More Beginners' Mind What-Not

By C. S. Lewis

When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and wouldn't go to the churches and Gospel Halls; I disliked very much their hymns which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren't fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.

Surprised By Joy

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Le Penseur Reflechit:

Last night, I was reading the first in the “Unspoken Sermon” series by George MacDonald (available online here; for purchase in book form here). MacDonald was known for writing fairy tales and was the author C.S. Lewis credited as “baptizing” his imagination. I have said often how much I love fairy tales and I think it has much to do with some of MacDonald’s observations. He says that the heart of Jesus is a child’s heart. In fact, he had some very thought-provoking things to say about growing in childlikeness and about the Kingdom of God where the least is greatest and the Son of God—the King—came not to be served but to serve, not to be saved, but to save. The picture was beautiful and suddenly the apparently intellectual lapse that has seized me as of late was seen in a new light. What if, rather than there being something stunted in my growth, I was actually growing wiser? What if wiser meant more like a child and not less? It does seem to me that many older adults I know do seem to lack something of the intellectual rigor of youth—an empirical observation on my part and not always true of course. But many older adults I know who are very well educated do not seem to be especially erudite in conversation or even in the ways they choose to present themselves to the world, though there are times in which their mental prowess is evident. Could it be that they have (whether consciously or not) discovered something deeper about life that the rashness and impetuousness of youth often overlooks? That so many things that matter to youth do not matter? Perhaps that as a youth, they had their heart set on being adults, but as adults they are content to be children? While it is only anecdotal on my part and could well be a product of the colored lenses through which I am now peering, it does seem that in many ways the brightest minds are younger: my mind finds no shortage of examples of older adults expressing amazement at the creativity and mental acuity of youth. Even in my beloved world of Web design, a lot of the cutting edge technologies and innovations are being designed by nineteen and early twenty-somethings.

Whatever the case, the topic of logic and illogic has come up a lot in my world. I have again re-read arguments that attempt to demonstrate that only the Christian answer is logical and that other worldviews are not logical by their very own presuppositions. And I am not convinced. I am not convinced not because I do not believe Christianity is true, not even because there are not philosophies which are logically inconsistent, but because I do not believe the world revolves around logic. We are to use our heads and some people, I admit, do not. But higher learning has much to do with refined knowledge. Refined knowledge, as we have said before, is processed from the same common-sense ore that we all share. But its desire is to take that basically reliable but sometimes faulty ore and turn it into an infallible product that is always reliable. There are many who confuse this illusion of infallibility with reality. But I am no longer convinced we should rush in to join them, showing them that our infallibility is not only every bit as infallible as but actually superior to their own. As I wrote my young friend who takes great interest in these subjects, I do not say that apologetics, philosophy, and higher learning in general do not have their place: I certainly have spent enough time pursuing them myself and likely still will. But in terms of the deeper things in life, they seem to me these days only so much straw. I find so much more joy and satisfaction in some (apparently) half-formed and childish notion of this indefinable, enigmatic Jesus than I have ever found in any of that. So as I told my young friend (and as we have also said before): these things are not everything. They are not nothing either. They are in many ways so much straw. But it was upon a manger filled with straw that the infant Jesus laid His head and even straw, in all of its humbleness, may very well have its legitimate place in His kingdom. Who knows? It might even cradle the head of a King.

The Way

Even being bought up in the Christian church, I never thought about Jesus in a very detailed way. It was God, consciousness and reality that interested me.

But Jesus is a real presence for me now. I wonder when that happened?
That Jesus is sneaky - like Anne Lamott's Jesus, who she compares to the cat who follows you home, then sits on your front porch, until one day you say, "Oh, ok, come on in."

***

Editors titled this: "Yeah, Whatever. This is All About You-Know-Who."

by Frederica Mathewes-Green

When the DaVinci Code hoopla is all said and done, it will still be Jesus that we’re talking about. It’s Jesus whose face on the cover sells a million magazines, whose name instills widespread awe. Even people who despise Christians paradoxically admire their Lord. In discussions of religion nearly everything is up for grabs, yet on this one point there’s widespread agreement. Why do people instinctively admire Jesus?

Forget that old saw about “He was a great teacher.” You may have fond memories of a high school teacher, but it’s not like this. When it comes to Jesus, it’s not just affection we feel, but love.

How can we love somebody we’ve never met? Maybe because, as the old song says, “He first loved me.”

But how can we sense love coming from someone who died two thousand years ago? Because he’s *not dead.* He’s still around.

Here’s how I know. After I finished college, I spent a summer hitchhiking around Europe. I was a dedicated spiritual explorer, enthusiastic about all the world’s religions — except Christianity, which I thought stupid and embarrassing.

One afternoon I was in a church looking at a statue of Jesus. Suddenly I realized I was on my knees. I could hear an interior voice, as if a radio in my chest suddenly snapped on. It said, “I am your life.”

Over the years I’ve continued to hear that voice, and found that many other people have have done the same, all around the world and in all centuries. These stories are remarkably alike. People encounter a spiritual presence of immense authority and power, but most importantly, love; and his name is Jesus.

This kind of thing has been off the discussion table for a few centuries, but that didn’t stop it from happening. Now that there’s greater openness to spiritual realities, maybe we can agree that, whatever else Jesus is, he’s a very powerful spiritual *something.* People don’t bad-mouth Jesus, and it’s because something inside checks them. They may eagerly hate Christians, but they can’t hate Christ. They sense there is a mystery here, and they sense something beautiful and good.

Let’s think for a minute about the nature of evidence. Imagine you’re watching people as they come in a hotel lobby. They’re shaking their umbrellas and saying, “It’s coming down in buckets!” You shrewdly conclude, “It must be raining.” Though you haven’t seen the rain personally, you make a deduction based on the reports and behavior of people streaming into the lobby.

Now imagine that people are coming in and saying, “I met Jesus.” They’re awed, happy, and glowing. Even though they’ve never met each other, their stories match up.

Yet it’s clearly not a regular walking-around human that they encountered. They fumble for words, and end up using language of the senses: they feel “near” or “far” from Jesus, they find his presence “sweet.” They echo the sensory terms of campfire gospel songs: “I Heard the Lord Call My Name,” “I Saw the Light,” “He Touched Me.”

You ask how it’s possible to perceive the presence of another person without using the physical senses. Someone suggests that it’s kind of like when you’re dozing on the subway and feel somebody staring at you. Except that what’s coming across is overwhelming love.

These reports are consistent and numerous, but you can’t figure out a way to test, or even predict, them. Somebody says that that’s the whole point. The initiative is completely outside the realm of human control. That’s how we know there’s something — Someone — there.

And with further study you note a penumbra effect. Some people have this kind of knock-your-socks off encounter, but a much larger group just feels inexplicably drawn to Jesus. They can’t say why, but they hunger to be “near” him, and voluntarily spend time in prayer, corporate worship, and Gospel reading. Further out are folks whose experience is even fainter, but instead of shrugging it off, they spend their lives beating their heads against Jesus. They may resist and argue, but there’s something about him that won’t let them go.

There is a better way; early Christians called it “The Way.” The interior presence of Christ can be nurtured and developed, as we gain discernment to separate the real thing from impulsiveness, emotionalism, or delusion. In the process we become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), transformed in body as well as soul. Many spiritual disciplines of the Way also occur in other world religions, such as fasting, love of enemies, acts of compassion, the guidance of a spiritual mother or father, sacramental meals and actions, and cultivation of continuous prayer. But, where some faiths expect a loss of personality boundaries and dissolution into the universe, here it’s almost the reverse: the presence of a distinct other Person becomes increasingly clear, someone who is all love and who fills your entire being with light.

Eastern Orthodox hymns stress that Christ is “the only lover of mankind.” He is the only pure and true love that we suspicious, lonely humans will ever know on this earth. As we absorb this radiant love, we are healed, clarified, and released from battering thoughts and fears; we are set free to love in return.

The reason everybody can’t stop talking about Jesus, the reason we instinctively respond to him with respect and love, is because he is still alive. When we get tired of arguing about creeds and Mary Magdalene’s bones, in the silence of the night we will still sense that presence. It is beating in the great heart of the universe, and in our own cramped and selfish hearts. And this stirs us with longing and hope.

It is possible to know Jesus better. The first step is to ask.

Honesty Will Reach Out...and Tattoo Itself All Over Your Face

Image from the Mad Priest

June 28, 2007

Tattoo.

The Big Kahuna, the movie adapted from the play Hospitality Suite, was on TV here and I caught the final monlogue. Get the movie if you've never seen it.

Phil: He’s honest Bob; he’s blunt as well. That sometimes is part of being honest, because there are a lot of people who are blunt. But not honest. Larry is not one of those. Larry is an honest man. You too are an honest man, Bob. I believe that, that somewhere down deep inside you is something that strives to be honest. The question you have to ask yourself is, has it touched the whole of my life? That means that you preaching Jesus is no different than Larry or anybody else preaching lubricants. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling Jesus or buddah or civil rights or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to someone honestly, as a human being… ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are. Just to find out. For no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it. It’s not a conversation anymore. It’s a pitch, and you’re not a human being, you’re a marketing rep. We were talking before about character. You were asking me about character. And we were speaking of faces. But the question is much deeper than that. The question is, do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion Bob, you do not. For the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet. You’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don't know what they are. It's when you discover them. When you see the folly in something you've done. And you wish you had it to do over. But you know you can't because it's too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you. To remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don't matter in the end. Then you will attain character because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face. Until that day however, you cannot expect to go beyond a certain point.

(I mentioned this quote last year in regards to hospitality and Fred Clark's blog Slacktivist. If you're not reading Fred Clark, you are missing actual blog writing as opposed to the blog muddling around that most of us do.)

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My Need Of God

My Eyes So Soft Hafiz Don't Surrender Your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more Deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight Has made my eyes so soft, My voice so Tender, My need of God Absolutely Clear. The Gift ***

Surrender

The Secret of the Naive Mind

There is much to be said about trust. Without it, close relationships could never be what they are; without trust, human beings could never come together and experience any full intimacy. And with trust comes another often necessary player: surrender. To the degree that we can, we try to harmonize our wills and wishes with those of the other person. This process involves negotiation, compromise, and trust: we must surrender ourselves and our wants to one another for the greatest good of our relationship. And while this process is almost always reciprocal in the healthiest relationships, it is not always evenly divided. In a relationship of total trust and surrender, the weaker in any given area ideally surrenders to the stronger so that both might profit: if I am better at thinking on my feet and she is better at speaking in public, we coordinate our strengths for the mutual benefit of all involved. Trust and surrender are a sort of dance that daily form the basis of healthy relationships, particularly those most intimate in which two persons learn to become of one mind and of one flesh.

The spiritual journey is a partnership between ourselves and God. Unlike human relationships, we are the weaker party in every way, which calls for a much higher level of trust and surrender on our part. We learn to trust God by the accumulated experience of his faithfulness in providing for our needs and sustaining us; we learn to surrender often by painful necessity when the circumstances of our lives are beyond our control. The more implicitly we learn to trust God and to lean on him, the simple and more childlike our faith becomes: our faith becomes more rarefied.

