What Child Is This?

A renewed and pertinent understanding of the Christmas story, by Karen Armstrong, printed in the LA Times: click here.

Christmas

[Circular Letter, Advent-Christmas, 1967] The times are difficult. They call for courage and faith. Faith is in the end a lonely virtue. Lonely especially where a deep authentic community of love is not an accomplished fact, but a job to be begun over and over... Love is not something we get from Mother Church as a child gets milk from the breast: it also has to be given. We don't get love if we don't give any.

Christmas, then, is not just a sweet regression to breast-feeding and infancy. It is a serious and sometimes difficult feast. Difficult especially if, for psychological reasons, we fail to grasp the indestructible kernel of hope that is in it. If we are just looking for a little consolation-we may be disappointed.

--Thomas Merton. The Road to Joy, Robert E. Daggy, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989): 108

*

A deeply authentic community of love. This is not a given, and requires diligence. Most of us may not even know such an idealized communion. Impatience, old grudges, habitual behaviors, holiday perfection-fatigue, loss: these can often speak louder than love. Because among us, love is quiet and patient and unassuming. Love smiles at a mistaken slight and burns away fear in the hearth fire like kindling. And Merton reminds us that we must give love to bask in its blessings. We must be love, to witness it. Is this possible in a family of many, each struggling for their own identity and security and voice to be heard? There is hope, of course, as in that elusive hope in Christmas lore. The indestructible kernel of hope, he says.

Hope hides in the ritual birth of a child—in children born every day. Life created, again and again. Life exists. Every morning, a new day. Every January, a new year. Wise "men" and glimmers of celestial light have always been and will always be, no matter our own stresses and family dramas and insecurities.

The assurance: faith—that after the snow and frost, after the months of cold hard earth in readied sleep, that life will recreate Itself again. That after a long day, another one begins with refreshed energy. That a child will be born after nine quiet, unassuming months in the womb.

Joyous Christmas, and New Year blessings for all. May our difficult times be devoured by Love. Amen.

(Merton quote received via weekly email newsletter from The Merton Institute. To subscribe, go here.)

Diversity is a gift.

It is a means by which we help each other catch a glimpse beyond the veil of our own particular conditioned mind.

Surrender

Praise be to You, Most Supreme God, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, All-pervading, the Only Being. Take us in Your Parental Arms, raise us from the denseness of the earth, Your Beauty do we worship, to You do we give willing surrender.

When I am attuned, I can feel that I'm holding on too tightly, tensing, constricting my muscles, and so probably too my heart. I might be knitting and realize the stitches are very terse against the needle and I understand where focus has been, then consciously relax my stitch. If the stitch is too loose, I'm trying too hard. But when I surrender to the movement of my fingers and hands, surrender to the act of creative rhythm, the stitches are just right.

It's the same, I've noticed, when I'm practicing yoga. In ashtanga yoga, there is the ujjayi breath, a constricting of the throat so that the breath passes along the back of the throat with a whispery hiss. This is to allow better control of and focus on the breath while practicing the asanas, or postures. But I often find myself struggling with that breath, feeling as if I'm not getting quite enough air, swallowing between exhales, interrupting my focus with my tight clinging. This has been going on for the entire year I've been practicing yoga, and the other night I had a break-through understanding that I was holding on too tightly. That like the knitting, there is a space where everything flows in harmony, where ujjayi is like a feather riding on the wind. And this I accomplished by just letting go. Surrendering to all of my life, not just my yoga practice, but coming to the mat with the attitude, "Okay, this is what there is. Let me be here."

These are gifts of surrender to take into my daily life, gems of understanding that change everything because they have been seen. Stress, conditions, circumstances, the holidays,... so many disrupting torrents causing me to hold tightly trying to steady the way. But the way is in surrender. Opening up the arms, the ribcage, the breath, the heart... and meeting whatever is there tenderly.

(Image: Statuette of goddess at the palace of Knossos, 13c. BC, Herakleion Museum.)

A Poem in Preparation for Winter

Let the lips open

revealing a river of fire

the heaving of fire

cleansing away

cleansing away

the Before

I'm a big proponent of the old adage:

If you don't have anything nice to say,

don't say anything at all.

Both right speech and silence are underutilized.

I or You?

Open our hearts that we may hear Thy voice, which constantly cometh from within.

Language is as boundless as we let it be, or as imprisoning as we make it. We may pray to "You", which implies an other, outside of us, while perfectly aware that the You is within. We may say "I am" with the power of One or the spirit of Many. Intention gives language its use. A word has two, three, ... infinite sides, all mirrors, all feathers in the wind.

A story of two lovers reaped from The Sufi Book of Life, by Neil Douglas-Klotz:

He knocked at her door.

"Who is there?" she asked.

"It is I," he responded.

"Go away. There is no room for you and I," she said.

He retreated to the forest and then returned, knocking on her door again.

"Who is it?" she asked.

"It is you, " he said.

The door opened.

Renewing Faith

Not faith in a faraway godhead that watches over us from the rim of a cloud, or a prophet saviour, or a guru, or a church of securities, but

faith in the abundance of the universe. Faith in the gracious intelligence of Life. Faith in compassion and wholeness. Faith in yourself, not in the simplistic pep-talk sense, but in your Self, the divine you.

Vigorous faith: energetic, vibrant, whole, immortal.

Depression

Depression is the ultimate loneliness, the ultimate isolation-perspective. When we understand, and then as a result, feel the unity and connectedness of all life, we can no longer feel depression because there is no "I" to feel it. Ego disappears. All is One.

Unfortunately, much of our particular socio-cultural system, habits, and conditioning pushes us away from that connectivity. We struggle to feel the wholeness among the habits of the Western (especially American) lifestyle. Even when we know some other way of being in our life would be healthier, more fulfilling, it is so much easier to fall into the main-stream, where the current is strongest. We are tired, we don't have the gumption to fight that force. And as we get caught up we become fixated on saving the "me" at all costs, so that all connectivity is a blur. Unity is there of course, but we can't witness is through the fog. Loneliness and lack of faith sets in. And the cycle burns again.

What happens if we step outside the cycle by stepping aside of the bully current? Who are we then? What is our relationship to Life then?

Lost Faith

Where do we go when we've lost faith? When the day is full of hopeless moments and the night feels like a bridge crumbling beneath us? Can we open our hearts to that particular suffering? Can we submit to the dark unknown beneath our footing and let our hearts relax into that infinite space? To find footing again, anew, in a fresh place.

It is not easy.

Setting out a bouquet of roses, baking some muffins, finding a new project or a new book-- keeping present, keeping alive in the details; these are small stones where our foot can touch down, even if we can't see an inch ahead of us. It is the soft glimmer of faith waking behind the dark reeds.

Perfectly Imperfect

The word practice is key. We practice patience and generosity and forgiveness. We practice awareness of the sacredness of life around us. One of the charms of humanity is our fallibility, and yet we still practice diligently, as though it is in the practice, not the perfection, that we can most fully open our hearts.

praxis

pratica

الممارسة

praksis

בפועל

πράξη

pratique

연습

практика

práctica

अभ्यास

Ahimsa

The venerable Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote of ahimsa:

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.

(from Nonviolence in Peace and War, 61, 1948, by way of Merton's Gandhi, 36, 1964)

I ponder this a while, excavating less referred-to forms of violence in my daily life, ones that are more subtle than what we usually consider. For instance, when I scream at someone in anger, I commit violence against them. I imagine most people would disagree with me about this being categorized as violent, but what do you feel when screaming at another person in anger? How does your body feel? And their reaction? Merriam-Webster defines violence as 3 a : intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force b : vehement feeling or expression : also : an instance of such action or feeling c : a clashing or jarring quality. Is there not a vehement and unloving force being spewed upon them? When someone yells at you, does your body not tense up in self-defense? Does your heart clench and your temperature rise?

More subtly still, when I deride myself for being useless or a failure or too [fill in the blank], even if it is but a fleeting condemnation, I am commiting violence against myself. This tiny aspect affects my state of being certainly, and by extension, my treatment of those around me. It sets the tone for easy judgement of others. And where there is judgement, there is fear. Fear, the incubator of violence.

And truthfully, when I go out and "get trashed", pounding alcohol or drugs into my body as fast and furiously as possible, trying desperately, if unconsciously to end my suffering, I am committing violence against myself. I'm not suggesting all forms of alcohol intake or instances of being drunk are attributable to this. But many of us, if not all, know the particular behavior I refer to. The whiny little self-demise that creeps up amid all the hoopla of "having a good time" out in the shadows, when what we are really doing is hurting, running, hiding.

