Let's Go

I heard someone read this poem on NPR on Saturday a.m.


I transcribed from the recording as best I could.

Listen Now

"Let us walk in the marketplace today
with shackles on our feet
walk with hands spread out
dancing with abandon
with dust covered hair
with blood stained shirts
the whole city waits for you -

Let's go.

They wait, the ruler of the city
The populace
The arrow of accusation
The stones of slander
The unfulfilled morning
The failed day
Who is their friend besides us?
Who in the city of the beloved is honorable?
Who remains worthy of the hands of the killer?
Prepare the heart for its journey --
Come you brokenhearted ones.

Let's go
and be killed again.
Friends.
Let's go.

(Poem by Faiz ahmed Faiz)

My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains

Dreams of Flying

I've been working on my computer, and with the help from my son have made everything in my life computer-wise more direct with less complicated workarounds. Learning how to compute by trying things is interesting but limits me to the things I know and hides from me what I don't know -- just like life. Then when I find out the things that I didn't know, and now know them, I can't remember how I solved that problem when I didn't know. You know?

There was a lot of -- "What's that file?" and I'd say, "I don't know." And there would be nothing in it. Why did I make the file? I don't know. It was a solution to a problem that has long since been solved, but the false solution remains to gunk up the works.

So, in the new year, I think that the universe is telling me that there is a necessity to change context. Look at the world in a different way, don't act upon the same assumptions, because they might be erroneous. They are certainly erroneous. It's that definition of insanity, of doing the same things and expecting a different outcome. Your vision has to change. This sums up the Old Testament prophets -- Again and again , they are telling the powers-that-be that the vision is wrong, the way of doing business isn't bringing about the Kingdom of God. What is the Kingdom of God? Well, if you're a King, you think it is that sort of Kingdom. But that isn't what the desert prophets were talking about. They were talking about vision, about context, about ways of seeing and being. God can only meet human beings in the present moment. The precise present moment , this one, and this one. Now. The stuff of the earth, of time, of wealth, of power, projects itself into both past in future in such a way that is binding. It tries to fix itself and become eternal. But there's the rub. It's not eternal, it's the stuff of time. The present moment is the great leveler. It's a present moment that is equally available to everyone everywhere at any time. You can't buy it, sell it, hoard it, fight over it -- it simply IS.

Calling things by their wrong names gunks up the works. The Christmas-time -- Solstice-time - feast-time is time set apart to be time eternal. So that we always have it. It's a reference point, a touchstone. Holy time, set aside time is always available, set outside of time, so that it remains to nourish us once we step into the time-stream. But we can't live in time eternal. We live our lives inside of time and action and karma (cause and effect). Up and down. Duality. Argument. Day and night. Sun and moon.

Maybe changing context is making that highway, that wider communication , between our eternal selves and our bound-by-time selves. We see differently when we see the wider picture, the wider context of time. As in the long genealogy at the beginning of Matthew. Here are all these people , moving through time, and asking "What is my purpose?" But their true purpose didn't show up until way way down the road, after their time was over. That's faith, that 's trust that there is a process at work in us, even though we may never see it. Faith and hope aren't about making ourselves comfortable, it's more like by opening our hearts, our inner parts to the energy that has faith and that makes hopefulness, so that that wide highway can be reinforced. So that our actions shine out with the correct energy. Faith and hope are like a compass, a GPS. They keep us going in a fruitful direction when we don't know the destination.

My son went to Christmas Eve service with me, and later said, that that liturgy, the liturgy of the Christian Church didn't have any meaning for him any more. I found that hard to hear, but it was hard only because it's just a reflection of my own path, I recognized in his words some of the hard places that I have been. All of "that" ceased to have meaning for me for decades, when I left the church and sought my images, metaphors and archetypes elsewhere. My path took me back to the church, but the larger point, the larger context is that I had to walk my own path, as he has to walk his. My respect for that tells me to send him off with great love, and with great hopefulness, so that he might make his path a true one, knowing that his foundational ancestry is true. In returning to church, my vision , my context had changed enough to allow me to be there, even though I don't believe like most believers. I'm there for different reasons, my relationship with the Christian Church is different from the relationship that most Christian people have with the church. I had to make a new covenant. Otherwise, I still wouldn't be there. I know that my son, the image maker, the game maker, the prophet has to set out to his own desert, his own pathless path, to be who God made him to be.

It was painful in a strange way to be with him this Christmas. He has a way of causing pain that is very interesting to me, in that it's something that I think that I do too, but cannot see while I'm doing it. But I could see it/feel it coming from him. It's less a doing than an energy, a way of being with people. It makes others feel diminished and dismissed. It's a sharp sword. When I was younger, and I'd go home for a holiday, at the end of my visit, my siblings and family members would say things like, "You always get everything stirred up when you come here." Or they'd say, "You cause trouble." I would always be shocked, because , from my perspective, I felt like I'd bent over backwards to be jolly , amenable and conciliatory. But it wasn't something that I was doing . It was a beingness, and energy, something that I was emanating. A lot of beingness is stuff that we have to grow into. It's uncomfortable when we haven't learned to use our energy properly. Part of my beingness is to be a troublemaker, to stir things up, to lance boils, to bring what's hidden to the surface. It's a lot of work to own that weapon and not kill with it.

I think my son has something similar to that. He has to learn to discipline that energy and hold his fire, so to speak. He has so much visionary strength and purpose that those who get too close to it frequently get burned. It's the double edged sword in us. Perhaps what Jesus meant by bringing what is in you out, or what is within you will destroy you. Learn to use your talent and your skill and your God-given fire, because if you don't , all of that fire will turn on you.

The Church as an institution has difficulty with this transformational aspect of human life. Those who truly seek transformation frequently leave, because the church too often gets stuck in the tasks of preserving it's own institutional life. But that isn't what Jesus was talking about. At all. Not a bit.

Consider this from Thomas Merton:

"There must be a time of day when the man who
makes plans forgets his plans,
and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has
to speak falls very silent.
And his mind forms no more propositions,
and he asks himself:
Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time
When the man of prayer goes to pray
as if it were the first time in his life
he had ever prayed,
when the man of resolutions puts his
resolutions aside
as if they had all been broken,
and he learns a different wisdom:

distinguishing the sun from the moon,
the stars from the darkness,
the sea from the dry land,
and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.


***


Rumi says:

"There is a strange frenzy in my head,
of birds flying,
each particle circulating on its own.

Is the one I love everywhere?"

***

Different Earth and Sky

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of
Second Comings

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

***
The metaphor of a window is talking to me these days. Looking out of a window, an empty window, looking in a window. What's the view like from your window?

I'm thinking about windows in terms of changing context -- that we're used to framing ideas and our occupation of reality itself in a certain contextual tension. Where and when are the windows
To whom do the windows belong?

It's actually difficult to change context. Habits of body , mind and feeling wear down neurological pathways that always direct the calls in a certain unaltering direction. Unless.
The unless seems to be a catharsis, an epiphany, a change point, a trauma. What unsticks and resets the person or the culture? Even if we know that we're headed in the wrong direction, how do we re-evaluate and "make it so" ?

The window we 're looking out shows us the same view , over and over again. Then, suddenly, there's another and different window. Another room that we never noticed. Or we look out of the same window, and suddenly see a completely different earth and sky.

***

Big Funnel

Op-Ed Contributors

Memo to the Dept. of Magical Copyright Enforcement

China has a world-leading knack for churning out copies and counterfeits, and the release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” last month prompted a surge of peculiarly Chinese imitations as well as a quickie unauthorized translation. Below are excerpts from the publishers’ summaries and the texts of the various “Harry Potter” counterfeits that have been circulating in China in the last few years, translated by The Times from the Chinese. While the selections may not always make sense (even, or perhaps especially to, “Potter” aficionados), we can promise you this: no spoilers.

Harry Potter and the Leopard-Walk- Up-to-Dragon

Harry Potter and the Chinese Porcelain Doll

Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl

Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince

Harry Potter and the Big Funnel

Harry Potter and Platform Nine and Three-Quarters

Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Harry Potter and the Showdown

{originally published August 10, 2007}

Post-Christmas Fare

www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/opinion/26dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

December 26, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

A Tale of Trigger

By MAUREEN DOWD

When consumerism curdles, it’s tempting to become an emotional Marxist about Christmas.

Not Karl. Groucho.

“Now the melancholy days have come,” Groucho Marx wrote to pal and fellow comic Fred Allen on Dec. 23, 1953. “The department stores call it Christmas. Other than for children and elderly shut-ins, the thing has developed to such ridiculous proportions — well, I won’t go into it. This is not an original nor novel observation, and I am sure everyone in my position has similar emotions. Some of the recipients are so ungrateful.

“For example, yesterday I gave the man who cleans my swimming pool $5. This morning I found two dead fish floating in the drink. Last year I gave the mailman $5. I heard later he took the five bucks, bought two quarts of rotgut and went on a three-week bender. I didn’t get any mail from Dec. 24th to Jan. 15th. ... For Christmas, I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it, and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I am going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”

I found Groucho’s grouchy letter in Caroline Kennedy’s “A Family Christmas,” a selection of songs, poetry, prose, letters and a list of the questions most frequently asked of Macy’s Santa.

(Q: Are you lactose intolerant?

A: No, Santa likes all kinds of milk, except buttermilk, although he will use buttermilk in cakes and pancakes.”)

The book includes the solemn and sardonic, including this verse from Calvin Trillin, yearning to escape the shopping zoo and endless loop of Der Bingle crooning and “Jingle Bells” jingling:

“I’d like to spend next Christmas in Qatar. Or someplace else that Santa won’t find handy. Qatar will do, although, Lord knows, it’s sandy.”

As a little girl, Caroline had the advantage of being able to ask the bloodhounds on the White House switchboard to get Santa on the line.

“The fact that he had the same soft Southern accent common to many White House workers of the day escaped me completely,” she writes dryly.

She includes a letter her father, as president, sent to Michelle Rochon, a little girl in Michigan.

“I was glad to get your letter about trying to stop the Russians from bombing the North Pole and risking the life of Santa Claus,” J.F.K. wrote, noting that he shared her concern with Soviet atmospheric testing. “You must not worry about Santa Claus. I talked with him yesterday, and he is fine.”

Ms. Kennedy writes that she continues the literary tradition of her mother. Jackie wrote Christmas poems for her mother, and Caroline and John wrote poems for Jackie.

As I read her book, it struck me that everyone must have a holiday tale they could write up and paste into the back of “A Family Christmas.”

Mine would be about Trigger.

When I was little, I got one of those wooden horses that bounced on springs for Christmas. I loved him and rode him every day.

One morning, I came down to the porch and the horse was gone. My mom explained that a poor woman and her son had walked by, and the little boy had stopped and stared longingly at the horse.

My mom’s world was turned upside down when she lost the father she adored at 12, so she had a soft spot for children who hurt. On a police widow’s pension, she was always mailing a few dollars off to St. Jude’s or to children she had read about who were hungry or needed an operation.

When she told me that she had given my horse to another child — a stranger — I was crushed. Whenever we fought for the next 16 years, I reminded her of her perfidy.

On my 21st birthday, I came home to find a bouncing horse with a handwritten sign in its mouth. “Hi. I’m back!” It was signed: “Trigger.”

I brought the horse of a different era to live with me, as a rebuke about how long it took me to appreciate one of my mom’s favorite sayings: “Don’t cry over things that can’t cry over you.”

Her lesson was lovely: that materialism and narcissism can only smother life — and Christmas — if you let them.

In a piece reprinted in the Kennedy anthology, Henry van Dyke writes: “Are you willing ... to own, that probably the only good reason for your existence is not what you are going to get out of life, but what you are going to give to life; to close your book of complaints against the management of the universe and look around you for a place where you can sow a few seeds of happiness ... to make a grave for your ugly thoughts and a garden for your kindly feelings ...? Then you can keep Christmas.”

