 "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." (Song of Songs 6: 3)
Policy proposals from candidates for public office are expected and necessary. But in our current condition of collective psychic fracture, that which we are in dire need of is a general -- and personal -- renewal of heart: without which, every word is inconsequential... But more, without a renewal of heart, every word is an invitation to increase every divide... How to "renew the heart"? I'll get to that, but first let me ask you, whom do you see in the image above? Your answer is, or is not, the pathway to the renewal of the heart... Every heart has a, if you will, a "technical function": it works in a vital union with the brain to keep the body alive, right? But did you know that the heart also has a "spiritual function"? Of course you did... On a very dear and personal level, each one of us "hungers" to give our heart away... and to receive in return, the heart of another, right? This yearning for the fulfillment of "romantic" love, for sexual union and delight, and for the comforts of "home", of "place", of "purpose", and of "being wanted" is the stuff of poetry, literature, and of every art. It fills the annals of film making as it fills our fantasies and day dreams... Romantic love is an important step in the development of the heart's "spiritual function", indeed, romantic love is integral to the deepest realms of spirituality... Without the experience of romantic love, it is nearly, though not impossible, to "sink" into the spiritual heart... The modern mystic, author, and priest Matthew Fox counsels us to "fall in love everyday"... Rev. Fox has, like mystics before him, experienced the absolute necessity of loving our way into the deepest realms of the heart: that is, in fact, the only way to get there... Loving is either deeply personal or it is just a vapid, pointless, mindless theory... sort of like what is passing for religion these days (perhaps for all days)... Now, back to the photograph. If you immediately see in it the face of the young Madonna and Her Son, then your heart is giving evidence of having moved into longing... This longing is the key to the door of the heart: that door only opens by means of the Key of Compassion. There is no other route into the heart besides that of an activated compassion... Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth ("Yeshua" is "Jesus" in his native language of Aramaic) clearly and concisely articulated this Key -- and instructed in its use... For I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in... Truly I tell you, inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me... So, there you have both the Key of Compassion and all that need initially be a policy proposal from a candidate for public office. 1) Adequate nutrition for every person on this precious blue Planet; 2) Adequate clean water for every person on this precious blue Planet; and 3) The welcomed safety of "home" for every person on this precious blue Planet. These most basic human needs are linked to every other human need -- and the needs of every human who will be alive seven generations from now... You can choose to be anxious about anything, or about anyone: that's pretty simple, right? You can be anxious about a gay man being elected President, or a black woman, or about an immigrant knocking on your door asking for safe refuge. You can also forget about Flint, Michigan, or children in cages, or whatever. Our minds our fantastic instruments useful for either blessing or cursing. But! But! But, if you want to entertain the better angels of your heart (you do, right?), then you simply have to be about the renewal of your heart! As already written, the door to the heart only opens by means of the Key of Compassion... After opening your heart, you need to intentionally cultivate compassion through falling -- deeper and deeper and deeper -- into loving... loving this person, loving that person, loving all the way into loving everyone and everything: why? Because you have been delightfully made in the Image and Likeness of the Divine Beloved Who is Always Love-Without-Limits... You can "consciously descend" into your heart through contemplative prayer... You can gaze upon an Icon of the Beloved and come to Identify as Oneness with the Beloved... When you have, finally, taken up "residence" in your heart, you will be home... The Beloved is There... And now go ahead and laugh yourself silly with the great revelation: so is everyone and everything else! You didn't know it, but your little-bitty heart holds within it the entire universe. How could it be otherwise? You are your beloved's and your beloved is yours... I am neither priest nor candidate for any political office. All that I am and have are the years of living-dying-living on the Chinatown Streets of Salinas... My heart has been shattered so often and deeply that my wife has wondered how it manages to keep on going... This is what matters, today and everyday, to dive again and again, into the heart: though it be broken many times over and just a leaking machine, loving awareness is the Home of the Beloved... and so one just sleeps and awakens into opportunities to keep the loving-flowing... that's it and that's everything...
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 "Tell me, O you whom my soul loves..."