We have learned throughout our lives to adopt a sophisticated stance. There are several reasons for this tendency, but each reason ultimately answers to self-preservation. The sophisticated person is not naive and thus not easily hurt; sophistication is adopted as a buffer and a shield. Sophistication gives us an edge and advantage: we are less dependent on others and we do not have to take as many risks. Sophistication helps us to navigate society’s maze, learning the ins and outs of the system and who to say what to when. The goal of sophistication is invariably self-interested.

There are two powerful and at times apparently conflicting forces at work within us: the one for independence, the other for unity. Sophistication can help us gain the former, but the latter, more costly longing is never fully culminated until sophistication gives way to vulnerability and we risk appearing naive, standing fully exposed before the other.

As our partnership with God grows in strength and in experience, our faith becomes more naive. We learn to trust God in ways others consider foolish; we learn over and over again to surrender to him those things that we cannot control, believing that he works out all things for the good of those who thus trust him. At times, those watching our lives must shake their heads in wonder, seeing one so hopelessly unsophisticated and uncultured. Yet if another looks long enough, a quiet inner strength will be the defining feature that emerges. In an interesting paradox, inner vulnerability gives us outer strength, just as intimate human relationships (while they can hurt us badly if they go wrong) can give us a renewed energy to face the world and to do the things we must do in this life. Sophistication, if it is to have any inner meaning, must be tempered with the willingness to risk naiveté, for it is only as one becomes as a little child that one understands the true nature of the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is built on peace and love, but peace and love are themselves built on trust and surrender. Too much sophistication, and trust and surrender become sacrificed on the altar of self-preservation.

Trusting God can be difficult. An invisible partner who does not speak as humans speak can appear to the sophisticated mind a stumbling stone, and not one of us has not stumbled upon that very crag. We would be a most unusual citizen of the modern world if we did not wonder whether we were delusional at times: if we were the poor victims of wish fulfillment, sublimating our deepest longings in the form of an imaginary friend who we naively imagine is at once both bigger and stronger than we are. The fruit of this kind of sophisticated thinking is discontent, and, in more advanced stages, an off-putting pride.

The naive mind is not without its questions, but the naive mind continues to speak to the invisible presence: rarely seeing, hearing often only in the form of intuition and sometimes not at all. The one who walks and talks with God sometimes, perhaps often, walks and talks in the dark. That is the reality of the life unseen. The fruit of this kind of naive dialog with the unseen partner—at least until the sophisticated mind concerns itself with self-preservation—is a deep and abiding sense of peace that grows stronger, a sense of calm when looking into the abyss into which all, the sophisticate and the naive alike, must peer. That faith, that hope, and the sense of love it inspires is truly like a seed and it continues to grow, our unseen partner becoming more and more real to us in the process. We learn to trust him more; we learn to surrender to him to increasing degree; that troublesome sophisticated mind troubles us less and less. The naive faith is a learned ignorance, and we must court and cultivate it if it is to grow. Faith is the mustard seed that makes the impossible possible, and when the impossible becomes possibility, faith has become sight.

The sophisticated mind has self-preservation on its mind; intimate relationships, however, involve self-forgetfulness. Self-forgetfulness is neither wise nor possible where there is not mutual trust and surrender. The sophisticated mind knows this. But the naive, uncultured mind, precisely because it is naive, refuses to let such knowledge stand in the way of its ultimate liberation. It trusts, at times blindly; it believes, at times in the face of utter hopelessness. It is, after all, naive. Sometimes in the world of sophisticates it gets slapped and kicked around. Yet even here, a strange reverence often pervades in the face of naiveté and it becomes its own protection. The very gruffest is at times seized deep within: “Leave him alone. He has the mind of a child. Can’t you see that, you oaf?” And so, the naive one is sometimes slapped and kicked, but often walks unharmed where sophistication fears to tread. The naive one walks through a world that is not his home: his world is one of love and peace where dreams come true and where promises are always kept: why on earth or heaven above would someone even consider breaking a promise? His mind is simple, and webs of deceit have not trashed it up.

For the spiritual pilgrim, the life of naiveté is a learned ignorance that comes neither naturally nor automatically. Yet the life of naiveté is the life of the child, and it is the children who enter the kingdom of heaven. A child is not only dependent and transparent, a child also is born of adult union. Those children who are fortunate know their mother and their father; so too, the spiritual pilgrim is not only dependent and transparent, but he knows his father and his father knows him. It does not matter what the passers-by think of him: sometimes he notices and sometimes he doesn’t. What matters is that he knows his father and his father knows him. As long as his father walks by his side, he is safe and he is content. Though he walk through the valley of the shadow of death, he fears no evil.

The spiritual pilgrim walks by faith and not by sight. That is to large degree what makes his journey so difficult. Far more times than he cares to count, the rains have pelted him, the rocks have dashed his feet, and the winds have assailed on every side. Yet he is never alone. Even when he feels like there is no one there—which is far too often for his own comfort—he is never alone. His father plots his course and paves his way, not always to the exclusion of the wind, rain, and rocks, but rather in spite of them. For wind, rain, and rocks confront all weary travelers on this journey, though some travelers prefer to walk alone. He, however, is never alone and this is his great secret and his great strength. He has learned the secret of the naive mind.

God bless,
Eric

******

This reminds me of Zen "Beginners' Mind" -- Similar but not quite the same. The question of surrender is always taking it to the next level. You can't make up a map, or rules, or know before you go. The task of surrender is more poetic, in that it follows along the pathways of metaphor, illustration, the indirect way, the reflected light.

What is spiritual growth , anyway? It seems to me a series of walls with the occasional door. Then I wonder, what in the world brought me to this path? I asked someone once, who taught in seminary what he thought the nature was of that call. He said simply, "There people who are here are here because they have no choice." That is the way I think about the mystical path, the inner journey of surrender. It has always been with me from my own earliest memories, though I wouldn't have put it in those terms. There has always been a faint distant tune that I've been listening for. There wasn't really a choice, it seems to be part of how a person is made, or the nature of the what is in one's bones and blood.

Well, that sounds a bit dramatic, but I think about why I didn't take some other more lucrative paths in life, what has led me here, and that is what occurs to me.

When I read the article above, it made me think of my practical , worldly family who are very materially successful. They must look at me as "naive" and "childlike" (and not in that nice, become as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven kind of way, but meaning that they think that I'm an idiot.) I understand more why they might think that. From their perspective , the way I live my life makes no sense. We inhabit different spheres.

Surrender, and that walking with God -- with the Friend -- becomes a kind of second nature, even though I couldn't really tell you much about where that walking is leading.

An old friend sent me a "Facebook" invitation and I wasted too much time messing around with photographs and whatnot.

And I picked up my dog Merlin from the vets. He is in pain, and has a huge scar and a lot of nasty looking staples. His back leg looks like a chicken leg, uncooked. Poor pup, he doesn't understand what's going on and he has a very scary looking fentenyl patch on his hip. He has hopped over to all of his favorite spots in the house and sniffed, and lay there at each spot for awhile. I imagine he feels as though he just got out of the loony bin.

Healing will take place , and tomorrow will be easier.

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Human Darkness

Picasso's "Guernica"

Reflections in the Dark

We watched "Pan's Labyrinth" last night. My son groused about it being too cluttered up with computer animation that was distracting for him, but I was not as able to distance myself, over subjective as usual, and good and dug into the story and all that that entailed. Hard to watch. I have several friends and a sibling who CANNOT watch violence on the screen. It it comes on, they catapult out of their seats and vamoose out of the room before anyone can even pause or mute or fast forward. I am not that bad, but I'm becomming more so every day.

The vulnerability of the women and the brutishness of the men frightened me at an instinctive level -- where I had to get up and walk around and not look at the screen. You could tell from the beginning that nothing good was going to be happening to the women , and the usual fairy tale plot line of menaced little girls was also going down some bad and disturbing roads. But the story was real. Real at that metaphor, Joseph Campbell place that we visit sometimes.

Yes , we are again in a time where men with no anima, no feminine are up to no good and trying to hijack the ship from the rest of us. We are again in the time of the degraded feminine, the coarse faux-masculine mentality of "charge straight ahead even though I'm going in the wrong direction." Brute force , baby.

It's INSIDE before it's OUTSIDE. It is that darkness in us that gets divorced and disowned until it finally bursts out into religion/politics/business. Or it was there all along. But it didn't encroach or menace. And now it does. Now it seeks to gain new ground. Particularly since it is rapidly losing any popular support it once had.

I remember reading about Lorca being killed just at the end of the Spanish Civil War. It just broke my heart. This beautiful and brilliant homosexual, an easy target for the bullies, silenced senselessly forever. And we people of his future, deprived of his lovely voice in our time.

Pan's Labyrinth is darkness told with a knowledge of redemption. It's more than a hope. It is something that is known. I know about redemption too. And I'm not too sure how I know, it's not a belief. It's different. I suppose I have experienced it , in a hive-mind kind of way. Or by way of the mythic, a past life, a deeply dug metaphor, a story that lives from my ancestry, who knows? The world is a place of mystery, that's for sure.

And the magic that we all hunger for is not all sweetness and light. Everything comes with a cost. The little powerless child who is really a princess from the center of the world lives in all of us. It's a truth and a secret that we have all glimpsed in our own hearts. It 's important to help her to live, and to recover what she has long forgotten.

We all have 3 or more tasks to complete before the moon is full.

Awe and Wonder and Suffering

"Hildegard says that no warmth is lost in the Universe. My phrase is that no beauty is lost in the Universe. If I get it right, Einstein is saying that no energy is lost in the Universe. So I think the gathering up of our awe and wonder and suffering and creativity and compassion, all this gathering up, this volcano, this spewing out, goes out there just like the nutrients do in a volcano. Spiritual nutrients. They are not material so they can go very far. In this context we are beyond space and time where our prayers gather the beauty, the warmth, the compassion, the suffering, the awe, and the creativity of our ancestors. And they fertilize that which is to come."

pg. 125
Natural Grace
Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

*****

Merlin

My Corgi, Merlin has sustained an athletic injury in jumping off the (short) deck, which he does all the time.

He tore his knee and is having surgery tomorrow to repair it.

Send him puppy kisses and prayers for a good result.

Thanks to everyone.

M is For

Paula's House of Toast:


So, on her first Sunday back, as I kneeled at the altar rail awaiting the Eucharist, a sudden ictus of motherdaughterliness overcame me: I was about to be fed, Mothered, both by new Mom Rev. I., and by Christ. What act is more emblematic of mother-and-child love than feeding ? I felt tears welling up. Properly canonical tears, I might add, as there are several alternate canticles for Morning Prayer that use maternal language, two from Julian of Norwich

Our mothers bear us for pain and for death;
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and eternal life.

and

We are all bound to God by nature,
and we are all bound to God by grace
and this grace is for all the world
because it is our precious mother, Christ.

and this one from Anselm of Canterbury

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you,
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.

Paula has many images and reflections both related and unrelated to the above. Very moving, very honest. Something that is deeply "spiritual" in a way that I can't explain.

It must be that she has ingested religion, life, her profession, her artistry, her eyes, and is able to talk in the midst of living all that in a way that is simply her. Call is God as expressed in her or just artistry.

