Hiatus

Taking a break here.    

In case you hadn't noticed.    

May your holidays be peaceful and fruitful.
Treasure the every day.   

The Mystery of Time

Time.  I'm pondering time.  And certain writers/thinkers whose musing on time has had a profound effect on many, myself included.

I'm reading, rereading and collating - allowing myself to be swept away, whether into Proust's novels or T S Eliot's Four Quartets, John Bayley's musings while tending to Iris Murdoch's descent into Alzheimers.  And I'm thinking especially of Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose lecture I attended as a very young person, on the holiness of time.  Which puts me in mind of how creativity and time are intertwined.  Whether in the story of creation - a meditation which begins Genesis, the Bible's first book.  The subject of Proust's In Search of Lost Time.  A theme to which Eliot returns again and again in Four Quartets, my favorite poem - a mystical work which also deals with creativity.

Time.  Old age is a good time to reflect on Time.  One seems to have time for such reflection.  Time to read.  Time to think.  Time to reflect on one's own time past and time future - in the light of time present. 

Heschel tells us that the seminal contribution of the Torah's setting aside the Sabbath - as a means of making time holy - is a huge leap from sacred space (temples and the like) to a new dimension - and a new way of prayer and celebration, which includes both the bodily (and its pleasures) as well as the soul, the sacred.

It was Heschel who introduced me to seeing the Holy in this way.  In such a way that I have never forgotten his lecture.  Never forgotten where I was when I heard it.  Never forgotten his effect upon me - an old man, speaking in simple, declarative sentences (so different from Eliot or Proust!) - which held such wisdom.  Which seemed to pass straight from his heart (or soul) to mine.  As if the words had, themselves, a sacred character - held the very holiness they spoke of.  My first brush with a genuinely holy person.  I knew it at once!  Like you know what love means - when you fall in love for the first time.  Holy Mystery delivered to me.  A new sense of the sacred.  Way beyond books and lectures and prayer in a church.

Now there's nowhere (specific) that this post is going.  There's nothing I can say better than the writers and thinkers just flagged (and I'd include the wisdom books of the Bible and John's Gospel and even some mystical passages of Paul).  But it sets one to pondering.  It makes you want to read, reread and reflect as you read.  It unearths memories from one's own life.  For me:  Reading Bergson's philosophy of time (the spirituality of memory, the meaning of life) - as Proust did - (my last year of college).  Being assigned Proust in French...  a daunting task for a time-pressed student, struggling to understand French, let alone his run-on sentences.  My purchase of Eliot's collected poems in the college bookstore.  And later, my first attempt to really understand his "quartets" at a Benedictine monastery also a daunting task - initially.  Followed up over the years by many a reading - till I have so much of it memorized.  (Still haven't plumbed some of its verses.) 

Time and nothingness.  That's where I'm headed.  On many levels.  So much of great literature, great philosophy, great spirituality points us toward these mysterious roots of our experience.  If by root we mean the grunt (or Ground) of which Eckhart hints - the mystic described as "the man from whom God hid nothing."

Then there's Shakespeare on Time, a theme to which he returns again and again in his sonnets:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Dickens:  "It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times..."

As Eliot wrote:  "There is no end to it..."   At least no end to the pondering...  the tolling bells (John Donne too)... the waves ... towards the pebbled shore ... our minutes and our end (Shakespeare too - above).  

Interesting how the idea of water, waves breaking on a shore and tolling bells, change and death and remembrance are so often tied together when dealt with by great authors:

There is no end to it....  And that's kind of exciting, isn't it?

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.      [TS Eliot:  Four Quartets]

Things that Don't Work as they Should

I know... I should be sorting, discarding, packing, downsizing...  But I've reached a kind of wall.  On one side are the things I've already given away, thrown away, packed away:  Emptiness.  On the other side ... what's left.  The in-between things.  It's hard to know exactly what to do with such things.

One thing I've noticed:  multiple iterations of certain items - that never quite work as they should.  Garlic presses, for one.  I must have 3 or 4.  Each one was supposed to be the ultimate gadget.  I have one in the shape of an egg.  It allows for the piece of garlic, the press, a tiny plastic window beneath it - where the pressed garlic is supposed to collect.  And a little plastic piece to clean the holes where the pressed garlic passes to the waiting "window".  (If you remembered to put the window back.)

