I am
a hole in a flute
that the Christ's breath moves through,
listen to this
music.
Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. It is a harrowing journey, a death to self--the false self--and no one wants to die. But it is the only path to life, to freedom, to peace, to true love. And it begins with silence. We cannot give ourselves in love if we do not know and possess ourselves. This is the great value of silence. It is the pathway to all we truly want.
It is necessary that we find God, and God cannot be found in noise and unpeace.... See how Nature--trees, flowers and grass--grow in stillness; how stars, moon and sun run their course in silence. The more we receive through quiet prayer, the more we can give in the activity of our daily lives. In essence, it is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words are useless if they do not come from within. Words that do not carry the light of Christ only increase the darkness.
Silence is the measure of the power to act; that is, a person never has more power to act than he has silence. Anyone can understand that to do something is far greater than to talk about doing it. If, therefore, a person has a plan or idea and is fully resolved to carry it out, he does not need to talk about it. What he talks about in connection with the proposed action is what he is most unsure of and most unwilling to do.
Life may be brimming over with experiences, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inward in prayer for five short minutes.
I think God might be a little prejudiced.
For once He asked me to join Him on a walk
through this world,
and we gazed into every heart on this earth,
and I noticed He lingered a bit longer
before any face that was
weeping,
and before any eyes that were
laughing.
And sometimes when we passed
a soul in worship
God too would kneel down.
I have come to learn: God
adores His
creation.
A man
born blind can easily
deny the magnificence of a vast landscape.
He can easily deny all the wonders that he cannot touch,
smell, taste, or hear.
But one day the wind will show you its kindness
and remove the tiny patches that
covered our eyes,
and we will see God more clearly
than we have ever seen
ourselves.
I don't want to be anything special, I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise. I sometimes imagine that I long for the seclusion of a nunnery. But I know that I must seek You amongst people, out in the world. And that is what I shall do, despite the weariness and dislike that sometimes overcome me. I vow to live my life out there to the full. Sometimes I think that my life is only just beginning, that the real difficulties are still to come, although at times I feel that I have struggled through so many already.
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Answered prayers cause more tears than those that remain unanswered.
We haven't journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
When we let go of hatred, prejudices, arrogance and entitlement from the heart, our actions change. We love, forgive and hope from the heart, and from there our world changes. So I offer this prayer for us: 'Holy One, we give you permission to carve away all that is not pure in our hearts. Wwe invite you to create space in our crowded hearts for you to dwell. Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us. We ask you to align our priorities with yours, and awaken our hearts from their sleep.'
When we let go of hatred, prejudices, arrogance and entitlement from the heart, our actions change. We love, forgive and hope from the heart, and from there our world changes. So I offer this prayer for us: 'Holy One, we give you permission to carve away all that is not pure in our hearts. We invite you to create space in our crowded hearts for you to dwell. Create in us a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within us. We ask you to align our priorities with yours, and awaken our hearts from their sleep.'
As long as we look for some kind of pay for what we do, as long as we want to get something from God in some kind of exchange, we are like the merchants. If you want to be rid of the commerical spirit, then by all means do all you can in the way of good works, but do so solely for the praise of God. Live as if you did not exist. Expect and ask nothing in return. Then the merchant inside you will be driven out of the temple God has made. Then God alone dwells there. See! This is how the temple is cleared: when a person thinks only of God and honors God alone. Only such a person is free and genuine.
The more I love humanity in general the less I love humans in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he's too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate humans individually, the more I love humanity.
The Holy Spirit is called the Giver of Gifts, but the Spirit's cherishing action is only really felt by those who acknowledge their own deep poverty--who realize that we have literally nothing of our own but are totally dependent on God and on that natural world in which God has placed us and which is the sacramental vehicle of God's action. When we grasp this, we are ready to receive God's gifts. Some souls are so full of pious furniture and ornaments that there is no room for the Holy Spirit. All the correct things have been crammed into the poor little villa, but none of the best quality. They need to pull down the curtains, get rid of the knick-knacks, and throw their premises open to the great simplicity of God.
