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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

To unearth justice by cultivating injustice is hard row to hoe.

Another St Patrick's Day passes. Another year not buying a Guinness to toast the faces past, family for whom the day was cause to celebrate. I thought I would. I was tired. Came home. Watched Enron shame. Checked basketball scores, (deciding they didn't matter), then to sleep.

The flowing stream is our teacher of mindlessness,
The while clouds our unthinking friends.
If I were to try to describe it,
All I could do is roar.
- Gensei (1623-1668)

At dawn yesterday I read final papers Pat turned in for prison course. Enjoyed his inquiry into death penalty, abortion, Socrates, Siddhartha, Blackburn, and God. Later at prison, Joe-Pete and I spoke about Oscar Wilde. Joe was taken with the novel.

In his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote:
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
(Preface, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde)

Afterwards, Joe-Pete, Pat, Joe J., Saskia, Darcy, and I spoke of these matters. We spoke of globalization, image and facade, Nietzsche's's remarks on morals, and the value of face to face, person to person integrity.

Conversation is a sacred trust.

What god can compare with you: taking fault away,
pardoning crime,
not cherishing anger for ever
but delighting in showing mercy?
(--from Micah 7: 14-20)

I suspect if showing mercy is to have any value, I will have to relent in utero any emerging urge to punish or defame those whose acts disturb greatly. It is a conundrum. When petty criminals break the law, they go to jail. When the powerful break the law, they get severance packages, or get the national debt raised (to nine trillion), or if popular enough, win jury nullification. It is always difficult reconciling hypocrisy -- my own or my country's. You'd think, with democracy, something more useless would emerge.

I re-think Wilde's words: "To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim." I also contemplate the words, "to unearth justice by cultivating injustice is hard row to hoe." (Was Santa Claus actually saying, "hoe, hoe, hoe"?)

And yet, in prison, something along the lines of the template we know as Holy Saturday's dark and empty re-creation is taking place. What? I don't know. It is concealed from me.

Would we proclaim it a delight to become, to be, a useless work or art?

Of God's ways...who am I to say? How would I know whether some concealed creative God is watching carefully and helping caringly this emerging humanity into authentic justice, love, and compassion? Or even if what-we-call-God, is itself, what is being watched. Perhaps what is being watched remains dead until careful, caring, entrance into the midst of what is taking place is what and who we become.

Peter Singer opens his book on Ethics with the following:
Ethics is about how we ought to live. What makes the action the right, rather than the wrong, thing to do? What should our goals be? These questions are so fundamental that they lead us on to further questions. What is ethics anyway? Where does it come from? Can we really hope to find a rational way of deciding how we ought to live? If we can, what would it be like, and how are we going to know when we have found it?
(Singer, Ethics, p.3, Oxford University Press)

How would we know?

Try to carefully watch. Try to care for what is seen. Pray. For Maria's sons; for the repose of the soul of Fanny; for the inmates and staff at Maine State Prison; for the two boys from Maine killed in Iraq this week; for all suffering difficulties in their lives; for innocence to pervade.

Innocence (from Latin "innocentia" which translates "harmless, innocence, and integrity) is unknowing anything other than the correct relationship with what is taking place.

100% correct relationship with what is taking place, I suspect, is dwelling in the midst, in the middle place, where what-we-call-God is Presence-Itself. The holy dwells here. The whole is what is taking place. But, (and this is pivotal), we must be there "innocentia" -- not-knowing anything other than the presence of God, in and through, each and every, concealed and unconcealed -- with one another.

Nietzsche said God is dead.

Right here in our midst, carefully, caringly, dwelling.

Waiting...waiting...waiting.

In his autobiographical novel Report To Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote:
There are three kinds of souls, three kinds of prayers.
One: I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me lest I rot.
Two: Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.
Three: Overdraw me, and who cares if I break!
“Choose!”

Waiting...waiting...waiting.

For our resurrection.

One with another.

Into the open.

The waiting comes to an end.

Fraud and deception wear suits and seem untouchable. Watching Kenneth Lay, Andrew Fastow, and Jeffrey Skillings in the documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," prepares us for the sequel to star George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld which might be called, "How Long Did They Think People Would Wait?"

People are beginning to stop believing in illusions. Illusions are costly. Many are willing to pay. Truth is free. Lies are expensive. It is time to pare down and embrace poverty.

Living in the world,
Yet not clinging to or forming
Attachments for the dust of the world,
Is the way of a true Zen student.
Witnessing the good actions of another person,
Encourage yourself to follow their example.
Hearing of the mistaken action of another person,
Advise yourself not to emulate it.
Even though you are alone in a dark room
Conduct yourself as though you were facing a noble guest.
- Zen-Getsu

The room has grown dark. Charades are enacted. Bravos sound hollow. Actors seem seedy. Curtain falls. Their names are fodder of jokes. Worse, derision. The false disintegrates as it is pronounced. Mouthfuls of dirt are spit out.