I find her work very hypnotic and dreamlike. But that's what it seems like when someone ushers you into their inner world without tidying it up too much first. It may not make literal and linear sense to you , but at another level, you are tracking right along with the meditation the reflection.

There are questions that she is posing without stating the question. That's what is interesting to read. It's the kind of question that is flesh itself.

Here we are, embodied, partial, segmented. Yet everything is here, all possible worlds.

Yoga Stunts

Willie Davis for The New York Times

Yoga at the Crossroads of the World

By DALTON WALKER

About 80 people woke up extra early to visit one of the country’s busiest intersections in search for serenity.

*****

Yoga at the Crossroads of the World

By Dalton Walker

Namaste New York! (Photo: Willie Davis for The New York Times)

About 80 men and women — some from as far as California and Honduras — woke up extra early to visit one of the world’s busiest intersections in search for serenity.

A fence guarded the group of people in Times Square in Manhattan as they listened to Douglass Stewart, a lead yoga instructor, belt out directions. Taxis honked horns and fire trucks blared by with their sirens loud. Yet, the group of people were unfazed as they shuffled on their mats.

More than 800 yoga enthusiasts registered for six sessions, said Tim Tompkins, a yoga enthusiast and president of the Times Square Alliance, the sponsor of the event. The sessions will go throughout the day, with the last one starting at about 7:30 p.m. This is the event’s fourth year; the event is held to coincide with the summer solstice. The Times Square Alliance also sponsors a New Year’s Eve celebration.

“What better way to bring in the summer solstice in the most chaotic place in the city,” Mr. Tompkins said.

Attendance has grown considerably since 2003, when Mr. Stewart and Mr. Tompkins and another friend performed yoga at 5:30 a.m. at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway. The next two years, interest in the yoga event rose appreciably.

All six yoga sessions scheduled for today are being held on the traffic island where the Armed Forces Recruiting Station sits. Carol Solimene, 45, who came from her home in Tiverton, R.I., for the session, said she has practiced yoga for 13 years.

“It was worth the trip,” Ms. Solimene said of doing yoga in the unusual environment. “I found it to be energizing in its own way.”

A native New Yorker, Robin Downs, flew in from her Los Angeles home for Father’s Day. She planned her schedule around the yoga event. She has been practicing yoga for 12 years.

“I came back to experience Times Square in a different way.” Ms. Downs said. “The session was a sense of peace amongst all of the madness. I’m going to make this trip an annual event.”

*****

Mysterious and Vague

Just walking

"The church is a band of men and women travelling towards the promised land: God's kingdom of justice, righteousness, peace and love. As they travel towards this goal they are stained with the dust of the journey, frequently weary, bedraggled and complaining, inclined to forget their destination and tempted to turn aside and settle down, yet repeatedly impelled by their memories and hopes to press forward.. ." [George Lindbeck]. Or as Bob says, "ain't talking, just walking, through the world mysterious and vague. . '

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the primal miracle

In my folly I had thought I was to him as he was t me. “Fool!” I said to myself. “Have you not yet learned that you are that to no one?” - Orual, in C.S.Lewis’ Till We Have Faces.

It's perhaps the saddest and most bitter quote in all of literature. Orual, plagued by her acquired feeling of unloveliness, expresses all the bitterness of loneliness turned inward, marinating for years in fear and self-loathing. And then countered so nicely by Lewis’ great quote on relationship:

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." [The Four Loves]

The bewilderment of finding out that you are loved, truly loved, not for what one might become, not even for what the other feels when with you, but just for being you. Relationship. Love. The primal miracle.

God built the side that God had taken from the dirt [adama], and from it built ish [man] into ishshah [woman]. “At last!" said ish, "This is the one – bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” . . . . Both were naked . . . but neither of them felt vulnerable [bosh, usually translated "shame", but literally means ‘to feel insignificant’.] - from Genesis 2:22-25

At last. Now he knew he mattered. At last. Mattered to someone. The primal miracle. It's not a story about long ago, it's a story about deep within. It's our own narrative. Repeated throughout history, in every culture and language. Each of us is Adam, knowing deep within that we are made from dirt, yet longing deeply to matter [matter wanting to matter?] - to matter to someone, to be to someone what he/she is to us. And when it happens, in that wondrous moment, it usually comes with a deep inhaling and exhaling and the soul humming Etta James' At Last. And it's not corny, or maybe just a bit, but the soul is entitled to that, isn't it? Because the soul understands, knows what this is - it's the second genesis.

Permalink

{Both posts from The Old Bill}

Meditation:

It is an indelible principle of Eternal truth, that practice and exercise is the Life of all. Should God give you worlds, and laws, and treasures, and worlds upon worlds, and Himself also in the Divinest manner, if you will be lazy and not meditate, you lose all. The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain. Worlds of beauty and treasure and felicity may be round about it, and itself desolate. If therefore you would be happy, your life must be as full of operation as God of treasure: Your operation shall be treasure to Him, as His operation is delightful to you. [Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations: The Fourth Century, #95]

Let it roll around in your mind a bit - it's quite wonderful.

Ouch

Short Stories

In one sentence:

"Hitting the turkey buzzard on the way to our wedding was the first indication we would never last."

Via dooce.

A.

Posted by Athenae

***

Torture Culture

Mark Danner

If this Age of Rhetoric has a tragic symbol, then surely this is it: the frozen scandal, doomed to be revealed, and revealed, and revealed, in a never-ending torture familiar to the rock-bound Prometheus and his poor half-eaten liver. A full three years ago, the photographs from Abu Ghraib were broadcast by CBS on Sixty Minutes II and published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker; nearly as far back I wrote a book entitled Torture and Truth, made up largely of Bush administration documents that detailed the decision to use “extreme interrogation techniques” or — in the First President of Rhetoric’s phrase — “an alternative set of procedures” on prisoners in the War on Terror.

He used this phrase last September in a White House speech kicking off the 2006 midterm election campaign, at a time when accusing the Democrats of evidencing a continued softness on terror — and a lamentable unwillingness to show the needed harshness in “interrogating terrorists” — seemed a winning electoral strategy. And indeed Democrats seemed fully to agree, for they warily elected not to filibuster the Military Commissions Act of last October, which arguably made many of these “alternative sets of procedures” explicitly legal. And Democrats did win both houses of Congress, a victory perhaps owed in part to their refusal to block Bush’s interrogation law. Who can say? What we can say is that if torture today remains a “scandal,” a “crisis,” it is a crisis in that same peculiar way that crime or AIDS or global warming are crises: that is, they are all things we have learned to live with.

***

I last visited that war in December, when Baghdad was cold and grey and I spent a good deal of time drawing black X’s through the sources listed in my address book, finding them, one after another, either departed or dead. Baghdad seemed a sad and empty place, with even its customary traffic jams gone, and the periodic, resonating explosions attracting barely glances from those few Iraqis to be found on the streets.

How, in these “words in a time of war,” can I convey to you the reality of that place at this time? Let me read to you a bit of an account from a young Iraqi woman of how that war has touched her and her family, drawn from a newsroom blog. The words may be terrible and hard to bear, but — for those of you who have made such a determined effort to learn to read and understand — this is the most reality I could find to tell you. This is what lies behind the headlines and the news reports and it is as it is.

“We were asked to send the next of kin to whom the remains of my nephew, killed on Monday in a horrific explosion downtown, can be handed over…

“So we went, his mum, his other aunt and I…

“When we got there, we were given his remains. And remains they were. From the waist down was all they could give us. ‘We identified him by the cell phone in his pants’ pocket. If you want the rest, you will just have to look for yourselves. We don’t know what he looks like.’

“…We were led away, and before long a foul stench clogged my nose and I retched. With no more warning we came to a clearing that was probably an inside garden at one time; all round it were patios and rooms with large-pane windows to catch the evening breeze Baghdad is renowned for. But now it had become a slaughterhouse, only instead of cattle, all around were human bodies. On this side; complete bodies; on that side halves; and everywhere body parts.

“We were asked what we were looking for; ‘upper half’ replied my companion, for I was rendered speechless. ‘Over there.’ We looked for our boy’s broken body between tens of other boys’ remains; with our bare hands sifting them and turning them.

“Millennia later we found him, took both parts home, and began the mourning ceremony.”

The foregoing were words from an Iraqi family, who find themselves as far as they can possibly be from the idea that, when they act, they create their own reality — that they are, as Bush’s Brain put it, “history’s actors.” The voices you heard come from history’s objects and we must ponder who the subjects are, who exactly is acting upon them.

The car bomb that so changed their lives was not set by Americans; indeed, young Americans even now are dying to prevent such things. I have known a few of these young Americans. Perhaps you have as well, perhaps they are in the circles of your family or of your friends. I remember one of them, a young lieutenant, a beautiful young man with a puffy, sleepy face, looking at me when I asked whether or not he was scared when he went out on patrol — this was October 2003, as the insurgency was exploding. I remember him smiling a moment and then saying with evident pity for a reporter’s lack of understanding. “This is war. We shoot, they shoot. We shoot, they shoot. Some days they shoot better than we do.” He was patient in his answer, smiling sleepily in his young beauty, and I could tell he regarded me as from another world, a man who could never understand the world in which he lived. Three days after our interview, an explosion near Fallujah killed him.

Contingency, accidents, the metaphysical ironies that seem to stitch history together like a lopsided quilt — all these have no place in the imperial vision. A perception of one’s self as “history’s actor” leaves no place for them. But they exist and it is invariably others, closer to the ground, who see them, know them, and suffer their consequences.

You have chosen a path that will let you look beyond the rhetoric that you have studied and into the heart of those consequences. Of all people you have chosen to learn how to see the gaps and the loose stitches and the remnant threads. Ours is a grim age, this Age of Rhetoric, still infused with the remnant perfume of imperial dreams. You have made your study in a propitious time, oh graduates, and that bold choice may well bring you pain, for you have devoted yourselves to seeing what it is that stands before you. If clear sight were not so painful, many more would elect to have it. Today, you do not conclude but begin: today you commence. My blessings upon you, and my gratitude to you for training yourself to see. Reality, it seems, has caught up with you.

Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appear regularly in The New York Review of Books. His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.

Copyright 2007 Mark Danner

*********
Slacktivist

Deliberate ambiguity

"You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. ... You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall."

The above is from the famous speech by Jack Nicholson's character in Aaron Sorkin's A Few Good Men. Nicholson's Col. Jessep was a "tough" guy in the sense of "tough" conveyed by the current euphemism for torture: "tough interrogation techniques," which is to say tough in the sense of "brutish, counterproductive and not too bright."

It's worth noting that "the wall" that Nicholson's Col. Jessep was defending was Guantanamo Bay, which means the truth that Jessep can't handle is this: Nobody needed him on that wall. Controlling that tiny slice of Cuba used to stand as the last line of defense between us and ... well, between us and not controlling that tiny slice of Cuba. In any case, after decades of military service on "that wall," we were ultimately unable to defend Guantanamo from lawlessness and tyranny because we put it there ourselves.