The leavening of yeast must have seemed to ancient men a profound mystery, and yet something on which they could always depend. Just so does the supernatural enter our natural life, working in the hiddenness, forcing the new life into every corner and making the dough expand. If the dough were endowed with consciousness, it would not feel very comfortable while the yeast was working. Nor, as a rule, does our human nature feel very comfortable under the transforming action of God, steadily turning one kind of love into another kind of love, desire into charity, clutch into generosity, Eros into Agape. Creation is change, and change is often painful and mysterious to us. Spiritual creation means a series of changes, which at last producePa Holiness, God's aim for us.
The world is aflame with evil and atrocity; the scandal of perpetual desecration of the world cries to high heaven. And we, coming face to face with it, are either involved as callous participants or, at best, remain indifferent onlookers.... We pray because the disproportion of human misery and human compassion is so enormous. We pray because our grasp of the depth of suffering is comparable to the scope of perception of a butterfly flying over the Grand Canyon. We pray because of the experience of the dreadful incompatibility of how we live and what we sense.
We do not know what to pray for. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at atrocities committed by man, for the capacity to be dismayed? Prayer should be an act of catharsis or purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility.... Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.
Prayer is a perspective from which to behold, from which to respond to, the challenges we face. [Humans] in prayer do not seek to impose their will upon God; they seek to impose God's will and mercy upon themselves. Prayer is necessary to make us aware of our failures, backsliding, transgressions, sins.
Prayer clarifies our hope and intentions. It helps us discover our true aspirations, the pangs we ignore, the longings we forget. It is an act of self-purification.... It teaches us what to aspire to, implants in us the ideals we ought to cherish. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let God's will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to God in our will, an effort to make God the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to God's concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right.
What is the purpose of knowledge? We are conditioned to believe that the purpose of knowledge is to utilize the world. We forget that the purpose of knowledge is also to celebrate God. God is both present and absent. To celebrate is to invoke God's presence concealed in God's absence.
To celebrate is to share in a greater joy, to participate in an eternal drama. In acts of consumption the intention is to please our own selves; in acts of celebration the intention is to extol God, the spirit, the source of blessing.
The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era.
As civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind. Mankind will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.
May I suggest that man's potential for change and growth is much greater than we are willing to admit and that old age be regarded not as the age of stagnation but as the age of opportunities for inner growth? The old person must not be treated as a patient, or regard his retirement as a prolonged state of resignation.
One ought to enter old age the way one enters the senior year at a university, in exciting anticipation of consummation. Rich in perspective, experienced in failure, the person advanced in years is capable of shedding prejudices and the fever of vested interests. He does not see any more in every fellow man a person who stands in his way, and competitiveness may cease to be his way of thinking.
Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.
If you are neutral in a situation of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has his foot on the tail of the mouse, and you say you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Even though he was full of divine power, Jesus believed that changing stones into bread, seeking popularity, and being counted among the great ones of the earth were temptations. Again and again Jesus opts for what is small and hidden and poor, and accordingly declines to wield influence. His miracles always serve to express his profound compassion with suffering humanity. Never are they attempts to call attention to himself.... It becomes plain to us that God has willed to show love for the world by descending more and more deeply into human frailty.
The more conscious Jesus becomes of the mission entrusted to him, the more he realizes that that mission will make him poorer and poorer. And finally he hangs on a cross, crying out with a loud voice, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Only then do we know how far God has gone to show us his love. For it is then that Jesus not only reached his utmost poverty, but also showed us God's utmost love.
All of us live by some vision. It may be a depressing vision. It may be a very limited vision. It may be a vision that it's all going to pieces. But there is a vision, conscious or unconscious, that each of us lives by. If it's a dark vision, one that's moving toward disintegration and chaos, then we will be fearful. If it's a larger vision, if it's a universal vision, if it's a vision of God's Realm and we really believe that it's going to come into being, we'll be filled with hope. Hope is the confidence that the vision which is the biblical vision will really occur. And no one is going to be excluded.
Potential servant leaders best receive their training set in the midst of the suffering, feeling the hurt and pain of which they are to be the healers. Unless we ourselves are there, we'll not be able to introduce others to the poorest of the poor. We pray for our neighborhood and also for those servant leaders who, in their own cities and countries, begin to bring in the shalom prophesied by Isaiah and embodied in Jesus. We'll keep on until we are interconnected and intertwined with the whole world. There is a new world coming. It must come because it is in God's mind and God has willed it.
