The Sleeper Must Wake

Sleeping

Whether you think it's trampy or not,
when we are not awake,
we really are ALL sleeping together.
Sawing logs, snoozing,
getting a little shuteye,
some sacktime,
heading to slumberland,
doing the blanket drill,
the bunk habit,
having a siesta fiesta,
a pajama party
or just getting forty winks
and a good night's rest

We're all setting alarms, reading a bit,
warming our feet and spooning in,
stealing the covers, hogging all the pillows or
taking up the whole bed, grass mat,
hammock or our bit of dry earth.
Whether the satin sheets, fur or flannels
are on the futon, floor or igloo ice
whether we are naked, night gowned
or wearing what we wore all day.
We have been doing this a long time together, alot.

Terrorists and tyrants,
the embargoed, enemies and occupying forces
within a few blocks of each other
lay down everyday
not only their weapons but their bodies,
anger and ideologies.
They give up. They surrender,
not to overwhelming odds or power
but to being...tired.
They know they can't win against it.
Something much bigger says
"I don't want to hear another peep out of you.
Now tuck each other in and go to sleep!"

Daniel Sisco, from A Breath On Stone: New & Selected Poems by Daniel Sisco.
Self-published, 2006

*****

What is it Necessary To Do To Be Saved?

An old man was asked, “What is it necessary to do to be saved?”
He was making rope, and without looking up from the work, he replied, “You are looking at it.”

The deep self-trance is a story we tell about ourselves, built up from bits and pieces of memory, to explain, to ourselves mainly, why we did what we did or react in the way we do, feel as we feel, or think as we think. It’s a story with plots and subplots, characters, heroes, villains, and a host of minor bit parts. It gives us a sense of congruence through life’s changes, an explanation for our thoughts and ideas, a modus operandei, a justification for all that we see we are about. We play different roles at different times in the self-story -- some we play very well, others more or less so-so, and still others rather reluctantly. but it is just a story, and it always begins with “Once upon a time....” -- which is to say, it is a fairy tale.

A coherent story, which includes all the major events and characteristics of our life, is a vital personal asset. The thrust of psychological therapy is to help us tell an accurate tale, not to leave anything out or to alter the fundamental facts, which are grist for the story line. For a good story gives some meaning, purpose, and use to our lives. Informal meditation is a common practice , an admirable human endeavor, an attempt to build a manageable story that we use to explain and justify our daily scenes.

The social environment and culture help, of course, because they are also stories that individuals in a group share among themselves. Society is a shared story built around the same structure and same plots as the self-story, a mirror, albeit a larger one, that reflects our inner theater. Our culture is competitive because our self-world is competitive. There are winners and losers, rewards and penalties, war and peace, ambition, cruelties, cultural biases and prejudices, and untold kindness and compassion. But these qualities are not “out there” in the dog-eat-dog world. They are reflections of the common experience of many individual self-worlds.

If we pay attention with a little bit of honesty, we’ll find the evidence for this playwriting and playacting ability in ourselves. Notice how you talk to yourself, argue, beg, or correct others around you, how you set up the scenes of encounter in your mind when feeling under siege from those more powerful than yourself. Notice the period pieces that you occasionally bring out onto the stage of your memory, how you rehearse scenes, replaying them again and again until you get them “right” to your satisfaction. Be aware of these little dramas and understand them for what they are, a defense against the immediate, unreflected moment, a contraction and a limitation of yourself into a manageable scene.

This storytelling ability, the deep self-trance, gives us the illusion of a separate self, a stage manager in the wings who directs the whole play of our lives. The sense of a separate self is a false sense. It feels real, of course, because we are so entranced by our “feeling” of independence. Our belief that it is real is only an assumption that we haven’t validated by our own experience. But it’s just an impersonation.

And like all imposters, it is very self-conscious about what it does, evaluating, measuring, assessing its performance, taking offense at rejections and criticism, glowing with self-congratulations at compliments and acceptance.

The sense of a separate and enduring self with its dramatics and story lines, this deep self-trance, is the aftermath of the tension between self-image and self-awareness. Self-image is the way we think, feel, sense, and perceive ourselves to be. In some areas we are very clear about ourselves. I like this and not that, I have this history and not another, these personality traits and moods and not other kinds of traits. In other areas we aren’t as clear or as sure about ourselves. Self-image is selective and to some extent fluid, changing to accommodate new experiences and new information. A healthy self-image is always updating itself. A weak or poor self-image tends to be rigid and unbending, dependent on outside support and affirmation.

Self-awareness is different. Whereas self-image has history, self-awareness is a-historical. Self-image is the way I see myself; self-awareness is the way I experience myself in various events of my moment-to-moment existence. When self-image and self-awareness are congruent, I sense a kind of background balance in my life. I’m not uncomfortable with the experiences that come my way, although most people are comfortable with themselves in a limited range of experiences.

Every so often, however, we are caught off guard and surprised by an experience of ourselves that doesn’t fit the picture. The contradiction between experience and image causes tension that can vary from wonderment, to self-doubt, to anxiety, to terror. Managing this tension between what I think and what I want, between my idea of myself and my unruly desires, between my self-bias and my experience, creates the deep self-trance, the sense of a separate and enduring self, the story line of my life. And it’s all driven by fear. The fear of falling apart.

The awareness of how fragile our sense of self is leads to a universal and potentially crippling trait: the temporality of our experiential human life. It is a given of human nature that the conditions of life are subject to change without notice. Thus, we are prone to worry. Change and worry go hand in hand. We try to prepare ourselves for the inevitable, for example, illnesses, transfers, retirement. We also habitually worry about it all, as it it’s important to train ourselves to worry well.

From one perspective we seem to be composed of a bundle of worry-questions, both spoken and unspoken. These worry-questions precede us like a leash dragging us through our day-to-day existence. We are barely aware of them, so routine have they become for us, yet they start when we awaken in the morning. “What am I going to do today?”
“What do I have to do?” “What am I going to wear?” “What shall I have for breakfast?” “What will people think of me if.....?” “Will I be liked?” “Will I be happy?” And so many other worry-questions that set the course of our day, questions that are just beyond the periphery of our awareness, silently steering us through the real and imaginary uncertainties of life.

Our lives are incidental. We hopscotch from incident to incident, event to event, accumulating as we go a bag full of strategies and defenses for our survival, hoping that we will never be caught off guard. We have all taken the Boy Scout motto to heart: Be prepared. But when we examine our personal history, we notice that despite our best efforts, none of us has lived the life we intended. And worrying has not changed that.

Of course, bad things can happen-- unfortunate misunderstandings, unexpected tragedies, and dreaded illnesses. No one is guaranteed a safe life. My life is out of my hands. It is not gong to work out the way I expect or hope it will. All of my knowledge, all of my experience, and all of my planning, do not adequately prepare me to live this moment. and in some fundamental sense I do no live my life. I live an I-don’t -know life. Rather, I am lived, and I am responsible for it.

The worry-questions, these anxieties, are expressions of our egocentricity. Their parent is self-bias, the compulsive need to preserve, at all costs, the comfortable sense we have of ourselves. And how fragile that sense is. Change a routine, we are threatened and respond with anger, pouting, or playing the martyr.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be free of this theater! It does get tedious, taking up so much of our time and energy in posturing and dramatizing and arranging our lives into some mildly satisfactory coherence. It is so tiresome servicing the hidden agenda of the deep self-trance, which gives everyone else their due to keep them at bay, because it expects everyone else to give it its due, independence. That’s the hidden agenda, self-preservation at all cost.

At some point in life almost everyone gets weary of managing the tension that keeps the fiction about the self alive. The story and strategies begin to fail, and people suspect that the meanings that explain their lives, the purposes they’ve dedicated it to and the use they’ve put it to, don’t match up with an elusive sense of life that is beginning to trickle through to consciousness. It is time to go behind the story to the fundamental facts of life just as they are without protective interpretations. The task is quite daunting, for it requires the loss of self, the loss of the sense of a personal history and a hoped-for future, the loss of everything that we’ve built up around ourselves. We are required to lose the self sheathed in its protective trance.

The anonymous desert saying poses a question, but a question that is radically different from the anxious annoyances that glue self-image to self-awareness forming the deep self-trance. It isn’t an easy question to formulate, much less to ask, but it is the fundamental question of life.
No one can help another person in this task, for all individuals must find a meaningful way of asking it for themselves. There is only one question worth asking, one worthy of an answer, one that drives the evolution of consciousness: How do I face life? In the story someone asked an old man, a hermit in the desert, the question this way: “What is it necessary to do to be saved?” Whoever this person was in the story, he or she paid an enormous price to ask this question, which was formulated out of personal experiences, doubts, and humility.

We hope that the right person, the right reputation, the right physical conditions, the right psychological experiences, will result in our contentment. We aren’t looking for genuine happiness. We are looking for its counterfeit, relief and satisfaction. In other words, we believe in the “and-they-lived-happily-ever-after” syndrome. We might laugh at it on the surface, but at a deeper level no one can really convince us that it is just a fairy-tale ending. It takes years of life experience to erode our infantile faith. Again and again, we mistakenly build our hopes on the same optimistic assumptions, only to be disappointed again and again. For happiness is independent of, and prior to, any and all of life’s circumstances and conditions.

Our immediate tendency is to overlook our present experience, in search of an ideal formula for happiness. We neglect to see in the current conditions and circumstances of our life the happiness we pursue under the camouflage of contentment. As a result, the unavoidable, unexpected, and unwanted fruit of our search is doubt, a doubt that, if allowed to work its magic, will focus a glaring light on our own inadequacy. We live a gray and bland existence peppered periodically with excitement. If we are prepared to learn from our experiences and to bear the burden of doubt, then we will be led to humility. Humility is the simple and keen awareness that we cannot help ourselves in any fundamental way. We cannot make ourselves happy. We cannot make ourselves good. We cannot save ourselves from our foolishness. But we might be able to learn what we can do.

An uncommon honesty was behind the question this unknown person asked: “What is it necessary to do to be saved?” It was a question that welled up from the depths of his being like a groan. It drove him to despair, but it also drove him to the desert.

Just as it is rare to ask this question, so it is rare to have it answered so clearly and compassionately . In the current religious climate those who are prepared to ask such a personally challenging a question too often encounter stock religious answers with all the life drained from them. The old man’s response was neither trivial nor flippant. Nor is it as simplistic as it at first sounds. The old hermit had done his work, which burned away the opaque filter of his self-bias so that he saw vividly and keenly life just as it is. One with the Divine, he was free to find himself and the Divine in whatever happens to be happening. Another anonymous desert saying has it, “God investigates three things in us: mind, word and deed.” This old man had penetrated to the heart of nondual consciousness, had gone past the contradiction between emptiness and mental content appreciating the rightful place of the intellect, and expressed his liberation in the everyday ordinary events and obligations of life. In a later century another anonymous spiritual master would express this liberation for one of his troubled students this way:

Put the strict way on one side and the lax way on the other, and look instead for what is hidden between them; once you have found this you will be free in spirit to pick up or leave any of the other things as you wish...What, you may ask, is this hidden something? Quite simply, it is God...God is hidden between them, and you cannot find him with your intelligence...So choose him, and you will be silently speaking, speaking silence, eating in fasting, fasting in eating, and so forth....This loving choice of God, knowing what to set aside in order to seek him out with the steadfastness of a pure heart, being able to put both opposites aside when they present themselves as the be-all and end-all of spiritual aspiration, is the best way of finding God you can learn in this life.

What is it necessary to do to be saved? The old man “was making rope and without looking up from the work, he replied, ‘You are looking at it.’” It doesn’t sound like a very profound answer. However, the answer fitted the question perfectly. The old man took the measure of the person before him and compassionately revealed the obvious, and the almost obvious, to this young seeker on the verge of liberation from the conflicts and fictions of an independent and separate self.

It is so tempting to set religion apart from the ordinary, making of it a sort of fairyland amusement part. This is a modern-day rendition of an ancient heresy, Manicheism, which tried to separate reality into spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane. Salvation is healing that illusory split. How do we do that ? We don’t . It is already done. it already always is. The “split” between God and man, the ordinary and the holy, the sacred and the profane, is a prop in our imaginary self-story. It does not exist and never really did. Our task is to realize that fact.

