don't understand the Way right before you,
How will you know the path as you walk?
Practice is not a matter of far or near,
But if you are confused, mountains and rivers
Block your way.
I respectfully urge you who study the mystery,
Don't pass your days and nights in vain.
- Sekito Kisen (700-790)
Wednesday Evening Conversation was on Swami Beyonananda's "Don't get even, get odd." Good to laugh at what is imaginative and funny.
A woman writes about spring and Maine:
A friend writing to me an email while he flew to Hawaii (for business) tells me that spring in Maine is like rising from a near death and that on other parts of the earth spring is more a renewal. I found that interesting, and cannot put my finger on why exactly, but I think he means that the winters into spring in Maine are so delicate an operation that if one is not as attentive as you then it might go unnoticed.
These days I feel like an undecided near-death experience. Just as all functions cease, there's a pause. To return or not to return? My experience wants to call a committee meeting. They're bound to bury the body if this delay continues.
Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God
If you say, "Show me your God", I will say to you, "Show me what kind of person you are, and I will show you my God". Show me then whether the eyes of your mind can see, and the ears of your heart hear.
It is like this. Those who can see with the eyes of their bodies are aware of what is happening in this life on earth. They get to know things that are different from each other. They distinguish light and darkness, black and white, ugliness and beauty, elegance and inelegance, proportion and lack of proportion, excess and defect. The same is true of the sounds we hear: high or low or pleasant. So it is with the ears of our heart and the eyes of our mind in their capacity to hear or see God.
God is seen by those who have the capacity to see him, provided that they keep the eyes of their mind open. All have eyes, but some have eyes that are shrouded in darkness, unable to see the light of the sun.
(From the book addressed to Autolycus by Saint Theophilus of Antioch, bishop; Office of Readings)
I realized tonight during conversation I didn't much like any explanation for why things are as they are. Whether traditional or new age, explanations seem tired. Rather an experiential encounter than theorizing. Better a pattern than a rationale.
Tillich was right. We need the courage to be.
Metaphysics is ground of ethics. Aesthetics, the soul.
Maybe I won't come back this time.
Someday dead will be dead.
Odd.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Sometimes solitude isn't just a nice possibility. Sometimes solitude is the only thing there is. Ask any hermit.
When one realizes completely the Dharma-body,
She sees no object.
She is the source of all things,
And her true nature is another name of the eternal Buddha.
Material things and mental phenomena come and go
Like clouds in the blue sky.
Greed, anger and ignorance; these three forms
Appear and disappear like a mirage on the ocean.
- Yoka-daishi (d. 713)
Sometimes a mirage stays a long time. The three forms -- greed, anger, ignorance, seem these days to move easily in and out of our bodies -- shilling, shouting, and stupidly sputtering inanity. The noise is troubling: Iraq, Afghanistan, American administration, global environmental matters, the fear that either there is a conspiracy so vast nothing is beyond its reach, or, petty evil men roam through the world seeking to devour.
We were late to mass this morning. We missed the first reading from Daniel:
First reading (Daniel 3:25 - 43):
Azariah stood in the heart of the fire, and he began to pray:
Oh! Do not abandon us for ever,
for the sake of your name;
do not repudiate your covenant,
do not withdraw your favour from us,
for the sake of Abraham, your friend,
of Isaac your servant,
and of Israel your holy one,
to whom you promised descendants as countless as the stars of heaven
and as the grains of sand on the seashore.
Lord, now we are the least of all the nations,
now we are despised throughout the world, today, because of our sins.
We have at this time no leader, no prophet, no prince,
no holocaust, no sacrifice, no oblation, no incense,
no place where we can offer you the first-fruits
and win your favour.
But may the contrite soul, the humbled spirit be as acceptable to you
as holocausts of rams and bullocks,
as thousands of fattened lambs:
such let our sacrifice be to you today,
and may it be your will that we follow you wholeheartedly,
since those who put their trust in you will not be disappointed.
And now we put our whole heart into following you,
into fearing you and seeking your face once more.
Do not disappoint us;
treat us gently, as you yourself are gentle
and very merciful.
Grant us deliverance worthy of your wonderful deeds,
let your name win glory, Lord.
What is the covenant, the agreement, we long for?
Is it that life itself is sacred? If so, we'll have to stop killing.
Is it that truth is our lifeblood? If so, we'll have to stop lying.
Is it that love is all there really is? If so, we'll have to abandon apathy and re-learn how to care.
We've come to like holocausts and sacrifice. They are obvious. There's blood, screaming, adrenaline, righteous righting the world, wild-eyed rants about being the best, the purest, the strongest, God's one and only servant, sons, country, religion, political system.
