Saturday, December 26, 2009

What Child Is This?

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

Thursday, December 24, 2009

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.)

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

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.)

Sunday, December 6, 2009

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