What we do with intensity and focus in our own neighborhood, the one in which God has set our community--your community--will enable us to reach out in affection to the whole globe. To the whole human family. To the whole created order. The time has come when all limited patriotic boundaries must be transcended. Everything is interconnected. We are related in affection to everything.
Breaking from the old, launching out into the new, always means inner turbulence and outer turbulence. Anybody who tells you that if you get into the boat with Jesus everything's going to work out well forever after, just doesn't understand the faith. There is always turbulence. Inner questions. Wondering. And then, eventually, the storm ceases. There is calm. The elements are quieted, and there is an inner, living hush. And we know Jesus in a new way, in the intimacy of the boat, and we are never as fearful again.
For those who have entered into life's energies, which very much include love, death becomes one more adventure and discovery. Dr. Edwin Poteet gathered his sons around him years ago, just as he was dying, and said, "Well, I'm off for the great adventure!" My own father said to a dear friend just hours befeore he died, "Helen, this is a glorious crossing!" To those who have entered into life's energies and know love, death is another adventure and another discovery.
The spiral of materialism is eternal and never ends.... The materialist is never satisfied. For the heart is not made full or satisfied by any, or even all, of the things that the religion of materialism and its preachers of advertising want so desperately to sell us. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be," warned Jesus. And the treasures that lead to compassionate living are not buyable because they are less objects than they are experiences.... Greed never asks when is enough, enough? It knows nothing of limits. Therefore, it knows nothing of the true pleasures that life is about. It is utterly ignorant of celebration.
The artist plays and, as in all play, wastes time. The artist is not paid for his or her time ... but since "time means money" we can imagine that in a clock-oriented culture like ours there is a deep fear of playing. The artist chooses to enter that tomb-womb of pleasure rather than to flee from it or deny its existence.
Freud insisted that it was the artist's commitment to the pleasure principle instead of the reality principle that made the artist such a threat to society. Art gives pleasure to the artist and to those who enjoy the work of art.... Art involves one in a recovery of childhood.... It is very likely that when Jesus warned his followers to "turn and become like children" he was advising political insurrection every bit as threatening to the powers of his time and place as when he drove out money-lenders from their places in the Temple.
The fear of pleasure is a deeply held political issue, and the creative person is out in front insisting that ecstasy and pleasure are what life is about--but everyone's pleasure, not one's own private pleasure. The mystics through the ages have named God the ultimate experience of pleasure. Every creative person knows this.
It's a very difficult thing to actually become the outcast, the needy one. The faithless one. The sinner. To come to the awareness that I'm not just to get close to the need of that person, and perhaps be contaminated because of the person's need, but I'm the person who has within me all the problems that the outcast has.
This kind of identification, this real identification, is very difficult. We had a woman who came to me with great enthusiasm to announce that she had completed her requirements and was ready for membership. After she had finished the announcement and we had begun to rejoice together, she added a footnote. She said, "There's one thing I want to make clear. I am not someone who has the needs most of the members have. I'm coming to help you minister to the need." She wanted to make this clear.
I told her that I thought she probably was not ready for membership because the only way one could come into this society was through an awareness of one's own need. One couldn't come in simply to help minister to it. What I'm saying is that we miss loving our neighbor when we think other people are "not our type." We miss Jesus. We can't find him because that's where he is.
Whether we like it or not, the moment we confess Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, that is, from the time we become a Christian, we are at the same time a member of the Christian church...even if we do not permit our name to be placed on a church roll, even if we refuse to identify ourselves with a particular congregation and share responsibilities with them, even if we absent ourselves from the worship of a congregation. Our membership in the church is a corollary of our faith in Christ. We can no more be a Christian and have nothing to do with the church than we can be a person and not be in a family. Membership in the church is a basic spiritual fact for those who confess Christ as Lord. It is not an option for those Christians who happen, by nature, to be more gregarious than others. It is part of the fabric of redemption.
Suffering is real; God is real. Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and eternal humanity. We accept suffering; we believe in God. The acceptance and the belief both come from "the depths."
But there is more.... "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning...."
