Holy Mystery Knocks ~ This Sabbath Day

A death of someone I never knew.
A man who left behind an interview
I've yet to read.

I have to wait for the translation.

But even now his spirit
Seems to burn
Within my heart.

The power of his words and life
Igniting and uniting
The embers - ready, waiting.

An unknown death
Takes flight.
Bringing new life and light.

Like a live spark - jumping a firebreak
A kindred spirit
Sets my heart ablaze.

A torch
Of Wisdom
Passed -
And caught:

One more holy person

Calling me back

To my not self

Nothingness ~ Emptiness

BEING

Full of Mystery.

Words of Wisdom - an Indian proverb - from one of his last books:

First we learn, 

then we teach, 

then we retire and learn to keep quiet. 

And in the fourth stage, man learns to beg.

Yes!  Holy Mystery, if we are willing to learn, calls on us.  To become channels.  To give our life over.  To allow the Inner Mystery its Way.  An inner transformation.  Nothing but Live Coals.  Intensity of emotion.  Burning inner Prayer into our very souls.  Radiating out.  Radiating Cosmic Transfiguration.  If we just let go...  And accept everything that comes our way.  As part of this Ceaseless Call.  So mysterious.  So awesome.  So close.

RIP:   Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini

.............................................................
Addendum:  The (downloadable) translation includes these words, new to me today:

Fr. Karl Rahner liked to use the image of embers hidden under ashes. I see in the Church today so many ashes above the embers that I’m often assailed by a sense of powerlessness. How can the embers be freed from the ashes in order to rekindle the flame of love? First of all, we have to look for those embers.

My humble view:   This man is a saint and a prophet!

Tracing the Outlines of Grace

From somewhere I copied this spiritual advice:

Just to continue
To express our nature and sincerity
in the simplest, most adequate way
And to appreciate it in the smallest existence. 

This is our task.  This is exactly what I was getting at in the previous post with this quote:

The Mystery of Christ

              is at work in

         everything

     however humble

                  or humdrum

Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic, had a series of visions during a grave illness in her 30th year.  In one of them she beheld something tiny and precarious, about the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand.  So tiny, she sensed, it could fade into nothing.   She was given to understand that this tiny thing was all of creation, held in being through God's tender, loving care. 

A zen master described zen in this brief aphorism:

Zen is dried dung.

Gerard Manley Hopkins summed it up this way in Gods Grandeur:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

None of this means that life is a bowl of cherries.  The zen saying makes that clear.  Julian's illness nearly killed her.  Hopkin's brief poem also references the seamy side of life.

But wisdom crystalizes one's attention.  As pressure and time turn coal into diamonds.

What is the meaning of the zen saying?  I can think of two things.  The first is that dung is what remains after one has digested whatever is consumed.   Often, people disparage wisdom or a path, as they might disparage dung.  But the task is to take the leavings and trace them back to the digestive process or the meal eaten or the seeds planted.  Alternatively, one can carry dried dung on a journey and use it for fuel.  Set alight, what seems worthless, is suddenly revealed as a source of heat and light.  It becomes useful.

Like what I'm trying to do here. 

Addendum I:  Do not miss this exquisite gift from an Islamic scholar:

hearts ablaze:  releasing the divine potential inside

Addendum II:  Thanks to a comment below, here is a brief quote from a website dedicated to a saintly Orthodox Bishop:

  "The Jesus Prayer is for moments of repentance. But in between these moments one is in the atmosphere of the Spirit, wordless and motionless - in the silence of deep hesychia which penetrates everything, including daily work. It is constant, never hindering earthly activities of any kind, but rather sanctifying them..."

Awakened by Grace

Two picture books fascinated me in childhood.  One held photographs illustrating religions of the world.  The other, drawings of every type of musical instrument.  In the unfinished attic, across from our bedroom, was a mostly empty room.  I recall perusing Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman in a lovely large volume.  Of course I didn't read it all or even understand a lot.  But those waves of verse, first hints of mysticism and oneness (I've only just realized) were part of a unity.   At one with the woods and the church of my childhood.  Places where a child could be alone, a soul awakened.  Along with books which fed the soul and linked it to all that is and might be. 

Childhood has all too many straight-jackets.  Holy Mystery is a welcome reprieve.  Even if one doesn't really recognize it till much later.

