vigils

even wood

edge of bench

holds hand

steadying

stand

ecoutez

Bricks usually are still and silent. As they should be.

Except in a monastery. Where they pray.

Which seems unusual.  But it’s not.

I’ve seen them. They don’t move.

They remain still. They listen.

As monks chant. They 

listen.

why is this week different

moon nears full

mud grows edges

holy days are upon us

wonder who God will be

still arriving

RE: Wake of my Waves

COLLAPSE

“... if I was able to slide back into time and stop all the horrible things that have happened..."(student)

These wistful and sighing words give me a pause . . .

And make me think about the seeming difficulty we face when we experience the sudden unhappinesses that occur near us, in our lives, and in the world.

I can hear the questions: "What the hell? Who asked for this?"

I said 'seeming' above because I've started to wonder whether I've missed all along the very basic three rules that govern life-in-this-existence.

In three words: Hi! Why? Bye! 

We arrive. We wonder. We leave. 

What I think I've not appreciated is that this triadic formula could also be a source of joy. 

Joy? Why not -- if 'joy' --"a feeling of great pleasure and happiness" means seeing the whole and delighting in being here within it. It's the 'whole' I've not been attuning to -- thinking that each 'part' I lose is a diminishment. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's something I still can't see.

In Hindu thought: the Creator (Brahman), the Sustainer (Vishnu), and the Destroyer (Shiva).

In Buddhism: the Buddha (arriving awareness), the Dharma (teachings for the duration), and the Sangha (the community into which our ego dissolves).

In Christian thought: the Father (the creator), the Son (the way of union of heaven/earth), and the Holy Spirit (the wisdom/understanding of life throughout boundaries).

The first line of Thich Nhat Hanh's poem "Please Call Me By My True Names" leads us into this meditation: 

Don't say that I will depart tomorrow—
even today I am still arriving.

http://wtf.tw/ref/nhat_hanh.html 

wrapped in light as in a robe

Mourning Dove as sun

clears hill this Sunday morning --

who -- arriving here

no name at all

Finding the body, again, is finding the earth -- as if for the first time.

Richard Rohr on Thursday:

Please do not think me a heretic, but it is formally and theologically incorrect to say “Jesus is God,” as most Christians glibly do and then need to “prove.” Jesus is instead a third something—the perfect union of “very God” with “very man.” For the truly orthodox Christian, the Trinity must be “God,” and Jesus can only be understood inside that Eternal Embrace. From within this loving relationship, the Christ came forth to draw us back (through the enfleshed Jesus) to where we all originally came from (Genesis 1:26, John 14:3). This is quite a different description of salvation—and, dare I say, the whole point! I wonder if “reincorporation” might not be a better word than salvation. 

We have much less need to “prove” that Jesus is God (which of itself asks nothing transformative of us). Our deep need is to experience the same unitive mystery in ourselves and in everything else—“through him, with him, and in him,” as we say in the Great Amen of the Eucharistic Prayer. The good news is that we also are part of the eternal divine embrace, now as the ongoing Body of Christ extended in space and time. We are the second coming of Christ!

(-- from, The Cosmic Christ, Week 2, The Union of Human and Divine, Thursday, April 6, 2017) https://cac.org/union-human-divine-2017-04-06/

We are not far from that which is our true name.

Which, curiously, is no name at all. 

save the fireworks

Most people love fireworks.

It doesn't matter who's paying for them.

The cost of the 59 Tomahawk missiles is between 60 and 94 million dollars to replace.

Russia's  Syria, we're told, dropped barrel bombs with chemical weapons on civilians. The United States fired 59 missiles at an airport.

Commentators go nuts praising the fireworks.

I usually don't go to fireworks displays.

I didn't go to this one.

Nor did the effusing impress.

The Oval Office has a lot of dark clouds at its windows.

Let's think about and pray for those killed and harmed and displaced by what happened in Syria over the last  . . .  five years. We certainly don’t seem to want any of the millions of refugees from Syria. Nor does it seem to matter that a half-million people have been slaughtered.

Instead, some geo-political backroom show of newly-found character and conscience arises in the dry weeds of Florida-vacationing billionaires seated around a horseshoe poker-table trying to decide who deals and what’s the gig and what's wild.

Save the fireworks.

Don't lose the world.

There's danger afoot.

Where are the wise leaders? Give them a call.