But it doesn't really work as it should:  Who presses only one clove of garlic?  If you're a garlic lover, one clove will never do!  And one clove is really all that fits in that little window place.  Well, maybe two, depending...  And to empty that little space?  And reuse it?  Not as simple as sounds. Another problem is that little plastic piece to clean the holes.  Unless you've replaced it upside down (in its cleverly designed little cubby) the garlic press won't press.  But it's hard to "grab" when it's upside down.  It's hard to put back upside down.  It's tiny - so you can't just leave it lying around.  In a minute, it's been mislaid.

All in all, it's a brilliant design, this little garlic press.  But it never really worked as it should.  One more thing that looked so enticing - in the store.  And failed to please - in the kitchen.

Tea steepers are like that.  Tea kettles.  Tea pots.  We've tried them all!  They've hit the sorting wall, along with me.  I could have a little nicknack shelf - a sort of museum of things that never worked as they should. 

Like so many things in life, this piece of wisdom can be applied across the board to so many other things - things which were cleverly designed to work.  Take the Constitution, for example.  On paper it looks so clever.  Three branches of government.  Balancing each other.  One to interpret it.  One to extend it.  One to manage it.  Well...  history has now revealed - in our own lifetime - it doesn't work as it should.  So many institutions, civil and religious, that don't work.  They promise so much!  We have high hopes.  The older one gets, the more dashed those hopes become.

Now what is the point here, you may asking yourself?  Nothingness, I suppose.  One more example of why some of us turn to meditation, to reading the saints or the psalms.  We need something to hang onto in this changing world - where nothing really works as it should.  Read Genesis, for example.  Right in the second chapter:  Things are already going wrong.  By chapter four there's been a murder - one brother slaying another - after the eviction notice and the pain of childbirth promised (and borne).  Hopes dashed.  "How great was human wickedness on earth," thinks the Creator by chapter 6.  So there's a do-over.  Like trying another garlic press.

It's comforting - in a strange way...  Reading the Bible.  You feel you're not so alone, carrying these pieces of wisdom, these collected garlic presses, tea steepers, blog posts.  Your own life, like the Bible.  The detritus of a life lived.  A people betrayed and dismayed.  And yet - the willingness to go on.  To love.  To hope.  To care about each other.  To make that next pot of tea.  To press that next clove of garlic.  The spice of life cannot be quenched!  Bread and wine - and thou beside me - in the wilderness.  It's the simple things in life that make it richer, deeper.

Even if - often - they don't work as they should.

........................................

Update:   Oooh.... let's get our hopes up, shall we?  (It's in the testing stage...)  

Then again... my clever cart - with its tiny broken part...  assembly postponed, till a whole new side of the cart...  (Quality Control....  please show up at Refugee Camp!)

Take a lesson, say I!

Wisdom's Bridge

Here's a great quote:

Everyone gets challenged in life and you can either spend the rest of your life looking backwards, or you can make a decision to keep going.

Wisdom through suffering; that's what the Greeks called it.  But not everyone learns wisdom from the suffering.

Some spend their lives like children having a tantrum.  Endlessly berating the people or events which have robbed them of what they expected or assumed or felt entitled to.  Yes, of course, we all have our wishes and dreams.  We all can act with selfish ends - even toward those we love.  Especially toward those we love.  Which is, of course, the reason we always hurt the ones we love.

Forgiveness allows us to let go - those things which burden and chain us to the past.  That, and an ability to build bridges.  That's how I think of it.  When disaster happens, can we find or build a bridge - to the future?  Can we channel our anger or disappointment (the latter, being reason for the former) so that we don't become stuck?

Divorces can be so nasty because people become stuck.  Stuck in rage against the person who hadn't come through as one needed.  Wished for.  Expected.

Civil wars are like divorces.  Political grid-lock, same thing. 

It all goes back to whether or not we're going to have a tantrum.  Or can we move on?  Can we not only move on but grow?  Can we move into that stage of Wisdom where bridges can be seen and crossed, bridges which afford more of a bird's eye view of the slings and arrows of life?  Which give us a way out.  Out of those corners it's so easy to paint ourselves into.

