you want to be flawless?

The mistake is politics, thinking you can manipulate things into your image.

For the imageless there is no manipulation, there is no politics.

Dogen said life is one continuous mistake.

Only the dead are flawless.

post-other; the ground of caring

Some men and women joined the military and served for a while. Some fought in combat. Some were hurt. Some died. Those that lived are honored today. It is a sober day.

At conversation tonight talk about the election, the hurt, the combat, the dishonorable comportment, and the surrogate intimidation and snarling dismissive mess that preceded and followed.

Love is attention to what is presenting itself.

Like the visit to Dana Farber I accompanied Thursday.

The attentive care from person to person.

One after the other there.

When community recognizes itself.

Leonard (d. 10nov2016)

He tried

In his own way

To be free

nothing has changed

And so, it is Wednesday.

And things, remarkably, have changed. Or has it?

SLEEPWALK 

Tonight I have walked with you 

along the deaf lanes of sleep, 

and now that it is morning 

nothing has changed, 

other than that the two who during the night 

were completely together 

have left me once again this morning 

and continued together further on their way. 

(Poem by Gerrit Achterberg)

Brought back from Saskia's trip to the Netherlands, an inscription on a house.

On house in Oud Naarden, Netherlands
[You’ll have to get a precise translation for yourself.]

Dymphy translated it for Saskia something like, “ When in the midst of sorrow or difficulty, and you don’t know where to begin, be embraced by poetry.” (Willem Jan Otten)

Droomgericht 

De klok regeert de kamer, 

monotone wetten 

murmelen in den avond,

niemand kan zijn regelen verzetten, 

niemand wordt hier doorgelaten. 

Vandaag ben ik beschuldigd, 

vanavond lig ik voor't gericht. 

Stilte in de zalen, 

alleen het ademhalen 

van de kast, een moeder die mij ziet. 

Wind en regen buiten  

pleiten en verdedigen,  

wind en regen buiten 

pleiten en omsluiten 

den rechter met hun redenen. 

Rinkelend verschrikken  

minuten, minuten;  

uren hijgen voort 

en vier muren klagen 

om een enkel woord 

van vergeven vóór den morgen,  

om een antwoord van vergeven,  

om een antwoord vóór den morgen.

Gerrit Achterberg

[Translated]

Dream Judgement

The clock rules the chamber,

monotonous laws

drone on through the evening

no one can set his rulings aside,

no one escapes this room.

Today I am accused,

tonight I lie before the court.

Silence in the halls,

only the breathing

of the cupboard, a mother who sees me.

Outside, the wind and the rain

appeal and defend,

outside the wind and the rain

appeal and enclose

the judge with their reasoning.

Jerking forward with fear

the minutes, the minutes,

the hours gasp ahead

and the four walls cry

for one single word

of forgiveness before morning, 

an answer of forgiveness, 

an answer before morning.

  

Translated from the Dutch by Barry Goldensohn

Polls close. Now

Counting

Votes

flower offered, never grasped

ラブソング

Rabusongu

Love Song

( あ a      俳句 Haiku    回想 Kaisō recollection)

頂く

Itadaku

I received

チョ・アンの

Jō An no

Jo-Ann's 

     静か

     Shizuka

     quiet

     目付き

     Shisen

     eyes

     五十

     50       

     fifty

     夏

     Natsu

     summers 

前

Mae

ago,

今

Ima

now, 

沈黙

Chinmoku

silence

...   ...   ...

Love Song

   (a Haiku recollection)

I received Jo-Ann’s

quiet eyes fifty summers 

ago,     

now,    

silence 

 

Jo-Ann

I read her death notice at 3AM.

She died, it said, Nov 2nd.

It was All Souls Day.

I was on retreat at Trappist Monastery.

In Massachusetts. She, Connecticut.

It was the nature of our friendship.

an hour appeared

Where did that hour come from?

from Holland, an email

"Rohr reading from today says it beautifully! Perfect way to start the day. “ --

The Christification of the Universe
Sunday, November 6, 2016

 

The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. —John 6:51

Jesus the Christ did not talk in this truly shocking way (see John 6:60) so we could worship bread and wine. He came so that we would recognize his presence in all things, not just in the human body of Jesus, not just in the human body of God’s people (1 Corinthians 12:12ff), but even in the nurturing elements of the earth, symbolized by the ubiquitous food of bread and wine (1 Corinthians 11:23ff), and therefore to the very edges of creation (Romans 8:19). The mystery that was made personal and specific in Jesus was revealed as the shape of the entire universe. [1] What else could the universe be but “the body of God”? Think about it. The Incarnate One is the stand-in for “everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). This is not a competing religious statement as much as a highly symbolic metaphysical plan “from the beginning,” “from the foundation of the world” (see Ephesians 1).