It starts very simply perhaps. Compassion for ourselves. Affording ourselves some patience and non-judgement out of self-love. Extending this practice to the person next to us. Practicing it every moment, extending further and further so that it reverberates in our schools, businesses, government.

Ahimsa, compassion, love; these seem intertwined like a finely crafted rope that cannot easily be separated. A rope that can hold our weight as we dangle over the depths of our suffering.

Praise for Autumn

Bold sun, breeze, gold and amber leaves, the ground covered in papery leaf debris, with lighting-rods of red. Squirrels play chase across the leaf bed sounding like a herd of elephants. One lone hawk turns into a circle of five or six, gliding far above the water, a backdrop of piercing blue and cloud-puff at its wing. Winds fan the water northeast. Rustle & whisper. Cold cawk of a bird off behind the sun.

Shared Wisdom

Karen Armstrong is author of many books including: The Case for God, Buddha, and The Battle for God. She was recently awarded the TED Prize and spearheaded the Charter for Compassion as a result of the award.

Art as Witness

Elka Amorim, Ink and watercolor

Inspiration, joy, loneliness, anger, fear--as well as we can understand these in ourselves, we can begin to act compassionately in our relationships with others; this is divine witness... which is one of the gifts of any art form, enabling us to glimpse something in ourselves we might not otherwise have noticed. I am grateful that people (artists, dancers, writers, musicians,...) take risks every day to dive deep into the Unknown and see what they find there, then share it with the rest of us.

Looking at Anger

Thich Nhat Hanh, in his book Being Peace, explains the fourteen precepts of mindfulness training and said this about anger:

Aware that anger blocks communication and creates suffering, we are determined to take care of the energy of anger when it arises and to recognize and transform the seeds of anger that lie deep in our consciousness. When anger comes up, we are determined not to do or say anything, but to practice mindful breathing or mindful walking and acknowledge, embrace, and look deeply into our anger. We will learn to look with the eyes of compassion at those we think are the cause of our anger.

In the West, we might ruffle a bit upon hearing "we are determined not to do or say anything" when anger arises. Psychology teaches us to speak up for ourselves, that it's healthy to let our anger out. Perhaps both are valuable. Perhaps if we are first determined not to do or say anything, we will do some real work on ourselves, get our thoughts straight, understand the root of our anger before we speak up. Then when we do speak up it can be stronger, more compassionate, and more honest than simple rage. "To look deeply into our anger" is an act of faith.

Anger Into Praise

But what of the healthy and inevitable anger in response to suffering and injustice we witness because it is real in our lives? Where do we as individuals and as a society respond to this anger without making the anger into life itself? This brings us back to Kathleen Norris's statement, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” I’m especially interested in that phrase, transformation into praise.

Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx, and founder of the American Buddhist meditation society called Against the Stream, spoke once of transforming that rightful distrust and anger present in punk rock and its culture into a useful questioning of authority and the status quo. Punk rock, rock n’ roll, rap, these were all originally (and sometimes still are) emanations of disquiet among social and political injustice. While incarcerated as a teen, Levine discovered meditation and its cohort, awareness, as peaceful vehicles against the current of pain and suffering, and now he teaches those tactics to anyone who dares to transcend. Ex-addicts and prisoners and rock hipsters are some among those he teaches. The website proclaims, “The Buddha said his path to awakening was one of rebellion –a subversive path that is against greed, against hatred, and against delusion. It is a path of radical, engaged transformation, a path of finding freedom and spending the rest of our lives giving it away. It is a path that goes Against the Stream.”

Similarly, in response to Chicago’s gang violence, there is an organization called CeaseFire that uses reformed ex-gang members in their tactical “street violence interruptions,” creating a community network system to actively defuse gang-related shootings and killings.

Compassionate action is praise. It is fruit born of the seed of anger.

(Photo: Scott Olson/Getty, via www.guardian.co.uk)

Psalms for Chicago

I have been thinking more about the psalms. Kathleen Norris expressed an idea that the psalms question all our dignified, American middle-class notions of politeness. She points especially to women who “are conditioned to deny their pain, and to smooth over or ignore the effects of violence, even when it is directed against them.” (Cloister Walk, 94) She wisely links pain and anger, “Anger is one honest reaction to the cost of pain, and the psalms are full of anger.”