Again and yet again, the Lover will turn to the "Song of Songs", until these sacred words become her own, in the self-abandonment of life in the tears of God... Again and yet again, the Lover will hear, from the Song of Songs, "The voice of my beloved! behold, he comes leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills"... in the moments of respite, from life in the tears of God... Life in the tears of God is not grief piled upon grief (although the "leaking" from the broken heart is definitely everyday). Rather, it is the slow, yet steady, transformation of the ways of loving... from possessive to codependent to romantic to subjective, and finally, to becoming love. (See the Introduction to Ralph Alan Dale's translation of the Tao Te Ching)... Baba Ram Dass powerfully explores this theme of becoming love in his spiritual classic Be Love Now... Becoming love does not require becoming a monk! You need not contemplate that particular vocation as the "only or best" means of advancing in contemplation or the experience of Oneness... But what is necessary, whether monk or person "in the world" is, in the final analysis, the very same thing, though the path differs... A monk might rise several times at night for prayer... a mom will certainly do the same as she nurses her baby... For both, it is all about becoming love. It is about remembering the importance to both intention and attention as central to spirituality and happiness... Hesychius of Jerusalem, sometime between 412 and 432 A.D, wrote to Theodulus, "Attention is unceasing silence of the heart..." and "Great care should be taken to preserve that which is precious..." (Excerpt from Writings From The Philokalia On The Prayer Of The Heart)... Whether monk, Mom, Dad, student, worker, executive, public servant, or whomever, "attention" and "great care" are essential for the cultivation of life in the tears of God... Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that "prayer is education"... Well, let me tell you, so is a Soup Kitchen, a marriage, a Board of Directors, a drug addict, a drunk, a banker, or a lawyer: no matter what you do or where you go, an education is waiting for you! The only question is whether or not you are taking your studies seriously! Attention and great care are the core work and study habits of both the intentional monk or Mom... Dostoevsky goes on to write further in The Brothers Karamazov: as to where this attention and great care will take the intentional monk or Mom: "Be not afraid of human sin, love man even in his state of sin, for this is already a likeness of divine love and is the highest love on this earth. Love all of God's creation, love the whole, and love each grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants, love every kind of thing. If you love every kind of thing, then everywhere God's mystery will reveal itself to you. Once this has been revealed to you, you will begin to understand it ever more deeply with each passing day. And finally you will be able to love the whole world with an all-encompassing universal love." Dorothy Day often said and wrote that Dostoevsky was her favorite author and The Brothers Karamazov her favorite book... More on life in the tears of God in the coming days... As a study-aid, you can order my book Resplendent In Rags by calling 1-715-531-3515 (although not this weekend... my daughter has my phone...)  Fr. Bede Griffiths
Okay. Sure. God is Love. Regardless of religion or denomination, we all want to believe that -- if there is a "God" -- than That Being is Love... Okay. Sure.... But, what if... What if God is not "just" Love, and instead, is the endless action of loving? Not "sort of", but exactly, like a Mother? There is a Sufi story that goes something like this (updated of course): It is night. Someone is walking down the sidewalk. He notices another man under a street lamp, on his hands and knees rummaging around on the ground... The first man asks, "Friend, have you lost something?" The other answers, "Yes. I have lost my keys. Would you mind helping me look for them?" So, the first man joins the other in his rummaging around on the ground... A number of minutes go by. The first man, in evident frustration asks the other, "Where did you lose your keys? They do not seen to be here." The other man replied, "I dropped my keys behind my house, but there was no light there. That's why I am looking here." Much of what passes for religion or spirituality is sort of like the "man under a street lamp, on his hands and knees rummaging around on the ground..." in the light that he could find... [And that is okay, sometimes it is the best that we can do.] But, what if your heart is hungering, yearning, and longing for something more: where do you then look? The answer is obvious, right? You look in the dark. You go into the secret places of your heart. You expose your trauma. You surrender your "shadow" self with all of its gift-full deceits, fears, and appetites for the safety of our various ego-delusions... And no, you do not get to throw any of it away! Just as you do not get to once again stuff it into a certain suitcase in the very back of your mind (a trick perfected by most of us men!) There is only one way forward... It is the last lesson taught by Fr. Bede Griffiths, as recorded by Andrew Harvey. "Then, quite suddenly... the inspiration came to surrender to the Mother. It was utterly unexpected; I heard a kind of inner voice say loudly, 'Surrender to the Mother,' and so, somehow, I really don't know how, I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had what I can only describe as an experience of being invaded and overwhelmed by love. Waves of love flowed into me... I called out... 