nightmare new religion

Praise him, praise him, let his praises fill the air!

Now that the republican chorus sings four part harmony the alternate hymn of the season lauding the occupant of the Oval Office, titled Meshugana (in Yiddish): משוגנה

.

Ah one, ah two, ah three...

The bubble machine spews empty accoladic refrains to the Meshugana and his Merry Apostates on a curving staircase in parody of manger tableau newly christened “The First Dough-Nald” and “O Come-on All Ye Failed Full-of-it”. “

The new coup has gotten the child out of Christmas and substituted a swarmy sycophantism, a dangerous and fawning haruspication of a coming messy ire.

this, no other, truth

In prison the heart sutra was recited.

In it the sentence: “This is no other than the truth.”

It caused 90 minutes of exquisite conversation.

These few days before Christmas.

must love Merton, must love universe

Night (solstice)

Posted: 20 Dec 2017 07:12 AM PST

Day 13 of the 2015 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. A pair of one-half light-year long interstellar “twisters”—eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures—in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) which lies 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. (Special thanks to RPT) (A. Caulet (ST-ECF, ESA) and NASA)

The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep. Night embraces the silent half of the earth. A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A homeless God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification, without even a number, a frail expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and entrusts Himself to sleep.

- Thomas Merton

(—from louie, louie blog) http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/?m=1

this is true

I liked Dan Berrigan.

Poet, prophet, priest. Pain in the ass to those posturing as good guys but sly and devious and full of deceit underneath.

Here’s his Advent Credo:

“It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss—
This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life. 

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction—
This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly. 

It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever—
This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace. 

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world—
This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world. 

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers—
This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams. 

It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history—
This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth. 

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ—the life of the world.”
– Daniel Berrigan, Testimony: The Word Made Flesh (Orbis Books, 2004).
 http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/?m=1. 

placed in the future

It was just after hearing for first time Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal , being captivated by it, its poetry and melodic invitation to investigate, that I happened on Ulisse de Corpo’s “The Theorem of Love” a 21 minute presentation at Science and Nonduality.

Both enchanted.

Then another piece, an article by Marco Galloni. Sort of a pre-Christmas visit by the ghost of Christmas Future.

It was the creation from the future notion that attracted.

Life originates from the future 

Studying the properties of syntropy Fantappié found the mysterious qualities of living systems, namely the increase in organization, structure, order and complexity and arrived to the suggestive hypothesis that the origin of life needs to be searched in the future and not in the past. In other words, causality in life would not precede but be ahead. The academic world did not like the idea of introducing finalism in science and Fantappié was deeply religious. He repeatedly stated that the theory of syntropy had made him understand the basic mysteries of faith, the meaning of which appeared to him suddenly clear. Also the religious world did not like Fantappiè’s conclusions which were considered a sin not easy to forgive. The convergence of faith and science was not accepted in the scientific and religious community. The following passage from a letter written by Fantappié to a friend describes the implications of his theory:Mainstream physics is based on the dogma that causes must always precede effects. Fantappié was instead showing that causes can lie in the future and retroact on the present and that living systems would react to this backward causation. This was considered heresy both by the academic and religious world, and syntropy soon fell into oblivion, degraded into a philosophical idea of an eccentric mathematician, who had certainly been a genius, but, at some point of his career, had swerved dramatically. The echo of this negative attitude can be found in the sharp and hasty judgments which are found in the documents of the academic world. For example, the MATEpristem site of the Bocconi University write that: “Luigi Fantappiè left a hundred works of which the most notable is a large memory on analytic functionals, based on an ingenious transportation of the basic formula of Cauchy in the calculation of functions of complex variables to the functional. In his last years he also worked on scientific/philosophical issues, but with questionable results. 

