talks, notes, and travelogues

the worlds are reconciled

2011-12-25T07:24:00.000-08:00

But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high.
The stars shall bend their voices
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.
(Richard Wilbur)

I’ve been trying to translate this beautiful poem by Richard Wilbur called “A Christmas Hymn” into Italian recently for the libretto of these upcoming concerts in Italy. I consulted an Italian woman who is a translator and an Italian teacher first got a hold of it and when it came back the last lines read “per la cui discesa tra noi il mondo avrà pace”––which to my mind means, “the world will have peace,” instead of “the worlds are reconciled.” So I sent it off to one of our Italian confreres, and I said, “Shouldn’t this really be ‘…i mondi sono riconciliati’” literally, “the worlds are reconciled.” He wrote back, “…il mondo avrà pace––the world will have peace.” Now, sometimes I ask questions for which I already know the answer I want, and I just keep asking until I get that answer. So I called our confrere, Fr. Thomas, in Berkeley who is an expert in translating and many other things, and I laid my dilemma out to him. And he launched into a brilliant argument about biblical exegesis, Hindu Tantra, philology and the secularization of the Italian language among other things, until I finally, impatiently, interrupted and said, “So what should the translation be?!” And he said, “…i mondi sono riconciliati.” Ah! Finally! So I asked him, “Why couldn’t they just say that?” And he answered something like, “Because they, like most people, have no concept for this. We don’t even know what it means for the ‘worlds to be reconciled,’ and so we resort to something they do understand––‘the world will have peace.’”

Now that might be a little harsh on the other translators, but it got me thinking about how bland, even generic, this message of peace can be for us at Christmas time, because we don’t have any categories for the real thing. The peaceful images of a newborn baby and snowfall and domesticated animals conjure up all kinds of tranquil images that are such a balm in a tumultuous world and our crazy lives. But the peace we are speaking about, and the peace that the angels thunder about from heaven in the story from the Gospel of Luke––a heavenly host saying ‘Glory to God and peace on earth’!!––is of a whole different order. It is not a peace that can be brought about by any kind of social order or economic system, capitalism or democracy any more than socialism. Anything any of these could bring about would be fragile at best until the next stronger somebody comes along and breaks through the shields and armor of self-defense. No, the peace we are speaking about here can only come about from the worlds being reconciled.

And what worlds are we talking about? Simply put, it’s realms of heaven and earth, one might say the spiritual and the material––what Hinduism calls Purusha and prakriti––consciousness and matter, and Buddhism calls samsara and nirvana. We believe that in this child these are reconciled. We hear so much bridal imagery in the last days of Advent, and rightly so, because the bridegroom is coming to consummate the marriage with the bride. The bridegroom is the Divine, and the bride is the whole created universe. And this child is the result of that procreative love.

People stumble all the time over the uniqueness of Christ, the necessity of Jesus, and the idea of redemption coming from Jesus Christ. Maybe we don’t need to spend a whole lot of time trying to prove that––it’s like a sacrament, only seen through the eyes of faith. But if there’s nothing else we claim, I think we should stick to this: that something unique happens in this person that makes him not just a person, but an event. It’s the high point in our evolution as a race, what we were/are meant to be all along. And the event is that in this child, we believe the worlds are reconciled. St Paul’s clearest cleanest description of Christology in the letter to the Colossians: in him the fullness of the godhead dwells bodily. But this child is also like yeast in the dough––the whole batch gets leavened by that fullness. This child is like salt in the earth––everything is flavored by it. And he will also be like the seed that falls into the ground and dies, and so will yield a rich harvest. And the harvest of course is what St Paul adds right after he speaks about Jesus––that you may come to fullness in him. That we may become yeast in the dough, salt for the earth, seeds that fall into the ground and die.

According to me, that's our redemption. We learn that our very bodies and this world are the place it happens, not something to be “cast off like a banana peel.” If this whole story is true, then not only are our bodies vehicles and instruments, but the events of his life will show us that it is those very bodies that get transformed, in the transfiguration, the resurrection, in the ascension. That’s how we are redeemed. We get ourselves back––that which we thought we had to leave behind to pursue holiness––but we get them back divinized, that we may come to fullness through him, in him, and with him. The worlds are reconciled! And with us, all of creation, Paul tells us, that has been groaning and in agony while we have awaited this redemption of our bodies. Everything is holy now. The worlds have been reconciled. Samsara is nirvana; the marriage of Purusha and prakriti has not ended in divorce: instead it is consummated.

This is the real peace that the angels are shouting about. The Hebrew notion of shalom, like salaam in Arabic, is not simply the absence of war or violence. It means a fullness, a wholeness, a right relationship with God, a reconciliation, a relationship that can only come about when the worlds are reconciled.

The other thing about this line in that Wilbur poem that strikes me is its tense: not that the worlds were reconciled; not the worlds have been reconciled; not the worlds will be reconciled––the worlds are reconciled. This is something real and active and already accomplished, but something that is yet to be realized––because we are not aware of it; it is not yet real for us. And this feast makes us want to realize it––that the worlds are reconciled.

There was one other phrase I was trying to translate that had a similar problem. It was from the song “Compassionate and Wise,” Heng Sure’s version of the Buddhist Metta Sutta: “…because our hearts are one / this world of pain turns into paradise” it says in English. And again both of the Italians sent it back saying, “Se i nostri cuori diventano uno,” which to my mind means “If our hearts become one.” And again I asked Thomas, “Can this not be expressed in Italian? I would have thought you could say it literally––Poichè i nostri cuori sono uno.” Again he said, “Of course you can say that in Italian, but we most of us have no categories for this concept either.” Because our hearts are one, already one in some marvelous way when the worlds are reconciled. This is not just a Buddhist concept! When we gaze at this child in whom the worlds are reconciled we see all of humanity. Just as we say that the resurrection and ascension are a triumph for all flesh, so too this incarnation is a triumph for humanity, because we are one body. St Augustine taught in one of his sermons:

All human beings are one human being in Christ, and the unity of the Christians constitutes but one human being. And this human being is all human beings, all humans are this human; for all are one, since Christ is one.

This too is the reconciliation. In this one human being we are all one human being. What would it mean to realize this?! That all human beings are meant to share the fullness––grace upon grace, that all human beings are meant to share in the divinity of Christ who came to share in our humanity, meant to participate in the divine nature. This is something that needs to be realized, that we need to become aware of, and in becoming aware of it, it becomes real: because our hearts are one. As the Buddhists teach, if we were to attain this wisdom it would give birth to great compassion. If we were to realize this, this world of pain would indeed turn into paradise.

What has happened in this child? The worlds are reconciled! Our hearts are one––in Christ all people are one person. This Christmas may we realize this––may we become aware of it in a new way so as to make it real in our lives, and in our world. Then we would know and bring about the peace––the real peace––that the angels are thundering about.

what are you waiting for?

2011-11-29T16:11:00.000-08:00

We are waiting for peace to break out
we are waiting for flowers to bloom
we are waiting for the moon to come
from behind the clouds of war
We are waiting for the light
We are waiting
and as we wait we sing songs of celebration
We are waiting
and as we wait we hold out our hands in love and friendship…
…and as we wait we dance: we dance with the cold east wind
and the creaking singing branches of giant firs
we dance with the devils
of dust and the angels of clouds
We are waiting
and as we wait we are learning the language
of burning roses and sunflowers slowly turning
toward the sun…
(Carlos Reyes)

I’ve been carrying that above poem around with me for a couple of years now. In our tradition we are beginning the season of Advent, a time of waiting, and this poem seemed particularly salient for that. It’s from a collection called “Poets Against the War.” What really strikes me about it is the “while we wait” part. It reminded me of the words we say after the Our Father at Mass: “…as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ.” But in this poem, while we wait we are doing something. It’s an active waiting; there’s motion in our passivity. That made me ask myself this question and I pose it to you too: What are we waiting for? You could ask that question in two ways, first of all as a real interrogative: it’s good for us to define what exactly it is that we are really waiting for in Advent, to remind ourselves again. And the question could be asked kind of rhetorically: “Well, what are you waiting for?” In other words, “Get going!”

A couple of anecdotes came to my mind concerning the beginning of Advent. (I’ve written about them in previous postings.) First I was remembering how when we were at Sabbath service in Jerusalem, and as the service was beginning the whole congregation turned to the door and sang this song (in Hebrew):

To southward I set the mystical candelabrum,
I make room in the north for the table with loaves...
Let the Shekinah be surrounded by six Sabbath loaves
connected on every side with the Heavenly Sanctuary.
Weakened and cast out the impure powers, the menacing demons
are now in fetters.

Rabbi Paula, who was one of the leaders of the pilgrimage, was so excited because this was a song that she had taught her congregants as well. And then this same song came up again a few days later when we were in the town of Zefat in northern Israel. Many of the Sephardic Jews settled there after Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain in the 15th century, and they brought with them the teaching of Jewish mysticism––the kaballah, especially the teachings of this one man named Isaac Luria. It is this very same Isaac Luria who had composed the song that we had sung the last Sabbath. It’s a song welcoming the Sabbath, but the Sabbath is welcomed as a bride, because she is also representative of God’s shekinah–God’s power. Our tour guide took us to a steep side of the hill overlooking the valley where Isaac Luria’s house was, and told us that every Sabbath people face the direction of that house and sing this song, welcoming the Sabbath as a bride, welcoming the power of God’s shekinah. Rabbi Paula was all excited again and explained to us that is why we all faced that certain direction at the synagogue in Jerusalem––that everyone in Israel, whether they know why or not––sings this song facing Zefat and the place where they believe the Sabbath comes from each week.

There was one other Sabbath custom too that we experienced that very day in Zefat. I was walking down this narrow street that has artisans, artists and craft shops on either side, when suddenly this old man approached me from one of the shops and started speaking to me in Hebrew. When it became clear that I didn’t understand Hebrew he asked me in English if I wanted him to tie the tefillin on my arm. When I looked confused he asked me, “Are you a Jew?” I said no and he said, “Oh, okay,” and proceeded to show me some other things in his store. A little while later two other, younger men approached me and again asked me the same thing, first in Hebrew (I assume that’s what they were asking me) and then in English. This time I said right away, “Sorry, I’m not Jewish.” I think he thought I was actually apologizing because he said, “Oh, that’s alright” and then handed me a booklet about the coming of the Messiah. I was confused about the whole thing so I asked one of our Jewish friends afterward what this was all about. He told me that it was common for people to ask you if you want them to tie the tefillin for you before Sabbath. He said the first guy was probably trying to sell me a set (that’s why he brought me into the store to look at other things afterward), but the second guy was preparing for the coming of the Messiah. The belief among some is that if they could get every Jew to observe the Sabbath faithfully, it would hasten the coming of the Messiah. They’re not just waiting for the Messiah––they’re hastening his coming.

There was one other thing that got mentioned in this regard, and that’s the influx of evangelical Christian money into Israel and Palestine. Some Christians believe that the Second Coming of Christ can’t happen until the Jews totally occupy all of Palestine again, and so they are pumping money into the settlements that Orthodox Jews are building in the disputed territories, the occupied territories––whatever you want to call them––the land that the Palestinians hope to have as their state. In this way these Jews and Christians hope to have more “facts on the ground,” as they are called, so that the Palestinians will leave, and then when the Jews have all the land again it will bring about the second coming of Christ. Of course what everyone notes is so strange about that is for the Christians this would mean that all the Jews would convert to Christianity or be killed in the final battle, but that doesn’t stop the Israelis from accepting the money; even though they have different ends they have the same proximate goal. Apparently also certain evangelical Christians are working with some Jews to try to breed the red heifer that is necessary in order to build the Third Temple, which they think in turn would hasten the second coming of Christ. (I assume would also mean the destruction of the Muslim holy sites already on the haram al sharif–the Temple Mound?)

What I was so impressed with about all this is how industrious these folks are. They are waiting, but they are not waiting. And there is this sort of mixed message in Advent for us too. Even the opening prayer at Mass for the first Sunday of Advent has got that tension in it; we pray that God would Grant us the resolve to run forth to meet the Christ with righteous deeds––so that we may be worthy to possess the heavenly Kingdom. We aren’t simply waiting to greet Christ: we are preparing for it with righteous deeds. We aren’t simply waiting to possess the heavenly kingdom: while we wait we are actively seeking to be worthy.

So I ask the question again: what are we waiting for? We’re waiting for the coming of Christ. So, if that’s what we’re waiting for, what are we waiting for? What are we doing to bring this about? How are we going out to meet the Christ like the Jews welcome the shekinah each Sabbath? We’re waiting for the coming of Christ, and while we wait, we are doing righteous deeds. What are we waiting for? What are we doing to be worthy of this coming or, as St Therese of Avila would say, what are we doing to make pleasant shelter for Jesus to dwell––while we wait…? We pray several times every day, “Thy kingdom come!” Well, what are we waiting for? “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!” God’s kingdom comes every time the Holy Spirit is ruling over our hearts, every time God’s will is done in me. We pray that we may come to share the divinity of Christ who came to share in our humanity. What are we waiting for? Why don’t we share this divinity of Christ that is offered to us? We hear in Scriptures that we are meant to be participants in the divine nature. What are we waiting for? Why aren’t we participating?

Even more important than facing the direction of Zefat, more important than tying the tefillin and observing the Sabbath, as beautiful as those traditions are, and certainly more important than breeding a red heifer or human rights violations in the name of a dubious interpretation of biblical prophecy, is preparing the wilderness of our hearts. I wish that we could be as industrious about preparing for the coming of Christ in our hearts as these folks are about the coming of the Messiah or the second coming of Christ in time and space. Concentrating on a physical place, concentrating on some kind of definitive break in history or, I think Jesus would tell us, too much concentration on any of the external things is nowhere near as important as preparing our hearts, preparing this house––the house of our very being. And that coming of Christ could take place at any moment, in any place––at evening or midnight or at cockcrow, with the snap of a twig in the forest, like a thief in the night, between your first and second cup of tea in the morning. And while we wait––the words from Matthew’s Gospel some weeks ago––we are “sober and alert.” The images that we use for meditation all come to mind: as the Buddhists say, we pursue enlightenment sitting on the meditation cushion as if our hair were on fire. This waiting is not just a passive thing. We sit in prayer like a cat before a mouse hole––perfectly poised and perfectly ready to pounce at any moment. And––while we wait––we are feeding the poor, clothing the naked, not oppressing the alien, we’re caring for the earth; and while we wait we are kind to each other and honest, while we wait we are doing God’s will, doing the work of God’s kingdom. When we do those things, when we live that way, we are actively bringing about the reign of God, in our hearts and in our world.

So, while we wait in joyful hope, let’s pray once again this Advent season that we would have the resolve to run forth to meet the Christ with righteous deeds, with ready hearts, so that we may be worthy to possess and embody the reign of God.

thou mayest

2011-11-15T16:41:00.000-08:00

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver

I tend to see morality in three stages. First of all there are the Thou Shalt Nots, things that we should not do. I think that we tend to think of morality mostly in terms of them, the Thou-Shalt-Nots. In ancient times, this was only considered the first stage of the spiritual life, the purgative stage of ridding ourselves of bad behaviors. But then there are the Thou Shalls, the things that we should or must do. It's like the yamas and niyamas of Yoga. We start out with the avoidances or restrictions and then move on to the observances. In the Ten Commandments, for instance, there are eight Thou-Shall-Nots and two Thou-Shalls. The Jewish tradition expands them into a system of 613 rules or mitzvot to obey, some positive and some negative, many of them dietary and health codes, purity laws and liturgical regulations. Jesus comes along and narrows them all down to two, and they are both positive: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your soul, and then he adds a second that is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus also emphasizes that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is more important than all those other dietary and health codes, purity laws and liturgical regulations. The ancient Christian writers thought that the surest sign of right relationship with God was charity, agape. And this is what we heard in our first lesson last Sunday from the Book of Proverbs 31. It seemed like it was addressed just to women and wives, but I think that it is equally applicable to anyone: even more important than "deceptive charm and fleeting beauty," and equally important to one’s work being done well are "reaching out hands to the poor, extending arms to the needy." Our circle has to open first of all to include someone beyond ourselves––our families and our friends; and then it needs to open up more and more ‘til the circle of our love and the range of our compassion embrace all we meet. I can say with some authority, especially after this trip to the Holy Land, that I have encountered people in every religious tradition who are outwardly the most religiously observant as well as ardent in protecting their little circle of family and co-religionists, and yet act with great injustice and prejudice toward the poor and the downtrodden, especially people outside of their own tradition or race. This is what the prophets of Israel railed against, and this is what Jesus addresses over and over again.

But then we heard that great parable last week of the master who gave his servants five and two and one talent from the Gospel of Matthew too. Remember it? The one with five made five more, the one with two made two more, but the one with one buried it, which infuriated the master upon his return. And he tossed this wicked lazy servant out into the darkness where there was “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” That parable is suggesting that there is something even beyond what we must and must not do––there are things that we can or may do. I got this idea from a friend of mine who recently told me about this theme in John Steinbeck’s novel “East of Eden.” Steinbeck centers around the Hebrew word timshel as found in the story of Cain and Abel, when God tells Cain that he mayest avoid evil, that he has the power and ability to avoid evil. Steinbeck, through the character Lee, says that this is what makes us great; this is what gives us the stature of gods, that even in our weakness and our filth and our sin, we still have great choice. We can choose our course and fight through and win. We have a marvelous capacity for choice. But I think that that Thou mayest extends even beyond the ability to choose between good and evil. Jesus in this parable isn’t telling us what things to avoid out of a fear, nor is he talking about the bare minimum needed to get by out of moral obligation. He is pointing us to the things we perhaps shouldn’t have avoided out of a sense of fear’ Jesus is pointing toward the can and the could and the mayest.

We learn in the spiritual life that discernment isn’t just a choice between good and evil; it’s a choice for the greatest good, toward the fullness. St Ignatius in his process of discernment is always urging his followers to find the summum bonum, the greatest good. I have come that they may have life, and have it to the fullest, Jesus says. This is an important movement in us, a moment of spiritual maturity. St John calls it the movement from fear to love. I’m suggesting it’s a shift from the end to the fullness. The end of our life is for our life to be full, filled ultimately with the very fullness of God. And I think this is what this parable us pointing to. God has also given us this marvelous capacity for freedom and co-creativity. God has given us this immense wellspring of life-giving water that is meant to well up from out of our hearts. God has given us the opportunity to be participants in divinity, St Peter says.

There is something more––beyond the shalls and shalt nots––for our lives to be full. We need to choose, and we need to choose out of our strength, not just act out of our fear. Make no mistake about it: that choice is a frightening thing, because when we choose to stand on the courage of our own convictions we have no one else to blame. The third servant in the parable avoided blatant evil and he even did something positive in conserving the money by burying it in the ground. But he didn’t take the risk of courage and creativity. I think that if he had said to his master, “I took a risk on something with your money and lost it all,” the master would still have promoted him to a higher position in the household. The crime wasn’t that he didn’t make any more money. The crime was that he didn’t even try, because he crouched down in fear. I was thinking of that Nickel Creek song that I like so much:

You’re staring down the stars, jealous of the moon,
and you wish you could fly.
Just staying where you are, there’s nothing you can do
if you’re too scared to try.

As Nelson Mandela reminds us, our “playing small does not serve the world… We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us…” We can, we could, we may do great things. That's what gives God glory.

So this all made me take a moment to take stock of my life. Have I been working to rid myself of those things that are harmful to me, that are blatantly objectively wrong? Have I been doing those things I ought to do, which I should do, to fulfill not just the minimum obligations of the law, but the obligations of charity as well? But further than that, am I taking the risks, am I walking on the waters of trust and adventure, and calling myself to a fullness of life, of being all I can be for the sake of the world, for the sake of building the kingdom of heaven, for the greatest glory of God?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

the return of the shekinah

2011-11-08T05:23:00.000-08:00

To southward I set the mystical candelabrum,
I make room in the north for the table with loaves...
Let the Shekinah be surrounded by six Sabbath loaves
connected on every side with the Heavenly Sanctuary.
Weakened and cast out
the impure powers, the menacing demons
are now in fetters.
(Sabbath hymn of Isaac Luria)

7 nov, 2011, ben gurion airport, tel aviv

The final moments here in Israel could have gone very badly. There is supposed to be a general labor strike starting this morning at 6 o'clock which will close Ben Gurion airport down at 8. I am leaving at 7:20, inshallah! Just in time. A few folks stayed behind to fly to Jordan today to tour Petra, but their flight already got cancelled so they are having to reshuffle. I was already dreaming up a contingency plan, what I might do if I got stuck in Israel and all my connecting flights home got cancelled... It would have been interesting.

These last days have been very relaxed. Morgie took us way back up north on Friday before shabat and before heading to Tel Aviv. It is considered to be the center of Jewish mysticism in Israel--many students and teachers of kabbalah--and also an artist colony filled with Orthodox hippies, as one of our Jewish friends described them. I was also told by a reliable source that, to my surprise, in spite of the mystics, artists and hippies it's also a very conservative town, some of the most ardent Zionists. We first had a wonderful visit with an American born artist named David Friedman. As we walked into his studio space I pointed to a copy of one of his paintings that was on display at the entryway and said, "That reminds me a little of Peter Max." Sure enough, he told us at the beginning of his presentation that he was inspired early on by psychedelic art and album covers. If some elements of that style remain, he has also evolved a long way. He himself is a serious student of kabbalah and makes great use of its symbolic language, numbers and images. His presentation about his art was just as much a spiritual teaching about the unity of the Divine.

I don't know if I ever saw Morgie as reverent about anything else on this tour as she was about Zefat, and especially when she talked about the Kaballah tradition that grew up in this area. It mostly centers around a man named Isaac Luria. After Jews got expelled from Spain in the 15th century by Columbus' patrons in Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, many of them settled in Zefad around Luria, who developed a certain mysticism based on the experience of exile. The idea was that God had actually gone into exile, God had "contracted," as it were, to make room for the created world. And the Shekinah, the power of God who is visioned as feminine, the bride (I need to look up if there is any relation between this word and the Sanskrit shakti, also feminine), had also been separated from the Godhead. And now there were divine sparks scattered all around and imprisoned, as it were, in matter. So there is a displacement at the heart of Being itself, and nothing could be in its right place. The exile of the Jews then stood as a symbol of a kind of cosmic homelessness of both God and humanity. But by faithful adherence to the Torah and careful observance of the Sabbath, Jews could end the exile of the Shekinah. Isaac Luria drew on this experience to teach about the primal unity that had existed before the beginning of time, a unity that could be brought about again, even in one's own body. By the way, this is also the symbol of Rachel's Tomb, God's Shekinah in exile. Some of Luria's disciples used to perform a Rite of Rachel, in which they would get up at midnight and rub their face in the dust, weeping. This would be followed in the early hours of the morning by the Rite of Leah, in which one would recite a passage about the Shekinah's return and union with the Godhead until one could feel her presence in every part of the body.

Morgie told us about the origins of some of the other more common Sabbath rituals that had their origin here in Zefad too, many of them very sexual in their imagery. )Rabbi Paula was barely keeping herself contained as Morgie was talking, because these are the very rituals she has taught her congregants and us, to some extent, on this trip.) The Shekinah and the Sabbath became joined and on Friday afternoons, people would dress in white and process out to the field outside the city to greet the Sabbath-Shekinah, the bride of God, and escort her back to their homes. Every home was prepared like a temple, with bread and wine, candles. And there was a song that accompanied this, composed by Luria himself, the same song that Paula had us all sing both Sabbaths we spent together. Paula reminded us too how when we were at the synagogue with Morgie in Jerusalem two weeks ago, even then we had faced the door. This song is always done facing toward Zefat, from where the bride will come. For one day each week, everything is back in its proper place, a little sanctuary of time, everything back in right relationship. Karen Armstrong adds in her description of it that this Friday night ritual also looks forward to that final return to the Source of Being. We stood out at a spot that was right above where the Jews did their mikvah (ritual baths) and from where we could see the distant hill where Isaac Luria lived.

Morgie took us on a good tour of the rest of the village, sharing stories all the way. "Anything can happen in Zefat," she kept saying as she regaled us with two or three different versions of various events in the history of the town. She pointed out to us a town in the distance that was the home of a great rabbi, and explained to us various songs and prayers that originated there in that region; she led us to two Sephardic synagogues, wonderfully colorful and busy in their interior design, one of which was miraculously actually lifted from its original home in Spain and transported here to Israel. (Anything can happen in Zefat!) She also gave us a tour of the candle factory and introduced us to her favorite Yemeni food shop, the proprietor-cook silent behind his grill wearing his distinctive black and white Yemeni kippa over his dark eyes and jet black side curls, for all the world a Jewish yogi who would not have looked out of place in Rishikesh, incense burning and very hip world music playing in the background. There was a long narrow cobbled street chock full of shops, many of them artist studios or purveyors of fine tchotchkes. Twice I got asked (at first in Hebrew) if I wanted to have the teffilin tied on my hand, once by an old man and once by a young one. When I showed my confusion, they both asked if I was Jewish. When I said no, I was dismissed, not unkindly. I asked Ariyeh later what that was about and he explained to me that they would then either try to get you to by a set of tefillin from them, or try to "evangelize" you toward being a more observant Jew, especially as Sabbath was approaching. Indeed, the older man gave me a tract about the coming Messiah and the signs that would accompany it. I slipped away with Ariyeh and had a scrumptious vegan meal at the kiosk of another American born Jew, this time a woman. We were pretty high in the hills, and it was raining off and on, and had gotten refreshingly cool, then downright cold, so it was nice to pile onto the warm bus and make the long trek down to Tel Aviv for our final days.

I had arrived in Tel Aviv but hadn't seen any of it yet. I'm not sure why, but Tel Aviv felt like a world of difference from the other places we'd been. Even though there is definitely more secular city than sacred in Jerusalem, we had spent most of our time in the old city, I guess, and none of the other places seemed quite as modern and cosmopolitan as Tel Aviv. It's also very new, built from the ground up (though right next to the old city of Jaffa) in the early twentieth century. It made it feel a little like Beirut. It's also a university town and feels like a young town, with quite a night life. Okay, I'll be honest: it felt like Babylon after Zefat and Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee. Our hotel was only a block from the sea, which was very nice and we all made the most of that. There was also a health food store around the corner and lots of coffee places, a lot fewer people in kippas or kuffis or any kind of religious garb. It reminded me that the Zionist movement in the late 19th/20th centuries was not necessarily religious, but secular and socialist. The focus was more on the kibbutzim than the kippa, more on politics than (or at least as much as) on the spiritual life. I have to keep reminding myself that Jewish is an ethnic group, like Italian or Swedish, that happens to be also a religion, and there is a uniqueness about the wedding of those two that is unlike even Hinduism, I think, though that may be the closest correlative in my mind. The big deal about the Ethiopians who were brought up in Operation Moses and Operation Solomon last century was that they could actually prove their Jewish blood line.

After a sumptuous meal, (do they eat like that every Sabbath?) we had a simple Sabbath gathering with a talk a woman who is an active member of the GLBT community in Tel Aviv. This was of special interest to the group since they were a number of folks from that community who were part of our group as well. But Donna surprised everyone. Only about half of her talk was about GLBT issues; she also was very articulate, passionate and forthcoming about other social issues in Israel: the military and the military mindset, the economic disparity, and racial issues, for instance. We enjoyed her talk a great deal.

The next day everything was optional until the afternoon event, which was highly recommended (nothing was really mandatory. Morgie was leading a tour of the ancient city of Joffa, and I was tempted to go but I wound up spending deciding to spend most of a glorious day alone on the beach, walking, writing, letting things sink in. Our meeting that evening was the beginning of our processing as a group. There was one question that Morgie kept putting to us and we were going finally going to dance around it a little bit: "What makes a place holy?"

I remembered talking to a young monk at a monastery I was vi sting once, who was lamenting about the state of life among the brothers there and struggling with whether or not he should stay, if that was "the right place." He came to the conclusion himself and stated it eloquently: "This is the right place. But we are not the right place." I have come to the conclusion that every place is holy and no place is holy. That was my revelation about the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. It's been a very important theme for me to recall how even after the destruction of the first temple during the Babylonian captivity, the Jews were coming to realize that their worship did not have to depend on a place, and so they developed the synagogue tradition and the closeness to the Word. That didn't stop Herod and his predecessors from building a bigger and better temple, but along the way what might have been forgotten was Jeremiah's prophecy: Behold the days are coming when I make a new covenant with the house of Israel. Deep within their beings I will implant my Law; I will write it on their hearts. And so again this beautiful image of Mary--that's really where the whole Jesus event starts. Her virginity is a sign of a pure receptive heart-soul-home for the Word, received so deeply that it takes root and becomes flesh. And so, to see Jesus in that lineage, the first thing he does in the Gospel of John is relocate the Temple to his very own body. And of course then Peter and Paul understand that all of our bodies are temples now.

What makes a place holy? We make a place holy in the same way we bless something--our blessing God doesn't make God holy: it acknowledges a holiness that is already there, it (here's my favorite word again) "realizes" it, it makes us a aware and our awareness makes it real. Every place is the right place. But we are not always the right place. If we were the right place??--a pure receptive heart-soul-home for the Word??--every place would be the right place, every place would be holy. I remember David Whyte's teaching about Moses, that the big shock wasn't that he was standing on holy ground; the big shock was that he'd been standing on it all along and didn't know it. Doesn't Jacob say the same thing (and Merton quotes it on 4th and Walnut): Truly this place was holy and I did not know it.

the golan and the galilean

2011-11-05T01:37:00.000-07:00

There are those who sing the song of their own lives,
and in themselves they find everything.
There are others who sing the song of their own people,
who attach themselves with a gentle love to the whole community.
There are others who reach toward more distant realms,
to sing the song of all human beings.
Then there are those who link with all existence,
with all God's creatures, with all words
and sing their song with all of them.

And then there are those who rise with all these songs in one ensemble,
and they all join voices:
the song of the self,
the song of the people,
the song of humanity,
the song of the world...
(Rav Kook, from Orot HaKodesh)

4 nov, 2011

There is/was nothing much to report about Wednesday, thankfully. We travelled from Bethlehem to Nazareth, with a quick stop at Manger Square and the church of the Nativity, plus a little side visit to a mosque across the street from it, and then made our way up to the Galilee.

The landscape changed as we drove north, hilly and low chaparrel, lots of vines and orchards. We were running parallel to the security wall in many places, and Morgie was explaining to us some of the dynamic about the Arabs in Israel, the difference, if there was any, between those on one side of the wall and those on the other. For many it is a subtle distinction: many on either side consider themselves to be Arab Palestinians, though some of them are also citizens of Israel; while others are in land they consider their own that is occupied. (Actually, there are also some on Israel's side of the wall who probably consider themselves in occupied territory as well.) The ideal of a bi-national, bi-racial state is nowhere near a reality since Arabs in Isreal are treated like second class citizens (I overheard one young Arab-Israeli woman say, "Worse than second class! Third class! Fifth class!" Apparently Moshen Dayan said of the Arab population, "We will treat them like dogs so that they leave." So Arab Israelis cannot serve in the military, do not get the same social services (though the details of that escaped me) and, the biggest thing of all is that it is officially a Jewish state with a Star of David on the flag. Morgie suggested how different things would have been if from the beginning Israel had welcomed the Arabs in their midst as fellow citizens instead of a resident combattants, and if the Star of David stood for the Jewish ideals of social justice rather a symbol of a nation only for Jews. But, then again, that is the same kind of battle between left and right everywhere, isn't it? And the Israelis in 1948 were justifiably scared. They were under attack on all sides by united Arab nations.

Our first stop in the Galilee, in an Arab village right outside of Nazareth, was actually at an Arab school. It is only two years in existence, and the principal, Dier Habiballah (the name means "beloved of God") very proudly gave us a power point presentation and a video (made by his son), and tour of the school grounds and a delicious lunch. He then took us up to meet the imam at the White Mosque there in the village, who gave us a short talk, very eager for us to hear about what I would call the moderate face of Islam, which he kept referring to as "real Islam." He was a kind, well-educated man, and very gracious in his welcome. The Mr Habiballah took us on the tour of his little village, which included a quick stop at the local olive oil plant and a stop at his own home. From the verandah of the fourth floor of his home (what he referred to as the penthouse), we had a stunning view of Mount Tabor at sunset. This is the "high place" mentioned in the gospels where tradition has it that the Jesus' transfiguration took place. Ziggy and I really wanted to climb it mainly for that reason, and at least two others wanted to climb it for the cardio exercise. It rises 1900 feet up suddenly in the midst of a valley. So we started hatching a plot to escape from the rest of the group and do so the next day.

We started out the next morning visiting the Basilica of the Annunication in Nazareth. For a tourist-pilgrim spot I liked it more than I thought I would. It's a relatively good-looking modern building, albeit poured concrete, with these wonderful images of Mary from all over the world on display in the outside plaza as well as on the interior walls of the basilica itself. I had a good time walking around with Rabbi Paula, talking about the various images of and titles for Mary, especially when we got to the one that showed Mary as "the ark of the covenant." Imagine speaking with a rabbi about that, and explaining what that meant, how Jesus was Word made flesh, how Mary's virginal womb was there to receive God's Word so deeply that it took root in her. Paula reminded me again that the word for womb is the root of the word for mercy--rahamin, which of course is the same Semitic root for the Arabic words ir-Rahman irRahim. And so that gives a whole new meaning to calling Mary the "mother of mercy." I talked too about how the problem is when we stop at Jesus, and Meister Eckhart's beautiful image of "the eternal birth of God in the soul." Doesn't Jesus say, when someone praises his mother, Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it? (It was quite poignant the next morning that when Lori was leading meditation she taught us a dhkr in English: "Out of the womb / of my human heart / the divine is born / into the world.")

There is also some archeological digging going on around of the old churches that had been built on the same site, and a little spot they call "Mary's kitchen." There is also the well there in Nazareth where the angel Gabriel spoke with Mary (no well is actually mentioned in scripture, of course).

Then we went up to the old synagogue. I loved that spot a lot. There is absolutely no evidence that this is the place where Jesus gave his inaugural address as recorded in the Gospel of Luke chapter 4, quoting the propeht Isaiah--The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; he has sent me with good news for the poor... to announce a year of favor...--but this particular synagogue surely dates back to that time, so it could have been and certainly was a good ecxample of what that synagogue would have looked like. Just like at the other tomb in Jerusalem in the church of the Holy Sepulchre that was not Jesus' tomb, I felt more moved by this, to see something actually untouched and historical rather than some place all decorated up to make it appear holy. It is a very simple stone structure. We sat around on benches and Lori led us in song, which sounded magnificent in the resonant space. I really could imagine Jesus sitting on the step, after rolling up the scroll and returning it to its place, at the front delivering the perfect sermon, short and to the point: Today the scriptures are fulfilled in your hearing. What did that mean to him?!

Then we got back on the bus and headed north and east toward the Sea of Galilee. Morgie had told us several times that we were going to stop there for a short time and then head up into the Golan Heights for the afternoon. I was already feeling like I didn't want to go to the Golan Heights. I had seen them from the other side in Syria last year while having breakfast with Shiekh Kuftaro. I remember him pointing to it and saying, "That is ours." By then, whether I would have admitted it or not, I was a little fed up with Israeli politics and I wanted to focus on the spiritual part of the pilgrimage, especially now that we were here in the Galilee. I had my map out and was circling the names of all the towns that I recognized from the gospels: Kfar Kana, Cana (where the first miracle was performed in the Gospel of John, turning water into wine), Naftali, Korazim (Chorazin), Kadarim (the land of the Gadarene demoniac), Bet Zayda (Bethsaida), Migdal (Magdala), Kfar Nahum (Capernaum). This area Morgie kept calling "the holy triangle," where Jesus did the bulk of his ministry. I noted how far we felt from Jerusalem at this point, psychologically and geographically--what a long walk it would have been for Jesus to go there when he did. The route he would have taken according to the gospels would have had him going east and then down the Jordan River valley and then west through Jericho, all land that is now the occupied territory. The landscape leading up to the seashore was beautiful, verdant, rolling hills.

We got our first glimpse of the sea just north of Tiberias and then ended up at the church of the Primacy of Peter, the spot where legend has it Jesus called to his disciples from the shore and cooked them breakfast after the resurrection, as recorded in the Gospel of John. As we got off the bus and Morgie was instructing us in logistics and giving some background of place, she pointed off to the east and mentioned the Golan Heights again. They were just there on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. I didn't realize that they were so close. I was happily surprised again by how simple the church was in this spot, with a large rock jutting out of the floor marked with a sign that read, in Italian, Mensa del Signore, "the Table of the Lord." It seems a little arrogantly Roman to remember the primacy of Peter at that particular church, but still, since it's under the custody of the Italian Franciscans as so many Christian sites in the Holy Land, not too surpirsing. There was just a little section of beach where everyone gathers, and Morgie had Ziggy read from the story of that famous breakfast from Gospel of John. It was as if it was choreographed: just as Ziggy read the part about Jesus telling the disciples to cast off to the other side of the boat, a fishing boat came into view on the horizon. That was pretty cool. Then we were set free for about 45 minutes to wander around.

I was surprised to find that nobody was venturing further north on the shore away from that little section of beach, but I did, and I found a couple of wonderful spots to sit or squat and gaze out over the water. There I felt very close to Jesus, and I could easily imagine what he might have felt like squatting there himself, gazing out at the far heights, at the tranquil sea, at the birds dipping in and out of sight. Every now and then I glanced up and looked across the water and thought to myself, "Is that really the Golan Heights?" I couldn't somehow take it in, that that area that was so highly contested could be right there, abutting my sea of tranquility. So I put it out of my mind, and I had what I think were the happiest 45 minutes yet in Israel, hopping from stone to stone to cross rivulets and squatting at various places and reading scripture. It was there that I realized this simple thing: Jesus is not in buildings for me, and not even in iconography that make him Pancrator. But Jesus is very real to me squatting on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, just as he was for me wandering the suqs and climbing the hills of Jerusalem more than in the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jesus was the new Temple and passed that on to us. God isn't in buildings, or at least not just in buildings: God is in us and in all of creation, and in our whole world sacred and secular through us, the priests of creation.

I eventually wandered back to the spot on the shore where the other folks were. Toward the south there was a fenced off section that was overrun with wild flowers and a whole flock of sparrows doing a swooping ballet. You could almost guess where Jesus would get the images he used in both Matthew and Luke to convince his hearers not to worry about tomorrow, what to eat and what to where. I kept thinking one could easily believe in the benevolence of the universe in that little spot in the world.

We piled back on the bus. Ziggy and I with a few others had by that time fully hatched our plot to take a taxi back down from Tiberias to Mount Tabor to climb, but both our two Jewish mothers, Morgie and Paula, at this point got on the microphone and, as tour guide and organizer, discouraged us greatly from pursuing it, so we were going to head into Tiberias with the others to spend the afternoon at a spa with hot tubs. We passed by the town of Magdala--no wonder Jesus knew Mary the Magdalene so well. He was always hanging out right in her neighborhood! Morgie told us that we would not be going up to the Golan Heights after all because the weather was so bad, raining off and on, and overcast so we wouldn't see anything anyway. So instead she pointed it out to us yet again and launched into an explanation of its strategic importance, and how the Syrians were launching rockets down on the valley below so that Israel felt impelled to take it, and the whole explanation again of defensible borders. At this point I was flipping through my bible looking for more and more mentions of geographical places in the area, trying so hard to hold on to the feeling of closeness to Jesus that I had felt at the sea shore, as if I were understanding something about Jesus and the gospels for the first time, or at least in a deeper way. I so badly wanted Morgie to stop talking about the Golan Heights, but she carried on all the way into Tiberias where she set us free to find lunch. I walked off by myself for a good long think, because I knew that this was actually a real problem for me. As I told Morgie later, it was as if two people I knew separately--Golan and Galilee--suddenly walked into the room together, and I said in surprise, "I didn't know you guys knew each other." But it was even more primal than that: I simply couldn't hold those two things together, the Golan Heights and the Sea of Galilee.

It's two days later as I write this, and I'm still sad about it. I can still imagine what it felt like to squat on the seashore and look out over the tranquil water and sense the benevolence of the universe. But the underlying theme of this whole trip has been one of going from the sacred to the secular--from the Temple Mound to the Holocaust Museum, from the Western Wall to picking olives behind the security wall, from Sabbath services to a protest march, from the church of the Nativity in Bethlehem to occupied Hebron and everything crashing at Abraham's Tomb, from the refugee camp to Rachel's Tomb. I was used to it and even kind of marveled at the brilliance of the planning of the trip. But I just wanted one place to be just holy, to be set apart and protected, to be separate and holy, to be kadesh. And a part of me is still saying it, "How dare the Golan Heights abut the Sea of Galilee? How dare Mideast politics taint my experience of Jesus?" I guess I too am still caught up in the "spurious illusion of a separate holy existence." But if there is any point to Jesus' life it's that nothing is separate, and we have to hold the beautiful and the ugly together and not lose hope. Almost every time the gospels tell us Jesus went off to a deserted place to pray by himself, someone comes and interrupts him and calls him to come and give himself in service; and he never complains nor hesitates. We have to be able to hold the two together and not let either one go, and not lose hope.

Everything is holy now.

rachel's lament

2011-11-02T23:39:00.001-07:00

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice,
nor truth that passes over injustice in silence,
nor moral virtue that condones it.
(Tadeusz Borowski)

2 nov, Bethlehem

We had the most intense day of the whole trip yesterday. Dave had warned us that it might be hard to be in the refugee camps in Bethlehem in the morning, and that it would be even more intense to be in Hebron in the afternoon, even giving people a clear option to opt out of the latter and spend time at the suq in Bethlehem instead.

Actually the morning was relatively easy. We went to a place called WI'AM, the Palestianian Conflict Resolution Center. It was founded and is directed by a Christian gentleman named Zoughbi Zoughbi, who is incidentally married to an American woman and spent some time living in the States. They are absolutely commited to non-violent means of conflict resolution at WI'AM, from small family and community issues all the way up to the immense issue of dealing with the Occupation. Zoughbi's best line of the morning, which we all really liked, was, "We want to empower the weak and bring the powerful to their senses, not to their knees." He quoted Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and various other voices from the civil rights movement freely during his introduction to us. The context in which they work: economic depression, the stagnation of the peace process, environmental degradation, domestic violence, traumatized children (at one point Zoughbi said, "We don't deal with post traumatic stress: the trauma is not 'post'; it's ongoing."), youth problems and the general demoralization and factionalism, including emigration, depression and hopelessness. In the midst of all that, he was another great prophetic voice and figure, and so articulate.

One of Zoughbi's young assistants, Usama, then gave us a tour of the refugee camp. The center actually is right on the edge of it. We had to cross right past Rachel's Tomb. Of course all of this is also done in the shadow of The Wall, the security wall which zigzags its way through Bethlehem, and its location in this particular spot is emblematic of the arbitrary nature of it. Rachel's Tomb is in the middle of Bethlehem but the wall snakes around it so that Israelis have access to it but Palestinians don't. It's very ugly, and has made an eyesore out of a holy site. Rabbi Paula was explaining to us that this is the place where women have come for centuries to pray for safe pregnancies, since Rachel had so much trouble conceiving children with Jacob. She is also the only one not buried with Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rabekah, Jacob and Leah (not sure if Bilhah is buried with the others...) so, Paula said, Rachel is also a symbol of the shekinah being exiled from Jerusalem. "And now it is encased in concrete," Paula lamented. I was of course humming "Rachel's Lament" all through the morning.

The refugee camp was nothing as I had imagined. This camp dates all the way back to 1948, mind you, when folks were first routed from their homes in what is now Israel, firmly expecting to return. But the war turned into occupation, and tents gave way to concrete structures, and dirt paths turned into paved streets, and people continue to add on and on to the structures so that there is quite a bustling shanty town built up. But all around are graffiti and signs announcing what village people were from, and how many came from that village and what particular year. Now deep into the heart of urban Palestine as opposed to our experience in the country picking olives last week, we saw lots of signs of bold opposition to the occupation, even frequent images of Che Guevara and the words "Libre Palestina!" The inside of the security wall was covered with colorful graffiti. The hardest one to read was, "There is no hope and so we wait to die.” We felt safe the whole way, and even cautiously welcomed by people we passed on the streets. Usama even led us up onto the roof of someone's house so we could see the security wall from above. He was a little more agitated and eager to tell us stories of Israeli abuse than Zuoghbi had been. We headed back down to the center after about an hour and Zoughib and staff gave us a sumptuous lunch, and then we were off to Hebron.

Usama came with us, and we met the young man named Sami who was to be our guide for the afternoon. Sami was quite a talker. After the bus dropped us off near the old city, Sami gave us quite a walking tour into alleyways and deep into the suq. His aim was to show us all the spots where Israelis have built settlements right in the heart of the city. We were told that the settlers in Hebron are among the most aggressive and extreme. They've actually been there since 1968. The most famous of all is Baruch Mazul who was from Brooklyn, and another Dr Baruch Goldstein who was responsible for a massacre in Abraham's tomb in 1994, 29 Muslims killed and over 300 wounded. Along the way, it wasn't clear why at first, we started gathering up more and more young people, college-aged, following us. We found out after a while they were all in training to be guides like Sami was. I actually felt like we were pretty well protected in case of any kind of incident or altercation. At several points we stopped right near where the guard posts were, and Sami would hold forth at length even at points gesturing toward the armed soldier in the watch tower and then toward the settlement areas that are now closed off to Palestinians. It really is a little bizarre: in the middle of the market, suddenly an alley would be blocked off and there would be chain link fence overhead to protect passersby from the items that the settlers were throwing down from above from the upper floors that they had taken over, for example. There were sevcral streets where no Palestinians could drive because they were where the Israelis were. The ratio of soldiers to settlers was incredible. I kept wondering how and why these Israelis would even want to live there let alone raise children there. They had to be the most hardcore who wanted to make, in a phrase we kept hearing, "facts on the ground." But I kept asking myself, "Who are the real prisoners here?" That is when, of course, I really got to feel what it means for a land to be "occupied."

Then we got a real object lesson. Our last stop was to be Abraham's tomb, which is also where tradition has it Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah and Joseph are honored if not actually buried, a holy place to all three traditions. The first little tense moment came for us visitors when the turnstiles locked up at the entry way when only about a third of our group had gone into the plaza in front of the tomb. The turnstile of course is run by two young Israeli soldiers. We finally got through in two more groups; we were by that time a group of about 40, us and our young Palestinian hosts. And then there was another security check with a metal detector, manned by three young Israeli soldiers with automatic rifles, and one older Palestinian man. It all happened so fast I could barely register what was going on. A few of us got through and I had just said to someone next to me, "These are like teenagers with guns!" Then one of the Jewish women in our group got stopped. She was wearing her Star of David visibly as a necklace. The soldiers made her go off to the side and asked her if she was Jewish. She replied yes, and then young woman soldier started scolding her, talking to her pretty nastily. I could see she was getting upset and so I sidled over nearer to where she was (I am not sure what I would have done) but then Rabbi Paula came up and started speaking to the soldier in Hebrew and found out that Jews had a separate entrance or, to say it another way, were not allowed to go in that entrance. So Paula found out where that other entrance was and started walking off that way, as did her husband and several others, particuarly the Jews in the group. We had been told that the building was now split in two, on one side a synagogue and on the other a mosque, so I guess it sort of made sense to me. And I guess I figured, since the Israelis were having the Jews go to another side, that they were somehow getting special treatment and we would meet up with them inside. As I say, it was all happening so fast. I kept asking the young Palestinians, "Who's rule is this that Jews can't come in the Muslim-Christian side?" I'm not sure I ever got a straight answer, and our Jewish friends never did go in. Unbeknownst to us that went in, they were so shaken by the encounter that they all stayed outside waiting for us to emerge. We don't know what they would have seen if they had gone in, but we did find out that there were six days a month for Jews and six days a month for Muslims and Christians, and it seems like this was a Palestinaian rule after the massacre, about which Sami told us a number of times in great detail when we were in the mosque. We only found out gradually just how hurt and upset the ones who had stayed outside were. Some thought we had abandoned them; some wondered why we didn't make a decdision as a group about going in; some even felt set up by our guides.

We had quite a de-briefing about the whole incident that night after dinner. I felt kind of nauseous sick abut the whole thing, especially thinking that they thought we had abandoned them or done something that intentionally left them out. It might be a little taste of what Jews (and their friends) felt like during the early days of the Nazi regime. It's also what the people of this region have to live with every single day, situations that are loaded with ambiguity and separation, fear and mistrust, pitting neighbor against neighbor. So we really got to feel what it is like to live in an occupied land.

Paula's husband Arieyh is probably the most well read and informed person in the group when it comes to the occupation. He has followed it since he was a young Zionist himself in the 1960s. The bus driver somehow couldn't find us after the whole debacle, and so we were all left standing in a little plaza waiting for nearly an hour, getting colder and more and more tired, but Ariyeh, who is no sympathizer of the settlers, contiuued to debate with Sami and Usama, not disagreeing with them in general but correcting some of their facts. Sami, for instance, kept saying that the first intifada was non-violent, but Ariyeh and Paula were living here then and they remember much clearer. Their discussion, right there in the middle of the street, got pretty heated at one point, Ariyeh being very assertive without being aggressive, but Sami and Usma firing off example after example from their own experiences. I kept remembering the Italian phrase that I learned at General Chapter with the Camaldolese, una bufera di parole--it was like we had experienced "a storm of words," and by that point I just couldn't take any more in. But I shall remember for a long time as I got out my Bible on the bus (when it finally found us) and started reading some evening psalms and scriptures, behind me I could hear Ariyeh asking Usama questions about his own experience, and Usama talking about the two times he had been arrested and tortured. At that point all I could do was hold them both in the silent space inside of me, which I could barely find, and I knew I had no other answer, that indeed there were no easy answers, only fallible human beings caught up in a terrible position that is only escalating in its complexity.

So, again all the more poignant being here, this morning we were all abuzz with this news, as reported in the Washington Post:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday ordered accelerated construction of 2,000 homes in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem and nearby West Bank settlements, his office said, a day after thePalestinians gained membership in a major U.N. agency [UNESCO].
Netanyahu’s move, along with a hold on the transfer of taxes collected by Israel for the Palestinian Authority, were described by Israeli officials as initial responses to Palestinian moves to gain recognition of statehood at the United Nations.

Ordered them! It reminded me of the story in Exodus when Moses and Aaron went to ask Pharoah to let their people go, and Pharoah instead said that they had to make bricks without straw. The oppressed become the oppressors. I'm just a monk and a musician not an expert at foreign affairs, but I must say from my perspective, even just as a voting American citizen, I am convinced that we, the US, are on the wrong side of this argument. And we need to let our leaders know that we must stop Israel from building more settlements, especially if they are using our money to do so. They are only making a bad situation worse.

Some of our group didn't like this, but Dave passed out a statement from Kairos, an organization of Christian leaders in Palestine that lists the facts about "reality on the ground" as a result of the occupation and then states unequivocally:

...the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is a sin against God and humanity because it deprives Palestinians of their basic human rights, bestowed by God. It distorts the image of God in the Israeli who has become an occupier just as it distorts this image in the Palestinian living under occupation. We declare that any theology, seemingly based on the Bible or on faith or on history, that legitimizes the occupation, is far from Christian teachings, because it calls for violence and holy war in the name of God Almighty, subordinating God to temporary human interests, and distorting the divine image in the human beings living under both political and theological injustice.

an oasis of peace

2011-11-01T13:48:00.001-07:00

If love manifests itself in you,
it has its orgins in beauty.
You are nothing but a mirror
in which beauty is reflected.
(Jami)

When we left Jerusalem we headed straight to Wahat al-Salam/Neve Shalom. The name means "Oasis of Peace." It is a fascinating and hopeful experiment: an intentional community, a village, of Jews and Palestinian Arabs (all Israeli citizens) living together. Its orgins actually lie in an interfaith group that met in Jerusalem in the early 1970s led by a Hungarian-Italian Franciscan friar named Bruno Hussar. His interfaith gatherings drew more and more people, many of them who were more interested in talking about the political situation than about religious issues. As our host, Daoud, explained to us, one day somebody said, "Well then, why don't we live together?" And so they did. Bruno got the French Trappist monks of Letroun Abbey, who were very well off (according to Daoud), to donate 100 acres of their land, which is conveniently locatred between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Two familes moved onto the property right away, living in campers trailers in the beginning. By 2010, some 60 families had come to live in the village, with an equal number of Jews and Arabs. Daoud told us that they always maintain the equal balance; the Arabs are divied between Christians and Muslims but there is not quota for those two groups. Eventually the village plans to have 140 homes. There are over 100 families signed up wanting to be a part of it, which is a sign of even more hope, that so many Israelites would be interested. Daoud explained to us the rigorous application and acceptance process that includes psychological tests and handwriting analysis(!). As their literature says:

The members of WAS-NS are demonstrating the possiblity of coexistence between Jews and Palesitianians by developing a community based on mutual acceptance, repsect and cooperation. Democratically governed and owned by its members, the community is not affiitiaed with any political party or movement. WAS-NS gives practical expression to its vision through various branches.

Daoud also told us that everything in the community is geared toward education. There is a school, and many more families even outside the village want their children to be a part of that, more than the school can accomodate. The school has a fascinating format. It is totally bi-national and bi-lingual. Jewish and Palestinian teachers each speak exclusively in their own langauges to all of the children. So from an early age "the children begin to develop an awareness of their identity, culture and traditions." In this they also aim "to create an atmosphere of openness and tolerance that encourages children to understand, accept and appreciate each other." There is also The School for Peace there that sponsors international conferences, often focusing on formation of youth and women's issues. And then there is the Pluralistic Spiritual Centre in memory of fra Bruno, and with it an interesting globe of a building called the Doumia-Sakinah, this latter being specifically Bruno's brainchild. The Doumi has no religious markings at all, just an open lightsome space with carpets on the ground. Several people in our group asked about shared spiritual practice. There doesn't seem to be any in the community itself; folks go to nearby towns or all the way into Jerusalem for the mosque or synagogue, but this space can be utilized for anything.