'I'm being overwhelmed by love.' "What I see now is that this whole experience... of being overwhelmed by love and the consciousness that was born from it -- was one vast miraculous healing, a divinely orchestrated breakthrough into the dimension of the Divine Feminine..." [The Hope, A Guide to Sacred Activism, by Andrew Harvey] Finally, "the dark" is the "descent of our mind into our heart"... "accomplished" through the grit and grace of surrender: through the radical self-emptying of a daily breaking heart... in this emptying, as we begin to "leak out all over the place" through service and solidarity, in mercy and compassion, just then, there is that mystic-infilling that is the Mother birthing the Beloved in the cave of our heart... [Warning: there is no such thing as "once and done".] Life in the tears of God is a brand new way of looking / being in the world. Seriously: take a look at the image of the Little Brown Lady (Our Lady of Guadalupe)... and then surrender into your own birth as a new human. Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth, adored the Transcendent Being, but he didn't rest or stop there! He came to liberate the transcendent power of Love into Loving, so as to embody the wisdom and justice of the Divine Beloved and make it effective for the transformation of both person and world... [Do you think that God does not cry for our breaking hearts and for this breaking world? This is what it means to pray...and work...]  Dorothy Day, Saint of the Gutter Beautiful
It's Time To Dissent Dorothy Day is oftentimes held up as a "model" of what it means to be a "good Catholic": traditional, prayerful, and alive with an activated compassion. She is now, as often as not, also referred to as a "saint", however much she protested at the mere thought of someday being canonized. In the Catholic Worker community, opinions as to Dorothy's possible canonization vary (as one would expect)... Having "progressed" through thirty years of a Catholic Worker Soup Kitchen, a convert's enthusiastic faith, and any number of broken hearts, my outlook now mirrors my "in-look"... I have settled into being an "outsider", a "renegade", if you will... and no doubt not a few would consider me a heretic. Okay. Well, no. Okay! is much more like it! Perhaps there is no spiritual evolution in "heaven". Perhaps Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, St. Francis, Rumi, Abraham Heschel, and all the rest are, and will forever remain, exactly as they were while living / working / praying / and thinking while alive on this plane of existence... But, perhaps too, there is a continuing opening into the New Creation... As for me, I dissent to theologies -- however they be marketed as "traditional" -- that marginalize the female gender, that justify institutions and practices of "power over" rather than "power under", and that effectively fail to rEvolutionize the mass of faithful. The systems of religion continue to allow for violence as a solution to problems. A "plunderful" capitalism rules the world. And "Trumpism" is allowed to flourish in all its putrid corruption and body of lies: endorsed and supported by Christians. I dissent from the comfortable Christianity / Catholicism that refuses to finally acknowledge that much of what is in the Bible is a load of hoo-ey: for example, see Numbers 31: 9, 17, 18. I dissent from a Christianity / Catholicism that allows for the demonization of sacred sex and pleasure. I dissent from a Christianity / Catholicism that has institutionalized trauma, domination, and death... Because I dissent, I stand for a rEvolutionary renewal of what it means to accept / or believe / or simply admit to the possibility of a Divine -- Quantum -- Consciousness, a Divine Beloved still Sourcing and Creating and Sustaining and Loving... I actually believe that it is this stance which is traditional and the excuses and justifications are what is not. Reading both the mystics of old -- and more importantly -- the mystics of today is essential. People like Riane Eisler, Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, John Philip Newell, and James Hughes Reho point the way to a rEvolutionary renewal: a re-birthing of Yeshua the Poet of Nazareth for the 21st century and forward... The Christian / Catholic life is meant to be an inward journey that compels an opening of the heart into a Radiant Transformation and an opening of our hands into a Radical Compassion... opened hearts and opened hands with which to embrace all of creation and the entire human family in the blessed delight of loving...  What's Love Got To Do With It?
