Only Different Kinds of Good Weather

Free Will Astrology

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating;
there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

- John Ruskin 

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SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): "Dear Rob: I have followed my nose most of my life, weaving from pleasurable diversion to interesting crisis and back. I've honestly had a great time and wouldn't change a thing. But lately I've been getting strong hints from life that maybe the game is changing for me. More and more I'm feeling like the grasshopper in that old fable -- you know, with no resources stored up and winter coming on fast -- while all the steady, hard-working ants are sitting pretty. So here's my question: Do I really have to stop enjoying myself and get down to business, whatever that means? Are there any real jobs for grasshoppers? - Shaky Sagittarius." Dear Shaky: If there will ever in your life be a time when you could figure out how to be both a grasshopper and ant simultaneously, it will be in 2009. Start meditating on how to get the best of both worlds.

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Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

Ted Kooser

*
always be open
e.e. cummings


may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

*
My Father's Diary
by Sharon Olds

I get into bed with it, and spring
the scarab legs of its locks. Inside,
the stacked, shy wealth of his print—
he could not write in script, so the pages
are sturdy with the beamwork of printedness,
WENT TO LOOK AT A CAR, DAD
IN A GOOD MOOD AT DINNER, WENT
TO TRY OUT SOME NEW TENNIS RACQUETS,
LUNCH WITH MOM, life of ease—
except when he spun his father's DeSoto on the
ice, and a young tree whirled up to the
hood, throwing up her arms—until
LOIS. PLAYED TENNIS, WITH LOIS,
LUNCH WITH MOM AND LOIS, LOIS
LIKED THE CAR, DRIVING WITH LOIS,
LONG DRIVE WITH LOIS. And then,
LOIS! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! SHE IS SO
GOOD, SO SWEET, SO GENEROUS, I HAVE
NEVER, WHAT HAVE I EVER DONE
TO DESERVE SUCH A GIRL? Between the dark
legs of the capitals, moonlight, soft
tines of the printed letter gentled
apart, nectar drawn from serif, the
self of the grown boy pouring
out, the heart's charge, the fresh
man kneeling in pine-needle weave,
worshipping her. It was my father
good, it was my father grateful,
it was my father dead, who had left me
these small structures of his young brain—
he wanted me to know him, he wanted
someone to know him.

*

His Stillness

Sharon Olds

The doctor said to my father, “You asked me
to tell you when nothing more could be done.
That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father
sat quite still, as he always did,
especially not moving his eyes. I had thought
he would rave if he understood he would die,
wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,
thin, and clean, in his clean gown,
like a holy man. The doctor said,
“There are things we can do which might give you time,
but we cannot cure you.” My father said,
“Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,
with the dignity of a foreign leader.
I sat beside him. This was my father.
He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to
tie him down. I had not remembered
he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,
the liquor a way to keep still. I had not
known him. My father had dignity. At the
end of his life his life began
to wake in me.

*

Okay, it's starting to happen. After feeling nothing for my father, no loss nothing at losing him, just depressed, just absence, it's hitting me, I'm beginning to recover the man, I think that grieving may be starting, this is actually a great relief but not timely. I can see how grief confuses people, you are expecting this 'something' and then you get something else, and so you don't identify what's coming at you. This is how people pick up identities, how they begin to become ancestors, ingesting them, becoming them.

It's ceremonial, it's passing a torch. A torrent of flavors, expressions, the sense of it.

I've been loading a lot of scanned family portraits, snapshots, souvenirs onto flickr, and I was watching a slideshow of some of my grandfather's pictures of his sons circa 1920. One in particular, here are these three boys, young, in old tattered knee pants and socks. I thought, "Now they are all dead, one a war hero, one a battered former Prisoner of War, one an engineer, everything that happened to them, to their families, and here is their picture on flickr, at a frozen time before they knew. Then my father, handsome, young, dashing, a young Sinatra. What he sounded like, what he looked like when he laughed. We have all of these people inside of us.

I want to miss him, I want to remember him, I want to let go of everything that passed between us, just let it float back into space , somewhere over the Himilayas.

Let it all go.

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A Vulnerable Place

"A Niche of a Prayer in a Vulnerable Place," by Stephen Prothero on Killing the Buddha

Obama in Israel
photo by David Katz/Obama for America


A Niche of a Prayer in a Vulnerable Place
Prayers given and stolen at the Wailing Wall
by Stephen Prothero

Yes, I read the prayer Barack Obama left at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. I was angry it was stolen, and by a seminarian no less. I was angry it was published. But I read it. I read it because I am a voyeur too, because I am struggling with how to pray and wanted to see how someone with Obama’s rhetorical skills might try to talk with God. I wasn’t kidding myself. I knew this wasn’t a truly private communication. In our age of celebrity nothing is truly private for those who would be president, so he must have known that the Wall might not be the only place it would be published. Still I wanted to listen in, take some measure of Obama the man. So, yes, I read the prayer he left at the Western Wall.

**

I will not say here what Obama prayed for. If you need to know that you can find it here, though I recommend you leave that URL to itself, and Obama to his God. I will say that Obama did not pray for any of his ex-girlfriends. And that his prayer, at least to my ears, fell a bit flat. Reading it didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know about Obama, or for that matter, about praying.

My consolation is that what really happens at the Wall cannot be contained in the words put onto paper or into stone. It cannot be stolen by a seminarian or published by a newspaper. Even in our age of celebrity some things are not accessible to photographers or editors, or even writers such as myself.

If I were to return to the Wall today, I would leave a prayer for both Obama and McCain. I would pray that each would listen to what the Wall has to say about power and vulnerability, and the delicate and dangerous dance between them. Some things are possible; some things are not. At least for me, that is what transcendence means: the significance of any human being, however large, is dwarfed by the mystery of the millions of things we will never fully understand, not least the practice of prayer itself.

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The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.
—Psuedo-Macarius
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"Idolatry is, in its essence, a narrowing of vision, a distorted perception. In William Blake's words, "The Visions of eternity, by reason of narrowed perception are become weak visions of Time and Space, fix'd into furrows of death."
This narrowing of perception brings us to a condition where vision ends and the sun goes down on prophecy. We become imprisoned in what St. Paul calls the "carnal mind." For the essential feature of an idol is that it can be seen, unlike the true God, whom no one has seen at any time."

-True Prayer
Kenneth Leech

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New York Times quotes Elie Wiesel "God created man because he loves stories," says this storyteller, whose lifelong discussion with God has not always been temperate. "I never divorced God, " he says. "I couldn't. I'm too Jewish." But, he declares, "I have the right to protest his ways."

-Elie Wiesel - First Person Singular PBS
*****
"The mysteries of theology, simple, unconditional, invariable, are laid bare in a darkness of silence beyond the light."

-Pseudo Dionysius (c.500) quoted in "True Prayer"

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******

"The life of prayer," she writes, "is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. Or again, it is like that ocean of God in which St. Gregory said that elephants can swim and lambs can paddle. Even a baby can do something about it. No saint has exhausted its possibilities yet."


Evelyn Underhill
(“Life as Prayer,” p. 175)

**
In “The Spiritual Life of the Teacher", her wisdom extends not only to teachers but to mothers and fathers and mentors of all kinds:

"In one way or another, you are required to be pupil-teachers, working for love. You must learn all the time, and give all the time; freely you have received, freely give. That is your Charter. Only do see to it that you fulfill the condition in which you can receive. The most up-to-date and efficient tap is useless unless the Living Water can come through and does come through."

Or again, further on:

"God is always coming to you in the sacrament of the present moment. Meet and receive Him then with gratitude in that sacrament; however unexpected its outward form may be."

(Life as Prayer, 185)
Evelyn Underhill
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Prayer as Mystery

Kathleen Norris

Prayer is not doing, but being. It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself. It is an invitation to recognize holiness, and to utter simple words---"Holy, Holy, Holy"---in response. Attentiveness is all; I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I'm busy doing something else.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

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Death Is Smaller

Slacktivist

A tent among us

This is from Anne Lamott's "Advent Adventure," from her old Mothers Who Think column on Salon. (That link is still alive, 10 years after this was first posted, but someof thespaces betweenwords aremissing, so I'm pasting and posting the ending here for readability's sake, which I hope Salon won't mind, it being Christmas and all.)

Merry Christmas, blessed Solstice, happy Hannukah. Emmanuel.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

So I called my Jesuit friend, Tom, who is a hopeless alcoholic of the worst sort, sober now for 22 years, someone who sometimes gets fat and wants to hang himself, so I trust him. I said, "Tell me a story about Advent. Tell me about people getting well."

He thought for a while. Then he said, "OK."

In 1976, when he first got sober, he was living in the People's Republic of Berkeley, going to the very hip AA meetings there, where there were no fluorescent lights and not too much clapping -- or that yahoo-cowboy-hat-in-the-air enthusiasm that you get in L.A., according to sober friends. And everything was more or less all right in early sobriety, except that he felt utterly insane all the time, filled with hostility and fear and self-contempt. But I mean, other than that everything was OK. Then he got transferred to Los Angeles in the winter, and he did not know a soul. "It was a nightmare," he says. "I was afraid to go into entire areas of L.A., because the only places I knew were the bars. So I called the cardinal and asked him for the name of anyone he knew in town who was in AA. And he told me to call this guy Terry."

Terry, as it turned out, had been sober for five years at that point, so Tom thought he was God. They made arrangements to go to a meeting that night in the back of the Episcopal Cathedral, right in the heart of downtown L.A. It was Terry's favorite meeting, full of low-bottom drunks and junkies -- people from nearby halfway houses, bikers, jazz musicians. "Plus it's a men's stag meeting," says Tom. "So already I've got issues.

"There I am on my first date with this new friend Terry, who turns out to not be real chatty. He's clumsy and ill at ease, an introvert with no social skills, but the cardinal has heard that he's also good with newly sober people. He asks me how I am, and after a long moment, I say, 'I'm just scared,' and he nods and says gently, 'That's right.'

"I don't know a thing about him, I don't what sort of things he thinks about or who he votes for, but he takes me to this meeting near skid row, where all these awful looking alkies are hanging out in the yard, waiting for a meeting to start. I'm tense, I'm just staring. It's a whole bunch of strangers, all of them clearly very damaged -- working their way back slowly, but not yet real attractive. The people back in Berkeley AA all seem like David Niven in comparison, and I'm thinking, Who are these people? Why am I here?

"All my scanners are out. It's all I can do not to bolt.

"Ten minutes before the meeting began, Terry directed me to a long flight of stairs heading up to a windowless, airless room. I started walking up the stairs, with my jaws clenched, muttering to myself tensely just like the guy in front of me, this guy my own age who was stumbling and numb and maybe not yet quite on his first day of sobriety.

"The only things getting me up the stairs are Terry, behind me, pushing me forward every so often, and this conviction I have that this is as bad as it's ever going to be -- that if I can get through this, I can get through anything. Well. All of a sudden, the man in front of me soils himself. I guess his sphincter just relaxes. Shit runs down onto his shoes, but he keeps walking. He doesn't seem to notice.

"However, I do. I clapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and my eyes bugged out but I couldn't get out of line because of the crush behind me. And so, holding my breath, I walk into the windowless, airless room.

"Now, this meeting has a greeter, which is a person who stands at the door saying hello. And this one is a biker with a shaved head, a huge gut and a Volga boatman mustache. He gets one whiff of the man with shit on his shoes and throws up all over everything.

"You've seen the Edvard Munch painting of the guy on the bridge screaming, right? That's me. That's what I look like. But Terry enters the room right behind me. And there's total pandemonium, no one knows what to do. The man who had soiled himself stumbles forward and plops down in a chair. A fan blows the terrible smells of shit and vomit around the windowless room, and people start smoking just to fill in the spaces in the air. Finally Terry reaches out to the greeter, who had thrown up. He puts his hand on the man's shoulder.

"Wow," he says. "Looks like you got caught by surprise." And they both laugh. Right? Terry asks a couple of guys to go with him down the hall to the men's room, and help this guy get cleaned up. There are towels there, and kitty litter, to absorb various effluvia, because this is a meeting where people show up routinely in pretty bad shape. So while they're helping the greeter get cleaned up, other people start cleaning up the meeting room. Then Terry approaches the other man.

"My friend," he says gently, "it looks like you have trouble here."

The man just nods.

"We're going to give you a hand," says Terry.

"So three men from the recovery house next door help him to his feet, walk him to the halfway house and put him in the shower. They wash his clothes and shoes and give him their things to wear while he waits. They give him coffee and dinner, and they give him respect. I talked to these other men later, and even though they had very little sobriety, they did not cast this other guy off for not being well enough to be there. Somehow this broken guy was treated like one of them, because they could see that he was one of them. No one was pretending he wasn't covered with shit, but there was a real sense of kinship. And that is what we mean when we talk about grace.