Salvation is an everyday ordinary experience. If Christianity really does proclaim good news, then the good news is that everything is redeemed. Nothing is condemned. All that is left to do is to realize it. No condition of life precludes happiness. No condition of life increases it. For a given individual making rope is as holy and effective and expressive as any ritual religious act. The simple act of making rope, or washing dishes, or walking to the office, or talking on the phone, does not imply anything other than itself. Nor is it meant to. Everything is as it should be. give up the search. It is right here. It is obvious.


(From the remarkable book, Listen To The Desert; Secrets of Spiritual Maturity Fro the Desert Fathers and Mothers by Gregory Mayers)

Procrastination

God has promised forgiveness to your repentance; but he has not
promised tomorrow to your procrastination.
  - St. Augustine

Everything Mirrors God

Chagall's Abraham and the Three Angels



"What do prophets do?" asks Rabbi Heschel. "Prophets interfere."

***

"Hildegard says every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of divinity. that's the tradition, and it's a wonderful tradition. God looks at us as in a mirror and sees the Godself. We are divine mirrors. And of course mirrors need light. A mirror in the dark is no good as a mirror. Mirrors are needy; they have to receive. This theme of mirrors that he refers to is very common in the mystical tradition; in fact the term "speculative mysticism" is about mirror mysticism. The Latin word for mirror is speculum. Dionysius is saying that things are mirrors of divinity. It's not about speculating and turning mysticism into a philosophical act of rationalization. It's about finding the mirror image in things. Everything mirrors God."

--The Physics of Angels
Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet

Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

***

"To study angels is to shed light on ourselves, especially those aspects of ourselves that have been put down in our secularized civilizations, our secularized educational systems, and even our secularized worship system. By secularization, I mean anything that sucks the awe out of things."

--The Physics of Angels

***

The divine angelic hierarchy is more than a collection of celestial beings; they are both inner and outer states of consciousness, constantly presenting an opportunity to us for our divine awakening. Now, more than ever, is the awareness dawning within the hearts and minds of people everywhere that the Divine is a part of our spiritual ancestry. The souls of the earth are awakening from a long spirited sleep to a great mystery -- that we are part and parcel of the great angels of light and love. This is the reality which is unfolding before us like a flower, right now in our world and in our lives.

-- Robert J. Grant

***

Birthday

Today , fast fading , is my birthday.

My niece in NY is in labor with her first child. I hope that he/she is born soon so that he/she can share my birthday with me.

Here's a quote:

"What makes our lives so horrible is that our salvation never comes in the form we would have chosen."

- John L'Heureux

But I think that that's what makes life wonderful and God inevitable. Like we would get to choose.

Others:

"Scholarship has long distinguished between two strains of thought that proceeded in the West from human knowledge of God. In one, the ascetic's metaphysic, the world is far from God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infinitely other than God, furled away from him like the end of a long banner falling. This notion makes, to my mind, a vertical line of the world, a great chain of burning. The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many peoples in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here, if nowhere else. By these lights the world is flattened on a horizontal plane, singular, all here, crammed with heaven, and alone. But I know that it is not alone, nor singular, nor all. The notion of immanence needs a handle, and the two ideas themselves need a link, so that life can mean aught to the one, and Christ to the other."

Annie Dillard
-- Holy the Firm

***

An Orchestra of Monkeys

"In practising spiritual disciplines as well as in trying to acquire faith, most of us are like monkeys. We do not understand the saint's inner state, and we are trying to attain it by the mere mimicry of its outward signs. We copy his actions and ideas, but because they do not really mean anything to us the task is an unproductive drudgery. For example, a monkey might, with some accuracy, describe an orchestra as a collection of people who blow through metal and wooden tubes, thump upon the skins of pigs, and scrape the entrails of dead cats with lengths of horsehair. We, of course, can give a fuller and more intelligible description of the work and nature of an orchestra because we understand its true meaning, which is music. But to a monkey music means nothing; it is simply a succession of noises produced by blowing, thumping, and scraping. Yet because the monkey is envious of human accomplishments, he may readily be persuaded (until bored) to imitate human actions that mean nothing to him, to go through the motions of playing a trumpet or a violin with results far from meaningful and musical. A human being, too, can learn and master all the techniques of music and yet never be an inspired musician.

So too, the moral splendour, the interior peace, and the spiritual power of saints and mystics are things which millions of us would like to possess. But it avails nothing to ape the exterior actions or even the interior ideas of such inspired persons unless we understand the meaning which these ideas and actions express. Apart from knowledge and appreciation of this meaning, our efforts to be like the great ones are so many attempts to produce the cause by the effect, to make the tail wag the dog. Now the meaning which saint and mystic express in idea and action is God. They think and act as they do because they are in a special way possessed by this life which is God, somewhat as the heart and mind of a dancer are possessed by the music which he interprets as bodily movement.

The idea of God is itself no more than an interpretation of the mysterious reality whereby the saint is moved and possessed; it is a life, a being, translated into a form of thought as one might try to represent a colour by a shape, striving to interpret beauty of tone by beauty of line. Such interpretations are the genesis of all religious doctrine, both metaphysical and moral; they are the instruments and techniques for expressing the divine meaning. But in the hands of so many persons they become like musical instruments in the hands of monkeys; they lack all inner significance to those who use them and those who watch them so used. The one hopes that this process of imitation will somehow make him a saint and a possessor of eternal life, though he knows not the true nature of these ideals. The other stands by in sheer bewilderment at so much activity without meaningful result.

Christian faith and practice have lost force because the enormous majority of Christians, both devout and nominal, do not know what they mean. Let it be said at once that such knowledge is not a matter of mere learning, of philosophical and theological acumen. Indeed, the theologian has often just as little grasp of the meaning of his religion as anyone else. He knows ideas; he knows the relations between these ideas; he knows the historical events--the story of Christ--upon which these ideas are based. He knows the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and the Atonement and can describe them with accuracy. But because he does not know, or even apprehend, what they mean, having no consciousness of union with God, his description of them--while correct as far as it goes--is as uninformative and lacking in significance as the monkey's description of an orchestra.

This theologian does not fail to grasp the meaning of his religion just because he is a pure academician without interest in its practice. For his practice, as much as his thought, is imitation. Monkey-fashion, he imitates the actions of the Fathers and the saints along with their ideas, attributing the fact that he does not become a saint to not imitating hard enough."

Alan Watts
Behold the Spirit
Written in 1947

***

"When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky."
- Buddha

***

and

Here are some quotes from the first chapter: Mysticism and Morality.

"The most releasing thing that anybody can possibly understand is that our inner feelings are never wrong. They may not be a correct guide to how we should act, of course. If you feel that you hate someone intensely, it isn't necessarily right to go up to that person and cut his throat. But it is right that you should have the feeling of hate. For you see, when a person comes to himself, he comes to be one with his own feelings. And that is the only way to control them.

"The sailor always keeps the wind in his sail. Whether he wants to sail with the wind or against it, he always uses the wind. He never denies the wind."

"In the same way, a person has to keep in contact with his own feelings. Whether he wants to act as his feelings obviously suggest or in a different way, he still has to keep his feelings with him, because they are his own essential self. As soon as he abandons his feelings, he has lost himself. He becomes an empty mask with no real life behind it. And all his protestations of love and goodwill will be hollow."

"So what the mystic feels while in the mystical state of mind is the divinity, the glory, of everything that is. And when we apply that mystical insight to the moral sphere, it is one's genuine feelings that are divine and glorious."

from The Culture of Counter-Culture: The Edited Transcripts (Alan Watts Love of Wisdom Library)

New Mexico

No Comment

Scott Horton

November 29

Cather’s New Mexico Sky

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

–Willa Sibert Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop bk vii, ch 4 (1927)

[Permanent link]

Rev JPH

Loved this post from "Of Course I Could be Wrong"

i love a good funeral

I adore funerals. Or, rather, I adore arranging and presiding at funerals. Every one of my funeral services is like a West End or Broadway production. Luvvies, I give them my all.

I spend ages with the family and friends of the deceased, finding out as much as possible about the person who has died. Not just the facts of their life but who they were, what they enjoyed, what made them tick. Then after discussing what they want from the service with the mourners I go off and do the creative stuff.

I hold very lightly to the official Church of England service (it's a bit boring and most of the people I bury or cremate wouldn't be familiar with its language and imagery). I've got rid of most of the prayers and stuff and I have replaced them with readings and poems from the more general English folk culture. I have a large repertoire and I chop and change, what I include, depending on the needs of each service. I also write a new sermon for each funeral. I know priests who have one funeral sermon and they just change the names and a few facts each time. This is not good.

As you would guess, my favourite task is getting the right music. In church services I love experimenting with solo voices from the choir loft, folk groups, brass bands and I liase very closely with the organist. Anything that will help the mourners remember and pay their respects is allowable in my book.

At a crematorium the scope for music is restricted but I always have a piece of music playing as the mourners enter. I also have music at the end of the service, during which I do not allow the undertaker to whisk the congregation away as I like to give the mourners an opportunity to sit and reflect.

I always discuss the music with the relatives and friends beforehand and, sometimes, the deceased will have left specific instructions. However, I do see my role as being proactive as I know what works and what doesn't work. (I hate it when undertakers try to get involved in this part of the funeral. They know as much about liturgy as I know about embalming). However, because I have a very, very wide view of what is appropriate, I have never said a definite "no" to anybody. What is important is the care you take choosing exactly the right music with exactly the right words. Also, you shouldn't just pick the first version of "Amazing Grace," or whatever, that you come across. The performance of the music has to be right. Some people are Kings College Choir types and some people are Shirley Bassey types. The same piece of music, sung by two different performers, will create a completely different atmosphere and say something completely different about the deceased. You have to choose the right tune and the right version. This takes time and a lot of research.

At the funeral, I don't so much preside as perform. I make them laugh and I make them cry. Not that I'm the centre of the performance. I'm more like an actor making it possible for his audience to understand the words and plot of the play. The trick to this is very simple. You must treat every funeral service as if it is the most important service you have ever taken in your whole life. There can be no exceptions to this because, although you may feeling a bit down or excited about going out that night, for the mourners it is, actually, the most important funeral service you have ever taken. They must never know that you may do two or three a week and that you do each one just as conscientiously.

I'm conducting a funeral this morning. It's just a crem job, there will only be half a dozen people there, but we will give it our all. At the end of the service I want everybody there, including myself, to know that we have done the right thing, we have done our duty, we have paid our respects and honoured the deceased. Above all I want them to remember this service as it should be as important and memorable to them as a wedding ceremony or Christening.

Posted by MadPriest

***
I personally enjoy funerals more than weddings , certainly more than christenings. And yes, that theatrical element is present and desirable. The funeral music is crucial. It's about capturing the spirit, the metaphor, the essence. What is a life, after all? How do we sum it up or grieve the loss of someone who has been part of us?

In my mother's funeral, I used Leroy Anderson's "Trumpeter's Lullaby" and Ella Fitzgerald's "Do I Love You, Do I?" We read poetry, we read psalms. I set out to make people laugh, to make them cry, to make them ashamed. People came who hadn't seen my mother for decades. It was important for us all to acknowledge one another and the slivers of life we had shared together, both for good and not so good.

We also had hymn singing. A business acquaintance of my brother's who attended the funeral was an opera singer. He really carried "For the Beauty of the Earth." My mother had been a church organist, and I felt it was important to have all kinds of music, as well as singing. At the end, the organist we had hired said she felt like she had gotten to know mother from the funeral. She said, "All of we organists are pretty eccentric."

It was a beautiful thing.

I think a poorly done funeral is a disgrace. At my sister-in-law's dad's funeral, they had a random Baptist preacher do the honors. Her father and her family had only been religious in the most perfunctory way -- really not believers. In the middle of the funeral service, the old Baptist minister started up an altar call, telling people that they needed to save themselves from hell. Her brother stood up and said, "well now, I think we're done here," and took the old gent's elbow and escorted him to the door and turned off the lights. A shame.

Laozi

Statue of the Venerable Master (Laozi) in Quangzhou, China.
Photo by Lavelk under the CC2.0 license.

Laozi on the Futility of Heavy-Handed Rule

Whoever undertakes to rule the kingdom and to shape it according to his whim—I foresee that he will fail to reach his goal. That is all.

The kingdom is a living being. It cannot be constructed, in truth! He who tries to manipulate it will spoil it, he who tries to put it under his power will lose it.