Possibility

December 25, 2007

Editorial

When Christmas Morning Comes

This is a simple holiday. Ask any child, or, better yet, ask yourself what you recall from your own childhood Christmases. Presents, yes, and shopping and decorations and the return of familiar songs and the smells of baking and perhaps the cadence of a few verses from the early chapters of Matthew and Luke.

What persists above all is the feeling of finally going to bed on a dark winter’s night full of hope for what the morning will bring. Even jaded adults can remember how that felt, and they remember it as viscerally as they remember anything.

The emotional truth in that transition lies at the heart of Christmas. It captures the most basic rhythm of our lives — going to bed at night and getting up in the morning — and makes us keenly, happily aware of it. That rhythm is all the more stirring because the season is so penetrating, the winter darkness so long.

Both of the basic stories we tell about Christmas, the shepherds in their fields by night and the peregrinations of Santa Claus, fill the darkness with life and possibility. A stranger, an extragalactic visitor wise enough to look past all the shopping, might be forgiven for thinking that this is the festival in which we celebrate the magic of sleep.

After all, what other holiday do we attend in robes and pajamas?

The optimism, the generosity, the charitable warmth of Christmas do stem, of course, from the pattern and the meaning of the biblical story. They have their source, too, in the sense of regeneration now that we’ve turned this darkest corner of the solar year.

Christmas is imbued with a more everyday hope as well, a recognition that the transition from sleep to waking always carries with it the immeasurable gift of a new day. The very premise is hopeful.

No one expects to wake every day as joyfully as a child at Christmas, or to sleep as badly the night before. The gift of possibility is there every morning.

We the Christmas Makers

God on Earth

St. John Chrysostom

Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the nativity. For this day the ancient slavery is ended, the devil confounded, the demons take to flight, the power of death is broken. For this day paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sin is removed, error driven out, truth has been brought back, the speech of kindliness diffused and spread on every side--a heavenly way of life has been implanted on the earth, angels communicate with us without fear.

Why is this? Because God is now on earth, and man in heaven; on every side all things commingle.

The Living Testament

*****

Dearly beloved, today our Savior is born; let us rejoice.  Sadness
should have no place on the birthday of life.  The fear of death
has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of
eternal happiness.

- Leo the Great, "Sermon"

*****

SAYINGS OF LIGHT AND LOVE
by St. John of the Cross
- jottings from his notebooks

39. My spirit has become dry because it forgets to feed on you.

40. What you most seek and desire you will not find by this way of yours, nor through
high contemplation, but in much humility and submission of heart.

***

DEAR ONES

We miss them most, at this time of year, when they live so vividly in memory and dream.  
Oh, she would have loved you! we tell a new member of the family, I wish you could have known her.  

Their place in history slips farther and farther away. They missed global warming and 9/11.
They missed Harry Potter and the fall of the Berlin Wall. They thought Madonna was the Blessed Mother.
They missed cell phones and computers in people's homes. They never had email addresses.

But we have them in indelible images. We remember their clothes, how they stood in the doorway,
sat in a chair. We remember being around the table at Christmas, all of us, remember them opening a gift.
We remember laughter. When pressed, we remember misunderstanding, too, but we prefer not to.
Left to our own devices, we enshrine their times with us as a golden age. We are free to do so:
they are not around to contradict us.

Insofar as they made Christmas for us, we were the losers when they left. Quickly, though -- very quickly,
if we were parents ourselves -- we made it for others, and grew swiftly and firmly into our new role:
Christmas-makers. We try to imagine them back, doing the things they did, some of which we do now.
We would bicker about it, perhaps. We have come to enjoy our emancipation, and realize with
something of a shock that they have lost their place among us. They cannot live here. They must remain
in the past.

And yet they cluster all around the perimeter of our lives. They are never far away. They seem to send us
love and power-- sometimes, they send love purer than any they offered when they lived as we live now.
I remember them, and -- for a moment -- I feel them.


Hello, dear Everyone! Hello!  And do you know that Christ is born, again?  This very night?
****

Longest Night of the Year...

   "Where there is danger there grows also what saves."

    - Friedrich Holderlin, "Patmos"

   ****

   "Live at the empty heart of paradox.
   I'll dance with you there, cheek to cheek."

    -Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

   ***

   "Thin Places. Those spots where two worlds meet, where the spiritual seems more apparent because
the perceived veil between the ordinary  and holy seems a little thinner. We make long pilgrimages
to these places, leave gifts, stare off into space, and wonder if there really might be a door to another
world in the back of a dusty wardrobe. Some also experience thin places through sacraments, ritual,
or moments in time."


Onehouse

When God Intercedes

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau

©2007 G.B. Trudeau

Alas!

Terry Pratchett Embuggered

Sad news for the fantasist and his fans :

"Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer's, which lay behind this year's phantom 'stroke'.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I
expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)

— Terry Pratchett



PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell. I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry."

(via Follow Me Here)

Deeply Shaken

Deeply Shaken

Father Alfred Delp

Advent is a time of being deeply shaken, so that man will wake up to himself. The prerequisite for a fulfilled Advent is a renunciation of the arrogant gestures and tempting dreams with which, and in which, man is always deceiving himself.... The shaking, the awakening: with these, life merely begins to become capable of Advent. It is precisely in the severity of this awakening, in the helplessness of coming to consciousness, in the wretchedness of experiencing our limitations that the golden threads running between Heaven and earth during this season reach us; the threads that give the world a hint of the abundance to which it is called, the abundance of which it is capable.

Advent of the Heart

***

 "Every light that comes from Holy Scripture comes from the light
of grace.  This is why foolish, proud and learned people are blind
even in the light, because the light is clouded by their own pride
and selfish love.  They read the Scripture literally, not with
understanding.  They have let go of the light by which to Scripture
was formed and proclaimed. "

  - Catherine of Sienna -

**
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
   - by Thomas a Kempis -

A Prayer for Cleansing the Heart and Obtaining Heavenly Wisdom

  Strengthen me by the grace of Your holy spirit, O God. Give me the
  power to be strengthened inwardly and to empty my heart of all
vain
  care and anxiety, so that I may not be drawn away by many desires,
  whether for precious things or mean ones. Let me look upon
everything
  as passing, and upon myself as soon to pass away with them,
because
  there is nothing lasting under the sun, where all is vanity and
  affliction of spirit. How wise are they who thinks thus!

       -------- Bk. 3, Chapter 27

***
Be here now in love, and all shall be well.
 - http://shalomplace.com

***
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a
very short creed.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

***

I sleep,  but my heart is awake.

-Song of Songs 5:2

***

Let us love the actual world that never wishes to be annulled,  but love it in all its terror, 
but dare to embrace it with our spirit's arms -- and our hands encounter the hands that
hold it.

-Martin Buber

***
For I tell you this;  one loving blind desire for God alone is more valuable in itself,  more
pleasing to God and to the saints,  more beneficial to your own growth,  and more helpful
to your friends,  both living and dead,  than anything else you could do.

-The Cloud of Unknowing

Now I Want Sight

Not Losing Heart

"And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart." Luke 18:1
**
"Let us ask ourselves honestly whose company we are ashamed to be seen in – and then ask where God would be. If he has embraced the failing and fragile world of human beings who know their needs, then we must be there with him." Meditations like this is why so many of us have had such hopes in the ABC." --From Mark Harris

Archbishop of Canterbury's Christmas Message to the Anglican Communion

One of the strangest yet most moving expressions in the New Testament is a verse in the Letter to the Hebrews (11.16): God ‘is not ashamed to be called their God’. The writer is talking about the history of God’s people. When they have been faithful to God, faithful in keeping on moving onwards in faith rather than settling down in self-satisfaction, when they are true pilgrims, then God is content to be known as their God. He declares himself to be the God of pilgrims, of people who know that their lives are incomplete and that they are still journeying towards the fullness of God’s promises. Visiting refugee camps in the Middle East, as I did this October, brings home so powerfully what it is to be literally and absolutely homeless, not able to be confident in any resources, inner or outer. People in these terrible circumstances will never be complacent, they will always be looking for a future. They are in the most obvious way those whom God is not ashamed to be with, people whose God he is happy to be. He is at home with the homeless. But it is also an image of God’s relationship with all those who are homeless or wandering in other ways.

What an odd expression, to say that God is not ‘ashamed’! It’s as though we are being reassured that God, in spite of everything, doesn’t mind being seen in our company. Most of us know the experience of being embarrassed by someone we are with – children are embarrassed by parents, parents by children; I have sometimes found myself walking down the road with someone who is talking loudly or behaving oddly, and wishing I weren’t there. But God is not embarrassed by human company when that company is turning away from self-satisfaction and ready to move on. We might think that God would be ‘ashamed’ of human company that was imperfect, confused, even sinful. But God is happy to be the God of confused and sinful people when they recognise their own confusion and face the truth of their need. That’s what the great parables of Jesus in St Luke’s Gospel are so often about, especially the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

So at Christmas, God shows that he is not ashamed to be with us. He has heard our cries of weakness and self-doubt and unhappy longing, he has seen our wanderings and anxieties, and he is not ashamed to be alongside us in this world, walking with us in our pilgrimage. And because he is content to walk with us, we are challenged about whose company we might be ashamed to share. So easily we decide that we would be ashamed to share the company of the sinful, the doubting or the outcast. But God, it seems, is not ashamed to be seen with such people. If he is ashamed to be called the God of any human group, the text from Hebrews strongly suggests that he is most ‘embarrassed’ by those who think they have arrived at the end of their journey, who think they have already attained perfection (compare St Paul’s angry and scornful words in I Corinthians 4.8 – ‘Already you have become rich!’). And it is clear why God would be ashamed to be the God of such people: they behave and speak as if they didn’t really need God, as if they didn’t really need grace and hope and forgiveness.

God loves the company of those who know their need, and that is why he comes at Christmas to stand with them, to live with them and to die and rise for them. He is the God who blesses the poor – not only those who are materially poor, but those who are without the ‘riches’ of self-satisfaction and complacency, those who know all too well how far they fall short of real and full humanity. And so we are to pass on that blessing to the poor of every sort, those who are without material resources and those who are ‘poor in spirit’ because they know their hunger and need. Let us ask ourselves honestly whose company we are ashamed to be seen in – and then ask where God would be. If he has embraced the failing and fragile world of human beings who know their needs, then we must be there with him.

May God give us every blessing and joy in the Christmas Season.

+Rowan Cantuar

Archbishop of Canterbury.

****

What I See In Your Eyes

Out of myself, but wanting to go beyond that
wanting what I see in your eyes,
not power, but to kiss the ground
with the dawn breeze for company,
wearing white pilgrim cloth.

I have a certain knowing.
Now I want sight.

-Rumi

***

Descent

Down he came from up,
and in from out,
and here from there.
A long leap,
an incandescent fall
from magnificent
to naked, frail, small,
through space,
between stars,
into our chill night air,
shrunk, in infant grace,
to our damp, cramped
earthy place
among all
the shivering sheep.

And now, after all,
there he lies,
fast asleep.

- Luci Shaw

***

"We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be."

**

"Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. That is my real goal. It implies "becoming unknown and as nothing."

-Thomas Merton
A Book of Hours

***

Healing

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross
the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most
important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest
are not only useless, but disastrous.
 - Thomas Merton

***
From Mark Harris' blog

Sunday music...The Healing River.

Some time ago George Bayley the organist at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Lewes, Delaware asked me for a poem that he might set to music as an anthem. I had nothing that really would work so I wrote "The Healing River."

George has been working on it for a year, tweaking the words a bit, and the choir has been practicing for a month. Today (Sunday, October 21) the choir sang and George played and Malcolm Archer, organist and master of the choristers at Winchester College Chapel, in Winchester, England conducted. It was an amazing performance.

It is wonderful to hear words I wrote sung to such powerful music. Thanks to George and the Choir. And thanks to the Rector of All Lewes for letting me hang out at St. Peter's.

Here is the video in a new improved version...better sound.



The video is also on Google Video.To get to it there, click HERE.