God is not just saving people; God is saving all of creation. It is all “Real Presence.” We could call it the primordial “Christification” or anointing of the universe at Creation. This is not pantheism (God is everything), but panentheism (God is ineverything!). Such a central message of cosmic incarnation was never seriously taught in the Western, overly individualistic church, except by a few like Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), and Bonaventure (1221-1274). It was much more common in the Eastern Church, especially in early scholars and mystics like Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and Symeon the New Theologian.

Inspired by the more contemporary mystic scientist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio writes:

Christ invests himself organically within all creation, immersing himself in things, in the heart of matter, and thus unifying the world. The universe is physically impregnated to the very core of its matter by the influence of his superhuman nature. Everything is physically “christified,” gathered up by the incarnate Word as nourishment that assimilates, transforms, and divinizes. [2]

From the way we treat the planet, other humans, and sometimes even ourselves, it seems we don’t understand or really believe this. When you don’trecognize that the Christ Mystery is universal, that God is present in—and is saving—all of creation, you can choose what you respect and what you disrespect, what you love and what you hate. The full Gospel takes away from you any power to decide and discriminate where God is and where God isn’t. The old Baltimore Catechism answered the sixteenth question, “Where is God?” quite clearly: “God is everywhere.” But we never really believed it!

Gateway to Silence:
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, help me see God in all things.

http://createsend.com/t/d-8E0EA64B180F1B62

I'll vote

I'll vote, once for two things.

Point me toward the booth.

More important: how do you spell the name of the candidate standing for intelligent & kind leadership?

crossroad

Haiku 
     (for Election Day)

In two days the US

votes  In three days we will learn

What becomes of us

all falling things

A writer had asked whether Hitler could be included in any thinking about acceptance or compassion.

The oak leaves put me in mind of those who fell/jumped on 9/11.

As I walked the Trappist abbey road, the experience of how falling might be viewed appeared.

The connective interrelationality was an immediate glimpse.

along road, Trappist Abbey, Spencer MA

Haiku

     (for 9/11 jumpers and Hitler) 

Would that all falling things
Could drift to earth
As delicately and softly
As oak leaves in gentle breeze 

(--wfh) 

"In the beginning," Buber writes, "is the relation."

It was the phrasing. It was Buber’s, quoted by Rohr in Divine Dance. I traced it and found these words in an article:

Martin Buber's work marks the beginnings of a philosophical movement including thinkers like Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas that criticizes objectivity as the first or only way of understanding reality. These thinkers emphasize relationality and dialogue over empiricism and objectivity, arguing that objectivity must be understood as a secondary or contrived way of relating to the world. These thinkers critique the modern, Enlightenment understanding of the subject as a separated, substantial, rational entity opposed to a world of 'things in themselves.' The ego, the "I," before it is a separated entity capable of understanding, using, or willing objects, is dependent upon a relation to an un-objectifiable Other. 

For Buber, to be is to be in relation, in dialogue. "In the beginning," Buber writes, "is the relation[5](p 18)." This beginning is also a saying. To be a human being, for Buber, is to hold oneself in an attitude of relation by saying a "basic word." There are, Buber insists, two basic words, I-Thou and I-It. One cannot say the word Iwithout relating to a world outside the self. These two basic words mark two ways of being in relation to the world. I-It relationships are characterized by experiencing and using objects. These are one-way relationships. The I of I-It relations understands and experiences the world as one composed of objects locatable in space and time. This way of relating to the world makes no distinction between people and things. It is the domain of determinative causality. These relationships are constituted within the horizon of objective temporality, understood as a network of moments passing from future, to present, to past.

I-Thou relationships, on the other hand, are two-way relationships based in dialogue. One being encounters another with mutual awareness. I-Thou relationships are characterized by what Buber calls presentness. For Buber the present is not "the abstract point between past and future," but "like the eternal now of the mystic, it is the present of intensity and wholeness" and "exists only insofar as meeting and relation exist[6](p 58)." While the It of I-It relationships is determined by objective temporality, the Thou of I-Thou relationships resists being ordered in space and time. Buber writes, 

"The Thou appears in time, but in that of a process that is fulfilled in itself-a process lived through not as a piece that is a part of a constant and organized sequence but in a 'duration' whose purely intensive dimension can be determined only by starting from the Thou[5](p 30)."

(--from, Healing relationships and the existential philosophy of Martin Buber, by 

Scott, Scott, Miller, Strange, Crabtree, 

https://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1747-5341-4-11  

  Then, Dogen Zenji, from the Genjo-koan the first chapter of the 75-volume version of Dogen Zenji's Shobogenzo.

(Text: section 8)  

Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off. Ash stays at the position of ash and it has its own before and after. As firewood never becomes firewood again after it is burned and becomes ash, after person dies, there is no return to living. However, in buddha dharma, it is a never-changing tradition not to say that life becomes death. Therefore we call it no-arising. It is the laid-down way of buddha's turning the dharma wheel not to say that death becomes life. Therefore, we call it no-perishing. Life is a position at one time; death is also a position at one time. For instance, this is like winter and spring. We don’t think that winter becomes spring, and we don't say that spring becomes summer. http://www.thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Genjokoan_Okumara.htm

In summary:

What is  

between 

 us

(nb: this is less a question than it is an answer only fit for haiku)

spare long thoughts

Someone wrote: “Fear of rejecting what is constantly affirmed to be true. Afraid of blasphemy.”