All of which is to say that The Los Angeles Times was asking the right question yesterday in the editorial, "Do we use torture?" The answer to that question is not something that any American has the luxury of not knowing.

The Times notes that the Bush administration has produced "ambiguity about a subject that cries out for clarity." I think that ambiguity is deliberate. I figure on one end of the spectrum there are X-percent of us who are completely opposed to torture, and on the other end a similar percentage of us who have no qualms about it at all. The rest of that spectrum is a big chunk of people who don't approve of it, but don't want the responsibility of disapproving of it either. They prefer to have, as Col. Jessep put it, "the luxury of not knowing."

President Bush's deliberate ambiguity about torture is partly a matter of legal CYA. The Geneva Conventions are the law of the land -- binding, American law -- so he can't flout them openly. But this deliberate ambiguity is also a bargain struck with that middle swath of the spectrum. "We don't torture," Bush says, winking broadly and crossing his fingers, and that seems to be good enough for them. Maybe they don't fully believe it, but they want to believe it -- or at least they want to live in a world in which they could fully believe it -- so they go back to luxuriously not thinking about it.

The somewhat hopeful thing is this: I believe these folks in the middle can be persuaded to come over to our side -- that if they can be made to acknowledge what it is they're trying not to know then they will come to oppose the perverse use of torture. I do not think they can be persuaded in the other direction. They may now be acting like the citizens of Sunnydale, desperately denying that the monsters are real, but they would never choose, instead, to become monsters themselves. Take away the deliberate ambiguity and Mitt Romney's despicable "double Guantanamo" nonsense won't produce much applause. (At least, I hope not.)

Posted by Fred Clark

Permalink

The Inbreaking Spirit

This Ruse You Call Necessity

A bit extreme, perhaps, but such can poets and prophets be....


Advice to Myself
Louise Erdrich

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.


***

Cleaning out the fridge today. Sometimes, sometimes, it's just everything clamoring for attention. I think of walking off into a meadow , walking until I come to the sea. This world has gotton all shaken up. Time seems to have disappeared.

It now seems to be right to get rid of a bunch of stuff, probably because the person that I was keeping that stuff for seems to have departed.

***

GASSHO

"People often ask me how Buddhists answer the question: "Does God exist?"

The other day I was walking along the river. The wind was blowing. Suddenly I though, Oh! the air really exists. We know that the air is there, but unless the wind blows against our face, we are not aware of it. Here in the wind I was suddenly aware, yes, it's really there.

And the sun too. I was suddenly aware of the sun, shining through the bare trees. Its warmth, its brightness, and all this completely free, completely gratuitous. Simply there for us to enjoy.

And without my knowing it, completely spontaneously, my two hands came together, and I realized that I was making a gassho.* And it occurred to me that this is all that matters: that we can bow. Just that. Just that."

~Eido Tai Shimano, Zen Master, quoted in A Listening Heart: The Art of Contemplative Living, by David Steindl-Rast, p. 83

* A gassho is the gesture of raising the hands palm to palm to indicate respect, gratitude, humility, or all three.

Permalink

****

CAVU

May today be all that you need it to be today. May the peace of God and the freshness of the Holy Spirit rest in your thoughts, rule in your dreams tonight and conquer all your fears. May God manifest himself today in ways that you have never experienced. May your joys be fulfilled, your dreams be closer and your prayers be answered. I pray that faith enters a new height for you. I pray that you step into your destiny. I pray for peace, health, happiness and true and undying love for God.

****

May you have a fruitful and CAVU* day.


*term meaning "ceiling and visibility unlimited"



****

Cats and Things

“The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”

-- Mark Twain



Which is at least PARTLY why I seem to be unable to get myself to the dentist.


****

Be Patient Toward All That Is Unsolved In Your Heart

Yoga May Help Treat Depression, Anxiety Disorder

By E.J. Mundell
HealthDay ReporterThu Jun 7

THURSDAY, June 7 (HealthDay News) -- Yoga's postures, controlled breathing and meditation may work together to help ease brains plagued by anxiety or depression, a new study shows.

Brain scans of yoga practitioners showed a healthy boost in levels of the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric (GABA) immediately after a one-hour yoga session. Low brain levels of GABA are associated with anxiety and depression, the researchers said.

"I am quite sure that this is the first study that's shown that there's a real, measurable change in a major neurotransmitter with a behavioral intervention such as yoga," said lead researcher Dr. Chris Streeter, assistant professor of psychiatry and neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine.

She believes yoga could prove a useful tool to help people battling depression and anxiety disorders. "We're not advocating that they chuck their medication, but I would advise that they could use it as an adjunct and see how they are doing," Streeter said.

Her team published its findings in the May issue of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

In the study, the Boston researchers used high-tech magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging to gauge levels of GABA in the brains of eight long-time yoga practitioners and 11 non-practitioners. The participants were healthy, and none was diagnosed with a major psychiatric condition.

Brain scans were taken before the beginning of the experiment. Then, the yoga group was asked to engage in the meditative practice for 60 minutes, while the non-yoga group simply read. The researchers then re-scanned each participant's brain, looking specifically at GABA levels.

"We showed a 27 percent increase in the brain GABA levels of those doing yoga -- a really significant increase," Streeter said. No such change was noted in the non-practitioners who had just read.

She said the style or school of yoga practiced didn't seem to matter. "We had hatha, ashtanga, bikram, vinyasa, and kripalu" practitioners included in the yoga group, Streeter said, "and many had been trained in several different schools."

According to Streeter, "this all gives us one of the mechanisms by which yoga may be having a beneficial effect. There could be other mechanisms."

But another expert pointed to what he considered flaws in the research.

Zindel Segal, chairman of psychotherapy and a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, has for years studied the use of behavioral interventions to alleviate psychological woes.

He said the Boston researchers were to be commended for using brain scan imaging technologies to investigate the effectiveness of these techniques. But he questioned why the yoga group was simply compared to a sedentary reading group and not to another movement-based group.

"Exercise itself may have some effects on GABA, so I think in this study, you'd really want that comparison," he said. Including such a control group would make it clear that it was yoga and not just an hour of physical exertion that was responsible for the brain changes.

He also pointed out that all of the people in the study were mentally healthy, and clinical depression and anxiety disorders involve more than the "daily fluctuations in stress and tension" that healthy individuals are prone to.

"We know that yoga can have a profound effect" on smoothing out life's daily ups and downs, Segal said. "But so does working out on a Stairmaster for an hour."

Segal also questioned the role of GABA in depression. While it may play a role in anxiety disorders, "GABA is not one of the main neurotransmitters that seems to be a part of the depression story," he said. Other neurochemicals -- most notably serotonin -- play much bigger roles in the disorder, he said.

None of this means that the study's findings are without merit, Segal said. "In fact," he said, "we have a program called 'mindfulness-based cognitive therapy,' where we do use yoga, as well as mindfulness meditation," as therapeutic tools. Streeter's findings "suggest the need for more study of these practices," he said.

Streeter agreed that her study is probably just a beginning.

"I think what's important about this study is that it shows that by using really cutting-edge neuroimaging technology, we can measure real changes in the brain with behavioral interventions -- changes that are similar to those that we see with pharmacologic treatments," she said.

Would other mind-body practices -- Tai Chi, for example -- produce similar effects?

"I think that's very possible," Streeter said. "I suspect that all roads lead up the mountain."

More information

For more on depression, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

Copyright © 2007 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

****

And, a very "yogic" quote from Rilke. It's Yogic, in that it admonishes the reader to use everything in life. To include, to not leave any part out. Yoga isn't just about physical exericse. It's about wholeness.

Live Everything

Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to beg you as much as you can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not now seek answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Letters to a Young Poet

Reflections

Consider two other parables for a moment pertaining to misguided skepticism, this time on the prospect of resurrection:

In his book Teaching Your Children About God, Rabbi David Wolpe, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, recalls an ancient Jewish parable about twin fetuses lying together in the womb. One believes that there is a world beyond the womb, “where people walk upright, where there are mountains and oceans, a sky filled with stars. The other can barely contain his contempt for such foolish ideas.”

Suddenly the “believer” is forced through the birth canal leaving behind the only way of life he has known. The remaining fetus is saddened, convinced that a great catastrophe has befallen his companion. “Outside the womb, however, the parents are rejoicing. For what the remaining brother, left behind, has just witnessed is not death but birth. This, Wolpe reminds us, is a classic view of the afterlife—a birth into a world that we on Earth can only try to imagine. (Jeffery L. Sheler. “Heaven in an Age of Reason.” U.S. News & World Report. 31 March 1997: 65–66.)

The second parable is recounted by Malcolm Muggeridge in his book Jesus: The Man Who Lives:

. . . Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely painted wings? If told, do they believe? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as theirs should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads—no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream. Similarly, our wise ones. . . . (Qtd. in Impending Resurrection)

In both instances, we can sympathize with the “wise ones”: the twin who has never seen the outer world and cannot conceive that such a place exists: likewise, the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads at the thought of ever having beautiful wings and flying through the heavens. The problem with their wisdom, however, is that it is limited and has not seen all the variables. Based on the existence that they know, such things seem like fantasy and their words sound wise. But they cannot conceive of an existence outside or beyond any more than the wise man in our original parable can conceive of a King who would summon him simply because he wished to see him.

(From Le Pecheur Reflechit ; The Wise Man and the King: A Postmodern Fable)

*****
Yet the spiritual life is one in which are being transformed moment by moment—an ontological change taking place within—as without we work out our salvation with fear and trembling, growing in grace and knowledge as by faith we seize hold of heaven by violent force. As Evelyn Underhill writes in the chapter entitled “The Dark Night of the Soul”:

The self, in its necessary movement towards higher levels of reality, loses and leaves behind certain elements of its world, long loved but now outgrown: as children must make the hard transition from nursery to school. Destruction and construction here go together: the exhaustion and ruin of the illuminated consciousness is the signal for the onward movement of the self towards other centres: the feeling of deprivation and inadequacy which comes from the loss of that consciousness is an indirect stimulus to new growth. The self is being pushed into a new world where it does not feel at home; has not yet reached the point at which it enters into conscious possession of its second or adult life. (Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness)

Faith and Her Ontological Offspring

Totemic Transformations: Shouting Dark Secrets

We are not yet what we will be. We are not yet what we are becoming. We do not yet know what we do not yet know. There is no way, really, that we could be what we are not yet or know what we do not yet know until those things are manifest reality. Since the sense of not yet knowing what we do not yet know is perhaps the easiest idea to explore conceptually, let’s pause on that thought for a moment.

***
To believe in the unseen is not necessarily to believe in what cannot be seen, but rather to see the potential in all things: to have the vision of more and to see it through until faith becomes sight. Recall our illustration of seeing flour: one person sees only flour. The other person also sees the flour, but in addition to the flour, she also sees hot, steaming pies and the hungry being fed. Both persons see flour, but only one sees what is unseen. One sees only the things of earth, the other says “on earth as it is in heaven” seeing the kingdom of heaven brought to bear upon the kingdom of earth in which all things are made new and being made new.