"In the days just before Christmas 1941, as a consequence of conversations with two colleagues, a physicist and a biologist, I was suddenly projected in a new panorama, which radically changed the vision of science and of the Universe which I had inherited from my teachers, and which I had always considered the strong and certain ground on which to base my scientific investigations. Suddenly I saw the possibility of interpreting a wide range of solutions (the anticipated potentials) of the wave equation which can be considered the fundamental law of the Universe. These solutions had been always rejected as “impossible”, but suddenly they appeared “possible”, and they explained a new category of phenomena which I later named “syntropic”, totally different from the entropic ones, of the mechanical, physical and chemical laws, which obey only the principle of classical causation and the law of entropy. Syntropic phenomena, which are instead represented by those strange solutions of the “anticipated potentials”, should obey two opposite principles of finality (moved by a final cause placed in the future, and not by a cause which is placed in the past) and differentiation, and also non-causable in a laboratory. This last characteristic explains why this type of phenomena has never been reproduced in a laboratory, and its finalistic properties justified the refusal among scientists, who accepted without any doubt the assumption that finalism is a “metaphysical” principle, outside Science and Nature. This assumption obstructed the way to a calm investigation of the real existence of this second type of phenomena; an investigation which I accepted to carry out, even though I felt as if I were falling in a abyss, with incredible consequences and conclusions. It suddenly seemed as if the sky were falling apart, or at least the certainties on which mechanical science had based its assumptions. It appeared to me clear that these “syntropic”, finalistic phenomena which lead to differentiation and could not be reproduced in a laboratory, were real, and existed in nature, as I could recognize them in the living systems. The properties of this new law, opened consequences which were just incredible and which could deeply change the biological, medical, psychological, and social sciences.”  

"Mainstream physics is based on the dogma that causes must always precede effects. Fantappié was instead showing that causes can lie in the future and retroact on the present and that living systems would react to this backward causation. This was considered heresy both by the academic and religious world, and syntropy soon fell into oblivion, degraded into a philosophical idea of an eccentric mathematician, who had certainly been a genius, but, at some point of his career, had swerved dramatically. The echo of this negative attitude can be found in the sharp and hasty judgments which are found in the documents of the academic world. For example, the MATEpristem site of the Bocconi University write that: "Luigi Fantappiè left a hundred works of which the most notable is a large memory on analytic functionals, based on an ingenious transportation of the basic formula of Cauchy in the calculation of functions of complex variables to the functional. In his last years he also worked on scientific/philosophical issues, but with questionable results." 

The God of Iron of Teilhard de Chardin 

This opinion is not shared by Professor Di Corpo and his wife Antonella Vannini, who have chosen to devote most of their studies and their energies to these questionable results. The PhD thesis of Antonella Vannini was based on the following hypothesis: “if life draws its nourishment from syntropy, then the systems that support vital processes, such as the autonomic nervous system, must show pre stimuli activations. If this is true, the parameters of the autonomic nervous system, such as
the heart rate and skin conductance, should react before stimuli.” The experiments conducted by Vannini for her PhD thesis show that the heart rate reacts before the onset of stimuli. These pre- stimuli activations are strong and easy to replicate. It is worthwhile saying that heart rate values change significantly in advance to emotional stimuli and this suggests that syntropy is perceived in the form of emotions. We would perceive our future only at the emotional level.

Starting from this past-future duality another mathematician, the New Zealander Chris King, has developed a model of consciousness in which free will would arise from our being immersed in a dual stream of information travelling in opposite directions of time: on the one hand information from the past in the form of memories and experiences, on the other hand information from the future in the form of emotions. We must constantly choose between what our head reminds and tells us and what our heart points us to. The perfect balance of the negative and positive solutions would explain the symmetry between rational and emotional hemispheres 

From a cosmological point of view, the syntropy model states that there is a starting point, from which energy diverged and a final point towards which energy converges. The starting point is the big bang, whereas the end point is the big crunch. Teilhard named the big bang the Alfa [sic. cf Alpha] point and the big crunch the Omega point. These two diverging and converging polarities work together, but in opposite time directions. In the big bang, energy explodes and diverges forward in time, but converging forces brings energy to condensate, to become matter, atoms, stars, galaxies, and lead the universe to increase its degree of complexity. Teilhard said that, as a child, one of the mysteries that fascinated him most was how matter could hold together. Speaking of a metal toy as a god of iron, Teilhard said: "I just cannot understand how matter can stay together." In fact this is one of the most difficult problems of classical physics: converging forces, like gravity, are described and studied, but they are not explained. The theory of syntropy, on the contrary, provides an explanation of converging forces: matter is cohesive because of attractors that act from the future and lead energy and matter to converge. Somehow the future already exists. The Omega point towards which we are evolving is already here, but the paths to get there can be the most different. The dual solution of the fundamental equations endows us with free will and we constantly have to choose our path, and the evolution to the Omega point and syntropy is not linear. 

Di Corpo goes further: if the theory of syntropy is correct, three levels of time must exist. The sequential time to which we are accustomed to, in which energy is divergent and entropy prevails, would be typical of expanding systems, such as our universe. On the contrary, in a converging system the flow of time would be reversed as it happens in black holes. There are also systems in which diverging and converging forces are balanced, such as atoms. At this level time is unitary and past, present and future coexist. 