I have often been threatened with death. Nevertheless, as a Christian, I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I shall arise in the Salvadoran people. I say so without meaning to boast, with the greatest humility. As pastor, I am obliged by divine mandate to give my life for those I love--for all Salvadorans, even
We need to listen to the sick and abused and to those most likely to have their rights violated. Whether they are nearby or far away, we know, often enough, who they are. The abused offer, to those willing to listen, critiques far sharper than my own. They are not asking for new centers of study and reflection. They have not commissioned new studies of their suffering.... [They call] for our pragmatic solidarity. We need programs designed to remediate inequalities of access to services that can help all humans to lead free and healthy lives.
The Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Israel, envisioned for his people, and strove to create, a nonviolent society based on faith, a reality which for us remains all but unthinkable.
Human beings prefer their gods to be set safely above them out of reach and beyond human weakness. Perhaps this was Judas's dilemma. Like him we can feel let down by seeing how vulnerable Jesus is. Those who feel let down are the most likely to betray. When Jesus, the hero from who we hoped so much, so readily accepts the humiliating failure of the Cross we tend to disassociate from him. Like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, we want to tell Jesus how he should have handled it better.
God's mercy is not merely therapy for a few individuals beset by guilt....God does not dole out mercy like cookies only for good, repentant children. God's mercy is not conditioned by our response. God is mercy. So, wide is wider than we guess.... Our calling is to live in mercy.... Recalling God's unmerited mercy ... we absolve one another, enacting the good news. 'In Jesus Christ,' we say, 'we are forgiven.' So we look into each other's eyes without illusions; we are sinners all. Yet we embrace each other in the mercy, the wide, wide mercy of God.
There are people moving toward developing church communities, not just for themselves, but for organizing their resources around areas of need. There are Christians seeking and searching for ways to develop the church as the Body of Christ and to equip the saints with the gifts of the Spirit for real service to people. With these trends, I believe that we are quickly moving to a position where we can begin to really preach the gospel in a way that makes reconciliation and love meaningful to all people.
The test will be to see if these trends are more than a movement. Don't hope for a movement! The civil rights movement died right on the brink of some real human development. We must have some people who will keep moving after the movement dies, after it is no longer popular to do what is right.
“From that day Jesus began to proclaim the message: Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is upon you.” – Matthew 4:17
Jesus forgave sinners and his own enemies even from the cross. One of the ways we listen to him is by following his example of forgiving those who hurt us. To do this is to enter the reality which Jesus places at the center of his teaching: the experience of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom is the place outside space, the moment outside time, where sin and all its consequences have been totally absorbed beyond the effects of fear and pain.
The Kingdom, one could say, is the way God intends us to live. It is our natural home. Jesus speaks of this Kingdom experience as his ancestors spoke of the Promised Land or the messiah, as a Zen master speaks of enlightenment or as the Buddha speaks of nirvana. He also embodies the Kingdom as a personal reality experienced through relationship. To know him as he really is, is to find oneself in the Kingdom.
To see Jesus in this clear depth we must see how central the Kingdom is to his vision of reality. It is not a system of morality. The Kingdom is not a place we are going to. Nor is it a reward we are to receive for good behavior. The Kingdom upsets normal ways of thinking more deeply than the strictest of moral commandments. It is a fundamental experience of reality as it truly is.
To be in the Kingdom is to live in harmony with heaven and earth, with friend and foe, with body and mind. It changes the way you even want to live. It is to live in the continuous consciousness that we are born and die under the ‘basileia’ of God. ‘Basileia’ does not mean Kingdom in the sense of place but reign or power. The Kingdom is power in the sense of bonding relationship. Where you are, especially if you are in love, matters less than whom you are with. To be in the Kingdom is to know ourselves in relationship.
The Kingdom is experienced when we acknowledge the loving power of God over the power of egotism and all the ego’s personal and social manifestations or structures…. The Kingdom, Jesus says, is within us, among us and between us. As an anonymous prophet once wrote on the wall of Paddington station in London, ‘Faraway is near at hand in images of elsewhere.’ Everywhere and nowhere. This is pure utopia, which means literally nowhere.
Jesus told Pilate: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ Utopian maybe, but not imaginary. The Kingdom is no less real than those dark forces of the psyche that can pull the human mind into the terror of destruction and death: ignorance, greed, pride, illusion, insecurity, anxiety, despair, impatience, intolerance, isolation. Humanity is pulled into its all-too-common inhumanities by these dark forces. In contrast to these forces the teaching on the Kingdom offers an inexhaustible hope and liberty. In the experience of the Kingdom Jesus offers humanity a realistic vision of happiness and a convincing hope that we are meant to be happy….
The teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom…is one of humanity’s greatest affirmations of fundamental hopefulness…. This teaching affirms life as meaningful and purposeful despite its tragedies and banalities. It affirms and celebrates the human aspiration to perfection and wholeness. It expresses our irrepressible intuition that fullness of being is our destiny. It consoles us with the only consolation that is not deceptive (which is the truth) that fullness of life is the intentional meaning of life.
Laurence Freeman is a Benedictine monk who writes about the Christian life. This excerpt is from his book called Jesus, the Teacher Within, available here.
The Gospel offers us a choice: We can join Jesus' mission or we can reject it, as the congregation in the Nazareth synagogue did two thousand years ago. We can risk our lives proclaiming the good news to the poor, releasing the imprisoned, giving sight to the blind, offering liberty to the oppressed, and seeking justice, economic conversion, disarmament and the transformation of society. Or---we can respond to Jesus' demand for justice for the poor like the angry crowd: with anger, resentment and violence. Hypocritically, we can continue to attend religious services while benefiting from systemic injustice, the oppression of the world's poor and the business of war. Through our silent complicity with the world's violence, we can try to kill Christ again.
"Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all [this] has taken place." For centuries interpreters have been confounded by this saying of Jesus, which stands out like a beacon in all three synoptic discourses, because they have tried to understand it as a prediction of something that did not happen. But prophets do not predict. They demand. They do so for the sake of God in their people. And they hope and pray that their demands will be met. Jesus is demanding a divine revolution of his people. The alternative is destruction.
We need quiet time in the presence of God. Although we want to make all our time time for God, we will never succeed if we do not reserve a minute, an hour, a morning, a day, a week, a month, or whatever period of time, for God and God alone. This asks for much discipline and risk taking because we always seem to have something more urgent to do and "just sitting there" and "doing nothing" often disturbs us more than it helps. But there is no way around this. Being useless and silent in the presence of our God belongs to the core of all prayer.
In the beginning we often hear our own unruly inner noises more loudly than God's voice. This is at times very hard to tolerate. But slowly, very slowly, we discover that the silent time makes us quiet and deepens our awareness of ourselves and God. Then, very soon, we start missing these moments when we are deprived of them, and before we are fully aware of it an inner momentum has developed that draws us more and more into silence and closer to that still point where God speaks to us.
To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain a sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in all attainments. Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live.
Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay now thy shadow over the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds blow strong.
Bid the last fruit to ripen on the vine;
allow them still two friendly southern days
to bring them to perfection and to force
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.
Who has no house now will not build him one.
Who is alone now will be long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters
and through the barren pathways up and down
restlessly wander when dead leaves are blown.
Lay now thy shadow over the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds blow strong.
Bid the last fruit to ripen on the vine;
allow them still two friendly southern days
to bring them to perfection and to force
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.
Who has no house now will not build him one.
Who is alone now will be long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters
and through the barren pathways up and down
restlessly wander when dead leaves are blown.
Welcome everything! Welcome alike what has been, and what never was, and what we hope may be, to your shelter underneath the holly, to your places 'round the Christmas fire, where 'what is' sits open-hearted.
People try to get away from it all---to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within.
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful---more free of interruptions---than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant's recollection and there it is: complete tranquility. And by tranquility I mean a kind of harmony. So keep going away from it all---like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all...and send you back ready to face what awaits you.
What's there to complain about? People's misbehavior? But take into consideration: that rational beings exist for one another; that doing what's right sometimes requires patience; that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried; and then keep your mouth shut.
So keep this refuge in mind: the back roads of your self. Above all, no strain and no stress. Be straightforward. Look at things like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. And among the things you turn to, these thoughts: that things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside of it. That disturbance comes only from within---from our own perceptions That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist.
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful---more free of interruptions---than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant's recollection and there it is: complete tranquility. And by tranquility I mean a kind of harmony. So keep going away from it all---like that. Renew yourself. But keep it brief and basic. A quick visit should be enough to ward off all...and send you back ready to face what awaits you.
What's there to complain about? People's misbehavior? But take into consideration: that rational beings exist for one another; that doing what's right sometimes requires patience; that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried; and then keep your mouth shut.
