This profound and difficult-to-hear spoken word poetry from Stephen Jenkinsen & Gregory Hopkins just rocked me this morning.
LISTEN
Poetry on Paradox
This struck a chord today, especially as I am enjoying the brand-new hopeful and anticipatory buds reminding me in the depths of winter that the potency of spring is always with us.
I Am That I Am
Welcoming 2023, I send love and hope to all and offer this thoughtful poem that was posted in Fr. Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations blog.
The poem “I Am” is by poet Dedan Gills (1945–2015), and read by his wife Belvie Rooks on CAC’s The Cosmic We podcast:
I Am
I am old and wise as the night. I am as beautiful as a bird in flight.
I am the moon and the sea. I am the robin and the bee. I am the soil and I am the tree.
I’m the lion and the gazelle. I am heaven and I am hell. I am the ring and I am the bell.
I am the joy and I am the tear. I am the brave and I am the fear.
I am the blistering desert. I’m the freezing snow.
I’m the cringing coward and the gentle hero.
I’m the aged and I am the young. I am the weak and I am the strong.
I am the smile and I am the frown. I am the pauper and I am the crown.
I am the wrong and I am the right. I am the day and I am the night.
I am now and I am never. I am yesterday and I am forever.
I am the bitter and I am the sweet. I live on the hill and I live on the street.
I am the top and I am the bottom. I am Martin, Hitler, Gandhi, and Saddam.
I am red, black, yellow, brown, and white. I love, hate, laugh, cry, and fight.
All the universe is reflected in me. I am all that ever was and ever will be.
When I lose, it’s the lesson that I win. Judging others is my sin.
Poetry That Made Me Smile
Once again, gratitude to sister Amina who posted this on her blog, Love, Harmony & Beauty #111, this week.
When I am smiling and laughing and saying Amen all at the same time, I know it’s a uniquely wonderful offering of written creativity and communication. Enjoy!
I Feel Sorry for Jesus
By Naomi Shihab Nye
People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
But I bet some days He regrets it.
Cozily they tell you what he wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game
where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.
They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.
He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers
and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.
I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.
And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.
Profound Musings from Mirabai Starr
The following excerpt is from Mirabai Starr’s musings with her express permission to share.
She reminds us that we are all mystics and in the second piece I offer below, points to the responsibility that brings.
Her work and insights are always beautiful and profound and humble. I highly recommend subscribing to her blog.
https://www.mirabaistarr.com/subscribe
From Mirabai:
Guess what? You’re a mystic. The world has conditioned us to put certain beings on a pedestal and perceive them as embodying a more exalted life than the sometimes bleak version we may be living. But, the definition of a mystic is someone who has a direct encounter with the sacred. That’s you. In your moments of watching the sky and watching TV, eating a delicious meal or changing a diaper, making tea and making love, the sacred and the ordinary are braided together.
The way of the everyday mystic is to weave our humanness into the tapestry of our relationship with the divine. We welcome everything and expand our ability to hold what is. We bow at the feet of reality. Not by turning away from what hurts but by tenderly turning toward it. Heartbreak is part of the path of holiness.
Without minimizing the grief, challenges, and fear that these difficult times are inviting into our lives, we can view the inevitable meltdowns unfolding in our personal and collective reality as opportunities to let go of outdated belief systems, reassess our spiritual lives and re-emerge, again and again.
We all carry within us an everyday mystic, a lover of the Beloved, and that part of ourselves is always here, waiting to be set free.
In this most recent Sabbath note, Mirabai speaks eloquently “…about the importance of not going straight to “we are all one” and bypassing the very real issues of marginalization and oppression that many of our siblings on planet earth experience every day. I believe we must continue to actively dismantle the structures and systems rooted in white supremacy while infusing anti racism-work with love. May we dare step up with our hearts open, again and again.”
Wisdom from Pir Elias Amidon
With gratitude to sister Amina who posted this in her recent blog:
The Dark of the Year
Now we come to the dark of the year, the long nights, and the silence of the stars. We feel how old the earth is, and how small we are. Ages upon ages of us have come and gone. Archeologists brush the dust from bones that look like ours. An old loneliness presses on our hearts, the ancient ache of our species adrift in an indifferent night, calling into the dark and hearing nothing back. We know we’re falling toward our deaths along with everything and everyone we care about, and there is nothing to be done.
Meanwhile the mountains above us sweep through the night. They’re not lonely. They know what is happening. If they could, they would bend down to us and say —
Children of Earth, you are home. Your home is the radiant universe, this holy mystery that birthed you. Your loneliness is your cry of longing for that home, and it is here. You are home.
Yes, whatever comes, goes, but coming and going are not really coming and going. Every evening is a dawn somewhere, every dawn an evening. We mountains come and go, like your breathing, and nothing is lost. The dark inside of us, above and below us, is alive with transparent holy light. Dark and light are not two.
Children, there is a wondrous loving holiness everywhere, luminous within all that your two eyes see. You know it but you can’t remember. The night is a cathedral of light. What you think is death is a door. When you go through it you will remember what you are, and your grief will vanish into joy.
Out of the luminous dark our universe home is made, made of a love that has no opposite, no beginning or end. Love bursts into form, into you, into us, returning from form in time without going anywhere. Time is its illusion, its make-believe, its playground.
We mountains know about time. Heaved from the earth, worn by rain and wind, witness of countless days and nights, we know about time and the timelessness it comes from. Trust us when we tell you that infinite joy ignites this timeless moment and fills all of space, even the darkest places, even your loneliness.