"Back at the meeting at the Episcopal Cathedral, I was just totally amazed by what I had seen. And I had a little shred of hope. I couldn't have put it into words, but until that meeting, I had thought that I would recover with men and women like myself; which is to say, overeducated, fun to be with and housebroken. And that this would happen quickly and efficiently. But I was wrong. So I'll tell you what the promise of Advent is: It is that God has set up a tent among us and will help us work together on our stuff. And this will only happen over time."

(Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.)

Posted by Fred Clark on Dec 25, 2008 | Permalink

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This is from Old Girl From the North Country (Variations on a Theme)

ADRIAN MITCHELL (1932-2008)

Here.

"It is love." (Adrian Mitchell)

*
I am printing the poem below, because I like to see the words, but follow the link to the video of the poet reading his poem, because it packs a whallop that is worth the trip. Honest.

DEATH IS SMALLER THAN I THOUGHT

My Mother and Father died some years ago

I loved them very much.

When they died my love for them

Did not vanish or fade away.

It stayed just about the same,

Only a sadder colour.

And I can feel their love for me,

Same as it ever was.

Nowadays, in good times or bad,

I sometimes ask my Mother and Father

To walk beside me or to sit with me

So we can talk together

Or be silent .

They always come to me.

I talk to them and listen to them

And think I hear them talk to me.

It's very simple -

Nothing to do with spiritualism

Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary. It is real. It is love.

April 18, 2006 Adrian Mitchell

Very Nice

I Am So Happy

Sullivan

The Antidote To Benedict

A gay Catholic who, unlike the current pontiff, saw Creation in its fullest, complex beauty:

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—
fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Have a happy Christmas whatever the Pope says.

Permalink

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After suffering ill health for several years and bouts of diarrhoea, Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Though he suffered from what today might be diagnosed as manic depression, and battled a deep sense of anguish throughout his life, upon his death bed, he evidently overcame some of his feelings of despondency, at times stygian in their intensity. His last words were "I am so happy, I am so happy."

[Wikipedia]

**

and

What Fundamentalism Requires

The cramped view of the Pope finds an honest expression in the views of many fundamentalists today. The universe is binary - male and female - and each half has a prescribed role. Here's how fundamentalists see the role and freedom of women:

A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body (the idea sounds almost funny). This is, therefore, usually a revelation to a woman. Many women think mens natures are similar to theirs, and this is so different from a woman's nature, that few women know this about men unless told about it.

Blue Texan notes Prager's own experience with two divorces. But he has fought like hell to prevent me from getting married.

The description of homosexual orientation as evil, of course, is linked to the view that women's physical subordination to men is intrinsic to nature and must be enforced. You cannot extricate the two concepts. The erasure of homosexuals is deeply, theologically connected to the subjugation of women.

Permalink

“But the image of God that John [the Baptist] embraced was a father-image — the image of wrath, and judgment, and punishment. It was the image of a grim, censorious deity, as he does appear under various circumstances in the Old Testament… Is this the true image of God? Maybe Jesus asked himself this very question while staying with the group and John the Baptist. He had known first-hand the lives of ordinary folk in the poverty and squalor of his little town of Nazareth. He had known the stinking sweat of earning his daily bread. He understood well the inevitable frailty of of human beings caught in the grind of life. He had witnessed the woes of the sick and the lame. He had some intuition that what these downtrodden people needed, in contrast to the priests and to the doctors of the law, was something more heartening than a God of wrath, of judgment, and of punishment.”

— Shusaku Endo, A Life of Jesus
The American Scene

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A Parting Shot at Women’s Rights

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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

34. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’

AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:	5
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;	10
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Pinter

John Haynes/Lebrecht

Harold Pinter also appeared onstage as an actor, here performing Samuel Beckett's one-man play "Krapp's Last Tape" at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2006. Throughout his life, he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays.

December 26, 2008
Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78

By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

*

In Mr. Pinter’s work “words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other,” said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Mr. Pinter’s plays than any other director.

But while Mr. Pinter’s linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction “pause” would haunt him throughout his career.

Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Mr. Pinter said that writing the word “pause” into his first play was “a fatal error.” It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect.

Early in his career Mr. Pinter said his work was about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work. As Martin Esslin wrote in his book “Pinter: The Playwright,” “Man’s existential fear, not as an abstraction, but as something real, ordinary and acceptable as an everyday occurrence — here we have the core of Pinter’s work as a dramatist.”

Though often grouped with Beckett and others as a practitioner of Theater of the Absurd, Mr. Pinter considered himself a realist. In 1962 he said the context of his plays was always “concrete and particular.” He never found a need to alter that assessment.

*

The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter: “One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference.” With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, “such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea,” Mr. Stoppard said, “or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.”

*

Poetry and Pacifism

Mr. Pinter grew up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films. From the first he was a great reader and a hopeful poet, with strong political judgments. When he was called up for military service at 18, as a pacifist he refused to serve.

In diverse ways he remained a conscientious objector in the years to come, echoing a line in “The Birthday Party,” in which Stanley, a lodger in a seaside boarding house, is suddenly taken away by two strangers to some ominous future as a friend cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do!” Years later, Mr. Pinter said he had lived that line all his life.

*

“The Birthday Party” opened in the West End in 1958 and received disastrous reviews. Then, prodded by the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, Harold Hobson, the eminent critic of The Sunday Times of London, came to see it at a matinee. What he wrote turned out to be a life-changing review.

“It breathes in the air,” Hobson wrote. “It cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is opened.” He continued: “Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you, and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere.” He concluded, “Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”

*

Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.”

Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.”

“I don’t go away and say: ‘I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,’ ” he added. “It’s a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself.”

*

Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of “The Birthday Party” half a century ago, Mr. Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, “The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth.”

He added: “The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work.”

Mel Gussow, a critic and cultural reporter for The Times, died in 2005.

*

Art, Truth & Politics
Harold Pinter
Nobel Lecture In 1958 I wrote the following:

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

*

"Are there in us, in you and me now, that recklessness of a loving heart, that wild courage, that crazy gladness in the face of darkness and death, that shuddering faithfulness even unto the end of the world, through which new things must pass? Are there in us such qualities as these, which are in fact themselves the first glimmerings of new things that even now are beginning to come to pass? If not, God have mercy on us for we will be as yesterday when it is gone. If so, then we, even we will have some part in the new heaven and the new earth that God is creating. By God's grace, may it be so."

-Fredrick Buechner

The Magnificent Defeat

*

A poet went to see a doctor. He said to him, "I have all kinds of terrible symptoms. I am unhappy and uncomfortable, my hair and my arms and legs are as if tortured. "The doctor replied, "Is it not true that you have not yet given out your latest poetic composition?" "That is true," said the poet. "Very well," said the physician, "be good enough to recite. "He did so, and, at the doctor's orders, said his lines again and again.Then the doctor said, "Stand up, for you are now cured. What you had inside had affected your outside. Now that it is released, you are well again."

—A Sufi Fable

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There Is No Downturn In The Grace Of God

Tanzanian Madonna

Godmother Sabina Cheliga holds Winifrida Mtemi,
who was baptized September 14, 2008, by the Rev. Sandra McCann,
one of our missionaries in
the Diocese of Central Tanganyika.

Photo/Martin McCann

The Bishop's Christmas Message
The Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta
December 24, 2008

In the Name of the Christ who came, who comes, and who promises to come again.

As you reflect on the Nativity of Jesus, I invite you to move beyond the small, limited vision of it that you find comforting. Take a deeper look into your heart and soul. Imagine what God may be up to. Consider the new thing that God might be doing in you.

Consider this: If God can transform the human race by the birth of a child, imagine what God might be able to do with you. If God can take a scared young couple from a small town in outback Palestine and make them the premier stewards of divine hospitality, imagine what God might be able to do through you. If God can invite a bunch of bumbling shepherds to come and see what God has done, imagine what God might have in store for you. If God can take an innkeeper's "no room in the inn" and turn it into the very place where heaven and earth intersect, imagine what God can do in spite of you in those moments when you have shut the door because you don't want to be bothered.

Christ is profoundly personal. We may try to make Christmas about something or somebody else. We may try to keep our head down and bury ourselves in the gentle pastoral economy of the nativity story. We may try to keep the Christ Child at arm's length. But try as we might, we are confronted in very deep and personal ways with God's invitation to come and see. We are called by God's relentless welcome, to come to Bethlehem and see.

We live in difficult days. War continues, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in more places around the globe than we can count, often accompanied by unspeakable violence. Our economy and that of much of the world is in its worst shape in decades and as a result many hard-working people are suffering, and the poor and needy have fewer places to turn. Senseless acts of self-destruction and a total lack of civility and generosity of spirit appear to go unchecked in our public discourse.

I believe that peace, prosperity, and generosity must begin within each of us as we welcome the Christ Child into the deep recesses of our hearts. There is no downturn in the grace of God. There is no foreclosure on God's mercy. There is no deficit in God's love. There is no shortfall of God's forgiveness. And the only bailout that makes eternal difference in your life and mine was offered centuries ago on a hillside just outside the walls of Jerusalem.

God comes down at Christmas in a really big way to inhabit our lives in large and powerful ways. God comes, however, one heart at a time, one suffering soul at a time, one hurting body at a time. God comes down at Christmas for this whole, big, messy, wonderful world. God comes also for you, this Christmas and forever.

Come and see.

+ J. Neil Alexander
Bishop of Atlanta

**
Whiskey River

link

"We might imagine that our thoughts, feelings, or the essence of who we really are is intrinsically private – that we fundamentally exist inside our mind and our body and that we can only imperfectly send and receive messages out into a world of other separate, isolated minds.
But the fact is, who and what we are is constituted, and constantly, moment-by-moment, re-constituted, by the world we live in and are part of. We are all part of a common fabric of being. All of us are simply human beings trying to clarify what it means to be human, and to come to terms with the suffering that being human entails.
When we imagine that our experience is unique, we may imagine ourselves particularly talented or particularly hopeless at whatever it is we're doing. But since all of us are struggling with the same problems inherent in being human, it turns out that all those things we thought were so unique about ourselves are precisely what we have most in common."

- Barry Magid
Ending the Pursuit of Happiness

**
When the full fields begin to smell of sunrise
And the valleys sing in their sleep,
The pilgrim moon pours over the solemn darkness
Her waterfalls of silence,
And then departs, up the long avenue of trees.
The stars hide, in the glade, their light, like tears,
And tremble where some train runs, lost,
Baying in eastward mysteries of distance,
Where fire flares, somewhere, over a sink of cities.
Now kindle in the windows of this ladyhouse, my soul,
Your childish, clear awakeness.

-Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours

**

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.


-Mary Oliver

*

Merry Christmas! 'Make of Yourself a Light....'

*

God-Moving-In-With-Us

RCCA Advent Resources

Read a bit about this from the Christmas message from the Rev. H. Julian Gordy, Bishop ELCA Southeastern Synod.

What is the good of light without some dark to stick it in? (Arlo Guthrie)

The news this Advent has not been good. You know what is on our minds: stocks fall, banks fail, auto manufacturers are running out of cash, unemployment is at a 26 year high, tens of thousands have lost their houses,… ongoing wars, genocides and disasters …, it seems pretty dark out there. Most of us know people who have lost jobs or houses. When that happens, the economic crisis is not just an idea anymore. It is real and particular. We know it. St. John reminds us that, in the real and particular person Jesus of Nazareth, the eternal, cosmic Logos became flesh and pitched its tent with us. In the baby of Bethlehem there is God in a form we can know: God born in dark circumstances, God asleep in the hay, God in need of warmth and food and human love. That God has become one of us in the particular baby of Bethlehem is what we celebrate this season. We prepare ourselves for it at Advent. We celebrate it at Christmas. .. . . We preachers are prone to complain about the greed and secularism and the craziness of the season, but maybe this mix of the holy and the holly is exactly what Christmas is about. "The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood," Eugene Peterson translates John 1:14 in The Message. God has come into our world, just as it is, dark as it is. This God-moving-in-with-us is what theologians call incarnation. C.S. Lewis called it the foundational Christian doctrine, the one Christian belief that sets our faith apart from all the others. God becomes human, a particular human. The Creator becomes a particular part of the creation. The Holy moves into the real world of greed and gluttony. The Prince of Peace takes up residence in a world of conflict. The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1) It is in that affirmation that we face today's headlines and whatever may come tomorrow. May God increase in us all the hope and joy of this holy season.

**

The Winter of Listening
David Whyte

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

-David Whyte, from House of Belonging

*

To family, friends, etc.;

Re: Lack of Christmas Card, presents, good wishes etc. this year.

I have run out of time and the means to participate in all of this stuff this year. I am not sure why I am down to the wire and have not done the things that I usually do.

There must be reasons. I can probably find them. But that's how it's turning out this year, so I'm going with a general not getting with the Great American Christmas this year. Maybe it is a leaf that I am turning or trying to turn. I need to clean, sort, throw away, give away, work, rest, contemplate, plan, not plan, and maybe envision a difference in life for the year ahead.

I spend too much money, worry too much, listen too little, I am having a need to step aside from the season and make room for something new. I don't feel very wise or empowered or able. But maybe its just a feeling.

I think I need to get smart in a different way.

It's like I need to give advice to myself, but I don't know what to advise. I'm usually pretty good at this, so maybe this is a step forward into not-knowing from being such a know-it-all.

The Eternal Light That Requires Neither Fuel Nor Candlestick

The God of the Christmas story relates to us on the basis of unconditional love

From the 'Telegraph'
Put aside your principles and remember: all you need is love
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says the first Christmas changed how everyone thinks about universal human dignity

Forty years ago this month, one of the greatest religious thinkers of the 20th century died. In his long career in Switzerland and Germany, he had published millions of words, played a crucial role in inter-church discussions across Europe, denounced nuclear weaponry – and, before the war, done most of the work in drafting for the German churches a statement of open defiance against the Third Reich. Some of his most powerful lectures were delivered in the bombed-out ruins of the theological department in Bonn when the war had ended and he was able to return to Germany after being driven out by Hitler.

Karl Barth was, by any standards, one of the most deeply principled intellectuals of the age, someone who was quite ready to pay the price of conscience in an insane and tyrannical state. It was probably only his Swiss citizenship that saved his life. So it's all the more surprising to read some of his words in a Christmas sermon preached in 1931, where he says that the real good news of Christmas is that we are given permission to be free from our principles. We need, he says, "to be able to live with principles, but we must also be able to live without them".

Why is this good news – and what has it got to do with Christmas, with this Christmas in particular and our current anxieties and hopes?

What Barth saw beginning to take its grip on Germany in 1931 was a system of "principle" that worked quite consistently once you accepted that quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn't. As the nightmare decade unfolded, the implications of this became clearer and clearer. And what he was warning against was the temptation of unconditional loyalty to a system, a programme, a "cause" which was essentially about "me and people like me". It's about the danger of my agenda, our needs, the programme of this particular group, its safety and prosperity.

And Christmas is supremely the story of a God who is not interested in telling us about principles. First comes the action – God beginning to live a human life. Then comes the appeal: do you love and trust what you see in this human life, the life of Jesus? Then the implication: everyone is capable of saying yes to this appeal, so no one is dispensable. You don't and can't know where the boundary will lie between people who belong and people who don't belong.

The 20th century built up quite a list of casualties around "principles" in Barth's sense. Various philosophies solemnly assured us that the human cost is really worth it, because history will vindicate the sufferings and sacrifices of the present. Keep your nerve, don't be distracted by the human face of suffering, because it will be all right in the end; we know it will because the principles are clear.

Fortunately the Western world has not for a long time seen the real horrors that this entails in terms of brutality and devastation. Yet we are not completely immune from appealing to "principles" in order to help us avoid some of the harsher consequences of our policies and preferences. They may in themselves be good and positive principles, not like the destructive ideologies of the past century. But we're bound to be uncomfortably aware at the moment that what looked like a principled defence of some of our economic assumptions (this is what real wealth creation means and there is no other coherent way of defending it) seems more ragged and vulnerable than it once did.

The unprincipled question won't be silenced: what about the particular human costs? What about the unique concerns and crises of the pensioner whose savings have disappeared, the Woolworths employee, the hopeful young executive, let alone the helpless producer of goods in some Third-World environment where prices are determined thousands of miles away?

People react impatiently to this, asking why religious believers should be taken seriously when they talk about economics. Fair enough. But the whole point is that the believer doesn't want to talk about economics, only to ask an "unprincipled" question – to make sure that principles don't simply block out actual human faces and stories. How we make it all work is vastly complicated – no one is pretending it isn't. But without these anxieties about the specific costs, we've lost the essential moral compass.

So Christmas doesn't offer an alternative set of economic theories or even a social programme. It's a story – the record of an event that began to change the entire framework in which we think about human life, so that the unique value of every life came to be affirmed and assumed.

Whether we realise it or not, the reason we are shocked by the mass killings under Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot, by the indifference of a Mugabe to raging poverty and epidemic, is because this story has made a difference to how our civilisation thinks about universal human dignity.

The God of the Christmas story (and the rest of the Gospels) doesn't relate to us on the basis of any theory, but on the basis of unconditional love and welcome. That act of free love towards the entire human race changed things – even for those who didn't and don't share all the beliefs and doctrines of Christianity. And for those who do share those convictions, loving God and one another is a defiance of all programmes and principles designed to preserve only the wellbeing of people like us.

All of us, Christians most definitely included, have problems living up to this. But that's one reason why we tell this story repeatedly, the story of the "unprincipled" God who values what others don't notice, who relates to people we'd all rather forget, whose appeal is to everyone because he has made everyone capable of loving response. At least once a year we all – Christians or non-Christians – need to hear again that permission to be free from principles so that we can ask the question about specific human lives and destinies, about the unacceptable cost of programmes and systems when they are only about me and people like me.

And when that question is asked, says Karl Barth in his sermon, what begins to come through "the eternal light that requires neither fuel nor candlestick".

May this Christmas bring that light into all our lives, to light up every face we meet.

**

From the Revealer:

Favorite new religion site: Religion Dispatches.

Favorite new religion site, egghead division: Immanent Frame.

Favorite resurrected religion site, pop division: God Spam.

The Revealer prize for best story of the year goes to "Turning Away from Jesus: Gay rights and the war for the Episcopal Church," by Garret Keizer in Harper's

**

Playing For Change

I Have Done Enough

"[T]he thought pierced him [Sam] that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach."
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

"The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." - Isaiah 11:9

"...as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, yet possessing everything." - Paul, 2 Corinthians 6:10

"Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!...
For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." – Romans 11:33,36

**

From Faith & Theology

“But what does it mean to take the place of man, to be Himself a man, to be born of a woman? It means for Him, too, God’s Son, God Himself, that He came under the Law …, that He stepped into the heart of the inevitable conflict between the faithfulness of God and the unfaithfulness of man. He took this conflict into His own being. He bore it in Himself to the bitter end. He took part in it from both sides. He endured it from both sides. He was not only the God who is offended by man. He was also the man whom God threatens with death, who falls a victim to death in face of God’s judgment. If He really entered into solidarity with us – and that is just what He did do – it meant necessarily that He took upon Himself, in likeness to us, … the ‘flesh of sin’ (Rom 8:3). He shared in the status, constitution and situation of man in which man resists God and cannot stand before Him but must die” (II/1, p. 397)

Like Barth, Torrance stressed that there is no system (no ontology) by which such affirmations can be explained. They are either understood out of themselves or not at all.

-Barth

*

I've done enough.

[my friend Chris]

*

The Art of Disappearing.

When they say Don't I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say we should get together.
say why? It's not that you don't love them any more.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished. When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.

--Naomi Shihab Nye

*

I sleep, but my heart is awake.

-Song of Songs 5:2

*

At least four different people in the last 24 hours have said to me "I have done enough" -- said by way of a conclusion reached regarding something they did or said that was in some way incongruent with the normal patterns or actions of their lives thus far. It was an announcement that they weren't going to do the thing that they usually do.

I have had this thought as well - a kind of exhaustion of resources, or maybe thinking, "Can't a person get a little bit of help here ?" So that maybe it was a call or cry to the universe for some help, a clue, a tip off, a course correction, a confirmation that all is not in vain. Something. A sign? Can I get a witness ?

Or else it's something childish like, "I just walked away with new free shoes -- and those shoes should have been better."

I have made no preparations for Christmas - no gifts, no anything to speak of and there is no 'because.' I have done enough. In that sense, it seems to me that I have come to the end of that path. That it's time to do things in a different way. It's time for something to move forward, and I can't move it forward. The only way for that to happen is for me to fall back. I hate that. Falling back, I mean, retreating. I want to be large and in charge and move it forward. But it's down to surrender. It's laying down the weapons and disarming.

I dropped a [heavy] can of dog food on my foot last night. Ouch. I hate that when that happens. I tend to take things like that as a sign, then decide that that's stupid. When I discount my own signs and portents its usually that -- my little concerns and disappointments are little, minor, silly and petty compared to the needs and passions of the world. This makes mine a matter of shame and embarrassment and not worth the trouble to look beyond them to that which the signs point. The little and the insignificant IS the season, is it not? It's a sign because it's minor, unimportant and easily passed over. You don't need a voice from the sky to tell you to listen up.

I am no longer expecting the temperature of the room to suddenly lower or there to be wavelike energy emanations announcing an inner truth that is about to be revealed.

"In my heart, I know it was true." God is breaking down old hardness of heart. [maybe] The past-memory-flashes of old failures are perhaps an incipient recognition that I am not that person now, that I might be able to acknowledge and be responsible for what my younger earlier self has done , left undone , done out of stupidity, lack of reflection lack of awareness of childishness.

I have done enough. I have done and now my doing needs to be different.

I taught a yoga class somewhere on Sat that I don't usually teach. As I began the class (not knowing exactly what I was going to do, trying to 'read' the room,) I thought "I've done this for so long now" -- meaning, I guess, that I have come through a lot of digestion of yoga as a means, as a path. I have to teach now out of my own being, not out of a formula or out of how others teach. I have to be the master. I have to own what I know and give it away.

"I have done enough" might be that the desire for more, always more is in conflict with the fact that I do indeed have everything that I need. I have done enough and now a different kind of learning and service might be in store for me. Who knows what enough means in this sense?

*

Last Night As I Was Sleeping

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I slept,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.


Antonio Machado
Translated by Robert Bly

*

You Know It

The Life Aquatic

slacktivist

Dec 16, 2008

Fear and love

Imagine that you believe in ghosts.

By "believe" I don't mean that you're simply open to the possibility, or that you once saw something that you aren't fully able to explain, or that you're vaguely agnostic on the topic in a "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio" kind of way. I mean that you believe in ghosts and that this belief is a central organizing principle of your life. You believe the world is crowded with spirits and that you are surrounded by the ever-present vengeful dead.

How could you function, believing that? How could you get through the day without being paralyzed by fear? And -- assuming that being crazy wasn't already some kind of precondition for believing this in the first place -- how could you live with that constant fear without it driving you mad?

This is what I don't understand about the true believers on the fringes of the loony religious right. Here, for example, is the most recent e-mail I received from the Christian Worldview Network touting the new installment of Brannon Howse's radio program:

Topic One: Is the world on the verge of being divided into 10 regions? Rev 17:12 says that 10 world leaders will give their power and authority to the anti-christ. Iraq has unveiled plans for the creation of a regional economic and security union for the Middle East explicitly modeled on the European Union. Have you heard about the African Union, The Union of South American, The North American Union and Asia and Pacific Union? Has President Bush turned our U.S. Economy over to the European Union? Financial Times writers admits that a world government is "now plausible". Topic Two: How many of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto has America fulfilled thus far on our road toward socialism?

These people must be terrified. And they seem to spend all their time urging one another to be even more terrified.

How do they manage to get up in the morning, make the coffee and drive to work in a world so full of terror and menace? How do they summon up the courage to walk out their front door when the "Union of South American" is lurking outside in the hedges?

How do they sleep in a room filled with ghosts?

Howse speaks of the "anti-christ" -- a term he uses to name the central figure in the frightening campfire story that constitutes his "Christian Worldview." The word antichrist(s) comes from the book of 1 John. It's part of that book's single, unified argument that "God is love" and that life presents an unending series of choices in which we must either side with love or with its opposites -- with God or with anti-God, Christ or antichrist, love or hate, love or falsehood, love or fear.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear," the author of 1 John writes. "The one who fears is not made perfect in love."

Somehow Brannon Howse and his terrified followers do seem able to sleep at night and to get up in the morning and go to work. The fear that defines and organizes them doesn't seem to prevent them from doing any of those things.

But it has rendered them incapable of loving others.

Posted by Fred Clark

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

Whiskey River
link

Days

Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday's saucer
without the slightest clink.

- Billy Collins

**
A Ministry Tool-Box

Erica Barnett has rounded up some of Warren's greatest hits. I forgot that he backed the Federal Marriage Amendment, the most extreme anti-marriage policy option on the table.

Permalink

**
IOZ

Prey

"Of course, Barack Obama knows, and Joe Biden knows, and Nancy P. and Harry R. know, that if Barry O. dons the scarlet robes of an emperor and has himself crowned Grand Moff of the Universe by the Pope, the Dalai Lama, and the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Progressives will still come out for the party, before returning to their blurgs to murmur darkly about the traitorous thanksralphery of "purists," whose uncompromising un-commitment to lesser-evilism makes them an eternal target of proggie ire. "The perfect," they cry, "is the enemy of the good." True. But so is the bad. The problem with the Democratic Party is not forgivable imperfection. The problem is that the Democratic Party is evil, vicious, and wrong. Is Rick Warren a vacuous moral apologist for American exceptionalism? Yes! The word for his selection is: appropriate."

Posted by IOZ

**
Holiday Cheer from Bad Attitudes

Is This a Great Country or What?

Merry Christmas from the Westboro Baptist Church!

“You’d better watch out, get ready to cry/ You’d better go hide, I’m telling you why/

’cuz Santa Claus will take you to hell.

“He is your favorite idol, you worship at his feet,/ but when you stand before your God He won’t help you take the heat.