(--from, The heresy of Fantappié and Teilhard and the converging evolution, in Syntropy 2012 by Marco Galloni)  http://www.lifeenergyscience.it/english/2012-eng-1-3.pdf 

And the perceiving our future only at the emotional level.

And does the future already exist?

Something to sit and feel about. 

matins

in dark

white dog

on foot of bed

crowds feet

in silence

where else

Stop

Just stop

the world

I want to

get off

(Here)

who is jesus today

no more

greed

is good

stones to stone him

Before Abraham was, I am.

Or,

58 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” 59 At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. (John 8:58)

Like zen koan inviting us to show our original face, the one we had before our parents were born, Jesus seems to be seeing through the illusions of time and separation.

If we come to see that we are    where we are    what we are    as we are    --    and let go of all judgment opinion we have about all this -- we begin to rest quietly in a reality beyond control or worry.

We are.

As God is. 

With each and all.

More than two centuries before the Reformation, a theological debate broke out that pitted theologian Thomas Aquinas against an upstart from Britain, John Duns Scotus. In essence, the debate circled around the question, "Would Christmas have occurred if humanity had not sinned?" 

Whereas Aquinas viewed the Incarnation as God's remedy for a fallen planet, his contemporary saw much more at stake. For Duns Scotus, the Word becoming flesh as described in the prologue to John's Gospel must surely represent the Creator's primary design, not some kind of afterthought or Plan B. Aquinas pointed to passages emphasizing the Cross as God's redemptive response to a broken relationship. Duns Scotus cited passages from Ephesians and Colossians on the cosmic Christ, in whom all things have their origin, hold together, and move toward consummation. 

Did Jesus visit this planet as an accommodation to human failure or as the center point of all creation? Duns Scotus and his school suggested that Incarnation was the underlying motive for Creation, not merely a correction to it. Perhaps God spun off this vast universe for the singular purpose of sharing life and love, intending all along to join its very substance. "Eternity is in love with the inventions of time," wrote the poet William Blake. 

Ultimately the church decided that both approaches had biblical support and could be accepted as orthodox. Though most theologians tended to follow Aquinas, in recent years prominent Catholics such as Karl Rahner have taken a closer look at Duns Scotus. Perhaps evangelicals should, too.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/january/20.72.html 

I'm beginning to understand what the Trappist monk meant when he told me to cheer up because things are only going to get worse. It is difficult to see any relenting of the seeming stupidity of ideological blowhards trying to frighten people with screeds that a coup d’etat is taking place against the sitting US president by the FBI and left wing sympathizers. Blood will flow due to their shrill insanity riling up the desolate and unhinged correctors of evil in our midst.

In the words of my beloved (deceased Republican) grandmother, who called ‘em as she saw ‘em, “Stupid is as stupid does!” She would have poured kidney beans on the tv if Fox were on when she was alive.

Here it is Monday, it is snowing, and mere anarchy seems loosed on the world.

The monk is right. There’s no end to the corrections foisted on us by craven and besotted souls.

dark days seen through

Original face koan?

57 “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”58 “Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” 59 At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds.          New International Version (NIV) John 8

 Those with big sins are throwing big stones at everything standing in their way.

Illusions die hard!

saturday morning practice

Cold morning.

Now practice is in winter zendo.

We listen.

“Advent Poem”  by St. John of the Cross

If you want, the Virgin will come walking down the road 

pregnant with the Holy and say, 

“I need shelter for the night. 

Please take me inside your heart, my time is so close.

”Then, under the roof of your soul,

you will witness the sublime intimacy,

the divine, the Christ, taking birth forever,

as she grasps your hand for help,

for each of us is the midwife of God, each of us.

Yes, there, under the dome of your being,

does creation come into existence eternally,

through your womb, dear pilgrim,

the sacred womb of your soul,

as God grasps our arms for help:

for each of us is His beloved servant never far.

If you want, the virgin will come walking down the street,

pregnant with Light, and sing!

 And continue to listen.

Advent, by Jessica Powers   

I live my Advent in the womb of Mary. 

And on one night that a great star swings free 

from its high mooring and walks down the sky 

To be the dot above the Christus I. 

I shall be born of her by blessed grace. 

I wait in a Mary-darkness, faith’s walled place, 

with Hope’s expectancy of nativity. 

I knew for long she carried and fed me,  

guarded and loved me, though I could not see.  