We do not yet know what we do not yet know: how could we? In many instances, we live in Merton’s poverty, serving the God of the dark. We do not feel him, we do not hear him, yet we possess him by hope, by faith, by love. In the midst of the poverty, the darkness, the lack of feeling, the lack of hearing, and the lack of conscious possessing, there is a seed that is growing. There are ontological changes taking place beneath the surface, permanent changes: the kingdom of heaven if being brought to bear on earth, what is unseen is being manifest as sight. It is in the dark, inner chambers of the heart that the silent Voice speaks.

***
Children do not become adults overnight but pass through a series of interweaving and interwoven stages.

We have here been speaking of being born from the womb; the same could be said for being begotten from above. The spiritual life is characterized in Christianity by the metaphor of birth and its object is life eternal, an object that we have argued long and loud in previous issues has everything to do with the life that now—yes, this very instant—exists: eternal life has to do with all of life, to be sure—life to come as much as now—but life only happens one moment at a time. I am alive now; I have life now. If I did not have life, I could not be said to be living. To be living implies a state of continuance that necessarily passes through the now: I am alive, I am alive, I am alive, I am alive, I am alive: each sentence is required over and over to adequately capture the essence of life. We are alive and to be alive means that we have life: we live moment by moment and if we did not, we would no longer be living.

***

Now consider that we have talked much about the idea of “on earth as it is in heaven”: that is, we have talked about the kingdom of heaven and its realization here on earth. We have suggested that the spiritual virtues of faith, hope, and love are all transformative virtues: they do not look to what is seen, yet they realize what they see, just as our sculptor begins with a lump of clay and ends up with a totem of his ancestors. We have said that “they realize what they see”: it came to my attention today on the forum, as I was reviewing a previous newsletter in which we were discussing Merton, that the latter’s words could stand some clarification. Specifically, he writes:

Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things. We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to [the] economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. So the soul that hopes in God already belongs to Him, and to belong to Him is the same as to possess Him, since He gives Himself completely to those who give themselves to Him. The only thing faith and hope do not give us is the clear vision of Him Whom we possess. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have hope. Spes quae videtur non est spes. [“For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen, is not hope. For what a man seeth, why doth he hope for?” (Romans 8:24).] (No Man is an Island 15)

***

More comments later...
*
Long story short: I know what I know, but I don't know what I don't know. This extends up to birth and death and down to what it is I am seeing at any given moment.

That God and eternity meet only in present time.

We are only here.

*

Sorcerer’s Apprentices who lost control of the Simplest Broomstick in the World: Language

Dear Reader of this Blog;
You are welcome to skip this entire entry. I am thinking to myself here to work something out. You are welcome to participate, but may not understand.
Love,
Me

A sutra means "a necklace" or things that are strung together.

Sūtra (Sanskrit,) or Sutta (Pāli), literally means a rope or thread that holds things together, and more metaphorically refers to an aphorism (or line, rule, formula), or a collection of such aphorisms in the form of a manual. It is derived from the verbal root siv-, meaning to sew (these words, including Latin suere and English to sew, all derive from PIE *syū-). In Hinduism the 'sutras' form a school of Vedic study, related to and somewhat later than the Upanishads. They served and continue to act as grand treatises on various schools of Hindu Philosophy. They elaborate in succinct verse, sometimes esoteric, Hindu views of metaphysics, cosmogony, the human condition, moksha (liberation), and how to maintain a blissful, dharmic life, in a cosmic spin of karma, reincarnation and desire.

Following are excerpts from Allen Ginsberg's poem
WICHITA VORTEX SUTRA

I
Turn Right Next Corner
The Biggest Little Town in Kansas
Macpherson
Red sun setting flat plains west streaked
with gauzy veils, chimney mist spread
around christmas-tree-bulbed refineries—aluminum
white tanks squat beneath
winking signal towers’ bright plane-lights,
orange gas flares
beneath pillows of smoke, flames in machinery—
transparent towers at dusk
***

Language, language
black Earth-circle in the rear window,
no cars for miles along highway
beacon lights on ceramic plain
language, language
over Big Blue River
chanting La illaha el (lill) Allah hu
revolving my head to my heart like my mother
chin abreast at Allah
Eyes closed, blackness
vaster than midnight prairies,
Nebraskas of solitary Allah,
Joy, I am I
the lone One singing to myself
God come true—
Thrills of fear.
nearer than the vein in my neck—?
What if I opened my soul to sing to my absolute self
Singing as the car crash chomped thru blood & muscle
tendon skull?
What if I sang, and loosed the chords of fear brow?
What exquisite noise wd
Shiver my car companions?



****

60,000
Northvietnamese troops now infiltrated but over 250,000
South Vietnamese armed men
our Enemy—
Not Hanoi our enemy
Not China our enemy
The Viet Cong!
McNamara made a “bad guess”
“Bad Guess?” chorused the Reporters.

***

Yes, no more than a Bad Guess, in 1962
“8000 American Troops handle the
Situation”
Bad Guess
in 1954, 80% of the
Vietnamese people would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh
wrote Ike years later Mandate for Change
A bad guess in the Pentagon
And the Hawks were guessing all along
Bomb China’s 200,000,000
cried Stennis from Mississippi
I guess it was 3 weeks ago
Holmes Alexander in Albuquerque Journal
Provincial newsman
said I guess we better begin to do that now
his typewriter clacking in his aged office
on a side street under Sandia Mountain?
Half the world away from China
Johnson got some bad advice Republican Aiken sang
to the Newsman over the radio
The General guessed they’d stop infiltrating the South
if they bombed the North—
So I guess they bombed!
Pale Indochinese boys came thronging thro the jungle
in increased numbers
to the scene of TERROR!
While the triangle–roofed Farmer’s Grain Elevator
sat quietly by the side of the road
along the railroad track
American Eagle beating its wings over Asia
million dollar helicopters
a billion dollars worth of Marines
who loved Aunt Betty
Drawn from the shores and farms shaking
from the high schools to the landing barge
blowing the air thru their cheeks with fear
in Life on Television
Put it this way on the radio
Put it this way in television language
Use the words
language, language:
“A bad guess”
Put it this way in headlines
Omaha World Herald— Rusk Says Toughness
Essential for Peace
Put it this way

•••

Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation “of the fabled dammed”
or else...
Language, language
Ezra Pound the Chinese Written Character for truth
defined as man standing by his word
Word picture: forked creature
Man
standing by a box, birds flying out
representing mouth speech
Ham Steak please waitress, in the warm café.
Different from a bad guess.
The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet:
Black Magic language,
formulas for reality—
Communism is a 9 letter word
used by inferior magicians with
the wrong alchemical formula for transforming earth into gold
--funky warlocks operating on guesswork,
handmedown mandrake terminology
that never worked in 1956
for gray-domed Dulles,
brooding over at State,
that never worked for Ike who knelt to take
the magic wafer in his mouth
from Dulles’ hand
inside the church in Washington:
Communion of bum magicians
congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri
working with the wrong equations
Sorcerer’s Apprentices who lost control
of the simplest broomstick in the world:
Language

***
Passing thru Waterville,
Electronic machinery in the bus humming prophecy—
paper signs blowing in cold wind,
mid-Sunday afternoon’s silence in town
under frost-gray sky
that covers the horizon—
That the rest of earth is unseen,
Unknown except thru
language
airprint
magic images
or prophecy of the secret
heart the same
in Waterville as Saigon one human form:
***

Three-Five-Zero-Zero

Once Congress had given President Johnson the power to do pretty much anything he wanted in Vietnam, he decided to send in ground troops to secure air bases and begin a full-scale ground war, marking the official escalation of the war. On the morning of March 8. 1965, three thousand, five hundred Marines – the first ground troops of the war – came ashore near the Da Nang airbase, welcomed by Vietnamese girls and four American advisors holding a bed sheet proclaiming "Welcome to the Gallant Marines."

But, interestingly enough, that may not be what the song "Three-Five-Zero-Zero" in Hair refers to. Jim Rado has said that the song was inspired by an Alan Ginsberg’s poem. Ginsberg’s "Wichita Vortex Sutra," written in February 1966, contains almost all the freaky, violent, surrealistic images in the song "Three-Five-Zero-Zero," often quoted word-for-word. In the poem, General Maxwell Taylor proudly reports to the press that three thousand, five hundred of the enemy were killed in one month. He repeats the number, digit by digit, for effect: "Three-Five-Zero-Zero." In addition to the many other images from the poem that found their way into the song, Ginsberg also refers to 256 Vietcong killed and 31 captured, which became 256 captured in the song lyric. Though the song starts out somber and intense, spilling out Ginsberg’s images of death and dying, it turns midway into a manic dance number, an absurdist celebration of killing that echoes Maxwell’s glee at reporting the enemy casualties, commenting on the Happy Face that the U.S. government tried to put on the ever diminishing returns of the war in Vietnam. While our soldiers (and theirs) kept dying, Washington tried to whip up World War II-style support for the war among Americans. But we had seen the war on our TV screens this time, and we weren’t celebrating.

****

The following excerpts -- pertinent passages -- are from Ginsberg's poem, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (Feb. 14, 1966). I found it in Allen Ginsberg, "selected Poems: 1947-1995" (HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 160-175.

Put it this way
Declared McNamara speaking language
Asserted Maxwell Taylor
General, Consultant to White House
Vietcong losses leveling up three five zero zero per month
Front page testimony February '66
Here in Nebraska same as Kansas same known in Saigon
In Peking, in Moscow, same known
by the youths in Liverpool three five zero zero
the latest quotation in the human meat market
Father I cannot tell a lie! [p. 163]
. . .
Three five zero zero is numerals
Headline language poetry, nine decades after Democratic Vistas
and the Prophecy of the Good Gray Poet
Our nation "of the fabled damned"
or else . . . [p.164]
. . .
Napalm and black clouds emerging in newsprint
Flesh as soft as a Kansas girl's
ripped open by metal explosion----
three five zero zero on the other side of the planet
caught in barbed wire, fire ball
bullet shock, bayonet electricity
bomb blast terrific in skull & belly, shrapneled throbbing meat
[p.166]
. . .
Eagle News Services Saigon ---
Headline Surrounded Vietcong Charge Into Fire Fight
the suffering not yet ended
for others
the last spasm of the dragon of pain
shot thru the muscles [p. 172]
. . .
Continued from page one area
after the Marines killed 256 Vietcong captured 31 [Ibid.]
. . .
The war is over now ---
Except for the souls
held prisoner in Niggertown [p. 175]
. . .
==========================

How's that, Cool Kats and Hip Chicks? So, next I scanned microfilm of The New York Times to look for the headline supposedly in every paper in February '66. The closest I found was dated February 18, post-dating the writing of this poem by 4 days (but I imagine Ginsberg read more than just the New York Times!), but this seems close enough: The article (Page One, continuing on page 12) was entitled "Taylor Asserts a 'Limited' War is Intent of US," and it was printed adjacent to "Senate Panel Hears General Taylor and Some Sharp Questions Follow." The article states:

". . . The general [Maxwell Taylor] questioned whether the enemy could long find replacements for losses now estimated at 17,000 a month. These, he said, were made up of an estimated 3, 800 killed, 11,000 wounded and 2,400 desertions."