My thoughts turn to Derrion Albert, the young man recently murdered by gang violence in South Side, Chicago. He was not involved in a gang but was a bystander and his beating was recorded via cell phone video. His is one of a rampant amount of children’s deaths in that area due to gang violence, which stems from what? Anger? Anger seething in alive and hopeful (and they are hopeful in spite of themselves, because they are human) young men and women who see no options for their future. They are entrenched in poverty, crime, drugs, domestic violence, poor education, distorted values… And the communities suffer endlessly watching their children die. If we can remember that these are misguided human beings caught in a wicked web, we might look at poverty, poor education, and drugs as among the true adversaries and see new value in the psalms: (9:18)

To the nether world the wicked shall turn back,

all the nations that forget God.

For the needy shall not always be forgotten,

nor shall the hope of the afflicted forever perish.

Rise, O Lord, let not man prevail;

let the nations be judged in your presence.

Strike them with terror, O Lord;

let the nations know that they are but men.

Hitting the Refresh Button

Sometimes I get too caught up in analyzing the exciting (& alluring!) whirlwind of human thoughts, ideas, and constructs... psalms, politics, language, history. I forget that "God" is simple. A beam of sunlight, a beating heart, a smile. How simple is the One? Put food in the mouth of a person who cannot feed themselves and feel the magnitude of simplicity.

Investigating the Psalms

The psalms are weighing on me after two days with the Liturgy of the Hours. I am testament to their lure, yet their language often eludes me. All the prostrating to “Lord,” hating adversaries and accusations of sin deter me. All the references to Israel and Zion confound me with their seeming lack of relevance in my life. Oh, that out of Zion would come the salvation of Israel! (53:7) These are words and ideas from another time, another culture, another political reality than mine.

But I won’t give up. I tried and tried to read William Faulkner to no avail until my brother said, “Don’t read his writing word for word but let the words wash over you.” And with that advice I plowed through four or five Faulkner novels one winter, finding the stories alive and searing in my living room. I feel the same possibility for the literature of the psalms.

Kathleen Norris suggests, “The psalms make us uncomfortable because they don’t allow us to deny either the depth of our pain or the possibility of its transformation in praise.” But still I question basing daily—hourly, prayer on so much pain and judgment. What we put into ourselves, our sustenance, matters. Television, junk food, the fixation on tragedy in the nightly news, these affect our chemical and psychological (and spiritual) makeup. I’m not advocating denial of anger or pain at all, but just wondering how these particular writings might or might not benefit us today.

And yet if I change the word Lord to Love, the power of this poetry grips me and won’t let me go:

O, [Love] to you I call; hasten to me;

hearken to my voice when I call upon you.

Let my prayer come like incense before you;

the lifting up of my hands, like the evening sacrifice.

Should semantics matter?

Of the Hours

At Gethsemani, the monks follow the Liturgy of the Hours, as do most Christian monastic orders. This is the official set of daily prayers and consists of singing the Psalms, hymns, and readings. As I wandered the grounds, journaling, napping, taking photos, or simply being in awe of my surroundings, the church bell continually brought my attention back toward a central point, my faith. The bells, distinct beautiful sounds that they are, ring on the hour, quarter hour and half hour, and have particular purpose notifying the community that a liturgy is due to begin. The monks begin their prayer at 3:15am and meet nine times for prayer throughout the day. I found the continual coming together: the bell tolling, people gathering one by one, the simple singing and prayer to be a dynamic routine. Eventually I looked forward to the bell and the repetition of sounds I would find in the choir.

The Liturgy of the Hours, in their full yearly cycle, is based on the Psalms, which happen to be the poetic verse of the Old Testament. These verses are much lauded in Judeo-Christian culture and it’s easy to see why; the power and aliveness that exudes from them endures. Still I find their language daunting and archaic, so that when I follow the words precisely I get caught up in analyzing and disliking them. They are not the words I want to pray, even as I recognize their significance in relaying the human condition of suffering and despair:

I am like water poured out;

all my bones are racked.

My heart has become like wax

melting away with my bosom.

My throat is dried up like baked clay,

my tongue cleaves to my jaws;

The metaphors are rich, virile, and sometimes difficult to penetrate:

You have exalted my horn like the wild bulls

you have anointed me with rich oil.