“So get this fact straight: you’re feeling God’s hate,/ Santa’s to blame for the economy’s fate,

“Santa Claus will take you to hell.”

Posted by Jerome Doolittle | Permalink

*

"It is a moment of light surrounded on all side by darkness and oblivion. In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another just like it and there will never be another just like it again. It is the point to which all of your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware how precious it is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all.

"This is the day which the Lord has made," says the 118th Psalm. "Let us rejoice and be glad in it." Or weep and be sad in it for that matter. The point is to see it for what it is because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life you're wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you've been waiting for always that you're missing.

All the other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from them. Today is the only day there is."

Frederick Buechner, from Whistling in the Dark

*

Mainly Wishful Thinking

Night's Lodging
by Luci Shaw

Across the purple-patterned snow
laced with light of lantern-glow,
dappled with dark,
comes Christ, the Child born from the skies.
Those are stars that are his eyes.
His baby face is wise
seek by my candle spark.
But is he cold from the wind's cold blow?
Where will he go?

I'll wrap him warm with love,
well as I'm able,
in my heart stable.

**
The zaniest Advent Calendar ever http://www.paperlesschristmas.org/

**
Christianity is mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept.

Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking.

Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on.

Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.

--Frederick Buechner

*

Listen To All Things Burning

IN SILENCE

-- Thomas Merton

Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
To speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
Are you (as these stones
Are quiet). Do not
Think of what you are
Still less of
What you may one day be.
Rather
Be what you are (but who?) be
The unthinkable one
You do not know.

O be still, while
You are still alive,
And all things live around you
Speaking (I do not hear)
To your own being,
Speaking by the Unknown
That is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
To be my own silence:
And this is difficult. The whole
World is secretly on fire. The stones
Burn, even the stones
They burn me. How can a man be still or
Listen to all things burning? How can he dare
To sit with them when
All their silence
Is on fire?”

+

"We each must become like fishermen, and go out onto the dark ocean of
mind, and let your nets down into that sea.

"And what you're after is not some behemoth that will tear through your
nets, foul them, and drag you and your little boat into the abyss. Nor are
what we looking for a bunch of sardines, that can slip through your net
and disappear, ideas like 'have you ever noticed that your little finger
exactly fits your nostril' and stuff like that.

"What we are looking for are middle-sized ideas that are not so small that
they are trivial, and not so large that they are incomprehensible, but
middle-sized ideas that we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the
folks on shore, and have fish dinner.

"And everyone of us, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for
your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy; you are
an explorer, and you represent our species.

"And the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because
our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in
crisis because of the absence of consciousness.

"And so, to whatever degree, any one of us can bring back a small piece
of the picture, and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm.
Then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit."

- Terence McKenna

**
An atheist group in Springfield,Illinois, posted a sign next to a Nativity scene in the
state's capitol building. "There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell,"
read the sign. "There is only our natural world."

--from Harpers Weekly

**

December 14, 2008

8th Annual Year in Ideas
Scrupulosity Disorder

By JASCHA HOFFMAN

In a paper published in the August issue of The Journal of Anxiety Disorders, Chris Miller and Dawson Hedges of Brigham Young University estimate that as many as one million Americans may suffer from a moral-anxiety-cum-mental-illness known as “scrupulosity disorder.” They define it as obsessive doubt about moral behavior often resulting in compulsive religious observance — and they warn that it can lead to depression, apathy, isolation and even suicide.

As the believing man’s version of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the diagnosis raises questions about where, exactly, the line is to be drawn between probity and perversity. It isn’t obvious how to treat someone who can’t sleep for worrying about their rectitude — or a devout Christian who is seized by the urge to exclaim, Goddamn! and repeatedly reproaches himself for it. Rather than try to fight off obsessive worrying, therapists might ask patients to give in to it, so that they can see that their supposed transgressions might be harmless. “If you believe in a God that’s all-knowing, you should trust him to know these blasphemous thoughts are mental noise and not what’s in your heart,” says Jon Abramowitz, director of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The diagnosis might raise some difficult issues. Ritual hand washing could seem compulsive in an atheist, but surely it isn’t for a Muslim, for whom such behavior is ordinary religious observance. Are the anxieties and fears that may accompany a passionate religious life themselves pathological? Abramowitz, who has treated scrupulous Christians, Muslims and Jews, is confident that a therapeutic approach to obsessive spirituality does not threaten religion. He says that when patients are gradually released from crippling doubt about their own virtue, they can emerge with a new sense of faith.

**

Because what I want most is permanence,
What I do best is bury fire now,
To bank the blaze within, and out of sense,
Where hidden fires and rivers burn and flow,
Create a world that is still and intense
I come to you with only the straight gaze.
These are not hours of fire but years of praise,
The glass full to the brim, completely full,
But held in balance so no drop can spill.

from 'Because What I Want Most is Permanence"
by May Sarton

Scars

Scars
William Stafford

They tell how it was, how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

To Feel Pity --That Was a Quality God's Image Carried With It

December 15, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist
A Church in Guantánamo

By Roger Cohen

GUANTÁNAMO, Cuba

I confess that I came here for the dateline. It beats Dusseldorf or Lille. Like Sarajevo or Falluja, it is one of those datelines that incline a reader onward.

I was in Santiago de Cuba, where the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s revolution will be celebrated on Jan. 1. It was hot, nobody knew if the ailing Fidel would appear, nor where exactly the festivities would take place. I thought, I’ll drive out to Guantánamo, you never know.

The night before I left, a band showed up on the terrace of my Santiago hotel and played “Guantanamera,” the wistful melody about the peasant girl from Guantánamo. I thought it strange that a place once associated with a love song now summons grim images of George W. Bush’s war on terror.

Guantanamera: once I heard it, I couldn’t get the chorus out my head. Would some proud, sultry-eyed woman fit the image? Purposeless journeys bring pleasant surprises. Yes, I’d go to Guantánamo for a glimpse of the U.S. naval base and whatever else I might find.

It’s a two-hour drive from Santiago, complicated by the absence of road signs, a Cuban idiosyncrasy. I went past the town to a hillside where the bay glimmered silver and the U.S. control tower glinted far away. What a place for bunch of Yemenis to end up.

On the way back to Guantánamo, I gave a ride to a woman who told me she worked in a prison in Havana for $20 a month and had come here to visit her children, whom she had entrusted to her mother after a painful divorce.

I asked her if she’d like to leave Cuba. “No,” she said, “but I’d like to have relatives abroad sending me money!”

In Guantánamo, we pulled up by the main plaza. Dusk was falling. Old folk sat on benches under the palms. I set out across the square with its lengthening shadows toward a whitewashed church, Santa Catalina de Ricci, whose heavy wooden doors were flung open.

A surprise awaited me. The church was full. A young priest in luminous green vestments was holding Mass. His words met me as I entered: “La Misa es siempre un encuentro con Dios” — “Mass is always an encounter with God.”

I am a stranger to faith. Yet a wave of physical relief swept over me. After 10 days in Cuba, with its hymns to the heroism of Fidel, Che Guevara, the Revolution and socialism, the priest seemed a merciful figure. Instead of the deification of Fidel and the utopian perfectibility of mankind, he posited human fallibility and consoling salvation.

Graham Greene’s masterpiece, “The Power and the Glory,” came to me, with its condemned priest in his cell: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity — that was a quality God’s image carried with it.”

I was spellbound, standing in the doorway, a breeze coming in. Cuba’s relations with the Catholic Church have improved in recent years, especially since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1998. Atheism has ceased to be a revolutionary tenet.

The priest began to tell the Parable of the Talents. How a wealthy man, parting on a journey, gave five talents to one of his servants, two to another, and one to a third. And the servant with five talents invested wisely and earned another five. And the servant with two talents did the same, also doubling his money. But the third, fearful of his master, hid the talent in the ground and earned nothing.

And the first two enter “into the joy of thy lord,” but the third “wicked and slothful” servant is cast into “outer darkness.”

“Where is this parable told?” the priest asked.

A child’s hand shot up. “Saint Matthew!”

The child was right. But what of this parable in a land where there’s nothing to invest in? Was it a “free-enterprise parable,” as John Howard, the former conservative prime minister of Australia once called it, a reminder that if you are given assets you must add to them, just as if you are entrusted with the word of God, you must spread that word?

Or was it, rather, a parable about the cost of standing up to authority, of being a whistle-blower like the third servant, who calls his master a “hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown?” Was it about the courage to face down totalitarianism and its rich apparatchiks?

I wondered, but preferred mystery to answers. I’d seen America’s Guantánamo prison. I’d felt the suffering of the woman in the car. I’d left New York’s financial disaster, based on greed for redoubled assets, and found the economic ravages of Cuba’s head-in-the-ground Communism.

Yes, pity. And if this priest had the power to turn the wafer into the flesh and blood of God, and if the people gathered here believed that and were consoled, I was ready to bow my head in silence.

That, it seemed, was why I had come to Guantánamo.

*
from comments

The parable of the talents is one that is often miss interpreted, by those who take a particular-- or should I say peculiar-- slant that favors their pedantic view, of the world. I prefer to take a cue from Garry wills series "What Jesus/Paul/the Gospels Meant" and focus on the general message, of the Scriptures, to give a clue as to where to place ones emphasis. In the Old Testament, we are instructed that since God created all the stuff, in the world, everything in it is his; we are just temporary custodians of said stuff. In the New Testament, Jesus tells us that the stuff of this world does little to pay your entrance fee, into Heaven; concentrate on helping others instead.

Therefore, the talents, which were units of money back then, can almost be directly translated as talents, in English; those abilities that you posses, that can be put into the service of other people (specifically those less fortunate than yourself). Your talent could be nearly anything, even earning money to donate to worthy causes. But the thing to focus on is not whether what you do is really changing the world around you: The change to focus on is the change that the doing, of the good deed, does to you. The change in your own heart is heart of the matter.

--Bruce Crossan, Lebanon, OR
*

"You may be an ambassador to England or France
You might like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You might be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody"

Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody"

*
Guantanemara is not a wistful song about a peasant girl. It is an anthem of Cuban liberation.

The song adapts the revolutionary poetry of Cuban hero Jose Marti to a traditional melody.

Pete Seeger and Julian Orban adapted Joseito Fernandez' 1929 ode to a woman from Guantanamo with lyrics from Jose Marti's Versos Sincellos, in the 1960's. This is the version most Americans are familiar with. Traditionally however, the lyrics were adapted to daily events and became a popular feature of Cuban radio before the Castro revolution. There is a radio show in Miami which currently transmits a daily 'Guantanmera' commenting on political, social, issues and local gossip. Stanzas usually end with 'Guantanmera, Guajira Guantanmera'. To complicate matters, 'guaijra' aside from meaning a female peasant is also a Cuban rural musical forms played by guajiros. Cubans can be confusing.

**
I suspect that the parable of the talents has to do with trust and letting go... The master gave only one talent to the last man because he knew he would bury it and it would be useless. If you let go and invest yourself in the world, your metaphorical talents will increase. And in a sense, the one who received five let go of the most.

The parable of the 'talents' calls us to mind the universals -- the power of art, the mystery of spirituality, the poisonousness of fear, and the pervasiveness of social control. Americans have allowed the latter two to rule the day in the last eight years. We've hidden who we have become in places like Guantanamo and outposts around the world which we "can't" pronounce, where we've sent those whom we don't want to hear scream from the torture that is on the end of extreme rendition. Perhaps, collectively we can recognize ourselves in the third servant and rejoin the rest of the world with more humility and awareness.

It is common for modern people to misunderstand Graham Greene's use of the word "pity" . The true meaning of pity is love. It may be an old-fashioned usage by English authors or it may be an old Catholic usage. It has never meant to convey superiority.

I heard a sermon recently on the talents suggesting that the parable is an ode to capitalism and investment. Hmm. I think of the term "self-spending" and think that the parable urges us to trust God in that direction. To give of ourselves, to love lavishly without reservation. I find it depressing sometimes that Christians can be so stingy, so cliquish and fearful. Or vengeful. I sometimes think that if we had extended deep goodwill to the world in return for the 9/11 attacks, how different our world would look now.

And torture. What will it take for this country to turn from this disasterous path?

**

The River Was Simply Manifest

"That was when they had been at the river for Ames's birthday, and had walked down to rinse the plates, and had stopped to watch Robby and Tobias racing leaves through an eddy between two ribs of sand. She said, "We hope he'll remember something of it." Then Glory had seen the place as if it were the kind of memory a woman might wish for her child, and it was exactly that, the river broad and shallow, the intricacies of its bed making rivulets of the slow water, bloom on the larger little islands and butterflies everywhere. And the trees meeting high above it, shading it, making the bottom earthily apparent wherever there was calm. They all loved the river, in all generations, Jack, too. She bent and dipped her hands in the water and pressed them to her face, to conceal the embarrassment of tears, but more than that, because the river was simply manifest, a truth too seldom acknowledged. When she had been on her own, sometimes she had thought of it."