Therefore: Some creatures go out in front, others follow, some have warm breath, others cold, some are strong, some weak, some attain abundance, others succumb.

The wise man will accordingly forswear excess, he will avoid arrogance and not overreach.

–Laozi (老子), Daodejing (道德經) No. 29 (4th century BCE)(following the Richard Wilhelm transl. 1911)

***

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.
Their wisdom was unfathomable.
There is no way to describe it;
all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful
as someone crossing an iced-over stream.
Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.
Courteous as a guest.
Fluid as melting ice.
Shapable as a block of wood.
Receptive as a valley.
Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
she is present, and can welcome all things.

Tao Te Ching

by Stephen Mitchell

Quick Burst of Violent Action

Cartoon from Mad Priest

US is ‘worst’ imperialist: archbishop

Abul Taher

THE Archbishop of Canterbury has said that the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.

Rowan Williams claimed that America’s attempt to intervene overseas by “clearing the decks” with a “quick burst of violent action” had led to “the worst of all worlds”.

In a wide-ranging interview with a British Muslim magazine, the Anglican leader linked criticism of the United States to one of his most pessimistic declarations about the state of western civilisation.

He said the crisis was caused not just by America’s actions but also by its misguided sense of its own mission. He poured scorn on the “chosen nation myth of America, meaning that what happens in America is very much at the heart of God’s purpose for humanity”.

Williams went beyond his previous critique of the conduct of the war on terror, saying the United States had lost the moral high ground since September 11. He urged it to launch a “generous and intelligent programme of aid directed to the societies that have been ravaged; a check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories; a demilitarisation of their presence”.

He went on to suggest that the West was fundamentally adrift: “Our modern western definition of humanity is clearly not working very well. There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul.”

Williams suggested American leadership had broken down: “We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.”

He contrasted it unfavourably with how the British Empire governed India. “It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did — in India, for example.

“It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together — Iraq, for example.”

In the interview in Emel, a Muslim lifestyle magazine, Williams makes only mild criticisms of the Islamic world. He said the Muslim world must acknowledge that its “political solutions were not the most impressive”.

He commends the Muslim practice of praying five times a day, which he says allows the remembrance of God to be “built in deeply in their daily rhythm”.

Read the interview in full

*****

Dear Archbishop of Canterbury;

You are about 6 years late to this party.

Sincerely,
__

Dreaming....

While I was in Florida, I had a dream one night. I dreamed that I had to go and meet someone and go with them somewhere. There was something we wanted to do, something artistic. Something with dance? Something like a performance that included all people, skilled and unskilled. I went and found this person, and started figuring out how to get to where we were supposed to go. There was no map, so I had to find the place from memory. Who was I going with? A woman, a young woman, an angry woman, someone I knew, someone who didn't trust me or like me. She wouldn't ride in the car with me, everything I said or suggested she resisted.

I went to where I remembered, but it was a pretty rambling disorganized journey. We kept following in separate cars, after the road was blocked or was otherwise impassible. My companion was not a lot of help, but I just kept on.

Then we had to get out and walk. There were lots of people it was a though we had emerged into an entirely different realm. Young people and classes. Bookstores. A crowded lively campus. It was all familiar to me but not to her. She didn't know where we were and kept expressing her discomfort.She was very restless and continued to offer resistance to every joy. I had the thought that I was bigger and older - more powerful. We happened on a performance. It was a bunch of old ladies dancing I think. I made her stop and watch. Then she wanted to go home.

I tried to give her directions back but I had no words. I had become mute. We were in a "thin" place -- a transitional place. I thought I would spend the night there somewhere but ended up turning around and going home. I hadn't done or achieved what I wanted to. Who was the woman? What errand brought us to this place? What was the place? So much of the dream was understood within the dream or assumed. But outside the dream it seems impenetrable.

Then I thought, there is a part of me that is very impatient and annoying.

I have to remember that "I" am more powerful than that wretched part.

Maybe the dream was to reassure me that the part of me that can help "her" through it is bigger stronger and more powerful than "her" shenanigans.

I wrote a poem about this.

*******

You're Dreaming

Solar winds
scorched into the cones of my eyes.
Looking back
Who is that?
but there is only vertical brilliance.

Dreaming and looking
I encounter the dance of the old ladies.
I inhale the dance of the street people
I await eagerly the dance I can't describe
I remember the dance of the hunt
The seeking out and searching dance
The dance of telegraphing messages
Sending them either ahead
or behind, depending on how you're facing.

On my way to shine
Running through
blocked roads
stopped traffic
and bottlenecks
at breakneck speed.
My companion, my double
Checks and checkmates my every move.

In every dream
Lie roads too narrow or strewn
Road that seems endless
Call my secret name.
This road is one
Traveled solely by memory.

Doppleganger shadow me --
What pas de deux
Counts our steps as we trip and turn ?
Clumsy as we strive to lead

I can't get her to go quietly.

Why won't she ride in my car?
Where are we going?

My friend, my compassionate self
That in me funded by a 25 year long prayer
Rise and take the hand
Of the one who has to fight everything
In her path.

Take the power of
the sun
the sky
Intimate with both difficulty
and with grace
God here to remind me
of our half remembered origins
Illuminating the way
without flaw.

Go Into Your Heart

Blake's Drawing of the Wise and Foolish Virgins

"A young monastic came upon an elder one day sitting among a goup of praying, working, meditating people.

"I have the capacity to walk on water," the young disciple said. "So, let's you and I go onto that small lake over there and sit down and carry on a spiritual discussion."

Bur the Teacher answered, "If what you are trying to do is to get away from all of these people, why do you not come with me and fly into the air and drift along in the quiet, open sky and talk there."

And the young seeker replied, "I can't do that because the power you mention is not one that I possess."

And the Teacher explained, "Just so. Your power of remaining still on top of the water is one that is possessed by fish. And my capacity of floating through the air can be done by any fly. These abilities have nothing to do with real truth and, in fact, may simply become the basis of arrogance and competition, not spirituality. If we're going to talk about spiritual things we should really be talking here."

****

Once upon a time, an ancient monastic tale says, the Elder said to the businessperson:

"As the fish perishes on dry land, so you perish when you get entangled in the world. The fish must return to the water and you must return to the spirit."

And the businessperson was aghast. "Are you saying that I must give up my business and go into a monastery?" the person asked.

And the Elder said, "Definitely not. I am telling you to hold on to your business and go into your heart."

*****


(Two stories from Joan Chittister's book "Wisdom Distilled From the Daily")

Per Crucem ad Lucem

Kierkegaard on reading Scripture

I wasn’t going to post on Kierkegaard today, but I came across this provocative statement in his Journal and thought it worth sharing. On face value, I suspect that many of us would disagree with what Kierkegaard is proposing here. Indeed, his own expository practice and adoration of Scripture might in itself challenge these thoughts. However, might he not be pressing on something that is important to hear in these days when bibliolatry abounds (as it does at least in some circles of the Christian community; of course, rampant bible neglect also abounds, and that to the equal starvation of the people of God, and so of the world …)?

Fundamentally a reformation which did away with the Bible would now be just as valid as Luther’s doing away with the Pope. All that about the Bible has developed a religion of learning and law, a mere distraction. A little of that knowledge has gradually percolated to the simplest classes so that no one any longer reads the Bible humanly. As a result it does immeasurable harm; where life is concerned its existence is a fortification of excuses and escapes; for there is always something one has to look into first of all, and it always seems as though one had first of all to have the doctrine in perfect form before one could begin to live that is to say, one never begins.

The Bible Societies, those vapid caricatures of missions, societies which like all companies only work with money and are just as mundanely interested in spreading the Bible as other companies in their enterprises: the Bible Societies have done immeasurable harm. Christendom has long been in need of a hero who, in fear and trembling before God, had the courage to forbid people to read the Bible. That is something quite as necessary as preaching against Christianity’.

- Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard (ed. Alexander Dru; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 150.

Posted by Jason Goroncy

http://cruciality.wordpress.com/

***

also, from the same blog

Žižek on transcendent meaning, authority and freedom

Commenting on Job’s three theological friends, Slavoj Žižek contends that ‘God is the only true materialist … [God] comes and says there is no transcendent meaning, everything is a miracle … there is no transcendent master, which is why I think we have to read Christ as a repetition of Job. What dies on the cross with Christ? What dies is not an earthly representative of a transcendent. What dies is precisely God as this transcendent master of the universe. What dies on the cross for me is the idea of God as the ultimate guarantee of meaning … The lesson of Christianity … of Christ … [is that] we cannot afford this withdrawal. When we are confronted with horrible things … holocaust, concentration camps or other similar catastrophes it is a little bit vulgar to say, “This only appears to us as a catastrophe because of your limited perspective, withdrawal back and you will see how it contributes to harmony, or whatever”. There is no big other! This is why I think this would be a kind of more materialist reading why Christ truly sacrificed himself. The message is “All we can do is here”; there is no father up there who takes care of it … It is not “Trust God”. No. God trusts us. All that can be done, we should do it. In this sense, with this incomplete notion of reality, … it opens up the space for freedom. There is freedom only in an ontologically unfinished reality’.

***

Wonderful.

Are You beam-blind?

A Lie That Tells The Truth

"Writing my memories gave time the appearance of a river. It flowed onward and forward, broad and unhurried. That was because the story started at midstream, when my character, Joel, sometimes also called "I" was in his twenties. Where was he going? He had no idea, but I did. He was going on a downward spiral toward the discovery of the true "I", about which no story can be told, because it is the witnessing mirror of life, forever unaltered by the scenes that pass through it. Downward because, in the topography of the soul, that is where the hell realms are. Even in hell, one can find the jewel without price. On the way there, he would pass through relationships, places, adventures, ordeals, all grist for the storytelling mill. But he would arrive at his destination in a region to which memory could have no access."

A Lie That Tells The Truth
Harpers Magazine
November '07
by Joel Agee

****

Some candle clear burns somewhere I come by.
I muse at how its being puts blissful back
With yellowy moisture mild night’s blear-all black,
Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye.
By that window what task what fingers ply,
I plod wondering, a-wanting, just for lack
Of answer the eagerer a-wanting Jessy or Jack
There God to aggrándise, God to glorify.—

Come you indoors, come home; your fading fire
Mend first and vital candle in close heart’s vault:
You there are master, do your own desire;
What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?

–Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Candle Indoors first published in: Poems (1918)

[Permanent link]

****
"A brother asked an old man: What is humility? And the old man said: To do good to those who hurt you. The brother said: If you cannot go that far, what should you do? The old man replied: Get away from them and keep your mouth shut."

and....

"Abba Or said: Either flee from people, or laugh at the world and the people in it, and make a fool of yourself in many things."

{both from Henri J.M. Nouwen Desert Wisdom: Sayings From the Desert Father}

**

On that note -- off to Florida to see my family.

Cheers!

A Good Day

Meditations on Thankfulness

Junk Trust

Mad Priest graphic

Hemmings: Will you be disappointed to be going back to television after this ride?
Eddie Langston: Oh, no. I have a glorious love-hate relationship with TV.
Hemmings: How so?
Eddie Langston: TV scares me. It makes everything seem credible.
Hemmings: Why is that so bad?
Eddie Langston: If everything seems credible then nothing seems credible. You know, TV puts everybody in those boxes, side-by-side. On one side, there's this certifiable lunatic who says the Holocaust never happened. And next to him is this noted, honored historian who knows all about the Holocaust. And now, there they sit, side-by-side, they look like equals! Everything they say seems to be credible. And so, as it goes on, nothing seems credible anymore! We just stopped listening!

Robin Williams movie Man of the Year

Slacktivist:

Who do you trust? (pt. 1)

Tristero had a thoughtful post last week on "Intelligent Design Creationism and the Erosion of Trust."

Reading this post on the evolution of HIV, tristero realized that, despite being a fairly clever layperson, the science of this particular debate was beyond him. The matter being discussed was so particular to the discipline of the experts in that field that:

... the rest of us have neither the time, the inclination, nor often the analytical talent to follow the details. ... The knowledge and data needed are too specialized.

You see where this is going? ID creationists are deliberately forcing the question of who we laypeople will trust. Since we are not in any position to judge Smith vs Behe on the playing field of the data, we must rely on irrelevant social heuristics to decide who makes the better case. ... Since I can't understand the argument as an argument, how do I determine who I wish to trust?