This report goes over the 3,500 number, but perhaps the Feb. 14 article(s) Ginsberg read contained the actual quote from Taylor, which may have actually said "leveling up three five zero zero per month," a number he'd be proud to beef up four days later to 3, 800. I'll keep looking for the actual news report which gives a daily VC kill rate of 3,500. I'd prefer to confirm that Ginsberg himself remembered the "3,500" number from the Marine landing (found several times listed in the New York Times, including a Page One headline), and he just got the two similar numbers mixed up.

Lyrics to Three-Five-Zero-Zero condense the entire thing to:

Three-Five-Zero-Zero

A thousand deaths ago, I quoted from the original poem "Witchita Vortex Sutra", but this time I think I'll just do the Rado version:

Ripped open by metal explosion
Caught in barbed wire
Fireball
Bullet shock
Bayonet electricity
Shrapnel
Throbbing meat
Electronic data processing
Black uniforms
Bare feet, carbines
Mail-order rifles
Shoot the muscles
256 Viet Cong captured
256 Viet Cong captured

Prisoners in Niggertown
It's a dirty little war
Three Five Zero Zero
Take weapons up and begin to kill
Watch the long long armies drifting home

(from The Sideshow)

The Eyes With Which I See

Poured Into the World

From Barbara Brown Taylor:

...And yet when I consider my life of faith, this world is clearly where my transformation has taken place. It is in the world that I have met the people who have changed me—some of them believers, but far more of them not—people who have loved me, fought me, shamed me, forgiven me, sanding down my edges on one side while they broke whole ragged chunks of me off the other. The world is where I have been struck dumb by beauty, by cruelty, by human invention and greed. The world is where my notions of God have been destroyed, reformed, chastened, redeemed. The world is where I have occasionally been good for something and where I have done irreparable harm.

The reason I know this, however, is that the church has given me the eyes with which I see, as well as the words with which I speak. The church has given me a community in which to figure out what has happened to me in the world. It has given me a place to love and grieve, within a tradition far older and wiser than I. It is the church that has poured me into the world, in other words—which is counterintuitive. How can a church survive that keeps pouring itself into the world? I cannot possibly say. All I know is the gospel truth: those willing to give everything away are the ones with anything worth keeping; those willing to look death full in the face are the ones with the most abundant lives. Go figure...

It seems to me that one of the difficulties in our current discussions regarding the Church, and specifically the Anglican Communion, is our hesitancy to fully pour ourselves into the world, because that may just require us to look death full in the face.

We do not exist for the sake of the Church. We exist for the sake of the world. If that means we do not survive, so be it. Our faith is in the living God, not in institutions, after all. Cannot God raise up something new from the ashes of our vanquished dreams?

Make sure you read the entire article. It is quite good. I also highly recommend Barbara Brown Taylor's most recent book: Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith.

(Fr Jake Stops the World)

***
I suspect that most dynamic communities operate on the idea of both the inward gaze and the outward activity.
The difficulty seems to be in having the two inform one another, without posing an either/or dilemma.

But for each of us comes so many times when the question is stay or go?

We expect so much from church, or from a spiritual group. If the operation of the group proves to be all too human, we may experience the scales falling from our eyes as an immense betrayal, whether it actually was or not.

Again, from Barbara Brown Taylor's Christian Century article:

"What I cannot figure is how any church organized around the self-donation of Jesus can stay invested in self-preservation. What would it look like for a church to lay down its life for its friends? If Philippians 2:5-8 were rewritten for the congregation, how might it sound?

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus—
you who, though called to be God's body in this world
did not regard your dearness to God as something to be
exploited,
but emptied yourselves,
taking the form of slaves,
being born in the likeness of Christ himself.
And being found in human form like him,
you humbled yourselves
and became obedient to the point of your own
dissolution—
even death before your time.

Leaving church, I believe, is what church is for—leaving on a regular basis, leaving to see what God is up to in the world and joining God there, delivering all the riches of the institution to those who need them most, in full trust that God will never leave the church without all that it needs to live."

This is It

Beginning to Be

Vaclav Havel

It is I who must begin....

Once I begin, once I try -
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and
ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
- to live in harmony
with the 'voice of Being,' as I
understand it within myself
- as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road....

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost.

{Former President of the Czech Republic}

***

The last few days have been frustrating. Everything seems to be falling though. Cancellations, wishy washy people, my own mind turning on me, as it does from time to time. I do hate it when I seem to fill up with bad thoughts. But at least I notice and gently make some room in the midst of the swirling desolation and put a little garden there.

It seems somewhat easier to recover that sense of choice, of not being the victim, that it's never really the other person, it's me. Not in the sense of blame or feeling guilty or down on myself. It's just that there's no one else here doing anything to me. It's my play, and I get to be the chooser. My inner attitude towards what is going on helps me to play my role, to not go unconscious. It's good to notice, good to remember that.

Big Fishes. Talking Donkeys

Beyond this shore
and beyond the farther shore
Where there is no beginning
No end
Without fear
Go.

-From the Heart Sutra

***
Onehouse
Permalink

Trigger points and sea water.

I have started spending a little time with a trigger point book that a friend (Hello friend...) lent to me over the weekend. I have a chronic pain condition and am pretty willing to try all sorts of suggestions from folks who have had success with nutritional and physical routines. It can get overwhelming if you try too many things at once but if you pick and choose, sometimes you will notice where there is or isn't a difference.

I always find referred pain interesting. The idea that noticeable origin of pain is not necessarily where the problem actually exists. When you use trigger points, you actually inflict pain on a certain spot to provide longer term relief to another area.

When dealing with relationship or community problems, we often go straight for what we think is the problem, rooting around for the truffle straight under our noses. We shout a great "Ah hah!" at ourselves or others when we think we have found THE source of the problem. In my thinking on the personal, I have noticed that when discussing certain things - politics, faith, lifestyle - people will often shoot back a "I am personally offended..." by someone else's personal opinion. The implied suggestion is that personally offending someone else is the worst thing that you can do. The often-miffed usually go into some long explanation about how wrong you are but the whole thing is supposed to be legitimized by personal offense. I don't take that very seriously anymore. The trigger point is that we think we OWN what is around us. This is our faith, our Bible, our Pope, our version of church, and our way of viewing the world. God himself is unable to defend against a wayward personal opinion and others are supposed to be very upset that you are personally offended. If you are offended, God himself is probably sulking in some corner too.

Some people call this love of their own opinion faithfulness. The ability to take things so personally and stick by them no matter what happens. But this is entrenchment and ownership and it is most often rooted in the fear of something new rather than the love of something old. If you find yourself stuck on one point, it usually means you have some kind of pain, bias or downright blindness somewhere else.

In the stories of the Bible, God usually sends a big fish, a talking donkey, or just a plain old prophet to people hiding behind their self-involvement and self-righteousness. This would be handy. It would do away with a lot of arguments if mid-discussion there was an interruption - "Uh, just a minute. There's someone at the door." and then a return, pale and covered in sea water to say, "Sorry, yeah. Guess what...I'm a dork."

**
Just excellent observations extended from trigger point theory.

The metaphor is apt, in that the detective part is tracing the pathway that the pain takes. What is the pathway to the painful spot?

The resolution involved de-stressing, allowing rest and re-education and re-integration. Sometimes we have to learn to walk and crawl all over again.

I would maintain (for the metaphor to be apt) that we have to walk again and again from the beginning. Again from the top. It's hard to face the necessity to begin again. I want to have accomplished great things. I want assurance that my pain will not return. But pain management isn't like that.

Well of course the pain will come back. But it won't be the same pain. There is a part of us that knows when it's the same pain. Then we're afraid that it'll never go away. It'll be with us for the rest of our lives, warping us and embittering our bodies and minds. But that pain goes. Pain changes. We change.

Part of pain's resolution must be spiritual. We begin again. Each day, a whole new life.

It is a philosophical solution and a spiritual one. We are never utterly crushed.

And then......
the big fish
the talking donkey.
A magical creature?

Don't worry. Something is coming.

The Sound on the Page

There have been many posts on many different blogs about the life death and writings of Steven Gilliard.

I've been thinking today about the qualities that made him so unforgettable.

James Wolcott hit it, I think , in his tribute:

"A few years ago I was talking to someone about a mutual friend who had died the year before--a controversial critic and biographer who, despite his grave robber reputation in print, was the funniest, most surrealistically imaginative, ricochetingly incisive, bizarrely erudite, and energized conversationalist we had had the privilege to know. He was like the ultimate late-night DJ, his work study constructed like a DJ's booth; he spoke as if there were always a live mike present and he was always on the air, but without being a rhetorical bully or tedious blowhard. Just hearing him laugh and riff at the other end of the phone line was a lift, a reveille call. I've come to terms with him being dead, his friend said, it was the silence he left behind that still ached: "Where did that voice go?" she wondered in genuine wonderment. It was impossible to believe a voice that vibrant and inspiriting had been silenced forever, it must be still broadcasting somewhere across the universe--but where?

That's how I feel after hearing the news of Steve Gilliard's death. Where did that voice go? Not his literal voice, his voice in person or over the phone--he and I only met once. I mean his voice on the screen page, his blog voice, which was a fiery broadsword in its wrath and softly contemplative in its grief and understanding. Ben Yagoda wrote a superb book about literary voice called The Sound on the Page, and nobody made a more resonant sonic boom than Steve at his best, misspellings be damned. It's so hard to fathom that that voice is now gone. Like a lot of Steve's readers, I would wonder during his weeks in the ICU how he would have responded to this piece of news or that; how he would have jubilated in those Betty masks in the stands as A-Rod came to bat, or scoped out Moquada al-Sadr's latest maneuver--such was his range. Nobody but nobody was more prophetic about how the invasion of Iraq threw open the gates of hell than Steve--he got it right when nearly everyone in the mainstream press and the entire rightwing blogsphere got it so triumphantly wrong. Somewhere somehow that voice must still be out there but it's no longer for us to hear, which is why his friends and readers can only mourn and give thanks for what we once had and have now lost.

Jane Hamsher and Pachacutec at Firedoglake pay their respects, as does Tom Watson, whose update provides links to the expanding circle of mourners.

June 3, 2007

***


Yes indeed..... Where did that voice go?

After my mother died, this is what gave me the greatest agony -- wanting to hear her own particular take on something. What would she have thought or said? I'd never know. I couldn't stand the absence. I couldn't take in the fact that her voice, her eyes, her view about life, me, her, the meaning of things was now absent from the world. I remember having that thought over and over -- "She must , then, still exist somewhere --
but where?" Where could I go to talk to her? If she was "out of this world" there must be another one where she still existed.

Everyone has a name , a voice, a thumbprint. It is, indeed , unique. It may not be profound, articulate, beautiful, perfect or belong to any class of superlative. But that voice, that individuality is sacred. I guess mourning is immersing oneself in the essence of the person , to remember them, to imbibe them, to take them into your own soul. Emerson once said that a human being was a quotation from the sum total of his ancestors. Likewise, maybe that quotation extends to our spiritual forefathers and mothers -- the people who have helped nurtured taught and befriended us. Authors of books we loved. You never know how very far this concept extends.