Here is the poem:

The Healing River

All the world in conflict struggles -
Truth the casualty, and millions are enslaved;
And by the river with rushes on its banks
We look, and in the reeds there lies a child.

Refrain:
We will sing the Lord's song
and we will be sustained;
the path to the true and promised land,
the place of greatest healing, begins at the river.

In the wounded city bombed again,
where children cower against the blasts,
a river runs in Babylon,
flowing through its heart.

Peace is the child at first light
who washes in calm waters at the river's edge,
turns and sees in a vision the city healed,
the leaves of the trees all new and green again.

Refrain:
We will sing the Lord's song
and we will be sustained;
the path to the true and promised land,
the place of greatest healing, begins at the river.

Up from the little river to the old City
the shopkeeper whispers "a salaam."
The monastery rings the hours
and men congregate looking for one more.

Here is no world at ease, no easy peace;
death is in this city above the river,
where we always stone the prophets.

Refrain:
We will sing the Lord's song
and we will be sustained;
the path to the true and promised land,
the place of greatest healing, begins at the river.

Near here the hoped for Child was born,
near here he died.
Not too far from here the Servant of God
sent the people to this place.
Near here the Prophet's dream carried him to God.
(May peace be upon him.)

May peace be upon us all, upon us all.
May we sing in peace the Lord's song
in strange lands and on more familiar ground.

Refrain:
We will sing the Lord's song
and we will be sustained;
the path to the true and promised land,
the place of greatest healing, begins at the river.

***

Laura Huxley

December 19, 2007

Laura Huxley, Her Husband’s Biographer, Dies at 96

By MARGALIT FOX

Laura Archera Huxley, a writer who was best known for her memoir of her years with her husband, the novelist Aldous Huxley, died on Thursday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

The cause was cancer, said Karen Pfeiffer, who was reared by Mrs. Huxley.

Mrs. Huxley’s memoir, “This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was published in 1968, five years after her husband’s death. The book recounted her seven-year marriage to Huxley, best known for the dystopian novel “Brave New World,” which was published in 1932.

Reviewing “This Timeless Moment” in The New York Times Book Review, Nona Balakian wrote: “Despite its soap-opera title and occasional discursiveness, Mrs. Huxley’s memoir makes absorbing reading. It captures, if not the totality of Huxley’s genius, certain integral and warmly human aspects of it.”

Over the years, Mrs. Huxley was also a concert violinist; a freelance filmmaker; a lay psychotherapist; a self-help author; the head of a children’s foundation; a lecturer on the human potential movement; and, in her words, a restrained investigator of LSD.

Laura Archera was born in Turin, Italy, on Nov. 2, 1911. A musical prodigy, she made her United States debut in 1937, performing Mozart’s A major violin concerto in Carnegie Hall with the New York Women’s Symphony Orchestra. Miss Archera later studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. At the outbreak of World War II in Europe, she chose to remain in the United States, eventually settling in Los Angeles.

After a close friend, Virginia Pfeiffer, became seriously ill, Miss Archera gave up her musical career to study psychology and alternative medicine. She later donated her Guarnerius violin to Yehudi Menuhin, Karen Pfeiffer said.

Miss Archera befriended Mr. Huxley and his wife, Maria, in the late 1940s, while working as a freelance associate producer of documentary films. In 1956, the year after Maria Huxley’s death, Miss Archera and Mr. Huxley were married at a drive-in wedding chapel in Yuma, Ariz.

In 1963, as Mr. Huxley was dying of cancer, Mrs. Huxley ministered to him by injecting him with LSD and by reading aloud to him from the manuscript of “The Psychedelic Experience,” by Timothy Leary and others.

In the mid-1970s, after her friend Virginia Pfeiffer’s death, Mrs. Huxley, then in her 60s, took in and raised her young granddaughter, Karen. Besides Karen Pfeiffer, of Los Angeles, Mrs. Huxley is survived by Karen’s daughter, Kaya.

In the late ’70s, Mrs. Huxley started Children: Our Ultimate Investment, a foundation concerned with the well-being of young people. Her other books include several self-help volumes, the best known of which is “You Are Not the Target” (Farrar, Straus, 1963), which has a foreword by her husband.

The book offers a set of what Mrs. Huxley called recipes for getting through life’s many difficulties. These include punching a tetherball, imagining one’s own funeral and dancing in the nude.

***

I used to use Laura Huxley's "Put Your Mother On the Ceiling" to teach kids meditation. I came across her books in my young adulthood, and found her ideas helped me to stretch some boundaries. Though I must admit, the idea of dying while tripping seemed frightening to me. Dying all by itself is a holy moment, and I never felt that LSD was a "holy" drug. How quickly time passes. I had no idea that she was that old.

Atheism, Movies and Dental Trauma

Letters to the Editor:


December 18, 2007

Politics and the Power of Religion

To the Editor:

Re “Campaigns Like These Make It Hard to Find a Reason to Believe,” by Eduardo Porter (Editorial Observer, Dec. 14):

In the 17th century, Blaise Pascal argued that people should believe in God — even if they didn’t! — because if God exists, only believers will go to heaven. He wrote, “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.”

Today, our presidential candidates, humbly touting their church’s beliefs, are bending over backward to appeal to religious voters, ignoring, at best, the agnostics and atheists in our country. Religion is suddenly a political hot topic, regardless of the so-called separation of church and state. It shouldn’t be.

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” — a remarkable quote from none other than Blaise Pascal.

William O’Fallon
Brentwood, Tenn., Dec. 14, 2007

***

To the Editor:

I was raised Roman Catholic. But by about age 8, I realized that the nuns and priests in my catechism classes were either unable or unwilling to answer my questions. My science teachers, on the other hand, were able to answer my questions and — even better — admit that they didn’t know the answers to some of them.

Such honesty won my heart, for if the God they spoke about in church was really all-knowing and all-forgiving, he would certainly see, understand and approve of my genuine inquiries into the nature of existence.

If there was no God, but I pretended there was one, I would lose my most important virtue, integrity. What I knew as a child is that religious belief is irrelevant to goodness and morality.

I suspect that I even hold my notions of right and wrong more dearly, because they are so much my own. And because of my constant scrutiny, there’s very little chance for the hypocrisy that I see in some religions creeping into my beliefs.

I hope that Eduardo Porter is wrong about the impossibility of an atheist’s being elected president. But at least I can be content in the certainty that my heartfelt beliefs in freedom, equality and tolerance can’t be tainted by any presidential hopeful.

Nancy Bennett O’Hagan
Swatragh, Northern Ireland, Dec. 14, 2007

***

To the Editor:

Eduardo Porter’s complaint about the seeming exclusion of atheists from the current political dialogue brings to mind Mark Twain’s comment: “Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion — several of them.”

Like atheists, those of us who choose agnosticism, the coward’s way out, suffer the same banishment. We don’t deny that there is a God, we just don’t think there’s any way to prove that there is one, let alone several of them.

Robert Manning
Boston, Dec. 14, 2007

***

The Wooo-Wooo Atheism

From the world of Oz

The harder the faithful argue against the not-so-new atheism, the plainer it becomes that their apologetics are mere question-begging. Consider John Haught. In an interview of modest length, he manages to pack in all the immodest errors of the hedged-bet, Pascalian, mainline-Protestant, middle-of-the-road theology that he (and many others) hold with such vanity to be the solution to the cavorting bands of radical materialists on one side and apocalyptic messianists on the other: the misreading of major continental philosophers; the habit of using the word nihilism with the same precision as an East German techno-grunge band; the habit of either over- or understating the epistemological claims of the scientific method as is convenient to his argument; the inexorable tendency to claim that while on the one hand, "scientific" knowledge not only can be but must be evaluated on terms external to itself, namely religious terms, religious experience and the unsubstantiable knowledge claimed by theistic systems about the physical and moral nature of the universe are whole to themselves and cannot be subject to such radical scientismical challenges as, "Prove it."

Most of the interview is pablum. It rehashes the old claim that science is insufficient to give us "meaning" and "hope," or else that it can give us meaning and hope, but it cannot "justify" our holding meaning and hope. You can see that Haught is a moving target--fortunately, a slow-moving one. The question of "meaning" is a hoary old diversion. Without defining what meaning is, religion claims that since science can't provide it, ergo God. Haught goes further, bundles meaning and hope into "purpose," and says rather grandly that since science can't offer an answer to this frankly ineffable question, faith takes the day. By faith he means only Western monotheism, by the way. Ask a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a man on the path of the Tao about his purpose and you will get something equally ineffable in reply. Atheists, scientific or otherwise, likewise find the emphasis on purpose odd. To quote the unfortunately effable drummer Neal Peart: "Why are we here? Because we're here." This sort of answer makes Western religionists uncomfortable because it doesn't accord them a privileged position in creation. All of the questions about purposefulness and consciousness that they raise; all of their insistence on the immaterial nature of the mind and the conscience; all of their objections about mechanistic explanations; these ultimately boil down to the last trench in their long battle to maintain a cosmology centered on man. Privileging human consciousness as uniquely unfit for natural inquiry is finally a bulwark against the idea that we are incidental to the universe: geographically, cosmologically, biologically, purposefully.

Haught would call this nihilism, which is really his way of saying that his own mind is too impoverished to imagine a moral order without external justification. In a word, authoritarian. In the absence of third-party validation, he can't accept any action or thought as virtuous. But, as I said before, this position itself, in his construction, requires no validation in turn. It just is. All objections to it, by origin of their externality, are necessarily small, mean, false. Meanwhile, he writes:

They [atheists] miss the moral core of Judaism and Christianity -- the theme of social justice, which takes those who are marginalized and brings them to the center of society.

It is deeply debatable whether the central moral precepts of Judaism fulfill this formulation, firstly. But even if they did, let's throw down a gauntlet: Show me one example of a society in the history of Christendom in which the "marginalized" have been routinely brought "to the center of society." During the Barbarian migrations? The Carolingian renaissance? The Dark ages? High feudalism? The Age of Discovery? The Renaissance? The Enlightenment? Post-Enlightenment Europe? The 20th Century? When? Never is when. The moral imperatives that Christianity claims as its central concerns have never actually been effectuated within Christian society. How is that for purpose? Meaning? Hope?

***
For movie buffs:
Zuzu's petals
from Slacktivist.

AND

I spent the morning at the dentist, which means that I have no more adrenalin left for anything resembling logical thought. I have always been terrified of the dentist, and my former dentist, who understood my neurosis and allowed for it, has retired. The new young dentists who have acquired her practice talk about me as though I were not there, ("boy she sure is bleeding a lot...") and tsktsked their way through the task at hand in such a way that I knew we were going to be doing a lot more than gluing in an aging crown.

Sho' nuff, after much grinding, bleeding, cauterizing and things I can't even characterize (punctuated by a cheery "Would you like to watch a movie?" -- my horrified eyebrow raising and lowering must have emphatically signalled "NO.") it was decided that the crown is past salvaging. I am scheduled for a tooth extraction and a bridge.

At the end of the carnage , I glanced at my green dental bib, and it looked like a couple of 12 year olds had cleaned a fish on it.

I miss my old dentist, Vivian , who would have whisked such gore discreetly away and spared me the horror.

It is not everything, I fear, that has changed for the better.

Old Friends

Faithful Fools members sit in Civic Center Plaza for reflection on the streets. From left, J.D. Benson, ra Mu Aki, and Martha Boesing.
Carmen Barsody photo

Martha Boesing's new, deeply moving play, "Song of the Magpie," is about a 69-year-old woman who goes out to experience the world as a homeless person. Boesing's one-woman play was performed at the Faithful Fools Street Ministry in San Francisco on March 11, 2006.

"Song of the Magpie" is based on the work of the Faithful Fools, a San Francisco-based organization that enables non-homeless people to go out into the world for a day, or in this case a week, in an attempt to experience at first hand the highs and lows of existence on the streets.