It's a challenge for all of us.  Even the saints.  Who, over and over flag the struggle (against one's inner child wanting to have a tantrum) and assure us it never ends.  But apparently, as the quote above reminds us, we can "make a decision to keep going" - in a good way.  In a way that makes life easier for everyone.  For ourselves and our loved ones.  For the rest of humanity.  The earth.  The universe.  The cosmos.

I think it involves enlarging our own ego.  So that what I identify as me is more and more inclusive.  That's what the Buddhists mean when they vow to save all beings.  That's how Jesus spoke and lived.  That's what Lux was referring to (scroll down, to The Great Community.)

Lux Umbra Dei, a man whose impact (on many of us) was brief, but whose wisdom was so deep, whose compassion so great, that we will never forget him.  (His Bio said simply:  Gratitude!  Gratitude!)  Lux pointed to that Reality, that Essence - which is also Holy Presence.

This is our task.  Our mission - if we choose to accept it.  (That's what the quote above speaks to.  That's what Merton was referring to.  What Lux embodied.  This blog seeks.)  That's what we need to grow into. 

Something deep inside us longs for this.

As Lux longed for The Beartooth Plateau:

My favorite place in the world is the Beartooth Plateau.  Hardly a year goes by when I don't visit.   The wind whistles up there and the air is icy cold when a rock wall shuts off the sun. There is an upland meadow at about 3000 meters that I love especially.  If you drive the Chief Joseph Highway and, reaching the pass, look northwest, you will see it: a vast table in the sky.

The tumult of this autumn never reaches that place, just the wind whistling in the little stands of trees that punctuates the grass expanse.  One can look south toward the Sunlight Basin from there and see the austere peaks rising...what does it mean to them that we are entering a new age...perhaps a golden age at that?

I am weary, feeling my age multiplied by illness and responsibility, seeing the changes coming, and knowing how much distress they will cause some on the short term. But the Plateau endures and so shall our species; we are contemporaries after all, and all this tumult is so much wind, so many fleeting photons ghosting through the ringing air.

Holy Presence

Downsizing... I pull from the shelf a dog-eared book, Thomas Merton's first autobiographical work:  The Seven Storey Mountain.  There is a yellow post-it note in it.  Writing on it:  Mine.  The words say:  Holy Presence.

Though I intend to give the book away, as I've read it numerous times, I set it aside - to savor the place I've marked.  A passage which must contain the essence of something I wanted to flag.  First paragraph (below) sets the scene; second and third dig deeper; fourth paragraph contains the essence:

We were in a restaurant having something to eat, and the Baroness was talking about priests, and about the spiritual life and gratitude, and the ten lepers in the Gospel, of whom only one returned to give thanks to Christ for having cured them.  She had made what seemed to me to be certainly a good point.  But I suddenly noticed that it had struck the two Friars like a bombshell. 

Then I realized what was going on.  ...  I had not grasped before how much this was part of her work:  priests and religious had become indirectly, almost as important a mission field as her work in Harlem. ... When the Spirit of God finds a soul in which He can work, He uses that soul for any number of purposes:  opens out before its eyes a hundred new directions, multiplying its works and its opportunities for the apostolate, almost beyond belief and certainly far beyond the ordinary strength of a human being.

Here was this woman who had started out to conduct a more or less obscure work helping the poor in Harlem, now placed in such a position that the work which had barely been begun was drawing to her souls from every part of the country, and giving her a sort of unofficial apostolate among the priesthood, the clergy, and the religious Orders.

What was it that she had to offer them, that they did not already possess?  One thing:  she was full of the love of God; and prayer and sacrifice and total uncompromising poverty had filled her soul with something which, it seemed, these two men had often looked for in vain in the dry and conventional and merely learned retreats that fell to their lot. And I could see that they were drawn to her by the tremendous spiritual vitality of the grace that was in her, a vitality which brought with it a genuine and lasting inspiration, because it put their souls in contact with God as a living reality.  And that reality, that contact, is something which we all need:  and one of the ways in which it has been decreed that we should arrive at it, is by hearing one another talk about God.  Fides ex auditu.  And it is no novelty for God to raise up saints who are not priests to preach to those who are priests -- witness the Baroness's namesake, Catherine of Sienna.