Recently someone asked me a question.  Based upon a book I'd loaned.  The question related to the concept of the elemental - a term translated from French, best explained by these quotes from the book:

"Elemental," as I understand it, means "reduced to the essential." ... The elemental refers to the origins, the ground, the constitutive qualities of something. ... The elemental becomes a "carrier" or an epiphany of the essential.  ... The essential, in its turn, designates the primary, the vital, the indispensable, and the necessary.  The essential is the irreducible truth of a reality; its authentic identity and raison d'être.

One illustration, suggested by the author, is the Virgin of the Sign (icon).  I paired it here with a numinous scene from nature which extends and amplifies it, setting up a kind of resonance within ourselves and the natural world, which points at the same time to the beyond in our midst.   My first paragraph and my next point to the same relationship.

Like a musical theme that runs through our lives.  The simplest events of daily living.  As in this calligraphy quote I have before me:  The Mystery of Christ is at work in everything however humble or humdrum.  Like whatever it is that bids the quanta leap at once but in direction free.  So pondering the question asked the elemental has revealed itself in inconsequential moments.  The making and the drinking of my morning tea.  Chopping vegetables for dinner.  The ritual of breakfast.  The ritual of dinner.  Watering the garden or writing this.  Streaming the theme of hidden celestial music.

All creation vibrates.  Is tuned.  Each single note is sacred. 

Sacrament of Our Brokenness

This quote really intrigues me.:

The kenotic sense of Christ on the cross sharing the suffering of everyone as they face the moral dilemmas of life could help to develop a more adequate moral compass if it could be better understood and elaborated philosophically and theologically.

 George F McLean

I wish I could flesh out the "moral compass" the writer calls for.

There is another quote of his that perhaps provides a further clue:

The image of the self-emptying Christ (Philippians 2:6-11) helps to strip away what may now be counterproductive remnants from the past in our sacred symbol system.

"To strip away... counterproductive remnants." I suspect there would be big controversy over what exactly is "counterproductive" - and I'm not sure myself if the problem is with the "symbol system" - as the writer suggests.  Though I suppose it depends on how one understands those words, that conceptual system.  But stripping away - leaving oneself open to a kenosis, a self-emptying.  Now that makes sense to me.

It reminds me of Andre Louf's book, The Way of Humility.  How our broken hearts are themselves the opening for God's work in us.  How our puffed up selves run so counter to God's unceasing efforts to reach and transform us.  How it is in our darkest moments, when we turn ... from within our own emptiness ... with a pinpoint yearning, stretching out with every fiber of our being, then letting go.  And simply falling into the outstretched, already waiting arms of God ...

And I wonder if the act of allowing ourselves to really endure the suffering of remaining, resting, within the fiery furnace of an ethical conflict or a spiritual struggle isn't what's called for here.  Not an intellectual exercise.  Not necessarily yielding a rational argument one could articulate.  But it seems to me that if one can endure the suffering of the various sides of any conflict - resting within that sacrament where we meet God who, even now, suffers with and for us...  that perhaps a transformation may come to pass.  Or a transfiguration.  Where we find ourselves in a new and promised land.  Able to take the path unfolding before us.  Or follow the footprints suddenly appearing.  Or accept a hidden doorway beckoning.

As we pray.  From a place.  Of utter extremity:

 

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord

       [Psalm 130: 1]              

It is time for the Lord to act

[Psalm 119: 126]            

Why Orthodoxy?

About a year ago, on occasion, there appeared a young man in our small parish.  So tiny is our little church that the presence of a visitor never goes unnoticed.  And always is appreciated.  I had occasion to speak with him.  I miss him.  For he was a genuine seeker.  And longed to convert.  Yet his wife was, for reasons I won't go into, securely wedded to the roman catholic tradition. 

This young man was studying for a Master's Degree in Religious Education.  At a nearby catholic institution of higher learning.  He was in a quandary.  For when he compared the tenets and scaffolding of the roman church to those of the eastern church, he found the former full of such conflicting doctrines that he was at a loss for how to present them in succinct and convincing form.  Even to himself!  And this, of course, was the subject of his studies, his future career as an educator.  On the other hand, he found Orthodoxy simple and coherent in terms of both his own understanding and his ability to present and explain.  I believe he was doing a paper on this - to make matters more pressing.  A stark comparison.  Several times he made this clear to me.  Along with his dilemma.  What to do?