Martha Boesing wrote the play and also performs as the lead character, Walker, who walks out into the rough world of homelessness with only four dollars tucked in a pocket and a small backpack. Walker is very funny and animated and she vividly captures the spirit of life on the streets and in the shelters.

Later in the play, when she is admitted into an emergency shelter, she portrays the viewpoint and traits of each person at the shelter. In the final part of the play, she undergoes a metamorphosis into Sophie, a homeless woman who provides an unforgettable revelation of the life-and-death nature of life on the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin district.

*****

Martha Boesing has found a way to break through that veil separating the visible world from the invisible. In doing so, she indeed breaks our hearts open. Her play is wise and brilliant and I would see her as a prophet for our time. In "Song of the Magpie," she has created a masterpiece. She is funny and sad at the same time and somehow brings out all the joy and bitterness and inner chaos and wisdom of the women she portrays.

At the end of the play, Boesing likens magpies to shamanic healers, wanderers, homeless persons. She sings a beautiful song to the magpies that ends with these lovely lyrics, a prayerful appeal for grace and enlightenment:

"Spirit of truth and love,
Lifegiving holy dove,
Speed forth thy flight,
Move on the water's face
Bearing the gifts of grace,
And in earth's darkest place,
Let there be light."

---

The King Is Holding a Millstone

"Look at the animals roaming the forest: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God's spirit dwells within them. Look at the fish in the river and sea: God's spirit dwells within them. There is no creature on earth in whom God is absent...

Look too at the great trees of the forest; look at the wild flowers and the grass in the fields; look even at your crops. God's spirit is present within all plants as well. The presence of God's spirit in all living beings is what makes them beautiful; and if we look with God's eyes, nothing on the earth is ugly...

All love comes from God; so when our love is directed towards an animal or even a tree, we are participating in the fullness of God's love."

(from "The Letters of Pelagius: Celtic Soul Friend," edited by Robert Van de Weyer)

via Darrell Grizzle

**

Rumi on the Purpose-Laden Life

Someone said, “There is something I have forgotten.” There is one thing in the world that should not be forgotten. You may forget everything except that one thing, without there being any cause for concern. If you remember everything else but forget that one thing, you will have accomplished nothing. It would be as if a king sent you to a village on a specific mission. If you went and performed a hundred other tasks, but neglected to accomplish the task for which you were sent, it would be as though you had done nothing. The human being therefore has come into the world for a specific purpose and aim. If one does not fulfill that purpose, one has done nothing.

انا عرضنا الامانة على السموت والارض والجبال فابين ان يحملنها واشفقن منها وحملها الانسن انه كان ظلوما جهولا

We proposed the faith unto the heavens, and the earth, and the mountains: and they refused to undertake it, and were afraid of it; but the human being undertook it: and yet truly, he was unjust to himself, and foolish. (Qur’an 33:72) . . .

Someone came to Sayyid Burhanuddin Muhaqqiq and said, “I have heard praise of you from a certain person.”

“Let me see,” he replied, “what sort of person he is, whether he has reached such a degree that he can know me and praise me. If he knows me by what I have said, he does not know me because words are impermanent, sounds are impermanent, lips and mouths are impermanent. They are all incidental. If he knows me by what I have done, the case is likewise. If, however, he knows my essence, then I know that he is capable of praising me and that the praise belongs to me.”

This is like a story they tell of a king who entrusted his son to a group of skilled men, with whom the boy remained until they had taught him total mastery of astronomy, geomancy, and other sciences, despite his utter stupidity and ineptitude. One day the king took a ring in his fist and, by way of testing his son, said, “Come, tell me what I am holding in my fist.”

“What you are holding,” he answered, “is round, yellow, and has a hole in the middle.”

“Since you have described it correctly,” said the king, “tell me what it is.”

“It must be a millstone,” he said.

“You have given its characteristics so precisely that the mind is boggled. With all the education and knowledge you have acquired, how has it escaped you that a millstone cannot be held in the fist?”

So it is now that the learned of our time miraculously fathom the sciences! They have learned perfectly to comprehend all sorts of extraneous things that do not concern them. What is truly important and closest of all to a man is his own self, but that our learned do not know. They pass judgment on the legality or illegality of everything, saying, “This is permissible, and that is not,” or, “This is lawful, and that is not.” However, the hollowness, yellowness, design, and roundness of the king’s ring are coincidental, for if you cast it into the fire none of those things remains. It becomes its essence, free of any of these characteristics. All the sciences, acts, and words that they put forward are likewise: they have no connection with the substance of the thing, which will abide after all these others. Likewise are all these attributes of which they speak and upon which they expound. In the end they will render a judgment that the king is holding a millstone in his fist, since they know nothing of that which is the principal thing.

–Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Rumi) (مولانا جلال الدین محمد رومی), Fihi ma Fih No. 4 (ca. 1270 CE)

[Permanent link]

*****

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean–roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin–his control
Stops with the shore;–upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,–thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,–thou dost arise
And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
For earth’s destruction thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send’st him, shivering in thy playful spray
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth: –there let him lay.

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals.
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada’s pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee–
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters washed them power while they were free
And many a tyrant since: their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves’ play–
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow–
Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

–Charles Gordon Noel Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto iv, st clxxviii—clxxxii (1812-18) in: The Poems and Plays of Lord Byron vol. 2, pp. 122-23 (E. Rhys ed. 1912)

Download a podcast of the twelfth part of Childe Harold here

[Permanent link]

Fix You

Young @ Heart Documentary Acquired by Fox Searchlight

Posted by Jay C on July 5th, 2007
Filed under: News

Last month, over on my personal blog, I posted about a group of feisty old folks who go by the name of ‘The Young @ Heart Chorus’. The idea isn’t really anything new; a group of unlikely folks singing covers of songs that play against their type. In this case, seniors taking on tracks from the likes of Sonic Youth, The Ramones, The Clash and…Coldplay! I’d come across some clips of one of their performances and must admit it was unbelievably moving. Upon some digging, I realized that these clips (featured below) were actually taken from a documentary shot for Britain’s Channel 4. Directed by Stephen Walker, the film follows the crew as they prepare for an upcoming performance. A sort of ‘Old School of Rock’ if you will. Here’s a short synopsis:

At an age when most people are either dead or living out their last days in retirement homes, these men and women are up on stage singing their hearts out about the big taboos surrounding old age: about love and sex, loss of youth, loneliness and death. In their mouths, familiar lyrics take on whole new meanings.

After unsuccessfully searching around Google Video for a full length upload of the film, i’m delighted to hear that Fox Searchlight has actually picked up ‘Young @ Heart’ for North American distribution. This is great news for both me and Stephen Walker, as this is the first documentary Searchlight has acquired in ten years! Quite the honour. This news comes to us from MovieWeb, but details are still sparce. As of now there’s no mention of a theatrical release date or dvd plans, so we’ll just have to be patient and see what comes of this. Until then, check out the clips below and let us know what you think.

Fox Searchlight Pictures Chief Operating Officer Nancy Utley announced that the company has acquired the Northern American rights to the moving and inspiring documentary Young @ Heart, the 2007 Los Angeles Film Festival hit which won the Audience Award for the Best International Feature. Directed by Stephen Walker, Young @ Heart stars the New England senior citizens chorus that has delighted audiences worldwide with their covers of songs by everyone from The Clash to Coldplay. The film is produced by Sally George, executive produced by Hannah Beckerman and funded by Channel 4 in the UK. The film is scheduled to be released in Spring 2008. "Young @ Heart is everything one could want in a moviegoing experience: surprising, moving, enlightening, and entertaining. The audience becomes a community as they laugh, applaud, and shed some tears. We couldn't be more honored to have this film as Searchlight's first documentary in over a decade," said Utley. "I am absolutely thrilled," said Stephen Walker. "This is the first film for our new company, Walker George Films, and my producer Sally George and I are incredibly excited to be working with the wonderfully talented and enthusiastic team at Fox Searchlight."

Video: Young at Heart Choir sing ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay

Video: Young at Heart Choir sing ‘Schizophrenia’ by Sonic Youth

Aughhh!

Consent Illumined Her

Meditation: Mary Mother of God

Advent has passed—the season in which we gaze into the sky, looking for a star to appear to show us where we might go to worship the Holy Child. Four weeks of gazing in preparation for that night when heaven and earth collide in a manger. We sing, we wait, we wonder: What was that night like? Was it cold? Was it really ‘silent’ as the carol suggests, or did the cries of the Christ-child awaken and provoke a chorus comprised of heaven, man and beast? Did Mary and Joseph exchange words, glances? Or could they even take their eyes off of the child- the Messiah?

Truly, Advent more than any other season in our liturgical calendar so deeply and intimately engages our imagination. During this season we begin to see the proliferation of images that has accumulated over the centuries since Christ’s departure. Images of the Annunciation, the Nativity, images of Mary holding her newborn child become so commonplace during this season that I wonder if we don’t take them for granted. Indeed, it is truly astonishing that this narrative, perhaps only second to that of the crucifixion, is the most frequently depicted scene in the gospel by artists throughout history. Why is it, then, that most of us only contemplate these images four weeks out of the entire year? The sheer volume of Marian representations suggests that the role of her image goes far beyond providing an attractive subject matter for our annual Christmas cards. Indeed the history of Marian piety and art reflects a longstanding yet tumultuous role the Holy Mother has played in shaping the life and worship of the church.

This presentation is intended to be more of an invitation to meditate for a brief moment on Mary, who by her humble obedience to God’s call invites us into embrace the life she carried. I invite you to ponder the role Mary plays, not only in the life of our Savior or his extended body the church, but in your own life of devotion. Has she been absent? Has she been avoided? Has she been beckoning?

My own journey with Mary began five years ago. During my first semester at Duke Divinity School I had decided to take Dr. Hauerwas’ course in Catholic Moral Theology. The course ended with a text entitled, “Mary: Mirror of the Church” by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. Perhaps it was the stressful end of the semester that made for such a dramatic ending to the class, but I will never forget what I witnessed that day. When Professor Hauerwas opened the class for discussion I was absolutely amazed by the silence that was quite uncharacteristic for this group of young, eager theologians who all semester prior to this moment had not hesitated to vocalize their profound findings in the week’s readings. But on this day I witnessed a group of men- I believe there was one other woman in the course besides myself- sitting in utter silence staring down at the book’s cover which displayed an image of Mary’s face. Finally, while looking at the image on the book, a young man broke the silence, “I have to admit,” he started, “I just don’t know what to do with Mary.” He continued to attempt an explanation for this and admitted, among other things, that her image made him quite uncomfortable because it evoked in him emotions and sensations that he normally would not consider consonant with holiness. “She is beautiful,” he exclaimed, “and I simply don’t know what to do with that.” This confession provided an opportunity for others to express similar reactions to this figure who undeniably plays an integral role in the narrative of our faith. I found myself burning inside. It took every ounce of strength I had to not shout out what I so deeply felt at that moment. I believe my hesitation was partly because I had not said a word in class prior to this moment, and partly because I was filled with so many mixed emotions that I feared opening my mouth would mean sure embarrassment. On the one hand, I was overjoyed to hear the confessions of my classmates because they were articulating the fears and barriers that had so definitively shaped my own experience in the protestant church. But I was also angry- not so much at my brothers who, quite frankly, possessed on this day a humility I had rarely witnessed in this particular setting, but more so because of the implications engendered by these observations. “It is because beauty has become a vice in the church today,” I wanted to suggest. “Perhaps the church has forsaken the possibility and actuality of incarnation. Beauty, as we now encounter it, solicits our objectification of it. When we encounter something or someone who is beautiful, we either want to own it or destroy it. But Mary is both intangible and indestructible. And as such we perceive her to be a threat.”

This moment became a catalyst for my simultaneously pursuing the questions: why have Protestants largely abandoned Mary? And why have so many Protestant churches similarly abandoned the arts? Clearly two very different questions but in seeking to answer the former, I realized these two issue are inextricably linked.