And my eye has looked down upon my foes,

and my ears have heard of the fall

of my wicked adversaries.

But when I let their song wash over me and stop thinking so much, but just exist in the words, I experience a tender surrender. This kept me coming back to every liturgy when I was present on the grounds, and kept me late (7:30pm) on a windy, cold day for the final liturgy, Compline.

Compline is the end of the day, the night prayer. The closing hymns and prayers are particularly sweet to the ear and heart. The monks sing on into the growing darkness,

May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.

Silence

Religion as storytelling, images, and rituals may simply be the poetry of faith—the allegories, metaphors, verse, meter and rhyme that give relatable witness to our experience of the Divine. This poetry can succeed in giving meaningful, but limited, glimpses of our most sacred understandings even as it fails to adequately replicate the glorious whole, which is unexplainable and mostly unfathomable. The truest revelation of the Unfathomable is silence.

At the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, the Trappist monks there are practicing silence among their daily routine of contemplation, work, and prayer. On Gethsemani’s thousands of acres, silence emanates from every sunlit branch and red-haired squirrel, even with the loudness of cars blowing by on the highway that traverses their land. And in the choir of their liturgy, silence penetrates between every word they sing of the Psalms.

Sitting in the rear of the empty church, all white painted brick, stone, golden oak and stained glass of yellow, grey, green, I find the silence endures as a lack that seems like the ultimate richness. There I discover the paradox of silence, what the Buddhists call Emptiness, that it contains everything, that it is rich beyond all comprehension. So that silence is intimate reckoning with the unknowable, unnameable, indescribable All.

I'm headed to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky tomorrow. Poet,writer, and activist Thomas Merton, aka Fr. Louis, lived his monastic life there. I'll share more on this next week...

(Photo: John Cremons)

Impermanence

Buddhism often refers to impermanence. The idea that all of life (conditioned and experiential) is constantly changing. They speak of it as a universal law of nature, like gravity, and invite each of us to discover if it is true or not ourselves. Is everything always changing, moving, sliding out from under our feet? Well, yes. And it’s the insecurity that impermanence brings that causes us to try so hard to control our circumstances and cling to stability wherever it can be found.

In its teachings, Buddhism suggests it is our attachment, our dire clinging for security to all the impermanent things in our lives, that creates our suffering. We fear the unknown. We want to be sure things will stay the same because we can stand on the familiar; whether it pleasure or pain, a memory or a desire, an unhappy relationship or a lucrative job, we cling to it. And when it changes or goes away, which it always does, we are indignant, angry, miserable.

Honor Impermanence. I used to have a sticky note posted in my bathroom medicine cabinet with these words. A reminder to stay present with the jostle and flow of life, to witness the coming and going and remain awake to it all with open heart. Openness; not clinging, not pushing and pulling, not holding on for dear life.

And in my mind, the quintessential symbol of impermanence is the ever-changing, multitudinous and constantly active ocean.

The Unknowable

There is a particular metaphor I’ve come to cherish for illustrating the phenomenon of Life, the relation between the Unknowable and human beings. No doubt it has been cited before, but I cannot remember how it came to me:

Imagine the Unknowable, or God, as the great, unfathomable depth and force of the ocean. And that we humans are ocean waves, active manifestations of the Unknown. So that one wave signifies one person, stretching out in singular, autonomous formation from the Source, but always made up of ocean, always an extension of it; then crashing or dissipating or curling away, but eventually returning to the Source from which it came.

(Woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai, Japan, c.1832)

A Moment with Milosz

A poem from Czeslaw Milosz, written in Goszyce, Poland, 1944:

—My past is a stupid butterfly's overseas voyage.

My future is a garden where a cook cuts the throat of a rooster.

What do I have, with all my pain and rebellion?

—Take a moment, just one, and when its fine shell,

Two joined palms, slowly opens

What do you see?

—A pearl, a second.

—Inside a second, a pearl, in that star saved from time,

What do you see when the wind of mutability ceases?

—The earth, the sky, and the sea, richly cargoed ships,

Spring mornings full of dew and faraway princedoms.

At marvels displayed in tranquil glory

I look and do not desire for I am content.

New Year, New Death

Yesterday marked the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Tuesday is the Autumn Equinox, the commencement of autumn. These are new beginnings, fresh starts, opportunities for rebirth. Even autumn, as earth winds down from its green fleshiness to the sleep of winter, there is a chance for renewal.

