Category: Main blog

I found this so moving and beautiful. “God utters me like a word.” “God… has called us… into the unknown.

From Emergence Magazine:

https://emergencemagazine.org/story/on-the-road-with-thomas-merton/

In May 1968, Christian mystic Thomas Merton undertook a pilgrimage to the American West. Fifty years later, filmmaker Jeremy Seifert and writer Fred Bahnson set out to follow Merton’s path, retracing the monk’s journey across the landscape. Amid stunning backdrops of ocean, redwood, and canyon, the film features the faces and voices of people Merton encountered. The essay offers a more intimate meditation on Merton’s life and the relevance of the spiritual journey today.

 The Way 

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on. 

~ Edwin Muir ~

(Collected Poems)

Vimala Thakar was a social activist and spiritual teacher born in India in 1921. In the 1950’s she was active in an organization that encouraged wealthy landowners to give land to the poor. They redistributed millions of acres through this program. She met Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1958 and decided she wanted to work on the inner life, but later she returned to her activist proclivities and worked with villagers throughout India teaching agriculture, self-rule, sanitation, and activism. I found these wise words that I originally posted in 2014 on Facebook and realized how timely and important they still are for all of us who strive for social change while holding our connections to the Divine.

“As soon as there is awareness of wholeness, every moment becomes sacred, every movement is sacred. The sense of oneness is no longer an intellectual connection. We will in all our actions be whole, total, natural, without effort. Every action or nonaction will have the perfume of wholeness.   

“In this era, to become a spiritual inquirer without social consciousness is a luxury that we can ill afford, and to be a social activist without a scientific understanding of the inner workings of the mind is the worst folly. Neither approach in isolation has had any significant success.    

“There is no question now that an inquirer will have to make an effort to be socially conscious or that an activist will have to be persuaded of the moral crisis in the human psyche, the significance of being attentive to the inner life. The challenge awaiting us is to go much deeper as human beings, to abandon superficial prejudices and preferences, to expand understanding to a global scale, integrating the totality of living, and to become aware of the wholeness of which we are a manifestation.   

“As we deepen in understanding, the arbitrary divisions between inner and outer disappear. The essence of life, the beauty, and grandeur of life, is its wholeness. Life, in reality, cannot be divided into the inner and the outer, the individual and social. We may make arbitrary divisions for the convenience of collective life, for analysis, but essentially any division between inner and outer has no reality, no meaning.   

“The total revolution we are examining is not for the timid or the self-righteous. It is for those who love truth more than pretense. It is for those who sincerely, humbly want to find a way out of this mess that we, each one of us, have created out of indifference, carelessness, and lack of moral courage. “

I’ve been thinking, reading, and posting a lot lately about the importance and indeed, the ethical responsibility for self-care, or as a what Donna Schaper, author of “Sabbath Sense: A Spiritual Antidote for the Overworked” called the “Sense of Sabbath.”

In our often hectic and overfull lives, it can be difficult to dedicate an entire 24 hours to putting away our devices, shutting off the need to get things done, and simply resting in the divine with our beloveds. Yet this has been a tried and true method for holding balance for thousands of years. It may be worth making the effort.

Yet, we can also simply engage our Sabbath sense in shorter time-frames and that will absolutely help us hold that balance and stay resilient in our work. Shaper suggests, “Sabbath Sense may be the chair we sit in when we come home, the coffee we enjoy once we get to work, the clothes we put on for a special occasion. Sabbath may be the breakfast out we have with each of our children before going to work on Friday. It may be simply a moment of memory at “off” times during the day or year.”

This poetry from a Panhala email felt like it says it well:

Any Morning

Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People wont even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.

~ William Stafford ~

(The Way It Is)

What’s In The Temple? 

In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, but ready to spring. 
It begs me to open the door so it can walk about. 
The poets speak in obscure terms pointing madly at the unsayable. 
The sages say nothing, but walk ahead patting their thigh calling for us to follow. 
The monk sits pen in hand poised to explain the cloud of unknowing. 
The seeker seeks, just around the corner from the truth. 
If she stands still it will catch up with her. 
Pause with us here a while. 
Put your ear to the wall of your heart. 
Listen for the whisper of knowing there. 
Love will touch you if you are very still. 

If I say the word God, people run away. 
They’ve been frightened–sat on ’till the spirit cried “uncle.” 
Now they play hide and seek with somebody they can’t name. 
They know he’s out there looking for them, and they want to be found, 
But there is all this stuff in the way. 

I can’t talk about God and make any sense, 
And I can’t not talk about God and make any sense. 
So we talk about the weather, and we are talking about God. I miss the old temples where you could hang out with God. 
Still, we have pet pounds where you can feel love draped in warm fur, 
And sense the whole tragedy of life and death. 
You see there the consequences of carelessness, 
And you feel there the yapping urgency of life that wants to be lived. 
The only things lacking are the frankincense and myrrh. 

We don’t build many temples anymore. 
Maybe we learned that the sacred can’t be contained. 
Or maybe it can’t be sustained inside a building. 
Buildings crumble. 
It’s the spirit that lives on. 

If you had a temple in the secret spaces of your heart, 
What would you worship there? 
What would you bring to sacrifice? 
What would be behind the curtain in the holy of holies? 

Go there now. 

~ Tom Barrett ~  

(Keeping in Touch)

Please enjoy this practice from Fr. Richard Rohr’s Action and Contemplation blog.

It uses the Christ Jesus, but it works equally well if you wish to substitute Buddha, Mohammed (PBUH), Vishnu, Quan Yin, Atman, or simply all-present energy.

Practice: Word Becomes Flesh

I invite you to read these Daily Meditations contemplatively, going deeper than the mental comprehension of words, using words to give answers or solve immediate problems and concerns.Contemplation is waiting patiently.It does not insist on quick closure, pat answers, or simplistic judgments, which have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.

Try reading the following ideas in a contemplative way:

Christ is everywhere.

In him every kind of life has a meaning and a solid connection.

Every life has an influence on every other kind of life.

Jesus Christ came to earth so that “they all may be one” (John 17:21) and “to reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:20).

Pick one idea and linger with it. Focus on the words until they engage your body, your heart, your awareness of the physical world around you, and most especially your core connection with a larger field. Sit with the idea and, if need be, read it again until you feel its impact, until you can imagine its larger implications for the world, for history, and for you. (In other words, until “the word becomes flesh”!)

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe(Convergent Books: 2019), 4, 7, 8.

A Brave And Startling Truth 

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet 
Traveling through casual space 
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns 
To a destination where all signs tell us 
It is possible and imperative that we learn 
A brave and startling truth 
And when we come to it 
To the day of peacemaking 
When we release our fingers 
From fists of hostility 
And allow the pure air to cool our palms 

***
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet 
Whose hands can strike with such abandon 
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living 
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness 
That the haughty neck is happy to bow 
And the proud back is glad to bend 
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction 
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines 

When we come to it 
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body 
Created on this earth, of this earth 
Have the power to fashion for this earth 
A climate where every man and every woman 
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety 
Without crippling fear 

When we come to it 
We must confess that we are the possible 
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world 
That is when, and only when 
We come to it.

~ Maya Angelou ~   (A Brave and Startling Truth)

This is a meditation created by and for children, but it is a sweet meditation that can be done easily and by anyone. Highly recommended.

Here’s a YouTube of a teacher reading about this meditation:

From our dear Jamal Rachman

Starlings in Winter 

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly they are acrobats

in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings, dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star

that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented, then closes again;
and you watch
and you try

but you simply can’t imagine how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life. 

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it; 

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard.  I want 

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings. 

~ Mary Oliver ~ 

(Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays)