 Never Enough!
According to the NRA, the Supreme Court, and the Republican Party there can never be enough guns in the hands of citizens! Over four hundred million guns, and still not enough! Clearly, this is NOT about guns: rather, it is about the "conservative" commitment, in absolute terms, to the "right" of unlimited profits... I suppose that we can all thank "god" that most of the Republican Party, the Supreme Court, and the NRA are "christian"... I mean, just imagine how fucked up we would be if they weren't! So, here's to the next bunch of kids who will be shot in some school in Anywhere, U.S.A... Can't you just here Jesus saying, "I was shot and you sold more guns!" (Matthew 25)
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 The world is pregnant with God. -- Angela of Foligno
And, according to Meister Eckhart, "From all eternity, God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing." I would think that these quotations would spark some sort of upheaval in your mind! Attitude, perspective, and intention are everything in the cultivation of a radically soulful life. If one adopts the mystic-insight that, indeed, the world is pregnant with God, then everything is pan-sacramental: a means of grace and wonder, and a meeting place of the soul with the Divine Consciousness... Every moment is a theophany: a showing of God. Every person and everything is a manifestation, a revelation, of Being and Love. This mystic-insight should compel a transformative rEvolution of consciousness and the "gentle" annihilation of the ego ("me, myself, and I" as the center of the universe")... As ego recedes, the divine nature of our soul-self (We and All are One), launches us into our sacred possibilities... If, in fact, the essence of God is birthing, then our daily perspective must likewise undergo a radical re-orientation. Our thoughts, words, and actions are sacred and are the primary means given to us to process-praxis Paradise upon this most precious blue Planet. By extension, all of our collective thoughts, words, and actions are as close to Paradise as we will ever be: in other words, everything now matters: everything hinges upon our renewed commitment to birth the Kind, the Just, and the Beautiful in all of our public policies and institutions... Every justification for the limitless expansion of predatory greed, exploitation, inequality, injustice, oppression, and violence is evidence of the seductive power of the Unholy Trinity (privilege, profits, and power)... In the delightful wonder of our divine pregnancy, we can choose to join together in the mystic-embrace of loving to give birth to Love Itself through the all of our everyday lives: with nothing any longer under the veil of some sort of sin or separation (dualism), everything is now Only One (non-dualism). Living the radical truth of becoming mothers of God (We are all meant to be mothers of God. -- Meister Eckhart), every step that we now take will be a lifting of this entire Planet onto the path of conscious evolution... We can choose to cultivate bliss, reverence, beauty, harmlessness, and kindness. Our mystic surrender and adoration is to the One Love Consciousness: the Oneness. Everything fits into the puzzle completed by active-compassion. Every old religious or political division and divide is bridged by the birthing of our intention to outdo Love in loving in a new, wild, and holy competition... Like that proposed by Jesus in his Beatitudes and Rumi in his poetry... this is the unleashed power of our possibilities!  Dorothy Day, Saint of the Gutter Beautiful, lived for nearly 50 years in various Catholic Worker Houses of Hospitality: and many times, in addition to peeling potatoes, protesting war and any number of injustices. Through it all, her most frequent companion was a copy of a "Breviary" -- a prayer book most often used by monastics... She was not, though, a crazed Catholic conservative in which the imitation of the priesthood was thought to be the "mark" of holiness. Rather, her life experiences compelled a daily centering, through the darkness of faith, a surrender to love and the oftentimes seemingly distant possibility of a Divine Presence... War in the headlines should elicit a similar response in our lives... how else can we truly live, hope, and even survive as human beings?  You are the Universe in ecstatic motion. -- Rumi
I can't drink. Nevertheless, don't you think this might be a good time to get drunk: and then maybe stay drunk for the rest of the year? Pausing, I of course know that beer was not an aid to Rumi's enlightenment or in his prescription for times of struggle and suffering... So... I remember a quote that I included in my book, Resplendent in Rags, it is from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise would appear in front of us in all its beauty... (Fr. Zossima) This is something different from getting drunk... "It suffices only to wish to understand it"... In words both ardently political and spiritual: this means to be woke! Yeah, you conservative nuts: get woke! Instead of recognizing the loving spiral of spirit and life weaving through and about everyone and everything, both leaders and us drift aimlessly in the inevitable grief of apparent separation: constructing systems of privilege, profits, and power that exist only to rape, exploit, and dominate: rendering the masses, and now the entire Planet, twisting in the winds of fear and hopelessness: easy prey for charlatans of religion and politics: who are interested only in getting their small share of the Unholy Trinity... This wokeness is not at all about becoming a "liberal". Liberals are just as much slumbering beauties as are conservatives. I frequently wear a button on my coat that boldly states: "Jesus was a Liberal"... I wear it hoping for a bit of provocation: no one has yet made a comment! What I want to say is this: "This is just a tease! I don't think that Jesus was a liberal at all! Rather, I do think that he was the most radical man ever! I mean, have you ever read the Sermon on the Mount, or Matthew 25, or his claim that the kingdom of heaven is within all of us! Man, that dude was through and through radical!" Like Lao Tzu and his Tao Te Ching. Like Mahatma Gandhi and nonviolence. Like Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker Soup Kitchens, Houses of Hospitality, and Farms. Radical. Radical with genuine wokeness. The Kingdom of Heaven is within us: the Way is spirit and life everywhere and within everything: there is no separation: this is philosophically called non-dualism. Instead of this and that, friend and enemy, me and you: there is, Only One, a Universe of ecstatic motion! We can, one minute from now, get woke! Jesus said and practiced the most wokeness imaginable: Love your neighbor exactly as you love yourself: who is your neighbor? Every single person and thing! Leave no one out or behind! Build the evidence of the Kingdom of Love right here, right now, on Planet Earth. Radical. Woke. |
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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