So keep this refuge in mind: the back roads of your self. Above all, no strain and no stress. Be straightforward. Look at things like a human being, like a citizen, like a mortal. And among the things you turn to, these thoughts: that things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside of it. That disturbance comes only from within---from our own perceptions That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist.
If in your heart you make
a manger for his birth,
then God will once again
become a child on earth.
One kind word can warm three winter months.
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about---quite apart from what I would like it to be about---or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.... Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.... This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.... It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation. We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be. The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done. The way of doing it is a secret I can learn from no one else but Him.
God help us to live slowly:
To move simply:
To look softly:
To allow emptiness:
To let the heart create for us.
Amen
I don't suppose that Joseph was free from resentment as he was sold into slavery by his brothers. He had time for meditation as he was dragged off to Egypt, meditation which could easily have turned into bitterness, resentment, and despair. He had cause for more of the same when his seemingly safe job got turned into a trap by the wife of his master Potiphar. And in whose entrails would the worm not have turned during a long and undeserved jail-sentence?
"God is at home. We are in the far country."- Meister EckhartI read that quote in an Annie Dillard book several years ago and it never left me. Too often we tend to imagine that heaven is a cotton-white cloudscape, a place that doesn't seem desirable to us here in this sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrifying world. We're comfortable here, and the skewed notion we have of eternity is that it's like a never-ending church service, where we'll be standing mindlessly around a throne, singing bad praise songs to a white haired God for the rest of our existence. From what I know about God, what I've read of [God] in scripture and what I've seen of [God] in what has been made - towering mountains, howling wind, purple budded trees, a baby's touch and a panther's roar - [God] is not a tame God. The City prepared for us is not a retirement home. Zion is not a country club. Death is but the cusp of a great adventure.
We speak of books we've read and ideas we've had. We speak of great questions like abortion and conservation and the dangers of nuclear power, and of what we take to be the Christian answers to such questions. If we get more personal about it, we speak of problems we've had - problems with children and old age, problems with sex and marriage, ethical problems - and of Christian solutions to those problems or at least of Christian ways of viewing them. And if, in the process, we decide to tell stories, then, like the preacher as peddler, we may tell stories about ourselves as well as about other people but not, for the most part, our real stories, not stories about what lies beneath all our other problems, which is the problem of being human, the problem of trying to hold fast somehow to Christ when much of the time, both in ourselves and in our world, it is as if Christ had never existed. Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are, and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all, costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and fishy stare.
Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half...and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
Long ao, Jesus said that men should not lay up for themselves treasures on earth, where moths corrupt and thieves break in and steal, but that men should lay up for themselves treasures in heaven. This insight suggests that life consists of planting and harvesting, of sowing and reaping. We are always in the midst of the harvest and always in the midst of planting. The words that we use in communication, the profound stirrings of the mind out of which thoughts and ideas arise, the ebb and flow of desires out of which the simple or complex deed develops, are all caught in the process of reaping and sowing, of planting and harvesting. There are no anonymous deeds, no casual processes. Living is a shared process. Even as a man is conscious of things growing in him planted by others, which things are always ripening, so others are conscious of things growing in them planted by him, which things are always ripening.
There is a widespread feeling of despair and feeling of futility not only about the present times but also about the future. There are many reasons for this attitude; indeed, the reasons are not far to seek. The cumulative anxiety resulting from wars with the vast eruption of hate and misery has left its mark in the soul of the nations of the earth. It is terrible enough when wars are fought by hired mercenaries, but when they become the immediate and personal involvement of young men and women, old men and women, boys and girls, then there is left no one who does not bear the deep bruises and shock of its consequence. The standing peacetime army is more and more taken for granted as the common experience of the modern nation.
"He that believeth...shall never die" is no empty phrase of Christian piety. It is rather a recognition of eternal process inherent in the experience of life itself. Despite the universal character of the fact, the experience itself is always private, always personal. The shadow of death of which the Psalmist speaks is the thing that strikes the terror, the resounding echo of which leaves no ear unassailed. But death itself has no such power because the experience of life contains the fact of death. There is a given element in life - it is the givenness of God. To know this thoroughly is to rob death of its terror and life of its fear.