After walking with Rose of Sharon to school this morning, and while turning the corner on my way home, Tina Turner's What's Love Got To Do With It popped into mind... I could hear the tune and chuckled Where Did That Come From? But as my usual, I figure it came to mind so that I could take it into consideration, give it a rumination, and write the up-shot for your consideration in turn... So, here it is... What's love got to do with it? Simply: everything! Love is the hospital for the broken heart. In a world being shredded by violence, fear of "other" religions, and a raw fear of the "other" regardless of an evident common humanity, we are in dire need of individuals and who will take upon her / him self the servant mantle of becoming a living, breathing, hospital of hearts... Seriously, exactly like our Brother / Mother Jesus... What if, instead of emphasizing "right belief" through formal creeds and doctrines, early Christian leaders had instead emphasized identification with the life-example of the Master? What if baptism was by fire instead of water? What if fire was understood to be our steady transformation into Love, into loving? What if loving in action was the definition and hallmark of the Christian? And what if the "Holy Spirit" was experienced as the Living Breath of Jesus, reaching out to us through the practiced remembrance of his words? What if faith was experienced as our intimate identification with the Master? What if the hospital of our hearts meant that we lived as compassion givers in our families, our work places, our communities, our nations, and on into the entire world? How would everything change in our religions, our politics, our economics, and in our cultures if we all were to summon the courage to become compassion givers? Folks who work in hospitals and in hospices are considered care givers, and they certainly are! But what I am pondering is the absolute necessity of a complete social transformation: a gigantic leap into rEvolution! There is a word... what is it? Hmm, ah! Yes, it is kenosis. That's Greek, right? Well anyway, in terms of the Christian faith, it means a radical emptying of the ways in which we identify as separate from the Divine Beloved, so as to be filled with the fullness, the Wonder, the Mystery, of the Cosmic Christ Consciousness... This core spiritual rEvolution is the Way of St. Francis, and of all of the Saints and Elders in the Christian rEvolution. (I'll not say "Church", because we all know that that would be a lie)... (Unfortunately!)... There are a few "signs" that point to the possibility of transformation, and in no particular order: 1) Simplicity of life-style: what can't be shared or easily given away should not be possessed. 2) Prayer of the heart: words are good, but adoration, longing, and yearning are better. 3) Clarity of intention: every "division" is rooted in the necessity of lies, hence every "unity" is observable in truth. 4) Become a new revelation of the Master's love: this has radical implications for social justice, equality, care for Mother Earth, and peace. And, 5) Tenderness is the Face of God: letting tenderness become our very own face is to give birth to God in a world that is dying for love... So, What's Love Got To Do With It? Simply: everything! [One final note: while this rumination has been written in "Christian" terms, with minimal effort, it is easily translatable into any other world faith.]  My Precious!
Every fan of "The Lord of the Rings", movie and book, will recognize the "lost" person of "Gollum"... In many ways, are we not also "lost"? Are we not "lost" both as a collective humanity and as individual persons? Are we not tearing our world asunder through the adoration of the accumulation of great wealth? Are we not tearing our world asunder by our silly -- yet catastrophic -- religious games of "saved" versus "unsaved", "righteous" versus "unrighteous", and "us" versus "them"? Are we not tearing our world asunder by our justifications for endless war and ignoring the science of climate change? Do not the words of Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ring stunningly true, "Humanity is being taken to the point where it will have to choose between suicide or adoration"? Great and original thinkers as Rev. Matthew Fox and Andrew Harvey have pointed out that the root of our religious / cultural "criminality" lies in the theologies that would have us submit to the idea that we are not "gifts of original blessing"... That we do not -- automatically as human beings -- possess a "transcendental nature" and are meant to grow in spiritual wisdom... Fox and Harvey insist that we are not, fundamentally, refugees from original sin! That neither you nor I are the result of random "natural causes or historical effects" (however much we might be living under a web of theological machinations for power "over" rather than power "for our liberation"). Instead, that we, each one of us, have been marvelously made, always for some truly great end... The combination of spiritual humility and a certain "mystic" awareness compels a radical mindfulness -- at least on occasion. Here are the very potent and rEvolutionary words of Simone Weil: "We have been made by Love, for Love, to become Love." Or, as it is written in the Bhagavad Gita, "You are very much loved by Me." Or as Jesus himself said, "Love one another as I have loved you." Perhaps we cannot stop either the theologians or the spiritual bosses from insisting upon our sinful nature, but we can stop our belief that they know something that we don't! Love is who we are and the meaning and purpose of our lives! Being born a human being is to be born into an infinite possibility, an invisible radiance, and an irreversible reality: our essential nature is as "my