Unfortunately we had little time there at Neve Shalom. We had arrived just before dinner on Sunday night, and only had our meeting and a tour with Daoud the next morning before leaving again. So we only got a little taste, but we were all in agreement that if there were another trip we'd like to begin and end there.

As we left Neve Shalom, a few of the folks asked if we could stop at Letroun monastery to shop in their wine store. It was a convenient stop right off the road, so we did. I didn't need to shop and I've seen plenty of monks and monasteries, so I wandered down to an outdoor plaza where there was a good sized group of students hanging out. I was mainly attracted to the sound of a drum and some singing. Some of the kids looked up as I approached, maybe a little warily, but I waved and smiled. They weren't really singing anything particular, just kind of goofing around. I went back up to where our driver Mahmoud was and asked him to ask them if they would sing something for me. He yelled down to one of the girls something like, "Tell them to sing something in Arabic for this American guy, he's a musician..." and the girls led me back over to the group and explained to them. Some of the kids greeted me and some asked my name and where I was from in English, and then they launched into song with the guys passing the dumbek around one to another. What an experience to be standing in the middle of these kids, the unabashed joy and abandon as they were singing and waving their arms and clapping. It was like being in the middle of an Arabic music video. They were very forward and friendly. At one point a tall guy grabbed my hips and started moving them to encourage me to loosen up and dance, I guess, and then a girl grabbed me by the hands amd pulled me into the middle of the circle and made me dance with her. At one point one of the girls said, "Now you sing!" I was trying to think what I would possibly do to match that energy, and I wasn't sure if they were Muslim or Christian at that point, though eventually one of the girls said, "Now we sing something in English," and launched into a Praise and Worship song that seemed pretty anemic by comparison to what they had been doing.(We later ascertained that they were Palestinian Baptists from Nazareth.) Anyway, they got distracted by their own exuberance at one point and I never had to do anything.

Our exact schedule was a bit up in the air due to some communication problems, but we pulled into Bethlehem, moved into our hotel (The Shepherd's House) and then piled right back into the bus so that Mahmoud could take us to someplace to eat. It was after 2 by that time and we were getting a little crabby, but still polite. Mahmoud loaded us into the top floor of a restaurant, which at first seemed a little overhwhelmed by the onslaught but stepped up to the plate and spread quite a banquet for us. We relaxed over the meal and then started drifting out of the resturant. I was among the last to leave because I didn't want to wander around the streets carrying the guitar, and the waiters were already cleaning up. When one of them saw the guitar case in the corner, he said, "Who's is this?" And he was very anxious to see it, so I pulled it out. He had his and his friend's picture taken posing with it, and then Lori and I sang "The Drink Sent Down" for them. Another wonderful moment.

But the best was last. We visited the Catholic Relief Services youth center in Bethlehem, called Youth Voices for Community Action. The woman with whom Ziggy had had contact, Hanna, was not there when we first showed up, and it was quite impressive that the kids stepped up and took right over. There was one young man a little older who was in charge, Basir, I believe his name was, and was shuffling kids around to do what had to be done. There were several young folks standing at the entrance to the second story room to greet us in English and tell us their names, and as soon as they got us seated, they read to us some introductory remarks from their brochure about CRS, and then announced that they had a program for us and then we would sing for them. Lori and I were prepared for this, but what we weren't prepared for was what they had to offer us. Someone pressed "play" on a huge boombox, some very loud Arabic music started playing and the kids launched into a folk dance, totally choreographed, that must have lasted over 10 minutes. And they were wonderful, just jubilant and beautiful. And there were more boys than girls dancing! Part of it seemed to be a kind of courtship dance, some parts just guys, some just girls. It was wonderful. Then Lori and I got out two chairs and sat in the middle of the semi-circle. We first sang "The Ground We Share" for them, which I thought would change the pace a little. They liked it a lot. But then we did "Bismillah" and as soon as Lori opened her mouth, they were in love, and they clapped and sang along and smiled. It was surely the best performance of that song we have ever had. When it finished, one of the young guys asked me, "Why did you decide to use these words 'Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim'?" so I got to tell the story of Francis and the Sultan again.

By this time Hanna had arrived. She gave us another little talk about CRS and her work, and then asked one of the young men to come up and talk about the specific work of this particular center. He spoke about cultural things, treatment of women, promoting Palestinian folk culture and non-violent approaches to addressing conflict, and one other thing he kept mentioing over and over again--trying to get young kids not to use bad language, as I understood, because of its connection to violence. We had a little bit of time for questions and answers both ways. One in particular stuck out. Ziggy asked them why they were so commited to their education, and one of the young women answered straight-away, "For the future and developement of our country." I have come to find out that Palestine has a very high rate of educational level, and also make a high percentage per capita of the PhDs in the US. The problem here in Palestine is the "brain drain," educated people leaving for better opportunities elsewhere. If these kids stick around, they will be a force to be reckoned with.

Then they asked us for another song. I got them in a circle and taught them "Pray Peace." It was a blast. And then they danced for us again. This dance was even more exuberant, if possible. These kinds of musical encounters--in parks, in restaurants, in upper rooms of youth centers--are as good as, maybe even better than, performing on stages in front of large audiences, the interaction person to person, the cultural exchange. It was even more deprerssing to hear then on the news last night that after Palestine was officially accepted into UNESCO, the United Nations cultural arm, the US backed up Israel in cutting off funding. That news was so real to me that I took it personally. All I could see were those kids' exuberant faces and wonder what was going to be accomplished by them getting punished.

and jesus wept

2011-10-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to contorl but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.(Abraham Joshua Heshel)

monday, 31 october

We left Jerusalem yesterday, though we will be back through there again today when we head to Bethlehem. I must say we are all a little relieved to be out of the city. Let me tell you a little about the last two days before I get too far behind.

Saturday of course was Sabbath (Shabat) for the Jews and it was for all of us too. It was a great experience to be in Jerusalem, or any predominantly Jewish environment, for Shabat so as to witness and particiapte in all the activities (or lack of which thereof) and rituals that go along with it, from the great meals to everything closing throughout the city to the special Shabat control on the elevators so you don't have to push the button, aside from the beautiful Sabbath services we were able to attend. We had no activities scheduled for that day except for a group check-in that evening.

Seven of us headed out together across the city at about 8:30 AM to see a few other major Christian historical sites. We walked across the valley through the artist colony and up again through the Jaffa Gate, then down David Street, left at the Christian Quarter Street, right on the Via Dolorosa and left on Al-Wad into the Muslim Quarter up to the Damascus Gate, where we stopped for Arabic coffee at the shop I had stumbled on the other day. Then we retraced our steps and turned left on the Via Dolorosa, various pilgrims groups with their priest chaperones already making their devotions at the Stations of the Cross, 'til it turned into Lion's Gate Road, and then out the Lion's Gate and across the street to the Kidron Valley and Mount of Olives, dodging traffic. Our first stop was the Tomb of Mary, with its famous 47 steps bult by the Crusaders. It's purported to be one of the most mystical Christian places in Jerusalem. It's very dark and in cruciform, filled with lamps and various types of religious paintings all over the walls, all very Byzantine. Then we walked up to the Church of All Nations, also called the Church of the Agony, built next to an olive grove that tradition claims is the very grove of trees where Jesus prayed before his death, The olive trees there are said to be that old, so there is just the chance that he did at least see or touch these very trees. That church is much more modern and Western, the ceiling covered with mosaiced seals of various countries. There was a huge crowd coming in and out, and a service of some kind going on inside when we got jostled in, and wound up standing right under the seal of the USA. Then we headed farther up to the Church of Mary Magdalene. The three women in our group, especially Lori, wanted to see that one. There were fewer and fewer people as we climbed up, and not many at all entering the gates of this place. It could be because it was heavily guarded, but not by IDF soldiers but by black clad Russian nuns with a box of scarves and various shawls to cover or put around women and men who they deemed inappropriately dressed. Even women in long pants got wrapped. The ascent up to the church itself was beautiful, and in spite of the din of the city behind us it seemed to get quieter and quieter, with carefully manicured gardens on either side of the walkway. The church is a 19th century construction, with nine golden onion domes on top typical of Russian Orthodox churches, and rather small on the inside at least in the antechamber on our side of the inconostasis. It was very hushed and very clean inside, with beautiful lightsome icons all around. There was also a roped-off line just in front of the inconostasis that we were not invited to enter, where folks were making the multiple signs of the cross in front of various images. I assumed that the sisters somehow knew who was Russian Orthodox and who was not. But we didn't feel miffed by that.

After a visit in the church we sat out on the portico for a good long while enjoying the cool breeze coming up the Kidron Valley, before heading a litte farther up the hill. Looking back I realize it got quieter and quieter the higher we climbed, and there were fewer and fewer people, and the churches were more and more simple as well. Our last stop was Dominus Flevit--"the Lord wept," sometimes called the Teardrop Church. This is the spot where tradition has it Jesus looked over Jerusalem and wept as recorded in Luke 19. It was pretty poignant to read the words there after all that I've read these past months, and all we have experienced this week: O Jerusalem, if only you knew the ways the lead to peace! It was built in the 1950's by an Italian architect named Barluzzi. It was the smalles chapel we had seen too, only big enough for about 50 people full, with a window at behind the altar that looks out on Jerusalem. As a matter of fact there was a crucfix on the altar in front of the window that was superimposed right on the Dome of the Rock. I don't think that was an accident. I think I can safely say, aside from the Wall, that was my favorite place in Jerusalem, so silent, so simple. I sat outside for a while and then when I stepped inside I was greeted by the sweetest sound: Lori and Jamie were singing a song I had never heard before--"When Jesus Wept"--in canon. It actually sounded like a recording and more than two voices. Everyone in there was sort of transfixed by the moment.

If we had climbed further up the moutain we would have hit the hill of the Ascension, but it was now noon in the blazing Mediterranean sun, and everything was closing for lunch, so we headed back down to the suq for lunch, and then went our separate ways for the rest of afternoon.

Sunday, our last morniing in Jerusalem, we all went together to St George's Anglican Cathedral about a half a mile from the Damscus Gate. I tho0ught it was interesting that with four or five different Christian denominations represented we went to celebrate at the place of a tradition to which none of us belonged. I guess that leveled the playing field. It was very much an Anglican Mass as one would be accustomed to in England, except that it was half in Arabic. The English speaking folks sat in back, the Arabic in front, and the presider went back and forth. Both languages were actually going on simutaneously for the common prayers, the Glory to God and the Our Father, all interspersed with rousing Anglican hymns. The handout with the order of service stated very clearly that this church aims to serve both communties and to be a moderating force in Jerusalem. Actually they tell us that the Christian community is diminishing rapidly in the Holy Land in general as it is all over the Mideast. In places where there is an Arab predominance Christians are a tiny minority but in solidarity often with Muslims because they are both Arabic speakers and nationality. I kind of like all of that.

And then for our last stop in Jerusalem, we saw the far end of the other side of the Jewish social religious soul when we met finally with Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights on Sunday on our way out of town. This is the same rabbi we were supposed to have met with in the Occupied Territories last week but had somehow gotten himself arrested. Rabbis for Human Rights describes itself as "the rabbinical voice of conscience in Israel... established with the purpose of giving voice to the Zionist ideal and the Jewish religious tradition of human rights." It was interesting to hear someone say that the Zionist ideal is really human rights. RHR was founded in 1988 by rabbis who were all Israeli citizens, to champion the cause of the poor, support the rights of Israel's minorities and to stop abuse of foreign workers, as well as trying to keep up Israel's public health care system, fight for economic equity, promote the equal status of women and help Ethiopian Jews. Quite a mandate. But I think they are best known for championing the rights of the Palestinians. As he began, Rabbi Arik said that they were doing nothing but calling Israel to its own best self because the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel had said that the purpose of this new state was

To foster the developement of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants, based on freedom, justice and peace and envisaged by the prophets of Israel; to ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race, and gender; to guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, edutaion and culture; to guard the holy places of all religions...

Wow. The part that really got me was the idea of basing it all on the "freedom, justice and peace and envisaged by the prophets of Israel," because it was impossible not to think of that all this past week. Rabbi Arik is a high strung tall man, kind of unkempt and unfocused, or so it seemed to me at first. But as he got warmed up he got more and more focused, pacing the floor in front of us and gesticulating wildly. He spoke to us for about a half an hour. The moment when he really got impassioned is when he was recounting to us how fellow Israelis ask him why he works so hard for the Palestinians, and isn't he worried about security? His answer could be equally applied to American's own situation. Arik said, getting louder and louder "Who's doing more for security?! The securtity forces that are out there abusing young Palestinians and turning them into terrorists, or us, who are making them friends? Who's doing more for the long term security of our country?! I'm doing this for my children!!" Then he told us this story. He was involved in a situation trying to advocate for a young Palestinian teenager who had gotten picked up by the military police in the West Bank. When Arik got there the young man was tied to the military vehicle and the soldiers were taunting him and hitting him. Arik said the kid was trying unsuccessfully not to cry or appear scared. When Arik stepped in to try to stop the soldiers they arrested him too and cuffed him to the other side of the vehicle. Later on when the situation quelled, in the affadavit that the young man gave he talked about all the abuse that he had suffered and then added, "Then a tall Jewish man in a kippa came to help me and told me not to be afraid." "That's why I do this," Arik said, "so that this man will remember when he grows up that a tall Jewish man in a kippa came to help him."

Dave said as we were walking out that it was like having a conversation with the prophet Amos. And several folks said later that they finally got a sense of hope about the situation in Israel. One of the guys who is with us, who is a secular Jew, said in the sharing last night, "I guess I've always wondered why you have to tie in the religious part when you are fighting for social justice. Now I know."

There's hope. Someone in our group, a Jewish woman, said last night that she simply didn't understand Jesus, and why Christians prayed to him and didn't go directly to God. We'll have to have that conversation at some point (we none of us answered right then...). But I love thinking of Jesus as a prophet. A prophet and more, yes, but a prophet, too. That's why he wept over Jerusalem, a prophet's tears.

mere talk of peace

2011-10-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Love all and hate none,
mere talk of peace will avail you nothing.
Mere talk of God and religion will not take you far.
Be a blazing fire of truth,
be a beauteous blossom of love
and be a soothing balm of peace.
With your spiritual light,
dispel the darkness of ignorance,
dissolve the clouds of discord and war
and spread good will, peace, and harmony among the people.
(Hazrat Jhuaja)

friday, october 28

Some corrections before I continue:
--the Messiah is not expected to come in through the Lion's Gate in the Old City, but the Golden Gate;
--the campus of Haddasah hospital where we went to see the Chagall windows was not the campus that was an island of Israel in Jordanian territory;
--here they call the skull cap a kippa not a yarmulka (which I had also misspelled as yamulka).

And please forgive the other countless typos and misspellings throughout. I do not have my Mac, the computer I'm using does not have WORD on it but a very basic word processing program that has no spell check, and the spell check on blogspot is not functioning (I think, because all the commands show up in Hebrew). And I am dashing out these blogs pretty much uncensored and unedited at the end of very long days, trying to do a good job on my assignment. (Maybe I'll even get some extra credit?)

And one more thing: the affluence of Israel is not spread around evenly. Many people here are struggling to make ends meet and some have left the country because they cannot make a decent living. I learned this because some of the folks from our group are going to a protest tomorrow night in the name of economic justice. I thought that this perhaps was mainly concerned with Arab Israelis, but actually the majority that have been attending these rallies have been Israeli Jews.

I am feeling so conflicted as we all are in the group, I think. As we were driving into the West Bank/Occupied Territories the other day, I said to Dave, "Most tour busses don't come in here, do they?" But of course that is why I decided to do this pilgrimage with this group, mixed group that we are (sorry that there are no Muslims with us, though Gitanjali is a stalwart well-studied Sufi), as a consciousness-raising trip together. I am (as we all are) so moved by the beauty of this city and the country in general. And I am so impressed with what a great job the Israelis have done of building this country, the infrastructure, the social services, the educational system. Much of this has been done with the influx of foreign money of course, much of it from America.

Today we visited Mount Zion proper. There is all kinds of confusion about what piece of property is actually exactly Mount Zion (as opposed to Mount Sion). Where we were today is. It's divided from the Old City by a little valley. It contains a wealth of treasures from all three traditions. Our first stop was the Benedictine abbey of the Dormition. This is in honor of the place where Mary the mother of Jesus died ("fell asleep"), surrounded by the apostles, as legend has it (there is of course no historical record), before she was assumed body and soul into heaven. The current buildings were only built in the early 1900's and bears all the hallmarks of modern artistic (and perhaps German) sensibilities, clean lines and non-proliferation of images. The church is two circular buildings attached, the one being for the monastic choir which opens to the other for the rest of the assembly. There were beautiful mosaics in the ceiling. Below there is a crypt of sorts with a statue of Mary reclining on a bier, the Blessed Sacrament chapel and more beautiful mosaics. I was quite excited for folks to see this place, feeling as if it made up for the heaviness of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; this place was all light and spaciousness. And a lightness in other subtle ways, too: the lettering in the mosaic over the tabernacle read: Deus caritas es... "God is love and those who abide in love, abide in God"; and the most prominent crucifix, in one of the side chapels, showed what I've come to think of as a pre-Franciscan Christus. It was uncolored and showed Jesus dressed as a king, reigning from the cross, having conquered death, with even a hint of a smile on his face.

We then visited a building known as the Cenacolo, (the cenacle), which contains the Upper Room where Jesus ate the Last Supper with the apostles as well as where the Holy Spirit came upon them in tongues of flame. Of course the current building again comes from Crusader times, so it is not the exact room, but tradition has it that this is the location. Morgie tells us they figured out that it would have been this location because Jesus told his apostles (in the Gospel of Mark) to go prepare to eat the Sabbath by going into the city and find "a man carrying a jar of water." But this same building also houses the what is thought (hoped) to be the tomb of David's, and outside was some stunning modern Jeiwsh artistic representations of the tablets of the Ten Commandments. In addition at one point the building had functioned as a mosque. One of my favorite images of Christ, the Pie Pelicanus, the mother pelican tearing her own flesh to feed her children her blood, was on the lecturn that was used by the Muslims, and there is still Arabic script high on the walls around the room though it has been reclaimed for Christian use. As we walked into the upper room there was a Brazilian charismatic group in there singing in Portuguese, waving their hands in the air and laying on hands in healing. As we walked out the other end there was a Jewish family in the courtyard performing a rite of passage for a three year old boy on his birthday, giving him his first haircut, singing and clapping all around him while he was in a special raised chair whose back was made in the shape of scissors. To go from one to the other was beautifully satisfying. Talk about changing the narrative: so these traditions can live together. Morgie had been quoting Isaiah 2 to us at the start of this tour, and everyone had pointed to me and said, "Cyprian!" since they were the exact words used in our song "The Lord's Mountain" as I had explained to the group the day before. Morgie wanted to hear it, so we sat in a little alcove on the street after these visits and sang it for her a capella, with plenty of harmony. It was a good moment.

After lunch, Morgie left us again in the very capable hands of Sarah, a Jewish Israeli who works for an Israeli NGO on the humanitarian crisis looming with the Palestinian people. Our main topic was the security wall that has become so famous and emblematic. She took us (Mahmoud amazingly guiding the tour bus up steep hills on narrow streets; most tour busses don't go here either) to several spots where we could see both the serpentine configuration of the wall. We were also able to see the stark contrast in many areas in Jerusalem itself--not the West Bank--where there are derelict under-funded Palestinian neighborhoods on one side of the road and fenced in Israeli settlements on the other. She gave us a dizzying array of facts and seemed to be able to answer any question no matter how complex, but she really made a conscious effort not to editorialize. She just gave us the cold facts, and let us draw our conclusions, 'til the end. The last area she showed us was high up Mount Scopus near the Hebrew University, looking east toward the desert. You could see the spot where we believe Moses stood and looked into the Promised Land though was not allowed to enter, you could see deep into the West Bank, and you could see the Israeli settlements cutting the West Bank in half.

As for the security walls, they work. Suicide bombings have decreased greatly, for instance. According to Sarah and her colleagues, they also have gone beyond their mandate, and seem to intentionally cut neighborhoods in half and cut people off from their livelihoods, as if to intentionally diminish the Palestinian neighborhoods' chance of survival beyond providing security, using security as an excuse to further the "greater Israel" agenda.

As I understand it, in 1947 the U.N. proposed General Assembly Resolution 181, the partition of then British-ruled Palestine into two states, which would have created a Palestinian state as well as the state of Israel. This paved the way for Jewish statehood, but the Arabs refused it, and Palestinian leaders have always insisted that it was right to do so. It is very timely that just today President Abbas, in a rare interview on Israeli television, said that that was a mistake, because now, "Israel existed. Palestine diminished."

Everything seems to hinge on Israel'e existence and expansion. Israel says that the diplomatic deadlock is caused by Palestine's (or at least some elements' in Palestine) refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state. Hamas and other radical elements, especially Palestinians who were dispossessed in the 1947-1948 war, oppose permanent coexistence with a Jewish state. Obviously practically speaking it is too late for that, and one wonders how they can hold on still to such a position. They refuse even to call it Israel, referring to them simply as the Occupiers, because Israel took territory even beyond what had been allotted it by Resolution 181. Palestine and Abbas, on the other hand, say the problem is the Netanyahu government's allowing these continued settlements of the West Bank exactly where, along with the Gaza Strip, Palestinians want to make their state.

The so-called Green Line in Jerusalem was established in the 1949 Armistice Agreement between Israel and its neighbors--Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan--after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War to mark out areas that are administered by the State of Israel and the areas outside of it, which are adminstered either by the Israeli military or the Palestinian National Authority. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel annexed more areas outside of that Green Line, areas that had been ruled by Jordan up 'til then. Israel calls that the "extended municipality of Jerusalem." The Green Line is not an international or permanent border but it was meant "to preserve the territorial claims of all parties." But again, the contested settlements are in areas beyond the Green Line where Palestinians wish to make a state and make a capital in Jerusalem.

What Sarah showed us yesterday is that it is near the tipping point where Isreal is going to make such a piece meal in both Jerusalem and in the West Bank that there will be no contiguous area for the Palestinians to make a state nor to make of Jerusalem a capital. And this certainly appears to be the intention; the far right wants exactly this and is not afraid to say so, to establish (or re-establish) the divinely mandated "Greater Israel." So Sarah proposed to us that there are actually three different solutions: there is still a chance that Palestinians will get a state and a shared capital along the Green Line, even if it is an amended Green Line to post-war 1967 borders; or that there will be a bi-national state shared by Israel Jews and Arab Palestinians with equal rigths and justice for everyone (I can barely imagine that); or one state, Israel, with apartheid.

Those, I think, are just the facts. We were all once again exhausted and overwhelemed and confused by the onslaught of information. We had a couple of hours break in the afternoon and then Morgie hosted us at her reformed synagogue for Sabbath evening service. It is a very progressive congregation, both Sarah and Rabbi Arlich (the one who had just been arrested) we in attendance too. The rabbi was wonderful and led us through their very contemporary service (all the psalms in totally inclusive language translations for God and people) with wonderful singing throughout and wonderful modern prayers. And a very welcoming community. We're definitely hanging out with the leftist Israelis, but they are Israelis, the ones who are fighting for their country to do the right thing. As one person described it: "We do everything in the name of our defensible borders. But we go beyond our defensible borders: we act like bullies."

That is partially because of this: when the Israelis ascended to the Temple Mount at the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, having warded off the threat from the united Arab nations, Karen Armstrong writes:

The phrase "Never again!" now sprang instantly to Jewish lips in connection with the Nazi Holocaust. This tragedy had become inextricably fused with the identity of the new state. Many Jews saw the State of Israel as an attempt to create new life in the face of that darkness. Memories of the Holocaust had ineveitably surfaced in the weeks before the Six Day War, as Israelis listened to Nasser's rhetori of hatred [He threatened to "drive them into the sea."] Now that they had returned to the Western Wall, the words "Never again!" were immediately heard in a new context. "We shall never move out of here"...

I heard one Israeli commentator say on NPR some months ago, "We don't care if the rest of the world hates us. We will survive."

walls and fences

2011-10-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest.
That which has no existence enters where there is no crevice.
I know hereby what advantage belongs to doing nothing with a purpose.
Tao te Ching, 43

27 oct, 2011, yad vashem and the west bank

After our long day seeing the major sites on Wednesday, after dinner we had our first of what will be several presentations from people speaking from alternative narratives in the region. Her name was Roni Kider; she is a Jewish woman from a little village right on the border of the Gaza Strip who runs an organization called "Other Voice." She had originally been a part of another village (she did not like the word "settlement") in the area that was given back to Egypt in a peace treaty, a place that she and her colleagues had "turned into a paradise," she said, with agricultural advances and water systems. The village was bulldozed to the ground when they left, and when she passed it by later she said she wept. She had also spent five years living in Egypt, since her husband had livd in Cairo (a home from which he was forceably displaced at a young age), speaks fluent Arabic and taught agriculture in Cairo. She told a touching story about the long struggle to get her young daughter's Palestinian best friend's mother to allow the children to play together, and eventually become friends with Roni herself. This inspired her to start this loose-knit organization simply to inspire and encourage conversations and friendships. Few of her fellow citizens in her current village support her, but she presses on nobly. She was a genteel woman, well-spoken and kindly, and obviously very intelligent. She encourages people not let go of the past--not forget it, she insisted, just let go--and look together to the future. Where do we go from here?

I asked a couple of questions. I am still trying to get the facts straight and the situation in 1967 that set the stage for this whole thing. The first I asked was pretty naive, I guess, but it seemed like an obvious thing: couldn't the Jews and the Arabs/Muslims have lived together here? No, she said, we could not. And then I asked her of the two million (!) Palestinains refugees living in the Gaza Strip, how many of them were/are displaced people from what is now Israel? None, she said, they all left on their own, no one chased them out. I wanted to believe her, but that didn't have the ring of the whole story to me. As one of our group has quoted to me, it sounded like "narrative getting confused with truth." Others told me later that they had the same reaction.

This morning was totally dedicated to the Holocaust Museum, called Yad Vashem, Hebrew from a line from the prophet Isaiah
meaning "everlasting rememberance." There are no words to describe the museum nor the experience. The main building is a long A-frame structure that is like a tunnel inside. Immediately upon entering you see a film playing on the back wall of the tunnel of life in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century before the Nazis. At the other end far away is clear glass, "a light at the end of the tunnel," but in order to reach that you need to go through a series of obstacles in the long corridor that make you jut in and across to verious side rooms that tell the history of the Holocaust in chronological order, from Hitler's rise to power as Chancellor of Germany through to the Final Solution in the early 1940's, the gas chambers and crematoria. Morgie led us through wearing a microphone transmitting to us via headsets. She is so incredibly knowledgeable of the whole history. She actually teaches Holocaust history in Poland as well as acting as a tour guide. Again, I won't even attempt to summarize it except to say that the whole place makes the actual situation come very much alive, everything from the victims shoes and personal items that were found in there pockets (many of them were stil carrying their house keys, for instance) to Oskar Schindler's actual list, and of course many little details that I had never known about.

