not finding fault, not fleeing

Here is the reason we practice.

And this:

I often say that there should be just two words over the door of our temple in Santa Fe: Show up! Yes, suffering is present. We cannot deny it. There are 65.3 million refugees in the world today, only eleven countries are free from conflict, and climate change is turning forests into deserts. Economic injustice is driving people into greater and greater poverty. Racism and sexism remain rampant. 

But understand, wise hope doesn’t mean denying these realities. It means facing them, addressing them, and remembering what else is present, like the shifts in our values that recognize and move us to address suffering right now. “Do not find fault with the present,” says Zen Master Keizan. He invites us to see it, not flee it!

The Czech statesman Václav Havel said, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” We can’t know, but we can trust that there will be movement, there will be change. And that we will be part of it. We move forward in our day and get out the vote, or sit at the bedside of a dying patient, or teach that third grade class.

(--from, Yes, We Can Have Hope, BY JOAN HALIFAX| OCTOBER 18, 2018 )

Saturday Morning Practice -- Mainers, New Yorkers, Marylander (via phone).

If we learn to trust what is happening before us and within us -- not finding fault, not fleeing -- we begin to learn what faith is.

Seeing what is there.

Moving through whatever fear might arise.

Listening to the healing sound of what is here, hearing into the silent revelation of things being exactly what they are.

merely told

Stories
are neither true
nor false — they
are merely told

The telling narrative
is it’s own truth
neither connected
nor disconnected

with
what
really
happened

like this

Where did the time go?

Such a silly question.

Every moment in life is absolute in itself. That's all there is. There is nothing other than this present moment; there is no past, there is no future; there is nothing but this.            — Charlotte Joko Beck

There’s no time now; and nothing like this.

as thanksgiving goes

It’s 10 degrees outside.

Find warmth, my brothers and sisters, find warmth!

The night is advancing.

nowhere else

I remember where I was when president Kennedy was shot and killed.

I was right here.

Then, now, and always.

his superlative slog

 As it is, this poem, saying it so well:

I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)                            

                      Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886 

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! 

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

Listen carefully and hear the  — c r o a k — echoing all day long from the odd one’s bog wallowing in his superlative slog.

no thank you

I agree with her:

In a single day, POTUS turns a blind eye to the barbaric murder of journalist and we learn that he tried to order DOJ to go after his political adversaries. Is there no depth to which he will not sink? We can’t let him drag America down with him. 

(—@SallyQYates, 11/20/18, 20:14)

I cannot imagine he will be allowed to continue his destruction of decency and democracy.

What a disaster he is for this country at this time!

Instead:

Ant. Protect us, Lord, as we stay awake; watch over us as we sleep, that awake, we may keep watch with Christ, and asleep, rest in his peace. 

CONCLUDING PRAYER
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus Christ, you have given your followers an example of gentleness and humility, a task that is easy, a burden that is light. Accept the prayers and work of this day, and give us the rest that will strengthen us to render more faithful service to you who live and reign for ever and ever. – Amen.

(—from Compline) 

a particle of love

A man I know has died. His wife had been reading Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace to him all summer. In the last week she had whittled the novel down to the final 20 pages. They remain.

He died yesterday morning.

They’d just gotten to, she wrote, Prince Andrei’s death and Pierre’s experience on the battlefield and his thoughts on death.

I find this excerpt:

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.”
- Leo Tolstoy -  (from War and Peace, thoughts of Prince Andrei)

Nor had we finished reading Charles W. Eliot’s John Gilley, One of the Forgotten Millions (1899).

We left Mr. Gilley on Baker Island.

six from saturday hospice

1.

Practice

A hearing presence
Is what I heard —
She might have said healing


2.

Going,

End-room is
Vacuumed is
Room end


3.

Smart phone

Rings on table
Of man nearing death
— no one answers


4.

Wordless

Pink doggy at head of bed
White Minerva in unclutching hand
Just watching, only being held


5.

Gone

She’s left the room
I sit with who she’s been
Where she was


6.

Not now

When it happens
It will
H will happen

saturday morning practice

God is the profound and intimate connection between all beings.

Then, two quotes from Rohr’s blog:

In Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the wave realizes that it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.” [1] 

And in Stephen Levine’s:
But water is water, no matter what its shape or form. The solidity of ice imagines itself to be its edges and density. Melting, it remembers; evaporating, it ascends. [2] 

So do not be afraid. Death to false self and the end of human life is simply a return to our Ground of Being, to God, to Love. Life doesn’t truly end; it simply changes form and continues evolving into ever new shapes and beauty.

(—Friday, 16nov18, Richard Rohr)

So too, the voice and ear from Maryland attends with us today this practice.

urge for going

The lyric, as sung by Joni Mitchell or Tom Rush said: I get the the urge for going. Here, Richard Rohr quotes Kathleen Dowling Singh:

I have come to believe that the time of dying effects a transformation from perceived tragedy to experienced grace. Beyond that, I think this transformation is a universal process. Although relatively unexamined, the Nearing Death Experience has profound implications. Dying offers the possibility of entering the radiance, the vastness, of our Essential Nature, at least for a few precious moments. . . . 