Who is this Azariah character, why is he in the heart of the fire, and to whom is he praying? Surely not to the God who is on the side of this one or that one, not the God who smotes and smites, nor the God who has a notebook of favorites and dishes out prime goodies to those that reach high and bow low to him. What else then does prayer seek? From whom? How? Is there a reality so far beyond our notions of what we call God that the reality is completely here, whole, now, and out-of-time?
Prayer stops during this time forming solitude, and seeks the heart of creation.
Prayer listens desperately for the empty sound of complete embodiment.
Prayer looks at each being with the readiness of light to warm the senses.
Perhaps we still do not know how to pray. We've been too willing to instant message our hierarchy, manipulating imagination, and downloading channeled updates that dictate our next move, next piece of advice, or next gospel truth no one else has ever thought of, the answer the world waits for.
Solitude helps destroy false interaction.
Silence helps mute false advice.
Stillness helps dissolve false action.
There is much that needs forgiveness. Maybe its a matter of forgiveness. Matthew says seventy seven times. Another rendition has it seventy times seven. It is confusing to calculate these symbolic numbers. Just what does the evangelist want to say about forgiveness? Certainly that our meager penitentiary overtures are hardly the beginning of the profound journey into the heart of God.
Remember, also, that forgiveness doesn't forget. That, it seems, is too easy a solution. But, to remember with open eyes and open ears means we have not disappeared from this material world into some wispish spiritualism that bypasses creation, incarnation, suffering, and death.
We are in this world. It's a fact. There's something very real that we do not seem to factor into our heady transcendence.
Take a break. Alone, soundless, undiverting.
The hermitage cannot find the hermit.
Something has gone.
Where?
Odd!
When one realizes completely the Dharma-body,
She sees no object.
She is the source of all things,
And her true nature is another name of the eternal Buddha.
Material things and mental phenomena come and go
Like clouds in the blue sky.
Greed, anger and ignorance; these three forms
Appear and disappear like a mirage on the ocean.
- Yoka-daishi (d. 713)
Sometimes a mirage stays a long time. The three forms -- greed, anger, ignorance, seem these days to move easily in and out of our bodies -- shilling, shouting, and stupidly sputtering inanity. The noise is troubling: Iraq, Afghanistan, American administration, global environmental matters, the fear that either there is a conspiracy so vast nothing is beyond its reach, or, petty evil men roam through the world seeking to devour.
We were late to mass this morning. We missed the first reading from Daniel:
First reading (Daniel 3:25 - 43):
Azariah stood in the heart of the fire, and he began to pray:
Oh! Do not abandon us for ever,
for the sake of your name;
do not repudiate your covenant,
do not withdraw your favour from us,
for the sake of Abraham, your friend,
of Isaac your servant,
and of Israel your holy one,
to whom you promised descendants as countless as the stars of heaven
and as the grains of sand on the seashore.
Lord, now we are the least of all the nations,
now we are despised throughout the world, today, because of our sins.
We have at this time no leader, no prophet, no prince,
no holocaust, no sacrifice, no oblation, no incense,
no place where we can offer you the first-fruits
and win your favour.
But may the contrite soul, the humbled spirit be as acceptable to you
as holocausts of rams and bullocks,
as thousands of fattened lambs:
such let our sacrifice be to you today,
and may it be your will that we follow you wholeheartedly,
since those who put their trust in you will not be disappointed.
And now we put our whole heart into following you,
into fearing you and seeking your face once more.
Do not disappoint us;
treat us gently, as you yourself are gentle
and very merciful.
Grant us deliverance worthy of your wonderful deeds,
let your name win glory, Lord.
What is the covenant, the agreement, we long for?
Is it that life itself is sacred? If so, we'll have to stop killing.
Is it that truth is our lifeblood? If so, we'll have to stop lying.
Is it that love is all there really is? If so, we'll have to abandon apathy and re-learn how to care.
We've come to like holocausts and sacrifice. They are obvious. There's blood, screaming, adrenaline, righteous righting the world, wild-eyed rants about being the best, the purest, the strongest, God's one and only servant, sons, country, religion, political system.
Who is this Azariah character, why is he in the heart of the fire, and to whom is he praying? Surely not to the God who is on the side of this one or that one, not the God who smotes and smites, nor the God who has a notebook of favorites and dishes out prime goodies to those that reach high and bow low to him. What else then does prayer seek? From whom? How? Is there a reality so far beyond our notions of what we call God that the reality is completely here, whole, now, and out-of-time?
Prayer stops during this time forming solitude, and seeks the heart of creation.
Prayer listens desperately for the empty sound of complete embodiment.
Prayer looks at each being with the readiness of light to warm the senses.