A good death is made up of the same elements as a good life. A good life is what a man does with the details of living if he sees his life as an instrument, a deliberate instrument in the hands of Life, that transcends all boundaries and all horizons. It is this beyond dimension that saves the individual life from being swallowed by the tyranny of present needs, present hungers, and present threats. This is to put distance within the experience and to live the quality of the beyond even in the intensity of the present moment.
And a good death - what is it? It has the same quality and character as a good life. True, the body may be stripped of all defenses by the ravages of disease; there may remain no surface expression of dignity and self-respect as the organism yields slowly to the pressure of change monitored by death. These are all secondary. The real issue is at another depth entirely. It is at the place where Life has been long since accepted and yielded to, where the private will has become infused with the Great Will....
And a good death - what is it? It has the same quality and character as a good life. True, the body may be stripped of all defenses by the ravages of disease; there may remain no surface expression of dignity and self-respect as the organism yields slowly to the pressure of change monitored by death. These are all secondary. The real issue is at another depth entirely. It is at the place where Life has been long since accepted and yielded to, where the private will has become infused with the Great Will....
God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly.... He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together. When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure.
Living in a world of racial apartheid where custom and conventions invented to separate black and white lasted long past an end to legal racial discrimination, those who are powerless - black folks - must be overly aware of small details as we go about our lives to be sure we do not enter forbidden territory - to be sure we will not be hurt. You learn to notice things. You learn where not to walk, the stores you don't want to go in, the white people you should not look directly in the face. And you learn to turn away from your own pain and memory and even though you have turned away, the memory of past injustice lingers - comes into the present and you cannot live the way other people live.
Sometimes you preach to people and give them the Word, you read it to them from the Greek and the English, and they don't get it. It just goes in one ear and out the other, nothing in between to stop it. The people come in, they listen to the sermon, and as the preacher stands at the door they shake his hand and tell him what a fine sermon it was that they slept through, and that's the end of it. They're goin' about their business. It just never makes any contact, it never fires up anything. They're just there.
Then there are all those people who listen. You've got a crusade for Christ, you know, and you've got people listening and singing and getting all hepped and everybody comes down and makes a profession of faith in Christ. "Oh, ain't it wonderful!" But then, when the sailing gets rough, and when the persecution arises because of the Word - "Well nobody made it clear we were goin' to get persecuted. They just told us we were goin' to get a free ticket to heaven. What do you mean gettin' persecuted? That wasn't part of the contract."
Then there are all those people who listen. You've got a crusade for Christ, you know, and you've got people listening and singing and getting all hepped and everybody comes down and makes a profession of faith in Christ. "Oh, ain't it wonderful!" But then, when the sailing gets rough, and when the persecution arises because of the Word - "Well nobody made it clear we were goin' to get persecuted. They just told us we were goin' to get a free ticket to heaven. What do you mean gettin' persecuted? That wasn't part of the contract."
I don't think Jesus taught that everybody was a child of God. He did not teach that ALL men are brothers. He taught that all men COULD be brothers. And he didn't teach that ALL people are children of God. He said all COULD be children of God. Now this is a vital point, because there's so much tommy-rot goin' around today about the brotherhood of man.
And there's a lot of tommy-rot goin' on about integration. Now, I know that the church of God does not respect color lines, but its aim is not integration. People say, "Well, you know, we have to learn to live together here on earth 'cause you know heaven is integrated." Sure. Heaven's integrated. Hell is too. They're both integrated. Integration isn't the difference between heaven and hell.
I want to give myself
utterly
as this maple
that burned and burned
for three days without stinting
and then in two more
dropped off every leaf....
If we really worked in order to give away the money we earned, that would undoubtedly set limits to the thirst for money which can possess us! Now to whom should we give? Scripture says almost nothing about giving to the church, except for the tithe. It speaks much more often about giving to God and to people. If we are going to rethink the problem of money in Christian life, perhaps we should not start by assuming it is an ecclesiastical problem.
An aspect of Christian faithfulness in the world of money is the way we express the fact that we no longer love money. If Christians have accepted God's judgment delivering us from possession by the power of money, our spiritual reversal must not stay entirely within but must be expressed externally. If we really do not love money any longer, we must incarnate our new attitude.
Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. It is not to lead our neighbor into a corner where there are no alternatives left, but to open a wide spectrum of options for choice and commitment.