Children of Earth, you are wondrous, holy, and inseparable from all. You are blessed — so bless! You are made of love — so love!
In the dark of the year, we light candles. A small light in our homes to praise the light of the dark. We embrace each other, thankful for the holiness within the embrace, within each other. We raise our glasses and touch them together, and the little clink is heard throughout the universe.
~ Pir Elias Amidon
The Future of Our Spiritual Journeys
This subject is top of mind right now. The blog post I will share below comes from Fr Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations Blog and is asking about the future of Christianity, but all of the quotes and practices I’ll share could be (and probably should be) applied to my own Sufi Ruhaniat community and, I suspect, many other spiritual organizations!
May we all be blessed and challenged to find our way toward the “…paschal mystery, the dying and rising of all things.” in our organizations, our communities and our individual lives.
Let me know what you think in the comments section.
******************
“For centuries, Christianity has presented itself as an “organized religion”—a change-averse institution that protects and promotes a timeless system of beliefs that were handed down fully formed in the past. Yet Christianity’s actual history is a story of change and adaptation.” —Brian McLaren
“Jesus never told us to put our trust in the larger institutions of culture or even the church. We must recognize that they are also subject to the paschal mystery, the dying and the rising of all things.” —Richard Rohr
“There are all these gifted people around but they didn’t have any power within church structures, which made people like me realize that the real power was not in the structure of the church, but in the living church. The gifted prophets in our midst.” —Barbara Holmes
Practice – Allowing Ourselves Not to Know
Before beginning to discuss the future of the church and Christianity, Brian McLaren invited the more than three thousand attendees of The Future of Christianity webcast to a fifteen-minute period of silence and contemplation. We share his invitation at the end of this week’s meditations, hoping it brings a spirit of openness to your faithful reflection this week:
This is a delicate moment to address deep issues in the Christian faith. If we come in with a set of unchallenged assumptions, we can pretty much predict how the outcomes will be in our thinking. That’s why we’d like to take a few moments now, as we begin this time of reflection together, to invite you to settle into a silence. And in that silence, to be willing to say, “I have a lot of ideas. I have a lot of opinions. But I am not my ideas and opinions, and if I allow myself to be captive to my current ideas and opinions, my horizons will be really limited.”
As we sink into this silence, we’ll hear the chatter of our own thoughts, the debates and questions of our own thoughts, and in a sense when we see those arising, we can say, “Oh yes, those are my own existing assumptions.” Maybe I can just let them be, and in humility open my heart to wisdom beyond my own. Wisdom that might come to us through the faculty, through our interaction, through the discussion that will happen, but also wisdom that may just come to you. May we dare to hope that our hearts, open to the Spirit of God, could not only receive answers to our questions about the future of Christianity, but that our hearts could be so changed in this time together, our minds and hearts and desires opened, clarified, maybe even purified. So that the future can be different.
Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.
Adapted from Brian McLaren, introduction to The Future of Christianity: A Virtual Summit, Center for Action and Contemplation, recorded live on August 23, 2022. Note: This segment is not included on the YouTube video cited in other meditations this week.
The Worst Thing
New mystic poetry from a new (to me) favorite mystical poet, Chelan Harkin.
The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.
The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.
The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath.
—
Chelan Harkin
Image credit: Vlad Gradobyk
Singing Together as Spiritual Practice
In our Sufi and Dances of Universal Peace communities we certainly believe in and practice singing and moving together as a core spiritual connection.
This was published in a recent blog post from Fr Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, and does a wonderful job of illustrating the value and beauty of this practice.
Singing Together
Faith-rooted organizers Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heltzel have participated in many movements for social transformation. They recommend singing together as a simple but profound practice that has sustained many movements of the past and can nourish our efforts of love and justice today:
We all have a song to sing, and for the movement for justice to grow and be successful, everyone needs to sing their song. Music came to life in the protests and picket lines, uniting activists in one common spirit. Learning the music of the movement is thus an important way of sustaining the struggle, as music encapsulates a creative and prophetic spirituality. . .
The church is, in a way, a repository of these spiritual songs that feed our soul. Every week when we go to church we bring the pains and promises, hurts and hopes of the week into the service, but there is something about singing that goes to the heart of the matter and to the depths of the soul. The physical act of singing together, with its healing vibrations through our body, actually comforts our bodies. And the texts we sing are amplified in our hearts and minds by the melodies the composers have offered us. It is no wonder that singing played such a profound role in the civil rights movement; it offers physical, mental and spiritual comfort in a communal setting, sustaining the weary and encouraging the worn.
We invite you to sing a familiar song out loud today; it may be spiritual in nature, comforting or enlivening. If possible, sing with companions and sense the energy that flows between and around your voices. Here is a short video from the Smithsonian of civil rights mass meeting participants in Danville, Virginia, 1963, singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”
Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heltzel, Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 177.
Beautiful Prayer
This closing blessing was at the end of an article by Cynthia Bailey Manns in the current issue of ‘Presence’, the international Journal of Spiritual Direction and Companionship.
Remember that you are Water.
CRY, CLEANSE, FLOW, LET GO.
Remember that you are Fire.
BURN, TAME, ADAPT, IGNITE.
Remember that you are Air.
OBSERVE, BREATHE, FOCUS, DECIDE.
Reminder that you are Earth.
GROUND, GIVE, BUILD, HEAL.
Remember that you are Spirit.
CONNECT, LISTEN, KNOW, BE STILL.
~ by Cynthia Bailey Manns