Gilead
pg 283-4
Marilynne Robinson

**
You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago

You think this happened only once and long ago?
Think of a summer night and someone
talking across the water,
maybe someone
you loved in a boat, rowing. And you could
hear the oars dripping in the water, from half a lake away, and they were far and close at once. You didn't need to touch them
or call to them or talk about it later.
--the sky? It was what you breathed. The lake?
sky that fell as rain. I have been like you
filled with worry, worry --- then relief.
You know the wind is sky moving. It happens all the time.

Marie Howe
from
"The Kingdom of Ordinary Time"

**

"9th century Zen master, Tozan Ryokai, attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse, "Don't try to figure out who you are. If you figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself." Actually, you are in the river. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you.

You may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror or the water, that is actually you. And whatever you do, you are there."
- Shunryu Suzuki
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen

**

And I saw the river over which every soul must pass to reach the kingdom of God and the name of that river was suffering - and I saw the boat which carries souls across the river and the name of that boat was love.

St. John of the Cross
Spanish mystic, 1542-1591

**

You continue struggling to see your own truth. When people who know your heart well and love you dearly say that you are a child of God, that God has entered deeply into your being, and that you are offering much of God to others, you hear these statements as pep talks. You don’t believe that these people are really seeing what they are saying.

You have to start seeing yourself as your truthful friends see you. As long as you remain blind to your own truth, you keep putting yourself down and referring to everyone else as better, holier, and more loved than you are. You look up to everyone in whom you see goodness, beauty, and love because you do not see any of these qualities in yourself. As a result, you begin leaning on others without realizing that you have everything you need to stand on your own feet.

You cannot force things, however. You cannot make yourself see what others see. You cannot fully claim yourself when parts of you are still wayward. You have to acknowledge where you are and affirm that place. You have to be willing to live your loneliness, your incompleteness, your lack of total incarnation fearlessly, and trust that God will give you the people to keep showing you the truth of who you are.

-Henri Nouwen

from 'The Inner Voice of Love'
via Love Till It Burns

*

The Soul Finds Its Own Home If It Ever Has A Home At All

This is a picture I excavated from my mother's and grandmother's effects.
I believe it is my maternal grandmother and her family.

"And here is the world, she thought, just as we left it. A hot white sky and a soft wind, a murmur among the trees, the treble rasp of a few cicadas. There were acorns in the road, some of them broken by passing cars. Chrysanthemums were coming into bloom. Yellowing squash vines swamped the vegetable gardens and tomato plants hung from their stakes, depleted with bearing. Another summer in Gilead. Gilead, dreaming out its curse of sameness, somnolence. How could anyone want to live here? That was the question they asked one another, out of their father's hearing, when they came back from college, or from the world. Why would anyone stay here?

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape ! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him.

She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk. Stangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity. But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her, Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret. Poor Glory, her life has not gone well. Such a nice girl, and bright. Very bright.

That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life.
In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting, and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all."

"Home" p. 281-282
Marilynne Robinson

Relationship

Charles M. Blow: The Demise of Dating

The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.

(For those over 30 years old: hooking up is a casual sexual encounter with no expectation of future emotional commitment. Think of it as a one-night stand with someone you know.)

According to a report released this spring by Child Trends, a Washington research group, there are now more high school seniors saying that they never date than seniors who say that they date frequently. Apparently, it’s all about the hookup.

When I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm.

I should point out that just because more young people seem to be hooking up instead of dating doesn’t mean that they’re having more sex (they’ve been having less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) or having sex with strangers (they’re more likely to hook up with a friend, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research).

To help me understand this phenomenon, I called Kathleen Bogle, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia who has studied hooking up among college students and is the author of the 2008 book, “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.”

It turns out that everything is the opposite of what I remember. Under the old model, you dated a few times and, if you really liked the person, you might consider having sex. Under the new model, you hook up a few times and, if you really like the person, you might consider going on a date.

I asked her to explain the pros and cons of this strange culture. According to her, the pros are that hooking up emphasizes group friendships over the one-pair model of dating, and, therefore, removes the negative stigma from those who can’t get a date. As she put it, “It used to be that if you couldn’t get a date, you were a loser.” Now, she said, you just hang out with your friends and hope that something happens.

The cons center on the issues of gender inequity. Girls get tired of hooking up because they want it to lead to a relationship (the guys don’t), and, as they get older, they start to realize that it’s not a good way to find a spouse. Also, there’s an increased likelihood of sexual assaults because hooking up is often fueled by alcohol.

That’s not good. So why is there an increase in hooking up? According to Professor Bogle, it’s: the collapse of advanced planning, lopsided gender ratios on campus, delaying marriage, relaxing values and sheer momentum.

It used to be that “you were trained your whole life to date,” said Ms. Bogle. “Now we’ve lost that ability — the ability to just ask someone out and get to know them.”

Now that’s sad.

**

This is one of the subjects that interests me a lot. I have been involved with a women's spiritual group for years now that is specifically for mothers of young children. I have young 20-ish sons. I recognize the precarious nature of the culture we live in, my own parents divorced, I do not discount the value of divorce, and yet, the commitment symbolized by marriage -as- metaphor is important and transformational. The reasons are not so much outer and societal as inner. Marriage is an inner as well as an outer path. 'Hooking up' isn't new. Or newly popular.

One of the most striking things, to me in studying the Bible as an adult is the premium placed on faithfulness. The idea of 'covenant' and of faithfulness to the covenant is deeply Biblical. It isn't a command so much as an unveiling that this is how the world is bound together. That it is a covenanted world. That God wasn't so much condemning or handing down arbitrary law , as God was saying, 'this is how this world is constructed.' It's less about sexual purity than about a leap of faith into the future and a willingness to be tested. Faithfulness is what permits intimacy. Sexuality is the metaphor. But the essence of faith and faithfulness is a quality of the spirit. It's the capacity to endure and to have vision and hold to its creation.

Everything has a structure. To understand the structure is to admit help and health and benefit. To misunderstand structure is to abuse it, destroy it and stay in ignorance. I know plenty of people who married, divorced, or left the relationship, but they were still connected to still 'married' to the person that they were with originally. Those heart connections aren't so easily severed. They outlast death. The structure that they entered into has deeper roots than recognized.

There's also , as my friend C. puts it, the stage in the relationship where you are absolutely certain that you are married to the wrong person. This unshakable certainty is what usually splits up the relationship, but is it genuine, is it a true feeling ? Is it just another temptation ?

I'm not trying to say this as a 'thou should' or 'thou must' but the desire to be deeply bonded to other people is part of our humanness -- it isn't a formula but the state of heart that persists through trials and temptations even past death-- that it is at it's heart another aspect of the deep God-mystery.

Having faith, faithfulness calls us to hold to something despite the evidence.This isn't mere pigheadedness, because it isn't evangelical or doesn't assert it's own rightness. It doesn't even necessarily call attention to itself. It just says that I must hold to something that I previously saw was the necessary path for me. That to fail in that will deny me the fruit of what I originally planted. Not because I'm wrong or being punished, that's just how things work structurally.

For example, I can see that my mother continued to be faithful to her marriage to my father, even after he betrayed and left her, even after she knew he'd never be back, even beyond all his cruelty to her. It wasn't masochism or delusion, it was simply how she was made. It gave her the grace to see her life through to the end with a dignity and wholeness that didn't perish under the weight of bitterness. She was able to have compassion for both him and for herself in the situation.

The kids today want to have it completely right before they date, marry, have kids. They want a guarantee of some kind, to put it together logically, thus ensuring success. They want a formula for intimacy. We are, after all a success culture -- having a plan and working a plan. But helpful as the plan is, this kind of covenant is out of the realm of the rational and logical. It is something that calls new life into being. it perpetuates ancestry, it calls forth ancient gifts, talents and feuds.

There's not a neat answer. I just get excited when I see the next generation having some courage to leap , to dare, to follow a dream, to not know exactly where they are going, and to not be afraid. There's energy there. And bread for the journey.

**

because what i want most is permanence

Because what I want most is permanence,
The long unwinding and continuous flow
Of subterranean rivers rivers out of sense,
That nourish arid landscapes with their blue-
Poetry, prayer, or call it what you choose
That frees the complicated act of will
And makes the whole world both intense and still-
I set my mind to artful work and craft,
I set my heart on friendship, hard and fast
Against the wild inflaming wink of chance
And all sensations opened in a glance.
Oh blue Atlantis where the sailors dream
Their girls under the waves and in the foam-
I move another course. I'll not look down.

Because what I want most is permanence,
What I do best is bury fire now,
To bank the blaze within, and out of sense,
Where hidden fires and rivers burn and flow,
Create a world that is still and intense,
I come to you with only the straight gaze.
These are not hours of fire but years of praise,
The glass full to the brim, completely full,
But held in balance so no drop can spill.

-May Sarton

***

Spirit Is A Bone

December 13, 2008

Revering a Symbol of Mexican Faith and Identity

By MARTIN ESPINOZA

She came into New York across the George Washington Bridge, a gold-framed portrait of a brown-skinned Virgin Mary escorted by a procession of pilgrims in gray jogging sweats.

A few carried torches that, along with the image of Mexico’s beloved Virgin of Guadalupe, left the Roman Catholic basilica in Mexico City that bears her name two months ago and reached St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Friday morning.

Jose Reyes, a stout 45-year-old construction worker who lives in the Bronx, got up at 4:30 a.m. with other members of his parish there, Immaculate Conception Church, to accompany the portrait into the city. Many local Catholic parishes with large Mexican congregations took part in the procession, a celebration of the Dec. 12 Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. As he walked through Manhattan, Mr. Reyes said, a sense of pride filled his spirit.

“It’s indescribable what you feel when you’re walking with her, knowing that she came all the way from where your roots began,” he said after a 10 a.m. Mass at the historic Fifth Avenue cathedral.

For many in the procession, the grandeur of the city’s concrete monoliths, its wealth and its well-dressed denizens briefly faded amid memories of humble towns in Mexico, of families crossing borders to be together for the holidays and of children playing in timeless colonial church plazas.

It is a common saying that you are not really Mexican unless you believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe. Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, wrote that “after two centuries of experiment and failure, the Mexican people only believe in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery.”

According to Mexican lore, the Virgin appeared in December 1531 before an indigenous farmer and laborer named Juan Diego Cuautlatoatzin. The brown-skinned apparition told Juan Diego that she was the mother of Jesus and that she wanted a church on the Tepeyac Hill, the site of a former Aztec temple dedicated to the goddess Tonantzin.

Both Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe are passionately revered as holy incarnations of Mexican identity. Recognizing their evangelical significance, Pope John Paul II, who canonized Juan Diego in 2002, declared the Virgin of Guadalupe “Queen of the Americas.”

The portrait that arrived at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Friday morning is a replica of the revered image kept at the Mexico City basilica. The portrait, about 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide, left Mexico City two months ago, and was brought by vehicle across the border, across the country and into New York, followed by pilgrims on foot and in cars.

During the Mass on Friday morning, the image was placed to the right of the altar. On the left was an image of Juan Diego.

Hundreds of Mexican families brought their young children in simple, traditional clothing for a special blessing toward the end of the Mass. The boys were dressed to look like Juan Diego, with a tilma, or cloak, bearing the image of the Virgin. In the story, that image was proof of her appearance on Tepeyac Hill.

“If there are any Juan Dieguitos, you can come up,” Msgr. Robert T. Ritchie said in Spanish. “We welcome all the children for this special blessing.”

Boys, from infants to toddlers, their upper lips sporting mustaches drawn with makeup or face paint, were brought up to the altar, some of them crying. Within seconds, the monsignor disappeared amid dozens of Mexican families. Only the hand he used to bless the children could be seen rising from the crowd.

Hipolito Garcia, a 35-year-old warehouse worker from Union City, N.J., brought his 5-month-old son, Rigo, and 3-year-old daughter, Roselyn, to the Mass for the blessing. Mr. Garcia is an illegal immigrant who is trying to gain legal residency through his wife, Teresa Calyeca, a United States citizen.

Mr. Garcia, who came to the New York City area from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala in 1991, said his prayers on Friday were for the legalization of the millions of Mexican immigrants “sin papeles,” or without papers.

“We also pray for a better economy,” Mr. Garcia said. “I have a job now, thank God. But we pray for things to improve all over. This economic crisis is worldwide.”

The portrait that made the trip from Mexico is owned by the Asociación Tepeyac de New York, an education and advocacy group that organized the procession, said a Mexico City government official who was at the Mass.

**

And a story about the Trinity Church graveyard (one of my favorite NYC 'haunts' (haha)

Buried in the Churchyard: A Good Story, at Least

By C. J. HUGHES

Published: December 12, 2008

Knowing that Grant’s Tomb is really a mausoleum solves the age-old head-scratcher about who’s buried there. (Ulysses S. and his wife, Julia, lie above ground, so no one is.)

If only cracking the case of Charlotte Temple’s grave marker were as easy.