To do this we must embrace the mirror side of beginning, that which ends. Death. To truly renew we must witness death, whether it be summer gardens, relationship with a loved one, or simply an old grievance. Our active part in beginning anew is to let go.

As we let go of old heartaches and misspoken words, space opens within our hearts. This opening is forgiveness, and forgiveness breeds compassion. We can face death with compassion.

Pema Chodron reminds us, “What we hate in ourselves, we’ll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for ourselves, we will have compassion for others.” So that what we can forgive in ourselves, we can forgive in others. And with forgiveness we can turn ourselves over to the new.

This Moment, Part II

When I first tried practicing Buddhist insight meditation, it was so difficult I thought I might lose my mind. Then I realized this is the point.

It’s a very simple practice to begin: Sit down. Focus your attention on your breathing, watching it move in and out. When you notice a thought or fantasy or memory you’re caught up in, return your focus to your breathe. Sometimes the thoughts are so loud and anxious that it feels impossible to even find your breathe, let alone focus on it. Or you will follow the breath and then ten minutes later you’re suddenly aware that you have been obsessing on something someone said to you last week. That’s normal, just refocus on the breathe.

Learning to be present with whatever conditions we find is the key. A thought comes, you see it, and let it go. Let go without judgment or praise or obsession, just let go. This may be the most difficult part. It’s amazing to discover how much I beat myself up for a single thought (and its subsequent emotions). Or how much I build myself up over some elusive desire I think will save me. To witness the workings of the mind, to learn from it rather than associate my sense of self with it; this is magic. And yet accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Practicing this reaps its own benefits, but taking it to daily life is what I have found most useful. Because when I am aware and mindful (which is achieved by staying present) then I can witness my reactions to this or that, or where I'm holding on to anger, or what the source of some irritation or jubilation comes from. This is wisdom. This is a way to “know thyself." And in knowing myself, I know the Divine. Pema Chodron said, “The source of wisdom is whatever is happening to us right at this very moment,” when she speaks of the teacher that never leaves us. And Sogyal Rinpoche refers to “bringing our mind back home.” This moment is home. This moment is our access to the all-consuming One. It is heaven, now.

This Moment

Thomas Merton prayed: Let me rest in Your will and be silent. This is often interpreted as a passive acceptance of circumstances or suffering. Others take such a prayer to mean that God’s will is predestined. But perhaps it is this moment, whatever it may contain, that is “God’s will”. Not yesterday or when we were ten, but this very moment. Not next week, or ten years from now; not when this is achieved or that much money is saved. Now.

Consider this possibility: the only thing we have is this moment. Then it is gone and is memory. And the moment coming up that we aspire to is just fantasy. It’s the present moment in which we breathe.

Let me rest in Your [moment] and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life, Merton prayed. Because in the moment, there is no need for anything else. There is only You.

Going Home

Lately I've been volunteering at an elderly home. My newest aquaintance is Louise, who will be 105 years old in December. She’s an amazing woman, full of vitality and humor. Yesterday she mentioned her upcoming birthday, and that she would then “start asking Father to bring me home.”

She went on to explain that she envisions there being a door. And without a physical body she can’t turn the knob to open it herself. But that all the good deeds and intentions, and loving relationships and grace from her lifetime will one by one open the door a little more and a little more, until the door is open and she can enter.

I suspect that once the door is “open” she will be overcome with home, without having to enter or do anything at all. She will become Home.

Her Wisdom shakes me. My piddly 35 years to her 105. I feel like a child basking in the sun.

(Engraving by William Blake.)

True Love

Recently I was given the assignment to create something that expresses my worldview. I made a collage. With a black marker, I drew a snake eating its own tail on poster board then proceeded to wallpaper the space within the circle and outside of it with images cut from magazines. I was fully aware that my “worldview” was being dictated by images already printed in media, but was surprised to find an interesting and valuable outcome none the less.

In the bottom right of the collage I pasted a photo taken from a W Magazine fashion spread of Bruce Willis and his new wife, Emma Hemming. This powerful image initially seemed to depict the kind of partnership relationship I seek in my life. It’s an easy first assumption.