But only now, with inward jubilee, 

I come upon earth’s most amazing knowledge: 

Someone is hiding in this dork it’s me.

Cf. http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/

here’s what Thomas Merton wrote in his The Seven Story Mountain

The Christ of the Burnt Men

I hear You saying to me:

           "I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way.

          "Therefore all things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.

           "Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone. Everything that touches you will burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone.

            "Everything that can be desired will sear you., and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy, and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations.

           "You will be praised and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert. 

             "You will have gifts and they will break you with their burden. you will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.

              "And when you  have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing. a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.

            "Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be.. On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me because I am not going to tell you.  You will not know until you are in it. 

            "But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end  and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Cristi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani:

           "That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men."

                                  SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QUAERENDI

(—from, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain,  pp  422, 3)

heuristics

Played baseball as a youth years ago on Erasmus Field on MacDonald Ave just off Avenue M in Brooklyn. I was a little slow as a runner and did not have a strong throwing arm. But I had a good glove and fast reflexes playing a shallow third base and good range as a first baseman. No one would have called me a prospect. (The Yankee scout kept asking me to play back on third during drills!) My bat was mediocre. Although I did put a ball over the left fielder’s head in the first inning.

Erasmus comes to mind these half dozen decades later.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467?–1536) was not a systematic philosopher although we discern in the large body of his writings a certain Erasmian habit of mind. He often reflected on subjects that invite philosophical inquiry: the influence of nature versus nurture, the relationship between word and thing, the ideal form of government, the nature of faith, and the theory of knowledge. Erasmus’ views on these subjects are of interest to historians today, even if they are unstructured, because his works circulated widely and his influence in Northern Europe was pervasive. In modern parlance, he was an opinion maker. If a general label is needed, Erasmus’ thought is best described as “Christian Humanism”, that is, a philosophy of life combining Christian thought with classical traditions. He embraced the humanistic belief in an individual’s capacity for self-improvement and the fundamental role of education in raising human beings above the level of brute animals. The thrust of Erasmus’ educational programme was the promotion of docta pietas, learned piety, or what he termed the “philosophy of Christ”. As a biblical scholar he supported the humanistic call Ad fontes, a return to the texts in the original language and therefore promoted the study of the biblical languages Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. He was in the vanguard of modern philology. His pioneering edition of the Greek New Testament shows that he had an understanding of the process of textual transmission and had developed text-critical principles. In politics, Erasmus embraced consensus, compromise, and peaceful cooperation, ideals he recommended to the participants in the Reformation debate, albeit with little success. Considered a forerunner of the Reformation by his contemporaries, he broke with Martin Luther over the latter’s sectarianism. More fundamentally, the two men disagreed over heuristics and engaged in a polemic over the question of free will. Erasmus took a skeptical position vis-à-vis Luther’s assertions. Unlike the reformer, he did not believe in the clarity of Scripture and used consensus and tradition as criteria to settle questions that did not allow a rational conclusion. Erasmus rarely ventured into doctrinal questions, however, favoring simple faith and devotion over dialectics and scholastic speculation. The circulation of Erasmus’ works was temporarily curtailed when the Catholic Church put them on the Index of Forbidden Books, but his ideas saw a revival during the Enlightenment when he was regarded as a forerunner of rationalism. His most famous work, The Praise of Folly, has remained in print to the present day, a distinction shared by few books from the 16th century.    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/erasmus/ 

 Heuristic is a good word.

To find out. Discover.

heuristic

[hyoo-ris-tik or, often, yoo-] adjective 1.serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.2.encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error:
a heuristic teaching method.3.of, relating to, or based on experimentation, evaluation, or trial-and-error methods.4. Computers, Mathematics. pertaining to a trial-and-error method ofproblem solving used when an algorithmic approach is impractical.
noun 5.a heuristic method of argument.6. the study of heuristic procedure. 

Origin of heuristic1815-25; < New Latin heuristicus, equivalent to Greek heur(ískein) to find out, discover + Latin -isticus -istic http://www.dictionary.com/browse/heuristic 

The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series in 1955. I stopped into every storefront a radio sounded from on 20th Avenue making my way home from Elementary school during the series.

I never rooted for another baseball team after the Brooklyn Dodgers left Flatbush and Ebbets Field. 

The Brooklyn Dodgers played their final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957, which the Dodgers won 2–0 over the Pittsburgh Pirates. 