precious"! It is the revelation of "namaste": the Divine in me adores the Divine in you! Everyday, we exist in the potential vivification of our humanity into "sublime lovers"! There is a "Quantum Consciousness" unfolding Itself in physical manifestation right before our eyes: It is the "PHI", the Divine Proportion, interweaving consciousness and matter into an Explicit Delight! And! And we have the potential, at every moment of our lives, to "change our minds" and to go from life as infantile egos, to becoming an adult blessing: and to live as gifts of love in our families, in our communities, and in the One Community of Humanity... living in such a way so as to a blessing upon those who will be alive seven generations from now! There is no better strategy for living, or for social change, then that of striving to become the world's greatest lover. Revelation is very precisely this. How can we claim to love our children if we do not bless them with a livable Planet? How can we claim any sort of religious faith if we are spiteful and hateful, prejudiced and bigoted, and unjust and violent? Doesn't it seem to you that this little blog just might be true? And that perhaps, perhaps the Universe and the Divine Beloved are screaming out with all the gusto and provable radiance that they can, just to awaken you into the utter delight of living as "My precious!"? And passing it on in your religion, in your politics, in your economics, and in your cultures...  Pope Francis is the enemy, at least according to Trump's former campaign advisor Steve Bannon and the anti-immigration "League Party" of Italy. And as reported in The Guardian, "Bannon has steadily been building opposition to Francis through his "Dignitatis Humanae Institute" whose honorary president is Cardinal Raymond Burke, the noted ultra-conservative...
You might be wondering as to why I would be wasting my time on Bannon and the "religious" Far Right? Honestly, so am I! Nevertheless, the "religious" Far Right simply galls me, whether it is those professing Catholicism, Protestant Evangelism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, or Whatever-ism... The refusal to relate their denial of the wisdom teachings of their Prophets and Saints to their reactionary and regressive political and religious opinions is simply stunning to me: as if, for example, Jesus could possibly be hateful towards a woman, a child, a refugee, or an immigrant: don't they remember the Story of the Woman At the Well, or the Parable of the Good Samaritan? Of course, to be "religious" as the ultra-conservative, requires a truly radical (all the way to the roots) forgetfulness. This is precisely how the Saudi or the Iranian leadership can ignore their Prophet and saints like Rumi, Hafiz, and Rabia and commit untold atrocities and uphold outrageous oppression... how Buddhists in Myanmar can slaughter Muslims... how Jews in Israel can, with the help of American dollars, construct an apartheid state... the list of Far Right "religious" justifications and hateful actions is nearly endless... But, of course, even in America the rise of Trumpism, Neo-Nazism, and a surge of racism, bigotry, and right-wing hate / violence is only too evident... And so, of course, Pope Francis is the enemy. There is no small irony in how the Far Right considers Francis a liberal, while folks such as myself see him as just "this side" of the continuing conservative regressive policies and "traditions" of the Catholic Church... when what we need is the practice of remembrance. The root of the Christian / Catholic faith is, supposedly, the Person of Yeshua bar Alaha. (Jesus the Son of God). Remembrance is to "dwell in the embrace" of the words of Jesus, is it not? Remembrance is to celebrate sacred pleasure: didn't Jesus honor a wedding by his presence and, at least for awhile, turn himself into a winemaker to keep the party going? Remembrance is to recall -- as an action -- how Jesus honored women; how he counseled simple living and the sharing of resources; how he urged compassion for all those who suffer; how he blessed an extravagant justice in his support of workers; and most importantly, how he insisted that we are all supposed to "love one another as I have loved you"... Faith is life: action for the vivification of love in every sphere of human life: personal, political, economic, and cultural... Ultimately, faith is neither "left" nor "right", instead, it is transformational... This is precisely why "faith" has to accept the inevitability of change. The insights offered to us by our ancestors in faith (every faith) are important, but at the very same time, they are as nothing for we are living now with our eyes, minds, and hearts pointing forward into new horizons. Yes! I love Francis and Clare of Assisi, Hildegard, Rumi, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Lal Ded, Hafiz, and countless other saints, thinkers, and activists from the past. But looking ahead, I read Matthew Fox, Andrew Harvey, bell hooks, Riane Eisler, Amit Goswami, Elif Shafak, Adam Bucko, Arundhati Roy, Alice Walker, and John Philip Newell from among many others. It does seem to me that the Far Right, regardless of particular faith, want us to live and think like that proverbial ostrich who looks around, is distressed by what is seen, and buries it's head in the sand, muttering all the while "I see nothing. I know nothing. I'll be okay if I do nothing." The mutterings of the ostrich is all you really need to know about the Far Right... perhaps they are so filled with self-loathing and hatred that they need to leave a dead planet in their wake... woe to our children if we keep electing them...  It is simply not true, as the old saying goes, "There, but for the grace of God, I go". No. You are already there!