Trying to determine the origins of Marian piety in the Church is a bit like trying to determine which came first the chicken or the egg? The early proliferation of her image indicates that early on followers of Christ revered Mary as Jesus’ mother. But it is difficult to determine whether this reverence was the impetus for the depictions or whether the depictions became a catalyst for what eventually led to the inclusion of Mary in Christian liturgy. What is clear, however, is that at some point the veneration of Mary necessarily involved the presence of her image. Intrigued by this observation I sought to understand why this was the case. I found the answer by looking at the Christological debates of the early Church.

Indeed Mary played an integral role in the Christological debates in that it was largely the issue of proper attributions for Mary that led to the Church’s affirming the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Council of Ephesus was called in response to a growing division in the church between Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, and Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople. The main issues were the title of Mary as Theotokos (God-Bearer) and the two natures of Christ that the title implied. Whereas the school of Alexandria stressed the unity of the subject of Christ, the school of Antioch emphasized the differences between Christ’s divinity and humanity. Nestorius argued that the proper title for Mary would be Christotokos, which he felt better explained the proper differentiations between the two natures of Christ. Cyril of Alexandria argued just the opposite. For him the title Theotokos affirmed the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. To say that Mary is anything less than the Mother of God is to deny Christ his divinity.

The two eventually reached a unified statement known as the Antiochian Confession which is reflected in the following homily:

For the Theotokos Mary gave birth among us to Emmanuel, and Emmanuel is God who became man. For God the Word was born of the Father before all ages ineffably and inexpressibly, is also born of the woman in the last days. For having taken up our nature completely, and making familiar to himself the human form and conception, and making our body a temple for himself, he came from the Theotokos perfect God and perfect human, one and the same.

(Homily I § 3)

The unified statement enabled Mary to maintain a prominent role in the church but did not mark an end to her tenuous position in orthodox worship. Some were not content with the confession and continued to take issue with it. Those who celebrated the affirmation of the Theotokos did so by creating more images of her and even began building churches in her name. This led to what some consider the conclusion of the Christological debates, namely the iconoclast controversy of the eighth century. Once again, the central issue was the Incarnation and its implications for Christian worship. Those who opposed the invocation of images argued such a practice was against the Old Testament condemnation of idolatry. Those who upheld the use of images in Christian worship argued it was an inevitable result of the Incarnation. St. John of Damascus was a champion iconodule who wrote a number of treatises in defense of the divine images. He wrote:

When he who is bodiless and without form, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing in the form of God, empties Himself and takes the form of a servant in substance and in stature and is found in a body of flesh, then you may draw His image and show it to anyone willing to gaze upon it. Depict his wonderful condescension, His birth from the Virgin, His baptism in the Jordan, His transfiguration on Tabor, His sufferings which have freed us from passion, His death, His miracles which are signs of His divine nature, since through divine power He worked them in the flesh. Show His saving cross, the tomb, the resurrection, the ascension into the heavens. Use every kind of drawing, word, or color.

—On the Divine Images

There is much at stake here. The means of revelation have changed now that God has revealed himself to us in the flesh. Images are now not only appropriate but ordained as a means by which we might understand the mystery of the Incarnation.

Thus, art i.e., the making of images, is inextricably linked to the Theotokos insofar as she is the one through whom we witness and experience the mystery of God Incarnate. Mary is the original paradox whereby our faith is born.

The end of my exploration looked surprisingly like the beginning. Just as I struggled with the which comes first question when looking for the origins of Marian piety in the Church, I found myself faced with a similar conclusion. I was surprised to discover that Mary was not abandoned by the Reformers. Although by their time certain Mariological doctrines had developed that they could not abide, in the end Zwingli, Luther, even Calvin, in the very least acknowledged Mary’s significance as the Theotokos. I wonder then, has she disappeared from the doxology of the church because of the absence of her image? My painting is my own response to this question. I wrote a proposal for a thesis project, and sought permission to do a painting, not because I didn’t feel like writing any more papers, but because I felt it necessary that the form and content of the thesis be consonant. A painting affirms the conclusions of the Christological debates, including the iconoclast controversy. To confirm Mary as Theotokos is to celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of the God who imagined himself for our sake. For this reason the Christological debates of the early church are pertinent for the Church today. For much is at stake when we rely too heavily on the immaterial to experience an embodied God.

Looking down at the image of Mary the young man confesses, “She is beautiful, and I simply don’t know what to do with that.” I wonder, is our aversion to Mary really about Mary? Is it Mary’s beauty, or the beauty of a transcendent God incarnate in flesh that frightens us? I think if we were honest, most of us would admit that when we are encountered by beauty, we too find that we do not know what to do with it.

I fear this is a symptom of a Church who has, for too long, relied solely on the intellectual worship of God. We have forgotten what it means to be confronted by the God who came in the flesh so that we might see him, touch him, feed him, and hear him. Our foremothers and fathers understood that the inevitable result of the Incarnation is the divine invitation to encounter God through all of our senses.

Creating this painting gave me the opportunity to affirm for myself, and I hope for the community, that in order for the Church to truly be the embodiment of a God who became flesh we must recognize that not all theologians use words. When we are able to embrace this we will no longer fear beauty as something counter to holiness. But until we embrace the fullness of our faith we will continue to walk in darkness having eyes that do not see and ears that do not hear.

I close with this exhortation from St. John of Damascus and ask that you would join me in a brief meditation on the One who gave birth to our Lord:

If you say that only intellectual worship is worthy of God, then take away all corporeal things: lights, the fragrance of incense, prayer made by the voice. Do away with the divine mysteries which are fulfilled through matter: bread, wine, the oil of chrism, the sign of the cross. All these things are matter! Take away the cross and the sponge of the crucifixion, and the spear which pierced his lifegiving side. Either give up honoring all these things, or do not refuse to honor images.

The original presentation concluded with a visual collage comprised of images of Mary from various eras and cultures set to the hymn, “Veni Veni Emmanuel” (“O Come, O Come Emmanuel”).

Consent

By Denise Levertov

This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

She did not cry, “I cannot, I am not worthy,”
nor, “I have not the strength.”
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

from “Annunication” in Breathing the Water

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Letting the Love and Light Flow

By Jean Vanier

When we begin to discover and to drop the barriers and fears which prevent us from being ourselves and which prevent the life of the Holy Spirit from flowing through us, we become more simple. Simplicity is no more and no less than being ourselves, knowing that we are loved. It is knowing that we are accepted, with our qualities, our flaws and as we are in the depths of our being. Simplicity is letting the love and the light of God flow and shine through us.

Community and Growth

(from Inward Outward)

A Note From The Universe

© www.tut.com ®

Doesn't it happen like that? I mean, isn't your entire life proof? One day you're scrimping, the next you're in the money.

One day you're lonely, the next you have friends.

Lost, then found. Ill, then well. Low, then high.

Yet with hindsight, it becomes ever so clear that the only thing that ever really changed was your thinking. Even though you were free to think as you pleased the whole time.

History need not repeat itself -
The Universe

Giving Names To Souls

Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Our Towns

Giving Names to Souls Forgotten No Longer

By PETER APPLEBOME

In Thiells, N.Y., an effort is underway to identify the 910 or so anonymous souls buried with no names.

***

Giving names to souls....

I think there's a poem in that..

Irrational Season

This is the irrational season
When love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason,
There'd have been no room for the child.

~ Madeleine L'Engle

facebook
Darrell Grizzle
Coffee Mystics
(thank you Darrell for this poem)

Nafs

(from Robert Bly's collection "The Soul Is Here For It's Own Joy - Sacred Poems From Many Cultures)

"The poems at the start of this book hint at difficulty. Some force appears to challenge anyone who wants to live a spiritual life. Rumi, Donne and other poets in this third section work to make that force more visible and more vivid.

Some Believe that calling this force Satan, as Western theologians sometimes do, projects it too far outward, since Satan has his kingdom elsewhere. Thinkers and poets in the Muslim world try to bring the force in closer to our lives and to our personalities. Their name for the interfering force is the Nafs.

The word Nafs simply means soul in Arabic, and it is a shortening of the phrase Al-Nafs Al-Amara -- the lower or bitter soul. The word Nafs is a name then for the lower soul, and the soul that is constantly and actively engaged in wanting. It is the "wanting-creature" or the Greedy One.

The Muslims consider this eating, wanting energy to be our inheritance from those prehuman ages in which we were animals. Christianity uses the word "carnal," which points to sexuality. The Muslim world says what we have actually inherited from animals are teeth and claws. That is why Rumi refers to the Nafs sometimes as the "animal soul" or the "bodily soul." One can dream of it as a worn-out donkey; but if the human being does not work with it, it can grow to be a dragon.

When it is that size, it is virtually unkillable. Rumi describes all that in his poem about the snake-catcher who one day brings home a frozen dragon which thaws out. Thousands die.

Dr. Javad Nurbakhsh, the master of the Nematullahi Sufi order of Iran, who has written the best book in English to date on the Nafs, says that the Nafs always desires that which is prohibited. It is arrogant, it likes compliments and praise, it is more hostile than any enemy, and it may sometimes be torpid like a dragon frozen by the cold. Above all, the Nafs is greedy and hates discipline or privacy. A well-known saint who prayed each day at the front of the mosque thought he was free of the Nafs. But one day he came late and had to pray from the back of the mosque. His Nafs became furious; and the saint realized that the Nafs can simulate prayer, as long as the person praying is receiving praise. After that, he prayed in secret.

The fondness for malls, the power of advertising in this century, and the gradual destruction of privacy in the United States, imply that the Nafs is getting its way."

****

MYSTICISM
- by Evelyn Underhill -

The nature of distracting factors which "confuse and enchain the
mind" will vary with almost every individual. It is impossible to
predict what those things will be which a self must give up, in
order that the transcendental consciousness may grow. "It makes
little difference whether a bird be held by a slender thread or by
a rope; the bird is bound, and cannot fly until the cord that holds
it is broken. It is true that a slender thread is more easily
broken; still notwithstanding, if it is not broken the bird cannot
fly. This is the state of a soul with particular attachments: it
never can attain to the liberty of the divine union, whatever
virtues it may possess. Desires and attachments affect the soul as
the remora is said to affect a ship; that is but a little fish, yet
when it clings to the vessel it effectually hinders its progress."

(St. John of the Cross)

------ Part 2, Chapter 3

Vonnegut

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

It's Still One Light

Image by Mad Priest

Faith and Theology

Benedict XVI: spe salvi

Benedict XVI’s new encyclical on Christian hope is now available online: Spe Salvi (30 November 2007). You gotta like a pope who can quote Kant, Dostoevsky, Adorno, de Lubac, and an obscure Vietnamese martyr – all in a single encyclical! The writer of a recent Telegraph article related this anecdote: “A colleague, staring at the Pope’s latest encyclical, remarked, ‘There’s no news here. It’s all about God’.” One can scarcely imagine a higher compliment for this theologian-pope.

Here are a couple of excerpts on the relation between faith and the future:

“[T]he Christian message was not only ‘informative’ but ‘performative’. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known – it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open [Obscura porta temporis, venturi temporis, aperta est].” (2)

“Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for…. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future.” (7)

And I especially appreciate what Benedict has to say about hell and purgation:

“Christ descended into ‘Hell’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light.” (37)

“Some recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses. Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation ‘as through fire’. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.” (47)

posted by Ben Myers

***

From "Light and Storm"

When a mystic talks theology...

"When a mystic talks theology, it's poetic. They feel their dogma and doctrine is perfectly true because they feel it with the whole of their being, and it's an expression of their heart, not a rule or a regulation. But when the theologian gets a hold of it, it loses that intuitive truth and becomes something we are *supposed* to believe in the hope that we might experience reality the same way the mystic did...until even that goal is lost and the dogma becomes an end in itself rather than a means towards union with God."

***
Rumi says:

All religions, all this singing,
One song.
The differences are just
Illusion and vanity.
The sun's light looks
A little different on this wall than
it does on that wall,
And a lot different on this other one,
But it's still one light.

