nuff said

Duterte, Trump, Kim Jong Un, Bolsonaro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Orban —-

Fill in commentary

at your peril

haruspicating time

Where did that hour come from?

Someone said, let there be one hour earlier placed into our agreement about time.

And there it is.

Words, again, haruspicate our being-in-the-world.

love is the question

1.

Question God.

No, really — I think that’s God’s name.

“Question” is the first name.

“God” is the family name.

When we question god we acknowledge a reality beyond ordinary understanding.

2.

Here’s a theory about everything:

All there is, is love.

That’s it. Love is “all there is.”

3.

The question of existence is

the question of love:

“Who am I?” “What is this?”

4.

I believe in nothing but the question

This is who I am

Love everyone ...

You can

love in this disturbing time.

When is one and one not two?

But to love another as a person we must begin by granting him his own autonomy and identity as a person. We have to love him for what he is in himself, and not for what he is to us. We have to love him for his own good, not for the good we get out of him. And this is impossible unless we are capable of a love which ‘transforms’ us, so to speak, into the other person, making us able to see things as he sees them, love what he loves, experience the deeper realities of his own life as if they were our own. Without sacrifice, such a transformation is utterly impossible. But unless we are capable of this kind of transformation ‘into the other’ while remaining ourselves, we are not yet capable of a fully human existence.  

(-- from Disputed Questions, by Thomas Merton)

When we realize our fully integrated human reality in this existence.

One and one becomes the description and definition of love in this disturbing time.

yes you were

Where were you? The Lord God asked Job. Where were you when I created the world and everything in it?

Job was silent.

The Lord God waited. Waits. Still waits.

When, the Lord God wonders, will Job come to the koan response?

When will Job realize and respond —- I was there.

I was there.

At which point the Lord God will stare at Job, then, suddenly, soften, lighten gaze, and say — Yes!

Yes you were!

Yes you are!

let it be yours

A saint is someone with no opinion separating them from seeing, hearing, touching, scenting, or tasting the permeating yet beyond-detectable reality of God in the presence of another and others wherever and however they appear within immediate experience.

And engaging with care.

Tomorrow is All Saints Day.

Let it be yours!

dark indictment

Chris Hedges, talking in Waterloo, Ontario, sends me to Engels.

— 1 — What is Communism? 

Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. 

— 2 —
What is the proletariat?
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.^[1] 

— 3 —
Proletarians, then, have not always existed?
No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions. 

(— by Frederick Engels, from The Principles of Communism,) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Elsewhere from a review in The Washington Post, the following:

A relentlessly dark indictment of global capitalism
     By Thomas Carothers, September 14 

Thomas Carothers is senior vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 

Building on several previous books presenting damning critiques of American society, in “America: The Farewell Tour,” Chris Hedges lays out his full manifesto: a comprehensive account of what he believes to be the devastating effects of capitalism on the United States and in fact the entire world. The book stands more vividly as a window into one of the renewed tribes of American politics in the Trump years than as a persuasive, cogent argument based on careful deployment of evidence and analysis. 

The tribe in question is the anti-capitalist left, enjoying something of a moment these days in response to the political gains of the populist right. Its main tenets are the same as in the last heyday of this outlook, the 1960s and 1970s, updated to match today’s socioeconomic and political conditions. Central among these is the argument that capitalism is an inherently destructive force that rots and ruins every arena of American life. 

The corporate state that presides over this destructive capitalist economic system is ruthless and relentless. “It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as forms of social control while it cannibalizes the nation and the globe for profits.”   

This scourge is all-consuming. Once-liberal institutions, including “the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” have all “collapsed under sustained assault during the past forty years of corporate power.” Today, there are “no institutions left in America that can authentically be called democratic.” 

It is terminal. “Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two.” 

And it is worldwide. “The malaise that infects Americans is global.” Global capitalism is responsible for all misery and the metastasizing of violent rage from many different sides, from jihadists and neofascists to far-right militias and antifa. 

Hedges portrays this nightmarish situation as the fulfillment of Karl Marx’s prediction of the eventual end of capitalism. This vision of capitalism’s demise is slightly puzzling, given that in his account, capitalism seems to be steamrollering everything in its path. 

But he argues that all this winning is only serving to make clear capitalism’s fundamental hollowness and deceit, which represent the seeds of its ultimate destruction. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-relentlessly-dark-indictment-of-global-capitalism/2018/09/13/ab8cbe98-ac84-11e8-8a0c-70b618c98d3c_story.html?nid&utm_term=.cefc0f23e59e

What is the tipping point for us? 

What is the unpredictable thing that will push the America’s people over the edge? 

What event will find the elite, the politicians, and the generals, finally, to walk away and allow what next must happen to, indeed, happen. 

Here is hedges’ talk:  The Collapse of the American Empire. It was held at Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6C2, Waterloo, Canada

https://youtu.be/csI8JLJ15Ak

Stark and sobering.

Not unlike death and poetry. 

and weep

America’s president sends military to southern border to stop poor migrants from crossing into this country.