That's an excellent question and a keen insight into the way in which promoters of junk science deliberately seek to push the dispute away from questions of fact to questions of trust. Tristero thinks that tactic has to be confronted explicitly -- that this is a game we should refuse to play. I think he's right about that (go read the whole post in which he makes that case). That way lies madness -- treating the world like a game of "Family Feud" in which there are no true or false answers, no actual facts, only the arbitrary opinions of "100 people surveyed, top five answers on the board."

Yet tristero's question remains vital: "How do I determine who I wish to trust?" Many of us are experts on one or two subjects. Some exceptional people even manage to be experts on half a dozen different things. But none of us is an expert on every subject, so we are all faced, at one time or another, with the dilemma of being a layperson forced to decide between competing experts.

Once upon a time, this was a key function of journalists, and particularly of political journalists. Faced with competing and contradictory claims, journalists' job was to evaluate those claims to determine as best as possible which (or whether either) corresponded with objective reality. In the case of particularly complex and specialized disputes, it was the journalists' job to find disinterested experts who could interpret the dispute and serve as a kind of referee. This task has been largely abandoned by journalists because: A) it's hard work, involving lots of reading and research and thinking and stuff; and B) reporting the conclusion that one side or the other (or both) was arguing something not supported by reality often resulted in one side or the other (or both) being upset with this conclusion and saying mean things about you and not inviting you to all the cool cocktail parties and correspondents' dinners and stuff, so who needs the grief?

So now journalists see their job differently. They no longer consider it their responsibility to try to evaluate the competing claims of the experts, only to report both sides of the dispute accurately (i.e., to reproduce the exact language, no matter how loaded, of each party in the dispute). Call it stenography, or he-said/she-said, this isn't helpful. The result is pseudo-journalism that says, "Some scientists say X, others say Not X. It's all very complicated." Or, in the case of political journalism, you get something like this:

"The Ins say this legislation will create 20,000 new jobs in the city, reduce crime and improve test scores in our schools. The Outs say it will produce economic stagnation, lawlessness and chaos. Back to you, Bill."

The unstated portion of all such reports would go something like this:

"For all I know, either side could be right. There's some kind of policy study that claims to sort all of this out, but it's really long and boring and I'm lazy and not too bright. So I don't know ... flip a coin, people."

The inevitable result of this approach to political reporting is the obsessive coverage of what tristero describes as "irrelevant social heuristics" -- discussions of candidates' hair, dress, "gravitas" or personal appeal. Policy disputes, no less than elections, are treated as horse races -- ignoring the substance of the competing claims and focusing exclusively on which side seems to be more persuasive, or to be "resonating with the voters."

This is junk journalism in the service of junk politics and junk governance, and none of it is compatible with a healthy democracy.

Just as the proponents of junk science are deliberately trying to push the debate away from questions of fact and into the realm of trust, so too the proponents of junk politics are actively promoting junk journalism -- moving away from questions of fact, policy and substance and into the realm of trust. Actually, "trust" isn't quite right. Trustworthiness, after all, is a concrete, measurable, verifiable thing. The realm of "trust" advocated by the proponents of junk science, junk politics and junk journalism is none of those things. It substitutes an arbitrary array of surrogates for trustworthiness -- personal appearance, charm, flattery and slander-by-proxy. Call it junk trust.

More on this tomorrow later.

Posted by Fred Clark
Permalink

*****

"As for truth, truth is what's written. Every created thing bears my intention written in it. Rocks. Stars. Very small beings. Everything only runs one way naturally, the way I meant it to. The trouble is that very small beings write books that contradict the rocks, then say I wrote the books and the rocks are lies."

-God, Grass, by Sheri Tepper

A Wandering Road Documentary

via Onehouse

The Gleaner's and I.

Someone pointed me to the Oprah website for a show she recently did on hoarders - people who meet an emotional need by buying and hoarding stuff of all kinds.

This reminded me of a movie I wanted to recommend here called The Gleaners and I, a by film maker Agnes Varda. I found it to be a very meditative work. I passed it onto my mother and it made its way through all of her friends. It's a good discussion group film too.

Here is a writeup on the Gleaners and I that was included in Issue 14 of Beyond magazine - Possible Worlds:

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Seventy-six-year-old Agnès Varda may be the “Grandmother of the French New Wave,” but she’s also a spry, intelligent, and entertaining filmmaker; her essay film, The Gleaners and I (2000) is one of the most inspiring documentaries of recent years.

The Gleaners and I is an essay film that provides a free-flowing and thoughtful look at the way society interacts with its leftovers. Shooting on digital video, Varda travels through southern France making incisive allusions to art history, homelessness, aging, consumerism, and the act of watching movies that could otherwise fill a whole series of lesser documentaries.

She begins with a definition of “gleaning” (while leafing through a dictionary with her affectionate cat looking on) as a tradition where the poor gathered the grain left over from the harvest. Then she visits the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and regards Millet’s famous 1857 painting of workers in a wheat field, “The Gleaners,” and films the onlookers in fast motion coming and going, gazing at the work throughout the day.

From there, she associates gleaning with a physical posture (“Gleaning might be extinct,” she narrates, “but stooping has not vanished from society”) and reflects on modern day gleaning—literally (a law in France still permits gleaning after the harvest from sunup to sundown) as well as figuratively (gleaning as a mental activity: learning, listening and watching).

“What strikes me,” she notes, “is that each gleans on his own. Whereas in paintings they were always in clusters.” By comparing various people (gypsies, artists, foragers), Varda constructs a flexible metaphor for engaging life and finding valuable things that others discard. She interviews gleaners, gains their confidence, and converses with them.

“There’s another woman gleaning in this film . . . that’s me,” she says as she humorously poses with a bundle of grain over her shoulder. Throughout the film, Varda gleans images: forgotten people, rejected traditions, unused produce, even stains on her ceiling (which she compares to modern art). The film is wonderfully self-reflexive, and she herself becomes one of its primary subjects: “It might be Old Age my friend, but my hair and my hands keep telling me the end is near.”

Varda has called her film a “wandering road documentary” that creates a cinematic resistance to the world of consumption. While other filmmakers might resort to grandstanding or ridiculing eccentric personalities, Varda s too busy celebrating life to bother. More than anything, The Gleaners and I expresses the joy of discovery, allowing the viewer to experience the company of a wise and compassionate filmmaker of boundless energy.

(Varda’s sequel, The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, is included on the DVD from Zeitgeist Video.)

- Doug Cummings

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Pilgrimage

Take a Pilgrimage

No Comment

Scott Horton

Alfonso X, el Sabio, Cantigas de Santa María (1256-84), Camerata Mediterranea and l’Orchestre Andalou de Fès, Erato CD #3984-25498-2 or Warner Classics as Apex CD 2564 61924-2

The harvest has been gathered, the first snows have yet to fall. The time has come to think of a pilgrimage. As a concept, the idea of pilgrimage is nearly universal among the human species. It is a physical journey to a place of veneration, usually a site connected with an historical or religious personage or event. The pilgrimage is a means of demonstrating faith. And in general, the pilgrimage is seen are proceeding on two levels: the first, the travel to the object; the second, the Weg nach Innen as Novalis writes in the Blüthenstaub-Fragment–the path within. For the Hindu, it might be a visit to sites associated with the life of Lord Krishna, or a trip to Verenasi on the sacred Ganges. For a Muslim, the Hajj, the trip to Mecca which all able-bodied faithful should undertake. For a Buddhist, a trip to the birthplace of Lord Buddha, in Lumbini, Nepal. For a Christian, it might be a shrine such as the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, which I visited earlier this year.

But I have one particular point of pilgrimage in mind: the journey to Santiago de Compostela, St. James of Compostela, in modern-day Spain. For the Christians of Europe, el camino de Santiago was the pilgrimage, especially after the Holy Land itself fell under the control of the Muslims, and could only be approached with great danger. The site is associated with a legend, namely that it is the final resting place of St. James, the brother of Jesus, who had preached the Gospel in the Iberian peninsula.

One image in particular is associated with the Way of St. James, and that is the scallop shell—in many languages called the muscle of St. James. The shell features a single point from which ribs radiate outwards, a symbol of pilgrimage. By tradition dating back to the eighth century, pilgrims who completed the journey would bring back a Galician scallop shell as proof. And later pilgrims destined for the shrine of St. James would wear the scallop shell as a symbol of their pilgrimage. While Santiago de Compostela’s tradition is distinctly Christian, this area was a destination for pilgrims from the time of classical antiquity. For the geography-challenged Romans, it marked the Western end of the World (finisterra), the meeting point with the dreaded Sea of Darkness (mare tenebrosum, as they called the Atlantic.) For the Celts, the site was also the point at which the sun set, and was associated with death rituals.

Of course, throughout human history, travel has been fraught with danger, and until very recently the dangers and risks were very great. A pilgrim therefore was advised to adopt a certain garb and to travel as a mendicant—a step that afforded some protection against the dangers around him. And music was another essential element of the pilgrimage—it marked the pilgrims, reminded them of their goal, and it entertained at the same time. There is a great heritage of music associated with the pilgrimage, and much of it today is shamefully forgotten. But much of this music is inspirational and reveals a rich legacy. In a sense it is a part of our cultural DNA; it reminds us where we come from as we proceed on this journey to an always receding aspirational goal.

And the pilgrimage I have in mind is one you can do in your own living room, or indeed, thanks to the advancements of modern technology and the path-breaking arrival of the iPod, anywhere. It won’t require you to travel anywhere, only to make the inward journey. It requires you only to listen and reflect.

In the mid-13th century, Alfonso X, called “the Learned,” directed the creation of a major collection of music associated with the Marian tradition, the Cantigas de Santa María including within them a great number of compositions associated specifically with the pilgrimage to Compostela. Alfonso was one of the great figures of the Middle Ages, he was the king in Castile and León, as well as Galicia, and briefly was elected Holy Roman Emperor. But his longer lasting legacy came not in the field of politics, but rather the arts, for he patronized and loved them in a way which previously was only known in the Muslim courts of al-Andalus. The texts are composed in Galego, the Galician-Portugese dialect spoken in Compostela, and many of these are songs which would have been sung by pilgrims en route to or from the shrine of St. James. It is curious that Alfonso, who spoke, wrote and promoted Castilian as the language of his kingdom, and who used Latin as a language for international and religious communication, but Castilian as his language of record and scholarship, turned to the dialect of Compostela as the medium for artistic expression. There are some 427 works in the collection, mostly the works of a few Galician composers, but some most likely composed by Alfonso himself (or “Affonso” as he calls himself in the texts).

An oud performer from the Cantigas de Santa María

The Cantigas de Santa María stand at the beginning of the Western musical tradition, and indeed they stand as a bridge. Is this music sacred or secular? The theme is certainly religious. Most of the songs recite typically thirteenth century miracle stories, some with a Biblical tradition, and some of a more Iberian and popular origin. A great many of them tell the story of an individual pilgrimage. A particularly poignant example is in Cantiga No. 175, which could be rendered into English roughly this way:

A German pilgrim was on the Route to Compostela with his son. When they arrived at Toulouse they looked for somewhere to spend the night. The inn they found belonged to a bad man, a heretic. People told them not to stay there, but the owner put a silver cup in the son’s bag just to spite them. As they walked away the owner started shouting that they had robbed him. The Judge and soldiers arrived, searched the boy and found the silver cup. The Judge said: “Hang the boy!” So they did. The father continued to Santiago and on the way back passed by the place where they had hung his son. He heard his son’s voice through his tears: “Father, don’t cry, I’m alive, the Virgin Mary is protecting me, she held me up with her hands”. The father ran to Toulouse and called the Judge and a lot of other people, who took his son down from the scaffold, alive. The son told them what had happened and how the Virgin Mary had held him up for three months. The people then killed the innkeeper.

Hardly the sort of a tale which could be picked up and dramatized by Hallmark for a holiday-season feature, of course. But this song reflects the harshness, the brutality, and the vision that mark the Spanish world of the thirteenth century.