Your sister, your brother, is your Sacred Other! This essential, dear, and radical truth is augmented by another: it is possible to, perhaps even one minute from now, to Kiss the Face of God! There are two ways of making this discovery for yourself. The first, is to go, run!, on a thirty, sixty, or ninety day retreat... Somewhere far from your comfortable life. Take with you only two pages from the Gospels: copy them out by longhand, pen to paper. Copy Matthew 5: 1 - 11; and Matthew 25: 31 - 46. Carefully fold these words and place them in the pocket of your shirt, the one closest to your heart. Let them be your meditation, your concentration, your self-conversation, and your Sacred Acceptance of the Sweet Radical Word of God. Walk. Sit. Cook. Fast. Pray. Eat these words. Trust. You will encounter the naked, the compassionate, Face of God, awaiting your kiss... The second way of making this discovery for yourself is this: go, run!, to a Soup Kitchen near to where you live: volunteer. Do not seek to "improve" anyone. Do not seek to "convert" anyone. Forget everything you were ever told about "sin". Do not recommend a "recovery program" to anyone. Chop potatoes. Wash the dishes. Shake hands of guests. Smile. Listen. Listen is the most important thing that you can do... and then like an oops! or a boo! ... it will happen: someone, perhaps a toothless old lady, perhaps even a drug dealer, will look at you and you will have your eyes opened! There, right there before you, will be standing one who will reveal to you the Face of God... you will recognize Her... you will, for the very first time, you will fall in love with the Divine Beloved, "hidden" as it were, in the Sacred Face of your sister, your brother... You will know, you will know all the down into the well-springs of your DNA, that you have been granted entry into the Tears of God, and that it is from within those tears, that you will be allowed to Kiss the Face of God... [Here's a little secret, there are nearly an infinite number of ways to Kiss the Face of God: you can go to a forest that is being clear-cut, and sit, and listen to the cry of the trees. You can go to a river that is so polluted that you wouldn't dare to drink the water, and sit, and listen to the cry of the river. You can go to a Neo-Nazi demonstration, and sit, and listen to the wailing of history. You can go to a hospital emergency room, and sit, and listen to the cry of the children. Here's the thing: you, I, we are alive for the purpose of learning all of the how's and why's of love. We are here, for but a brief space of time, to learn that it is precisely (and only) in becoming a living-compassion and agent of justice, that we will discovery who we are, and more importantly, who "they" are!] We are never so free, never so noble, as when we Kiss the Face of God... from within the Tears of God... "We have been made by Love, for Love, to become Love." -- Simone Weil  Contemplation and Action, or rather, the living union of the two in a single human life is a vital necessity if this precious blue Planet is going to be saved as home for humanity with a regenerative bio-diversity. Without the commitment of individuals to grow into a union of C & A, how can we expect for communities to do so?