Tucked inside the graveyard of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, it is a weathered brownstone slab about the size of a refrigerator. Carved across it in inch-tall letters is the name Charlotte Temple. At first glance, it seems like any tribute to the deceased.

But Ms. Temple appears to have been make-believe. “Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth” was a book written by Susanna Haswell Rowson and published in 1790. It is a Danielle Steele-style yarn about a young British girl who runs off to America with a soldier, only to be abandoned.

More>>

**

Whiskey River

link

"The only reason that we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.

Then this experience of opening to the world begins to benefit ourselves and others simultaneously. The more we relate with others, the more quickly we discover where we are blocked, where we are unkind, afraid, shut down. Seeing this is helpful, but it is also painful. Often the only way we know how to react is to use it as ammunition against ourselves. We aren't kind. We aren't honest. We aren't brave, and we might as well give up right now.
That's the beginning of growing up. As long as we don't want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we are always going to be infants. When we begin just to try to accept ourselves, the ancient burden of self-importance lightens up considerably. Finally there's room for genuine inquisitiveness, and we find we have an appetite for what's out there."

- Pema Chodron

**

via wood_s_lot

Spirit Is a Bone

Justin E. H. Smith

The Jews say spirit is a bone,
a solid part, as hard as stone.

Others think it’s like the gas
that glows and hovers o’er the grass
in graveyards hosting dead ancestors,
who go a-ghosting, when methane festers.

(....)

Or is it chyle, or pus, or some other juice?
Does it grow on a tree in a pod like a goose,
and drop off when the branch can not manage its weight?
Does the hour of dropping determine its fate?

...(more)

**
We went to see "The Day the Earth Stood Still" -- despite an exciting beginning, and some promising atmospherics, I lodge my customary complaint about the dull and obviously 'product placement' driven script. Why all the millions for technological effects and NOTHING spent for a decent script ??

The child actor was neither memorable nor endearing, but instead by-the-numbers annoying and formulaeic. Kathy Bates was silly and stuck with a truly terrible hairdo and an insulting wardrobe. Really.

And what happened to "Klatu Barada Nictu" ? Would it have killed them to put it in?

Well. I enjoyed it, I guess but switch a few details here and there, and you have "Independence Day" or "Men in Black" or any other space ships and crisis in America mega-movie. Would it kill the big producers to hire a real writer ?? Take a few chances on a real film?

**

**

Philosophy For Our Time

cross posted to 'Life Goes On ?!"

A facebook classic exchange ::

F*^k all the smart ass people everywhere.
The people that think they're the shit. The people that give you that one last comment just to piss you off. That last comment that could have just been done w/out.

There are some certain people (some that go to M*****) that i won't name that have this smart ass characteristic to them.

you all can go to hell.....

F*%K YOU ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

--J.

um....
not to sound like a smart ass, but Socrates, one of the most highly held philosophers all through history was the first person to ever make this arguement. (smart people are stupid, those who think they know everything, know nothing, etc.)
I'm studying for a philosophy final right now and was just reading the story of his trial surrounding this arguement, and I just thought I would drop some knowledge on you and let you know how unoriginal this topic really is.....
not trying to seem like a hater, just had to say something.

are you still doin drama dude, haven't talked to you in awhile??

--mx.

seriously mx. ...go do a goat

J.

i hate people who censor the word fuck for no reason

s.k.

fuck you s*** k******

J.

***

No Going Back

Mary (Reprise)

What is that book we always see -- in the paintings -- in her lap?
Her finger keeping the place of who she was when she looked up?

When I look up: my mother is dead, and my own daughter is calling
from the bathtub, Mom come in and watch me -- come in here right now !

No Going Back might be the name of that angel -- no more reverie.
Let it be done to me, Mary finally said, and that

was the last time, for a long time, that she spoke about the past.

--Marie Howe
from "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time"

That Which You Are Seeking...

"That which you are seeking is doing the seeking."

(St. Francis of Assissi)

**

Merton: The Enlightened Heart

By Joan Chittister

December 10 is the 40th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s death. There is a story that may best explain the influence and the place of Thomas Merton in contemporary society and spiritual development.

Once upon a time some disciples begged their old and ailing master not to die. “But if I do not go, how will you ever see?” the Master said to them. “What is it we can possibly see when you are gone?” one of them asked. With a twinkle in his eye, the Master answered, “All I ever did in my entire life was to sit on the river bank handing out river water. After I’m gone, I trust that you will notice the river.”

The lesson rings true: What teachers teach us while they live is one thing; the quality of what they leave us to think about the rest of our lives is another. Thomas Merton was a fascinating, engaging, offbeat, charming and provocative personality, true. But what he directed the world to see was far more than the mystique, the mystery of the cloistered life. He left us things worth thinking about for a long, long time.

Merton saw the world through a heart uncluttered by formulas and undimmed by systems. He taught more than piety and asceticism for its own sake. He taught concepts that flew in the face of tradition then and fly in the face of culture still: the sin of poverty, the moral imperative of peace, the rectitude of stewardship, the holy power of nonviolence, the sanctity of globalism and essence of enlightenment. Merton sowed seeds of contemplation that led to action—an often forgotten but always bedrock spiritual concept.

In Jewish spirituality, for instance, two concepts dominate and are intertwined: The one, devekut, translates as “clinging to God” or contemplation; the other, tikkun o’lam, translates “repairing the world” the work of justice. One without the other—contemplation without justice, clinging to mystery without repairing the real world—is unfinished, the tradition teaches, is dark without light, is grand without great, is soul without body.

Contemplation, Merton teaches us, is learning to see the world as God sees the world. The contemplative sees the world through the eyes of God and the real contemplative is driven to respond according to the mind of God for it. Clinging to God, in other words, generates the passion it takes to repair the world.

Merton’s monastic contemplation joins those two concepts again, this time in the face of a culture that is inclined more to rituals than to this kind of contemplative dimension of religion. Indeed, Merton spent his life dealing out river water to a world yet disinclined to see the river itself but claiming to be following it. Merton handed out river water to soften the dry and sterile ground of religion gone hard, and life gone barren.

Source: “Thomas Merton: Seeder of Radical Action and the Enlightened Heart” in The Merton Annual, Vol. 12

**

Love - Br. Thomas Merton

“What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can.

Indeed, that is one of the most significant things about the power of love. There is no way under the sun to make a man worthy of love except by loving him. As soon as he realizes himself loved – if he is not so weak that he can no longer bear to be loved – he will feel himself instantly becoming worthy of love. He will respond by drawing a mysterious spiritual value out of his own depths, a new identity called into being by the love that is addressed to him.”

From Disputed Questions by Br. Thomas Merton

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York, 1960. Page 125.

*
"Thoughts in Solitude" by Thomas Merton

"The desert is the home of despair. And despair, now, is everywhere. Let us not think that our interior solitude consists in the acceptance of defeat. We cannot escape anything by consenting tacitly to be defeated. Despair is an abyss without bottom. Do not think to close it by consenting to it and trying to forget you have consented.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we wage it courageously, we will find Christ at our side. If we cannot face it, we will never find Him."

**
Song for Nobody

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
- Thomas Merton

**

I first learned of Thomas Merton in 1982. I was recovering from surgery, and a documentary on his life came on PBS. It was really beautiful, there was something touching and real about his life and his mission.

I read Seven Story Mountain and was launched from there to reconsider the Christian Church after spending a long time away. I understood that he had given up the notion of some perfect institution or some perfect enlightened human being. That to be human was adequate and enough. That God's quest for us, God's pilgrimage in search for us was a great mystery that would never be rational or systematic, but something that was revealed out of the heart of our own lived lives. That Merton's invitation to live one's own life in a different way hit me right where I lived at that moment in time, even though he had died some time ago. I knew that his life went on, as did we all. I had just lost a friend to AIDS, and I suddenly felt reconnected to Michael, I knew that death was not the end.

Pretty good stuff. I still reread Merton regularly and he's always saying something timely and something I've never heard before.

**

Whatever Is Present Is Utterly and Urgently Present

"Rilke's letters to his wife of this period show not only the agitations of his mind but testify also to an atmosphere of psychological vulnerability where, as he put it, seeing and working were "almost one and the same." Before his eyes, the world seemed to be reforming itself as a kind of benison: "All the things of the past rearrange themselves, line up in rows, as if someone were standing there giving out orders; and whatever is present is utterly and urgently present, as if prostrate on its knees and praying for you." (LOC 3) These words are not fanciful, especially if we consider that they issue from one of Europe's great workers in homelessness, a poet whose reputation in large measure was built on rootlessness and alienated consciousness. What they suggest is an unusual psychological climate in Rilke, an alteration of his characteristic dis-ease with surroundings.

For Rilke, artistic creation was less a matter of learning than of unlearning, of foreswearing intellectual or psychological certainty by making some sort of radical leap. "Surely," he writes a month after his return to Paris, "all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further..." "Therein," he continues, "lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it,--: that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life recites a prayer." (LOC 4) The religious tone is instructive. Homelessness, Rilke's artistic donne, is set aside, and the world is perceived as animated and, more importantly for Rilke, uncharacteristically welcoming and beneficent. Suddenly, the work of art is not so much an alienated jewel in the world's crown but a tutelary device, a way for entering and participating."

--from Uncertain Poetries:
Selected Essays
Michael Heller

via wood_s_lot

**
Different Ways of Praying
-Brenda Ueland

In an old notebook: Everybody prays in a different way. Jesus "fell on his face." Lord Ashley in Cromwell's army just before the charge at the battle of Edge Hill: "O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be on this day. If I forget Thee do not Thou therefore forget me." The poet Cowper: "Sometimes I seem too myself to be banished to a remoteness from God's presence in comparison with which the distance from East to West is vicinity, is cohesion." Bunyan: "Oh, the staring holes that the heart hath in time of prayer ! No one knows the byways the heart hath, and the back lanes to slip away from the presence of God."

Hugh Latimer's letter to Ridley, just before they were burned at the stake: "Pardon me and pray for me; pray for me I say. For I am sometimes so fearful that I could creep into a mouse-hole; sometimes God doth visit me again with his comfort. So He cometh and goeth."

Dean Gouburn: "When you cannot pray as you would, pray as you can. Sometimes when you need rest most, you are too restless to lie down and take it. Then compel yourself to lie still. So if you are averse to prayer, pray the more."

Madame Guyon said that sometimes vague groping for God outside us leaves only emptiness -- one finds only emptiness. It was so with her until a Franciscan friar said to her, "Madame, you are seeking without that which you have within. Accustom yourself to seek for God in your own heart and you will find him."

From William blake: "I am not a God Afar off but a brother and Friend. In your bosom I reside and you reside in mine, forgiving all Evil, not seeking Recompense." Blake said that when he could not write or paint, when he had no inspiration, he "was devoured by jackals and hyenas." He was asked what he did then. "I pray, Sir." He also said: "Anyone who loves can feel love descend into him and knows it is the Lord."

The trouble frequently with even nobly intellectual and rational people is this: Their effort toward Truth, Goodness, Love can be merely analysis, dissection. but when you analyze and dissect Truth or Love it can be merely an autopsy. There it is, all laid out on the table in parts, but the Truth is fled. I say: "Go ahead. Analyze, analyze, study, negate. That is fine. But at the same time you must pray to love the truth that you are seeking. Only Love, descending into you from the Lord, turns the analysis into a synthesis, a recklessness and a grandeur so that the Truth becomes a part of you, transfigures you and leads you to a highter one. "

Strength to Your Sword Arm
Brenda Ueland

**
Story of the tears:

“One may ask, If a man deeply troubled and sunk into sorrow, and his heart is heavy, yet because of tribulation he feels the urge to go to the heavenly King to see, solace; is he then to desist from praying because of his sorrowfulness? What shall he do, since he cannot help it that his heart is heavy.

The answer is that “from the day of destruction of the Temple, all gates to heaven have been closed, but the gates of tears have not been closed,” and suffering and sadness are expressed in tears. Standing over the gates of tears are certain heavenly beings, and they break down the bars and locks of iron, and allow the tears to enter, so that the entreaties of the grieving supplications go through and reach the holy King, and the place of the Divine Presence is grieved by the sorrow of him who prays, as it stands written: “In all their afflictions He is afflicted.”

(Zohar: The Book of Splendor, Edited by Gershom Scholem)
via Raymond Sigrist

*
"One day You will take my heart completely and make it more fiery than a dragon. Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet.”

---Jalal ad-Din Rumi

*
God, right now, let us forget what all the health reports say and simply thank you for the gift of coffee. Thank you for those wonderful beans that are picked, roasted, ground, and brewed to make that wondeful elixir. Thank you for the warmth of the mug in our cold hands. Thank you for energy and life it puts back in our brains and bodies. Thank you for that warm, wonderful feeling in which every sip seems to flow directly into our blood streams and out to the tips of our fingers and the ends of our toes. Thank you for cream, sugar, and sugar substitutes. Thank you for anything good that goes with coffee. Thank you for coffee ice cream. Thank you any place that sells coffee. Bless every person who makes or sells coffee. Are you getting the idea God? Thank you for all your blessings--and at the moment, thank you especially for this one. Amen.

http://www.faithwebsites.com/fpcdouglasville/thewell.cfm

Steven L. Case's Book of Uncommon Prayer

*
some quotes from "Coffee Mystics" a facebook group

*
I am struggling with the work week, struggling with a lot of things right now. The phrase "my heart is heavy" has meaning this week, because I am fatigued by nothing in particular. This is one of my least-favorite states and one that plagues me from time to time, unrelenting fatigue, unrefreshed sleep, a sullen unrepentant outlook, just an identity that is very difficult to shake. I bet if I were still dancing I could shake this off.