On April 18, 1958, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first game in L.A., defeating the former New York and newly relocated and renamed San Francisco Giants, 6–5, before 78,672 fans at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.^[32] Sadly, catcher Roy Campanella, left partially paralyzed in an off-season accident, was never able to play for Los Angeles. 

A 2007 HBO film, Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, is a documentary covering the Dodgers history from early days to the beginning of the Los Angeles era. In the film, the story is related that O'Malley was so hated by Brooklyn Dodger fans after the move to California, that it was said, "If you asked a Brooklyn Dodger fan, if you had a gun with only two bullets in it and were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O'Malley, who would you shoot? The answer: O’Malley, twice!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Brooklyn_Dodgers

My game, one I longed, even then, to play well, was heuristics.

Still is.

so silent as this

listen —
never
heard
a poem
so
silent
as this

...

From the Poetry Foundation:

         Despite its many adaptions into multiple languages and styles, the haiku remains a powerful form due to its economic use of language to evoke a specific mood or instance. Most often occurring in the present tense, a haiku frequently depicts a moment by using pair of distinct images working in tandem, as in these lines by Kobayashi Issa, translated by Jane Hirshfield: 

        On a branch
        floating downriver
        a cricket, singing. 

(Notice how, in translating from Japanese to English, Hirshfield compresses the number of syllables.) 

The haiku continues to be a popular form today, and its different qualities have been emphasized and expanded by a wide variety of writers. Poets such as Etheridge Knight, emphasize the formal and sonic quality of the verse, as seen in his piece “Haiku,” whereas poets such as Scott Helmes have chosen to emphasize the haiku’s visual arrangement, as seen in his piece, “haiku #62.” 

For further examples, see also “Three Haiku, Two Tanka” by Philip Appleman and Robert Hass’s “After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa.” In addition, see the Imagist poets of the early 20th century, most notably Ezra Pound. 

Look here to browse more haiku.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/haiku-or-hokku 

the vocation of the monk

For the 20th time on a December 10th we speak aloud, in the presence of a Sunday Evening Practice community, our promises as meetingbrook monastics:

Contemplation,  Conversation,  Correspondence. ...as held by Meetingbrook Dogen & Francis Hermitage“m.o.n.o.”(monastics of no other). 

Contemplation  is the promise of simplicity. It is a gift of poverty inviting open waiting, receptive trust, attention, and watchful presence. It is a simple Being-With.  It is attentive presence. 

Conversation  is the promise of integrity. It is a chaste and complete intention to listen and speak, lovingly and respectfully, with each and all made present to us. It is a wholeness of listening and speaking.   It is root silence.  

Correspondence  is the promise of faithful engagement.  It is responsible attention and intention offered obediently to the Source of all Being, to the Human Family, to Nature. It is a faithful engagement with all sentient beings, with this present world, with existence with all its needs & joys, sorrows & hope.   It is transparent service.

http://meetingbrook.org/3promises.htm 

Our practice between traditions holds Francis of Assisi and Eihei Dogen Zenji as our guiding lights and Thomas Merton as inspiration.

We are humbled and delighted to continue our promises and our monastic life.

This is emphatically the vocation of the monk “who seeks full realization ... [and] has come to experience the ground of his own being in such a way that he knows the secret of liberation and can somehow or other communicate it to others.” At the deepest level, the monk is teaching others how to live by love. For Christians, this is the discovery of Christ dwelling in all others. 

Only with such love, Merton went on, is it possible to realize the economic ideal of each giving according to his ability and receiving according to his need. But in actuality many Christians, including those in monastic communities, have not reached this level of love and realization. They have burdened their lives with too many false needs and these have blocked the way to full realization, the monk’s only reason for being. 

Merton told a story he had heard from Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche of a Buddhist abbot fleeing from his Tibetan monastery before the advance of Chinese Communist troops. He encountered another monk leading a train of twenty-five yaks loaded with the treasures of the monastery and “essential” provisions. The abbot chose not to stay with the treasure or the treasurer; traveling light, he managed to cross the border into India, destitute but alive. The yak-tending monk, chained to his treasure, was overtaken by the soldiers and was never heard of again.  

“We can ask ourselves,” Merton said, “if we are planning for the next twenty years to be traveling with a train of yaks.” Monasticism, after all, is not architecture or clothing or even rules of life. It is “total inner transformation. Let the yaks take care of themselves.” The monastic life thrives whenever there is a person “giving some kind of direction and instruction to a small group attempting to love God and reach union with him.”   