The prophetic tradition implores us to welcome the stranger and show compassion to those needing help avoiding harm and danger.

Worshippers are gunned down in a Pittsburgh synagogue.

Political ignorance, politician and right wing media hatred, contribute fear and paranoia to a people ripe for racist and bigoted response to the cynical provocations of president and his political crony cowards.

And for Christians, Jesus has died in their churches.
Three days later, three weeks, three months, three decades later, the stone is fixed solidly in place and no emergence has taken place. They have sealed the wise one in to a catafalque of complicit complacency aligned with a deeply flawed and critically disturbed pattern of expedient thinking and acting completely antithetical to supposed mission statement and human decency needed.

Hope has retreated into desolate hiding place.

The nation’s capital — both financial and human — has been turned to self-aggrandizing self-import hoarding, leaving out in the damp and cold night the vast and uncertain majority who once believed in a loving, inclusive, and neighborly promise and potentiality.

Behold what is within without!

Look upon what has been made of us, and weep!

with another towards no other.

If what we call “God” is what may be, possible — then when we dream to create an expression of what is coming after God, perhaps the God-reality beyond concept and formulation, we move with another towards no other.

I learn that Thomas Keating OCSO died last Thursday.

Silence is the primary language. We must learn this expression.

game, series, over

Boston

שְׁמַע...why can we not hear

(Silence)

Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one" 

(Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד׃)

the “now” with God

The cell is the body.

The monk in his cell sleeps, reads, makes prostrations, prays, and is simply present to God as God is to him, forgetting all the past, not planning the future, but being in the "now" with God."  (-M. Basil Pennington, OCSO)

The “now” is the awareness which enfolds and embraces all beings, all things, all places, all circumstances.

dodgers in the 18th

Turns out I went to bed 10 innings too early.

blinker, turning

So many cars

So lucky

To arrive

Safely

where shall we look

Zu den Sache selbst

watch your words: we are listening

He who lives by the slur will be decried by it.

unobsequious obsequy

For my obituary:

Bill Halpin died as he lived -- he took a nap and, you might say, failed to wake.
He didn't battle cancer, though it accompanied him.
He wasn't plagued with a heart condition, though he looked for his heart all his life.
His diabetes did not slow him down, he was always slow.

He died of life. He always felt that the single greatest cause of death is birth. If there was no birth there'd be no death. And, no. the opposite of life is not death. Life has no opposite. That's a wisdom that doesn't show up in advertisements between innings of the World Series.

Bill Halpin did three things during his 74 (or so) years:
   1. He wore ragg socks and wool berets;
   2. He sat in silence from time to time;
   3. He felt poetry and pondering were the ways we learn about words, the world, and wisdom.

Apart from that, he tried to love those who were part of his life: his son, his companion, those he alienated, his sister's progeny, those he sipped coffee with, those he conversed with in prison, in the elderly residence, in hospital, in hospice, and in the Raimon Panikkar Conversation Kitchen at foot of Ragged Mtn.

He was pretty much a fool. Didn't hold jobs well. Couldn't teach university courses over 30 years worth a lick. Never made a profit in 13 years of harbor-side bookshop & bakery. Never settled in to child welfare, residential treatment centers, alternative high school education programs, training staff for each of these was of suspect worth, and, finally, was an imposter to the helping profession believing that poetry and philosophy were valuable assets in the spy game of mental and emotional health.

He was a categorical and calculative failure through the years.
He pretended to be contemplative.
He couldn't sustain a single prayer or find any trace of God in places listing God's address.

Still, on route 90 Friday mornings on way to maximum security prison for open conversation, he'd hold up his toasted English muffin to the oncoming traffic and say, barely audible, hoc est enim corpus meum, and he believed every word of it true.

And so, he died as he lived, watching breath depart and return. Only, this last breath decided to go off into space for a walkabout, leaving him, wondering: What now?

Time to buy a hat

Red Sox versus Dodgers.

(everlasting)

Is the Lord just? Will he defend the poor?

   A thousand ages in your sight / Are like an evening gone;   Short as the watch that ends the night / Before the rising sun. 

   Time, like an ever rolling stream, / Bears all our lives away; /    They fly, forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day. 

   O God, our help in ages past, / Our hope for years to come,   Be now our guard while troubles last, / And our eternal home.

(--from, "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" Hymn, office of readings) Good men have vanished from our midst.    It is you, O Lord, who will take us in your care   and protect us for ever from this generation.   See how the wicked prowl on every side,   while the worthless are prized highly by the sons of men.          (--from, psalm12)  Bald Mountain turns to gold as October leans toward its end.  Faith, I suspect, is fragile in this age of presidential mendacity and pusillanimous petulance. We are bereft of  enlightened leadership, and receive a strategy of diminishing light and encroaching darkness. Is God in the lies? Or have we reinvigorated the ancient teaching that this world belongs to the prince of lies? May the Lord bless us, protect us from all evil, and lead us to life (everlasting), Amen

no teaching authority

I have the stick he used

when he’d sprained his ankle.

It is my zen stick.

He was my father.

His continuation day