Daily Manna from the 'Net - Sunday, September 12, 2004


Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. Ephesians 4:29-32 NIV

This showed up , as a daily mailer kind of thing. Yesterday, I manipulated a situation which , basically , left someone hanging out to dry in a meeting where they were counting on me. I had the sensation of watching myself do it, and knowing I was doing it in person, just to be spiteful. Good grief. You think that you have made some spiritual progress, and then turn around , and do some boneheaded silliness that is just forehead-slappingly MEAN. To be mean just because you can, and just to see what happens. Sometimes I look at myself, and can hardly believe what I seem to be capable of. Backstabber. I'm sort of not sorry either. Just wanted a meanness outlet. They must be why people box or run or practice karate, to rid oneself of aggression.... Trying to get ready to start up EFM, and feeling very unqualified, and hypocritical, and gaaaaaaaaaaa... I know there was a good reason to do this, but it escapes me at the moment. Peter and I went to see "What the Bleep" last p.m. , thinking it would be
a movie that would really appeal to us. There were aspects of it that were interesting, and well done. I liked a lot of the interview segments. But , the story line of the deaf photographer and all of her angst was a bit wearing. The New Age paradigm seems sort of hollow in the middle. A lot of thinking and a lot of mental stuff presented by some (clearly) very clever folks who have been changed by their work (in Science, Medicine, Psychology). But, I was thinking, there should be artists, a good script , a real story, or a narrowing of point of view, or focus. Yes, we, at many different levels DO create our reality. But others realities intersect our reality. And, when we're down here talking about atoms, and subatomic particles, and quantam physics, and the distiinction at that level of individuation ----- to then make the leap, that the mind is one, that identity is one, not to mention WE, silly humanity, is also one. It need more development, and perhaps , more heart. More soul. More, emptying of self.

I need to mull more over the sermon I heard this morning, which started with the idea that the Bible's polarity is between ignorance and knowledge, (Knowledge as illumination). That God's relationship to humanity, is one of asking human beings to change their minds, to turn, to grow and to change. We've all been so preached to about sin and righteousness and judgement , that we have to reclaim those concepts and that language to see what is really going on. Is God trying to reform people? To make them behave? To "ambush" them, or set them up? To convince them that they are bad, or sinful?

It seems that Jesus probably didn't talk like that. That, in fact, he thought the simple act of being at the table with them was sufficient.. That in that context, repentance was, basically not to withdraw, not to close down. Willing to change our stance, God can get to us, and tell us more and more and more..... Religion becomes a human crafted technology to get God to do right.
The alternative to "religion" then, might be "the kingdom of God", the "Rule of God" in all human consciousness. It is the recognition that religion can get too stuck in the externals. That, viewed from an inner perspective, "righteousness" might mean a relationship with someone with no obstacles in it... Religion might mean, something for those people who are scared of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who've been there. (to hell). The spiritual, the kingdom of God; these concepts boil down to Zen Buddhism. I watch myself have thoughts and feelings. I know I am different from those. I go to that different zone, where the universe looks different. The spiritual points us to a reality we do not normally see. This zone of reality know that it really is a redemptive universe, created that way by whatever the Creator Is. So , also part of the spiritual, part of the Kingdom, is participation with other people in examination of reality.. When we come to the table, we allow ourselves to be beckoned and summoned. There , in the presence of others , we come to know that we are forgiven, known, and loved. And we come to know, who else is there alongside us.

That this path in relationship with God is why we study and read the Bible, why we participate with people in projects that effect change, both in us and our society. We aren't a completed work, in that sense. There is always something to work on, and something to see that is new.
And boneheaded lapses that show us that we've got nothing to give ourselves airs or importances about. Get to work.

The Celtic saints of earlier centuries made much of the idea of peregrinatio, a difficult-to-translate word that suggests an open-ended journey. It was not uncommon for medieval Irish monks to set out with no destination; they left with only the simple impulse to go and seek... the idea was to learn to live as travelers, pilgrims, "guests of the world," as sixth-century Irishman Saint Columbanus put it. There was to be a creative openness, even if that meant living in a kind of exile so as not to hold too tightly to one's ambitions and spiritual itinerary. The idea was to leave behind the known and safe to find a truer basis for security.


Timothy Jones: A Place for God, 46-47

From the book, Dakota.

Some of my very favorite bits from Dakota, by Kathleen Norris. The last part never fails to make me laugh:

Is It You, Again?