There was one panel "dedicated" to Pope Pius XII and his silence. Morgie had mentioned it earlier in connection with Pope Benedict's visit to Isreal and this very museum, how he had gone to another building, the Hall of Rememberance, but had not come to the museum itself because of that particular display. And then when we got to it, she read it out loud to us in its entirety, and added that "we have no intention of taking it down." She also singled out Catholicism (not all of Christianity?) for stirring up anti-Semiticism throughout history, which is true enough, by naming the Jews "Christ-killers" and worse. I was sorry she didn't make any mention of Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, or Deitrich Bonhoffer, nor the countless Catholics (Fr Deiss, Pope John Paul II, my old friend Paolo) who worked in the underground resistance. And I wondered too about the silence of the Lutheran chcurch in Germany itself, to which I think we can assume many of the Nazis belonged.

Finally at the end of the tour you come upon the glass wall at the far end, and Morgie opened the door and said, "The light at the end of the tunnel: Isreal!" And you walk out on to a upward slanted porch to see a vista of beautiful countryside looking west toward the Mediterranean. That stayed with me strongly, the bald unequivocal statement that the Jews now have Israel as a safe haven from that--is that the right wording? Maybe it is just to point out that in the end, in spite of that horrific suffering, "Look! now we live in a paradise." Or, a little more darkly understood, as if to say, "Now you see we are so fiercely self-defensive and protectionist." All of the young people from the Israeli Defense Force walking around with machine guns in the plaza afterward really drove that point home.

There were a few other sites to see on the grounds, the aforementioned Hall of Rememberance, and the Memorial to Children, which reduced a few of the mothers to tears. None of us could or wanted to speak much aftereward. I kept thinking of the Western Wall and juxtaposing it to the fences put up around the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps and death camps. Morgie did tell us that she didn't like the word "camps." "'Camp' is where I send my kids," she said. "These were death 'facilities.'"

After picking up a quick lunch at a shopping mall, Morgie left us. Gitanjali and I taught the other pilgrims Tim Manion's version of Psalm 122, "Pray Peace." I hadn't sung that in years, and I was kicking myself when I got here that I hadn't thought of it, so I wrote to Rory and Tom Kendzia and asked one of them to send it, which Rory kindly did. I'd forgotten what a great marchin' song that was, and perfect for the aliyah--ascent. I'd also forgotten how beautiful the verses were. Here's verse 2:

Whispered gently by the Spirit is the Law
sounding clear across our days the call.
Hold we firm before the powers and we
pray peace, pray peace, pray peace.

We then headed behind the other wall and fences, into the Occupied Territories, the West Bank. People had told me about the poverty I would see in the West Bank, so I was prepared for that. Oddly enough, what I wasn't prepared for was the affluence of Israel. That's what really made the contrast, so suddenly to see scattered half built structures and beat up cars.

That word "occupied" never struck me with as much force before, it's tossed around so glibly. There were cars lined up at the security check point--Palestinian cars with their green license plates--while vehicles with Israeli license plates and our tour bus drove right through. We saw some of the new disputed settlements right away. We were told that some of the settlers simply see this as suburban Jerusalem. Israelis can at this point simply go into this land and start new developements, usually on highest hills, and they will be supported by the government. This is also what "occupied territory" means: the occupiers can do whatever they want there with impunity. I still get different versions of what is meant by the '67 borders, but this much seems to be true: The agreement after the Six Day War, when Isreal chased Jordan out of this region, set this area aside for the Palestinians, even though it was still under Israeli control. But of course the ultra-Zionists, supported by American money, want this land for Israel too, and are slowly moving in until the status quo changes. These are some of the settlements that are standing in the way of the peace talks. Most of the signs were now in Arabic instead of Hebrew, but at one point we saw something the entrance to one of the new settlements, like a subdivision about to be built, with signs in Hebrew around some construction type trailers. I wondered if they were actually advertising for the new neighborhood. The settlements have chain link fences around them.

It's hard to write about these things. I"m trying to act like a journalist and be objective, not editorialize. But when you write the facts it sounds as if you are trying to make Israel look bad. These are just the facts. I certainly don't sympathize with the terrorist actions taken by Hamas or al-jihad. I kept reminding myself over and over: everyone agreed when the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were carved out for the Palestinian people. And now the Israelis are moving in, and no one can stop them.

Our guide for the day was supposed to be Rabbi Arich from Rabbis for Peace, but as we were driving in Rabbi Paula got a phone call that he had been arrested and someone else was going to come in his place, Rabbi Yehiye, with whom we rendez-voused along the side of the road. He came into the bus and gave us some preliminary remarks. He's the son of Polish Jews who were Holocaust survivors himself, raised in Melbourne, Australia. He led us deeper in, past Ramallah in the distance (one of the areas where the Israelis have no jurisdiction). As we were driving, every now and then I would see UN vehicles passing by, and young Orthodox kids with their black and white clothes, and broad rimmed hats or yamulkas. Yehiye was a gentle man in his 60s, with a face that seemed to go back and forth between kindness and worry. He explained to us that there is a group of rabbis who live in Israel proper who work with and for the Palestinian people as their advocates in courts and protecting them as they tend to their crops. We were on our way to do the latter as well. It seems as if the settlers like to place obstacles between the Palestinians and their crops, hoping that they will simply give up and leave this land for them. (But where would they go?) Some have even chopped down olive groves. But the biggest probelm is water. The settlements have all the water they want. The Palestinians have little and sometimes none. I asked, "Is there any justification, rationale given for that?" No, there isn't.

Mahmoud, our bus driver, dropped us off at a grove of olive trees and without any preliminary hellos or sala'ms or introductions, we climbed up some ladders and got to work. There were three young guys, two older men and an old woman with a baby already at work on this little grove of trees. I was on a tall ladder stripping branches with Lori. One of the young guys finally caught our attention and started trying to have some interaction with us in Arabic and sign language. This went on for about an hour, during which time we were offered ice cold Coca Cola from our smiling hosts, and Bakr, one of the 15 year olds, shimmied up the tree between Pastor Dave and I, and started pretty much showing off for us and (mostly) for the women in the group, as a 15 yuear old might. After about an hour we gathered around Rabbi Yehiye and Zacaria, a Palestinian man who seems to be a leader in his community. He told us a few more horror stories about aggression on the part of the Israeli settlers toward the Palestinians, fire bombing cars, chopping down trees and petty things like throwing rock at their goats while they are grazing just to try to provoke an altercation, knowing that the Israeli soldiers in the area cannot arrest the Israelis but can hold the Palestinians until the police come. I might have thought he was exaggerating but for having heard several times now similar stories from Jewish Israelis who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, from a human rights perspective. As if on cue, Zacaria got a phone call that three young men had been arrested by the Israeli military in his village. After conferring with Yehiye, he hurried off and left Yehiye to finish up with us.

Yehiye told us that it is American Jewish and evangelical Christian money that is behind the settlements. Whether that is absolutely true or just his "narrative" may be subject to a fact check, but it sounds right to me, and that is certainly what Palestinians think. I asked him what his co-religionists, his fellow Israelis, and finally the Palestinians thought of him, a rabbi in their midst. He answered well, first by saying, "Well, we never really knwo what people think of us!" Then he went on to say that for the first two it is a mixed bag, but there are obviously a lot of people who think that he is a traitor. The Palestinians he says are usually at first surprised. They think that all Jewish Israelis hate them. But he has been at this a long time and has developed relationships of trust. "I may be the only Jew they ever meet," he said. He has gone to the court with them and stood up for them in the face of violent settlers, protected their crops and their families. He told a story from the Talmud about a poor and illiterate man who wanted to marry a queen, but the queen said the only way she would marry him is if he proved his love by learning how tro read and write. He struggloed for months trying to learn but made little progress. He sat down by a stream one day, about to give up in his quest, when he spotted a rock through which the water had bored a hole. He thought to himself that if something as soft as water had the patience to bore a hole in something as hard as a rock, then he had the patience to learn to read for his Beloved. And then he said that his relationships with the Palestinians are like that. He said he didn't believe in big flashy actions, but in the long slow building up of friendship and trust. A Taoist rabbi. I tried to tell him that I wanted somehow to do the same thing, please let the Palestinain people know that not all American Christians support support the aggressive actions of the settlers.

We were all pretty fired up and/or confused by the day as we went around the circle and checked in after dinner. The juxtaposition of the Western Wall with the security wall, the fences around the Polish ghetto and fences around the settlements, the victims becoming the victimizers. Again, I would feel less comfortable even writing all this if my Jewish friends around me and our hosts here weren't leading us to these conclusions themselves. Morgie herself mentioned the "victim mentality." Rabbi Paula had given us this wonderful essay by A.B. Yehoshua earlier in the day, and her husband Ariyeh brought up this one quote that said exactly something that I have been trying to articulate for years:
The victim does not become moral because of being a victim.

The Holocaust, with the terrible things that it did to us, did not give us an eternal justification card. It only made the murderers immoral, not the victims moral. To be moral, you must do moral things. And the test is constant and daily.

This applies to any oppressed group, people of color, the gay community, women, any religious or ethnic group. We don't become moral just because of being a victim. To be moral we must do moral things.

the ground we share

2011-10-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

Those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion,
whuch cannot be moved,
which stands forever.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem
so the Lord surrounds his people.
(Ps 125)

26 oct 2011

I was about to go out and find a falafel when the rest of the group arrive around 7 o'clock last night. They (and I) went immediately down to the dining hall of the King Solomon Hotel where there was a sumptuous buffet laid out, and then the tour guide, Morgie, got us all immediately into the bus for our first outing. I think they do this to keep people up as long as possible on the first night to start getting acclimated to the time change. But what an outing! We had an hour and a half tour of the excavated tunnels that run underneath the Muslim Quarter along the western supporting wall of the Temple. Of course, as places change hands one civilisation, or the detritus of one era, gets overlaid by the new. We were down two or three layers, running our hands along the massive stones all the way to the end of the wall itself where the stones meet the bedrock that had been shimmed off the mountain, and then that very bedrock was chisled to make it look as if it was cut and carved stone rather than natural. Down there also is an opening to see what is known as the foundation stone, the very center of the earth, according to ancient Jewish legend. At that spot there are people praying while the crowds of American, European and Asian tourists go streaming by.

This morning we were up and out by 8 o'clock. Morgie took us first by bus high on a hill south of the city to show us the spot where Abraham would have seen the land for the first time, and read to us from Genesis 12--

When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shecem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, 'To you and your offspring I will give this land.'

--to start us out in earnest, back to the beginning of the story. Rabbi Paula led us in the berakah prayers of some wine and bread and we ate and drank to bless our journey together.

Of course looking to the east what we also saw from there was the other famous wall, the concrete wall dividing Isreal from the West Bank. Amazing to see it in person after having read so much about it. It looks like a grey snake winding through the hills. We will learn more about that later.

Our first day was a visit to the holiest places of all three religions: the Haram al Sharif, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

We headed first to the Haram al-Sharif (as the Muslims call it), the Temple Mound, to visit the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Since nearly the beginning of the Muslim reign in Jerusalem (well over 1000 of the last 1500 years), this spot has been commemorated as the third of the holiest places in Islam. The Dome of the Rock is built over the stone where tradition tells us Abraham took Isaac to sacrifice him. The Hebrew bible and the Qur'an have different versions of the story, but it is a foundational story for all three faiths, especially as evidence of Abraham's faith. It is also the spot at least somewhere near where the Jews believe the Holy of Holies of the Temple was. It is for this reason, among others, that Orthodox Jews will not go up there, partially because they fear stepping on the spot where the Holy of Holies was. Of course wound in there are many other religious and political arguments as well. There also is the Al-Aqsa mosque. This is the one that we sing about in the song "The Ground We Share," as "the farthest house" or the distant mosque mentioned in Surah 17, where Muhammad was carried on the horse Buraq led by the angel Gabriel to Jerusalem (though Jerusalem is never mentioned; it is assumed that that is "the farthest mosque"). Morgie told us that she told a group once how this mosque had been built in the year 705, and a man corrected her: it had already been there when Muhammad was carried there. She used that as an example: there is history and their is myth--and they are both true. She never debunks anything in her accounts of events associated with places, and I find that very refreshing to hear both the cold hard facts and the myths.

We could not go into either of those buildings; only Muslims can. This was not always so. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as a provocative act, against the advice of people around him, to prove up point, went up to the Temple Mount in 2000. It was seen as, probably because it was, more a commandeering of a space than as a gesture of reconciliation. That set off a great wave of violence in Jerusalem that resulted in some deaths. So now, the place is under tight security and there is the presence of Israeli soldiers and police as well as being under the supervision of the Palestinians. We were also told that Muslim males under the age of 35 still aren't allowed up there at all. It is only open to visitors from 7 to 10 in the morning and then again from 12:30 to 1:30 PM. I hadn't heard the announcement to the contrary, but I was pulled aside by the security screeners because they saw my Bible in my backpack. Not allowed up there. So I had to go back outside and leave it on a table just outside security but already inside the long entry ramp. I could only retrieve it by coming back between 12:30 and 1:30 if I could get in at all, and there was no guarantee that it would be there when and if I returned. I really didn't want to lose my Bible, but luckily pastor Dave offered to stay behind with it since he had been several times up the mount in the past, which was very kind of him.

I have read so much about this spot in particular, and espeically about Muhammad's night flight, that I was thrilled to be up there finally. I was very saddened that we could not go into the mosque or the Dome themselves. We then went back down to the Wall to spend some more time, it being the first time for the folks on the tour. I again found it very powerful to be there and could imagine sitting there for a long time reading scripture or just pressing my forehead to it, both of which are done regularly there. One sad note about it (and we finds that every one of these holy spots has some history of contention attached to it): there was a Palestinian neighborhood tucked pretty close up to that wall until 1967. A few days after Isreal won the Six Day War that year and captured the Old City, they bull dozed that neighborhood (most of the people probably had fled) to make the plaza in front of the wall, which is now paved and elegant. Why must someone's consolation always be bought at the price of someone else's desolation?

After lunch we headed up across the valley to one of the sites that had been pointed out to us several times already, the Hadassah hospital. That is also a emblematic of the strangeness of this little area. When that hospital was built, it was a little island of Isreal in Jordanian territory which started just to the west of the Old City. It then became part of the state of Israel in that same war. Brigid's brother who works for the BBC wrote a book called "Six Days" that recounts how those six days set the stage for everything that has followed and continues to this day in this region. Aside from that (and it is hard for anything to be aside from that) when the hospital was built in 1959 the great Russian born French Jewish artist Marc Chagall was commissioned to do a piece of art for it, and he chose to do twelve stained glass windows depicting the twelve sone of Jacob, the tribes of Israel, for the synagogue. This is quite a hospital complex; it has its own shopping mall plus this synagogue. The windows were extraordinary and many people come to Hadassah just for them. We listened to a long explanation of the symbolism of each window. One of the windows carries a scar of the war, too. Some of them were damaged severely by mortar shells, and so Chagall was called upon to restore them. But he left one damaged piece of colored glass as it was, with a hole in it.

We then headed back down into the Old City for a tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This church goes back to the time of Constantine's mother, St Helena, who is said to have found the true cross, and discovered all the sacred spots pertaining to the crucifixion, Mount Calvary, which seems to have been little more than a hill, but was outside the city at the time of Jesus; Golgotha itself, the "place of the skull," a rock formation that looks as if it has two eyes, preserved behind glass; the slab where Jesus was anointed, the thing that I saw the other day when I entered the church unaware; and then the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea where Jesus was buried and from which he rose form the dead. All of these spots are contained within the church. The original church that Helena has built was huge, three times the size it is now. The current church comes from the Crusader times, after 1099. The tomb was a cave cut into a rocky hillside. I have had in my mind all these years a big cave that you could stand up in, from the pious pictures we looked at as kids. We still never made it into the actual tomb that is supposed to be Jesus'. They cut the hillside away and a huge ornate housing was built around it centuries ago. There is, obviously, a long line, and only three people can get in at a time, and there was a lot of chaos and pushing and shoving and even some shoutingwhen we were there. But we did see another of the cave tombs that has been preserved just behind it. That was fascinating because I actually could get an un-gilded picture of what it might have looked like: a low cave with five fingers jutting out of it, each of those being just large enough to contain a corpse, then sealed with a stone. After a year or so after the body had decomposed someone would come and take the b0ones and drop them into a common receptacle near the front of the cave so that the tomb could be used again. Trying to picture all of that, the burial, Mary Magdalene, the angel, the apostles, was a wonderful exercise.

I don't want to scandalize anyone by what I am about to write, but I remained uncovinced by the whole place. First of all there is dispute over where the exact location is--the Protestants have an alternative site in a garden outside of the Old City--so that puts some doubt about the historicity of it all. But worse than that, if the presence, the spirit, of Jesus is in that building, for me it was covered over, hidden behind all the warring Christian factions who have fought (and still occasionaly do) for control over the place, not to mention the river of blood spilled by the Crusaders in conquering the Holy Land in the name of the Suffering Servant, the homeless rabbi who foreswore violence of any kind. I was equally put off by all the chaos of the place, all the various men (the custodians are all men, of course, monks, priest, friars) in their religious garb, and all the different ceremonies going on at the same time. The Protestant and Jewish folks in the group were not impressed at all, some left almost immediately, and I could hardly blame them. The one bright spot was the little Franciscan shrine of the Visitation and adjoining Blessed Sacrament chapel, which had an air of Vatican II-like noble simplicity, a stark contrast to the overwrought iconography and mosaics and layer upon layer of garish decoration, candles and statuary. I truly have felt the presence of Jesus much more walking in the crowded suqs (markets) and looking out at the hills surrounding Jerusalem and even at the kotel, than I did there. I had the same reaction to St Peter's in Rome though, so it's not out of character for me. I'd like to go back some time and see if I can't find something in it. I kept thinking of Virupraksha cave in Tiruvanamalai and wishing that Jesus' tomb was venerated as simply and reverently as that. Why does reverence always have to be shown by the addition of more and more decoration, more and more stuff? Why do we have to try to make things more sacred when they already are, like the tilda of Guadalupe or the new translations of the Roman rite, for instance?

more later...

on the holy mountain

2011-10-26T11:01:00.000-07:00

On the holy mountain stands a city
cherished by the Lord.
The Lord loves the gates of Zion
more than all Jacob's dwellings.
Of you are told glorious things,
O city of God.
(Ps 87)

25 oct 2011, Jerusalem

I arrived in Tel Aviv around 2:30 AM. That's, obviously, not the best time to start your day, or end it, as the case may be, since you're totally between hotel check in and check out time. So my plan was to hang out at the airport until the first shards of daylight (and maybe write a song), and then take the shuttle into town, (there's a shared taxi service called Nesher, that Michaela had found all about) and then hope that our hotel could get me into a room as early as possible. I hadn't slept much at all the night before, maybe a few minutes here and there on the plane and at the airport; but I was too excited to sleep during the 45 minute ride in the shuttle from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As I had hoped, teh sun was just peeking over the horizon as we made the climb into Jerusalem. The area around Tel Aviv seemed relatively flat, but as we neared Jerusalem the terrain got much hillier, and I really did get a sense that we were ascending, making the aliyah, there.

It all worked out, though I wasn't able to get a room as early as I hoped (about 11:30). The gentleman at the front desk of the King Solomon Hotel was very kind, and he told me that he would try to get me in as early as possible. So I stored my bags, asked for the directions to the Old City and headed out. I knew we were close and indeed I made it to Jaffa Gate before the stroke of 8, After spending so much time reading about the history of Jerusalem especially these last weeks and months, it was quite a thrill to gaze at the ancient walls for the first time. And I thought, "It is this little walled in piece of geography that has been fought over for centuries, this land that has comes to carry such a weight of meaning for so many Jews, Christians and Muslims." How many different musical versions of Psalm 122 went through my mind?! I rejoiced when I heard them say, 'Let us go to God's house. And now out feet are standing in your courts, O Jerusalem.

There were very few places open and very little activity at that hour still. I just began to wander aimlessly, hoping to find somewhere to sit down and have a cup of something and a little breakfast, which proved to be quite a task. I did have a small basic tourist map from the hotel, but had not studied my guide book much yet at that point. I sort of stumbled into the Church of Holy Sepulchre. As you enter you encounter immediately, to my surprise, a stone slab that foks were venerating. I wondered if that was what they were claiming was Jesus' burial place, until I discovered that that was the spot where he is reported to have been anointed after being taken down from the cross. The burial place itself was in another protected area which already had a long line of pilgrims waiting. I wandered about for a bit and then headed out, up and down narrow streets among the closed up shops until I finally came upon a few vendors selling baked goods and an open coffee and tea place in the Muslim Quarter near the Damascus Gate. The Old City is (as some of you will know) divided up into four quarters: Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian, which also is for the most part Christian, but none of the quarters contains exclusively sites proper to their tradition. Some great Christian sites are in the Muslim Quarter, and of course the Muslim Dome of the Rock and al-aqsa Mosque share the ancient Temple platform with the Western Wall, both of which are considered to be among the holiest places in their respective religions. As I munched on a couple of sesame cakes and drank a cup of strong Turkish coffee I got my bearings with my guide book, and headed immediately afterward to that area myself.

I can say honestly and without exaggeration that the Western Wall, the qotel, was probably the most powerful holy spot I have ever experienced. It is all that really remains of the second Temple, part of the great platform that Herod the Great built to support it by shimming off the rocky top of Mount Moriah on which is stood. In some way to understand the Temple Mount is to understand Jerusalem, it seems to me. Jewish tradition teaches that the Temple Mount is the focal point of Creation. In the center of the mountain lies a stone, called the Foundation Stone of the world. On top of the mountain is believed to be the rock on which Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac. Over that now sits the Dome of the Rock, one of the three holiest places in Islam. This is where the First and Second Temple were built, and the Ark of the Covenant was set. Jews believe the "Jerusalem was chosen by God as the dwelling place of the Shekinah," and a large a large placard told us that, even though the Temple in now gone, the Divine Presence--the Shekinah--never moves from the Western Wall.

The Wall itself is now considered a synagogue, an official place of worship. There is security screening getting into the area, a fence about 50 yards back separating the sacred space, another fence dividing the men from the women, and someone there issuing skull caps to anyone who does have one. I felt a little silly at first donning my white yamulka, but Bible in hand in made my way up to the Wall and found an open spot, and laid my forehead on it the Wall. It felt like the Wall was vibrating. I opened up my Bible and just happened to have Psalm 20 next in line to read, and it was perfect.

May God send you help from the sanctuary,
and give you support from Zion.
May he remember all your offerings...
May God grant you your heart's desire,
and fulfill all your plans

I thought of Valjean's 6th grade class at Salesian School in Aptos first (since I am on assigment from them to put there prayer request in a crack in the Wall, which I did); and then I was trying to think of everyone I knew and loved, and carry their intentions there too. I'm afraid to say any more about what the experience was like, but I read Psalm 20 again. It felt like the Wall was carrying suffering, and absorbing it but vibrating with it too. The psalm felt so real, more real than any psalm ever had. At one point someone had put a chair behind me to sit down, as is done, but I didn't want to take up any more time in the space. But I stayed outside the fenced in area for a good long time again. It was really extraordinary.

The security line and the queue for the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque were both so long, so I headed back to the hotel to see if I could get my room. It's a good long walk. It was still not ready but the gentleman told me that it would be soon so he sent me over to some couches to sit down. At which point I fell fast asleep (I had been up a while by then...) and woke up only when the same man was right over me me saying, "Sir! Sir Your room is ready!" So I settled in the room, showered and changed and headed out again and spent all afternoon walking and exploring again. I went back to the Wall, but the Temple Mount itself was closed to the public, so I still didn't get to see the Dome and the moasque. But that is on our itinerary for tomorrow. I also walked down through Lion's Gate, which it is believed the Messiah will enter, and down to look over the Kidron Valley (how many times I have sung about that in the Passion of St John? Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley...), and then down to the Tomb of Mary, which is supposed to be the holiest church in Jerusalem, but it was closed too. From there you can see Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, etc. but I didn't climb it yet. And then back through the Armenian Quarter and all the suqs (markets), and then finally back to the hotel where I crashed again. The rest of the group arrived around 6::45, and we had a sumptuous buffet dinner, and got right on the bus and went back to the Temple Mount again. I had no idea we were going at it right away. Our tour guide gave us a walking tour underneath the Western Wall, all the archeological tunnels, the huge stones layered below the present Arab Quarter, and the ancient cisterns, and finally even to the bedrock that is the foundation of the Temple. Simply amazing.

We'll be back there tomorrow for a tour of the Temple Mount which was actaully a garbage dump for many years after the destruction of the Second Temple. When the Muslims took over they recognized its holiness (which apparently the Christians did not) and built on it these two great structures, which we shall see tomorrow. Now, finally to bed...

something of inexplicable value

2011-10-24T01:17:00.000-07:00

...I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills, like a million flowers on fire - clearly I am not needed yet I feel myself turning into something of inexplicable value . . .
(mary oliver)

24 oct, london

When we returned from London with just enough time to get a little rest, and for Brigid to runoff and set up the evening event. I was part of an event which included a book launch, an Indian classical dancer and me. It was held at a Uniting Church near where I was staying in Cardiff. I left the book with Brigid to mail to me so I am not going to get the name of the author nor the title of the book correct just now, but the author was a rather well known liberal Baptist minister (I said, "We don't have any of those where I come from."), a mentor of Brigid's. And the book was entitled something like "Encountering the Sacred in Unexpected Places." We met briefly before the event (he had been to the event at St Michael's on Tuesday) and he told me of his interest in dialogue with the neo-pagan movements and with modern science, beyond that of with other religions. (There's that pagan theme again.) He was interviewed by a well-spoken man who was a friend of his. It was fascinating. Then a young woman from Karnatika gave us a beautiful performance of bharata natyam, Indian classical dance with an explanation of the story she was conveying. She seemed particularly pleased to meet me because of my connection with India, and we had our picture taken together on her cell phone (so it's official...). And then I did my thing, which seemed to be a pretty good blend of the two previous events.

The next day, Friday, after a good morning off, Brigid brought me over to the house she shares with Richard, who is a professional musician and part time recording engineer as well. He has a recording and filming set up right there in the house. Brigid had had the idea that I should a couple more videos for You Tube (with due regard for the irreplaceable Devin Kumar...), and so we did. We had a lot of fun working together and also talking afterward. Richard travelled playing for Van Morrison for five years, so of course lots of anecdotes about life on the road, but also about the deeper things of the musical path. He is that kind of musician I have always gravitated toward, these guys who are great players, maybe session players, absolute pros, but may never be the stars in the spotlight. The Brigid and I made the long trek down south to county Dorset for the retreat weekend. We didn't arrive lit late that evening when everyone had already gathered. The retreat facility is called Holton Lee, and if I remember the story correctly it started as a Christian community, dedicated to spirituality and the arts. As a matter of fact one of the founders, Jodi, who is still there, was a member of the musical group the Fisherfolk who I knew of already some years. Now they have done few intentionally Christian activities in the past few years, but are dedicated to arts, ecology, and especially to work with handicapped people. They are experimenting with a few specifically spiritual retreats again, and this was to be one of the absolute first. Brigid had worked there for some time some years ago, so she knew the place well. When I left California there were only three people signed up for the retreat and we weren't sure it was even going to go, but by Friday, after the events around the UK and a connection with the Bede Griffiths Sangha through our old friend Jill Hemmings, there were a full 25, a perfect number for the facility. We were mixed bunch, some Catholics, some Anglicans, several non-affiliated. I make it a point not to ask what tradition people are from when we start. For some reason I don't want to know. I guess it's that I want to believe that what I am talking about is universal, and if it isn't then I need to change the way I talk about it. We only started on Saturday morning, but we packed in a lot between then ands Sunday lunch, including "stretching and breathing" (which looks suspiciously like a yoga class), the regular prayer service, teachings, meditation, and musical presentation like the ones I have been doing, and a nice Lectio and Agape feast to close. I thought it went super. The feedback I heard from folks as well as the questions they asked during the discussions made me think over and over again of Fr Bede, how he could re-articulate Christianity in such as way as to help people to make peace with it, and to understand the other spiritual traditions enough to be able to encourage and uphold them too, and so to aid anyone in their spiritual life. I left feeling very grateful for this work we get to do. We met in a wonderful white box of a room with ceiling to floor windows on one side that looked out to the east. During our stretching and breathing in the morning, it was still pretty dark when we gathered at 7:15, but the overhead fluorescent lights were too harsh, so we just had lit candles around the room. So the beautiful sun was coming up right in the beautiful faces of the retreatants, full on by the time we got to the meditation period at the end. I shall remember how several of them stayed afterward when it was time for breakfast, siting on the floor in front of the window, admiring the sun and letting its warmth spill over their upturned faces. "Awakening in this moment of peace..."