And it’s remarkable, and typical for the attitudes of the age of Alfonso X that the Virgin Mary of these songs intercedes for those who respect and summon her, whether or not they are Christians. One of the most striking songs is cantiga No. 181, which begins “Pero que seja a gente,” and details a legend taken from the life of the twelfth century King of Morocco, Aboyuçaf, who allies himself with the Christians under the banner of the Virgin and defeats their enemies near the Morabe river. Because “os que a Virgen mais aman, a esses ela ajunda” (“those who love the Virgin, those She helps”), goes the refrain, alternating once more with numerous couplets. This cantiga also shows the use of the medium as a source of historical documentation, and a sense of shared or common history between the Christian Iberians and their Muslim counterparts.

Two hurdy-gurdy performers

A third and truly remarkable cantiga, and one of the group ostensibly authored by Alfonso himself is cantiga No. 209. It begins “Muito faz grand’erro” and relates a semihistorical event that occurred during his reign. While at Vitoria, Alfonso was suddenly struck by an illness which his doctors took for fatal. The king commended himself in the hands of the Virgin, lying down on the “book of the Virgin” (probably this is a reference to the Codex E of the Cantigas de Santa María, which is now in the Escorial museum, and from which the marginal illustrations are taken), and was saved. This cantiga is thus an account of a miracle sung and authored by its beneficiary, a conventional form with an historically significant implementation. It is also a mesmerizing setting: written for female voices alone, and accompanied by a single note held by an instrument, has a strophic structure of eight verses with refrain. The harmony is very simple—fifths, octaves and unisons.

These stories are interspersed with songs of praise to the Virgin Mary. The lyrics are simple and you don’t need to speak medieval Galego to understand them. It suffices if you know a bit of modern Spanish or Portugese, or even Latin, French or Italian.

The most famous of these, and certainly the best-known song in the collection is cantiga No. 100. The French music historian and Vivaldi biographer Sophie Roughol describes it this way in an excellent recent article in the early music magazine, Goldberg:

One of the best known cantigas, and the most frequently peformed, is the 100th, “Santa Maria, strela do dia” (“Virgin Mary, star of god”). It is a simple poem to the Virgin. In the tradition of the medieval conductus, it is a non-narrative prayer sung a cappella, exalting the virtues of Mary, in three long verses, alternating with a refrain of four lines: “Santa Maria, strela do dia, mostra nos via, pera Deus e nos guia.” This is a typical cantiga de loor, a song of praise, announced by the title: Esta é de loor.

But if you don’t listen to the texts and follow the music alone, you might find the religious themes surprising. The execution is popular, the qualities a continuous blend of the introspective with the racy, piquant, exotic. To a modern listener they are much more approachable than much of what we consider to be the “classical” traditional: the determined beat, the heavy use of percussion instruments, for instance.

But the really astonishing thing about the cantigas is not the lyrics; it’s the music. España es differente. In this music, you will hear the three strands from which the culture of late-medieval Spain emerged. Alfonso called himself rey de tres religiones, king of the three religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. We see this interaction first visually, in the illuminations found in the three codices that preserve the cantigas; the musicians who accompany these works are often clearly Christians, but there are no shortage of Moors and Jews scattered among them. And second, in the instrumentation, for most of these works have been composed for instruments known to the North African-Andalusian Islamic tradition, such as the oud (عود) or taâr (تار ), at this time barely known in Europe outside of Iberia. And finally in the performance style, in which we see a confluence of the troubadour tradition of the north, and three native Iberian styles: Christian, Islamic and Sephardic.

There are many collections of recordings of the Cantigas de Santa María, including an extensive series by Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XX and Eduardo Paniagua series with Música Antigua. Both of these take the “Western approach” to understanding the cantigas. But, while still somewhat controversial, a challenging and different approach is offered by Joel Cohen and the Camerata mediterranea together with l’Orchestre Andalou de Fès under the direction of Mohammed Briouel. They interpret the music backwards from the Moroccan tradition (which in Arabic is called the Andalusian tradition). The instrumentation falls easily into place and the sound seems instinctively right. It’s a brilliant product and it demonstrates an amazing fact: that the greatest masterwork of the Christian medieval tradition, the Cantigas de Santa María, springs straight from a Muslim cultural tradition and provided it with bridge of influence into the European mainstream. It is another amazing demonstration of the brilliant culture that flourished when three faiths prospered in harmony in medieval Spain.

[Permanent link]

All Of You Who Stood There With Me

Natan Altman, Portrait of Anna Akhmatova (1914)

CRUCIFIXION

“Weep not for me, mother.
I am alive in my grave.”

1

A choir of angels glorified the greatest hour,
The heavens melted into flames.
To his father he said, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me!’
But to his mother, ‘Weep not for me. . .’
[1940. Fontannyi Dom]

2

Magdalena smote herself and wept,
The favourite disciple turned to stone,
But there, where the mother stood silent,
Not one person dared to look.
[1943. Tashkent]

EPILOGUE

1
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I’ve learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That’s why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

‘I arrive here as if I’ve come home!’
I’d like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That’s how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition—do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar’s Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.
[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]

–Anna Akhmatova, “Crucifixion” and “Epilogue” from Requiem (1935-40)(trans. Sasha Soldatow)

Listen to Anna Akhmatova read Requiem here

[Permanent link]

Men in Skirts

Pope Benedict, King Abdullah: Men In Skirts Who Hate Females
Diane Francis
National Post


The Men in Skirts. Both leaders have been on a "charm offensive" and
been seeking photo opportunities and providing unusual access to
journalists.

Recently, these two -- King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Pope Benedict --
met in Vatican City. Both are at the apex of their  respective "establishments" which are,
not to put a fine point on it, dominated by men who oppress and condemn women to
second-class status.

There could not be a better photograph to symbolize the convergence of 
such political and religious power which has perpetuated the world's single 
biggest socio-economic problem: the disenfranchisement of females in most
countries.

The Gender Gap
The widespread practice of denying women education, business participation and political influence is economically ruinous. It means that half the world's, or a nation's or an ethnic group's IQ is relegated to child-bearing and child-rearing. It means that there are too many mouths to feed, clothe and educate with the end result that the little girls, who survive being murdered in the womb or at birth by parents who want sons, are often condemned to dreadful lives of servitude and illiteracy.
Make no mistake: There is a correlation between female literacy and social or economic wealth.

Religious Gender Intolerance
The strictest interpretation of Roman Catholicism is that married women cannot chose to avoid having children and cannot leave a marriage, even to an abusive husband.
In Latin America, wife-beating is rampant and divorce frowned upon. Ignorance and poverty are also prevalent and both are the result of excessive pro-creation encouraged by church teachings.
Some writers and leaders in South America have begun to speak out against this dreadful state of affairs. The mistreatment of women, partly religious and partly cultural, is one of the reasons why South America is being left behind.

The Rich and The Backward
The Middle East and other Islamic cultures are worse. In Saudi Arabia privileged women live in harems and have too many children. Some Saudi Princes have dozens of offspring in a region, and world, where many starve due to over-population. It is immoral.
For instance, Pakistan may have a female politician who is a former Prime Minister, but the country has a terrible gender track record as does India and Afghanistan. Ten years ago, only 22% of women in Pakistan were literate compared with 49% of men. Improvement has been minimal in cities and non-existent in rural regions.
China has lifted living standards by educating females, promoting them economically and rationing reproduction rights. Tragically, many parents opt for sons, which is why there are fewer females there, but those who survive have a better life than did their mothers.
China has, along with other enlightened countries in the west and Asia, demonstrated the benefits of gender equality. There is a strict correlation between the educational level of women in a society and its GDP growth.

Rampant and Destructive Chauvinism
Even so, ignorant men who rule most countries and religions mistreat their womenfolk, thus shooting their own societies and the world in the foot.

(Photo: Osservatore Romano/AFP/Getty Images)

***
Interesting that this is a Canadian publication. I can't really imagine an American publication printing anything this pointed. We've become to expect "rampant and destructive chauvinism" in this country, and are surprised if we don't see it.

"The men in skirts." Nice.

Reality To The Full

"One day the Teacher said, "It is so much easier to travel than to stop."

"Why?" the disciples demanded to know.

"Because," the Teacher said, "as long as you travel to a goal you can hold on to a dream. when you stop, you must face reality."

"But how shall we ever change if we have no goals or dreams?" the disciples asked.

"Change that is real is change that is not willed. Face reality and unwilled change will happen."

Humility is reality to the full.


--Joan Chittister
from "Wisdom Distilled From the Daily"

As God Is In God

In God

Meister Eckhart

As the drop poured into the ocean is the ocean, not the ocean the drop, so the soul drawn into God is God, not God the soul. The soul is in God as God is in God.

***

God is nearer to us than anyone at any time. He is nearer to me
than my raiment, nearer than the air or light, nearer than my wife,
father, mother, daughter, son, or friend. I live in Him, soul and
body. I breathe in Him, think in Him, feel, consider, intend,
speak, undertake, work in Him. "For in Him we live, and move, and
have our being."

- John of Kronstadt


- Luke 17: 20-25 (The kingdom among us)

An erroneous translation in the past said that 'The kingdom of God is within you."
The more correct translation is "The kingdom of God is among you."
The implication of the new translation is that God's Spirit is most active in
our relationships with one another.


-  Spend some time with the passage "The reign of God is already in your midst."
Pray for the grace to recognize God's presence throughout the day.

(From Daily Spiritual Seed)
Be here now in love, and all shall be well.
- http://shalomplace.com

Philip St. Romain, Editor
Daily Spiritual Seed is an outreach of:
Heartland Center for Spirituality
3600 Broadway
Great Bend, KS  67530

***
God reanimates us and reinvigorates our lives when we stop living out of our
resentments grudges wounds and pretenses.

The joy of today is available only if we see it today , not through yesterday's
jaundiced eyes.

I think.

Perpetual Unrest

Our Fundamental Being

Evelyn Underhill


We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do. Craving, clutching, and fussing, on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual, even on the religious plane, we are kept in perpetual unrest: forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in, the fundamental verb, to Be: and that Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of the spiritual life.

The Spiritual Life

inward/outward

****

In our EFM reflection tonight, we explored the story of Cain and Abel, and the frustration of human beings when they attempt to use the faculty of reason to discover the reason Why?"

What could be the reason why , after all, without condemning God as a monster, the author of all disaster?

The Why is best left to storytellers and to novelists who are exploring the human heart from the inside rather than from the courtroom. They might shed more light than unseemly glare generated by the literal mind.

*****
THE HISTORY OF LOVE

by Nicole Krauss


MY BROTHER THE MESSIAH

"I want to tell you a secret, " he whispered. "Because it's your birthday." "What?" "First you have to promise to believe me." "OK." "Say 'I promise.' " "I promise." He took a deep breath. "I think I might be a lamed vovnik." "A what?" "one of the lamed vovniks," he whispered. ""The thirty-six holy people." What thirty-six holy people?" "The ones that the existence of the world depends on." "Oh, those. Don't be --" "You promised," Bird said. I didn't say anything. "There are always thirty-six at any time," he whispered. "No one knows who they are. Only their prayers reach God's ear. that's what Mr. Goldstein says." "And you think you might be one of them," I said. "What else does Mr. Goldstein say?" "He says that when the Messiah comes, he's going to be one of the lamed vovniks. In every generation there's one person who has the potential to be the Messiah. Maybe he lives up to it, or maybe he doesn't. Maybe the world is ready for him, or maybe it isn't. That's all." I lay in the dark trying to think of the right thing to say. My stomach began to hurt.

*******
The Story of A Book Within a Book

"There are two types of people in the world," one of Nicole Krauss's characters in "The History of Love" decides, "those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone." There are also two kinds of writers given to the verbal tangents and cartwheels and curlicues that adorn Ms. Krauss's vertiginously exciting second novel: those whose pyrotechnics lead somewhere and those who are merely showing off. While there are times when Ms. Krauss's gamesmanship risks overpowering her larger purpose, her book's resolution pulls everything that precedes it into sharp focus. It has been headed for this moment of truth all along.