They're hard to find.

listening ... in prison on Friday morning a conversation about God

God is

what is

coming

to be

here

what is God to be

God is

being 

creative

a fox lay dead on side of road

I thought i'd read some poetry

but found all the words

had left their thousands of pages

for places unknown --

Just like them

to absent themselves

once they discovered unloving

mouths and eyes on them

decrypting violence

We know bombs. No matter how justified we think they are.

We don't know how to welcome the stranger. No matter how terrible their predicament.

We shrug. And say god bless us and the world. No matter how hypocritical that sounds.

رحمة ramah

‎Syria, Syria, Syria —

mercy,
‎
rahmah,  رحمة

it's a true story

On Discussion Board, a student posts to another student:

RE: What question is life the answer to?  

The book you described (Mister God, This is Anna) sounds fascinating!  

I'll have to look into it... "My question for the ARÊTE paper, is about the meaning of life. What if I treat 'life' as the answer, and look for the question?   What is the result of sex? Life.    

From an Atheistic point of view, what else is there?  (Not a rhetorical question, if you have ideas, please share them with me)"  

But then this brings back the (perhaps quite cliche by now) question of whether the chicken or the egg came first. If sex is the question and life is the answer, what question does sex answer, or rather, what is the origin? Doesn't life have to exist first? Ah, it seems to me that everything is an answer and everything is a question, and it just keeps going back further and further!  

Fascinating!

On Discussion Board, moderator response:

 RE: What question is life the answer to?  

 "If sex is the question and life is the answer, what question does sex answer, or rather, what is the origin? Doesn't life have to exist first?(student) 

I know the answer. It's a true story. 

An ancient elderly couple from time before time suddenly and unexpectedly woke up and found themselves sitting at a kitchen table as the sun came in the window.  They looked around, having no idea who they were, where the were, and how they got there.  

She asked him, "Would you like some coffee?"  

He, dizzy and disoriented, looked blankly at her, at the empty cup on the table, and began to say "Yes" -- when the word (in his confusion) came out backwards (his synapses weren't hitting on all cylinders yet), and, miscalculating the alphabet, backed up one letter, from 'y' to 'x' -- and he said, instead of "Yes" -- "Sex". 

She looked at him, puzzled, and went to get the coffeepot.  

And this is why there has always been a confusion and puzzlement about sex. It is reversed 'yes', with the 'y' replaced by 'x'.  

 There you have it. There are so many stories from ancient forgotten memory that are no longer told.

Ask me some time about the real reason "bread and butter" was replaced by "money and work" as description of what we do to make a living .

without surcease

I was in DC 4April1968.

The sorrow, the loss, the anger was pulsing.

Forty-nine years later the same consternation, mistrust of narrative, and wariness of the will to correct injustice lingers.

On that balcony a dying took place that is grieved without surcease until even now.

not a joyful time to come

Worry about North Korea.

Worry about Syria.

Worry about Russia.

Then there’s the current administration.

Pick one of the first three.

A skirmish, a terror incident, a diversion from the administration’s scandals.

Soon, I fear, we will be at another war.

And the rascal prevaricators will find camouflage behind new American lives lost and the national distress about a new sorrow giving cover to old tactics of political survival.

It’s not a joyful time to come.

daily prayer

Conversing the unknown

night prayer

Man is not ready to become man.

Nor woman, woman.

We’re still too resentful.

Who will allow ego to fragment?

Who will take the future home?

I have seen no one ready.

We will have to stand here and watch.

Here I am, watching.

Surely someone will come along.

Am I no longer here?

No longer watching?

Gone

to

pieces

morning practice

snow this april first

(lite, not much), zendo incense

chats flakes on way up 

how's that work

man in hospice, in-

mate ethereal white dog

in his bed with him

says he'll pray for me

when he gets to heaven

I say thank you

and tell him when

he gets to heaven

to give them hell

friday morning, haiku

orange peel at edge

of bed folded over it-

self on brown blanket

as it is, infinite

Reading a piece about William Blake from a Sri Lankan site:

On the analysis of the themes of his poems and of his numerous engravings and paintings it is evident that Blake had an inner vision beyond sense perception and he was in constant touch with what he perceived through the eye of the soul. Blake emphasised this in his own words: ‘A spirit and a vision are not as the modern poses, a cloudy vapour or nothing. They are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.’ ‘With my inward eyes ‘tis an old man grey. With my outward, a thistle across my way.’  

Inner emotion  

Blake could visualise an inner emotion very quickly as he lived in the spirit which was source of his imagination. Blake’s philosophy was based on the exaltation of the sprit over the body, instinct and intuition over education and of spiritual vision over the impressions of the physical sense. He made a famous statement that it was possible to see the infinite and the external beyond the material appearances of the finite world. ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is infinite.’ As a mystic and visionary poet Blake rejected all beliefs, philosophies and attitudes that existed in the 18th century England. 