I am going to teach a yoga class this p.m. in about 15 minutes, and facing a group of people who took some pains to come here this p.m. and pay me money -- in spite of the cold and the rain and the sulky economy -- I intend to break through to some humility that will allow for a change of heart. Sometimes I am just heartily sick of myself, but there's nowhere else to go.

In my next life, I plan to be insoucient.

**

Beautiful - Good

Inward Outward

Michael Green

Obviously or consciously, we are all pilgrims, searching this world over for the Lost Thing---that which the early Desert Fathers called philokalia, the 'Beautiful-Good.' In all the Celtic affairs, soul-yearning seems as much the stuff of life as breathing. In our time it is a more haphazard affair, for we are constantly grasping at the moon. The cure is a kind of open secret, a turning around, a shifting of the gaze from what is far to what is near, to the stillness of beginnings, to the simple secret place where the soul gathers its nourishment: a knowing of the roots. A knowing of the roots. This is a quality of Traditional People---those drum beaters and dancers and firelight storytellers who chose to dwell outside the walls of the empire.

December, 2008, Celtic Blessings Calendar

**

"There are thresholds which thought alone, left to itself, can never permit us to cross. An experience is required - an experience of poverty, of sickness."
- Gabriel Marcel
Les Pauvres de Yahvk

**
"You have had the audacity to take on human form and you are delighted. But the human form has ten thousand changes that never come to an end. Your joys, then, must be uncountable."

 - Chuang Tsu

**
"I think it is time to face yourself again.
Then again, it is always time."

 - Stonepeace

*
"You yourself
should reprove yourself,
should examine yourself.

Your own self is
your own mainstay.
Your own self is
your own guide.
Therefore you should
watch over yourself -
as a trader, a fine steed."
- Buddha
Dhammapada

**
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

**

I think that I am coming down with another cold. I think that I am going to choose to not believe that this is even possible and just go to bed and start over tomorrow.  Today has been frustrating and it's not the fault of the day. It's just an inner place that has actually been helped by my needing to work etc. 

Then four hours of "Lost" cast me into the outer darkness.

To bed.

**

Only You Can Open Your Heart

December 7, 2008
Shaman Channels 12th Century but Adapts to 21st

By JONATHAN ADAM

TAIPEI, Taiwan — After 10 minutes of drum-beating and incense-burning by her assistants, Chang Yin donned a black, spotted robe and a pointed hat. She picked up a fan with her right hand and a silver flask of sorghum liquor with her left.

Then, she sat in a chair before an altar piled with joss sticks, cans of beer, fruit, other snacks and images of deities. The session began. She appeared to slip into a trance.

Ms. Chang is a jitong, a shaman who dispenses advice while said to be possessed by a spirit. Here, inside a modern office building next to Taipei’s bustling main train station, she is carrying on a folk tradition that goes back hundreds of years in Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

In the past, such shamans played a central role in rural village life. Based in local temples, they would resolve community disputes and pick auspicious dates for important occasions, and they were believed to help heal the sick by channeling spirits.

Now, as Taiwan’s economy has developed and its population urbanized, some jitong, like Ms. Chang, are changing with the times. With the tradition on the decline, Ms. Chang is one of a small number of people who are maintaining the shamanistic practice but adapting it to the needs of modern city dwellers.

“People moved into cities, but they still have this kind of religious need,” said Ting Jen-chieh, a specialist in Taiwanese religion at the Institute of Ethnology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, the capital.

Forty years ago, shamanistic ceremonies were still a frequent feature of village temples, with jitong playing an important public role.

Now, Mr. Ting said, few young Taiwanese are interested in becoming jitong. Many older people who carry on the shaman tradition have switched to “private practice,” often in cities, operating out of homes, storefronts or offices rather than temples.

The problems they are called upon to solve have changed, too: there are fewer village-level quarrels, more questions on marital disharmony or workplace setbacks.

In the southern Taiwanese village that Mr. Ting has been studying, there were eight jitong in the 1960s. Now there are none.

“Before, jitong were seen as performing a public service,” Mr. Ting said. “But now, as people have become more educated, they’ve come to think the practice isn’t scientific, that it’s uncivilized.”

But if jitong are less visible, the underlying beliefs that prevailed when Taiwan was a predominantly poor, rural society are surprisingly resilient.

Many Taiwanese pragmatically switch among Taoist, Buddhist, folk and other beliefs and practices, depending on the situation, Mr. Ting said. And at least 70 percent of Taiwanese still adhere to some traditional ways, he said.

Another example is the divination blocks that many Taiwanese still use in temples for spiritual guidance. Each crescent-shaped block has a flat and a rounded side. How a pair of the blocks falls is believed to determine the answer to a (typically yes or no) question one might ask.

“Taiwan has become more middle-class-oriented, but we still keep our folk practices,” Mr. Ting said.

Consulting a jitong is a case in point. The practice has not been totally abandoned, just updated. Ms. Chang, for example, regularly sends out text messages to about 300 clients. That virtual network has replaced the tightly knit village setting of old.

One Sunday a month she invites those contacts to her office for an open spirit medium session.

On this particular day, as she answered petitioners’ questions, several elderly men lounged nearby on pillows and chairs, watching the proceedings. Children ran in and out of the room. Ms. Chang’s assistants bustled around in the office and an attached kitchen, lighting joss sticks, washing dishes, tending to accounts.

Her office door remained open, with about 15 waiting visitors and passers-by chatting and eating in the outside hallway.

As clients knelt on pillows before her and aired their troubles, Ms. Chang was by turns marriage counselor, family therapist and psychotherapist.

“In the U.S. or the West, people go to a psychologist,” said one 40-year-old man who works in financial services in Taipei, after he and his wife had finished their session. “The jitong plays the same role. In Taiwan, we think going to a psychologist feels a bit strange. A psychologist is just a person, but this is a god. I can say anything to a god, but I can’t say everything to a psychologist.”

Most often, Ms. Chang said, she is possessed by Ji Gong, a maverick Buddhist monk who lived in China in the 12th century and loved his meat and liquor. Thus, the cans of beer as offerings on the altar and Ms. Chang’s slurred speech as she channeled the tipsy monk.

Another popular god is Santaizi (literally, the “third prince”), the youngest son of a Tang Dynasty general who has a third eye and boundless energy.

But she says other spirits, including Jesus, can speak through her.

“I usually ask Ji Gong to answer peoples’ questions,” she said. “When I start the ritual, I need to dress in Ji Gong’s clothes and drink alcohol, because Ji Gong likes it.”

She says she does not remember anything that happens while possessed by the spirits.

“My assistant helps me, recording everything I say and telling me what I did,” she said.

This time, a visibly relaxed Ms. Chang, as Ji Gong, was cracking jokes, sipping liquor, hiccuping, waving a fan, teasing questioners, scolding a child and in general thoroughly enjoying the experience and putting everyone at ease.

The questioners all listened calmly, letting Ji Gong do most of the talking.

Ji Gong assured one troubled woman who had recently lost a baby that the child was doing well on “the other side.”

“Give me your heart, and I’ll open it,” Ji Gong told the woman, using a Chinese phrase for giving happiness. The woman put her hand to her heart and then extended it to the shaman.

“That’s not your heart, that’s your hand,” Ji Gong said, chuckling mischievously.

“I was just kidding; only you can open your heart,” Ji Gong said. “If you want to open it, just open it. You think too much.”

Another time, Ji Gong gave specific advice to a couple and their young son, repeat visitors. To the wife, he said, “Your husband’s not gentle enough, as usual,” and gently upbraided the man.

Then Ji Gong had another message: “Your son wants to ask you for money, but he’s afraid to. He wants money for an online game; he’s been trying so hard to overcome an obstacle, but he needs a weapon. Just give him 100 dollars or 200 dollars.” (Those sums, in Taiwanese dollars, are equivalent to about $3 or $6.)

Ms. Chang does not charge for the jitong services. She teaches classes, and most of her income derives from advising businesses on feng shui and other such matters.

In an interview, Ms. Chang said that the spirits called her to be a jitong; she did not choose it.

“When I was 6, I asked my mother why there were people walking in the sky through the clouds,” she said. “They didn’t blame me or think I was seeing things; they bought a book with pictures of holy beings and asked me which ones I’d seen.”

When she was 12, a Taoist priest began teaching her the ways of the jitong during summer and winter school breaks. At 15, she said, she was capable of being possessed. She completed vocational school and held jobs in a hospital and in sales, but she said the spirits kept pestering her to be a jitong and to deliver their messages. A few years ago she did.

If the profession has evolved in tandem with changes in society, Ms. Chang said it was not only the jitong who had adjusted.

She said that these days the gods were more likely to be consulted on thorny personal relationships than on physical illness.

“So now they give a different type of guidance,” she said. “The gods have changed along with the times and kept up with the trends.”

Yang Chia-nin contributed reporting.

*****

INTERVIEWER
You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON
People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

The Art of Fiction No. 198

Marilynne Robinson

Issue 186, Fall 2008

**

Obsessions

Maybe it is true we have to return
to the black air of ashcan city
because it is there the most life was burned,

as ghosts or criminals return?
But no, the city has no monopoly
of intense life. The dust burned

golden or violet in the wide land
to which we ran away, images
of passion sprang out of the land

as whirlwinds or red flowers, your hand
opened in anguish or clenched in violence
under that sun, and clasped my hands

in that place to which we will not return
where so much happened that no one else noticed,
where the city’s ashes that we brought with us
flew into the intense sky still burning.

-Denise Levertov

Out of Nowhere

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
to it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

R.S. Thomas

**

The Real Thing

Alessandro Pronzato

The crowded bus, the long queue, the railway platform, the traffic jam, the neighbor's television sets, the heavy-footed people on the floor above you, the person who still keeps getting the wrong number on your phone. These are the real conditions of your desert. Do not allow yourself to be irritated. Do not try to escape. Do not postpone your prayer. Kneel down. Enter that disturbed solitude. Let your silence be spoiled by those sounds. It is the beginning of your desert.

**
INTERVIEWER In your second novel, Gilead, the protagonist is a pastor, John Ames. Do you think of yourself as a religious writer?

ROBINSON I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

The Art of Fiction No. 198
Marilynne Robinson

**

THE KOAN

The Diamond Sutra says,

"Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth."

Working With the Koan

Usually people work hard to make things happen. Yet it might be that things happen by themselves, coming out of nowhere.

**

When you forget your carefully assembled fiction of who you are, you can find a natural delight in people, in the planet, the stones, and the trees. There is no observable limit to this beauty, and no one is excluded from it. Then, if you are fighting an enemy, you may be fighting them as well as you can, but you won't be a true believer. You will know that an enemy is not truly other and that the fighting is some kind of misunderstanding. The worries that lead to quarrels may still be present, but they are not the main thing. Your problems could be a kind of dream, very powerful when you are in it, and yet a dream. You might notice that, even deep in dreaming, you are near to waking up. And the more you are awake, the kinder the world might seem.

**
from
Bring Me The Rhinoceros
and other Zen Koans that will save your life

John Tarrant

**

I've been working very hard. It seems like I am pouring more and more effort into my work and it has lost that effortless flow that it achieves from time to time. Working in that way has been exhausting. Do things , then , happen out of their own lives, out of seeming nowhere ? I've been contemplating this, and other teachings from John Tarrant's book.

The effort I am putting forth seems to be the belief that it's all up to me. That I need to make something happen, or set certain things in motion. Which is true, but what does that say about the times when this healing energy comes forth with little to no effort on my part ?
I guess I miss the openness that I often feel when I'm working well, the feeling of trust that the right things will happen, that the client, the patient will get what they need. Then I feel confidence in the quality of my attention and my intention. I get to be more of the rudder person on the boat, and not the entire rowing component. This also implies a trust in the process, that things will come. Not exactly predestination or fate, but the sense that the human being and the rotations of the universe are seeking out one another in the cosmic dance. That the dancer and the dance are intertwined, not arriving out of different fields of causation.

A friend and I sang in a cabaret on Weds. We hadn't rehearsed, he had forgotten about the engagement, we ended up having to sing one song from the lyric sheet, because we didn't have the words down pat. He was in a bad mood. But I think that we sang pretty well, and did a pretty fair job. It was a matter of throwing ourselves into the thing without apology or reservation. It was applying attention and intention and launching with trust. We were able to navigate the mystery without total humiliation and shameful withdrawal from the field.

"Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth."