We have borrowed these clothes,
These time and place personalities
From a light,
And when we praise,
We're pouring them back in.

Divine Sparks

Doing Good

TIKKUN OLAM (REPAIRING THE WORLD)

"Tikkun olam" (literally, "world repair") has come to connote social action and the pursuit of social justice. The phrase has origins in classical rabbinic literature and in Lurianic kabbalah, a major strand of Jewish mysticism originating with the work of the 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria.

The term "mipnei tikkun ha-olam" (perhaps best translated in this context as "in the interest of public policy") is used in the Mishnah (the body of classical rabbinic teachings codified circa 200 C.E.). There, it refers to social policy legislation providing extra protection to those potentially at a disadvantage--governing, for example, just conditions for the writing of divorce decrees and for the freeing of slaves.

In reference to individual acts of repair, the phrase "tikkun olam" figures prominently in the Lurianic account of creation and its implications:

God contracted the divine self to make room for creation. Divine light became contained in special vessels, or kelim, some of which shattered and scattered. While most of the light returned to its divine source, some light attached itself to the broken shards. These shards constitute evil and are the basis for the material world; their trapped sparks of light give them power.

The first man, Adam, was intended to restore the divine sparks through mystical exercises, but his sin interfered. As a result, good and evil remained thoroughly mixed in the created world, and human souls (previously contained within Adam's) also became imprisoned within the shards.

The "repair," that is needed, therefore, is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence—and causing all things return to a world before disaster within the Godhead and before human sin, thus ending history.
While contemporary activists also use the term "tikkun olam" to refer to acts of repair by human beings, they do not necessarily believe in or have a familiarity with the term’s cosmological associations. Their emphasis is on acts of social responsibility, not the larger realm of sacred acts--and on fixing, not undoing, the world as we know it.

The phrase "tikkun olam" was first used to refer to social action work in the 1950s. In subsequent decades, many other organizations and thinkers have used the term to refer to social action programs; tzedakah (charitable giving) and gemilut hasadim (acts of kindness); and progressive Jewish approaches to social issues. It eventually became re-associated with kabbalah, and thus for some with deeper theological meaning.

Thus, over time tikkun olam went from being part of the religious technology of medieval mystics to a standard part of the vocabulary of contemporary North American Jews. Its goal shifted from dissolving history to advancing it.But the phrase “tikkun olam” remains connected with human responsibility for fixing what is wrong with the world. It also appears to respond to a profound sense of deep rupture in the universe, which speaks as much to the post-Holocaust era as it did in the wake of the expulsion from Spain and other medieval Jewish disasters.

Contemporary usage of the phrase shares with the rabbinic concept of "mipnei tikkun ha-olam" a concern with public policy and societal change, and with the kabbalistic notion of "tikkun" the idea that the world is profoundly broken and can be fixed only by human activity.

However, except within traditionalist Hasidic communities, the use of "tikkun olam" rarely reflects the belief that acts outside the realm of social responsibility (for example, making a blessing before eating) effect cosmic repair; that tikkun repairs the Divine self; or that the goal of "tikkun" is the complete undoing of the created world itself.

Tikkun olam, once associated with a mystical approach to all mitzvot, now is most often used to refer to a specific category of mitzvot involving work for the improvement of society—a usage perhaps closer to the term’s classical rabbinic origins than to its longstanding mystical connotations.
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Jewish Mysticism: Unearthing the Spiritual in a Physical World
by Ellen Solomon

Life is full of pleasurable experiences: an early morning at the seashore, a favorite piece of music artfully performed, a strong connection with another person. Often, we seek out experiences for the feelings and states they create in us, from the high energy and confidence achieved while climbing a mountain to the inner peace found amidst a gardening project. Whether we pursue solitude or time with others, an international experience or an activity in our own neighborhood, we frequently emerge from these encounters uplifted and rejuvenated.

Jewish literature abounds with positive references to man's experiences in this world. The great medieval commentator Rabbi Moses Maimonides writes about drawing inspiration from daily life: the intensity of "being in love" teaches us about the yearning and love for God; witnessing the beauty of nature develops greater awe of God. The Talmud states that after death we will be asked whether we enjoyed the pleasures of this world during our lifetime and will have to justify ourselves if we did not. In addition, Jewish mystical literature also encourages us to interact with this world, telling us about the holiness, or divine energy, that permeates the physical universe.

The Creation Process

Before Creation, the only thing that existed was God. His essence filled the entire universe, leaving no "space" available for any further creation. Therefore, when it came to the mind of God to create our universe, the Kabbalists (Jewish scholars of mysticism) say He constricted Himself to make room so this world could be created. This act is referred to by the Kabbalists as "tzimtzum."

The tzimtzum was not actually the creation of one universe but of many. God formed a progression of concentric universes, each containing a measure of His infinite light, although in diminished concentration, so the universes could exist outside His essence. Each universe received a lesser concentration of divine light than the one created before it. Because of their high spiritual content, each universe was created in the spiritual realm, until the turn came for our universe to be created. This world received an infusion of divine energy with a low enough intensity that it could be represented in a physical form.

Finding the Infinite Light

In our universe, God's essence takes the form of divine sparks. As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan explains in Jewish Meditation, these sparks are the manifestation of God's will that this physical world and everything in it should exist, and therefore these sparks reside in every object and every action. Perhaps the existence of these divine sparks can explain why some schools of meditation use the concentration on a simple phrase or object to achieve a spiritual experience.

Not only can we find mystical experiences within this world, but Jewish mysticism also teaches us that we can sense the light of God beyond this world. In his book Innerspace, Rabbi Kaplan says that by meditating on some of the other universes one can experience their spiritual essence. It is possible through prayer or other meditation to perceive the divine energy pouring into this world by way of the worlds beyond.

Man Is Spiritually Active

The Kabbalists teach us that man's role is not one of passive appreciation. Rather, a major element of man's existence is spiritual searching, uncovering the divine energy concealed in the physical world.

The divine sparks in this world lie dormant, and with each constructive action we perform, sparks are released from the physical entities that contained them. Although God's infinite light is mostly hidden in this world, when sparks are released, the divine light permeating our universe takes on a greater intensity. Likewise, destructive actions cause the spiritual light in this world to dim.

The unleashing of sparks in this universe affects the other universes. When divine sparks are set free in this world, it experiences a slight increase in divine light; the quality of light in the world will more closely resemble the original infinite light before the tzimtzum. In response to the heightened spiritual level in this universe, the next universe similarly undergoes an increase in spiritual light, causing the next universe to do the same, and so on.

Ultimately, the "message" of our one good deed, transformed by its travels through the spiritual worlds into a highly spiritual communication, reaches God. This is the first half of what Rabbi Kaplan calls a giant "feedback loop," through which God personally responds to our actions. Our universe, as well as the adjacent spiritual universes, does not run on automatic pilot. God, while independent of these universes, remains involved in our lives, responding to our actions with the transmission of infinite light, transformed via the spiritual worlds so that it reaches our universe in the form of additional sparks.

Like all sparks in this universe, these new sparks are concealed in entities around us, waiting for their release to further permeate our environment with spiritual energy. Perhaps this spiritual feedback makes up a part of the pleasure we often feel when performing good deeds and otherwise interacting positively with the world around us.

The Commandments as Tools of Spiritual Communication

Often we have a sense of what is right and wrong, what defines positive or negative action. But sometimes, due to the hidden nature of the divine energy in our universe, we are unaware of many other actions that might be considered good deeds in the spiritual realm.

Fortunately, God did not leave us to figure out the spiritual realm by ourselves. Over three thousand years ago, our ancestors received the divine message called the Torah. The Torah, Hebrew for "teaching," contains stories showing how some Jewish role models lived their lives, as well as the commandments, or mitzvot.

At some point in our lives, many of us have had discussions regarding the relevance of the mitzvot:

"We don't need to keep the commandments; some of them are very outdated. People don't get trichinosis from pork anymore."

"At my house on Passover, each kid got to choose food from their favorite fast-food restaurant. I mean, we still ate matzah to know what it felt like to be a slave."

"Mezuzahs are so nice, reminding us that God is inside the house and all. But why should it have to be a parchment? Any symbol that has meaning should be okay."

Certainly mitzvot encourage people to live healthy and constructive lives. Mitzvot also inspire many of us through their symbolism. But to say that a mitzvah has a single, easily understandable purpose denies its essence.

It is impossible to ascribe only one purpose to a mitzvah. A mitzvah can manifest any number of meanings, depending on the practitioner and his circumstances. Furthermore, each mitzvah has a spiritual impact which we can sense but cannot truly understand. This mystical, unknowable meaning is the true value of a commandment.

Conclusion

Our world is filled with opportunities for spiritual experience. The opportunities are everywhere: close to nature, in a crowd of people, even in the mundane surroundings of our everyday lives. Each of us holds the keys to unlock the divine sparks around us. Through the positive actions of mitzvot, we can fulfill one of human-kind's primary roles: to reveal and enjoy the spiritual elements in the physical world around us.

Ellen Solomon works as a computer programmer in New York City. With a master's in Jewish education, she teaches the laws and ethics of Jewish speech on the Web site www.torah.org.

****

These articles were suggested by a young friend of my son's. I remember being fascinated, at her age, with the Quaker ideas of silence and "the light".

More recently, Nan Merrill's wonderful books ( "Praying the Psalms" and "Meditations and Mandalas") and her by-mail group "Friends of Silence" have helped me to carve out time to develop this quality of silence.

It takes practice. Just as breathing exercises (although I never do them without remembering Ann Tyler's "Breathing Lessons" -- the bemused husband attending Lamaze classes with his wife and incredulously exclaiming; "Breathing lessons?! Who need breathing lessons?!") take time to become a pattern in the nervous system.

All of the inner practices take time to take root in us, so that they become us, they become second nature, part of our own musculature and neurology and not foreign to our nature. Our own mind and will and intellect can only take us so far on the spiritual path. I think that people who were born as natural mystics have that internal yearning to go into the inner silence and receive what has always been waiting there.

Spoken By the Wise Man

A manuscript of Sermon No. 39 by Meister Eckehart. The quoted language, in Middle High German, comprises the right column. The manuscript dates to ca. 1370 and is in the Stiftbibliothek in Einsiedeln.

[Permanent link]

Justus in perpetuum vivet et apud dominum est merces eius. (Wisdom 5: 16)

We read a short dictum in today’s epistle spoken by the wise man: “The just [or righteous] man lives in eternity.”

In the past I have spoken on those qualities which constitute a just person, but now allow me to cast this in a different way. A just person is one who has been formed by justice and has become the embodiment of justice. The just person lives in God and God lives in him; and thus is God manifest in each virtue of the just person and refreshed in each virtue of the just. But indeed it is not simply by each virtue, but by each deed of the just, be it as trivial as it maybe, nevertheless as a manifestation of justice, it will bring joy to God. He will be flooded by joy because nothing remains upon his ground save that which is given life by joy. This is a fact which those of more feeble intellectual abilities must simply believe, while the enlightened must know it.

–Meister Eckehart of Hochheim, Sermon No. 39 “Justus in Perpetuum Vivet” (ca. 1320) in: Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, p. 267 (J. Quint ed. 1955)(S.H. transl.)

Pharisees and Philistines

A Golden Compass

--Hafiz


Forget every idea of right and wrong
Any classroom ever taught you

Because
An empty heart, a tormented mind,
Unkindness, jealousy and fear

Are always the testimony
You have been completely fooled!

Turn your back on those
Who would imprison your wondrous spirit
With deceit and lies.

Come, join the honest company
Of the King's beggars -
Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns
And those astonishing fair courtesans
Who need Divine Love every night.

Come, join the courageous
Who have no choice
But to bet their entire world
That indeed,
Indeed, God is Real.

I will lead you into the Circle
Of the Beloved's cunning thieves,
Those playful royal rogues -
The ones you can trust for true guidance -
Who can aid you
In this Blessed Calamity of life.