(--in The Sunday Observer, Sri Lanka, 19Oct2014, "William Blake, A mystical and visionary poet," by W.T.J.S. Kaviratkne http://archives.sundayobserver.lk/2014/10/19/mon25.asp

Looking at likeness sketch above icon of woman who held heart in unlikely and soft continuity as though mystical connection.

This Friday morning recollection.

our new administration

if we look

at all

we seem

to see

a thousand

shards of

slight

moksha

do you love
me

he asked
one

day
the fisherman

looked
around, surprised

you know
I do; then

looked his
questioner

in his face
realizing

he'd been
asked

nothing 

concerning the obvious coverup in government, if there is any hope

Press
and
People

Good investigative journalism
and
Active vocal citizens

Words
and
Voices

reading obituaries

they simply die
no more

need be
said

once they stood
walked, or

sat beside
when we

talked or
didn't

it seems
some outbreath

without
a word

just keeps
going

until I
spot

the fact
of it

where there is here

After a while
you realize

Nothing
continues

Beyond
now

a life of transparence

The professor visited his student for the first time in the student’s monastery entered on 10Dec1941. The poem “Once in Kentucky,” was the fruit of the first visit the professor paid to his former student at the Abbey of Gethsemani. (cf. Steindl-Rast)

The professor, Mark Van Doren. The student, Thomas Merton.

Here's his poem as presented by Bro. David Steindl-Rast osb, in the Foreword to the book of poems (pp.xiv-xv) Practicing Silence, New and Selected Verses, by Bonnie Bowman Thurston. 

Once in Kentucky

In our fat times, a monk:
I had not thought to see one;
Nor, even with my own poor lean concerns,
Ever to be one.

No. But in Kentucky,
Midway of sweet hills
When housewives swept their porches and March
   light
Lapped windowsills,

He, once my merry friend,
Came to the stone door,
And the only difference in his smiling was,
It sorrowed more.

No change in him, except
His merriment was graver.
As if he knew now where it started from;
And what the flavor.

He tasted it, the joy,
Then gave it all to me:
As much, I mean, as I could carry home
To this country,

To this country whose laughter
Is a fat thing, and dies.
I step across its body and consider,
Still, those eyes.

      (Poem, Once in Kentucky, by Mark Van Doren)

...   ...   ...

A life of prayer, a life of poetry, invites us into a life of transparence. 

Seeing through. 

Being seen through.

at barn door, morning chant

at barn door, morning chant

dark and cloudy sky

prayer ascends; loving-kindness descends

three sticks of firewood return to kitchen wood stove embers

I don’t know where this train’s bound

At Sunday Evening Practice, at table, we read:

We were sitting in front of a blazing fire when Thomas Merton again took up this theme of growing.  “The main theme of time is that of inner growth.  It’s a theme to which we should all return frequently in prayer.  There is a great thing in my life – Christ wants me to grow.  Move this around a little bit in meditation.  Instead of worrying – Where am I going? What kind of resolution should I make? – I should simply let this growing unfold in my prayer.  I should see what is holding me back from it.  What is it?  What kind of compromises have I made?  Am I substituting activity for growth?  (I have often asked myself, is this writing getting in the way?  For me writing is so satisfying an activity that it is hard to say.)  In someone else it is easier to see this process of growing and to see what hinders it.  But when it comes to ourselves, all we can do is try to honestly be ourselves.  

“One of the greatest obstacles to your growing is the fear of making a fool of yourself.  Any real step forward implies the risk of failure.  And the really important steps imply the risk of complete failure.  Yet we must make them, trusting in Christ.  If I take this step, everything I have done so far might go down the drain.  In a situation like that we need a shot of Buddhist mentality.  Then we see, down what drain?  So what?  (So that’s perhaps one of the valuable things about this Asian trip.)  We have to have the courage to make fools of ourselves, and at the same time be awfully careful not to make fools of ourselves. 

“The great temptation is to fear going it alone, wanting to be ‘with it’ at any cost.  But each one of us has to be able to go it alone somehow.  You don’t want to repudiate the community, but you have to go it alone at times.  If the community is made up of a little group of people who always try to support one another, and nobody ever gets out of this little block, nothing happens and all growth is being stifled.  This is possibly one of the greatest dangers we face in the future, because we are getting more and more to be that kind of society.  We will need those who have the courage to do the opposite of everybody else.  If you have this courage you will effect change.  Of course they will say, ‘this guy is crazy’; but you have to do it. 