I think the work I have done here these past weeks has been good. "Clearly I am not needed," yet it would be nice to think that I might be doing something of inexplicable value. After lunch I took the train up to London, a good two hour journey, which I enjoyed as always, to Waterloo station, buzzing and cold, and then took the Tube up to Islington, where I am now staying with my friend, yogi and Rolfer Giovanni and his mate Luke. Just enough time for a good sleep, a hot bowl of porridge, a trip to the gym and then my other friends Paul and Catherine of Psallite are coming up from Portsmouth to take me to lunch and then drop me at Heathrow for the flight to Tel Aviv. I have nearly finished this second book on Jerusalem, saving the last few chapters for my time there. I feel like doing some kind of ablution to prepare myself, but I may have to content myself with breaking a sweat in the gym and a good long hot bath. I expect I'll have some things to write about from there soon.

evangelium paganorum

2011-10-23T03:01:00.000-07:00

I am here.
Anything more than that
is rumor and slander.
(Mahmoud Darwish)

23 oct, holton lee, england

One conversation that Brigid and I had in the car proved prescient. The subject has actually come up a few times during my stay here, and that is paganism, of all things. If I get this right (and there is always a chance I don't) the British Isles are particularly amenable to the rise of a kind of neo-paganism, so I am told, specifically because of the renewed interest in Celtic spiritulaity, which had/has a well-developed sense of the "spirits" of nature.

Now I need to clarify terms again before I continue. As I understand it, the original term pagan means the country people, or the people of the land who worship or at least commune with gods and spirits. What it came to mean was unbelievers or heathen, and comes to have a lascivious, debauched air about it. It's that second meaning that I want to avoid. As far back as the Hebrew and the Christian scriptures, pagan means the first thing, not just "unbelievers" but people who worship idols or, as St Paul says, "the elemental spirits."

I also need to distiguish between two meanings of another word, and that is "spirit." As Fr Bede uses the term it means that realm of Absolute Reality as well as that place in us which is beyond all name and form. As Ken Wilber might say, it's the causal realm, that from which all else comes. But when we talk about "elemental spirits" and such, we actually mean entities which dwell in the realm of the psychic, the realm of soul not the spirit, simply because (and this is Fr Bede's language) anything still within the realm of phenomena is really a manifestation of soul, even though we call even ghosts "spirits." He would say the same about visions, locutions, all kinds of so-called "spiritual gifts" which are really psychic gifts or siddhis in the yoga tradition.

So monotheism in some way wants to go beyond all those entities straight to Spirit and spirit. The argument for the Oneness of God in Judaism and Islam is a conscious avoidance of all those entities in the realm of soul/psyche, or at least not worshipping them. I don't think that those "spirits" don't exist, because that whole psychic realm is very real. And there are good "spirits" there as well as dark ones, just as there are good powers and dark ones. All the "gods" are some kind of manifestation of these powers, forces. This is actually something that the great mystics agree with all the way from Shankara and the Buddha to St John of the Cross: don't get caught in the realm of the psyche. Go beyond it to the realm of your spirit and the Spirit. St John tells his readers to ignore visions and locutions and go beyond up Mount Carmel where there is nada nada nada; Patanjali tells his readers in the Yoga Sutras not to get hung up on the siddhis.

So to me that is the issue with paganism. It's simply not my way. First, as a monotheist I do not spend any time worshipping the Hindu gods either at Mount Madonna nor in India (though I understand very well that all the Hindu gods are really manifestations of Brahman) if for no other reason than I don't want to cloud up my soul/psyche with more images and archetypes (I've got enough already from my Christian tradition that I need to go beyond), and also because it is simply not our way. I also don't spend time communing with the "elemental spirits" for the same reason. On the other hand, I actually do acknowledge their existence. I was telling Brigid the story of our late Fr Romuald who along with Fr Bede's teaching gave me the clearest practical understanding of all this. He showed me that we need to respect that realm, but we don't have to be afraid of it if we are rooted in Spirit. And so on several occasions he had counselled people with psychic gifts. He didn't freak out about it, he simply showed them how to put that at the service of God. When he was living in New Hampshire at our short lived monastery there, he was sure that the house was huanted with ghosts. And he simply let them know what they could and couldn't do, and then said a series of Requiem Masses for them for the repose of their souls.

So, bottom line, if people refer to themselves as pagans (and I meet more and ore people who do, proudly!), if they are using that to refer to themselves as "lascivious heathens," I move on. If they are refering to themselves as someone who communes with the elemental spirits or worships other gods, then we have a whole different conversation. I would never refer to a Hindu as a pagan, mind you, or someone from the First Nation tribes anywhere. That might be a term used by an old school missionary type, but to me it always has a negative connotation.

So, I said something about "pagan music" at the event the other night, trying to say that music from the native peoples of Alaska, for instance, wasn't just pagan music as the missionaries claimed, that had to be discarded and replaced with Gregorian chant or some kind of horrible so-called Christian music (and there was a lot of HORRIBLE music that I heard there). Well, someone in the audience who said she loved everything else I said and sang, felt as if I had stabbed her in the heart by saying that, because she was sympathetic with a lot of pagan practices, as was her friend who was with her. We spoke to me at length about it afterward. And I tried to convey all of the above.

What is funny about it all is that the third good of our Camaldolese congregation of monks was originally called, as noted in the subject line, evagelium paganorum, the "evangelization of pagans." We never use that phrase anymore (and that would lead to a whole other discussion about what it means in this day and age to evangelize too...), but Brigid teased me that I was having plenty of opportunities to do so during my time in the UK this year. It's interesting to try to figure out what it meant in the 11th century in Europe.

After the late drive back to Cardiff, Brigid and I headed to London for the BBC interview. I was afraid we were going to have to drive, but Brigid decided that we should spend the money and take the train, which was just alright by me, an extra two hours to read and write and relax. We got to the BBC building in London about noon. The producer met us in the lobby and ushered us up to the recording booth on the fourth floor. It was kind of exciting to be there, and there was a buzz of energy and creativity and Very Important People (and very tight security). The producer set me up in the recording booth and briefed me on the questions that the host was going to ask, and then she retired with Brigid and the engineer into the control room, separated from us by glass. The host came in shortly after. His name was Hardeep Singh Kohli. If not by the surname Singh, one could tell by the turban that he was a Sikh. He actually regularly serves as guest host on this religious show, "Good Morning Sunday," but his main gig is as a comedian, mostly on various broadcast media. He's a unique combination himself, a Sikh from Scotland educated by Jesuits. He was very quick and intelligent, and also a very good interviewer, and I enjoyed talking with him immensely right away. He made me feel right at ease and we were well into a casual conversation before I realized that they were rolling tape and we were well into the interview.

Hardeep asked good questions that I think really got what I was up to, focused on the balancing out of monk and musician, and what kind of mission or message I had, etc. The only awkward moment came when he said to me, "So you spent all those years are a Christian monk and an ordained priest; why did you leave Christianity and become a Buddhist?" I carefully explained that I hadn't actually left Christianity nor become a Buddhist. At that point he glanced down at his notes and then shot a dark glare into the control room at the producer, and then picked up and carried on. (It wasn't her fault; he must not have read his briefing carefully.) Later I quoted him the Darwish poem above: "I am here./ Anything else is rumor and slander." Anyway, he had me sing two songs as well, and I don't think he was just blowing blue smoke when he said how much he liked the music. He gave me a big hug at the end of the interview, and we both agreed even after the tape machines stopped running that we had enjoyed our time together. It won't be broadcast until December, just before Christmas.

On the way down with Hardeep in the elevator I was just catching snippets on the BBC live feed of a breaking story about someone being captured and killed but I couldn't make out who it was. When we reached the lobby we saw it also playing on the TV screens there, and we realized it was the story of Mohammar Ghaddafi. It was chilling, but also poignant to get the news there first, at the BBC headquarters. And right away I was overwhelmed by a kind of sadness that we had to celebrate something like this. Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden... Obviously we are better off without these men running anything, but in spite of our relief, I still don't think we are allowed, nor is it good for us, to celebrate and gloat over their humiliation and death. It brings out the absolute worst in us. Every time we have had a dedication of merit in the days since I have prayed for the people of Libya, Ghaddafi's victim, his family and the repose of his tortured soul too.

I've just finished up a retreat way down south in Dorset near the town of Poole. After lunch I'm heading on the train up to London to stay with my friend Giovanni for the night and then off to Israel tomorrow evening.

May all bengs be well.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be at peace.

nature, grace and glory

2011-10-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

Haifa says to me,
"From now on
you are you!"
(Mahmoud Darwish)

thursday, 20 oct, on the train bound for london

I thought today I was going to have a morning off, spend time reading and maybe even getting to a gym, trotting up to the open market for some Welsh cakes and tea for breakfast... but it was not to be. Just as I was settling in to bed late last night, my host here, Brigid, called to say that what she had been hoping for had come through: she had secured a spot for me on the BBC's Sunday radio program, "Good Morning Sunday." I feared we were going to be driving there, three hours or so by car, but to my delight we are on the train instead, expensive but so comfortable and I can read and write on the train all the way to Paddington Station, my third or fourth favorite place on earth.

The next day, three events: first singing for 180 eighth form young people (12 year olds) at a private school. The best part of that was that Brigid's 11 year old son Joseph wanted me to walk with him to school, and we had a great talk about India and France and Los Angeles, music and the bishop of Wales. I told a few people that young people in large groups scare me, but it went well. I did "Awakening" and then a couple of singalongs (including "With My Own Two Hands") and the time flew by quickly. Afterward a rather conservative looking teacher came up to me--you can't tell a book by its cover--and asked me, "Wasn't that a Jack Johnson song?" Then we started heading north, and Brigid took me for lunch at Llantaranam Abbey. It's the site of an 11th century Cistercian monastery. Many years after that was demolished a lord built a beautiful mansion on the grounds, and in 1947 turned it over to the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Annecy, a French congregation of sisters founded by a Jesuit in the 17th century, suppressed and then revived in the 19th. Many of the sisters there were retired, but several are still very active. One, Sr Brita, is a higly accomplished artist, though she is away now in Ireland doing more study on Celtic spirituality so I didn't get to meet her. Another, Sr Alice, runs the nearby Ty-Creoso Centre (nearest I can tell that's pronounced "tea croysoh"), which means, "House of Welcome." While I ate with Sr Alice and Sr Maria Goretti, the superior, Sr Alice asked me good penetrating questions about my life and work, and about the Camaldolese in general. Again, I had probably already judged the book by its cover and was taken aback by how insightful she was and how broad her thinking was. She was talking about the future of religious life and the mystery of individual vocations within it. There were several aphorisms of their re-founder, Jean Pierre Medaille, SJ, that they had all memorized as young sisters, and she kept saying one of them to me over and over again: "Be what God wants you to be, in nature, grace and glory, for time and eternity." I sang for the sisters in the parlor after lunch, and then one of the sisters gave us an historical tour of the buildings and the site. Then as we went to Ty Croeso to say goodbye to Sr Alice she gave us a tour of that marvelous facility too, and they both loaded me down with literature, post cards and blessings.

We then headed up farther north to a little city called Abergavenny (accent on the first syllable, if that helps...). There is another ancient priory there of which all that remains is the stunning 12th century church, with its choir and high altar. On the site of the cloister itself there is now a large meeting room that is used for various groups. (When we arrived a meeting was going on for education in sustainable living.) It is now of course an Anglican church, but they had the idea some years ago to honor the Benedictine background of the place by holding "monastic days." Basically the idea is that as many people as could would pray all the liturgical hours together and follow a monastic schedule for the day. And, since I was a monk... they replaced the normal evening activity for an evening with me.

I tried to hint to Brigid that there was a good chance that I would not be the kind of monk they were looking for. There is a long storied tradition of rather classic English Benedictine monasticism here in Britain that was hugely influential on the English church, especially on the Anglican church which adopted many monastic elements as popular liturgical elements. The classic distinction between cathedral and monastic that still abides in Roman Catholicism does not abide in the same way in the Anglican tradition. For example, the tradition of evensong. One thing I find interesting is that in several places the choir sits in the choir stalls. Now that sounds right except that the "choir" (the place, the stalls) functions in ancient churches as the place where monks (or canons) would sing the liturgy, between the high altar and the congregation, who in ancient times would be pretty much observers of the liturgy. In some of the Anglican liturgies that I have attended, the "choir" sits there, meaning the trained singers, which still puts them behind the presiding minister during the liturgy of the Word, and between the congregation and the presider at the altar during the liturgy of the Eucharist. I am sort of fascinated by ritual as ideology in action, and the meaning conveyed by choreography, and I am not sure I understand what Lucien Deiss used to call the "ministerial function" of that choreography. I will have to ask someone. But at any rate, ai was afraid that my particular life style and liturgical sensibilties, not to mention the music that I was singing would not be in keeping with this style of "monastic." I kept hearing Sr Alice's words in my head: "Be what God wants you to be, in nature, grace and glory, for time and eternity"-- and in Abergevenny.

We got there just before Vespers. Two priests led it, with a handful of lay people in the choir stalls as well. One of the priests, with a beautiful clear voice, sang the Gregorian antiphons before each psalm, and then the two priests sang the psalms, right out of the Benedictine breviary. None of the other congregants sang, and I mumbled along, not quite sure what to do. And I actually was a bit tired by then and was sort of lulled into a deep quiet by the beauty of their voices and the place. The evening event was in the priory center two hours later. I wanted to make sure I was speaking to this particular crowd, and I thought I might have to come up with a whole new program, so as to go "from the kown to the unknown." So I spent some time preparing/rehearsing more mainstream pieces. But again there was actually quite a mix of a crowd, a few folks from the monastic day, as well as one of the priests, but it had also been advertised in several other places (containing three different starting times!), including enthusiastic and kind words by the local bishop and an article in the local paper, all of which had mentioned my particular approach to these things, so in the end I felt a little better and resorted to pretty much the program I had been using.

Then the long drive back down to Cardiff, the late night phone call informing me of this BBC gig, and here we are, about to pull into Paddington Station.

"Be what God wants you to be, in nature, grace and glory, for time and eternity."

(I'm heading to Dorset today for a weekend retreat. Will try to post once more before I leave for Israel about the BBC yesterday.)

the depth and the breadth

2011-10-21T06:28:00.000-07:00

I walk lightly so as not to crush my cheerfulness.
I walk heavily so as not to fly.
In both cases the ground protects me
from disappearing into adjectives
that cannot be used to describe it.
(Mahmoud Darwish, "From Now on You Are You")

19 oct, 2011 cardiff, wales

I traveled by train here to Cardiff from Swindon yesterday. Sunday night Janet, the priest who had invited me for the events in Cirencester, had Patrick and I along with another of her friends who is an Interfaith minister over for dinner at her place in a village not far from Cirencester. Driving through the ever narrower roads into the village where she lived and then down her lane, for all the world I thought I was in a Ken Follet novel about medieval England. We had a great dinner and visit, and a lively conversation. Janet was originally in business, but before that had done her post-graduate degree in theology (patristics) at Oxford. A stint working in Japan led to her seriously studying Zen under a teacher there, and when she returned to England and decided to pursue her doctorate, she wrote on "Denying Divinity," a comparison of the negative language (the via negativa) in Dogen-zenji and that of Maximus the Confessor and Pseudo-Dionysius. She then went on to ordination in the Anglican church as well as teaching comparative religion (among other theological and philosophical subjects) at the college level. She has a particular interest in inter-religious dialogue, obviously, and this was the main topic of our conversation.

At one point Janet asked me what I thought we were really trying to accomplish in our work. My answer was, "Friendship." She asked me if I thought we were preaching to the already-converted or if we were doing something more besides. That was a good question. I said that it seemed to me that there was both a depth and breadth involved: the more I get to know someone and another tradition, the deeper my knowledge goes; that in turn allows me, inadvertently perhaps, to disseminate some understanding about others and their tradition to folks who may not necessarily have any interaction with people of different traditions, my own relatives and friends, other religious, etc. I think the depth is more important than the breadth, but it cannot help but spread, like love itself.

The next day Patrick took me for a long drive down into Sussex county to visit a wondrous place called the Ammerdown Centre. It is mainly housed in the converted stables on the estate of Lord Hylton, whose family still live in the manor house. Ammerdown was started by a group of progressive Roman Catholics shortly after Vatican II as a Conference and Retreat Center "nestling in woods next to a Stately Home, surrounded by beautiful landscape gardens and parkland, with an exquisitely beautiful chapel in its midst." So says the handout advertising the place. It really is a wonderful space, the chapel, a converted granary, I believe, with symbols of other faiths displayed prominently as well as the reserved Eucharist in a corner tabernacle. It is "run as an open Christian community dedicated to hospitality, spirituality and growth." The courses are wide ranging, everything from arts to spirituality. A sampling of earlier this year: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, Understanding Islam, Chrisitan Arts, Artisitic Influences of World Faiths, Gregorian Chant, Jewish Spirituality, Desert Mothers, the Enneagram... We had a good long visit and lunch with Mrs Benedicte Scholfield, the French born current director. She was keen, and this was the purpose of Patrick bringing me there, on me coming to do something for them in the future.

The event went well at Cirencester Monday night. I am avoiding the word "concert" because for most of these events the organizers want a talk as much as they want music, and most of them have wanted me to add a period of meditation in as well. It works out well for me. I bring my notes with me but I generally never consult them anymore and I just sit there and sing songs and tell stories. I've got a bunch of new stuff to talk about now that has been gluing together with more current reading and practice, so it seems fresh to me. The only downside is that I don't get to sing as many songs as I'd like and I am itching just to do a concert without all the talking, but this is a luxury problem. The next day, I was up early with Patrick to go and sit za-zen with a couple of his students at a local house in the village. He is now an official dharma heir in the White Plum lineage and runs a group here called the Wild Goose Sangha, the wild goose being an ancient Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit. Patrick has been a very serious student of Zen ever since I've known him. Janet says that he is the only one she knows who combines these three elements: a former married Angican priest who became one of the rare married Roman Catholic priests, and then went on to be come a Zen teacher. The room where I always stay is filled with his books, many on Buddhism. He is also always a great resource for new reads in general and I wind up wanting to tuck two or three books into my backpack as I leave... but I resist.

Patrick got me to the train headed for Cardiff later that morning, and I was met there by my very enterprising host, Brigid Bowen. She is a journalist by profession, now involved in several different projects, and also a long time spiritual seeker, interested greatly in inter-religious issues. Though a Catholic from birth, she is a student also of Thich Nhat Hahn, having been to Plum VIllage in France several times. She has had several things lined up for me this week. Tuesday night I was at St Michael's College, which is basically a training school for Anglican priests. mostly for the Church in Wales. I had a wonderful visit and tea with the acting director, a youngish man named Steven Baker. He had been to Shantivanam and was well read in many of the current thinkers on comparative religion The evening event was super. We were in an upper room in the library, which could hold only about 50 people. By 7:25 there was still only one person there, a kind elderly retired Roman priest with whom I had a wonderful conversation. He was 87 years old, and had seen a lot of life, including having been a conscientious objector during World War II. (That was mighty brave in its own way back then, maybe even moreso here in Britain where the bombs were actually falling.) I thought that I might be spending the evening with just him when suddenly the place filled up, every seat. I suppose it might have had something to do with a semi-academic setting, though not everyone was from the seminary. Several folks whom I met afterward had read or heard about it elsewhere, a Yogi, a few musicians, etc. It was the best evening I have had thus far; the crowd was so attentive, and that was certainly encouraging for me, especially knowing that there were several folks in the audience who were well read and sympathetic already. I found myself talking about Gregory of Nyssa during the introduction to "The Great Mother" from the Tao te Ching, and all about fana and baqa and the belief in the abiding self in the prophetic traditions during the introduction to Kabir's "Drink Sent Down."

god is one (pt 2)

2011-10-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

A word of hope, encouragement and good news
a remembrance of humble saving power
a burning bush of unquencahble fire
a tnagible sign of hidden salvation
a window open towards heaven
a bridge of peace
a house of friendship
a noah's ark, a ship of fools
a shelter from the storm
a blessing on our life's journey
(Lord Hylton, vision statement of Ammerdown Centre)

(This is a continuation of the previous blog, a long version of a sermon I gave at in Cirencester...)

... Now, unfortunately, this breakthrough, this revelation and belief in monotheism in actual practical application, is often what gets blamed for (and is the cause of) religious wars. I'll give you one example, that Karen Armstrong writes about. When these same exiles (known as the golah) returned from captivity in Babylon, they immediately turned that revelation of God's inclusivity into a reason for exclusivity instead. Not only were the goyim--the gentile nations to be excluded, but even some of their own people. When the people of the old northern kingdom of Israel, known as Samerina, offered to help in the rebuilding of the Temple after the exile, they were rejected by the returning exiles! They were called the am ha-aretz, the "people of the land," members of the ten northern tribes and other Judeans, the children of those who had stayed behind. And in spite of the fact that prophets such as Ezekiel saw all twelve tribes as members of Israel and worthy of holiness, Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua his priest and their followers deemed that only the golah--the exiles constituted the true Israel, and even these Samarians were seen as enemies. Later, after the Torah became the official law code of Jerusalem under Nehemiah and Ezra, at one point even among the returned exiles men were commanded to send their foreign wives and children away to join the am ha-aretz. "Membership in Israel was now confined to the descendants of those who had been exiled to Babylon and to those who were prepared to submit to the Torah," Armstrong writes, and goes on to point out that from then on this "ruthless tendency" to exclude other people would henceforth become a characteristic of the history of Jerusalem. But doesn't this seem to be the tendency of religion in general when it is in search of a kind of cultic purity? Some of the actions and attitudes of Roman Catholics seem to have a tendency this way these days too. I have heard more than one person say how they wouldn't mind a "smaller more faithful church," and how many discussions I have heard about who should be denied the Eucharist!

That same situation with the golah and the am ha-aretz played itself out in Jesus' time. The Gospel of Luke tells the story of Jesus on his way to Jerusalem passing through Samaritan land. And the people of the region won't offer him hospitality because he was on his way to Jerusalem. Those who had been excluded now become the excluders! The violent cycle of exclusion keeps churning. So the apostles offer to call down fire from heaven, but Jesus will not allow it. Jesus is bringing a new understanding of the law and it is this: concomitant to love the Lord your God is that nobody gets left out, not the blind, not the lame, the lepers, the tax collectors and prostitutes. And who is my neighbor? Specifically the one who had been excluded: the Samaritan. What may not be obvious at first is also that Jesus is a Galilean, and the Galileans had a special appreciation for the Israelite traditions of the north where Galilee was located. The gospels quote the northern prophets (Elijah, Elisha, Jonah) but the rarely mention the kings and priests who were typical of Jerusalem and Judea. "They speak of the Isrealites as 'children of Abraham' and avoid the theology of Zion and the holy city." Furthermore--and doesn't this add an interesting element to understanding Jesus?--the Galileans "were probably accusmtomed to a more relaxed interpretation of the law, and were less strict about certain purity laws than were the Judeans." (Pagola, 50)

(An aside, that story of Jesus heading to Jerusalem always reminds me on not being able to get to Israel last year when we were in the Mideast, but we couldn't go because Syria would not give a visa to anyone who was on their way there, nor let someone back in the country if they had been. Chilling.)

So, somehow the way it gets interpreted and manifested, it seem as if it were built into the very structure of the Abrahamic faiths to be in competition with each other and with other religions and with other gods, and even within one's own ranks in search of cultic purity. And the Abrahamic faiths often get accused of intolerance because they manifest themselves not as a unity but as a kind of triumphant exclusivism. And so folks will contrast monotheism to the paganism of, say, the ancient Sumerians or Canaanites, or the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans, or Hinduism's henotheism, which are all seen as somehow more benign and tolerant because they accept a variety of gods. This applies not just to back then, mind you, but also now. This is a very current argument. I'm using "pagan" in the modern sense here, not in any pejorative sense. There are many people nowadays who proudly refer to themselves as "neo-pagans," and their tolerance of the worship of many gods gets contrasted with monotheism's rejection of all that in the name of this one God. In some way this is a valid critique, because how many times and ways throughout history has monotheism become a kind of supremacism, simply a claim to the possession of the absolute truth as opposed to others who possess only illusions?

But actually this revelation of and understanding of God's Oneness (at least as James Carroll argues it) is supposed to serve as an antidote to violence and a repudiation of any kind of exclusivism, because this is not a god who is opposed to any creature or people--this is the God of all creatures and people. It's a fundamentally positive message. And this is certainly not a god who is opposed to creation in general, because this is the God who is the ground of all being, and with whom, so Jesus shows us, we are meant to be in intimate relationship.

And relationship is somehow the key: our relationship with God is only exclusive in the same sense that any love relationship is exclusive. As in a marriage, where the exclusivity of the love of one partner for the other is pro-creative, the relationship gives birth and opens itself up to inclusivity, to children, to relatives, and hopefully eventually to an ever wider circle, to neighbors, to the tribe, the nation, and finally opening up to strangers and foreigners, to universality. In Israel's case there was a certain what we call "scandal of particularity," this One God having chosen one particular people. But even here it's meant to move "through exclusiveness to inclusiveness," as a marriage would, from one people opening to all people. That's why Isaiah says they will be "a light to the nations." This is what Peter and Paul come to realize as they began their mission to the Gentiles, that nobody gets left out. This is the genius of the idea of election in the prophetic traditions, that it doesn't involve "the oneness of total union in which the individual is lost," and it's not about simple uniformity. Again, like a marriage, why the mystics of all three tradition resort to the language of marriage and bridal mysticism. Election is a union of communion, the union of a relationship in which separate beings, while remaining separate, neverlesstheless come together, a union in which fear of and opposition to each other gives way to friendship. Of course, we Christians believe that that is exactly what occured in the Jesus' new way, and he even says to his disicples, "I no longer call you servants, but my friends."