One of this novel's many endearing conceits is that books are like homing pigeons. Zvi Litvinoff, a published author who plays a pivotal role in this story, has sent out 2,000 copies of "The History of Love," a book-within-a-book that contributes to the hall-of-mirrors sensation here. He imagines what it would be like if those copies "could flap their wings and return to him to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all." And while Ms. Krauss's "History of Love" is headed for wide popularity, Litvinoff's is an abject failure. Nineteen hundred ninety-nine pigeons vanish; only one mildewed copy attracts any attention. But that one disintegrating volume is enough to shape the destinies of everyone within Ms. Krauss's vibrantly imagined world. It travels from Europe to South America to New York. It prompts plagiarism, fuels imaginations, makes people fall in love. It envisions whole new chapters in human history, like an Age of Silence during which hand gestures were the only means of communication. This was a time when the scratching of a nose could be easily misconstrued to mean "Now I realize I was wrong to love you." This obscure "History of Love" contains all the world's deepest secrets - or so it seems to 15-year-old Alma Singer. When Alma's parents named her, they took to heart a line from the moldering "History of Love": "The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma." Now Alma's father is dead, and her mother has been hired by a mysterious stranger to translate the book, which was originally written in Yiddish, from Spanish into English. This amounts to one of the simpler transactions in Ms. Krauss's mesmerizingly convoluted scheme.

In Ms. Krauss's most important scene - her novel's last - characters communicate by tapping one another twice. This can be seen as a form of shorthand for what has come before. Nothing in "The History of Love" exists without some kind of echo or doppelgänger. There are multiple Almas, multiple texts and several interrelated old men.

The noisiest of these, Leopold Gursky, lives on the Lower East Side and speaks with a crankiness ("The Starbucks employee looked at me as if I were a cockroach in the brownie mix" vastly different from Alma's teenage breathlessness. About having worn her late father's sweater for 42 days in a row, Alma explains: "On the twelfth day I passed Sharon Newman and her friends in the hall. 'WHAT'S UP WITH THAT DISGUSTING SWEATER?' she said. Go eat some hemlock, I thought, and decided to wear Dad's sweater for the rest of my life." If for no other reason than the range of voices she has persuasively created, Ms. Krauss would stand out as a prodigious talent.

Speaking of which: the wunderkind writer whose themes and fancifulness most closely resemble Ms. Krauss's is Jonathan Safran Foer. His work would come to mind just as readily - more readily - if the two were not married. But while Mr. Foer's current "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" has a character playing "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the tambourine by its second page, "The History of Love" appears restrained by comparison.

Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps Ms. Krauss's "History of Love" moving (and keeps its reader offbalance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides. They range from parodying various publications' characteristic obituaries of a very famous writer, a man who was best known for a single, ecstatic five-page paragraph (Ms. Krauss perfectly mimics the syntax of both The Times and The New Republic) to skewering the kind of editor whom all writers dread. He takes Litvinoff and his wife out for a drink, regrets being unable to publish "The History of Love," presents "a gift of a book his publishing house had just brought out" and leaves the Litvinoffs with the check.

Other notions are described no less realistically, even when they are as imaginary as the Age of String. ("There was a time when it wasn't uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations.") Even at their most oddball, these flourishes reflect the deep, surprising wisdom that gives this novel its ultimate heft.

In addition to the book's tricks and all of its beloved Almas, Ms. Krauss's work is illuminated by the warmth and delicacy of her prose. "Grammar of my life," says Gursky, describing a loneliness that this novel will transcendently remedy: "as a rule of thumb, whenever there appears a plural, correct for a singular. Should I ever let slip a royal WE, put me out of my misery with a swift blow to the head."

********

Whether we are the frustrated teenager,(the protagonist of the novel), or Cain, or just ourselves, trying to piece together the puzzle that is our own life incompletely viewed, spying on our parents, looking for the secret in our own birth order, or abandonment by someone we love, or our banishment ,our own History of Love is the story of coming to understand that we are all the Messiah, one of the people upon whom the world depends.

We are all windows into eternity for someone, all a reflection of divinity for someone. A sacrament for someone. And that someone is probably not us. Who is complete unto herself? Just windows and doors and clues in someone else's puzzle. The call to Being the simplest yet most profound calling of all.

*****

Teachers are Sojourners

aaron ghiloni

10 Propositions on Education

1. Mas! Education leaves you wanting more. The “professional” grad student who is forever signing up for some new course is on to something – learning spawns further learning. One good year of education overcomes five bad ones. “There is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education…” (John Dewey).

2. Education is active. This doesn’t mean that merely moving about is educative, but that real education always issues in action. On this, the perpetual grad student has missed the point – like the rich young ruler, they need to sell all their books, move out mum’s basement, and start living. Education that does not “lead out” (educare) into learned activity is just a dizzying merry-go-round.

3. Education is not a commodity, but a lifestyle. Learning is constant, continuing far beyond schooling. In fact, you’ll probably learn more out of school than in school.

4. We learn. Education happens communally. This doesn’t mean that sitting in a circle is inevitably more educative than sitting in traditional rows. However, if a circle creates more opportunities for social interaction than it is destined to be a better learning experience.

5. Life is not a True/False test; therefore the best learning is open-ended. Like life, true education is punctuated with ellipses (…) and question marks (?) not full stops (.).

6. The best teachers are often not teachers. Your Little League coach probably taught you more in one season than your philosophy professor did in three semesters (and for a lot cheaper).

7. The best teachers are sojourners. They teach with staff in hand and sandals laced, ready to move at a moment’s notice. The best teachers covet “teachable moments” like a frog covets flies. All other activity stops when a fly lands on a lily pad.

8. The best teachers listen. There is nothing more annoying than asking a professor a question and having him/her avoid it in the name of “staying on topic.”

9. Every teacher must read John Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed” once a term. This is the best pedagogical writing ever. http://www.infed.org/archives/e-texts/e-dew-pc.htm

10. Elite schools, strenuous degree programs, and cultural literacy are grossly overrated. Learning matters, not because it aspires to enroll in some archetypal library in the sky, but because it establishes continuities between reason and experience, between the world and the individual. Education matters when it makes you more common, more ordinary, rather than when it makes you more erudite, more urbane.

Posted by ::aaron g::

Bible Black

Van Peebles Land

I WAS less than halfway through my teenage years and out of my element.
My best friend lived in a red wooden house surrounded by the dark trees of a wood on the edge of a demolished factory.

His mother did not spend her days making flapjacks and she had not decorated the walls with paintings of water-mills or golden retrievers. Instead, this was a house where the smell of incense drifted up to the rafters and battered but beloved books were piled on every surface.

The most important appliance in the home was not the dishwasher but the turntable.

She cradled her LP of Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man and told me that this was one of the defining albums of her life.

None of my other friends’ mothers talked about music in this way. And the idea that the world-weary man on the cover in a dark jacket and glasses (and, bizarrely, holding a banana) could have such an influence on someone in a position of responsibility was incredible and alarming.

She put the record on the player and from speakers throughout the house there came the magical crackle of the stylus touching the disc.

Then the voice of Cohen rushed into every room. It was dark and gravelly, what Dylan Thomas would have called “Bible black”.

Ah, you loved me as a loser, but now you're worried that I just might win.
You know the way to stop me, but you don't have the discipline.
How many nights I prayed for this, to let my work begin,
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

I was one of four pupils in my primary school who did not make it into the choir, and if Cohen had also turned up to sing Baa Baa Black Sheep I think he would have been ejected at a similar speed. He did not “sing”, but his words sounded like a gale at night when it slams against the roof and windows.



I was not ready to take U2’s The Joshua Tree out of my CD player and let this mysterious Canadian songsmith in, but I was intrigued.

Then I saw his name on the bright orange spine of a thick book high on a shelf in the local library. This was Stranger Music, a compilation of his poetry and lyrics.



Within seconds of opening the covers I understood there was much more to Cohen than songs about world capitals. Almost without exception, each work was soaked in two elements – love and religion.

Despite several efforts, I never got the hang of Christian pop music, which primarily seemed to consist of happy people singing propositions.

But U2, Bob Dylan – another recent discovery – and now Cohen immersed themselves in the colliding mysteries of the spiritual and the physical.

This was profoundly more interesting than the ideas transported on the advertising jingle melodies designed for church teenagers. It was also more biblical.

In a single song, Cohen wove together the stories of King David and Samson – each a great man who is shipwrecked by the love of a woman.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof,
You saw her bathing on the roof,
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you.
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair,
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.

Despair, lust and epiphany bleeds together in Cohen’s canon. This song climaxes with the lines:

And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

This is not propaganda but portraiture – the portrayal of a God-hungry man in a far from utopian world.



Cohen stands in the traditions of the poet who penned Psalm 22:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

Stirred and slightly shaken by reading his words my hunt for new Cohen CDs in a pre-iTunes age began. He was not stocked in any of the towns near my home, not when shelf-space was needed for Daniel O’Donnell.

In a market in Moscow I found a bootleg best-of compilation which I still listen to maybe twice a year.

Cohen is a great musician. Songs such as Suzanne have melodies which haunt and enchant.

But just as a great designer would not choose to model his own creations on the catwalk, so writers such as Dylan and Cohen have penned lyrics so universal they cry out to be carried by more than one musician.

It is genuinely exciting to learn of his collaboration with Philip Glass, consistently acclaimed as one of the world’s most important composers.



His intricate scores for films such as Kundun suggest he will give Cohen’s words the room they need to breath, and allow new light to break in.

Glass’s source-text will be Cohen’s recent book of poetry, Book of Longing, much of which was written during a lengthy and frugal sojourn in Buddhist monastery.

Cohen and Glass have a combined age of 143 yet neither has retired, and we should be thankful.

Posted by David Williamson

And So It Stays Just On the Edge of Vision...

Slacktivist:

A bit of perspective: Thousands of people, including 170 official delegates from 44 countries, are gathered in Delhi, India, for the World Toilet Summit:

Worldwide, an estimated 2.6 billion people have no access to safe and hygienic toilets, a number the UN hopes to halve by 2015 as part of its Millennium Development Goals.

That's at least one out of every three people. Odds are, if you're reading this, you're not one of them, so if you were looking for something to be grateful about today (probably more than once), there you go.

****

Big thanks to Wade L. for forwarding this link from the inspired Lark News: "Left Behind VBS fiasco lingers."

READING, Pa. — When Sandy Durant learned her church was going to host a Left Behind vacation Bible school, she was overjoyed. Her children loved the Left Behind Kids series, and she and her husband had read the entire adult series.

But when she arrived to find her children gone on the last day of VBS she "absolutely flipped out."

It didn’t help to learn that it was all a ruse designed to show people what it would feel like to have a loved one snatched away in the Rapture.

That there is some pitch-perfect, Onion/Guest quality satire. While checking out the rest of Lark News, don't miss what may be the Best FAQ ever.

***

Go read hilzoy

Please go read hilzoy on waterboarding:

That we are even having a debate about this question, and that it is not a foregone conclusion that someone who claims not to know whether waterboarding is torture cannot possibly be confirmed as Attorney General, is a testament to the moral degradation of our country, and of our political discourse. ...

Imagine what we would think of a country where candidates for high office and nominees for the highest law enforcement position in the country had earnest debates about whether or not the rack was torture ("hey, I do stretching exercises before I go jogging, and it doesn't hurt me!"), or whether disembowelling living prisoners shocked the conscience ("I had my appendix out, and I'm doing just fine!") We would think that the people who said such things had utterly lost their humanity. Yet for some reason, altogether too many of our fellow citizens seem to think that it is perfectly acceptable for politicians and their appointees to have the same debates about waterboarding. I suspect that future generations, and the current inhabitants of other countries, will regard this the same way we would regard people who took it to be an open question whether the rack was torture: with abhorrence.

She supports this with a detailed explanation of the "controlled drowning ... controlled death" of waterboarding from Malcolm W. Nance, "a former Master Instructor and Chief of Training" at the Navy's SERE school in San Diego, who states:

"Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period."

Go read the whole thing. I have nothing to add except "what hilzoy said."

Posted by Fred Clark

**
From Onehouse

"All of the great world religions I now know, although I didn’t know at the time, say that if you want to have vision, you must put your ego to one side and not keep blazening and posturing and preening with the ego. Put it to one side and you begin to see things in a different way."

Karen Armstrong

Permalink

***
and finally, fragment of Aubade by Philip Larkin, a wonderful and now deceased poet who put his depression to good use. More or less.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

***

The Christian House is Next to the Muslim House

I am not happy when people ask, "How is the situation for Christians?" Those who kill don’t kill only Christians. They kill Muslims as well—the situation is the same for both .... The Christian house is next to the Muslim house. Each has his own religion, each defends his own home, each defends his religion. But your faith is for God, the country is for everyone.

- Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, patriarch of the Baghdad-based Chaldean Church, which has existed for nearly 2,000 years. The pope recently named him, along with 22 others from around the world, to the College of Cardinals, making Delly the first Roman Catholic Cardinal from Iraq in modern history.

