Mysticism and Spirituality Circle

Dear brother Salim from Missoula wrote of his time in Yom Kippur and said,

“Tonight I learned of a prayer I’d not before heard. Part of the Mourner’s Kaddish, it goes like this:”

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.

And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give to them
What you need to give to me.

I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.

Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live in your eyes
And not in your mind.

You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands
By letting
Bodies touch bodies
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.

Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away

Center for Action and Contemplation

Some simple but urgent guidance to get us through these next months.

I awoke on Saturday, September 19, with three sources in my mind for guidance: Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his “Second Coming” during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic.

These three sources form the core of my invitation. Read each one slowly as your first practice. Let us begin with Etty:

There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.

—Etty Hillesum, Westerbork transit camp

Note her second-person usage, talking to “You, God” quite directly and personally. There is a Presence with her, even as she is surrounded by so much suffering.

Then, the perennial classic wisdom of the Psalms:

In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
Men are but a puff of wind,
Men who think themselves important are a delusion.
Put them on a scale,
They are gone in a puff of wind.

—Psalm 62:5–9

What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people are facing the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by a single narcissistic leader whose words and deeds incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify the daily chaos. The pandemic that seems to be returning in waves continues to wreak suffering and disorder with no end in sight, and there is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and those subsisting at the margins of society.

It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the American population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns).

We are without doubt in an apocalyptic time (the Latin word apocalypsis refers to an urgent unveiling of an ultimate state of affairs). Yeats’ oft-quoted poem “The Second Coming” then feels like a direct prophecy. See if you do not agree:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out, no matter who wins the election or who is on the Supreme Court. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.

God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be found when all sides are so far from “the Falconer.”
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.

Stand as a sentry at the door of your senses for these coming months, so “the blood-dimmed tide” cannot make its way into your soul.

If you allow it for too long, it will become who you are, and you will no longer have natural access to the “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often and that held so much vitality and freedom for her.

If you will allow, I recommend for your spiritual practice for the next four months that you impose a moratorium on exactly how much news you are subject to—hopefully not more than an hour a day of television, social media, internet news, magazine and newspaper commentary, and/or political discussions. It will only tear you apart and pull you into the dualistic world of opinion and counter-opinion, not Divine Truth, which is always found in a bigger place.

Instead, I suggest that you use this time for some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.

    You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all. 
    And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
    And everything to gain. 

Richard Rohr, September 19, 2020

Center for Action and Contemplation

I don’t know about the rest of you my beloved friends, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dying hit me hard. I don’t remember such a feeling of despair and grief since the 2016 election.

Out of that and the rest of this unique and difficult time, a new poem has been rising up. It may yet evolve, but here it is in its current manifestation.

From These Ashes
~ a poem in honor and remembrance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ~

How does the phoenix
Rise
From these ashes?

My overstressed soul body
Already hunched nearly to the earth
Beneath
The weight of
Fear and Separation
Grief and Sorrow
Greed and Ignorance
Illness and Death
Smoke and Fire

Felt the blow of her dying
Like a final death stroke
Pounding my wounded, naked soul
into the deep ashes
Of the blackened forest floor.

How does she rise from these ashes?

The blow left me bleeding
Blood and sweat pouring down

The blow left me weeping
Snot and tears flowing

The blow left me dying
Shit and piss evacuated

Body and soul decaying into the ash.

How does she rise from these ashes?

How does she possibly rise?!

Blood and sweat
Tears and snot
Shit and Piss
Decay…
All mingle
and sink into the Ashes.

Absorbed by the earth
The microbes and mycelium gather
And feast, and dance, and nurture

And a single seed
Dormant beneath the black gray ash
Sparks to life
On my essence-enriched nutrient soup.

This is how she rises.

From the ashes below my prone form
Sprout tiny green leaves

Quickly,
Miraculously,
They grow
Surround
And lift that still
Silent soul bundle,

Through the mist
Through the dissipating smoke
Through the rain-soaked clouds

Ocean salt rain
washes away
Ash,
Shit,
Piss,
Tears,
Snot,
Blood,
And sweat.

A pristine
Glowing soul body is offered
in love, life, and light
To the warm golden sun
Which has risen
Again.

This is how she rises.
This is how we rise.
This.
Just this.

Sept 2020 – © by Wakil David Matthews

Like a Life-giving Sun

You could become a great warrior
And help to free yourself and the world
Though only if you in prayer become sweet lovers.

It is a naïve human being who thinks we are not engaged in a fierce battle,
For I see and hear brave foot soldiers all around me going mad.
Falling on the ground in excruciating pain.

You could become a victorious warrior
And carry your heart through this world like a life-giving sun
Though only if you and God become sweet Lovers!

~Hafiz

A friend just sent a link to this eZine. These writings are from last year during the smoke-filled days of summer here in the NW and the fires in Australia.

Disturbing, yet beautiful and profound to realize the totality of the air we are breathing in these times.

Fine Particles of Brilliant Forests, Burning

One of our dear ones from Talent, Oregon sent out a note to let us know that they were safe and their property was spared. But they are living in a wasteland with no services, no water, no connections, only devastation, smoke, and ash.

Yet he shared this beautiful poem. May it hold us all in the midst of this apocalypse.

All those days you felt like dust, like dirt,
as if all you had to do was turn your face
toward the wind and be scattered to the four corners.

or swept away by the smallest breath as insubstantial—
did you not know what the Holy One can do with dust?

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.
This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning.

This is the moment we ask for the blessing that lives within the ancient (and current) ashes,
that makes its home inside the soil of this sacred earth.

So let us be marked not for sorrow. And let us be marked not for shame. 
Let us be marked not for false humility or for thinking we are less than we are.

but for claiming what God can do within the dust, within the dirt,
within the stuff of which the world is made and the stars that blaze in our bones
and the galaxies that spiral inside the smudge we bear.  

~ Jan Richardson