When going through my mother's things, I finally took a sweater of hers that she wore a lot. It had her smell. I put it in a plastic bag , and put it in my closet. I still have it. What am I saving? It's odd. And yet, just the faint scent of a person is evocative, conjures her up in full. That piece of the hologram is enough to spark memory and warmth.

When I think of the Eucharist, it speaks to me as that sort of intimacy.

"This is my body.
This is my blood."

That we take the person into our very substance, and now they are part of us. We carry them, we remember them. Even people we don't "know" personally. I remember every writer who I read and loved as a girl. I can still recall those writing voices. There is a certain quality of life that I took away from those relationships.

There is an everlasting quality to relationships, friendships, formation experiences. Those voices, places, words, smells, places, are then always ours, part of us, with us. We remember them, not so much by thinking of them but we remember them by living our own life in a certain way.

When I started to read Gilliard, I had never read much history or political thought. I didn't have a good sense of military history or the back story of current events. His voice as a blogger was so compelling that it convinced me and inspired me to read more, to educate myself in military and political history, to get the facts, to know what the real story was. That the lives of my fellow citizens might rest on how many people really grasped the importance of all of this. The lives of me and my children might rest on informing myself and acting, on speaking up, on taking a stand.

I often laughed out loud reading his quips, his smack downs, his tirades against some event large or small. When something of significance happened , I'd visit his blog, wanting to know what he thought about it. I would read his "take" on military issues, both strategic and tactical.

His voice was a voice of both reason and conscience. It also had the warmth passion and directness of a friend, as though you were going to sit down and talk over these issues with someone who deeply cared and wanted you to know too.

It IS " impossible to believe a voice that vibrant and inspiriting had been silenced forever, it must be still broadcasting somewhere across the universe--but where?"

I guess we truly mourn those who have qualities that we admire by emulating them and by remembering them. By internalizing that wonderful voice and letting it speak to us from wherever that point of origin may be now.

If life does go on (and I believe with certainty that it does) these voices remain eternal and are a coin that will someday be redeemed just as sure as their memory is cherished.

***

e e cummings


Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus

he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

"Rule Book" ?!

Sunday, June 03, 2007

"We are the Borg. Resistance is futile"

From THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH:

Church of England bishops have drawn up plans for a "rule book" of beliefs that would expel liberals who refuse to abide by it. The proposals to introduce Papal-style laws come despite warnings that they could lead to a split in the Church.

The confidential document from the House of Bishops, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, claims that a "narrower definition of Anglican belief" is crucial to prevent the Anglican Communion from becoming embroiled in future disputes over issues such as homosexual clergy. The paper reveals the determination at the highest levels of the Church to impose powers to quash dissenters, backing a covenant - or set of rules - that would block Anglican clergy from pursuing liberal and potentially divisive policies. The bishops' paper warns that in order to preserve the unity of the Church, those who do not conform to a more prescriptive statement of faith will be "forced out".

Rowan Williams has just embarked on a three-month "study leave". He will return to work in September.

***********

*sigh*

Discpline

Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond to God’s guidance. Thus, disicpline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God - a time and place where God’s gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.

--Henri Nouwen
Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith

What We Don't Want To Hear

"Jesus said to his disciples, " I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you."

--John 16: 12-15
**
Well , there are lots of things that I can't bear to hear -- but the Spirit of truth will lead me to it all the same.

I read the following on Godspace.

"We all have the choice to respond to the brutalities of our world with despair, anger and bitterness or with hope, love and compassion. If we respond in anger and bitterness the violence and atrocities only seem to grow and multiply. If we respond in love and with compassion God’s presence is able to shine through and transform the horrors into hope. This does not belittle the horror of atrocities such as this but it does make us aware that our God, who is scarred and disfigured by all our sins, our God who suffers with us in the midst of pain, will one day make all things new.

As Christians we look forward to the advent of a new heaven and a new earth in which all suffering and pain and death will be done away with. At the centre of our faith is the hope that through Christ all that is distorted by evil can be transformed into the goodness and glory of God.

Several years ago I came across this poem by Michael Leunig It seems very appropriate for today.

There are only two feelings
Love and fear
There are only two languages
Love and fear
There are only two activities
Love and fear
There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results
Love and fear, love and fear

In meditating on this prayer I wrote the following reflections which are based on 1 John 4:18 “There is no fear in love because perfect love casts out fear.”

Fear is of this world, love is from God
Fear closes us in, love opens us up
Fear builds walls, love constructs bridges
With fear nothing is possible, with love all things are possible
Fear destroys, love creates
Fear kills, love gives life

God may we live by the love that flows from your spirit, the love that casts out fear and evil. May we reach out with care and compassion to all those who are hurting and in need. May we drive out the world’s fear with your perfect love.

Amen"

***

This made me think of C.S. Lewis:

"I am, indeed, far from agreeing with those who think all religious fear barbarous and degrading and demand that it should be banished from the spiritual life. Perfect love, we know, casteth out fear. But so do several other things--ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity. It is very desirable that we should all advance to that perfection of love in which we shall fear no longer; but it is very undesirable, until we have reached that stage, that we should allow any inferior agent to cast out our fear."

A friend of mine in management used to say that a lot of problems in business were due to "P.P" i.e., "Premature Power." The person is pretending to know and be something that he/she is not YET.

They may have the promise, the capacity , the aptitude, but NOT YET. They want to leap of the intermediate learning , apprenticing steps. You know, "Fake it till you make it" , (in and of itself, not a bad thing) but made into a law , it restricts learning, limits one's ability to listen. One's ignorance easily slips into the driver's seat and presumes to drive. What is it that we can't bear to hear? That we might be wrong about anything, particularly things that we care deeply about. Our own ignorance , passion and presumption are not enough to carry us over to the love of God that truly bridges the chasm where fear dwells.

In a similar way, we want to leap over all sorts of things (the very things that we can't bear to hear) and banish fear with love. But are we really there? Isn't part of the intermediate step one of discernment and doing battle with that which is fear-inducing?

Daniel Berrigan once said, "A good peace movement starts small and gets smaller."

This is his statement at his trial for civil disobedience:

On May 17th, 1968, Nine people, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother Father Phillip Berrigan, entered a draft board and removed draft files of those who were about to be sent to Viet Nam. They took these files outside and burned them with home-made napalm, a weapon commonly used on civilians by the U.S. forces. They then awaited their arrest by authorities. The following is the statement Dan Berrigan read in court during their trial.

Some ten or twelve of us (the number is still uncertain)

will, if all goes well (ill?) take our religious bodes

during this week

to a draft center in or near Baltimore

There we shall of purpose and forethought

remove the 1-A files sprinkle them in the public street

with home-made napalm and set them afire

For which act we shall beyond doubt

be placed behind bars for some portion of our natural lives

in consequence of our inability

to live and content in the plagued city

to say "peace peace" when there is no peace

to keep the poor poor

the thirsty and hungry thirsty and hungry

Our apologies good friends

for the fracture of good order the burning of paper

instead of children the angering of the orderlies

in the front parlor of the charnel house

We could not so help us God do otherwise

For we are sick at heart our hearts

give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children

and for thinking of that other Child of whom

the poet Luke speaks The infant was taken up

in the arms of an old man whose tongue

grew resonant and vatic at the touch of that beauty

And the old man spoke: This child is set

for the fall and rise of many in Israel

a sign that is spoken against.

Small consolation a child born to make trouble

and to die for it the First Jew (not the last)

to be subject of a "definitive solution"

And so we stretch out our hands

to our brothers throughout the world

We who are priests to our fellow priests

All of us who act against the law

turn to the poor of the world to the Vietnamese

to the victims to the soldiers who kill and die

for the wrong reasons for no reason at all

because they were so ordered by the authorities

of that public order which is in effect

a massive institutionalized disorder.

We say: Killing is disorder

life and gentleness and community and unselfishness

is the only order we recognize.

For the sake of that order

we risk our liberty our good name

The time is past when good men may be silent

when obedience

can segregate men from public risk

when the poor can die without defense

How many indeed must die

before our voices are heard

how many must be tortured dislocated

starved maddened?

How long must the world's resources

be raped in the service of legalized murder?

When at what point will you say no to this war?

We have chosen to say

with the gift of our liberty

if necessary our lives:

the violence stops here

the death stops here

the suppression of the truth stops here

this war stops here

Redeem the times!

The times are inexpressibly evil

Christians pay conscious indeed religious tribute

to Caesar and Mars

by the approval of overkill tactics by brinkmanship

by nuclear liturgies by racism by support of genocide

They embrace their society with all their heart

and abandon the cross

They pay lip service to Christ

and military service to the powers of death

And yet and yet the times are inexhaustibly good

solaced by the courage and hope of many

The truth rules Christ is not forsaken

In a time of death some men

the resisters those who work hardily for social change

those who preach and embrace the truth

such men overcome death

their lives are bathed in the light of the resurrection

the truth has set them free

In the jaws of death

they proclaim their love of the brethren.

We think of such men

in the world in our nation in the churches

and the stone in our breast is dissolved

we take heart once more.

***

What can I not bear to hear?

People, my own fellow citizens and candidates for the Presidency of the United States cheering for torture?
Hatred and demonization governing news and commentary on the public communications channels?
Our leaders willfully lying, then justifying the lies by clinging to Jesus?
Calls to violence.
Calls to pass laws requiring citizens to carry concealed weapons.
(Hell, why conceal them? Why not require citizens to mount machine guns on turrets on their cars? Isn't that the logical extension of the policy?)
Blaming the poor for being poor.
Lying about the poor, who cannot defend themselves against slander.
That we will continue indefinately in Iraq with no apology for the murder , mayhem, lawlessness and torture that we leave in our wake.
That if our soldiers speak out against illegal orders, they are censured or imprisoned.
That if our soldiers return broken in body and mind, they are hidden, marginalized and forgotton .

I could go on.

But I'll save that for another sermon.

***

Godspace

Onehouse has begun a group blog.

Love this poem that is posted there from here.

***

Here is a Celtic prayer attributed to Columba of Iona I have found really helps me when I am trying to focus and listen to God.

**

Sometimes in a lowly cell
In the presence of my God
I stand and listen.
In the silence of my heart I can hear his will
When I listen
Despairing people flock to me
They expect that I can see the answers
They ask my advice,
They say I am wise
I answer that nothing can deceive me
If I stand alone and silently listen
For I am but a servant
Who is guided by his king
When I listen
Sometimes in a lowly cell
In the presence of my God
I stand and listen

Radical Conversion

"Let us go from this place broken as bread to this world."
Leave the old behind.

**
As I may have mentioned, read Father Jake Stops the World's book discussion of Sara Miles' book "Take This Bread"
here
here
and here:

***
I found this Fr Jake Addendum quite amazing:

"Reading this book, with all the stories of those whose lives became meshed with Sara's as a result of this "radical conversion," was a very emotional experience for me. I found myself shouting aloud "Yes!" at some points, and quietly shedding tears at others. Read it. It is an amazing story.

I need to say something personal about hunger. I've said some of this before, but I need to say it again. And again.

As I've mentioned before, I spent a few of my teen years as a homeless boy, usually hiding from the police because I was a run away from various foster homes. During those years, I often went many days without a meal; sometimes without any food at all. If I came across a few pennies, I'd buy hard candy. Sucking on it made the craving for food a little less intense. In season, I'd feast on the wild berries that could be found along the borders of some of the city parks. Sometimes I'd sneak into the dorms of the university, looking for scraps in the dining halls. And sometimes I'd do even more desperate things to feed my craving need.

When this went on for a few months, the lack of nutrition caused unusual physiological changes. I became very weak. I would have to rest more often as I walked. I could no longer do the periodic odd jobs that supplied me with money for food, as I no longer had the strength to control the mower, or lift the sacks of charcoal onto the pallet. I once headed south from San Francisco, hitching rides with no destination in mind. I ended up in San Diego. The police picked me up for being a minor out past curfew. When they found out I was a run away, they sent me to the local juvenile hall. The next morning, I was led outside with the rest of the boys for calesthenics. I couldn't do it. Not even jumping jacks. The other boys got a good laugh out of it, of course. The staff were shocked by my weak attempts to flop my arms and legs. There was no stength left in my muscles. I was slowly starving to death.

There's another attribute of malnutrition that doesn't get mentioned much; the effect it has on the brain. Becoming so physically weak was usually accompanied by very strange thoughts and emotions. Sometimes I'd walk into a room and have to immediately leave because the sudden bombardment of stimuli coming from those who were present was too overwhelming. Paranoia was a constant companion. I would begin to avoid other people, and could often be found walking along the road muttering to myself. The boundaries between imagination and reality would begin to blur.

After about a month of meals every day, these symptoms would disappear. That is why when we offer someone from the streets a hand up, there needs to be at least thirty days given before we place expectations of employment or training on them. They need time to heal from malnutrition before they can function.

One other point: Because I was on the run and hiding from the police, I tried very hard to remain invisible. I never carried a bag or a backpack, and would wash up every morning in a public restroom. What amazed me was that most of those who were on the street with me also took great care to not draw attention to themselves, and made the effort to appear as if they were just like everyone else, even though many of them were not being sought out by the authorities. Why? Because they were ashamed. Because, in the eyes of society, they had not lived up to the expectations of the "American dream." They saw themselves as failures.

There are thousands of the invisible poor in our own backyards. They want to hold on to any scrap of dignity that they have left. We can honor this by freely helping them, with no strings attached. No names. No sign-ins. No records of their visit. If we don't do this, they may not be willing to receive our gift. Guarding our human dignity is a powerful thing.

After all, we're talking about food. Did you know that in the US, 20% of our food ends up in the garbage? There is enough. Why must we place conditions on who receives it? Food can be seen as an sacramental sign of grace; and since freely we have received, so freely we give.

Reach out to those who are slowly starving to death in your own backyard. Reach out to them, not because they are worthy, not because they deserve it, but because they are human; because they are children of the living God. And who knows, if you look deeply into to their eyes, you may just glimpse there the King who said to us, "Just as you have done this for the least of those who are of my family, you have done it for me."

J. Posted by Jake

**
I think that "Fr. Jake" has his own book(s) to write....

Oh, Shit

Just read on Just a Bump In the Beltway of Steve Gilliard's death this morning.

Permalink

**
I've collected up short bits about Steve and some acidic writing samples on Life Goes On?!

**
Not unrelated, I came upon a reference to "Something Happened a Long Time Ago" by Jon Carroll
It was written in l995, but is apropos to Steve's death. I never met Steve, but I was a "fan" , reading his great blog for years.

Steve could go from anger to joy in seconds, and do it seamlessly. His writing had passion, irreverence and tremendous lived wisdom. It was some of the best stuff I've ever read on the web. It exemplified some of the things I loved about "citizen journalism." It kicked the asses of the overpaid pundits, talking heads and the greats , who somewhere along the way had lost their souls. His writing said the things that we people who don't live in Washington and "do" politics for a living wanted to say. He told it like it is.

I miss that voice and that writing. I miss his insight and humor. I miss the many wise, profane and funny commenters from his blog.

Read "Something Happened a Long Time Ago."

Do you think there is something left in your life that you should go ahead and do?

Maybe?

****

JON CARROLL -- Something Happened A Long Time Ago

JON CARROLL

Wednesday, December 27, 1995

AS NEAR AS I can figure, today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Jeanne Steager. She was riding in a car on a stretch of Route 17 near Scotts Valley. The road was slick with rain. There was no median barrier back then, just a double yellow line.

A truck crossed over and hit her car. The only virtue that anybody could find in her death was that it was immediate. She was, as near as I can figure, 25 years old.

Jeanne Steager was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of California, a colleague of my then-wife. I did not know her all that well; my impressions of her today are all blended into one long dinner party at her house, with graduate student spaghetti and graduate student conversation. She had a husband named Peter, who later became one of my closest friends; she had smooth olive skin and deep brown eyes.

She wanted to go to Europe; I remember that. First her doctorate; then the trip to Greece. She had it all planned.

I was at the time commuting from Berkeley to a job at the San Jose Mercury News. I worked in the promotion department for a large, blustery man named Mr. Stern. He used to leave early and hide under the stairs to see if anyone tried to sneak out before 5. It was like working for your vice principal.

He was kind of a cartoon boss, really; he would have been amusing in a slapstick sort of way if my noncartoon salary had not paid the rent on my noncartoon house.

I wrote radio advertisements for the Mercury News that were read at the halftimes of San Jose State football games. I ran a kind of Keno-like circulation promotion game; I had to check thousands of entries a week to see if the numbers matched the ones I had previously drawn.

As I did, I repeated a sentence that had stuck in my head from some political science class. I thought it was from Marx: ``Man shall be saved from repetitive labor.'' Maybe Marx did say it; silly man.

SO THEN JEANNE STEAGER died of multiple head wounds, died instantly within sight of a gigantic plaster Santa Claus two days after Christmas. She was the first person I actually knew who died.

And what I could remember about her was her plans. What I could remember about her was the neat rows she had set down for her life, the lines on the graph paper that stretched in pleasing geometry well into the future.

I doubt that she was thinking, when she turned her head and saw the truck coming, ``Well, there goes that trip to Greece.'' But I thought that, later. I thought that the overlooked corollary to ``it's never too late'' is ``it's never too early.''

The day after Jeanne Steager died, I went into Mr. Stern's office and quit my job. I was out of there in an hour; I was back home for lunch. It's never too early. Plans are just guesses.

I SUPPOSE I AM bringing tidings of subversive cheer; I suppose I am suggesting that you consider a change. Quit your job if you hate it. Go on. I know these are hard times, and people fall off the edge, but God is passing out brain tumors too, and you might as well take the plunge. The plunge is all we've got.

When you're young you think that life stretches out indefinitely and you can take this crap for another decade. And the lesson of Jeanne Steager is, No, you bloody well can't. Life is of varying lengths, and actuarial tables are only averages, and sometimes you gotta close your eyes and jump. Even if it's scary; especially if it's scary.

Easy for me to say now; I have my dream job. I have my dream job because I quit that other job; that's a fact. Transcendence happens at precisely the same rate as that other stuff.

As Wendell Berry says: Practice resurrection.

**** ******* **** **

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/1995/12/27/DD61571.DTL

This article appeared on page D - 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Metaphor

Flying Heart

Every Angel

Angel #1, 2002, by Michael Markowitz. Charcoal,
pastel, and pigment on paper.

Detail of Angel, 2002-2003, by Michael Markowitz.
Charcoal, pastel, and pigment on paper.

Every Angel Is Terrible

Artwork by Michael Markowitz

(Lines from "Second Elegy")

Every angel is terrible.
And still, alas
knowing all that
I serenade you
you almost deadly
birds of the soul.
Where are the days of Tobias
when one of these
brightest of creatures
stood
at the simple front door
disguised a little
for the trip
and not so frightening
(a young man
like the one
who looked curiously
out at him).
If the dangerous archangel
took one step now
down toward us
from behind the stars
our heartbeats
rising like thunder
would kill us.
Who are you?
Creation's spoiled darlings
among the first to be perfect...
pockets of essence
ecstasy shields
tumultuous storms
of delightful feelings
then suddenly
separate
mirrors
gathering the beauty
that streamed away from them
back to their own faces again.

— Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by David Young
(from Duino Elegies,
copyright 1978 by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc.)

****

Last night we watched "Paris is Burning"

"The film explores the elaborately-structured Ball competitions in which contestants, adhering to a very specific category or theme, must "walk" (much like a fashion model's runway) and subsequently be judged on criteria including the "realness" of their drag, the beauty of their clothing and their dancing ability.

Most of the film alternates between footage of balls and interviews with prominent members of the scene, including Pepper LaBeija, Dorian Corey, Anji Xtravaganza, and Willi Ninja. Many of the contestants vying for trophies are representatives of "Houses" (in the fashion sense, such as "House of Chanel") that serve as intentional families, social groups, and performance teams. Houses and ball contestants who consistently won in their walks eventually earned a "legendary" status.

Jennie Livingston, who never went to film school and who spent 7 years making Paris Is Burning, concentrated on interviews with key figures in the ball world, many of whom contribute monologues that shed light on the ball culture as well as on their own personalities. In the film, titles such as "house," "mother," and "reading" emphasize how the subculture the film depicts has taken words from the straight and white worlds, and imbued them with alternate meanings, just as the "houses" serve as surrogate families for young ball-walkers whose sexual orientations have sometimes made acceptance and love within their own families hard to come by."

I found it very moving. The desire to be part of a family, a community, a group. And yes, titles such as "house" "mother" "children" were very deeply metaphorical. These men, who would probably never be mothers or fathers were taking on very motherly and fatherly roles to shepherd their younger members through the very hazardous routes open to young, gay or transgendered urban youth with a great deal of compassion.

Angels in their own way.

Ministry is all around us. It's answering a call, probably never thinking of God, or Jesus, or church or theology or liturgy. But all of those things are in us in some way, part of being human, part of being linked to others who we recognize. We want someone to remember us to love us to value us. Those who we remember and love and value thank us. It heals people.

This is part of a poem I am working on about all of this.

***

Paris is Burning

I never knew what "house" meant -
As in "house" music
Burlesque house, satire house
the popular "my-life-depends-on-this" vogue
so much deeper than the high budget fashion spread

Ex-tra-va-gan-za.
The house of extravaganza
The house of nin-ja.
The house of crazy celebrity parody
Why celebrity? Why known for being known?
It says: "Remember me."

Someone remember my name
as my house, my tribe
my people, my kind.
Those who know me or knew me once as a someone.

Maybe I'm just a no one, a nothing, an easily passed by fragment
A film clip that is cast to the cutting room floor
A discard filled up with uneasy emptiness
My life meaning nothing at all.

I want to lay claim to those who claimed me for their house
Who put their hands across my body
Who pronounced me the most real
In spite or maybe because of every part that is flawed
Or something that I can't change.

They take me in
We make each other more and more real
We become each others' mammas and pappas.

We anoint our prophets and our kings.
Remember us, the shape shifters
Those who float in both space and time
Populating dreams
Under girding cities filled with deep uncertain dreams
Yet to be decoded.