We listen, but don't hear, the name of integrity. It is the one name we long to hear. Except, it is a soundless name. There's nothing preceding it, nothing following it.

His name is holy, (From the Magnificat, Vespers)

If we hear a name that fills us with silence and reverence, we will be silent and reverent.

So far, the names have been disappointing -- noisy and deceptive.

Don't settle for hurried willful shame.

Wait for what is holy.

It is truly you.

Unsnookered.

Laying open.

Eternal life is now.

Every act , every thought, done or made now, touches every time, everybody, everywhere.

One who sees his body as unreal is a Buddha;
One who comprehends his mind as illusory is a Buddha;
One who realizes both body and mind as empty,
What difference from the Buddhas has this person?
- Krakucchanda Buddha

The empty is formed here and now. We radically retrieve origin conversation when we profoundly, mindfully converse wholly now.

Awake, Lord, why do you sleep?
Rise up, do not always reject us.
Why do you turn away your face?
How can you forget our poverty and our tribulation?

Our souls are crushed into the dust,
our bodies dragged down to the earth.
Rise up, Lord, and help us.
In your mercy, redeem us.
(from Psalm 44)

The Lord is eternal. When we are not here, we are no-where. When we do not wholly act, no one benefits. When we do not hold all in our heart and mind, there is absence everywhere.

No us anywhere, no Lord anywhere to be found.

No wonder we cannot encounter the Lord. We are nowhere to be found.

If we are present, the Lord is present.

What is unreal is unpresence,

Real is radical origin.

Retrieve this conversation.

Lincolnville church will keep all-night vigil the 19th into the 20th. Three years later the war remains a shame. Rev. Susan holds open her church.

If you wish to see the Buddha,
You must look into your own inner-nature;
This nature is the Buddha himself.
If you have not seen your own nature,
What is the use of thinking of Buddha,
Or reciting sutras, or fasting, or keeping precepts?
By thinking of Buddha, your meritorious deed will bear fruit;
By reciting sutras, you may attain a bright intellect;
By keeping the precepts, you may be born into heavens;
By practicing charity, you may be rewarded abundantly;
But as to seeking Buddha, you are far away.
- Bodhi-Dharma (d.533)

No vengeance or revenge is worth the depletion of soul. We have become a nation afraid of our enemies and our leaders.

Put no trust in violence,
do not be seduced into robbery;
and if riches come, do not count upon them.
God has spoken once and for all.
Two things have I heard him say:
that strength belongs to God,
and that mercy, Lord, belongs to you.
For to each of us you give
whatever our actions have deserved.
(from Psalm 62)

It is time to empty our fear.

Give it back to mongerers.

Slough the discreditable.

Pray all night.

With no notice, out back door. Mud leaps up from wet earth. Cut branches hold wake for one another alongside pre-budding forsythia yellow petals. No stopping coming of spring.

Borrowing from the four great elements,
I assumed my body.
My mind, originally birthless,
Functions according to circumstances.
When circumstances do not exist,
My mind does not exist either.
Woe and weal are like illusions:
They arise, they also fall.
- Visvabhu Buddha

A surfeit of words in shop this noon. Not dependent on content, continuous commentary. I remember my lies. We lie when we cover authentic open with cloaking shrubbery. My lies thought dressing in many words would make them lovely. It didn't. Only made suffering not see itself in mirror.

Two friends are suffering the first steps of separation. One is resolved; one wishing otherwise. Listening. Suffering sound.

In wider circumference, there's a tin ear continuing about Iraq. I wonder where intelligent listening has gone. We seem to only hear frippery and foppery. Someone must emerge capable of hearing what men in power are really saying about this country and the world. They pronounce the right words, (freedom, democracy, hopeful), but there is no action following with slightest resemblance; there is no content below their pronunciation.

You must therefore do what they tell you and listen to what they say; but do not be guided by what they do: since they do not practise what they preach. They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men's shoulders, but will they lift a finger to move them? Not they! Everything they do is done to attract attention... (Matthew 23:1-)

No longer seeking attention is no longer speaking without the soundless. No longer dressing up lies in lovely arrayed words.

We must close doors quietly, and move on, leaving nothing behind.

But, husks of holiness, broken open, fallen to earth, mud-born.

Our white DeSoto with hooded headlights in Brooklyn backyard on 69th street comes to mind. We remember the past. Even if it does not exist, there is memory of it.

