46 years after 1968

Drop, drop in our sleep, upon the heart sorrow falls, memory’s pain, and to us, though against our very will, even in our own despite, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God.[3] 

(--in Edith Hamilton’s 1937 AESCHYLUS, Agamemnon 179-183)

Memorial Day 2014

War is a way of declaring the absence of insight.

It is despair writ large. War is each murder and each greed lust ambition power taken to full height. It is deception and deviation as twin celebrities posing full face photos for mass consumption. Artifice as ascriptive achievement.

War is the failure of imagination to see the true relationship of me to myself, you to yourself, earth to ever-present-originator.

The God
Is near, and hard
to grasp.  

But where there is
danger,  

A rescuing
element grows
as well  

— FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLEIN  (-- Epigraph, in Tomas Halik’s Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty) 

In the face of such massive and irrefutable ignorance all we humans can do is cry and declare with pathetic prayer: jamais plus la guerre, jamais plus la guerre! 

It is memorial day in this morally ravaged country. The dead lay silent in their ground. On town streets bands and cars and marching children put a face on helpless celebration of sorrow for the things done, lives lost, souls and psyches stunned and devastated.

People sometimes come to a confessor, at least to the confessor whose confession this book is, in situations in which their entire “religious system”— their thinking, their experience , and their behavior— is in a greater or lesser state of crisis. They feel themselves to be in a “blind alley” and are often unaware whether it happened as the result of some more or less conscious or self-confessed moral failing or “sin,” or whether it is to do with some other changes in their personal life and relationships , or whether they have only now realized the outcome of some long and unperceived process during which their faith dwindled and guttered out. Sometimes they feel a void, because in spite of their sincere endeavors and often long years of spiritual search they have not found a sufficiently convincing answer in the places they have looked so far, or what had so far been their spiritual home has started to seem constricted or spurious. Despite the uniqueness of individual human stories, after years of practice as a confessor one discovers certain recurrent themes. And that is the second aspect of the confessor’s experience to which this book seeks to provide a testimony. Through the multitude of individual confessions, which are protected, as has been said, by the seal of absolute discretion, the confessor comes into contact with something that is more general and common to all, something that lies beneath the surface of individual lives and belongs to a kind of “hidden face of the times,” to their “inner turning.” 

(--Halik, Tomas (2012-01-10). Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, Kindle Locations 125-135). 

Will we relent? Change our mind? Come to senses? See what is real and true?

One can hope.

Without optimism.

Hope.

Remove the sandals from your feet

There's a resistance to opening oneself to an alternative reality. So says Avivah Zornberg — The Transformation of Pharaoh, Moses, and God,  On Being. Radio interview with Krista Tippett (originally, from 2005).

Obdurate and closed to appeals from the outside world. A hardened heart; Pharaoh. A slow and heavy mouth; Moses. A dull and uncomprehending mind; us.

This story, as with all stories, is ours. Right here and right now, ours.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on you'll be travelling the road between who you think you are and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey." 

(~~father writing to his daughter, Amelia, in the movie, "The Princess Diaries," script by Gina Wendkos, from the novel by Meg Cabot)

Adam and Eve are expelled. Moses and Aaron are expelled. You and I are expelled.

Into the unknown.

Our true home.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note                   

                        by Adrienne Rich 

Either you will 

go through this door 

or you will not go through. 

If you go through 

there is always the risk 

of remembering your name. 

Things look at you doubly 

and you must look back 

and let them happen. 

If you do not go through 

it is possible 

to live worthily 

to maintain your attitudes 

to hold your position 

to die bravely 

but much will blind you, 

much will evade you, 

at what cost who knows? 

The door itself makes no promises. 

It is only a door.

                               (Poem by Adrienne Rich) 

The possibilities of story, the endlessly open possibilities of our leaving, our exodus from the known toward the infinite and curious unveiling of what-is unfolding from the nothing we know into the nothing we don't know which sets in motion the nothing we are.

Here.

God-with-us.

eu-logos

No one wants
to see
time going
by
without good
reason

just one look

If “love” is a fundamental ground of human desire and existence, then is it any wonder that we have adopted the belief that “God is love” or “Compassion is enlightenment”?

If Thomas Merton is correct that “love” has no opposite -- that there is only love and the perversion of love -- then our attitude toward love and compassion mirrors or determines our attitudes about God or the perversion of God.

If you are looking at me and I am looking at you, then is there only one looking?

A friend writes that his ticket has been punched by a conductor and the timetable for his departure is posted on the big board. I suggest that he “fool ‘em and ride on top of the coach.”

What vehicle is the coach? What rails are being travelled? What whistle at crossings is being sounded?

Who knows?

Tonight begins March Madness.

Here’s looking at you, kid!

(For, indeed: “Here” is looking at (or rather “as” you.)

Without you, I’m nothing.

Just one look...is all it takes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM_nfDPgcuI&feature=kp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UN_k600kvao

ergo, igitur

Not knowing is not bad.

It presupposes not treating.

Knowing this is good.

visiting Kali

Solace, the singing group, sang for Kali Sunday afternoon.

She moved to the music in her bed.

The sound of everyone being told they are, indeed, beautiful.