(--from, Recollections of Thomas Merton’s Last Days in the West, BY BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST, OSB)  http://gratefulness.org/resource/recollections-of-thomas-mertons-last-days-in-the-west/ 

We admit to being weird, “in the good way,” one practitioner allowed, after telling the story of deciding to remain outside the structures of the organized expressions of religious groups. We are not idiosyncratic and idiorrhythmic -- (Late Greek idiorrhythmos (from Greek idio- + rhythmos measured motion, measure) --  to be those things. We are that way because that’s the way we are. There’s no intent to be that way; we are that way.

“It’s all a matter of rethinking the identity of institutions so that everything is oriented to people.  The institution must serve the development of the individual person.  And once you’ve got fully developed people, they can do anything.  What counts are people and their vocations, not structures and ideas.  Let us make room for idiosyncrasies.  The danger is that the institution becomes an end in itself.  What we need are people-centered communities, not institution-centered ones.  This is the direction in which renewal must move.“  

Maybe new structures are not that necessary.  Perhaps you already do know what you want.  I believe that what we want to do is to pray.  After all, why did any of us become religious if we didn’t want to pray?  What do we want, if not to pray?  Okay, now, pray.  This is the whole doctrine of prayer in the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s all summed up in one phrase:  ‘If a man wants to pray, let him go and pray.’ That is all St. Benedict feels it is necessary to say about the subject.  He doesn’t’ say, let us go in and start with a little introductory prayer, etc, etc.  If you want to pray, pray. (--ibid,  http://gratefulness.org/resource/recollections-of-thomas-mertons-last-days-in-the-west/ ) 

Every piece of rye bread and kombucha green tea is eucharist by any other liturgy or hermeneutic.

On this month’s mailing from Friends of Silence, this quote:
“Being prophetic means, first and foremost, being a dangerous listener.” (--Robert J. Wicks)

Some listen clearer. These might know what prayer might be -- something without object. Something in itself seeing into itself.

The sound of a tree forming one syllable every ten years readying to recite the entire oral mythology of ground and root, leaf and seed -- a billion year recitation of a billion year excursion -- one syllable at a     very     very     long     time.

The Great Correction (by Eliza Gilkyson) 

Everyone tied to the turning wheel
Everyone hiding from the things they feel
Well the truth’s so hard it just don’t seem real
The shadow across this land

People ’round here don’t know what it means
To suffer at the hands of our American dreams
They turn their backs on the grisly scenes
Traced to the privileged sons

Down through the ages lovers of the mystery
Been saying people let your love light shine
Poets and sages all throughout history
Say the light burns brightest in the darkest times

It’s the bitter end we’ve come down to
The eye of the needle that we gotta get through
But the end could be the start of something new
When the great correction comes

Down to the wire running out of time
Still got hope in this heart of mine
But the future waits on the horizon line
For our daughters and our sons

I don’t know where this train’s bound
Whole lotta people trying to turn it around
Gonna shout ’til the walls come tumbling down 

And the great correction comes 

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/purple-america/the-great-correction-song 

Prayer knows nothing of piety.

It is goulash and lentil soups side by side on stove. Shakuhachi flute before and after zazen. White dog chasing green frisbee over snow-covered path after final circle with woman wearing hoodie. The carousel of practice onto which one steps without brass ring or ticket stub. A car leaves dooryard for Augusta.

May all beings be the way they are with acceptance and blessing after breath extinguishing candles,  gone 8pm. 

Gone where nothing goes when deep in prayer. 

Curving rails through wooded stretch of empty tracks where faintest echo of train gone by makes no sound on star white snow. 

a new language of prayer

Across the globe there is a rough conversation about what to do with those who are involved with either drugs, criminality, or political hegemony.

Is it possible that prayer, real prayer -- not egoistic plays of power and control -- will find our real mind and real heart?

A president far away says, “Kill the outlaws,” and they are killed.

He says, “Kill the drug dealers and users,” and they are killed.

He says, “The human rights advocates are also enemies,” and they looked at one another knowing where words like that lead.

Susmaryosep *

Nothing like that could happen here in the United States, right?

Right?

Hello?

Elsewhere --

Political opposition is also dangerous. 

иисус Марии и Иосифу **

We’ve got to learn a new language of prayer. That’s what the monk Thomas Merton said two months before he died.

This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction... The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something...

O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.

(--Closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975); quoted in Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master : The Essential Writings (1992), p. 237.)