Hafiz,
Look at the Perfect One
At the Circle's Center:

He Spins and Whirls like a Golden Compass,
Beyond all that is Rational,

To show this dear world

That Everything,
Everything in Existence
Does point to God.

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Christians and The Golden Compass

by Kim Fabricius

While Richard Dawkins and his crack troops are busy shooting fundamentalist fish in a barrel, the Catholic League in the US, up in arms over the celluloid version of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (the first installment of the trilogy, His Dark Materials), is now taking steady aim at its own foot by calling for a mass boycott on this “atheism for kids.”

Hey, objects this kid, where are the Presbyterians and the Anglicans? In the novel the head of the wicked Magisterium is Pope John Calvin, while Pullman has called St Lewis’ The Narnia Chronicles “one of the most ugly and poisonous things I have ever read.” Let’s at least be ecumenical in our vilification of the film. I should be careful: the ultra-evangelical Christian Voice in the UK, infamous for its attacks on Jerry Springer: The Opera, doesn’t do irony.

Of course Pullman does have the church in his sights. Indeed he is on record as saying that “My books are about killing God.” I just hope that The Golden Compass faithfully executes the deicide that the author so imaginatively conceived and elegantly crafted in the novel.

For the death of this God would actually do the church a great service. He is the god Pullman’s mentor and fellow iconoclast William Blake, whose 250th birthday we celebrated last Wednesday, called Old Nobodaddy, who bears as little relation to the God Jesus called Abba as the straw deity that the New Atheists so tediously torch. This god, who is finally defeated in the third book of the trilogy, is a bearded old fart “of terrifying decrepitude, of a face sunken in wrinkles, of trembling hands and a mumbling mouth and rheumy eyes.” He is the object more of ridicule than indignation (one thinks of the satire on idolatry in Isaiah 44).

The real target of Pullman’s animus is not this impotent wretch but his grand inquisitors who deploy religion in the (dis)service of control and repression, the ecclesiastical authority so savagely pilloried by Blake in “The Garden of Love”:

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.

As Rowan Williams, a great fan of Pullman, has written: “What the story makes you see is that if you believe in a mortal God, who can win and lose his power, your religion will be saturated with anxiety – and so with violence. In a sense, you could say that a mortal God needs to be killed.”

But the narrative does more than smash empty idols, expose institutional hypocrisy, and condemn vice – “cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism … well, who could quarrel with that?” asks Pullman – it inculcates what are decidedly Christian values. Pullman’s coming-of-age story is articulated in terms of growth in wisdom. Here is the winsome heroine, Lyra, reflecting at the very end of the trilogy on selflessness and truthfulness, the virtues it takes to create anything good, beautiful, and enduring: “We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and brave and patient, and we’ve got to study and think, and work hard, all of us, in our different worlds, and then we’ll build.” If such values are indicative of a “pernicious atheist agenda,” bring on the AOB.

Okay, Pullman’s onslaught is unrelenting, his didacticism can get the better of his art, and for a writer so knowledgeable about a literary tradition steeped in Christian faith – not only Blake and, of course, Milton (“his dark materials” comes from Paradise Lost), but also, among others, Edmund Spenser, George Herbert, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Emily Dickinson – he can be theologically quite obtuse, if not without flashes of insight.

But that’s not the point. The point, for the church, is the embarrassing mini Magisterium of Christian Pharisees and Philistines who prove the point Pullman is making. And the ultimate irony: there is nothing like a good boycott to market a product. Popcorn, anyone?

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My post on "Black Helicoper Parenting" Here


Here's Rowan Williams' comments:
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1165873,00.html

It's a review of a stage adaptation of the trilogy from 2004. Shortly after that Williams had a conversation with Pullman. Here's the transcript:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/03/17/bodark17.xml

Light Work

Minimal

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The art-work - or interactive light-work - of Anthony McCall, who has a new exhibit at the Serpentine in London, can be appreciated here.

Another piece on him here; and here. McCall began in the "happening" movie and art scene in the 1970s. But new technology has enabled him to take a big step forward:

Line Describing a Cone was made as a simple stop-frame animation, the camera filming a white-on-black drawing, gradually revealed, rotated on a drawing pin. The recent ones are of course made on computer, which accounts for their phenomenal complexity, as well as their perfect clarity of line and plane, their total control of coordinated movement – and (a downside) the fact that, if you look closely, the whole image breaks up into grid of little squares.

Permalink
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Anthony McCall
30 November 2007 –
3 February 2008

British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.

After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.

Empty Bottles On The Unswept Floor

READINGS
[Fragments]
THE MENTAL KITCHEN
By W. H. Auden, from "De Droite et de Gauche," published in 1952 in the French monthly Preuves and included in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955, edited by Edward Mendelson, to be published next month by Princeton University Press. The original English text of the essay, which was translated into French by Christine Lalou, has been lost. Translated from the French by Richard Howard.

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Criticism is tradition defending itself against the three armies of the Goddess Stupidity: the army of amateurs who are ignorant of tradition; the army of conceited eccentrics who believe tradition should be suppressed by a stroke of the pen in order that true art may begin with them; and the army of academicians who believe they maintain tradition by a servile imitation of the past.

The desire to link art to life, beauty to truth, justice to goodness, almost infallibly leads criticism to utter a host of stupidities; a critic who ignores or represses this concern and contents himself with being no more than an amateur or an historian of art avoids covering himself with ridicule, but at what cost. No one reads him.

Judging a work of art is virtually the same mental operation as judging human beings, and requires the same aptitudes: first, a real love of works of art, an inclination to praise rather than blame, and regret when a complete rejection is required; second, a vast experience of all artistic activities; and last, an awareness, openly and happily accepted, of one's own prejudices. Some critics fail because they are pedants whose ideal of perfection is always offended by a concrete realization. Others fail because they are insular and hostile to what is alien to them; these critics, yielding to their prejudices without knowing they have them and sincerely offering judgments they believe to be objective, are more excusable than those who, aware of their prejudices, lack the courage to enter the lists to defend their personal tastes.

The best literary critic is not the one whose judgments are always right but the one whose essays compel you to read and reread the works he discusses; even when he is hostile, you feel that the work attacked is important enough to be worth the effort. There are other critics who, even when they praise a book, cancel any desire you might have to read it.

The terms "young" and "old" can be applied only within a closed system. In all matters subject to historical development, such as art or civilization, only the terms "before" and "after" may be applied. The Iliad precedes the Aeneid, but it is meaningless to say that it is older. Furthermore, it is no less absurd to say that works of art are immortal; the persistence of the work of art is not in the object's material duration but in its life-giving quality for a spectator or a reader living in a particular historical period. The Iliad in 1950 is not identical to the Iliad in 1750, but it is not older. It can be said that a poem ages only when the language it is written in undergoes certain transformations while evidently remaining the same language. Strictly speaking, "Old English" should be called "Young English."

In the course of many centuries a few labor-saving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen-alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc.-but these mechanisms are very crude, liable to affect the health of the cook, and constantly breaking down. Artistic composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much the same as it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.

Sincerity is like sleep. Normally, we should assume that, of course, we will be sincere, and not give it a second thought. Most of us, however, suffer from bouts of hypocrisy as we suffer from bouts of insomnia. In both cases, the remedy is generally quite simple: in the case of insomnia, a change of diet; in the case of hypocrisy, a change of company.

What English-language poet has not at times rebelled against a language in which the suffix -S makes a noun plural and a verb singular?

Art requires not only conventions of form but also conventions of rhetoric.
There can be no art without a convention which emphasizes certain aspects of experience as important and dismisses others to the background. A new convention is a revolution in sensibility. It appeals to and is adopted by a generation because it makes sense of experiences which had hitherto been ignored. Every convention, in its turn, when it has done its work, becomes reactionary and needs to be replaced. Its effects, however, do not disappear. Its successor embodies them.

When a reviewer declares a book to be "sincere," we know immediately:
A. that it is not sincere, and
B. that it is badly written.

A mannered style is like an eccentric garment. Very few writers can carry it off, but if they do, we are enchanted. Rhymes, meters, stanzas, etc., are like servants. If the master is just enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly, happy household. If he is too tyrannical, the servants give notice; if he is too weak, they turn slovenly, impertinent, drunk, and dishonest.

The poet who writes "free verse" is like Robinson Crusoe on his island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, darning, etc. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor: empty bottles on the unswept floor, dirty sheets on the unmade bed.

There is much to be said in favor of an established form, whether blank verse, heroic couplet, or any other. Instead of striving for an original personal form, at the risk of achieving no such thing, the poet employs a given form; he may then devote all his efforts to making it express everything he has to say. With rare exceptions, the more original a poet is, the less he considers it a limitation to employ a given form; furthermore, by continually working with the same form, he will exercise his mind to think easily and naturally within it and will become sensitive to the subtlest variations of which this form is capable.

If it were true that the purest poetry is the poetry that most closely approaches music, then the purest of all would be tea-table conversation; for in such conversation words have no meaning in themselves; their meaning depends entirely on the vocal modulations of those who are speaking. "What a lovely day!" can mean,
according to the tone of voice, "And what do you think?" or "Admire me!" or else "Help me!" or even "Blah-blah-blah!" or "Bah!"

Poe's theory about the necessity of writing short poems is in accord with the Industrial Revolution. As societies grow, their poems tend to grow shorter. A peasant will listen to interminable epic poems in the village square; the literary man in big cities reads sonnets in his bath.

It is sometimes easier to enjoy wholeheartedly a fine poem that expresses convictions we do not share than a fine poem that expresses our own convictions, for the skepticism assignable to poetic form in itself disturbs us only insofar as the subject treated is really important to us.

Poetry in primitive societies-more static in their structure and more immediately governed by ritual practices-expresses simple things in a contorted manner; the sentiments are direct, the poetic form is complicated and complex. The poetry of our disintegrated society, which has little respect for ritual, seeks a direct expression for complicated things; the sentiments are subtle and ambiguous, the poetic form is "everyday language."

If art were magic, if the purpose of a love song were to incite the Cruel Fair to entrust the poet with the key to her bedroom, a magnum of champagne would be more beautiful than a sonnet.

Propaganda is the use of magic by those who no longer believe in it against those who still do.

Catharsis is properly effected not by works of art but by religious rites. It is also effected, less properly, by bullfights, professional football matches, bad movies, military bands, and monster rallies at which ten thousand Girl Guides form themselves into a living flag.

In a photograph, differences between a crag, a marble column, an oak, a frog, and a human face are merely differences in shape and texture.
From the height of ten thousand feet, the earth appears to the human eye as it appears to the eye of the camera; that is to say, all history is reduced to the accidents of nature. This has the salutary effect of making historical evils, like national divisions and political hatreds, seem absurd.

I look down from an airplane upon a stretch of land which is obviously continuous. That, across it, marked by a tiny ridge or river or even by no topographical sign whatever, there should run a frontier, and that the human beings living on one side should hate or
refuse to trade with or be forbidden to visit those on the other side, is, from the height where I find myself, revealed to me as ridiculous. Unfortunately, I cannot have this revelation without having the illusion that there are no historical values.

From this same height I cannot distinguish between an outcrop of rock and a magnificent cathedral, or between a happy family playing in a back yard and a flock of sheep; so that I am unable to feel any difference between dropping a bomb to destroy the cathedral, the happy family, or even the rocks or the flock. If the effects of distance between the observer and the observed were mutual, so that as the objects on the ground shrank in size and lost their uniqueness, the observer in the airplane felt himself shrinking and becoming more and more generalized, we should either give up flying or create a heaven on earth.