The problem is not in the tradition, not in the religion; the problem is in us. We get it wrong. When we reduce God's oneness to an excluding monotheism, we get it wrong. When we think and act as if God's Oneness means that God is at war with other gods, we get it wrong. When we act as if union means the destruction of all difference, we get it wrong. No, union means E pluribus unum--from many to one. Bad religion is totalitarianism; good religion is union in diversity. The theme that stretches throughout the Bible going back to Abraham, Moses, David, indeed to the very story of creation, is God's oneness, a "oneness that unites rather than destroys."

Thus the genius of Genesis, and of the religions that follow from it, is the insight that all that exists was and is created by the same God. More: all that exists was and is created in that God's image. Oneness, not cosmic war, is the ground of existence. God is One, and each of God's creatures participates in that Oneness, with humans as the creatures who know it, even if, having a genius for evil as well as good, [we] tend to imagine it otherwise. (Carrol, 303)

And so the response that Jesus gives when he is asked about the coin in the Gospel of Matthew??--"Give to Caesar what is Caesar's," he says, since Caesar's head is not it, "and give to God what belongs to God"??--really begs the question, "What does not belong to God?" The Lord's are the earth and its fullness. God is one.

So what is the antidote to monotheism (or any spiritual tradition) being exclusivist and triumphalistic? Only a real conversion, an experience of God not being the God only of Christians (or Jews and Muslims or anyone), but God who is the God of all people who are struggling to understand the fullness of divinity in their own (and our own) sometimes feeble and immature stabs at worship; to see the oneness of God not being about a quantity but as a quality, to understand God as the ground of being itself, as the ground of awareness itself; and to see the image of God manifesting wherever we see beauty, truth or goodness manifesting, be it in a great work of art, the budding of an apple tree, a work of scientific genius, in another religion; to recognize it in any kind of self-donation from a simple act of kindness to world-changing social reforms. And to make of our hearts and our homes and our spiritual communities little places of this unity, unity in diversity where union means not a bland comformity and uniformity, but a celebration of the panolpoly of unity in its beautiful diversity.

God is One.

god is one (pt 1)

2011-10-17T09:25:00.000-07:00

A garden of joy and delight
a spirit of living water
a tent of welcome
a door of acceptance
a shared table of bread and wine
a meal to satisfy our common needs
a precious jar of healing ointment
a holy psace open to all
an invitation to the dance...
(Lord Hylton, vision statement of Ammerdown Centre)

(Much of the following is based on James Carroll's book "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" (all unattributed quotes will be from there, mainly pages 58-64, and 302-302) where he introduced me to a deeper understanding of the oneness of God, and on Karen Armstrong's book "Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths." These are the two books we've been studying in preparation for our trip to Palestine. Plus my host and old friend here in Cricklade, Patrick Eastman, loaned me a controversial book by the Spanish theologian Jose Pagola called "Jesus: An Historical Approximation," that added a few insights as well. What I'm posting here is about three times as long as the sermon I gave Oct. 16 at the Anglican Parish Church in Cirencester.)

Something very interesting happened to the Jewish mindset and understanding of God during the Babylonian exile and captivity. At first the Hebrews weren't really monotheists; they didn't necessarily believe that there was only one god. I ran into this term only recently: at first they were actually what we call "monolators"??; they worshipped only one god, their god, but they didn't necessarily deny the existence of other gods. But as time went on the Jewish people understood more and more about the character of this god that they worshipped, and their experience of God eventually made them question the very existence of any of other gods, and especially all the tribal deities that surrounded them, the local gods who seemed to be so limited and narrow. The god of Israel--lower case "g"--eventually became for them God--upper case "G." And so when they were in Babylon, the Jews not only refused to worship the local gods, they even refused so much as to acknowledge that these local gods existed at all. In other words, they became monotheists, meaning that they began to believe that not only was this the only God to be worshipped, but that only this God-as-they-understood-God was real. There was only one God. So the psalms say over and over, The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have eyes but cannot see, hands but cannot feel..., etc. And of course we see so many allusions to this also in the prophet Isaiah: I am the Lord and there is no other, there is no God besides me (Is 45).

It is after that period in their history when editors and redactors really starting compiling the book that we know of now as the Old Testament (though of course it is not "old" to a Jew--it is simply the Torah, or the Jewish Bible). These redactors and editors started reading this monotheism back into their own history, and perhaps they even added it in at times as they interpreted the ancient stories that had been passed down to them. It might not be obvious at first, but even if we look at that first story of creation in Genesis there's evidence of this new understanding of God that's different from other religions of the ancient world. Even though the creation story in Genesis has a lot in common with other creation stories of that region, what makes the Jewish story unique is that it shows God not only creating this particular tribe or that particular kingdom; it shows God as the creator of the entire cosmos, God as the origin of all that is. God is One.

But I was interested to learn that the term "monotheism" wasn't actually coined until the seventeenth century, and our understanding of what the oneness of God means is actually very modern. In our scientific age, inadvertently perhaps, we think of "one" as a number, and so God is thought to be some kind of a solitary entity who stands apart from everything else, standing apart from all other creatures as well as all other gods, and therefore God can be seen as antagonistic to everything else as well. If we understand "oneness" in that way, then God can easily be a source of conflict and competition, our god against all the other gods, as if God had some kind of ego to defend or territory to protect. But we shouldn't understand the Oneness of God mathematically or scientifically or even philosophically. It has to be understood spiritually, meaning not to think of "oneness" as a matter of quantity; God's oneness is a quality. What the Oneness of God is affirming is a unity. God's Oneness does not mean a being who stands apart from creation, God's Oneness does not mean a being who is radically different and superior to creation. It means the being who is present to creation, "as the reconciliation of all oppositions," Carroll says, echoing the theme of the mystic Nicholas of Cuxa. God is unity, God is the One who unites, God is oneness itself.

Now if we go back for a moment to the story of Moses' meeting God in the burning bush, we see God who is revealed as "I am who am" or (what is the best translation of the tetragrammaton?) perhaps, as I've read it translated, "I am who causes to be." God is being itself. God is not just a Being over and against all other beings: God is being itself. Deus es ens, says Thomas Aquinas, the very ground of being. (We are, you may note, pretty close to the Indian understanding of brahman, not to mention the Rhineland mystics' and Paul Tillich's notion of God as grunt.) God isn't just associated with Israel nor with any other particular clan or tribe; God is related to all that is. The Oneness of God isn't a number: it's a quality. Even more, it's a relationship, a relationship with all that exists.

And this revelation that God is one also means, again as the prophet Isaiah especially saw, that the God of this people, Israel, is actually the God of all people. God is not the god "of the tribe but of the cosmos--of all creation." So if God is jealous, God is jealous of everyone's love, "and offers himself, through the... promise made to Abraham, not to a single people, but to 'a multitude of nations.'" And of course Jerusalem, and Mount Zion with it, becomes the symbol for this, again as we see often in Isaiah: In the days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be raised above the hills and every nation shall come streaming, many poeples come and say, 'Let us climb the mountain to the house of God..." (Is 2) And so in Isaiah 45, in what may have seemed like a shock to the people of Israel, the prophet Isaiah calls Cyrus, the king of Persians, God's anointed one!??--"though you know me not." And it is Cyrus who is mandated to rebuild the Temple in the ruins of the ancient city. God is one! The God of all people, "though they know me not!" I was reminded too of Paul in the Areopogus as reported in the Acts of the Apostles, claiming at the shrine to the unknown of god, that this is the God revealed by Jesus.

So after the Babylonian exile, Israel starts to perceive God in a whole new way, a way in which competition from or comparison to other deities was simply inconceivable. This belief in God is not merely in opposition to other gods; it's totally different from the belief in other gods; it's an entirely different way of knowing. James Carrol has the beautiful phrase: "God is present in this world as meaning is present in knowledge." To affirm the Oneness of God is to affirm a God who is closer to us, as St Augustine wrote, than we are to ourselves, or as it is written in the Qur'an, "closer than our jugular vein." We might say God is closer to us than our own awareness is, or as the very ground of our awareness, "as meaning is present in knowledge." That's the Oneness that counts, and monotheism is identitfying the awareness of this God with the very ground of awareness. (We are now awfully close to the Indian notion of Atman-ground of consciousness.) It's a "magnificent breakthrough in the religious imagination," Carroll says, and it's the core of the religious vision of the Bible.

In this day and age I look for any occasion when I can refer to Judaism, Christianity and Islam together, the three religions that stem from Abraham, the Abrahamic faiths. Sometimes we also refer to the three of them as the prophetic traditions, those that believe that God intervenes in human history, as compared to the mystical traditions of the Far East, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, for instance, that are much more focused on the interior. (This is not to say that each aspect isn't present, perhaps in a quieter and more hidden way, in the other.) All three of these Abrahamic faiths are based on this oneness of God. So the Shema, the most famous of all Jewish prayers, that still defines Israel to this day, from Deuteronomy (6:4-9): Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad--"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." This is a declaration of faith, a pledge of allegiance to one God, the first prayer a Jewish child is taught and the last words a Jew says prior to death??--an affirmation of God's Oneness. James Carroll suggests that it may be that Jesus' embodiment of God's Oneness, his sense of intimacy with the Father, saying things like "The Father and I are one," is the very reason that his followers recognized that he was divine. (And also the very thing that got him killed.) And so the Christian creed which begins with, Credo in unum Deo--"I believe in one God...". And so the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), influenced by Jews and Christians, clears the kabah in Mecca of all the other deities and declares what is known in Islam as the shahada--la illa ha illaha--"There is no god but God..." Some suggest that it is this sense of and feeling for the Oneness of God that sparked the rapid spread of Islam. Certainly Muhammad himself thought he was merely recovering the ancient faith of Abraham, not founding a new religion. The great ideal of the Qur'an was tawhid, which literally means "making one." So, as Karen Armstrong explains it, individual Muslims were called "to order their lives so as to make God their chief priority: [and] when they had achieved this personal integration, they would experience within that unity which was God." Ah, what does that mean? "To experience within the unity that is God"? But not only individuals, the whole human society "also had to achieve this unity and balance and all its activities under the aegis of the sacred." (Armstrong, 220) And so, as well, holiness "was thus seen as inclusive rather than exclusive." And since Muslims were engaged in a struggle (jihad) to restore all things in the human and natural world, the line between sacred and secular gets blurred. Furthermore there ought to be no divisiveness or sectarianism in religion. Muhammad believed that Jews and Christians belonged to the same ancient faith. For example, the Christians of Medina were allowed to worship in the mosque "as an expression of the continuity of the Islamic tradition with the gospel." Muhammad did not expect Jews or Christians to convert unless they wanted to because he believed they had valid revelations of their own. (Armstrong, 226-227)

God is One. (continued...)

playing in the dust

2011-10-17T09:20:00.000-07:00

Children run out of the temple and play in the dust.
God watches them and forgets the priests.
(Rabindranth Tagore)

16 oct, 2011, cricklade

Matt Rees of the Stillpoint Center picked me up at the Abbey yesterday afternoon. We had met briefly last year when I was doing the program at the Abbey and so we barely knew each other. We had a good conversation on the way to Oxford, in which I found out that he was actually an Anglican priest. He gave me a lot more background about Stillpoint too, and told me that they had also Richard Rohr and Martin Laird (author of that wondeful book "Into the Silent Land" that Sr Barbara introduced us to) here in the past year. Pretty good company! They don't actually have a center; events are held at various locations, including the Abbey. When we got to Oxford, Matt walked me over to the convent of the Sisters of the Love of God, an Anglican contemplative community, where I was to stay the night, right around the corner from Matt's house and St Alban's where the evenint event was to take place. The prioress, Sr Catherine, met us and led us over to a separate building where there was a "flat" that where I was to stay. She explained that their Sr Benedicta had lived there for some time, but had recently moved back to the convent with the rest of the community. As we walked in I immediately noticed a nameplate on the wall: Sr Benedicta Ward. I said, "What?! Is that THE Sr Benedicta Ward?!" Now, that may not be a familiar name to many of you, but she is one of the world's experts on the desert monastic tradition, and is famous in the monastic circles for having compiled the authoratative collections of the sayings and lives of the desert fathers and mothers. I've read many of her works. She had been a lecturer at Oxford for years and I believe also did work with Bishop Kallistos Ware. Really the flat was like a little urban hermitage, very simple (at least now; "Sr Benedicta had so many books!" Sr Catherine said.) So I was pretty honored and happy to be staying there. It's actually a bustling little neighborhood, surrounded by student housing. I was told there are more than 30,000 students in Oxford during the term. As a matter of fact there was a crowd of loud Oxfordians right outside my window until quite late last night. I was wondering how patient Sr Benedicta was with that.

I got myself out for a little walk of the neighborhood, down to the Thames and winding up at a pub on the corner called the Magdalen Arms. Now, again, this may not mean much to you, but we were on Magdalen Road right down the street from Magdalen College (pronounced "maudlin," by the way), the college where CS Lewis and Bede met and tutored. As I sat at the Magdalen Arms and had afternoon tea, I imagined the two of them knocking back a pint right there discussing some of the finer points of Greek tragedy. Matt picked me up accompanied by Ian, another Anglican priest and his partner in Stillpoint. I swear, if I hadn't known better I would have taken the two of them to be just two working class guys, maybe a bass player and guitarist for a rock band after a hard day's night, not as two Anglican priests. My own prejudice, I'm sure, (I hope they won't mind this characterization, if they are reading...) but they've got more the faded jeans-rumpled hair look than the stiff-collared image I had of Anglican clergy. We were met also by Ian's wife, Gail, and they took me back for a light dinner before the evening event. And of course we swapped all kinds of stories. Both Ian and Matt have been involved with experimental communities; that's how they first hooked up. When they started Stillpoint they simply decided to invite anyone they themselves would want to spend an evening with. It's worked so far. They both have a great love for the arts, and Matt has a great fondness for the Beat poets, with a picture of Alan Ginsberg on the wallpaper of his mobile phone. Ian also has been deeply involved in the "new monastic" movement, which also of course got us into another deep discussion. Needless to say, I was pretty fired up by the time we got to the evening event.

It went quite well, I thought. I used the regular prayer service as the format, with the addition of a bit more music than usual. As a matter of fact, I sat down to play some music as people were came in, as I would normally do in the States as well, to quiet people down as they gathered. The difference between here and there is, last night they actually did quiet down! They were listening very attentively, so much so that I finally spoke to them and explained the piece I was going to play and sang a bit too. It was a great setting in the nave of the church and a sweet acoustic. And folks were very responsive and kind afterward.

This morning was the whole other end of the spectrum. Beth, one of the parishioners of St Alban's, kindly drove me from Oxford across the Cotswold to the town of Cirencester, where I was to preach at the Cirencster Parish Center. It is a grand old church, the largest parish in Gloucester county, I was told. Really it's a combination of three churches/congregations. There are six priests, but I once I got to the vestry I couldn't tell who was clergy and who wasn't because there were so many people in clerical blacks, cassocks, and surplices. Three ordained besides me were part of the service, Rev Janet Williams, who had invited me, another woman priest and the vicar himself who had a red sash around his cassock. I thought perhaps a cardnial had slipped in (!) but he put on a dalmatic and served as deacon. I had to laugh at myself. I'm used to being a wandering preacher, but it is rare that I actually show up at a the door of a church carrying my backpack and guitar, not to mention highly underdressed. Anyway, after asking several people how long one preaches at an Anglican service, I had scrupulously timed my homily at 15 minutes and told the congregation that I had and that they could check their watches. This was to break the spell of my own nervousness and to let them get used to my American accent. I think it went pretty well. Folks here are not at all as responsive as we are in the States, and I've gotten used to that. Afterward that I had several good conversations with folks who had obviously been very attentive. One guy, who had been one of the liturgical ministers, surprised me by asking me afterward, "Fancy going out for a pint later on?" I stammered that I didn't actually drink and I wasn't sure if where I was staying was anywhere close, but if we could work something out. It didn't, but I appreciated the offer to see a little local color.

Anyway, I'm gonna post the homily in a few parts upcoming... It's mostly based on James Carroll's book "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" (all unattributed quotes will be from there, mainly pages 58-64, and 302-302) where he introduced me to a deeper understanding of the oneness of God, and on Karen Armstrong's book "Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths." These are the two books we've been studying in prepartion for our trip to Palestine. Plus my host and old friend here in Cricklade, Patrick Eastman, loaned me a controversial book by the Spanish theologian Jose Pagola called "Jesus: An Historical Approximation," that added a few insights as well. What I'm posting here is about three times as long as the sermon; I got so caught up in the topic I couldn't stop writing while I was at the Abbey.

the holy fire of imagination

2011-10-14T02:11:00.000-07:00

Only the art that comes from within,
out of the creative personality,
will be interesting, impressive, constructive.
(Edwin Fischer)

11 Oct, the Abbey, Sutton Courtenay

I'm lucky to have a few days of r&r to let me soul catch up with my body, as they say. I love this place. I was here for the first time last year. The name, the Abbey, I'm told, is a Victorian pretension, but the place does have the look and feel of an old monastery. It's a 13th-14th century manor house, once owned by the Astor family, a quadrangle with a Great Hall (which has a minstrel gallery), and a vast array of rooms in various states of renovation and decoration. The kitchen is like a warm underground hearth, the little meditation room is a sunny sitting room, my bedroom reminds me of a cell at old Camaldoli, complete with the sweet smell of centuries-old wood and a stone fireplace. There are four live-in people on staff now, Brad, my host and pretty much the public face of the Abbey, Hillary who just moved in six months ago and does a lot of the office work, and Dylan and Charlotte who do the wonderful cooking. (Today for lunch there was a potato and onion lemon pepper soup.) They try to live ecologically sensitively and eat organic (the household is vegetarian though none of them are). Christianity is only one of the streams flowing in and out this place, though it was started as a Christian experiment in the evolution of consciousness by a German Ghandian and a progressive Anglican bishop. There is qi-gong, yoga, literature and music, lots of music. Dylan and Charlotte are aficionados and big supporters of chamber music, and often sponsor performances here. The addition of that fine art element makes for a fascinating parade of personalities in and out of the door. Just for one example, when I arrived a German cellist and his wife, who is a poet, were here at the counter having a discussion about the poetry of Wallace Stevens; Gustavo, a Brazilian pianist was here as well, with his wife who is a Russian born philologist. They are touring Europe as Gustavo plays a series of concerts. At one point there were four languages going on at once, though everyone speaks near flawless English. (I asked Gustavo how many languages he speaks; he said, "Seven, and my wife speaks six.") Brad's lady friend Beata has just arrived from Germany as well. She is a psychologist and teacher, and we just had a wonderful conversation over dinner about Ken Wilber. Not to mention the folks that come to attend the events. It is really inspiring to be in an environment such as this, where the level of culture meets the spiritual search, where the transcendent is as recognized in a string quartet as much it is in the Upanishads.

I flew in from Chicago overnight Monday, and got in so early Tueday morning (5:45) that I thought it best (and kind of fun) to kill some time before calling up my hosts let alone arriving here. So I had a little sandwich and a cappuccino at the airport (I couldn't figure out if I was hungry for breakfast or dinner), and then took the train up to Paddington Station in London. I didn't need to kill time there; I spent most of my time trying to figure out which train to take, trying to buy a ticket, and trying to get the phone card I had just bought to work. I finally got through to Brad here at the Abbey by sending him a text message on my own phone, and hopped on a train out to Didcot Parkway, where he met me. I have had two small informal things to do for them here--last night music and tonight a new series that Brad has started called "Living the life..." in which he simply invites a guest in for conversation with a group of people, asks a range of questions about the how and why of their lives, and hopes for a topic of conversation to arise. I have found that I am an easy interviewee--just put a nickel in me and I never shut up, though it does have to be the right nickel. He started out asking me about monastic life, my particular living out of it, some questions about music and then the real spark question: what was the single most important event of your life? Oddly enough, the thing that stuck out the most for me was my decision to move in with the Franciscans in uptown Chicago my senior year in high school (that era very much on my mind since I have been through Chicago and seen several folks from that era these past weeks) because that was the time when I decided to "walk the other way," as the song goes, and I suppose I have continued to walk the other way ever since. It sort of set a theme. That set off a great conversation among the other participants about the moment of decision, the moment of discovering one's own voice, the moment of stepping out on one's own. I was quite impressed by their sharing, and Brad was a fine animator and facilitator. He'd make an excellent TV host.

The other thing that came up for me was how there has always been these two paths running parallel in me, music and spirituality, that are somehow inseparable. If I find myself too involved in music I start to miss the spiritual life. But the spiritual life for me without music, art, beauty is so dry. They don't always feel like the same path, but in this phase in my life they do more than ever, when practicing the guitar seems like a spiritual practice and working in the recording studio at times feels like an extension of my meditation. That's the ideal. Dylan and I are were talking about this the other day, how often art reveals the transcendent when religious language leaves off or becomes hackneyed and a hindrance rather than a vehicle. Afterward he gave me a copy of this wonderful speech that Edwin Fischer gave at the opening of a summer school for pianists in 1937. He had gathered them all in a "quiet house... far from the bustle of the big city," an "austere place which you can only reach after a good quarter of an hour's walk. Without artificial light, without cars and telephones [pre-cell phones obviously...] surrounded only by Nature" so that "thus in tune with trees and clouds and winds you may approach those musical works with receptive minds." I quoted one small sentence above, and here's another little section I loved:

Like an explorer you must, then, gently go down into the dark depths of your being where you were as a child, and there you must listen to the surge of your desires and your longings and become like a child again, like a tree or a flower, genuine and unsullied, giving yourself up to the fullness of life. And when you are quiet enough, in awe of the divine within you, with your ear pressed against the ground to listen to the secret tune which vibrates through the universe--then He will light in you that holy fire of imagination which draws strength from the very depths of your being.

If our art, if our everything were to come from that place...

Other than those two little things I have been enjoying the quiet and the days have passed very quickly. I have been working very hard on my sermon for Sunday. Before I offer a concert at the Anglican church in Cirencester on Monday, the priest there has asked that I do the Sunday sermon, maybe also in hopes of stirring up a little buzz for the concert. I don't know why exactly but I am a little nervous about preaching in an Anglican church, with no idea what the hearers will be like. I have some faces in my mind, but they are not based on any known reality. I do know that the priest, Janet WIlliams, recently published her doctoral dissertation through Oxford on a comparison of Dogen-zenji and the apophatic tradition of Christianity, and that may have set the bar a little artificially high. At any rate, the scriptures that are assigned for that day played right into my hand, something I have been reading about, fascinated with and eager to write about. I'll post it after I've delivered it (just in case they're peeking in Cirencester). I've also of course been practicing, putting together a nice set for the upcoming six concerts, and getting a good walk or run in every day. This village, Sutton Courtenay, is three miles from the town of Abingdon, which is best arrived at by traveling the "Thames path," which is exactly that, a mostly dirt footpath that runs along the River Thames, past a small lock, through some woods and fields and lands right in town. The weather has been beautiful, partly cloudy, warm days and chilly nights, and this house is very quiet, so it is a much appreciated break before the work ahead.

a mountain of ideology

2011-10-10T12:31:00.000-07:00

Integrity is like a sword.
You shouldn't wave it around unless you're going to use it.
(Ken Follet)

8 oct, monastery of our lady of grace, beech grove, indiana

I had an uneventful trip out to the Midwest, met at O'Hare by Rory Conney who whisked me away to suburban Lake Zurich where he and Terri and Desi live. It was a quick visit (I only got to see Terri quickly at breakfast in the morning) but well worth it. Whodathunk 30 years ago that Rory and I would spend a morning jogging together? Besides being an extraordinarily talented songwriter and, especially, lyricist, he is also one of the most well-read and articulate people I know. Those two things go together obviously; there is a wealth of study, philosophy, theology and wisdom that forms the foundation of those lyrics. So I always I am inspired by our visits. He's also got a great love for pop music too so we exchanged some goodies. Hew left me with two songs by Steven Earle, one called "John Walker Blues," about the young American jihadist and another that I really want to work into the repertoire asap simply called "Jerusalem." We met another long time musician friend, Gary Daigle, for lunch and then Rory put me on the Metra train for Chicago. An hour or so hanging out at Union Station (such a cool place) and then boarded the Greyhound Bus for Indianapolis. Two nuns from Our Lady of Grace Monastery met me when I arrived, quite concerned for me that I had traveled so long to get there, eager to feed me and get me settled when we got to the monastery which was only 20 minutes or so from the bus depot. The others had already had a preliminary business meeting Friday evening and a social so I had to play catch up pretty quickly the next morning.

We are 13 at this meeting, seven men and six women, three of the men and one woman are Trappists in their distinctive black on white habits. The rest are regular observance Benedictines with the exception of one Camaldolese. I had written ahead to one of the women asking about the protocol concerning habits and was told that it would be very informal. At Morning Prayer I discovered that I was the only man not in full habit, though all of the women were in "lay clothes" except Sr Robert, the Trappistine from Wrentham. I had my standard issue Indian jhippa that I got off the back of Fr Amasamy, SJ, which again provoked lots of conversation. (I love telling that story.) Abbot James of St Anselm, Washington DC, said he even envied having something practical like that to travel in. Never mind these lofty issues--incarnation, re-incarnation; let's get to the practical things: what to wear! Monks... I kid, but, really, like Rory's lyrics, there is a mountain of ideology beneath the choice of one's clothes. Just ask many Benedictine women who still bristle at those old habits as a sign of domination and the stifling of humanity (if I may speak for them). And why would one wear or not wear an outer sign of one's religious status? These are actually not little questions.

The first part of the meetings on Saturday were all business: approval of minutes of the last meeting, election of new advisers and directors, review of the fiscal year, and then a long discussion about the future of the MID website. Here again, this was not just a discussion about the website; this was a discussion about the North American branch of MID's relationship with the international DIM/MID, and about the future vision for the organization. I sat out most of the early discussions, asking pertinent questions, still trying to figure out the whole structure and purpose of the organization. (I, for example, didn't even know how long my term was going to be.) If I understand correctly now: there is the Vatican Secretariat for Dialogue with non-Christians, and under that comes the DIM/MID, headed up by William Skudlarek, OSB, now working out of San Anselmo, the Benedictine University in Rome. And then there are the local conferences, We are officially the North American Commission for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. We are made up of a board (no more than 20), with an executive director (a paid position) and a president, treasurer, secretary; plus there are advisers, most of whom are non-Christians. Currently Br Gregory Perron is serving as president. He is a monk of St Procopius Abbey in Lisle, IL, where he serves as sub-prior, and is already an acquaintance of mine. He attended the retreat that Bro David Steidl Rast and I did for Boulder Integral Life. He is a big student of Ken Wilber's writings and as a matter of fact accompanied David and I to meet with Ken.

I started popping into the discussion more when we got the future of the website. Not that I am any great techie, but because here we were discussing something about the energy and vision of the board for the future. During that discussion I discovered that the Americans have been seen as something like mavericks in the greater organization and (if you read the last blog this will make sense) partially because of the involvement of lay people on the board, such as our old friend Wayne Teasdale. I brought up the discussion about the "new monastics/emerging communities" right away, as an example of the dynamic use of a Website (Julian's) that is getting lots of traffic. This issue came up again later as well when we were discussing the next gathering of Monks in the West (MITW), a Buddhist/Christian encounter that will be held for the second time up at the Land of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah, CA, hosted by Heng Sure. Of the various possible themes that surfaced, three seemed to go together: the monastic ideal, formation of lay people, and meditation. So we ended picking as a theme for the next MITW the "Universal Call to Contemplation" (I swear, that title did not come from me!) to focus in on two things: how contemplative practice has become so important outside of monastic circles; and the exchange between the emerging communities and older institutions. Several folks at the meeting had had good encounters with this same movement, and we agreed that it wasn't just what monasticism had to offer them, but what they also had to offer us in terms of creativity and commitment.