The Nearing Death Experience implies a natural and conscious remerging with the Ground of Being from which we have all once unconsciously emerged. A transformation occurs from the point of terror at the contemplation of the loss of our separate, personal self to a merging into the deep, nurturing, ineffable experience of Unity. 

My experience is that most people who are dying have no conscious desire for transcendence; most of us do not live at the level of depth where such a longing is a conscious priority. And, yet, everyone does seem to enter a transcendent and transformed level of consciousness in the Nearing Death Experience. . . . It is rather profound and encouraging to contemplate these indications that the life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to automatically produce union with Spirit.  

Reference:Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation(HarperOne: 2000), 14, 15. (From Richard Rohr 12nov18

The lyric muses that although we get the urge for going — returning, while alive, to the ground of being — we never seem to go.

snow, here

In maximum security prison, of a Thursday, we read and speak of Berry’s poem:

VII 

        by Wendell Berry

Again I resume the long
lesson: how small a thing
can be pleasing, how little
in this hard world it takes
to satisfy the mind
and bring it to its rest. 

Within the ongoing havoc
the woods this morning is
almost unnaturally still.
Through stalled air, unshadowed
light, a few leaves fall
of their own weight. 

                            The sky
is gray. It begins in mist
almost at the ground
and rises forever. The trees
rise in silence almost
natural, but not quite,
almost eternal, but
not quite. 

                      What more did I
think I wanted? Here is
what has always been.
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of His works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.

(“VII" by Wendell Berry from This Day. © Counterpoint Press, 2013) 

Even in me, carrying wood in from barn, the echoes of Schubert’s Ave Maria. I am thinking of the lad who will travel back to Vermont through the storm in a few hours.

I am thinking of the man whose hospice room I left, his family gathered, no longer struggling to say the simplest phrase, nearing his death.

Here is what has always been.

And here is what will always be.

no, really

Being-

With

no names

Is

what is

here

no more than this

 From St Joseph’s Abbey blog:

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2018

Without Reserve 

Dom Thomas Keating's funeral Mass was a celebration of love and remembrance. And many  of his relatives and friends joined us in the Abbey church last Saturday. Abbot Damian presided at the Mass and preached movingly about Thomas' last days. He told us that Father Thomas frequently asked him to read the following prayer of Blessed Charles de Foucauld to him as he lay dying.

Father, 

I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. 

Whatever you may do, I thank you: 

I am ready for all, I accept all. 

Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. 

I wish no more than this, O Lord. 

Into your hands I commend my soul; 

I offer it to you 

with all the love of my heart, 

for I love you, Lord, 

and so need to give myself, 

to surrender myself into your hands, 

without reserve, 

and with boundless confidence, 

for you are my Father. 

POSTED BY     THE MONKS      AT 10:51 AM    http://spencerabbey1098.blogspot.com/

It is 14° degrees outside.

I chant into frigid air at barn door a blessing of name and loving kindness.

I bow to the possibility — the already here and yet to be.

I bring wood in for firebox.

“We are poor passing facts” — wrote Robert Lowell.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name. 

(—from poem, Epilogue)

outside barn at dawn

This from louie, louie  http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/, beth cioffoletti’s blog:

Meister Eckhart, the German philosopher, mystic and theologian said, “There is nothing in the world that resembles God as much as silence.”

In essence, Eckhart is saying this: Silence is a privileged entry into the realm of God and into eternal life.  There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

What is meant by this?

Silence is a language that is infinitely deeper, more far-reaching, more understanding, more compassionate, and more eternal than any other language. In heaven, it seems, there will be no languages, no words. Silence will speak. We will wholly, intimately, and ecstatically hold each other in silence, in perfect understanding.

Words, for all their value, are part of the reason why we can’t do this already. They divide as much as they unite. There is a deeper connection available in silence. Lovers already know this, as do the Quakers whose liturgy tries to imitate the silence of heaven, and as do those who practice contemplative prayer. John of the Cross expresses this in a wonderfully cryptic line: “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.”

Silence does speak louder than words, and more deeply. We experience this already now in different ways: When we are separated by distance or death from loved ones, we can still be with them in silence; when we are divided from other sincere persons through misunderstanding, silence can provide the place where we can still be together; when we stand helpless before another’s suffering, silence can be the best way of expressing our empathy; and when we have sinned and have no words to restore things to their previous wholeness, in silence a deeper word can speak and let us know that, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

“There is nothing in the world that resembles God as much as silence.” It’s the language of heaven and it is already deep inside of us, beckoning us, inviting us to deeper intimacy with everything.

-- Ron Rolheiser OMI, http://ronrolheiser.com/in-praise-of-silence/#.W-tY3SdReSN

Silent trees listen to morning chant outside barn at dawn this Wednesday morning as logs are carried in for wood stove.

where begin where end

white dog
climbs stairs
end of day —
each breath 

the joy of 4am

Yes

rain;

the sound

of it

thank you veterans

wood stove

warms

Panikkar kitchen

this cold night

invitatory

first light

easterly turnng

beyond bamboo

jamais plus la guerre

War is never the answer.

Soldiers, Airfolk, Sailors, Coastguards, and Marines — they all know this.

The wrong questions by the wrong people with the wrong motives are tossed like political confetti over the right questions and the lives of our armed forces.

No more!

Jamais plus la guerre!