Those who accuse the movies of having a deleterious moral effect, of dividing families and increasing youthful crime, may well be right, but not for the reasons they usually give. It is not what movies are about-gangsters or adultery-which does the damage but the naturalistic nature of the medium itself which encourages a fantastic conception of time. In all narrative art, the narration of the action takes less time than it would take in real life; but in the novel or drama, even when they are naturalistic, the passage of time is abridged, i.e., placed in perspective. For example, a man woos a woman; in the theater this scene may last perhaps ten minutes, but the audience will have the sense that the scene took place over a period of two hours. The absolute naturalism of the camera destroys this sense: the illusion of real life is so strong that the audience begin to be convinced that, in real life as on the screen, the conquest of a woman takes forty minutes. When, leaving the movies for real life, they become aware that this takes two hours, they lose patience. Make movies as moral as you like, in their subject matter or their tone, they will still be harmful; because, if they seek to inculcate a taste for virtue, they cannot prevent themselves from bearing witness that virtue can be acquired in only a few minutes. When he grows impatient, the movie addict does not cry, "Hurry!"; he cries, "Cut!"

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[Conversation]
THE HEART OF
THE MATTER
From a previously unaired portion of a 1982 radio interview with Graham Greene by Nigel Lewis, included on The Spoken Word: Graham Greene, released in October by the British Library.

NIGEL LEWIS: Let me ask you a stock question. If you had a wish, what would it be?
GRAHAM GREENE: The death of a certain individual.
LEWIS: [Pause] Do-does-do you think about that all the time?
GREENE: No, no. I have a hope that he might suffer the fate many men in the media suffer.
LEWIS: Is that something that is constantly there?
GREENE: Not constantly, no. I'd say a Mass for his soul. [Laughs]
LEWIS: You'd say a Mass for his soul, but the man himself is evil?
GREENE: Yes!

20 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2007

The Spirits Which I Have Summoned I Cannot Banish

From No Comment by Scott Horton

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

A reader writes: “You’re turning everything into a subject for political commentary. Jane Austen? Even Mickey Mouse in his greatest starring role, as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice? Gimme a break.”

So what is that tale of the absentee sorcerer and his young intern all about? Just fun and games? Material for a few gratuitous flights of fantasy? That may reflect Disney, but certainly not Goethe. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”—“Der Zauberlehrling”—is a beautiful ballad, one of a great number that Goethe wrote in a productive storm in 1797. It can be read and appreciated on many levels, certainly. It’s exciting, provocative, entertaining. And true, almost from its first printing it was seen as something suitable for children.

But the story is not just about magic. It’s an admonition. And the subject—the theme for which those spells and charms stand as tokens—is the notion of telling falsehoods in public discourse. You may start this process with good intentions, the narrator tells us, but they will quickly overtake you. The lies have a habit of taking on a life of their own, like those dancing brooms. They will in the end work mischief. They may set the household in an uproar. Or they may bring a nation to war.

Perhaps you see the image already. But there is no doubt that this is the image that Goethe had in mind. Indeed, where did Goethe get this tale? In 1788, his friend Christoph Martin Wieland, a great writer and philosopher and also an accomplished translator from classical Greek, whom Goethe had invited to Weimar and set to work reforming the duchy’s school system, published a translation of the stories of Lucian of Samostat. Lucian was a second century Assyrian, from a town on the headwaters of the Euphrates (today deep under the waters behind the Atatürk Dam in Turkey, near the Iraqi border), who wrote a series of brilliant satires in classical Greek. Deep in that collection was a work called Philopseudes (the “Lover of Lies”). Midway through the story, a narrator named Arignotus weighs in and tells of a magician and his apprentice.^.One day the magician leaves and his apprentice invokes the spells he heard his master use. A door opens and closes, and brooms begin to dance… You know the rest of the story. Goethe has worked this material into a ballad, but he is very faithful to it, and there is no doubt that he has followed Lucian’s meaning very carefully.

Goethe picked up from the middle of the story, where the tale of the sorcerer’s apprentice appears. It’s a story-within-a-story. But how does the whole narration begin? As is his style, Lucian tells us both at beginning and at the end what the object of his story is.

Can you tell me… what in the world it is that makes many people so fond of lying?…

And our narrator then proceeds to catalogue the reasons why people lie. He gives us the well intended, good natured lie—to avoid hurting the feelings of one who would be harmed by an honest judgment, for instance. The socially expedient lie of the “madam is not at home” variety. The lie borne of patriotism and a desire to advance the interests of one’s country, he says. And even the lie borne of necessity, as clever Odysseus’s lies on his perilous journey home to Ithaca.

But most dangerous, says Lucian, are the public men in whom “this passion for lying is ingrained.”

The balance of the satire is a demonstration of this point. And in the end, after a variety of tales, including that of the sorcerer’s apprentice, Lucian comes to ask some questions. He casts them ironically, of course, but they really couldn’t be more serious.

When the people have heard these lies, have been bewitched and stirred up by them, what is the consequence? Lucian says it is useful to think of the lies as a disease, and their recounting as a rabid dog biting the uninfected. He, too, then risks the infection. Is there is no shield to use against this scourge? And Goethe puts this thought very elegantly, in two of the most quoted lines in the German language: “Die ich rief, die Geister,/Werd ich nun nicht los.” (“The spirits which I have summoned/I now cannot banish.”)

Today the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran was published in summary, laying bare another year’s worth of lies from the Bush Administrations. Lies which, as usual, were spun with the object of avoiding diplomacy and making war. The same Administration furiously spun lies about the Iraq, leading to a tragic waste of blood and treasure in an invasion and occupation of that country. These are the foreseeable consequences of calculating public lies.

So is there no solution? No master magician to return and set things right? No innoculation to issue? Lucian is very clear on this point. No, there is no sorcerer who will come and make it all better. It is up to us to do so. And in the end it’s about accountability for those who lie, and placing a proper value on the truth. Here is how Lucian finishes the tale:

We have a powerful antidote to such poisons. It is truth… As long as we have zealous use of it, the malicious and foolish lies will not disturb us. We shall have peace.

This is the message at the core of the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It’s a good one for all of us to contemplate today.

[Permanent link]

¹1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4/1, p. 874-77 (1797)(Münchener Ausg. 1988).

²2. Christoph Martin Wieland, Lukians wahre Geschichten (1788) in: Werke, vol. 5, p. 629 (H.W. Seiffert ed. 1968).

³3. Lucian of Samostat, “The Lover of Lies” in: Works, vol. 3, p. 319 in the Loeb Library vol. 130.

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Brothels are built with bricks of religion

The original political vision: sex, art and transformation

Dissent and emancipation were holy for William Blake. He could teach our prime minister so much about how to be radical

Terry Eagleton
Wednesday November 28, 2007
The Guardian

One reason Gordon Brown gave for not holding an election was to have time to roll out his vision. It is not a meaning of the word that Britain's greatest revolutionary poet would have recognised; William Blake, born 250 years ago today, had what George Bush Sr called "the vision thing" in the way other people have headaches or fits of laughter. At four he glimpsed God's head at the window, at eight a tree shimmering with angels. For Blake, being a visionary meant seeing beyond a version of politics centred chiefly on parliament. "House of Commons and House of Lords seem to me to be fools," he wrote. "They seem to me to be something other than human life."

Like Brown, Blake grew up in a lower-middle-class Christian milieu. But the culture from which Blake sprang was one of the most precious Britain has produced, in which Jacobin artisans and Republican booksellers rubbed shoulders with Dissenting preachers and occult philosophers; the country was effectively a police state, ridden with spies and hunger rioters. Brown's Britain is not yet a police state, but its technologies of spying and surveillance surpass the wildest dreams of the autocrats of Blake's day. Blake himself was tried for sedition and acquitted, having allegedly cried in public: "Damn the king and his country!" Today whole sectors of the labour movement bow the knee to monarchy, or at least tolerate it as a minor irritant. The history of labour from Blake to Brown is, among other things, how dissent became domesticated.

Blake's politics were not just a matter of wishful thinking, as so many radical schemes are today. Across the Atlantic one great anti-colonial revolution had held out the promise of liberty, and to the poet's delight another had broken out in the streets of Paris. Together they promised to bring an end to the rule of state and church - "the Beast and the Whore", as Blake knew them. Most of our own writers, however, seem to know little of politics beyond the value of individual liberties.

In this, they are faithful to the libertarian lineage of John Milton; but Milton knew rather more about politics than freedom of expression. In his greatest poem, he mourned the paradise that radical Puritans had hoped to witness on earth. As mythologer-in-chief of the English 17th-century revolution, he urged the cutting off of the king's head, and was lucky to escape with his own. It is hard to imagine Craig Raine or Ian McEwan posing a threat to the state.

In his own mighty epic - Milton - Blake turned back to his great Protestant forebear from a Britain now scarred by industrial capitalism. He raided Milton's work to foster his own visions of liberation, passing on the revolutionary torch to WB Yeats. This self-appointed mythmaker to the Irish war of independence was inspired by Blake's notion of the poet as prophet and public activist.

Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," he claims, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Political states keep power by convincing us of our limitations.

They do so, too, by persuading us to be "moderate"; Blake, however, was not enamoured of the third way. The New Testament that Gordon Brown reads in his Presbyterian fashion as a model of prudence, conscience and sobriety, Blake read as a hymn to creative recklessness. He sees that Jesus's ethics are extravagant, hostile to the calculative spirit of the utilitarians. If they ask for your coat, give them your cloak; if they ask you to walk one mile, walk two. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, and those who restrain their desires do so because their desires are feeble enough to be restrained.

The energy captured in Blake's watercolours and engravings is his riposte to mechanistic thought. In a land of dark Satanic mills, the exuberant uselessness of art was a scandal to hard-headed pragmatists. Art set its face against abstraction and calculation: "To generalise is to be an Idiot," Blake writes. And again: "The whole business of Man is the arts, and all things in common." The middle-class Anglicans who sing his great hymn Jerusalem are unwittingly celebrating a communist future.

Brothels, Blake wrote, are built with bricks of religion. Today, hardly a single Christian politician believes with Blake that any form of Christian faith that is not an affront to the state is worthless. Blake was no dewy-eyed radical, convinced as he was of the reality of the Fall. He had a radical Protestant sense of human corruption. His vision of humankind was darker than that of the Panglossian progressives of our own time, with their vacuous talk of "moving on". Yet it was more hopeful as well. London had lapsed into Babylon; but it remained true that "everything that lives is holy", and it might still prove possible to transform the city into the New Jerusalem.

· Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor of English literature at Manchester University

Yet Wearinesse May Tosse Him To My Breast

cartoon church

"Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion--without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness. When one knows that the torturer will not eternally triumph over the victim, one is free to rediscover that person's humanity and imitate God's love for him. And when one knows that God's love is greater than all sin, one is free to see oneself in the light of God's justice and so rediscover one's own sinfulness."


Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (p. 124)

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Two poems by George Herbert, a visionary who saw the world as a great cosmic drama in which we humans are struggling, with the help of divine love, to remember who we are and enter into our birthright as daughters and sons of God. His verse pulls no punches about how far we can fall, but also entices us with seen-as glimpses of a great destiny. He speaks to our deepest longing to rise above the seriousness of the status quo.

(from "Subversive Christianity" , a blog that is no longer extant, but remembered fondly.)


Miserie

Indeed at first Man was a treasure,
A box of jewels, shop of rarities,
A ring, whose posie was, My pleasure:
He was a garden in a paradise:
Glorie and grace
Did crown his heart and face.


But sinne hath fool'd him. Now he is
A lump of flesh, without a foot or wing
To raise him to the glipse of blisse:
A sick toss'd vessel, dashing on each thing;
Nay, his own shelf:
My God, I mean my self.


The Pulley

When God at first made man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by;
Let us (said he) poure on him all we can:
Let the worlds riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
Then beautie flow'd, then wisdome, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottome lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewell also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts in stead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.


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The experience of the sermon is not the words or the text, but the transformation of elements, water to wine, image to reality. The priest is called to bring alive the metaphors of the divine so that they can become living and palpable in present time. The only place where God intersects humanity is in present time. If the priest or celebrant can't open a door for the community, he or she should perhaps pursue another calling. Perhaps listening to a sermon should be an experience of shared danger, shared anticipation. What if God should show up?

We've gotten so that we think that God is an idea in our heads, because we live in our heads.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

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