But after setting the collage up at home for a few days, I began to look at it more closely, meditate on it, discovering newer and deeper contexts. The image of the couple so forcefully entwined, staring into each other’s eyes, holding closely together, both powerful and powerless in each other’s presence, began to inspire a question.

Could this image represent my relationship with the Divine?

The worldly issue of putting gender on God might present itself on the surface, but looking closer reveals the symbiotic creativity and love between the two beings. The passion and acceptance. The mutual respect and intertwining nature of the Creator and the Created.

If this image can represent my relationship with the Divine, and I think it does, it can also be a representation of the Divine: the feminine and masculine aspects of Unity. Similar to the concept of Yin and Yang: two elements that are necessary to each other, not in opposition to each other. The one can only exist in relation to the other.

(PHOTO: Steven Klein, W Magazine, July 2009)

faith is a process... not a product.

--Kathleen Norris, from The Cloister Walk

More Thoughts on Love

Sometimes when I’m walking or driving around, I experience a spontaneous feeling of love and affection for people I see. A dusty road worker, a mother with her kids in the grocery store, an elderly man renting a movie, the fellow sweeping the subway station, a cranky old woman riding the bus… Today I realized that I love these people like I love the fictional characters I write about in poems and stories. They are dear to me in all their detriment and glory and selfishness or self-sacrifice—just people living and breathing and learning to find their way. And then it dawned on me that it’s much harder to act with love, than to simply feel love. When I interact with people throughout the day, at the cash register, on the phone, in line at the post office; can I hold on to that love and affection then? It is much harder to love in person than love from a distance. It is much harder to act love than just feel love, although one must certainly depend upon the other.

(Image: Alexander Girard “Black and White” Environmental Enrichment panel, by Herman Miller, 1971)

Love is Not a Four-Letter Word

Unfortunately love is a word used too liberally to label almost any relative emotion. I love him, expresses the feeling between two romantically involved people. Yet the same word describes the affection for family, friends, pets; or appreciation for a new sweater, a favored pair of shoes, even the weather.

We also say Love to describe the Supreme Source of Life.

Language shapes our perception of reality. I think we take the power of language for granted. We should be more conscious of what we say, and to do that we must be more aware of what we mean.

Interestingly, in Spanish, Te quiero means "I love you", but the verb querer means both -to want, and -to feel affection for. I find the dual association to be more honest, in an ironic way. Often when we say I love you, what we really mean is, I want you, I want to possess you.

I take issue when a friend claims the impetus for her writing is love, when we both know she is referring to countless romantic entanglements that are more often emanations of obsession, desire, jealousy, and intrigue. We have all misused the word, love.

I propose using another word for that kind of passionate addiction that we misname as love: eros. (Erotic love or desire.) This way we will need to be honest from the moment we communicate it in words; and maybe we will be less likely to delude ourselves, or others. She and I are in eros. Then when it is truly love it can be called love, with all the trust and mutual respect to which such a title alludes.

Then, also, we can be assured we honor Love as the Divine Mystery that is all. And we can love our mother and son of course, which is accurate (in most cases). And we can adore a new sweater or those old broken-in pair of sneakers.

Thoughts from Hafiz

A poem by Hafiz, a fourteenth century Sufi poet:

I have learned so much from God

That I can no longer call myself

a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself with me

that I can no longer call myself

a man, a woman, an angel

or even pure soul.

Love has befriended me so completely

It has turned to ash and freed me

of every concept and image

my mind has ever known.

(From Daniel Ladinsky's The Gift: Poems by Hafiz the Great Sufi Master)

The Other

I was reading an article in Harper's Bazaar this weekend about French lawmakers considering whether or not to outlaw the burka (full-body covering for women, used by particular sects of Islam), and the more common hijab (the simple headscarf, often worn by a young woman in this country with jeans and sneakers).

Whether or not I agree with the belief system behind these garments is irrelevant. I'm astounded that a Western government would think it remotely in its realm to dictate what a citizen can and cannot wear.

What is it in us that fights to be right at any cost? What is it in us that is so utterly threatened by The Other?

Relax, Apocalypse is Just the Death of Ego

A Storm. The Woman and the Dragon

Page from the Apocalypse, an illuminate manuscript, c. 1320

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection

The imagery comes from Revelation 12:-3: "...a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns..."