By illusion the various good karmas are caused;
By illusion the various evil karmas are committed.
My body is like a bubble, and my mind is like the wind;
This illusory creation has no root and no reality.
- Sikhin Buddha

Remembering reality is tricky affair. What we call reality usually fits within the template of space and time, cause and effect. This is good. It gives us something to agree about. Yes, we did sit at table Sunday night, seven-ish, after 40 minute zazen, walking, then chanting the Prajna Paramita Sutra, reading Shunryu Suzuki on dualism. We ate turkey soup, then, because and when the bell sounded, we four spoke, talked about the smell of engine oil or bleach on hands apparent to our noses when we place hands together to bow.

Jesus said: "Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not be judged yourselves; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned yourselves; grant pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back."
(Luke 6:36 - 38)

There's an equation with judgment: you judge = you are judged. Buddhists call it dependent co-origination. This is because that is. Jesus, almost off-handedly, lets the equation be known. You cannot do anything to neighbor without doing it to yourself. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Brother Charles (with his single wooden drumstick of terror) was preaching the gospel during algebra class in high school. (Albeit, a punishment/pain preaching for those of us careless or lazy with our calculations.) Still, Jesus taught the wisdom: We will be given back as we give.

Then there is the event of the resurrection. ["event, from Latin eventus, from past participle of evenire, to happen : -, ex-, ex- + venire, to come; see gw- in Indo-European roots.]

What comes out of the fact of resurrection? What comes from the belief in resurrection?

Reading Rowan Williams on Resurrection.
Even in the Gospels, one thing is never described. There is a central silence, not broken until the second century, about the event of resurrection. Even Matthew, with his elaborate mythological scenery, leaves us with the strange impression that the stone is rolled away from a tomb that is already empty. Jesus is not raised by an angel (like Luke's Peter, in Acts 12), but raised by the Father. It is an event which is not describable, because it is precisely there that there occurs the transfiguring expansion of Jesus' humanity which is the heart of resurrection encounters. It is an event on the frontier of any possible language because it is the moment in which our speech is both left behind and opened to new possibilities. It is as indescribable as the process of imaginative fusion which produces any metaphor; and the evangelists withdrew as well they might. Jesus' life is historical, describable; the encounters with Jesus risen are historical and (after a fashion) describable, with whatever ambiguities and unclarities. But there is a sense in which the raising of Jesus, the hinge between the two histories, the act that brings the latter out of the former: it is not an event, with a before and after, occupying a determinate bit of time between Friday and Sunday. God's act in uniting Jesus' life with his eludes us; we can speak of it only as the necessary condition for our living as we live. And as a divine act it cannot be tied to place and time in any simple way. It is, indeed, an 'eternal' act; it is an aspect of the eternal will by which God determines how he shall be, his will to be the Father of the Son. These are abstract words, they describe nothing. They can only point to the truth that God's being and will are always and necessarily prior to ours. The event of resurrection, then, cannot but be hidden in God's eternal act, his eternal 'being himself'; however early we run to the tomb, God has been there ahead of us. Once again, he decisively evades our grasp, our definition and our projection.
(from Resurrection, Interpreting the Easter Gospel, pp.96-97, by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, c.1982)

I was still a boy when that DeSoto no longer parked to the side of the garage. It disappeared into someone else's narrative. Then, probably, to a junkyard. There is nobody in my family alive today who would remember that car. I'll mention it to my son -- who doesn't drive -- but who lands in Chicago today. The space he occupied while here three weeks is vacated.

There's a refreshing clarity about emptiness.

Peter Steinfels, writing in the New York Times about a Williams essay, "Between the Cherubim: The Empty Tomb and the Empty Throne," concludes:
In his essay, Archbishop Williams recognized a need for scholars of Christian origins to explore the historical basis for the empty-tomb narratives and other Resurrection stories. But he insisted that theology, as ''a disciplined mode of reflection'' on the ''grammar'' of Christian faith, had something to say about the matter as well.
For him, the empty-tomb tradition, with all its untidiness, is an essential element of that faith. As an "image of absence, an image of the failure of images," the emptiness of the tomb, like the space between the cherubim of the ark, safeguards the liberty of God.
( from "Beliefs; The empty-tomb narratives, untidy in variety, nonetheless prove grist for theological reflection." By Peter Steinfels (NYT) Published: April 19, 2003)

Suzuki, in last evening's reading, wanted us to consider the shift in the statements -- from: "form is emptiness, emptiness is form"; to, " form is form, emptiness is emptiness."

One, at table, was delighted with the shift. Another, considering resurrection, remained imagelessly befuddled.

There's no end to it.

Maybe that's good enough for now.

Or maybe that's all there is: for now.

When it comes down to it, only the gaze suffices.

Abraham had a long time to mull what he almost did. Murdering your young for God is madness. Abraham realized suddenly he was insane, his wife broken and crazed, his boy terribly confused.

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)

What are we...looking at?

Will no one stay our hand?

Do not kill your children. Free them. Go home.

We are what sacred scripture has come to.