Perhaps, finally, there is enough evidence to explain why we have forgotten what real prayer is and why so few enter into a life of prayer.

---   ---   ---
* Filipino slang, a contraction of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
** Russian, for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

one didn't matter

I wanted once

to be a mystic

it was clear

I was no-

body

So I didn't 

bother to file

a patent claiming

one didn't matter

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn't

On this day, the acknowledgement of Mary’s being invited.

These two poets give us perspective:

1.

Annunciation

         (by Marie Howe)

Even if I don't see it again -- nor ever feel it

I know it is -- and that if once it hailed me

it ever does--

and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction

not as toward a place, but it was a tilting

within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where

it isn't -- I was blinded like that -- and swam

in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so

specifically myself I thought I'd die

from being loved like that.

2.

ANNUNCIATION

                   (by Denise Levertov)

   

           ‘Hail space for the unconfined God’

             (—from the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc)

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished, 

almost always a lectern, a book; always

the tall lily.

       Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,

the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,

whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions

courage.

       The engendering Spirit

did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

She was free

to accept or to refuse, choice

integral to humanness.

               ______________

Aren’t there annunciations

of one sort or another

in most lives?

         Some unwillingly

undertake great destinies,

enact them in sullen pride,

uncomprehending.

More often

those moments

      when roads of light and storm

      open from darkness in a man or woman,

are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair

and with relief.

Ordinary lives continue.

                                 God does not smite them.

But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

                  ____________________

She had been a child who played, ate, slept

like any other child–but unlike others,

wept only for pity, laughed

in joy not triumph.

Compassion and intelligence

fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous

than any in all of Time,

she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’

and gravely, courteously,

took to heart the angel’s reply,

the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb

Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

in hidden, finite inwardness,

nine months of Eternity; to contain

in slender vase of being,

the sum of power–

in narrow flesh,

the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,

push out into air, a Man-child

needing, like any other,

milk and love–

but who was God.

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

                  ____________________

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

his gaze

The question was put to the old man, "Have you ever seen God?"

He said nothing , looking down at the ground.

She asked again.

And again he said nothing, only this time he raised his gaze, and looked at her.

if laid into the earth

The king and the land are one.

When we look back to these ancient schools of initiation, what sort of a teaching do we find there? What was the Mystery that was taught in them? It is after all only the forms of the teaching that change with the passage of time. Astonishing as it may seem, we actually find that in these very ancient schools of initiation the secret, the mystery that Parsifal discovered, is brought to its highest development — the secret; namely, of how the new budding life of nature in Springtime is connected with the Mystery of the Cross. We have to understand it in the following way. 

The power of reproduction which we recognize in the animal and human kingdoms is also to be seen in the plant kingdom. In the springtime of the year the divine active power of creation shoots up out of Mother Earth. For we have to recognize that a deep connection exists between the power that manifests when the Earth clothes herself with her robe of green, and the divine creative power. The pupils in the initiation school were taught as follows: “All around you in nature you see the opening flower buds, and within them a power at work which is then later concentrated in the small grains of seed. Countless seeds will come forth from the flowers — seeds which, if laid into the earth, will be capable of bringing forth new plants. And now receive what I am about to say into your heart; take it deeply into your soul. The process that is taking place out there in nature is the very same as takes place in human beings and in the animal kingdom, only in nature it takes place without desire or passion. It goes forward in perfect purity and chastity. The boundless and chaste innocence that sleeps in the flower buds of the plants — this, it was felt, must enter right into the soul of the pupils. 

(--from, Parsifal, The Secret of the Grail in the Works of Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Arthur, Lecture by Rudolf Steiner,  Landin, July 29th, 1906 http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/19060729p01.html 

If the king is corrupt, the land suffers. 

light prayer

432,288 miles diameter

92.96 million miles away --



Morning sun rises through





Bamboo shade -- right here --




Everything is new and near

rooting for tree

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary questions Judge Gorsuch at his confirmation hearing.

Yesterday the directors of the FBI and National Security Agency testified before the House Intelligence Committee covering Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

There are questions about the truthfulness of the current President when he accused the prior president of wiretapping the residence of the current president, a felony if proved true. There seems, on the testimony of members on the Intelligence Community, to be no evidence pointing to the accuracy of the allegation.

The machinery of government grinds on.

There are 3 branches.

Let’s root for the tree to be healthy.

when everything changed

Russian cyber attack with collusion?

So much to lose if true.

They say it is spring today.

How late are we?

nothing moves

under white ash bed

blanket red embers yawn, flame

licks twigs -- slow waking