As a fanatic reader and lover of art, I’m fascinated by allegory and its multi-layered possibilities. I am disregarding the traditional, literalist explanation of this imagery to consider something else:

She is Hagia Sophia, Divine Wisdom, known as the feminine aspect of God. After transcending the seven demons that represent stages of experiential understanding in the material world, she sits at the eighth level, the cosmos, the mythological refuge of the Goddess. Her Wisdom leads (in this case, her child, or in other terms, her world of children: us) to the Mysterious Portal of All.

In other words, after toiling in identification with experience, the ego dies allowing the human-being to be handed over by Wisdom and Understanding to its true nature.

A Name

Although I had the idea for this blog some time ago, I couldn't find the right title. Until my mom found a small book in an antique store entitled Meditations for Women, ed. by Jean Abernathy, 1947. On the title page the owner of the book had written in cursive: "vigorous faith, love, and steadfastness."

The book has an entry for every day of the year and today, August 20, Josephine W. Johnson wrote:

'AND A TIME TO CAST AWAY

And religion can also be an ugly thing. More depraved in some of its middle-class respectable aspects than in the unprintable rantings of fundamentalists in London parks, or the hysterical leapings of revivals.

I sat in the office of a prominent minister in the city while he spoke over the phone about buying a Negro church building. The matter concerned crossing that invisible line between white and Negro districts. And the minister became apoplectic with rage... "You can't do this thing! We can't afford to have these values go down!"

And so the real-estate values of the church were firmly mortared...

In spite of the magnificent and backbreaking efforts of some, it has been said with terrible truth, "The church is the largest Jim-Crow organization in the United States." '

Her thoughts are eye-opening, even radical for 1947. Wisdom shows Herself any time, any place. More on Wisdom tomorrow...

A Place to Start

While I figure out the blogger widgets and gadgets, I'll simply start with a poem of my own.

ON WAKING

1

Dawn comes thin, grey, clear

There is no metaphor here

Just grey blueness, this proclaimed

In the first light

Undo night, unto the dark sight

The seeing again over again

2

I woke up, to face the dark

But the dark would not turn my way

And in my dreaming, when the dark came for me

I woke, just as it said my name

3

If but a word

Could send me into the flame

My name, spoken in Your voice

The opening of the fire-guarded door,

Entry to absurd, everlasting pure

Original Statement of Purpose

My intention for the meditations on this blog is to explore faith and inspire faith community. I hope that it will bring together people like myself who seek community and contemplation though choose to do so outside the context of a single religious practice, as well as those who do express their faith and community within a particular religion. The idea is to share and ponder what unifies us while offering what divides us to the Mystery of the infinite variety of Creative Genius.

Although I do not subscribe wholly to the Catholic Church or its doctrines, my childhood upbringing in Catholicism still informs the language and imagery of my faith, as does: Buddhist meditation and teachings, Sufi poems and stories, the forgiveness of Rosh Hashanah and the exile of Passover Seder, the Hindu mind-body yoga practice, Native American nature and ancestor worship, quantum physics, and “New Age” concepts of self-awareness and healing; not to mention the insights of various people I encounter on life’s journey who share a glimpse of their own individual Faith.

A friend who was being “reborn” in the Christian faith once questioned my relationship to the Bible. “So you think you can just pick and choose which things to follow from the Bible?” she asked me incredulously. My answer to her, after ten years of thinking about it, is yes. I follow my heart and conscience, which I believe is my compass to God* as well as my direct guidance from God, as I discern Truth in human ideas, creations, and texts. The reason I can find strength and wisdom in all the places I listed above is because they illumine the same love and the same quality of Light, whatever the particular culture or vernacular the Light is diffused through.

Some will take offense at this sense of the Divine. I can only say that when we close our hearts, we miss out on another one of the infinite ways to know and witness the One.

Thus, these meditations are meant to foster vigorous faith.

Please share your judicious comments and feel free to make topic suggestions. I hope what you read here will enrich your heart and mind wherever you are, whatever your challenges in life may be.

*Note on “God”: In our ineffective and futile human attempts to name, label, and classify things, we also try to name the ultimate beautiful monstrosity of the Unknown. God, Allah, Yahweh… Throughout these writings I use many “names” for this inexplicable source familiarly known as God. Therefore, in my writing (and my heart) God = the One, Light, the Divine, the Abyss, You, Love, Creator, Life, the Universe, the Unknown, Genius, Mystery, Grace, the Truth and so on.