The other thing that came up several times in various discussions was the relation with Islam. Sr Helene of Atchison KS spoke about being involved in a Christian-Muslim event that had included some prayer but was mostly scholarly discussions, and wondered out loud what her/our place was at something like that, especially since Islam, like Judaism, has no monastic tradition per se. I was reflecting on our wonderful encounters with our friends in Santa Cruz, especially the Tent of Abraham (which to our disappointment is not going to happen this year), but also remembering attending a conference at Santa Clara in the Spring and wondering the same thing. I was even a little annoyed at the scholarly conference, feeling as if I was getting too far adrift of my own vocation, whereas I would go a long way out of my way to pray, converse and eat (or do yoga!) with our friends from Pacifica Institute. The topic of relations with Islam and what our role should/could be came up several other times, most pointedly on Sunday afternoon when we watched the film "Of Gods and Men" together. That of course is the story of the seven Trappists of Tibhirine in Algeria who were killed in Algeria in 1996. Seeing that movie for the second time I was no less moved by it, especially to view it with Trappists several of whom knew one or the other of the monks killed and had other knowledge about the events surrounding their deaths. The film is so well done, and really does show Christianity, Catholicism, religious life, and monasticism at its absolute best. I remember thinking it was like a conversion experience for me the first time I saw it, it filled me such hope. I was even more moved by the scenes of Frere Christian, the prior, quoting the Qur'an both in writing and in speech, and even writing in Arabic in his letters. That's why we study--so as to speak another's language (Literally and metaphorically), to understand another's tradition, to find the good in it, to honor the other. I was reminded of so many things: discussing the Bhagavad Gita with the young guys from the Krishna Consciousness Center in Laguna Beach, talking about the Tao te Ching late one night in New Camaldoli's library with a visitor, discussing the practice of the tasbih with Mohammad, the owner of that delicious Moroccan restaurant in Copenhagen, how people just light up when they find out that you have spent some time to learn something about their tradition. Especially in this day and age so many irresponsible, ignorant and downright stupid things get said in public by politicians and preachers about other traditions, which is not just unfortunate, it's downright dangerous. It's how wars get started and keep going. Of course the other thing I was thinking about this time as the first time I saw the film was the Five Holy Brothers and Saint Bruno Boniface, the first generation Camaldolese monks who were martyred in Poland and Hungary. Especially the former came to mind as we discussed what we call the "dialogue of presence." The brothers went to Poland not to preach, but just to be there as contemplative monks among some of the most savage tribes, just as the Trappists in Algeria did not proselytize, but were woven into the life of the Muslim community around them. I thought of Charles de Foucauld as well, and of shopping at Corralitos market and running along Browns Valley Road.

It was all the more enjoyable then last night when some of the folks asked me to share some music with them at our last gathering, a social, and I sang "Bismillah," "The Drink Sent Down" and "The Ground We Share." I also sang "Compassionate and Wise" for them, and was about to launch into the whole story of how Heng Sure had written that piece after the terrorist attacks in 2001 for... when I realized that he had written it here for this very gathering ten years ago! Some of them remembered.

It's Monday morning now, I got a grand send off this morning at 5 AM. Bro Gregory, Sr Kathy and Sr Helene (president, secretary, executive director) all got up to usher me to the train station this morning. I'm on the Amtrak Cardinal now, since 6 AM ET, heading north to Chicago to begin the trek across the sea. Wishing you peace.

an unexpectedly competent minority

2011-10-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

Happy are those who are able to escape from the lower self and feel the gentle breeze of friendship.
Their hearts are so full of the Beloved that there is no longer room for anyone else.
The Beloved flows through their every vein and nerve.
Every atom of their body is filled with the Friend.
True lovers can no longer perceive either the scent nor the color of their own selves.
They have no interest in anything other than the Beloved. (Jami, Sufi mystic)

6 oct, denver airport

Okay, so let's start out with a shout out to the World Religions Class at SFHS. That above quote is for you. It goes along with Fr. Bede's maxim on the right side of the white board in your classroom: "The aim (goal? scopos?) of life is to go beyond the self." It's just keeps coming up over and over again, doesn't it? This first entry may be a little boring and specific, but I'll try to make it more interesting as the days go on.

I am en route now, the first leg of a long journey. Tonight, Chicago where I will stay with Rory Cooney and Therese Donahoo tonight, old musician friends from Phoenix days (old friends, not old musicians. Speaking of which, we prayed and broke bread with Tom Booth and the Paschal Mystery Band last night in the Sangha room. They're on the road doing a tri-state tour. It was like an ambush of grace.) Tomorrow Rory will put me on a suburban train into Union Station where I catch an Amtrak bus to Indianapolis and my first meeting of the Board of MID, Monastic Interreligious Dialogue, being hosted by the Benedictine nuns of Beech Grove. I was voted onto the board just this past year and am quite interested in what it means to participate. The organization has been around since 1977, founded as an offshoot of an older organization: AIM--Aide Inter-Monasteres.

As Franics Tiso explains in an excellent article (written to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Raimundo Pannikar's ground breaking book on "the monk as universal archetype"--"Blessed Simplicty"): A large number of Christian monastic foundations were made during the 1950's and 60's outside Europe and North America, where the majority had been 'til then. This suddenly raised the challenge for monks to engage in dialogue between cultures and address the issue of inculturating, that is, adapting monastic practices to the native genius of the culture in which the monks found themselves. And "AIM was founded in 1960 as a way of coordinating the efforts made in that direction." MID, on the other hand, was an attempt to institutionalize international monastic based specifically interreligious dialogue. At the time the Vatican was keen that the monastic orders continue to assume a leading role in the interreligious dialogue that was called for at Vatican II. Why monks? Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, who was prefect for the Secretariat of Dialogue with non-Christians at the time, said it this way: because historically monks are the outstanding type of the homo religiosus (or at least they are supposed to be!) and as such monks could serve as a "reference point for both Christians and non-Christians." As a matter of fact, he says that "the existence of monasticism at the heart of the Catholic Church is in itself a bridge connecting all religions," and if we were to approach Hinduism or Buddhism for example, without the monastic experience, we should hardly even be considered religious people. Again, why? Because the real dialogue is not the dialogue of ideas and comparative theologies, but the dialogue of religious experience, and monasticism at its best is a practical life, a life of praxis. Not to say that other forms of religious life are not, but for the monk it is front and center.

Which brings up another point, the underlying point of Tiso's article. In the early days of Roman Catholicism's involvement in interreligious dialogue after Vatican II, it was often young people who were not official monastics--so-called "lay monastics"--who carried on much of the work of interreligious dialogue. It was specifically these "new monastics" that felt themselves addressed in Pannikar's book, and who were so inspired by Abhishiktananda and Bede Griffiths, the former of whose experience was especially the underlying fodder for Pannikar. According to Tiso, these "lay" or "new" monastics (NB: Julian Collette and his creative efforts with "emerging communities") often served as secretaries and assistants for, as well as being protagonists in, AIM and the organizations it spawned; they also brought a lot of practical knowledge as well as raw the data of emerging ideas about monasticism and immersion in dialogical encounter with members of other world religions. "Monastic interreligious dialogue was relying heavily on the scholarly expertise and organizational skills of lay collaborators, almost all of whom lived their lives under the aegis of the mysterious attractive force of institutional monasticism, without becoming monks." Tiso laments that these new monastics were sidelined early on because of the tension provoked by the encounter, partially, he feels, as he writes in a pretty good pithy phrase, because this is what happens when "a group feels threatened by the dynamism of an unexpectedly competent minority in its midst, something that has been observed in other institutional setting as well."

These new monks connected with monastic interreligious dialogue in the '70s and '80s ended up scattered across the landscape in a variety of marginal careers. But even Tiso admits that maybe that is as it should be, because "their very marginality corresponds to the most fundamental discovery of inner experience: that material success, name, fame and outer format count for very little in comparison to the experience of divine, ineffable wholeness..." and, as Pannikar himself noted, "the inner experience is definitely prior to the subsequent development of career and other commitments, including vows." Tiso goes on to note that the one form of life that has especially survived of all this is the hermit vocation, which tends to be a strong, even primal, monastic image. Many of these hermits find themselves in a very good position to provide a bridge "for those who have explored non-Christian religions and who now wish to return to the practice of Catholicism in depth."

I've got all of that in mind, especially having had a lot of good interaction with Julian these past weeks and examining my own vocation, as I go into this meeting with a dozen other monastic men and women this next weekend--specifically, what and how can we all, monks and non-monks, contribute to harmony among peoples and the evolution of consciousness so necessary in this day and age of polarization and fear?

resentire

2011-09-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
Forgive your neighbor's injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.
Could anyone nourish anger against another
and expect healing from the LORD?
Could anyone refuse mercy to another like oneself,
can they seek pardon for their own sins?
If one who is but flesh cherishes wrath,
who will forgive their sins?
Remember your last days, set enmity aside;
remember death and decay, and cease from sin! (Sir 27:30-28:7)

There’s an Italian verb that I keep thinking about these days––risentire. The root of it is sentire, which means both “to hear” and, mainly “to feel.” To risentire primarily means “to feel the effects of something,” or “to feel again,” or, in its reflexive form (risentirsi) simply “to resent.” That’s of course where we get our English verb “resent.” In English it always has a negative connotation, so it’s interesting to reflect on its root––to feel something again.

There are two things about resentment that I’ve learned from recovery programs, First, that resentment is a “dubious luxury” even for normal people, let alone addicts. And secondly––and I like this one a lot––having a resentment, or carrying a grudge, is like taking poison and expecting someone else to die from it. But actually resentment kills us from within. My guess is that is the cause of a host of other neuroses as well as perhaps cancer and other sicknesses.

This week the scriptures read in Christian churches all over the world focus on forgiveness and Jesus’ teaching on the importance, nay, essentiality of it. And to me the opposite of forgiveness is resentment. The image I have of resentment is a cow chewing on her cud: she swallows it and then spits it up again and chews some more, trying to get every ounce of juice and flavor out of it. And we do that too with resentment, savoring every drop of bitterness and anger, righteous indignation and feeling of victimhood, until we actually start to enjoy it. It becomes a habit, we get addicted to it, it’s the land we live in, a way of life.

Christians often have the misperception that the Jewish scriptures only present an angry, violent and warlike God, and are filled only with retributive justice and vengeance, but the 28th chapter of the book of Sirach says that wrath and anger are hateful things, and those who hold onto them are sinners. And it uses the similar images about resentment when it asks “can anyone nourish anger”––isn’t that a savoring kind of word? But that’s what we do, we nourish it and make sure it doesn’t go away. That’s resentment––“”can anyone nourish anger and expect healing from the Lord?” We can’t receive healing if we nourish anger. And then Sirach asks, who would forgive the sins of someone who “cherishes wrath.” That’s another one of those words––we sometimes “cherish” our righteous indignation, but in doing so we close ourselves off to forgiveness. It’s simple math, really. Hands and hearts are just like each other in that way: if they are open they can give as well as receive. If they are closed to give they cannot receive. If we can’t give forgiveness, we can’t receive healing. The older I get the harder it is for me to watch people grow old still nursing their resentment and their bitterness, going into their senior years angry, the “long day’s journey into the night.” It’s frightening, and Sirach addresses that too: “Remember your last days, set enmity aside; remember death and decay, and cease from sin!”

Sometimes the lessons that we need to learn for our personal lives are also important lessons we need to learn corporately, as a people, as a nation. It’s poignant that we should hear those scripture lessons on the same weekend that we are celebrating the many commemorations of the terrorist attacks of 2001. It occurs to me that we have to be careful about our remembering so that it doesn’t turn into the bitter poison of risentire–resentment. All the TV stations and news magazines and papers are showing the images of the planes flying into the World Trade Center and images of the towers collapsing, and the smoldering rubble in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the devastated west side of the Pentagon over and over again. We have to be careful. There could be something almost prurient about it, spitting it up and chewing it all over again, draining every drop of bitter juice out of it.

I remember that I specifically couldn’t get the image of the second plane flying into the World Trade Center out of my mind for days and weeks after the attacks. It took on a life of its own in my head; it became a dark symbol of everything I was afraid of. Finally I asked one of the brothers to download me a photo off the internet and print it up for me so I could have it and put it on my bulletin board and learn the lesson it had to teach me. It had become for me, as I was saying, my version of memento mori, “remember death,” in the great monastic tradition; or at least I was kidding myself that that’s what it meant. And then one day I read an article by a wonderful British theologian who reminded me of my Baptismal promises, and suddenly I realized that in Baptism I had renounced Satan’s works and all his empty promises, and this was the work of Satan! This was not power; this was a lie and it had NOTHING to teach me! And I was actually giving my power to it by resenting it––feeling it over and over again. I’d made it into a kind of dark god. That was not power. That was a lie to distract me from the beatitudes, from the loving God who is the source of my strength, a lie, a satanic lie to try to convince me that the good would not prevail. And worse yet, this horrendous crime had been committed by my fellow human beings, my very own brothers who had been deluded into suicide, and it was tempting me to believe that peace was not the answer, tempting me back into my youthful nihilism. That was a vacuum of power and to give it any more of my attention, to stand awestruck and trembling before the sheer sublimity of it any longer, to resent it was to turn my back on the light that I had based my life on believing would overcome the darkness.

So we remember, but we remember not to re-sent: we remember to grieve so that we can move on. We remember so as to be vigilant and strong, and we remember so that we can let go because, as Sirach taught, “wrath and vengeance are hateful things”! The other scripture that I keep thinking about these days is 2 Corinthians 5. Paul teaches that God was in Christ to reconcile the world to himself. That was the whole purpose of the life of Jesus––to reconcile the world to God. Now there’s a whole theological treatise we could spell out there to flesh out what that means, but my point is actually the next line that Paul writes after that: and now, “that good news of reconciliation has been entrusted to us.” We remember not to resent; we remember so as to reconcile, we remember only so as to grieve and heal and be made stronger so that we can then be a sign of unity and an instrument of peace in a world that needs it now as much as ever.

“Let peace fill our hearts, our world, and our universe.”

st bernard and dominionism

2011-08-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

The Prophet (peace be upon him!) said to the returning soldiers, ‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?' the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’
(Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar,hadith no. 31.)

The last lines of the Gospel we read today (Mt 23:1-12) seems to me to be one of those fundamental truths about Jesus’ way, this movement toward littleness, toward simplicity, toward powerlessness: “The greatest among you must be your servants. Those who exalt themselves will be humbled; those who humble themselves will be exalted.” But it is often the first thing to go, even––maybe especially––in religious life. Do not be like the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus warns his disciples. “All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in the marketplaces, and being called ‘Rabbi.” But we love our widened phylacteries and long tassels, and seats of honor and our honorific titles! (Our OSB Cams and Revs!) I remember being at Mass at a seminary in Rome one Sunday when this Gospel was read. I had never seen such pomp and circumstance at an ordinary Sunday Mass. We were all arranged hierarchically, with even visiting concelebrating priests in full vesture, with a dozen or so acolytes. And I remember saying to the priest who was with me as the guy started the homily, “I can’t wait to hear what he does with this!” After the homily he whispered back to me: “He was brilliant. He avoided the gospel completely!” We have to be constantly vigilant, swim against the stream, because without our noticing it, sometimes what we started out to do can become its polar opposite.

Of course what it brings to mind for me is the monastic impulse in the church. At least one version of the story has it that when Christianity was legalized and got too comfortable, this band of men (and some women too) headed out into the desert to live a life of renunciation, solitude, simplicity and austerity, swimming against the stream of, as C. H. Lawrence wrote in his brilliant book Medieval Monasticism, “laxer standards and the careerism that crept into the church once imperial approval had given it respectability.” (Lawrence, 2) But those early desert dwellers were simply going out to live a life that was rooted in the Gospels, in imitation of Jesus, by following the evangelical counsels, in poverty and simplicity, by avoiding clericalism and any kind of social standing. I think too of our own founder St. Romuald, who turned his back on the comfort (and corruption) of San Apollonare in Classe and headed into the forest, to live a life of austerity and simplicity, features that would be the hallmark of the Romualdian reform in general, again swimming against the stream of the natural tendency toward social position and comfort.

Today is also the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and we could certainly say the same thing about him and the early Cistercians as well. They were definitely a reaction against what they saw as the corrupting influences of the wealth and power of Cluny. They aimed to live a life of greater austerity, simplicity––“in the swamps of France”; they even wore a white habit to distinguish themselves from the black habits of Cluny. And when St. Bernard preached his fiery sermons about conversion, he wasn’t trying to convert people just to Christianity, but to the monastic life as a living out of the Christian life, “…claiming that those who observed the Rule of St Benedict were reproducing the life-style of the Apostles.” (Lawrence, 184)

Yesterday was the feast of St. Bernard Tolomei, the founder of the Olivetan monastic congregation, the congregation of Laurence Freeman and my good friends at San Miniato. We heard all about Bernard Tolomei’s “contempt for the world” that was the impetus for his beginning to live a monastic life. Ironically, he took his name from Bernard of Clairvaux, but the first thing I thought of was what Pope Benedict wrote about Bernard of Clairvaux––the exact opposite! (This is from the encyclical Spe Salvi 15):

It was commonly thought that monasteries were places of flight from the world (contemptus mundi) and of withdrawal from responsibility for the world, in search of private salvation. Bernard of Clairvaux, who inspired a multitude of young people to enter the monasteries of his reformed Order, had quite a different perspective on this. In his view, monks perform a task for the whole Church and hence also for the world… [M]onks have a duty towards the entire body of the Church, and indeed towards humanity; he applies to them the words of pseudo-Rufinus: “The human race lives thanks to a few; were it not for them, the world would perish ...”

And in keeping with the theme for the retreat that Douglas Burton-Christie is giving to us at New Camaldoli this year, “Practicing Paradise”:

In fact Bernard explicitly states that not even the monastery can restore Paradise, but he maintains that, as a place of practical and spiritual “tilling the soil,” it must prepare the new Paradise. A wild plot of forest land is rendered fertile—and in the process, the trees of pride are felled, whatever weeds may be growing inside souls are pulled up, and the ground is thereby prepared so that bread for body and soul can flourish.

But then there is this dark side of Bernard’s legacy too that many speak of: first his preaching of the Crusade, and then the Cistercians’ sponsorship and Bernard’s near canonization of the Knights Templar. I’ve been reading a lot about this in James Carrol’s book Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Did nobody notice that this was the polar opposite of “the Gospel of peace and love”? The Knights Templar thought of themselves as warrior monks; they even adopted the Cistercians’ white habit, but now it was emblazoned with the dramatic, distinctive red cross, the cross that had become a sword. Didn’t anybody notice that as far as professions are concerned “monk and warrior stood at opposite poles”? (Those are the words of C.H. Lawrence again.) Later the Knights themselves would be charged with various heresies and perversities, and eventually they were brought before the Inquisition and suppressed––though they would rise again a generation or two later as the Masons. Again another polar opposite: what started out as a military order to protect the church turns into a secret society against it! But even more importantly, how did the tendency toward simplicity and poverty get transformed into the energy for violence and worldly domination?

This tendency is still with us, and maybe it always will be. I’ve been reading a lot lately about a school of thought that has been surfacing in our own political realm known as Dominionism. The philosophy is basically that Christians (and Christians alone!) are biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Jesus returns. (See Ryan Lizza’s excellent article “Leap of Faith,” New Yorker, August 15 & 22, 2011.) Some of these Dominionists, like this man the late Francis Shaeffer who is singled out as the main inspirer of this movement, even argue for violent overthrow of governments––in the name of the Bible! Dominionism relies on Genesis 1:28, where human beings are urged to “have dominion over all the earth.” But it seems to me that the texts Christians should be looking at for how we are supposed to have dominion in the world should be the one we heard today: “The greatest among you must be your servants.” Or the Philippians Canticle that says Jesus “emptied himself and took the form of a slave… and therefore God raised him on high.” Or else John 13, which shows exactly how Jesus had dominion: he tied a towel around his waist and washed his disciples’ feet! That’s how we are supposed to have dominion over the earth. We are supposed to be the slaves even of the fish and the fowl and the cattle; we are supposed to be servants of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth; we are supposed to wash the feet of all others, not be their masters.

It’s not just the monastic movement, but the Christian movement itself is marked by this tendency toward poverty and powerlessness. And not just the Christian movement, but the spiritual life itself is marked by this movement toward dispossession and a blessed simplicity. The famous hadith of the Prophet Mohammed comes to mind. He had dispatched a contingent of the army to the battlefront, and when they returned he said to them

‘Blessed are those who have performed the minor jihad and have yet to perform the greater jihad.’ When asked, ‘What is the greater jihad?' the Prophet replied: ‘The jihad of the self.’
(Al-Majilisi, Bihar al-Anwar, vol. 19, p. 182, hadith no. 31.)

In Arabic this is known as jihad al-nafs, the “struggle against the self.” (The Arabic word nafs of course is related to the Hebrew word nepesh, sometimes translated as “soul.”) This struggle against the self is really against evil ideas, desires and the powers of lust, anger, and insatiable imagination, placing them all under the dictates of reason and faith in obedience to God's command, and finally, purging all evil ideas and influences from one's soul. This struggle is much more difficult than fighting on the battlefield. Pope Benedict ends the section on St. Bernard saying that, “Are we not perhaps seeing once again, in the light of current history, that no positive world order can prosper where souls are overgrown?” Otherwise, what Carrol’s book brings in high relief, how often we turn religion into a kind of tribal warfare. At one point he recalls the quote of Abraham Lincoln, about not presuming that God is on our side, but humbly praying every day that we are on God's side.

We have to be constantly vigilant, swim against the stream, because without our noticing it, what we started out to do can become its polar opposite. Let’s pray in the authentic spirit of the gospel, and St. Bernard, that the trees of our pride would be felled, and that whatever weeds may be growing inside our souls would be pulled up, and that the ground of our being would be prepared so that our bodies and souls may flourish.

the betrayal of easter

2011-04-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

God never forces open the doors if shut against him.
For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning…
not through the compulsion of God’s power
but through love,
and thus become united with God in freedom.
(Rabindranath Tagore)

Probably the most chilling moment for me in the telling of the story of Jesus’ death is how Matthew and Mark report that Jesus cries out from the cross, Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani––“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Both Matthew and Mark say that right after saying these words, Jesus then lets out a loud cry, a kind of primal groan. These words are of course from Psalm 22, and I’ve heard various explanations as to why Jesus says them. In the Matthew and Mark the crowd thought he was actually calling on Elijah. One explanation I heard was that Jesus was just saying the prayers that a devout Jew would say as he was dying. Bede Griffiths explained it by saying that even Jesus’ own image of God was taken from him, all his ideas about God, a similar kind of death that we have to undergo in our prayer lives as we let go of all names and forms that we hold on to for comfort. But I think there is an even more chilling, literal, scriptural explanation for Jesus saying these words––and that is that the Father does really abandon Jesus!

The Greek word paradidonai appears quite a few times in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death. It means basically “to hand over or to betray.” So Judas hands Jesus over to the temple guard, the temple guards hand him over to the Sanhedrin, the Sanhedrin hands him over to Pilate, and Pilate hands him over to be scourged and finally to be crucified. But the ultimate betrayer of Jesus, the one who has really “handed Jesus over” isn’t Judas or the high priests or the Sanhedrin or Pilate or the Romans; it’s God the Father. God abandons Jesus to this event. His Abba, the one whose love Jesus had spent his whole life preaching about––Look at the birds of the air, learn from the flowers of the field! Blest are the poor in spirit!––hands him over to as humiliating and torturous of an experience as a human being could have, as scripture says, God did not spare his only Son. That’s why those other lines from Psalm 22 are so poignant: He trusted in the Lord, let him save him and release him if this is his friend. But God doesn’t save him or release him from this horrible experience.

Of course the real horrible news about all of this is that if God abandoned Jesus, if God does not save Jesus from all of this, where does that leave us? Could it be that God will and does abandon us too? Even good Christian women get sexually assaulted, advocates for peace and justice get assassinated, and tens of thousands of people get killed or washed out to sea in an earthquake and a tsunami for no sin or wrongdoing. My God, my God, why have you abandoned us? I keep remembering a couple of scenes from the movie “Of Gods and Men,” that tells the story of the French Trappist monks in Algeria who decided not to abandon their monastery during a civil war even though they knew they were facing probable death. The youngest monk, Christophe, is the one who is the most afraid of what probably lies ahead, and one powerful scene shows him praying in his cell, absolutely terrified, saying over and over again, “Aides-moi, aides-moi–Help me! Help me!” Sheer terror. Not only is his body about to be destroyed, psychologically he has been brought to the edge, to the limit of his strength.

We––or at least I––still have a tendency to think of prayer as magic, that God is the Wizard of Oz and we are like Harry Potter. But in actuality our bodies and even our souls do not always get spared––God abandons us to the wiles and ways of creation. What Jesus has experienced is a total destruction of his body and perhaps a total destruction also of his psyche, his ego, his whole mental complex. But there is something deeper to us than our bodies and our souls: our real Self (I write this with a capital “S” as Indian sages and Jungians would), our real Self that is something hidden––with Christ––in God. That’s what cannot be destroyed, annihilated. There is something about us that is deeper than our bodies and beyond even our souls––our real Self.

There is a beautiful teaching of Rabindranath Tagore from his book Sadhana that speaks about this, this realm, this part of us beyond our physical and mental organism, which, he says, “the great King of the universe has not shadowed with his throne.” In our physical being, in our mental being, we have to acknowledge the rule of something beyond us, the intractable laws of nature. But this deepest part of us God has left free, even free to disown God. And Tagore says that it is only in this region that anarchy is permitted; it is only in this realm of our being that “the discord of untruth and unrighteousness can hold its reign.” This is ultimately the region of our will. It is there, in our real Self, that God has actually withdrawn his commands, for there God comes to court our love not command it. God’s “armed force, the laws of nature, stand outside its gate,” Tagore says, “and only beauty, the messenger of God’s love, finds admission within its precincts”; and it is there that God must win an entrance, where God comes as a guest, not as a king, and where God has to wait to be invited.

... and things can come to such a pass that we may cry out in our anguish, “Such utter lawlessness could never prevail if there were a God!” Indeed, God has stood aside from our self, where his watchful patience knows no bounds, and where [God] never forces open the doors if shut against him. For this self of ours has to attain its ultimate meaning… not through the compulsion of God’s power but through love, and thus become united with God in freedom.

It’s only there that we are really free. What has felt like God abandoning us has been actually God withdrawing, God standing aside, waiting to be invited. It’s at that moment when we must invite God in. Every other aspect of our being is subject to intractable rules and laws, but here, in the deepest part of our being, we are free. What will it take for us to find that aspect of our being?