A sincere spiritual practitioner will not be content with "empty form", but rather, she will hunger for a genuine spiritual intimacy that holds the promise of transformation. Dorothy Day had a steady diet of the Psalms, and as she liked to add, of coffee as well. The Psalms can be a core spiritual practice, as contemplatives Abraham Heschel, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths affirmed. Through the psalms they were able to surrender their "thinking minds" for the vast, naked, spiritual field of pure contemplative grace... For both the activist and the contemplative, in the Christian tradition, hunger and surrender are the "royal road" leading to identification with the Universal or Cosmic Christ... Another intimate practice for the contemplative activist is the "root" meditation on the Beatitudes of Yeshua. Nowhere else does the Poetry of the Master become so vital. The studies and versions by Neil Douglas-Klotz in his books Prayers of the Cosmos and Blessings of the Cosmos should be, as a matter of course, a "main dish" in the contemplative "diet". Another contemplative activist, Paramahansa Yogananda taught the "vibrational essence" of the Universe. As modern quantum physics points out, all of that which we perceive as "matter" is "hinged" upon the vibrations of atoms, which are themselves "hinged" upon the "nothingness" of the "consciousness of Light"... In other words, through and through, everything which is, is penetrated by the, what shall I say? the Divine Bliss of Energy? Every single human being is fallible. We all have an abundance of limitations. Not one of us ever really approaches "perfection"... And when it comes to the limitations of language and translations from "this" to "that", the so-called original intent by the speaker or writer, perhaps from hundreds if not thousands of years ago, is quite difficult to be sure of -- especially without the annihilation of contemplative practice and experience. But all of the mystics of the world religions agree that the height, depth, and breadth, of Divine Revelation is encompassed by the challenge of "Love the Holy One with the Desire of your every Breath and love your neighbor as your Sacred Other"... The 21st century mystic-activist must center his daily life in the yearning for intimate union with the Beloved, and from that yearning, serve others in solidarity: such is the path that will lead to the transformation of this precious Blue Planet... and a meaningful life besides!  Is there anything more "traditional" than the oppression of women and girls? Is there -- seemingly -- anything more "traditional" than the sexual exploitation of children and youth by priests in the Catholic Church? Is there anything more "traditional" than the raping of the Earth by a predatory capitalism?
Justifications of "tradition" cover the humungous ass of the Unholy Trinity of the Three P's: Privilege, Profit, and Power: World Without End, Amen... Whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic, the justifications of and for "tradition" are, at their core, exercises in the practice of "power over" as opposed to the "power that lifts up": of people and of the Earth itself. The "power that lifts up", as exemplified by Yeshua (Jesus) the Poet of Nazareth, St. Francis of Assisi, Rumi the Ecstatic, Martin Luther King, Jr. Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks, Wangari Matthai, and Dorothy Day (from among many others), is the liberation of the people into their divine possibilities. The recognition of these "divine possibilities" is all the difference in the world! Patriarchy / Oligarchy / and the Religious Theologies that require the separation of people from the Divine Beloved, from the Earth, and from one another are the root "traditions" cultivated by the Unholy Trinity. These "traditions" manifest in such ideas and practices as "original sin", the shaming of the female, the denunciation of sexual pleasure, the justifications for violence (greed, war, racism, capital punishment, human trafficking, sexual slavery, etc.), and the rape of the Earth for endless and mindless profit. Likewise, "little traditions" like white supremacy, nationalism, corporatism, unlimited gun rights, union busting, and mind-manipulation through a barrage of public lying all serve the Unholy Trinity. On the "other side of things", there is all that actually makes the the world go round and life still worth living! In spite of all the manifesting greed and violence, most people on this precious blue Planet want, and do, live in peace. Most of us are more than willing to both respect and share with our neighbors. We practice empathy and compassion as "just" our daily way of life: no big deal. We reverence our children. We really want to serve and protect this planet. We enjoy a mutuality in our sexual practices. We delight in pleasure and the simple gifts of life. AND we would construct a paradise all across this planet and borders if the Unholy Trinity would just shut up and get out of our way! We might practice Islam: but we do so in the ecstatic spirit of one such as Rumi. We might practice Judaism: but we do so in the generous spirit of one such as Abraham Heschel. We might practice Christianity: but we do so in the contemplative spirit of one such as Bede Griffiths. The religions of the world are each in a different way very much alike. We -- if left alone by the power-mad and pleasure-haters -- actually do believe that loving one's neighbor and the Holy One is the summation of all the Law and Prophets: with very practical implications: we don't steal (organize greed), we don't lie (like the White House), and we don't kill (like a tin-horn dictator or war profiteer). We practice compassion and build social justice and equality for all! We erase the boundaries of inequality between men and women and minorities! AND we envision -- not only "Green New Deals" -- but a Paradise of Promise on this Planet that includes everyone and is focused on a Good and Beautiful life for those alive seven generations from now! This is the "tradition" that really matters! |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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