Perhaps we still do not know how to pray. We've been too willing to instant message our hierarchy, manipulating imagination, and downloading channeled updates that dictate our next move, next piece of advice, or next gospel truth no one else has ever thought of, the answer the world waits for.
Solitude helps destroy false interaction.
Silence helps mute false advice.
Stillness helps dissolve false action.
There is much that needs forgiveness. Maybe its a matter of forgiveness. Matthew says seventy seven times. Another rendition has it seventy times seven. It is confusing to calculate these symbolic numbers. Just what does the evangelist want to say about forgiveness? Certainly that our meager penitentiary overtures are hardly the beginning of the profound journey into the heart of God.
Remember, also, that forgiveness doesn't forget. That, it seems, is too easy a solution. But, to remember with open eyes and open ears means we have not disappeared from this material world into some wispish spiritualism that bypasses creation, incarnation, suffering, and death.
We are in this world. It's a fact. There's something very real that we do not seem to factor into our heady transcendence.
Take a break. Alone, soundless, undiverting.
The hermitage cannot find the hermit.
Something has gone.
Where?
Odd!
Monday, March 20, 2006
At 4:40am in Lincolnville church, I join those keeping vigil for peace. Some have been there since 6pm Sunday evening. We sit in silence. Rev. Susan reads from Bro.Roger's final letter, something about "wider."
We find very seasoned driftwood Sunday morning on pebble beach west of Owls Head Light. In the shape of an "M" with 1x4 crossbeam, notched to perhaps hold bow of boat in cradle, we paint edges, affix on 4x4 post by Barnestown Road, add words "meetingbrook hermitage" below, and stand back to look. As if St. Joseph himself had planned and fashioned a cross-like invitation for us, we are finally signed.
The online Catholic Encyclopedia, "New Advent," tells a story about Joseph, spouse of Mary, step-father of Jesus:
It will not be without interest to recall here, unreliable though they are, the lengthy stories concerning St. Joseph's marriage contained in the apocryphal writings. When forty years of age, Joseph married a woman called Melcha or Escha by some, Salome by others; they lived forty-nine years together and had six children, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was James (the Less, "the Lord's brother"). A year after his wife's death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age, Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates; a miracle manifested the choice God had made of Joseph, and two years later the Annunciation took place.
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08504a.htm)
As a religious house of prayer, meetingbrook begins again the season of spring. We pray lauds with Isaiah:
He will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)
We clear brush around front gate, admire sign, drag limbs behind barn to be cut later for firewood. We walk Ragged Mountain with Cesco before coffee and eggs. I fuss walking stick, hand sand it, some poly along it, another driftwood gift on my sister's anniversary of birth.
Our religious life isn't fussy. Contemplation, Zen, and Engaged Service. Nothing more.
Meir and I hugged just after six in parking lot as sun rose this morning.
It was a beautiful morning. I drove to St Bernard's for mass.
Nothing more.
Joseph's Day.
Gifts all around!
We find very seasoned driftwood Sunday morning on pebble beach west of Owls Head Light. In the shape of an "M" with 1x4 crossbeam, notched to perhaps hold bow of boat in cradle, we paint edges, affix on 4x4 post by Barnestown Road, add words "meetingbrook hermitage" below, and stand back to look. As if St. Joseph himself had planned and fashioned a cross-like invitation for us, we are finally signed.
The online Catholic Encyclopedia, "New Advent," tells a story about Joseph, spouse of Mary, step-father of Jesus:
It will not be without interest to recall here, unreliable though they are, the lengthy stories concerning St. Joseph's marriage contained in the apocryphal writings. When forty years of age, Joseph married a woman called Melcha or Escha by some, Salome by others; they lived forty-nine years together and had six children, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was James (the Less, "the Lord's brother"). A year after his wife's death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age, Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates; a miracle manifested the choice God had made of Joseph, and two years later the Annunciation took place.
(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08504a.htm)
As a religious house of prayer, meetingbrook begins again the season of spring. We pray lauds with Isaiah:
He will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)
We clear brush around front gate, admire sign, drag limbs behind barn to be cut later for firewood. We walk Ragged Mountain with Cesco before coffee and eggs. I fuss walking stick, hand sand it, some poly along it, another driftwood gift on my sister's anniversary of birth.
Our religious life isn't fussy. Contemplation, Zen, and Engaged Service. Nothing more.
Meir and I hugged just after six in parking lot as sun rose this morning.
It was a beautiful morning. I drove to St Bernard's for mass.
Nothing more.
Joseph's Day.
Gifts all around!
Sunday, March 19, 2006
I Am, these three years. Dying. In Iraq.
I wake this morning praying the words, "I Am With You Always." (Mt 28:30)
Is God always dying? In Africa? Afghanistan? Iraq? Palestine?