Authentic monasticism cannot be extinguished. “It is imperishable. It represents an instinct of the human heart, and it represents a charism given by God to man. It cannot be rooted out, because it does not depend on man. It does not depend on cultural factors, and it does not depend on sociological or psychological factors. It is something much deeper.”
(—from, louie,louie blog, The monasticism of Thomas Merton, Sunday, 10Dec17 , an extract from "Living With Wisdom", a biography of Merton, by Jim Forest http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/)

Finally, from Jim Forest,

There was also the memory of Merton’s last words. Following the morning conference, Father de Grunne told Merton that a nun in the audience was annoyed that Merton had said nothing about converting people. 

“What we are asked to do at present,” Merton responded, “is not so much to speak of Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him by feeling how he lives in us.”

Δεν γεννιέται

Den genniétai -- (“not being born”, or, unchangeability.)

No wonder

we avoid

God

Something will

have to

change

for us

to see

this

change

what is being for

 Quote from Philosophy Now:

We therefore have a fundamental contrast here between being and doing. On the one side we have the champions of doing, on the other we have the champions of being, and much of our western philosophy could be seen as the battle between these two primary categories. In technical language we could say  it is the battle between deontology (the ethics of doing one’s duty) and ontology (philosophy of being). 

But in post-modern ethics both of these categories are called into question. Writers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Zygmunt Bauman want to suggest that the reason why the battle between these two fundamental schools of thought is so unfruitful is that neither of them is fundamental. They suggest that underlying them both is a much deeper category which represents a much more profound moral life. They call this category ‘Being for’. For Bauman morality cannot be derived from reason or ontology. I am for comes before I am. I am I in the sole measure that I am responsible, when I rise above and transcend myself. In other words Descartes’ cogito, “I think therefore I am”, does not take us to the foundation of the matter. It is not the self-evident truth upon which all other truths must be based. There is a much more foundational truth lurking below the “I am”. It is the “I am for” which comes into play when, before reasoning things out or before working towards being a good character, I live towards another as neighbour.

An Archeology Analogy

An analogy might help us to understand this post-modern contention. It is rather like the archeologist who first unearths one city, the city of doing, but then finds another city below it, the city of being, but, when s/he scratches the earth again finds yet another city below that, the city of being for. There is therefore a kind of layering:

Doing
below which is
Being
below which is
Being For

What is Being For?

Being for is not merely one of the virtues which we can develop and use in our everyday interaction with other people. Nor is Being for a way of life which we aspire to, a kind of ideal which we set for ourselves, something we try to live up to. Being for is much more immediate than this. It is a way life which precedes all thinking about our actions, it is a way of life which precedes all forms of calculation about what our actions might lead to, and it is a way of life which doesn’t come more easily to us as we strive to learn more about it . The reason is that thinking about our actions puts the ‘I’ at the centre of the discussion: “What am I to do?” Training ourselves or letting ourselves be trained in the virtues also puts the ‘I’ at the centre: “What kind of person am I to become?” What Being for does is to transcend the I and look towards the Other. It comes in the form of a paradox: We cannot be fully ourselves, we cannot discover our true  identity, we cannot find the ‘I’, until we forget the ‘I’. The ethics of Being for is then not an exercise in learning but an exercise in forgetting, letting go, taking the risk.  

https://philosophynow.org/issues/23/Jesus_Pioneer_of_Post-Modern_Ethics

next step

The psalmist asks: How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:4)

And yet, sing we must.

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:

We who must die demand a miracle.. 

(—from W. H. Auden's long poem FOR THE TIME BEING: A Christmas Oratorio. It was written during the dark times of World War II.) http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/church/auden/

The miracle

of being

able

to listen

to another

is the infinite

within and

between

us.

first snow

We were never not having the conversation at nurses station at hospice house.

Nor were we never not having the cogent conversation at hospital in s.c.u. room with man whose brain tumors scholarize science for him, who sees patterns of sound in vibrative light.

It is an eternal conversation. It is about living and dying, the co-creating collapse of the possible into the actual moving into the improbable.

Hours go by.

As snow falls.

And the feast of Thomas Merton’s dying day walks formless the cloister corridor of fond recollection.

I drive home from hospice and hospital in silence.

Conversation is all we know of heaven and what we’ve forgiven of hell.

The radical proposal is to trust one another with what we call our lives.

today’s threefold inspiration

Buddha’s enlightenment day. Being awake is becoming aware.

Immaculate Conception of Mary. From the get-go, no barriers to realizing whole truth within one’s own incarnation.

John Lennon’s death. Words cannot tell what a poet reveals in song.