Now at the time I was a mere babe within Orthodoxy.  Whereas now I might be considered a toddler, I suppose.  At 67.  But his words and his conviction have stayed with me.  I am saddened at his departure.  I might have learned a great deal more from this young man.  Torn between communions.  Torn as a husband.  And father.  And future teacher.  One of life's mysteries is to lose touch with people.  And maybe never know....  (One can only imagine how his dilemma has been magnified by recent events.)

God works in mysterious ways.   It's evident in scripture.  It's evident in one's own life.  So much of the spiritual path occurs in darkness.  The daily humdrum.   But every once in a while things fall together.   And when that happens it seems like an illumination across one's life, across scripture - into the heart of Holy Mystery.  Like a glimmer of certainty.  Like a sign or a mark that yes, this is the path.  And yes, the same path whose markers have been glimpsed before.  Such an event discloses meaning - personal meaning for one's life, together with cosmic meaning - Life as inner and outer.   A rapid succession of insights as more and more falls into place.  A sense of God's Guiding Presence.  Across a lifetime.  Across so many dimensions.  

One book has clarified this.  And I've hardly started it.  A book on Origin, the early Christian writer.  Spirit and Fire.  His method of biblical theology so familiar.  So close to my own inclinations.  Even his themes as set out by von Balthasar.  And the astonishing connection to themes and writers we studied in college.  During the time of Vatican II.  Resurfacing in the past few years through my new connections to Orthodoxy.  But also evident in Cistercian writers influenced by Orthodoxy.  Or converted to Orthodoxy.   The confluence of authentic catholic spirituality (in the widest and deepest sense).  This book's introduction speaking of tents and wells - images I've used in past and recent posts.   Origin's method of asking questions on the basis of anomalies, then searching scripture guided by the rule of faith, so in tune with my own approach.

It's like finding an archeological site and recognizing your own deepest yearnings mapped out already long ago.  Waiting to be rediscovered.  Laid out like a kind of blueprint for spiritual writings read and pondered over the years.  

It's kind of scary when this happens.  "Holy Fear" a man of holiness used to tell me.  For my signpost signals:  Go ahead.  You're on the right path.  I am with you.  Do not fear.
 

Nearly half a century on... I have not forgotten.

One priest influenced me most deeply during my college years.  Someone I never took a course from.  But somehow his homilies from daily Mass - our last two years - must have sunk into me.

Over the years I was sad to see that the Vatican deprived him of his job.  Though he never ceased teaching and writing.

It is good to see Charles Curran weighing in on the crisis of our day - as he did during Vatican II in my college long ago.

I honestly can't describe how or in what way he influenced me.  It must have seeped in, like gentle rain falling on ground which I didn't even know was thirsty for the influence of a catholic thinker in my young life - in a catholic college, which encouraged us to THINK!

Having recently returned from a reunion with many of my classmates, I am struck by the beautiful women we have become - women now the exact age of the year of our graduation.  Women who think for themselves.  Women who have grown far beyond the uniformity of the current hierarchy, which ironically terms itself catholic.  Women grown into the same kind of spirit-filled heart-giving souls which LCWR sisters embody today and encouraged in our youth.

Charles Curran, I never forgot your name.  I have no idea how your presence and homilies seeped into me.  You never knew my name.  In your humility you came and went.  And left your presence in my heart.

It Was Never About Religion

[Repost - Originally posted on the Saturday after NY voted to approve gay marriage.]

“I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife."

                        [Republican NYState Senator, conservative, married 46 years]               

Look, do Muslims expect all of us to fast on Ramadan?  No!  Do Jews expect everybody to keep Kosher? No!  Do Mormons expect us all to wear magic underwear?  No!  Did Jesus say a word about gay people?  No!  

This was not about whether to solemnize a relationship in church or synagogue or mosque or temple.   It was not about who would officiate.  Nobody's religious rights have been infringed.  

This is about love and commitment.  About family rights and responsibilities.  About children being able to say their parents are married.   It's like citizenship for an immigrant.  Full stature in society.  I mean, who wants to be viewed as an alien?

“Their love is worth the same as your love,” Mr. Cuomo said [to lawmakers]. “Their partnership is worth the same as your partnership. And they are equal in your eyes to you. That is the driving issue.” 

Sure I can talk about all that in a spiritual way.  And I have.  On numerous occasions. 

Today is a day for rejoicing!  The Sabbath.  Even if I'm not Jewish.