Christian God is killed by Christians. Muslim God is killed by Muslims. Jewish God is killed by Jews.
What use proving the existence of God, or heaven, or hell -- if the death of God is our primary occupation?
At Chestnut Street Baptist Church, Camden, last evening, a dramatization of Peter Kreeft's "Between Heaven and Hell," a trilogue among C.S.Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley. The three of them died on same day, November 22, 1963. We were transported back to that particular day in history, as well as the theological apologetics of philosopher Kreeft through his centerpiece, Lewis. It was a thought-provoking encounter. Virginia, co-director, showed us the wires and the technology. Saskia met woman with child from St Bernard's in Rockland.
Cease practice based on intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and following after speech,
And learn the backward step
That turns your light inward
To illuminate yourself.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away and your original face
Will be manifest.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
The face of "I Am" shines through cold morning. Leaves, trees, churches, farms, driftwood, and fishing boats -- the very fact without apology or apologetics. With afternoon silence, very fact is all one needs.
Bless the Lord, all the earth, praise and exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, mountains and hills; all growing things, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, seas and rivers; springs and fountains, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, whales and fish; birds of the air, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, wild beasts and tame; sons of men, bless the Lord.
(--from Lauds, Daniel 3)
This third anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq turns out gloomy. At church this morning, priest said the opposite of love is apathy.
He's right. Love dies when we kill God. God dies when we kill brother and sister.
We do not know what it means to say resurrection and appearance have nothing to do with time.
I do know what it means to mourn. In no face, in no God, I find no solace.
The fact of war tortures God. After three years men and women have learned something important about torture -- if you are not being tortured, you don't have to care about it. If you are being tortured, caring is crushed out of you. Someone has to answer for God.
It's about time. Outside time, what goes on?
Kreeft sees light at end of the performance. A voice. God's?
Walking down stairs behind us to exit onto Chestnut Street, two men make requisite
comments about play. "I couldn't keep up with it," one said. "Me neither," said companion, "but it was good."
I've never been convinced that understanding is primary. It is better, some say, to love God rather than understand God. "I Am," God says. Who understands that?
Take the original face. See what is primary. See what you are. What I Am is.
Stop the torture. Stop the war.
Shhh...
Listen.
I wake this morning praying the words, "I Am With You Always." (Mt 28:30)
Is God always dying? In Africa? Afghanistan? Iraq? Palestine?
Christian God is killed by Christians. Muslim God is killed by Muslims. Jewish God is killed by Jews.
What use proving the existence of God, or heaven, or hell -- if the death of God is our primary occupation?
At Chestnut Street Baptist Church, Camden, last evening, a dramatization of Peter Kreeft's "Between Heaven and Hell," a trilogue among C.S.Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley. The three of them died on same day, November 22, 1963. We were transported back to that particular day in history, as well as the theological apologetics of philosopher Kreeft through his centerpiece, Lewis. It was a thought-provoking encounter. Virginia, co-director, showed us the wires and the technology. Saskia met woman with child from St Bernard's in Rockland.
Cease practice based on intellectual understanding,
Pursuing words and following after speech,
And learn the backward step
That turns your light inward
To illuminate yourself.
Body and mind of themselves
Will drop away and your original face
Will be manifest.
- Dogen (1200-1253)
The face of "I Am" shines through cold morning. Leaves, trees, churches, farms, driftwood, and fishing boats -- the very fact without apology or apologetics. With afternoon silence, very fact is all one needs.
Bless the Lord, all the earth, praise and exalt him for ever.
Bless the Lord, mountains and hills; all growing things, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, seas and rivers; springs and fountains, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, whales and fish; birds of the air, bless the Lord.
Bless the Lord, wild beasts and tame; sons of men, bless the Lord.
(--from Lauds, Daniel 3)
This third anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq turns out gloomy. At church this morning, priest said the opposite of love is apathy.
He's right. Love dies when we kill God. God dies when we kill brother and sister.
We do not know what it means to say resurrection and appearance have nothing to do with time.
I do know what it means to mourn. In no face, in no God, I find no solace.
The fact of war tortures God. After three years men and women have learned something important about torture -- if you are not being tortured, you don't have to care about it. If you are being tortured, caring is crushed out of you. Someone has to answer for God.
It's about time. Outside time, what goes on?
Kreeft sees light at end of the performance. A voice. God's?
Walking down stairs behind us to exit onto Chestnut Street, two men make requisite
comments about play. "I couldn't keep up with it," one said. "Me neither," said companion, "but it was good."
I've never been convinced that understanding is primary. It is better, some say, to love God rather than understand God. "I Am," God says. Who understands that?
Take the original face. See what is primary. See what you are. What I Am is.
Stop the torture. Stop the war.
Shhh...
Listen.
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