To which, four offerings:

   
      Blasphemy haiku

Nothing I say 

Will turn God away 

From turning to see 

How to get closer to me

  Blasphemy haiku 2 

God leans in 

As I lean in 

Seeking one another

Blasphemy haiku 3

Everything swirls crazy  

Outside and around me -- 

All I have is what is at center  

Holding still waiting my return

 Epilogue blasphemy

Do not mistake 

how metaphors Change

(an unchanging heart) 

Longing to hear response

In summary: Haiku-esque responses spare long thoughts.

(Who brings their computor to a silent monastic retreat?)

others' wise prayer

All Saints: all in heaven, known and unknown.

All Souls: all who've died, wherever they are.

For these, our attentive wish for their well-being.

Otherwise known as -- our prayers.

trappists, monks’ hour

3:30am listening to vigils in shaded side chapel
4:30am shikantaza on wood bench
5:am 28degrees touching frost on car window

you stand, you sit, you bow
there’s nothing to stand, sit, bow for --
it is just done, with awareness

favorable disposed toward

Some say God is in community.

Others look and listen long and hard and say God is community.

I contend we are a reluctant community.

Hence, God becomes our disinclination.

The very mystical Cappadocian Fathers of fourth-century eastern Turkey (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and Basil of Caeserea) eventually developed some highly sophisticated thinking on what we soon called the Trinity. It took three centuries of reflection on the Gospels to have the courage to say it, but they circled around to the best metaphor they could find, and the Greek word they daringly came up with was perichoresis, or circle dance.

Whatever is going on in God is a flow, a radical relatedness, a perfect communion between Three—a circle dance of love. God is Absolute Friendship.

God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself.

(--Richard Rohr, http://wmpaulyoung.com/god-is-a-dance/ 

I  long

to be 

inclined

"Ambiguous undulations as they sink," (--from poem, Sunday Morning)

(I'll take it from here, Wallace)

Pain comes and pain goes

Blessed be the name of the load

Some carry through the day

At blurry edge of discomfort

Looking anywhere to find relief

Distraction from diffident decay

...

(Above lines are not from Wallace Stevens poem which can be found here:) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/13261

in email, someone sends excerpt from Fowles novel

Quote:

That simple phrase, I do not know, was my own pillar of fire. An ultimate, a metaphysical, I-do-not-know. For me, too, it revealed everything. For me too it brought a new humility akin to fierceness. For me too a profound mystery. For me too a sense of the vanity of so many things our age considers important. I do not say I should not have arrived at such an insight one day. But in that night I bridged a dozen years. Whatever else, I know that.

"In a short time we saw Henrik walk back into the trees. I could not see his face. But I think the fierceness it wore in daylight was the fierceness that came from his contact with the pillar of fire. Perhaps for him the pillar of fire was no longer enough, and in that sense he was still waiting to meet God. Living is an eternal wanting more, in the coarsest grocer and in the sublimest mystic. But of one thing I am certain. If he still lacked God, he had the Holy Spirit.

"The next day I left. I said goodbye to Ragnar. There was no lessening of her hostility. I think that unlike Gustav she had divined her husband's secret, that any attempt to cure him would kill him. Gustav and his nephew rowed me the twenty miles north to the next farm. We shook hands, we promised to write. I could offer no consolation and I do not think he wanted any, for there are situations in which consolation only threatens the equilibrium that time has instituted. And so I returned to France."

(--from The Magus, end of ch.44, by John Fowles)

texting-theo-logos

On 9/11 people jumped from the towers. One firefighter wondered later -- "I just remember looking up, thinking, How bad is it up there that the better option is to jump?"

Those 10-11 seconds of relief from inferno, flying between certain death and certain death, remain -- in itself-- a lifetime of "oh my, look at this" experience.

A woman named Betty at our shop the day after gave her opinion that "the instant they stepped off their perch they stepped into heaven" and were free of what followed on the ground.

My take on her view is (today) that it is less about life and death and more about stepping off the certain into the open with trust.

Betty was a woman of faith. I often do not understand faith. But I liked Betty. And I listened hard to her words.

(Betty died a few years ago. Saskia and I were asked to conduct a memorial service for family and residents at the Stella Maris residence in Rockland. It was a circle expression of wording & worded experience -- which is probably a good definition of what we are here as humans!)

Maybe faith is a stepping off our perches into the hands of G o d
Who presents Itself as the clueless understanding of this next thing we engage ourselves in doing between one and the other -- a dying yes to life which resembles a resurrection of life through death even as we live on through the unknown (Himself) seeing us through.

If I knew anything I'd shut up. Because I don't know anything I trytrytry to see what surfaces with underwater wording.

Between you and me -- may G o d
Be the phrase "see ya!"