I might put it differently.  He might too.  Had he been alive today.  Reminds me of St. Francis:  "Preach always.  If necessary, use words."  And that reminds me of another Francis.  Who preaches by example.  Whose words yesterday match the way he lives:  "St. Peter did not have a bank account."

I'm tempted to preach here.  In words.  But I won't.

This whole blog:  Nothingness - pretty much - contains the essence.   

Downsizing

As we prepare to make a huge transition - from our house of 26 years to an apartment in a retirement community (one hour westward) - we spend our days sorting, reminiscing, packing, and making endless decisions:  Give away, throw away, or squirrel away?  

Things have been found.  Other things have been found to be lost.  Amazing the possessions one acquires.  Quite a relief, I find, to let so many go.  We've concluded that possessing less enables one to actually know what's there - and where.  (Clear plastic boxes are a godsend in this regard.)

Time is precious now.  More precious than possessions.  Especially precious - given Mr. TheraP's current health concerns - which make him wonder things like:  "How many June 16ths are left to me?"

The ultimate question hangs over everything:  What really matters?

The Long Goodbye

Mr. TheraP calls it The Long Goodbye.  Advance warning that his time on this planet will be shortened.  Shortened - from the illusion that we'll both grow older and older.  That whatever comes our way, we will face it together.  

Via surgical invasion and medical statistics we now know he has a lung condition that is chronic and progressive with an average of 4-6 years from the time of diagnosis.  We know there is no treatment.  Except a lung transplant.  But he's too old.  Which, honestly, we're thankful for.  He's grateful he won't have to undergo what he views as the trench warfare of some medical treatments.  (Chemo, radiation, a lung transplant.)  It's not cancer, but it is, in the words of the surgeon who did the diagnostic surgery:  "quite relentless, quite bad."

We've been given one more statistic.  When he gets to the point where he needs oxygen all the time, he'll have only a year or two left.  He doesn't use it now; then again we haven't met with the pulmonologist he's scheduled to see next month, in a nearby city, a few weeks before the move to a retirement community.

We were planning to move there anyway.  For Mr. TheraP.  So he could use the University Library.  For his decades-long research on a medieval poem - his life's work, not yet completed.  There were some other reasons.  But those reasons have pretty much been eclipsed by the medical news...

As anyone reading this can imagine, the emotions have run the gamut.

Thankfully we can discuss all of this.  Sometimes through the tears.  It puts everything into perspective.  A perspective we always knew about.  Even talked about.  But being give a timeframe concentrates the mind.  Makes you realize what really matters.  Gives you unexpected tasks and unexpected opportunities for appreciation.

We're appreciating that we know.  That we have time.  That we can choose to savor this time.  To reassess and set aside old issues, recommit ourselves to the great adventure one embarks on in a marriage.  The opportunity to love and be loved - in spite of all the limitations and quirks and difficulties of trying to merge two lives.  Into one.  We're reassessing our past.  In light of the present.  We're reassessing the future.  In the light.

I'm a believer.  Mr. TheraP isn't sure.  I'm OK with that.  So is he.  Because my beliefs don't limit his.  Nor his, mine.  The Great Mystery surrounds us.  Has us in its grip.  Is relentless in its loving care (see TS Eliot's Four Quartets.)

So we have this time.  This advance warning.  Making time more poignant.  Elevating the everyday.   Deepening the present moment - beyond the everyday.

Time is now altered.  Irrevocably.  

Last night we watched a movie.  In a foreign language.  Somehow it struck us both so powerfully.  I think it's partly due to the exquisite film and acting.  The lush beauty.  The range of emotions.  But it's also due to the fact that whatever happens now happens within this new perspective we've been granted.  A blessing.  In disguise.

This morning I read an article.  It struck me so deeply.  Way beyond it's subject matter.  Or how the writer happened on his subject.  Its end is worth quoting:

Only those with no imagination, and no grounding in reality, would deny the possibility that they will live forever. It’s possible that many reading these words will never die. Let’s assume, though, that we all have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers.

...

Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks “getting it wrong” and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers.

We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.

I love this guy!  Wow!  His words echo in my heart... "to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers."

And the final paragraph.  Our task now.