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who “have found the center of their lives in their own hearts.” Monastic life seeks to provide the silence and stillness that leads to such awareness for the individual monk and then allows him to offer it, through hospitality, to others who seek it.

For the monk, even repentance is seen in terms of hospitality. For one modern Benedictine, repentance means “not primarily…a sense of regret,” but “a renunciation of narrow and sectarian human views that are not large enough for God’s mystery.” It means recognizing that we have not always seen grace where it exists in the world, and agreeing “to turn away from a stubborn and obdurate position that cannot accept what is new and different and therefore cannot entertain God’s mysterious ways.” The word “entertain” is used advisedly here, as the monk goes on to speak of hospitality: “The classic sign of [our] acceptance of God’s mystery is welcoming and making room” for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it.

Page 197-198

"Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it."

- Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain

"If these are the creatures, what must the creator be like?"

- St. Francis of Assisi looking at the stars, quoted by Richard Rohr

"Walking is the single best way to experience the here and now. It mimics the beating heart, a rhythm in which the body takes obvious delight. Walking is also the best place by which our senses can take in the world. We hear conversations, see faces, taste the humid air, sense a change in the weather."

- William Vitek, Preservation magazine, from The Utne editorial (November - December 2003)

"But I'll push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free
I'm resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery."

- Dar Williams, Spring Street, The Green World

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.

Insight Information

These are notes for EFM about Luther and the protestant reformation.


"In saying that he hated God, Luther felt himself guilty of the unforgivable sin of blasphemy, but he also found it difficult to reconcile himself to a seemingly capricious God...... Staupitz gave Luther two insights drawn from his realist and mystical background during the time of his struggle in the monastery, and Luther never forgot them. First, he taught Luther in mystical fashion that even temptation and trial can be a sign of grace. "If Christ, who was so close to God , was forsaken on the cross," Luther wrote on a later occasion, "we who are truly alienated from God must suffer a hurt, but the hurt is for our healing."

....A vivid metaphor echoes the experience that impelled him to take the cowl: "When lightning strikes tree or a man, it does two things: it rends the tree and swiftly slays the man, but it turns the face of the man and the branches of the tree to heaven. Christ was of all the saints the most damned and forsaken.".....Luther gradually came to see, that his feeling of alienation from God did not necessarily mean that God had forsaken him. Indeed, the very worst temptation, he said, would be to have no temptation at all.

Luther would be tossed from one side to the other with doubt, Staupitz argued, as long as he agonized over whether he was numbered among the saved or the lost: "If you keep on arguing about it, you will lose Christ, the scriptures, the sacraments, and everything."

and then: "How was the wrath of God to be reconciled with grace? How could anger be harmonized with mercy? Luther came to see that the heart of his problem was the relationship between God's righteousness and mercy.....What the gospel reveals, Luther came to see, is not the punitive righteousness of God but the forgiving righteousness. The God disclosed to us in Christ is a God whose constant purpose for us is to be merciful. The good news of the gospel is that the righteous God does not punish us but makes us righteous. God justifies us by grace....."If you have a true faith....then at once you have a gracious God , for faith leads you in and opens up God's heart...Those who see God as angry do not see him rightly, but look only on a curtain as if a dark cloud had been drawn over his face."..."So much more God has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The word did it all..." Luther came to the view that the church in its essential nature is invisible, the "communion of saints," the fellowship of those who are united to one another under a common head. The visible church is only the means or organ of the invisible, and what is of account is not the succession of bishops but the succession of believers, who are known only to God.....All should remain in the natural calling to which divine Providence has appointed them. This calling of theirs is the place in which they can and should serve God and their neighbor. Any who neglect the duties of their calling will not be helped at all by fasting, making pilgrimages, telling beads, endowing masses and such other "good works"as there may be.

***************

To me, this is talking about the need to change the mind itself --- the dualistic mind that is constantly wanting to know everything, and to put God and faith in material terms. The mind that becomes spiritual materialism, that cannot see past the symbol to what the symbol points to. That projects upon God the things symbols and feelings that haunt the individual. That expects God to be rational and predictable. Mercy, and love , and forgiveness are not deserved, rational , or expected. They are usually always very surprising.

March 14, 2004 //

After church today, a lady (in context of another conversation) said, that her husband never liked it when people had fun at church. That it was supposed to be serious.