(Source: The New York Times)

From Jim Wallis' blog "God's Politics"

Imagination

(from Scott Horton's No Comment)

C’est l’imagination qui a enseigné à l’homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum. Elle a créé, au commencement du monde, l’analogie et la métaphore. Elle décompose toute la création, et, avec les matériaux amassés et disposés suivant des règles dont on ne peut trouver l’origine que dans le plus profond de l’âme, elle crée un monde nouveau, elle produit la sensation du neuf. Comme elle a créé le monde (on peut bien dire cela, je crois, même dans un sens religieux), il est juste qu’elle le gouverne.

It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.

–Charles Baudelaire, Lettres à M. le Directeur de ‘La revue française,’ III: ‘La reine des facultés’ (1859)

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*****
The Celtic Imagination: Experience and the 'Web of Betweenness'
(From John O'Donohue's "Beauty, The Invisible Embrace")

Thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary.
-Hermann Broch

Because we tend to see our experience as a product, we have lost the ability to be surprised by experience, the sense of the mind as a theatre where interesting sequences of complex drama are played. Whether we like it or not, the depths in us are always throwing up treasure. For the awakened imagination there is no such thing as inner poverty. It is interesting how contemporary English has the phrase: 'to have an experience', with the suggestion of possession, property and ownership. In the folk culture of the Celtic Imagination, experience was not a thing to be produced or to be owned. For the Celtic Imagination the focus was more on the experience as participation in something more ultimate than one's needs, projection or ego: it was the sacred arena in which the individual entered into contact with the eternal. Experience in this sense was an event of revelation. In such a world, experience was always lit by spirit; the mind was not a closed compartment 'processing' its own private impressions, the mind always had at least one window facing the eternal. Through this window wonder and beauty could shine in on a life and illuminate the quiet corners where mystery might be glimpsed. A person's nature was revealed in experience; it was also the place whee gifts arrived from the divine. Naturally, experience was one's own and not the experiences of someone else. However, it was understood as being much more than the private product and property of an individual. Expressed in another way, there was a sense that the individual life was deeply woven into the lives of others and the life of nature. the individual was not an isolated labourer desperately striving to garner a quota of significance from the world.

In the intuitive world-view of the Celtic Imagination, the web of belonging still continued to hold a person, especially when times were bleak. In Catholic theology, there is a teaching reminiscent of this. It has to do with the validity and wholesomeness of the sacraments. In a case where the minister of the sacrament is unworthy, the sacrament still continues to be real and effective because the community of believers supplies the deficit. It is called the ex-opere-operato principle. From the adjacent abundance of grace, the Church fills out what is absent in the unworthiness of the celebrant. Within the embrace of folk culture, the web of belonging supplied similar secret psychic and spiritual shelter to the individual. This is one of the deepest poverties in our times. That whole web of 'betweenness' seems to be unravelling. It is rarely acknowledged any more, but that does not mean that it has ceased to exist. The 'web of betweenness' is still there but in order to become a presence again, it needs to be invoked. As in the rain forest, a dazzling diversity of life-forms complement and sustain each other; there is secret oxygen with which we unknowingly sustain one another. True community is not produced; it is invoked and awakened. True community is an ideal where the full identities of awakened and realized individuals challenge and complement each other. In this sense both individuality and originality enrich self and others.

Truthfully

cats are smarter than dogs.
cats & dogs are smarter than humans.

This will get you grinning like a Cheshire Cat.
Thanks to Janis for sending it in.

Posted by MadPriest

***
Just funny -- and I need a break after all these torture posts and visits to IOZ
who is a sort of more intellectual Mad Priest in a worse mood.

War Is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength

Image from Mad Priest

Tortured Editorials

I’ll go back to Rick Hertzberg’s devastating words on the Washington Post’s editorial page: “pathetic. Really pathetic.” This past week, straining for something that could, in the Washington environment at least, pass for wisdom on the Mukasey nomination, WaPo delivered up one of its most stunningly ignorant editorials in recent memory. It offered a wonderfully practical solution to Congress. Go ahead and confirm Mukasey, Fred Hiatt argues, and then pass a law banning torture.

Frankly I am very much in the market for Solomonic wisdom on this score. As I’ve written before, I think that Michael Mukasey has the traits that could make him an historically important attorney general. There is no issue as to his character or abilities. But there is a very serious issue as to torture, and a litmus test which the Administration seems to have put in place, as to which the Senate cannot cave without serious damage to its—and to the nation’s—reputation. And I am attuned enough to the “realities” of Washington politics to think that this is exactly what it is going to do.

But Mr. Hiatt’s suggestion is an attempt to perform a frontal lobotomy on the current debate. Why? Because torture is unlawful. It has been unlawful as long as the Republic has stood, and the illegality of the current practices is plain. The “debate” on this issue has never been a debate in any sort of reasoned, intellectual style. It has been an effort by the forces aligned with barbarity to get the entire nation to drink a carafe of red Kool Aid, to accept that Black is White, and the sun rises in the West. Or to get more to the Orwellian essence of the matter, that “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” the three-part mantra that lies side-by-side with “torture makes us safe.”

And even more astonishing, this intellectually vapid position is actually embraced by Senator Diane Feinstein, who should know better. In her Los Angeles Times op-ed, Feinstein writes

As Judge Mukasey wrote, waterboarding is clearly against the law for the American military. Waterboarding is clearly prohibited by the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Convention. It was again prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act, which only covers military interrogations.

Congress should go further and explicitly ban waterboarding and other so-called enhanced interrogation techniques for all parts of the government.

Feinstein’s statement that the Detainee Treatment Act “only covers military interrogations” is false. Indeed, this was a particular point of contention between the Bush Administration and the legislation’s sponsors, lead by Senator McCain. The Administration argued that the limitations should apply only to the uniformed services. But McCain and Congress disagreed. The text of the statute was explicit, and clear, and it was applicable to all persons under detention or control of the Government of the United States—i.e., it quite explicitly applies to CIA detainees, as well as the military.

There’s a common problem here. Both Senator Feinstein and the Washington Post editorial page editor have made the mistake of taking Administration arguments, which are simply and plainly bogus, at face value. They picked up the tumbler of Kool Aid and drank it to the bottom.

Neither WaPo nor Senator Feinstein appear to have taken the time to examine the Anti-Torture Statute, either, which is precisely on point, provides a clear answer, and has been at the center of the debate for the last four years. The depth of their ignorance is shameful.

Marty Lederman does a good job of walking through a bit of the relevant history, and his blog post on this subject is worth reading in its entirety

– On July 6, 1955, the Senate unanimously gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the Geneva Conventions, each of which (in Article 3, which applies to al Qaeda detainees) categorically prohibits “torture” (not to mention “cruel treatment”).

– On October 27, 1990, the Senate unanimously gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the Convention Against Torture, article 2(1) of which obligated the United States to “take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.”

– In compliance with article 2(1) of the CAT, in 1994 the Senate and House approved, and on April 30, 1994 President Clinton signed, the Torture Act, which categorically prohibits torture outside the United States (18 U.S.C. 2340A(a)).

– And it’s not as if torture was legal even before the Senate, House and President acted on these instruments. As the Supreme Court recently explained, under international law (including the laws of war binding on the executive branch), the flat ban on torture is among the handful of international law norms with the greatest “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations”: Even for purposes of civil liability, “the torturer has become–like the pirate and slave trader before him–hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind”.

All of which is to say — and it’s fairly amazing that this still needs to be said in this day and age — if there is any single thing imaginable that the Senate, the Congress, and the world community have not “declined to do,” it is to ban torture categorically. (Even Judge Mukasey understands this: He writes it dozens of times in his responses to the Senate.)

We’re approaching four years into the great American torture debate. So why, with the passage of time, does the national debate just keep getting stupider and stupider? And why do critical voices, like those of a vitally important newspaper and of a senator generally viewed as at the golden center of a great deliberative body, demonstrate a progressive mental palsy in their ability to address such a morally essential question? These are signs that torture, at last, has begun to corrupt our nation’s vital life signs. They reflect a willingness to strike a bargain with evil. But evil knows no compromises, and those striking the bargain should think well about what they are bartering away.

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***

The JAGs Set the Record Straight

Michael Mukasey in his testimony and written responses admits of much uncertainty as to whether waterboarding is illegal. This is scandalous. There is no issue on the subject. In connection with consideration of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the four TJAGs testified that the practice of waterboarding constituted torture and was a criminal act not subject to qualification or privilege. And now four former TJAGs write to support the view taken by their serving colleagues:

November 2, 2007

The Honorable Patrick J. Leahy, Chairman United States Senate Washington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Leahy,

In the course of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s consideration of President Bush’s nominee for the post of Attorney General, there has been much discussion, but little clarity, about the legality of “waterboarding” under United States and international law. We write because this issue above all demands clarity: Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

In 2006 the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the authority to prosecute terrorists under the war crimes provisions of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. In connection with those hearings the sitting Judge Advocates General of the military services were asked to submit written responses to a series of questions regarding “the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning (i.e., waterboarding) . . .” Major General Scott Black, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General, Major General Jack Rives, U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General, Rear Admiral Bruce MacDonald, U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General, and Brigadier Gen. Kevin Sandkuhler, Staff Judge Advocate to the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, unanimously and unambiguously agreed that such conduct is inhumane and illegal and would constitute a violation of international law, to include Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

We agree with our active duty colleagues. This is a critically important issue—but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America’s military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture—no less than wanton killing—is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. It is essential to be clear, specific and unambiguous about this fact—as in fact we have been throughout America’s history, at least until the last few years. Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product, at least in part, of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well- established legal principles applicable to this issue. This must end.

The Rule of Law is fundamental to our existence as a civilized nation. The Rule of Law is not a goal which we merely aspire to achieve; it is the floor below which we must not sink. For the Rule of Law to function effectively, however, it must provide actual rules that can be followed. In this instance, the relevant rule—the law—has long been clear: Waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances. To suggest otherwise—or even to give credence to such a suggestion—represents both an affront to the law and to the core values of our nation.

We respectfully urge you to consider these principles in connection with the nomination of Judge Mukasey.

Sincerely,

Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter, United States Navy (Ret.) Judge Advocate General of the Navy, 2000-02

Rear Admiral John D. Hutson, United States Navy (Ret.) Judge Advocate General of the Navy, 1997-2000

Major General John L. Fugh, United States Army (Ret.) Judge Advocate General of the Army, 1991-93

Brigadier General David M. Brahms, United States Marine Corps (Ret.) Staff Judge Advocate to the Commandant, 1985-88

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The Implications Of a World In Which It Could Be True

November 4, 2007

Emory’s Little Tibet

By SHAILA DEWAN

DRESSED in a pale blue, floor-length chuba, Paige Wilson silently mouthed a paragraph-long greeting, in Tibetan, that she was about to deliver to the Dalai Lama. The members of Emory’s chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, of which Ms. Wilson is president, were among the lucky few selected to meet His Holiness in person.

Bowing slightly, the Dalai Lama exchanged a few words in Tibetan with Ms. Wilson before addressing the quivering knot of students. “I didn’t mess up,” she said later, “but in the middle of my speech he saw I was nervous and touched my face, and smiled at me.

“It grounded me. It’s, like, a very human thing to do.”

Emory’s three-day whirlwind of conferences and ceremonies in late October had come to be referred to on campus simply as The Visit. Even before the Dalai Lama’s headline-making meeting with President Bush, students had lined up over several days for free tickets. In the defining moment, several thousand watched as the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, was installed as a distinguished professor — and then issued a campus ID card.

The association is more than a public relations coup for Emory. True, it brings the university its third Nobel Peace Prize winner (President Jimmy Carter and Bishop Desmond Tutu have been faculty members); and it links the institution to a living symbol of a human rights struggle irresistible to a generation for whom Che Guevara is a pop icon. Then there’s the cool factor of an exotic religion whose popularity in the West seems only to grow.

But the appointment, the Dalai Lama’s first, is also the culmination of a relationship spanning nearly two decades, one that harks back to Emory’s history as a Methodist institution aiming to mold students intellectually and morally. Emory has both a prominent divinity school and, as evidenced by its Peace Prize trifecta, a longstanding commitment to peaceful conflict resolution.