The Arc of Life and the Quality of Experience

The Paris Review

The Art of Fiction No. 198

Marilynne Robinson

Issue 186, Fall 2008

INTERVIEWER
Ames says that in our everyday world there is “more beauty than our eyes can bear.” He’s living in America in the late 1950s. Would he say that today?

ROBINSON
You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as “beauty.” Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it’s not Versailles. It’s a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.
At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty. Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter. There’s no question that we have our versions of that now. The most destructive thing we can do is act as though this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we’re doing most of the time.

INTERVIEWER
Ames believes that one of the benefits of religion is “it helps you concentrate. It gives you a good basic sense of what is being asked of you and also what you might as well ignore.” Is this something that your faith and religious practice has done for you?

ROBINSON
Religion is a framing mechanism. It is a language of orientation that presents itself as a series of questions. It talks about the arc of life and the quality of experience in ways that I’ve found fruitful to think about. Religion has been profoundly effective in enlarging human imagination and expression. It’s only very recently that you couldn’t see how the high arts are intimately connected to religion.

INTERVIEWER
Is this frame of religion something we’ve lost?

ROBINSON
There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We’re cultural creatures and meaning doesn’t simply generate itself out of thin air; it’s sustained by a cultural framework. It’s like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

**
From Advent with Evelyn Underhill :

SPIRITUAL LIFE : BEGIN WITH OBJECTIVE FACT

The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost. Till we accept this truth, religion is full of puzzles for us, and its practices often unmeaning: for we do not know what it is all about. So there are a few things more bracing and enlightening than a deliberate resort to [some basic] statements about God, the world and the soul; testing by them our attitude to those realities, and the quality and vigour of our interior life with God. For every one of them has a direct bearing on that interior life. Lex credendi, lex orandi. Our prayer and belief should fit like hand and glove; they are the inside and outside of one single correspondence with God.

Since the life of prayer consists in an ever-deepening communion with a Reality beyond ourselves, which is truly there, and touches, calls, attracts us, what we believe about that Reality will rule our relation to it. We do not approach a friend and a machine in the same way. We make the first and greatest of our mistakes in religion when we begin with ourselves, our petty feelings and needs, ideas and capacities. the Creed sweeps us up past all this to God, the objective Fact, and His mysterious self-giving to us. It sets first Eternity and then History before us, as the things that truly matter in religion; and show us a humble and adoring delight in god as the first duty of the believing soul. So there can hardly be a better inward discipline than the deliberate testing of our vague, dilute, self-occupied spirituality by this superb vision of Reality.

**
FOR THOSE WHOM THE GODS LOVE LESS

When you discover
your new work travels the ground you had traversed
decades ago, you wonder, panicked,
'Have I outlived my vocation ? Said already
all that was mine too say ?'

There's a remedy --
only one -- for the paralysis seizing your throat to mute you,
numbing your hands: Remember the great ones, remember
Cezanne
doggedly sur le motif, his mountain
a tireless noonday angel he grappled like Jacob,
demanding reluctant blessing. Remember James rehearsing
over and over his theme, the loss
of innocence and the attainment
(not by separate note sounding its tone
until by accretion a chord resounds) of somber
understanding. Each life in art
goes forth to meet dragons that rise from their bloody scales
in cyclic rhythm: Know and forget, know and forget.
It's not only
the passion for getting it right (though it's that , too)
it's the way
radiant epiphanies recur, recur,
consuming, pristine, unrecognized --
and remembrance dismays you. And then, look,
some reflection of light, some wing of shadow
is other, unvoiced. You can, you must
proceed.

--Denise Levertov

**

To Ask My Dead Friends

INWARD OUTWARD

Make a Mess, Discover Your Life

December 6th, 2008

By Anne Lamott

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Besides, perfectionism will block inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California). Perfectionism means that you try desperately not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived. Clutter is wonderfully fertile ground—you can still discover new treasures under all those piles, clean things up, fix things, get a grip. Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it’s going to get. Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation.

When I was 21, I had my tonsils removed. I was one of those people who got strep throat every few minutes, and my doctor finally decided that I needed to have my tonsils taken out. For the entire week afterward, swallowing hurt so much that I could barely open my mouth for a straw. I had a prescription for painkillers, though, and when they ran out but the pain hadn’t, I called the nurse and said she would need to send another prescription over, and maybe a little mixed grill of drugs because I was also feeling somewhat anxious. But she wouldn’t.

I asked to speak to her supervisor. She told me her supervisor was at lunch and that I needed to buy some gum, of all things, and to chew it vigorously—the thought of which made me clutch at my throat. She explained that when we have a wound in our body, the nearby muscles cramp around it to protect it from any more violation and from infection, and that I would need to use these muscles if I wanted them to relax again. So finally my best friend Pammy went out and bought me some gum, and I began to chew it, with great hostility and skepticism. The first bites caused a ripping sensation in the back of my throat, but within minutes all the pain was gone, permanently.

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds—the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both—to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don’t even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way.

So go ahead and make big scrawls and mistakes. Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I’m sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Anne Lamott is a writer of books and essays. This piece is an excerpt from her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

**

The Art of Fiction No. 198

Marilynne Robinson

Issue 186, Fall 2008

INTERVIEWER You’ve also written that Americans tend to avoid contemplating larger issues. What is it that we’re afraid of?

ROBINSON People are frightened of themselves. It’s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we’re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

INTERVIEWER Do you suffer from anxiety?

ROBINSON I probably experience less anxiety than is normal. People who are literate and prosperous by world standards nevertheless choose anxiety. I consider that kind of anxiety to be unspent energy, energy that goes sour because it is not spent. Calvinism is supposed to induce emotional stoicism. One thing that comes with the tradition is the idea that you’re always being posed a question: what does God want from this situation? It creates a kind of detachment, but it’s a detachment that brings perception rather than the absence of perception. And at this point, my children are adults, established in life. They seem to know how to make themselves happy. When they were young I felt anxiety for them. It was a kind of animal alertness: what do I need to head off at the pass?

**

Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let's try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.

-from Denise Levertov's

Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus
Agnus Dei

**

I have begun,
when I am weary and can't decide the answer to a
bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

--Marie Howe

**

Are You Old Enough To Appreciate the Moment ?

Intercoastal Waterway

Starfish

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

- Eleanor Lerman

**
I love this poem. I love it more every time that I read it.

I still have the sea inside, from being in Fla.

It has occurred to me that moving through life, learning from life, if you have ingested your
life, then you have lots inside that will not pass away or be lost.
Love, you have inside, and people. You have places too, and certain memories, certain moments. It becomes a kind of a wealth and you realize that this is eternity, not eternity as some future time and place. The eternal is available when we step outside of time and space in recognition of God, timelessness, love, connection -- all that binds us to one another and to the world.

I thought about this in terms of my brothers and sister , I thought, "Well, the things that they do and have and are good at, I don't need to do those things, because I got it through them." So what's to be jealous of? I can have surfing, the water, wealth, paralysis, suffering, joy, craftsmanship, talent, passion and the other gifts belonging to those I am bonded to. I have those experiences talents and traumas, just as I know alcoholism from my father . I don't need to become alcoholic to know it, and I don't have to fish or shoot a gun or drive a boat to feel it. The good and the bad, it works the same. So having the sea inside comes from the many hours I've spent there, the many hours my parents and siblings and ancestors visited lived and worshipped there. The sea is mine and me.

I'm just making this up, but maybe its true. Or maybe it's a metaphor for what's true.

It's having the experience of thinking, "I wonder what so-and-so would think about that ?"
And then , you know what they would think or feel or say about that, you'd know what kind of joke that they'd tell , or what kind of sarcasm would tinge their voice. Because you got it.
You got them.

It occurred to me when my mother died that in the last years of her life, I 'got' her. Then I realized that others in the family never got her, she never made sense to them, they , in a sense misinterpreted. So I was able to advocate for her, to take her part, to say what she would have said if she could have said anything. I knew. I felt beholden, as though it was my duty. How terrible to have no one stick up for you, no one to take your part. Did she get me? I'm not sure about that. But I do know that she strained the boundaries of her own willingness to try. She wanted to see through my eyes, she wanted to be part of me to participate with me in the world. It was difficult for her, but there it is.

It's like this other poem that I read on Whiskey River:

Remember

That to have the eyes of an artist,
That can be enough,
The ear of a poet,
That can be enough.
The soul of a human
just pointed
in the direction of the divine,
that can be more than enough.
I tell you this to remind myself.
Every gesture is an act of creation.
Even empty spaces and silence
can be the wings and voices of angels.

- Michele Linfante

**

In The Center Of Our Being Is A Point Of Nothingness

PSALM

In the center of our being is a point of nothingness
which is untouched by sin and by illusion,

a point of pure truth,
a point or spark which belongs entirely to God,
which is never at our disposal,
from which God disposes of our lives,
which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind
or the brutalities of our own will.

This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty
is the pure glory of God in us.
It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.
It is in everybody, and if we could see it
we would see these billions of points of light
coming together in the face and blaze of a sun
that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

I have no program for this seeing.
It is only given.

but the gate of heaven is everywhere.

--Thomas Merton

Attention Is Love

Prayer as Mystery

Kathleen Norris

Prayer is not doing, but being. It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself. It is an invitation to recognize holiness, and to utter simple words---"Holy, Holy, Holy"---in response. Attentiveness is all; I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I'm busy doing something else.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith

**

The Art of Blessing the Day from THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY This is the blessing for rain after drought: Come down, wash the air so it shimmers, a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon. Let the parched leaves suckle and swell. Enter my skin, wash me for the little chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing. In the morning the world is peeled to shining. This is the blessing for sun after long rain: Now everything shakes itself free and rises. The trees are bright as pushcart ices. Every last lily opens its satin thighs. The bees dance and roll in pollen and the cardinal at the top of the pine sings at full throttle, fountaining. This is the blessing for a ripe peach: This is luck made round. Frost can nip the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop, a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus, the burrowing worm that coils in rot can blemish it and wind crush it on the ground. Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun. This is the blessing for the first garden tomato: Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store sells in January, those red things with the savor of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name. How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm, warm as the flank of a cow in the sun. You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin. This is the blessing for a political victory: Although I shall not forget that things work in increments and epicycles and sometime leaps that half the time fall back down, let's not relinquish dancing while the music fits into our hips and bounces our heels. We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain. The blessing for the return of a favorite cat, the blessing for love returned, for friends' return, for money received unexpected, the blessing for the rising of the bread, the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote with no more feeling than one says gesundheit. But the discipline of blessings is to taste each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet and the salty, and be glad for what does not hurt. The art is in compressing attention to each little and big blossom of the tree of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit, its savor, its aroma and its use. Attention is love, what we must give children, mothers, fathers, pets, our friends, the news, the woes of others. What we want to change we curse and then pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can with eyes and hands and tongue. If you can't bless it, get ready to make it new. Excerpted from The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy.

The Single Element Unmixed

"The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the
more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we
were coming."

- Freeman Dyson, pioneering physicist

**
from Onehouse

What I've discovered is all of the holy books are marvelous, absolutely so,
including the Bible. The Bible has the most beautiful language of any book
I've ever read, not to mention the fact that there's something there.
God is there. But I really do believe he's hidden. I believe the Jewish mystics
who went into the kabbalah know that. The Bhagavad Gita is the Bible to 300
million Indians and others who are not Indians. Thoreau and Emerson read it.
Krishna says there never was a time when you and I did not exist, and
there will never be a time when we cease to be. He said, "This body
wears out, like garments, and when a garment wears out, you take it off
and you lay it down and you pick up another one and put it on."

One of the terrible things about executions is to jump people off into the
universe like that. I think for a soul to be wrenched from the body is for
the soul to be in anger and in pain and in hatred. I believe it impacts
negatively on our world, that probably a lot of the calamities that happen
are a result of that sort of thing.

 Permalink

**

"Have mercy on me O God, according to your loving-kindness;
in your great compassion blot out my offenses."

Psalm 51
Have Mercy On Me O God
We are as alike as apart

I am at the heart of our community

This is the hearth and the fire I tend

Turned and turned, coals to ashes to flame,

This way and that,  fire rising and embers burning
Stumbling out of the crowded corridors of sleep
where the ancient storytellers weave and sing.

A broken spirit within my bones
from nothing in particular
Accumulated tension as spirit winds in tight to the bones and holds.
Holds on..
The sum total of all of us,  what we together describe
the summing up may never come,  do we  know it already?
The holy theme might exist only to be denied.
The confidence of the sure swamped by the
vast unknowing under our earth.

A terrible trap might await us for our failings.
What's bad about that?
What's crushed blooms again, the evidence is everywhere.
What is for God
And what is for you
What you hold in your heart is the same thing.

Whatever God cooked into our patterning
is God's alone.
We can't cook it up

Mercy and grace are each their own
element
Not of this earth
Making and pretending and
contriving won't reach them.
Reliance on God
and the gift of catastrophe
exhumes God's love out of the heart of us.
The single element
Unmixed

becomes
eternal.

Nov 24, 2008
**