Well --- they need to have fun, especially if it is serious. Or because it is serious. Or especially because.....I thought of the Yoga aphorism about Yoga being practice. I think that that is the main thing that I have learned from Yoga. That practice is necessary. Our desired goals do not simply occur. That changes we yearn for do not (mostly) mysteriously happen. That practice is necessary. So that , if we wish to becomes creatures to whom love is second nature, it is necessary that we practice loving other people.

This may be the real reason to go to church in the first place. Not out of duty, or any of the surface reasons. But that to fulfill the gospels, it is necessary to explore and practice what is being talked about as the highest good, in the scriptures of all religions. We can only practice in concert with other human beings. And , they shouldn't all be just like us , either. They should be people most like to irritate and annoy us. In this way, we learn, we practice. This is the liturgy.

Meanwhile, Yoga itself, says to start with your own vessel, start at the beginnning, at the place where you find yourself today. Start from where you are, not from where you want to be or wish you were. Don't start from wishful thinking. It is necessary to arrive in the present, and then to practice staying there, paying attention, gathering energy, holding quiet. In this way, God and the universe can work on us, without the constant interference of our anxiety.

You know, Shalin set up this blog for me , and then blogger said it wasn't able to put up photos, so instead we went to photolog.net. But since I now have this second blog, maybe I'll see what I can do with it.. Hmmm. Maybe this will be about the yoga business Beverly and I are sort of getting launched. Nature of reality and all that. What is worth doing? What good can we get into together? I wonder...So, this will be the nature of reality. Life is practice, just as yoga is practice. We are practicing , in the company of one another, and evolving towards the kingdom of God. Something fun I saw today....
check www.reachm.com/amstreet/archives0000sq.html which will take you to http://www.eccehomo.no/ie.html.

It is a Macedonian billboard, taken from a Scandanavian artist , depicting visions of Matthew's gospel, with a cast of GLBS humans. Wonderful...I think God would smile.

January 17 , 2004

Reading a weblog quoting from Oliver Sacks essay describing the way the brain translates raw reality into perception & consciousness: "Instead of seeing the brain as rigid, fixed in mode, programmed like a computer, there is now a much more biological and powerful notion of "experiential selection," of experience literally shaping the connectivity and function of the brain (within genetic, anatomical, and physiological limits, of course). Then he quotes Claire Bateman's poem , the beginning of "the Daughter-in-Law's tale."

Because the kitchen heat made me dizzy,
I stepped outside to breathe
in the radiant air of almost-twilight
where snowy fields unfurled in all directions.
I knew no one would miss me
in that house crammed with
basting neighbors & chopping cousins,
but I must have stayed out a little
longer than I realized,
savored my solitude a little
too greedily;
by the time they found me,
I'd become as much a legend
as if I were an albino rose
sprouted from a bed of shaved ice..."

(the author continues) Sacks' essay draws on William James for historical context. Here is the penultimate paragraph:

"But how then do our frames, our momentary moments, hold together? How, if there is only transience, do we achieve continuity? Our passing thoughts, as James says ( in an image which smacks of cowboy life in the l880s) do not wander round like wild cattle. Each one is owned, our own, and bears the brand of this ownership, and each thought, in James' words, is born an owner of the thoughts that went before, and "dies owned, transmitting whatever it realized as its Self to its own later proprietor."

***************

Isn't that fun? Not too far from Zen, and Tibetan concepts about thought forms. Yoga says, basically that thought is creative, so habitual thought begins to seek confirmation in reality, or to actually sculpt physical time/space. It conjures up interesting images of thoughts, wandering about like a pack of wild dogs? Feral cats? A flock of finches? Armadillos?
This is a poem I wrote two versions of last week.

SPACE OPERA

I woke up this morning , to an all night rain,
I didn't hear the rain,
Because I had floated from my bed,
to journey out , and onto a beach somewhere southern
watching a war -- a battle blazing,
up there in outer space.
I was telling my companion, describing to him,
so that the images formed, were conjured, dimly, as I spoke;
I told him about my uncle, captured by the
Germans in l943.
What a night I had!
Out wandering between universes --
tiptoeing across boundaries,
where war is declared.
As the lights flash and move,
tracing distant battle,
I think: "People are dying, but I don't see them."
I can remember my uncle, especially how
he smoked a cigarette ;
Smoke wreathing his eyes, lined and sad.
The act of smoking, a sacrament.
What didn't he know, when he went to war
that he knew later , but never told?
One of the band of silent men I grew up with
My father, determined to turn that page
and never go back;
Just pushing, pushing against the past
like the giant rock of Sisyphus --
Everyday another mountain.