“One of the great things about the Methodist tradition is they don’t insist that everybody has to be Methodist,” says Robert Paul, the college dean. “His Holiness is a religious figure who is not dogmatic, not sectarian, doesn’t advocate ‘My way or the highway.’”

John D. Dunne, one of the prominent Tibet scholars who has joined the faculty in recent years, says the university’s credo, “Educating the heart and mind,” has become a vanguard attitude among universities. “Our cognitive skills, our ability to understand things, also has to do with our emotional state,” he says. “This is kind of the leading edge, too, of neuroscience.”

The university is by no means a Berkeley or a Reed College; its reputation is more “new Ivy” than crunchy. In the South, it is best known as a medical powerhouse with a leafy Beaux-Arts campus and an endowment made handsome by Coca-Cola money. (In addition to a medical school and strong public health department, it runs a six-hospital health care system.)

What is now officially known as the Emory-Tibet Partnership started small, in 1991, as a friendship between Dr. Paul, an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Nepal, and Lobsang Negi, who had been sent by the Dalai Lama to create the North American seat of the Drepung Loseling Monastery on a parcel of donated land in Atlanta.

Geshe Lobsang, as he is called (geshe is an honorific denoting the highest level of monastic education), enrolled as a graduate student at Emory. “We used to say, ‘Who’s the guy in the robes?’ ” recalls Nancy Seideman, Emory’s executive director of media relations.

Lobsang Negi ultimately left the monkhood and is now a senior lecturer who also directs the Drepung Loseling Institute, the monastery’s secular arm, which designs programs in Tibetan culture for Emory.

THE Dalai Lama’s faculty position, which is unsalaried, is more imprimatur than anything else. He will not teach any courses but will continue to be host every spring to a study abroad program in Dharamsala, India, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Emory officials say the program is unique in that students live and study at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, founded by the Dalai Lama, and have a private audience with him in addition to hearing his public teachings.

The program, which is open to non-Emory undergraduates, has attracted students with interests beyond Buddhism as religion or personal enlightenment, says Tara Doyle, the director. Students have designed independent study projects on the refugee experience, Tibetan medicine, human rights issues, Western nuns and even a single Tibetan poem.

“There’s something about things Tibetan that attract people who are of somewhat diverse orientations,” Dr. Doyle says. “They’re seeking for something.”

A decade ago, Emory offered two Buddhism-related classes with some 60 students; last year, there were more than 1,000 enrolled in 12 courses in Tibetan language and history and Buddhist philosophy, as well as a graduate seminar, on emptiness. High-ranking lamas often serve as guest lecturers. (Tibetan studies is not a separate department; courses are offered under the aegis of religion or Asian studies.)

The partnership reaches across disciplines and into various facets of university life. The library is amassing a digital collection of Tibetan texts. University employees can take meditation classes twice a week. And at the behest of the Dalai Lama, science professors are developing a curriculum on cosmology, physics and biology, in Tibetan. Monks are well educated in traditional Buddhist subjects like philosophy and logic but not in science or math.

Scholars have sometimes bristled when the Dalai Lama has been presented in an academic context. In 2005, more than 500 brain researchers protested his scheduled lecture on meditation at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, arguing that the subject had not been studied with rigor and objectivity.

Emory has tried to counter that criticism. Dr. Charles Raison, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Mind-Body Program at the medical school, recently concluded a study of meditation and depression in 100 students. Half were given health instruction but did not meditate. Half, led by Geshe Lobsang, learned compassion meditation (practitioners develop a sense of interconnectedness by envisioning all humans as friends or family). Response to stress was measured by testing levels of inflammation indicators in the blood. Dr. Raison says his research builds on other studies showing that people who perceive themselves as part of a social network are healthier.

While the doctor will not discuss his results, pending publication, Eliot Johnson, one of the participants, offered an anecdotal conclusion: “I definitely felt happier. Just comparing finals that semester with the semester before, it was a lot less stressful.”

Mr. Johnson, a junior in tattered Converse sneakers, was hovering tentatively at the edge of a cluster of students who had met on the quad to practice their Tibetan. The more advanced chatted away with four saffron-and-maroon-robed monks from the monastery. A double major in religion and Asian studies, Mr. Johnson plans to go to Dharamsala this spring to experience Buddhism in its home setting.

“I’m still trying to work out my own spiritual side of it,” he said. “But philosophically, it makes a lot of sense.”

Emory’s approach is to encourage a perspective somewhere between academic remove and uncritical embrace. In a recent class on Buddhist philosophy, team-taught by Geshe Lobsang and Dr. Dunne, the subject was interconnectedness. Geshe Lobsang told an old story about a monk who throws a rock at a dog, only to discover that his beloved teacher has received the bruise instead. Responding to a ripple of skepticism among the students, Dr. Dunne suggested that instead of pondering whether the story was literally true, they ought instead to consider the implications of a world in which it could be.

Shaila Dewan is a reporter in the Atlanta bureau of The New York Times.

***

The Tibetan path is changing. How could it not change, with the Dalai Lama exiled from Tibet? With the Chinese banning "reincarnations" meaning that they will choose the next Dalai Lama . Meaning that they as conquerors proclaim the holder(s) of all the lineages of the Tibetan sages. Meaning, I assume , that they claim as conquerors and occupiers the right to eliminate the Tibetan culture, religion and technology of freedom and enlightenment. Hmm.

The Dalai Lama seems to have countered with a translation of Tibetan meditation and medicine into the languages and practices of science, psychology and philosophy. By bypassing the predictable "hot-button" reactions to religion, the Buddhist way can survive as a stream of renewal to all of the world's faiths, to help to water and renew all of the faiths of Earth and chelate out some of the most noxious and toxic of those self-same faiths' teachings and practices. It is the preservation of a wisdom way of life, not by sequestering and excluding but by opening the circle and inviting the rest of the world in.

How do you practice peace? By being peace, by finding a peaceful path through the minefields of human thought and belief. By increasing awareness of the state of the human mind and its possibilities. By inculcating a holy consciousness without dogma or exclusivity by simply expanding the boundaries of consciousness.

****

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

--Albert Einstein (quoted in "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying - Sogyal Rinpoche)

***

"Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. So you leave everything fresh, natural, vivid, and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn't change, its color doesn't fade, and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness."

--Dudjom Rinpoche

***

"Once you have the View, although the delusory perceptions of samsara may arise in your mind, you will be like the sky; when a rainbow appears in front of it, it's not particularly flattered, and when the clouds appear, it's not particularly disappointed either. There is a deep sense of contentment. You chuckle from inside as you see the facade of samsara and nirvana; the View will keep you constantly amused, with a little inner smile bubbling away all the time."

--Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

***

Moral Compass

"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

No Comment

by Scott Horton

November 2, 12:12 AM

The Torture Litmus Test

Several days before his first meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael Mukasey’s Justice Department handlers arranged a private meeting for him with a number of “movement conservatives.” Two different administration sources have described the meeting to me. During the meeting, Mukasey’s counterparts, largely figures associated with the Federalist Society, pushed him on two points in particular.

First, they wanted him to undertake that he would not appoint a special prosecutor to look into the U.S. attorneys scandal and related charges concerning political prosecutions. At this point it is clear that if an independent investigation were to be launched, it would quickly run head-on into some of the same figures who sat in the room with Mukasey. The email traffic which has surfaced already—and it is only a tiny fraction of the total—shows how Rove and Miers repeatedly relied upon the Federalist Society and its members to help them out in addressing recalcitrant U.S. Attorneys who would not debase their office by converting it into a political tool. Let’s be cynical and say that the first request they put to Mukasey was designed simply to protect themselves and keep their behind-the-scenes involvement with the Justice Department’s highest profile scandal so far out of the spotlight.

And second, they pushed aggressively on the torture question. They wanted Mukasey to pledge that he would toe the Administration’s line on “the Program,” that he would continue to protect those who authored the program with the cloak of an Attorney General opinion keeping them safe from prosecution.

When is waterboarding not torture? When it interferes with Dick Cheney’s and David Addington’s retirement plans.

Mukasey, I am told, gave vague reassurances on both points, “without completely giving away the shop.”

That meeting and the Judiciary Committee hearing that followed provide a basis for us to conclude that the Bush Administration has developed a new litmus test for its attorney general: he must be prepared to wink at torture publicly, and behind the scenes to issue opinions giving the authors of the program comfort.

There has been no shortage of litmus tests in the past: abortion, gay marriage, the flag amendment—whatever hot-button issue the G.O.P. cooks up for its next election campaign. But the torture litmus test is new, and it seems to be key for lawyers. It really is an exercise in Kool Aid drinking. If you’re prepared to hedge on whether waterboarding is torture, then you might be counted upon to do anything. Indeed, there is no question about it. Waterboarding is torture and has been understood to be torture in a formal sense for over a hundred years. Soldiers who used it were court-martialed, and the attempted defense of military necessity was smacked down by the Army’s Judge Advocate General in 1903. There is no shortage of other precedent. This is why Mukasey’s dodge on the issue—first a very primitive dodge, and then a more sophisticated one—is so troubling.

So why has torture emerged as a Bush Administration litmus test? My friend Jack Balkin nails this:

The real reason why Judge Mukasey cannot say that waterboarding is illegal is that Administration officials have repeatedly insisted that they do not torture, and that they have acted both legally and honorably. If Judge Mukasey said that waterboarding is illegal, it would require the Bush Administration to admit that it repeatedly lied to the American people and brought shame and dishonor on the United States of America. If Judge Mukasey were to say waterboarding is illegal and not just “a dunk in the water” in Vice President Cheney’s terminology, he would have announced that, as incoming Attorney General, he is entering an Administration of liars and torturers.

And Jack summarizes the dilemma very accurately:

Which places any Attorney General nominee in a difficult bind: The Bush Admininstration will not nominate anyone to be Attorney General who will state publicly that what the Administration did was illegal or dishonorable. That means that the only persons who can be nominated are those who are willing to be complicit in its illegality and dishonor. For if the nominee admitted that the Administration had repeatedly misled the American people about the legality of its actions, he would not be welcome in the Bush Administration.

The New York Times says the issue is one of legal culpability of those who have administered the program. In a speech I delivered in Ohio last October, “When Lawyers Are War Criminals,” I went over this analysis in some detail and concluded it was incorrect. The CIA personnel, military personnel and contractors all have immunity. But there is a class of persons who are probably not immunized in any effective way by the current statutes, namely the administration officials who authored this scheme: Dick Cheney, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Haynes and a handful of others. They are the figures “on the line” who are most adamant that Mukasey (or any substitute for Mukasey) provide them with the protection they feel they need.

Hence, the debate around Michael Mukasey has really ceased to be about Michael Mukasey and his qualifications to serve as attorney general. It has become a debate about the torture issue. And protecting the authors of a criminal scheme from their certain ultimate fate: prosecution.

I have very strong conflicting views about the vote which is coming in the Judiciary Committee. I believe that Mukasey, as an individual, is exceptionally well qualified to serve as attorney general. I would approve the Mukasey who says he “personally” finds waterboarding abhorrent. But I am troubled by the “official” Mukasey who is being trotted out as something different. And I believe that the nation cannot, at this stage, accept the appointment of an attorney general who refuses to come clean on the torture issue. In the end this is essential to national identity, and to the promise of the Justice Department to serve as a law enforcement agency. Too much of what the Justice Department has done of late has little resemblance to law enforcement. Rather it looks to be just the opposite.

If the Bush Administration wants to turn torture into a litmus test, so must Congress. The question therefore ultimately becomes one of principle and not personality. The Judiciary Committee should not accept any nominee who fails to provide meaningful assurance on this issue. And, though it saddens me to say this, Michael Mukasey has not.

[Permanent link]

Here's the thing. If ONE mainstream Christian denomination had vocally and universally condemned torture and demanded an accounting at the very beginning of this terrible downhill slide, we would not be in this current morass.

Where is the Christian Church in this defining moral issue of our time?

Where is the church leadership, in speaking the truth?

When a bishop is consecrated, all the bishops present form a circle around him, their hands on or near his head.

A girl was watching such a ceremony with her mother from a cathedral balcony. "What are they doing to him, Mom?" she asked. Her mother replied dryly, "They're removing his spine."

See "What We Don't Want To Hear."



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

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

This is his statement at his trial for civil disobedience:

"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.


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 and 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."



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