The paradox of hospitality is that it wants to create emptiness, not a fearful emptiness, but a friendly emptiness where strangers can enter and discover themselves as created free; free to sing their own songs, speak their own languages, dance their own dances; free also to leave and follow their own vocations.
We must relearn what it means to be a body and what it means to continue Christ's ministry of preaching the gospel to the poor. I believe there is a strategy to do this. We have seen three principles work that seem to be at the heart of how a local body of Christians can affect their neighborhood. We call them the three "R's" of the quiet revolution:
Relocation
Reconciliation
Redistribution
For many white Christians, strategies for involvement in the community are based on a volunteer or charity mentality. Our white society's concept of charity is one of the main stumbling blocks to real community development. This is because in white society, charity can blind people to reality and substitute cheap action for expensive action. And when I say this to my white brothers and sisters they get very uncomfortable. But charity blinds us and keeps us from seeing that our whole system works methodically against the development of certain people---economically, educationally, spiritually and socially. The white person who is a part of that system and benefits from it uses charity in order to cleanse his or her conscience and in order to have a means for not dealing with the big issues.
The different aspects of poverty form together into a cycle of destruction and dependence that winds itself down upon and around a person. That's the cycle of poverty.... Not enough food when young so that he can't think straight. No hope of education or personal development or family so she gets pregnant before she's fifteen. No education, poor jobs. Poor jobs, poor pay. Poor pay, bad housing and food. Bad housing and food, poor health. Poor health, poor performance on the job, less pay. A cycle, but at its center a captive, a mind so busy responding to the day-to-day needs that it has no time to think about the future or about those spiritual realities which give meaning to life.
It is not asceticism but tantra--love utterly poured out--that opens the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what Jesus taught and this is what he walked. And he left us a method for practicing this path ourselves, the method he himself modeled to perfection in the garden of Gethsemane. When surrounded by fear, contradiction, betrayal; when the "fight or flight" alarm bells are going off in your head and everything inside you wants to brace and defend itself, the infallible way to extricate yourself and reclaim your home in that sheltering kingdom is simply to freely release whatever you are holding onto--including, if it comes to this, life itself. The method of full, voluntary self-donation reconnects you instantly to the wellspring; in fact, it IS the wellspring.
Vigilance and joy cannot coexist.... Joy is an emotion that only occurs when we let go of all watchfulness, all concern about outcomes, and simply let experience flood in and feelings flood out. Joy is incompatible with search behavior because there is nothing missing. Joy is feeling complete, full. Wealth addiction is feeling empty.
At his death, Gandhi owned 16 worldly possessions:
1 robe
1 mala bead for prayer
1 pair of sandals
1 blanket
1 pen
1 bent safety pin
1 metal bowl to pour water
1 fork
1 bowl
1 spoon
1 lantern
1 water bottle
1 cloth napkin
1 length of rope
1 ink well
1 spinning wheel
If men and women today began by the thousands experiencing the depths of Jesus Christ in a transforming way, there would simply be no place for their expression of experience to fit into present-day straitjackets of Christianity.
Gandhi does not say that everyone may expect to become nonviolent by wishing to do so. But that all who dimly realize their need for truth should seek it by the way of nonviolence, since there is really no other way. They may not fully succeed...but they will at least begin to attain the truth. Because of them there will be at least a little truth in the darkness of a violent world.... He believed that in the hidden depths of our being, depths which are too often completely sealed off from our conscious and immoral way of life, we are more truly nonviolent than violent. He believed that love is more natural to us than hatred.
At every moment display righteous indignation over the means (whether good or evil) which your opponent has used to attain the same corrupt end which you are trying to achieve. Point to the means he is using as evidence that your own purposes are righteous - even though they are the same as his.... In politics, as in everything else, pharisaism is not self-righteousness only, but the conviction that, in order to be right, it is sufficient to prove that somebody else is wrong.
Communities must not be isolated one from another. They are called to live in communion and to collaborate one with another. They are all part of a vast body uniting heaven and earth, uniting those who have gone before and those who are present on the earth today. And together they are all preparing the seeds that will flower and bear fruit in the generations to come. They are preparing the ways of tomorrow so that the body of Christ may be fulfilled. Each community is but a sign of the liberating love of God.