There is another line from the Psalms that Luke tells us that Jesus uttered on the cross just before he dies, from Psalm 31: No one can take my life from me, I give it freely. Now as he dies, that’s the moment when he hands over his spirit and thus becomes pure vessel of the Spirit, or as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, that’s when and why he becomes the source of salvation. As old Brother Luc says in the movie: “I’m not scared of death. I’m a free man.” That’s the moment he hands over his spirit, and becomes pure vessel of the Spirit. In this region of self that anarchy is permitted, Brother Luc does not let anarchy come in. In that moment praying in anguish in his cell, Brother Christophe is choosing to believe that there is something else, beyond his body and beyond the limits of his own mind, and he calls out to That in his anguish and invites the Sacred Guest in. In this realm of his being where “the discord of untruth and unrighteousness can hold its reign,” he ultimately does not allow it to hold its reign. That’s the moment he delivers over his spirit and becomes a pure vessel of Spirit. Later in the film there is another long shot of him praying before the altar just as the morning sun is rising, and it is very subtle but you can see slowly, slowly his face eases and the hint of a smile appears on his face, as that which is beyond his body and beyond his soul makes itself known to him. Now he too is no longer scared of death; in his spirit, he is a free man. He’s found his spirit and becomes pure vessel of Spirit.

This is why the saying goes that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the faith," because when we hand ourselves over we surrender our spirit and thus become pure vessels of the Spirit. We are the seed that falls unto the ground and dies and thus yields a rich harvest. It’s not our place to know what that harvest will be. I myself would like to believe that the body even in this life in some way shares in the transformation brought about by the spiritual life and that this is the lesson of the Transfiguration, the Resurrection and the Ascension, the triumph of the flesh––and that maybe we will even experience a kind of physicality in it all as literal interpreters of scripture would have us believe. At least we all like to believe that our souls will in some way live on as an essence, a kind of ghost or angel or presence. Truth is, we simply do not know what kind of existence is beyond death. It’s not our place to know what that harvest will be, but the Resurrection tells us only to have hope that there will be a harvest, that something will grow from our lives being handed over. As Paul tells us in his great discourse about the resurrection, what is sown is corruptible––our bodies and our souls––what is raised up is incorruptible. Our bodies and our souls are the seed that falls onto the ground and dies; the harvest is a great mystery. It’s not our business to know what it is exactly that is raised up, our job is only to believe that if we fall to the ground and die, something of the essence of us will live on, and that life will continue and we will have been and will still be a part of it. It’s not our business to know what that part is––if we will live on in a song or a sermon, in a building or a grandchild, in inspiration or something more concrete––our job is to hand over ourselves to the hands of the divine, to invite the Sacred Guest in, and thus to deliver over our spirit––even now––and so become pure vessels of the Spirit––even now. That’s the promise and fruit of Jesus’ Resurrection.

the nature of the ground

2011-03-19T05:45:00.000-07:00

The significance of Brahman is expressed by neti, neti!
(Not so! Not so!)
For beyond this, that you say it is not so,
there is nothing further.
Brahman’s name, however, is “the reality of the reality.”
That is to say, the senses are real,
and Brahman is their reality.
(Brihdarankyaka Upanishad.)

I’ve been reading with fascination the theologian Robert Barron recently. I first ran into his book And Now I See… in England. My friend Patrick Eastman recommended it and I quickly was hooked. Then my friend the philosopher Janice Daurio in Camarillo gave me a copy of a talk he had given at a theological conference on “Religion A and Religion B,” which I found very provocative, and maybe will get to later. Then at my last stop in Milwaukee (I’m in St Louis now), I ran into a classmate of the same Robert Barron, and we had a number of good conversations about his (Barron’s) thought. There is one thing that I have been particularly fascinated by, his writings on the great theologians Thomas Aquinas and the more modern Protestant Paul Tillich, on God as being and God as ground of being. Of course what I am looking for is resonances with the Hindu notion of Brahman––the divine as ground of being, and further Atman––the divine as ground of consciousness, and I think that it folds in nicely with our discussion of Chapter II of Huxley, “On the Nature of the Ground.” The latter is harder to squeeze out of Western Christian thought but the former is quite present. Some sampling, citing Barron’s own citations…

He writes about Thomas Merton discovering, in the writings of the influential 20th century neo-Thomist and Christian humanist Etienne Gilson, the notion that God is not a thing or a being, but rather God is the sheer act of Being itself. It’s so easy to, as we say, reify God––to make of God a thing, just another entity, just another Being though somewhat Bigger and Better than a human being. But God is not a being: God is being itself, in whom all other things exist. Listen to this beautiful poetic passage:

There is a mysterious reality, at the borders and at the heart of ordinary experience, suffusing and yet transcending all that surrounds us, a reality that can be invoked with a thousand names and that cannot finally be named… It is as high as the heavens are above the earth and as low as the caverns of Hell; it is as dark as a pillar of cloud and as luminous as a pillar of fire; it is the burning bush that is not consumed, and it is the water from the rock. It is the sheer act of Being itself, and it is nothing at all; it is the hardest to see, and it is what is most obvious. (And Now I See, 91)

Being itself––and not just some supreme being––is that which transcends any particular thing that exists. This is why Paul says in the Acts of the Apostles, “in whom we live and move and have our being.” And this Being itself, this sheer energy of existence, “must be that which grounds every particular thing in the universe, that which works its way into every nook and cranny of finitude, that which is unsurpassably immanent to creation.” (107) Barron speaks of it too in relation to what he calls the “serenity of God,” drawing from both Tillich and Thomas, saying that, since God is the sheer act of existence, “there is a peaceful untrammeled serenity to the divine being,” as suggested by the sacred name “I Am Who Am.” And repeats again this very important point twice on one page: “God is the act of existence unreceived, unlimited, undefined; God is not a type of being, but rather the sheer energy of to-be itself.” Or as Thomas Aquinas taught, Deus es ens––God is being.

But then he goes on to write about Thomas’ notion of the creatio continua, that this sheer energy of being, this sheer act of existence is continuously bringing forth life, continually creating, continually pouring forth as creation. Creation is not a once and for all act of some essentially transcendent being at the top of a hierarchy of being, “but rather the ever present and ever new gift of being poured out from the divine source.” We creatures are in relationship, or better, simply are relationship to this energy which (who) is continually drawing us into being, continually making us new. So the presence of God is always at work at the very roots of our being. Hence we can refer to the ground of our being, the continual creative ground of all existence that/who is “just as close to a simple stone as to an archangel… There is no place where the grounding Power of Being itself is not at work.”

So much for ground of being; there is a firm and authoritative orthodox tradition within Christianity’s conception of God. Ground of consciousness is a little harder to find.

The idea, if I understand it, from Hinduism, is that if we were to descend into and explore the depths of our own consciousness, through meditation, Yoga, training the senses stilling the mind, going beyond our shallow false self to our real self––we would discover that the ground and source of our consciousness is none of than God as well. Ken Wilber might say, “we run smack dab into God” when we make the interior journey through the meditative/contemplative traditions. It may not be that easy without a last of grace, but that is another topic. Still... What I did find I Barron’s exposition of Augustine’s teaching on the mind, which forms the basis of his explanation of the Trinity. Augustine our psychological functioning mens, which is usually translated as “mind,” but Barron suggest it might be better translated as––are you ready for this?––“spirit.” Now what Barron means by “spirit” and what I understand it to mean may be two different things, but let’s assume that “spirit” is our openness to the divine that Paul writes of in his letters, and what Bede Griffiths thought of as the fine point of the soul, beyond body and beyond mind, soul, all forms of higher consciousness. This mens–spirit is not only analytical or rational power, as we usually understand mind; for Augustine it is “the grounding psychological and spiritual energy of consciousness. It is the font and source of all intellectual activity, the spirit as such.” There it is––atman, the ground of consciousness. Augustine does not say, and neither does Barron, that this ground and energy is God’s own self, but we are pretty close here when we speak of the “spiritual energy of consciousness.”

One might say it either way, to satisfy the skeptics: we believe that there is a ground, a source, a font of being, that is Being itself; and a ground, a source, a font of consciousness, that is Consciousness itself. And we believe that that Being self-discloses––this is, by the way, what the Word––Logos is, Being’s self-disclosure. Is this not consciousness? We believe that there is something intentional (dare I say, personal?) about Being itself. And we call Being itself, who is the ground and source of Being, God. And we call the ground of consciousness God. You could either say God is Being itself; or one could simply say that we call the ground of Being, “God”; either that God is consciousness itself (Word and Wisdom), or that we call the ground of consciousness “God.”

I ran into several allusions to Psalm 139 in Joel Goldsmith’s book A Parenthesis in Eternity, a book that was profoundly influential on Eckhart Tolle, and I have found them again and again in Barron too, the idea that where can we possibly run from this? I wrote this meditation (on the “notes” app on my iPhone) and have been carrying it around with me for some time, inspired first by Goldsmith, solidified even more by Barron:

God is Being itself––Deus es en, the One Who Is––Sat.
God is consciousness, mens, logos, the Word and Wisdom who was with God from the beginning and is God––Chit.

Being and Consciousness are not two,
because Being is conscious, intentional, intelligent;
and consciousness––the Word––is the self-disclosure of Being.

To know this is Bliss––Ananda.

I am a word made flesh,
an Imago Dei, an image of the unseen God,
an individual manifestation of Consciousness,
Consciousness manifest as an individual,
like a branch on a vine.
God is the source of my being,
the ground of my consciousness.
To know this is Bliss.

I am a branch on the vine.
God and I are one––
the father-creator,
who made us by whom we subsist,
the mother of the ten thousand things,
in whom we live and move and have our being.

“If I climb up to the heavens, you are there.
If I fly the wings of morning, you are there.
If I dwell across the waves, if I lie down in a grave,
in the light or in the darkness, you are there.”
(Ps 139)

ashes on the third eye

2011-03-12T08:05:00.000-08:00

Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. Let no one separate them; they cannot be separated. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. (Peter Chrysologus)

In Hinduism and Buddhism, there is this marvelous tradition of the third eye. It’s located between the eyebrows (at the ajna chakra), and is considered to be the tenth opening of the body. But where as the other openings in the body lead out, this one leads in. It is the inner eye of wisdom, the eye that opens when one has achieved enlightenment, moksha or nirvana. It’s sometimes called the gyananakashu–the eye of knowledge, the seat of the antar-guru-the inner teacher. You often see statues of gods or the Buddha, or famous yogis and sages and bodhisattvas with some kind of a mark there. People who follow Indian traditions wear a tilaka there between the eyebrows to represent the third eye, as at our ashram Shantivanam in south India we would mark ourselves three times a day, with golden sandal paste in the morning, the red kumkum of devotion in the afternoon, and the vibhuti ashes in the evening.

Some years ago, a friend of mine who is pretty cynical about Christianity wrote me at the beginning of Lent saying, “Oh yeah, Ash Wednesday. The day you Christians cover up your third eye with ashes.” Cute. I thought about it for a minute and then remembered that story in the Gospel of John chapter 9 when Jesus heals a blind man. Jesus spit on the ground and made some mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes and told him to go wash his eyes out and when he did he was healed. So I wrote back to my sarcastic friend, “Yes, we cover up our third eye with ashes for a short time, but only to have them washed 40 days later in the waters of Baptism so that we can really cleanse and open that third eye with the wisdom of resurrection at Easter.” I’m not sure it convinced him, but the image stays with me.

Lent is all about Easter, and Easter is all about Baptism. From ancient times Baptisms were performed on Easter and there was a preparation period beforehand for those about to be baptized, the catechumens, a period of cleansing and formation in which the candidates prepare to die to their old selves and rise to a whole new way of seeing, a new way of living, a new way of being in the world. Interesting enough, one ancient Greek word that was usually associated with both conversion and Baptism is photismos, which means, enlightenment or illumination; Baptism was meant to be an enlightenment experience! For most of us Christians we were baptized when we were, as one of my theology professors used to say, “little red-faced humanoids” and have no recollection of the event let alone any kind of enlightenment associated with it. I often feel like our spirituality is all about trying to catch up with something that happened to us long ago, to realize a reality that is already somehow operative in the depths of our being. And so the period of Lent is a time for the rest of us too to cleanse and purify, die to our old selves and realize this enlightened self––cleanse that third eye of wisdom by renewing, remembering, realizing our Baptism at Easter.

Traditionally there are three practices that are offered as ways of cleansing this eye of wisdom, three ways of dying to the old self so that the new self can emerge from the ashes. Most of us Catholic kids only associate Lent with “giving up something for Lent,” usually candy. But, as you see in that passage from Peter Chrysologus I quoted above, there are actually three practices that go together, and you almost get the impression that none of them work unless they are done together: prayer, fasting (or sacrifice), and mercy (almsgiving, charity). Peter Chrysologus says, “prayer knocks, fasting obtains, mercy receives.”

How do these practices help us die to ourselves? Well, as for prayer, most of us don’t discover prayer until we experience some kind of need or want, and usually that’s when we turn to prayer almost like magic, and much more often for a want than for a need. But if you really want to understand the power of prayer, go to an AA meeting or another 12 Step meeting some time. There there are people who really need some kind of power greater than themselves for survival and prayer is conscious contact with that Power. There’s a saying from AA I heard once: “All you got to know is that there is a God and it’s not you.” That’s the dying to self––a recognition that there is a Power Greater than me that is not me. But the marvelous thing is that when I am in touch with that Power Greater than me, I find out, discover, that that power is actually my ground and my source, and that power can be the very energy of my life, if I die to my small self and rise to this greater one.

As for fasting or any kind of abstention––again I think it’s a matter of need. We are for the most part spoiled rich kids who have no experience of real need. We most of us have the basics of life. But I wonder: are we really free because of that? I want a soda, I am free to drink a soda: but am I free to not drink a soda? I am free to surf the Internet and send text messages to my friends all night long; but am I free not to? I am free to get drunk, smoke a cigarette, get high, load up on caffeine and sugar all I want; but am I free not to? What fasting does is put a little space between me and what I want; that self of my cravings dies for a moment. And when and if I can do this two marvelous things happen: first I discover a freedom, knowing that I am not a slave to my desires, not a slave to my bodily cravings; and then I get this sweet pure sensation of actually feeling need––feeling hunger, feeling loneliness, feeling poverty.

That leads to the third practice: mercy, charity or almsgiving. As I said, most of us are spoiled rich kids, and poverty is kind of an abstract thing to us. We don’t actually feel what it feels like to be hungry, cold, homeless, sick. Well, hopefully when I actually have a sense of what that feels like, I can actually development a sense of solidarity or compassion or sympathy for those who actually are hungry, homeless, lonely, sick on a regular basis, perhaps through no fault of their own. The marvelous magical formula about reaching out then is this: we discover that, as the Prayer of St Francis says, in giving we receive, in pardoning we are pardoned. An open heart is an open heart––the heart open to give is also open to receive. If we die to our little insular world of comfort, we discover a whole world of connection, a web of relationships.

So, let’s see what these three practices put together can offer during this season. Maybe they could lead us to cleanse that third eye of wisdom in the waters of Baptism, that when our old self dies––the self-sufficient small self––a new self will arise, our real self that is hidden with Christ in God.

the nakedness of the journey

2011-02-09T11:34:00.000-08:00

We are called to see each arising of our day
not as a threat, but as an opportunity––
a chance to open our arms,
lay down our weapons,
and surrender to this exact moment of our lives.
(Reginald Ray)

Always on the lookout to overcome dualism, to redeem eros, to recover our bodies, the earth, and to see, as Wilbur and Aurobindo and Huxley insist, that any duality is really a misunderstanding of the seed of truth that is in the tradition, the core of the perennial philosophy. So some things I’ve run into recently.

In a pair of articles in the Winter 2010 issue of Tricycle with Reginald Ray the well known contemporary teacher in the Tibetan tradition. He himself is a student of the controversial Chögam Rimpoche, founder of Naropa Institute, where Ray himself taught for some years. He uses the terms Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana––normally associated with Theravadan, Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese, and Tibetan Buddhism respectively, to refer to three stages in which he spiritual journey unfolds. Obviously he has a prejudice toward the Vajrayana, his own tradition, but it is specifically because he has found in it an insistence on the unique power of relative reality, and the power of all that makes up the ordinary human experience. Here we are of course in the realm of the relation of the Absolute to the Individual, the One to the many, the foundational problem of our spiritual traditions.

The first stage is the Hinayana stage. The word literally means the "lesser vehicle" and came to be seen as a pejorative term for the Southeast Asian tradition that stays close to the Pali canon, more monastic, insistence on a total break from “the world.” But seen as a stage, this is when we begin to realize that there is such a thing as reality that is only relative––the realm of feelings, thoughts, perceptions, situations––and they are experienced as an obstacle. At this stage in our meditation practice the focus is on gradually (or not so gradually!) extricating ourselves from our karma, understood here as our “reactivity,” which digs us deeper and deeper into suffering–dukkha and clinging to self. In a second stage, which he refers to as the Mahayana stage–literally the “great vehicle,” a term obviously favoring this tradition; “here comes everybody!”––we gradually become more and more aware of something that lies beneath that relative reality, “in a spacious, open and unimpeded dimension” of our existence. But in having made that discovery, we are not meant to leave that realm of the limited and relative, we are not meant to simply dismiss the world of emotions, feelings, perceptions, etc. behind forever. From the Vajrayana viewpoint, “it is actually the opposite”:

The third, Vajrayana stage of the journey calls us to reenter the world of the relative with a ferocity and intensity that is––to the conventional mind––quite crazy. In the Vajrayana we see that our difficulties with relative reality stem from our attitudes and beliefs, rather than from reality itself. We are called to see each arising of our day not as a threat, but as an opportunity––a chance to open our arms, lay down our weapons, and surrender, to this exact moment of our lives.

I suppose that’s why the name of the article is “The Vajrayana Journey is an experience of love, power, and freedom”!

Last Sunday I was reflecting on how we don’t wait to we get our lives together before we enter into service, that service and our insertion in the world is actually part of our sadhana; it is the Yoga of Compassion (the phrase of Karen Armstrong that I like so much), the corporal works of mercy. At the same time, there are legitimate and necessary times of withdrawal from the world, pratyahara, if you will, to reassess and reconnect with our own ground, hopefully also with the Ground of Being and Consciousness itself. I am still picking carefully through Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, and I am, as always, fascinated by the complementary if not opposite approach presented by the different traditions. For Teilhard we also need to first get in touch with this ground of our being, but he refers to it as, as the title implies, the divine milieu. There is no good English translation of the French word milieu, though it of course has been adapted as an English word meaning one’s social environment. (As a matter of fact one early translation of the book into English left the whole title in French, le Divin Milieu, noting the inadequacy of English to convey the meaning.) The French concept and for Teilhard, a milieu is much more than a social context. It is a realm, and the divine milieu an all encompassing realm, much like Fr. Bede’s notion of the spiritual realm, as well as Ken Wilbur’s, which is both source and summit, but also somehow saturates all of reality like water that soaks a sponge, like the smoke from the incense on my altar and my inefficient fire place insinuates itself into everything I own. Teilhard teaches that we must first become aware of this:

Before considering others (and in order to do so) the believers must make sure of their own personal sanctification––not out of egoism [he insists], but with a firm and broad understanding that the task of each one of us is to divinise the whole world in an infinitesimal and incommunicable degree. (DM, 142)

Once we have become aware of this realm, that’s when we really understand charity.

As insipid as the word "charity" sounds to us moderns sometimes, this is a specific type of love that implies a love for humankind, with kindness and tolerance. The ancient translation of the famous text is Deus caritas est–“God is charity” not “God is love” (incidentally, the name of Pope Benedict’s first encyclical), and though the famous hymn usually comes down to us as Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est––“Where there is charity and love, there is God,”––early manuscripts show the version used by our friend Bob Hurd in his beautiful and popular rendition: Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est–“Where charity is true, there is God.” When we discover this divine milieu we also discover charity, in the sense that “our salvation is not pursued or achieved except in solidarity [emphasis his] with the justification of the whole ‘body of the elect.’” We are all one person, according the Teilhard, and this is his understanding of who/what Christ is––the Person, the head and living summary of humanity. (Is this not the Purusha, or am I seeing too much into this?) And so our individual mystical efforts await their essential completion in union with the mystical effort of all others who make up this body. We link our work with that of all the laborers who surround us; we rekindle our ardor by contact with that ardor of others; we make our sap communicate with that circulating in all other cells. That is when power bursts asunder the envelope in which our individual microcosms “tend jealously to isolate themselves and vegetate.” Ouch.

But here it is, and compare this with Reginald Ray’s call for us to reenter the world of the relative with a ferocity and intensity:

Those with a passionate sense of the divine milieu cannot bear to find things about them obscure, tepid and empty which should be full and vibrant with God. They are paralyzed by the thought of numberless spirits which are linked to theirs in the unity of the same world, but are not yet fully kindled by the flame of the divine presence. They had thought for a time that they had only to stretch out their own hand in order to touch God to the measure of their desires. They now see that the only human embrace capable of worthily enfolding the divine is that of all people opening their arms to call down and welcome the Fire. The only subject capable of mystical transfiguration is the whole group of humankind forming a single body and a single soul in charity. (DM, 144)

May all become compassionate and wise!

P.S. Ray also said something during in an interview entitled “Blazing With Wakefulness” (get a load of that!) in the same magazine that really struck me, referring again to his relationship with his old teacher Chögyam Rinpoche:

When spiritual instruction and mentoring become too fixed, then the vitality tends to be lost, and a person’s development is compromised… You can’t build your spiritual life on inflexible procedures and rules and regulations, because at that point your armor is pretty much back in place. Once you start living out of “shoulds” and “oughts” and rules and credentials and levels and attainments, all of a sudden the nakedness of the journey is lost.

then!

2011-02-07T17:52:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of time
I declared two paths of spiritual discipline:
jnana yoga, the path of spiritual wisdom,
and karma yoga, the path of action.

Those who shirk action do not attain freedom;
nor can gain one perfection by abstaining from work.
Indeed, no one is inactive even for an instant;
all creatures are driven to action by their own nature.
(Bhagavad Gita 3:3-4)

There’s an upside and a downside to the self-help culture in which we live. The upsides are actually many––folks getting a sense of their own worth and dignity, a sense of an inner power that is transformative, inspiration toward greater healing and fulfillment. The downside is that we can focus too much on ourselves. I find the same thing happens often when people initially get focused on the so-called mystical traditions––Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, for instance. I’ve been working on some new chapters for Universal Wisdom (there are 30 online now, by the way: see the Sangha Shantivanam website), and once I cross over the dividing line between Buddhism and Judaism I can feel a whole change in the cabin pressure. The texts from the Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Dhammapada, are very inward focused (the exception being certain passages from the Gita, as the one quoted above about detached action). Part and parcel of this is a criticism of Christianity, especially of Western Christianity (how often I heard this in India, from Christians!) for being so extroverted, outwardly focused on God and others instead of cultivating the cave of the heart. Of course, once the polemics die down and we can see the contrast non-judgmentally, we can also see what a beautiful marriage it would be if East and West were to really meet and complement each other, like breathing in and breathing out.

I am constantly trying to cultivate for myself and teach to others a holistic, integral spirituality, that is, care of the body, the soul and the spirit: health of body, which includes care for our environment, care for the soul with its multiple layers of consciousness from emotional intelligence and psychological health through cultivating the intuitive minds of the artist and mystic intuition, opening up to the higher realms of consciousness and ultimately to spirit itself. But when I end the retreats that I offer on Spirit, Soul and Body, I often draw a circle on the board divided into four quadrants, one for each of the above and a fourth quadrant for––what? Along with my confrere Bruno I don’t always know what to call this fourth quadrant: incarnation, insertion, participation? Usually I wind up calling it simply “service.” What the Ur self-help program––the 12 Steps of Alcoholic Anonymous––teaches is that service is an intrinsic part of recovery. In other words, we don’t wait until we get it all together before we start being of service; no, service is one of the tools for getting it all together. I love the phrase that Karen Armstrong uses in her book on the Buddha: the Yoga of Compassion. There is the Yoga of Knowledge, the Yoga of Meditation, the Yoga of Devotion, the Yoga of Sound––and there is the Yoga of Compassion, the Yoga of Action. Again reaching toward an integral approach, it seems as if we are trying to put some element of each of these Yogas into our personal practices, and one essential element is inserting ourselves in the world, participation, incarnation, service, and not just after we’ve been enlightened and gotten it all together. There will always be a place for withdrawal and silence and solitude, but inserting ourselves in the world is one beneficent practice toward our enlightenment. Service itself is a spiritual practice. In Catholicism it is referred to as the “corporal works of mercy.”

Why? Because it gets us out of our small self. I like the image about pratyahara in the eight limbs of Yoga that I learned, sense withdrawal. It’s like a tortoise pulling its head into the shell for a time. I remember a teacher saying, “It’s not because the world is bad; it’s just that we need to rein in our senses every now and then and make sure they are connected with that deepest part of ourselves.” Yes, yes! That’s it. But then what? We find the inner light and that inner light shatters our shell, like the light from Jesus’ heart that blew the stone off the tomb in the garden of the Resurrection.

Often in our tradition we hear a reading from the Jewish scriptures and then hear a reading from the Gospel that is like Jesus doing an exegesis on it. For once, the opposite is happening. This past week the reading from the prophet Isaiah put Jesus’ teaching from the Gospel in context. Those glorious passages from the Sermon on the Mount: You are the light of the world! You are a city built on a hill! A lamp on a lampstand! I could say my whole ministry as a priest has been based on trying to convince people of this, about themselves. But as a minister and a teacher, I find that I am always walking that fine line, trying to know when to build people up and when to challenge then to do something about it. The whole point of being beautiful and radiant and shiny is not to stand around looking beautiful and radiant and shiny. The whole point of being a city built on a hill is for people to live there, feel welcomed there. The whole point is to participate in this cruel crazy beautiful world. Our friend Huxley writes that no religion does any one any good but so far as it brings the perfection of love into us. So “true orthodoxy can nowhere be found but in a pure disinterested love of God and our neighbor.”

What does this mean practically? In a beautiful prophecy from Isaiah he tells his co-religionists in exile:

Share your bread with the hungry!
Shelter the oppressed and homeless!
Clothe the naked when you see them!
Do not turn your back on your own!
Remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech.
Satisfy the afflicted…

And here for me is the important word: “Then…”

Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.
Then you shall call and I will answer.
Then light shall rise for you in the darkness.
Then the gloom shall become for you like midday.
(Is 58:7-10)

We crawl into our shell, the beautiful cave of the heart, in meditation and prayer. We find the light, we die to our outer selves in prayer and meditation, and we also do it in service. And then then then… the light bursts our shells, our caves open and we shine. Remember that song I quoted last week from Daisy May Erlewine? "There is work to be done, so you got to shine on!"

This of course is the example of Jesus too, who as St Paul tells us, did not cling to his godliness, his holiness, who never seemed to be mind being pulled out of his solitary retreats in the mountains abiding with his Abba to heal the sick or preach. Rather, he emptied himself, took the form of a slave. And then he taught his followers, The greatest among you will be the ones who serve; and the first ones among you must meet the needs of all. Then our light will not just glow in our hearts: it breaks forth like the dawn!

Shine on!

2011-01-25T11:18:00.000-08:00

Shine on, shine on,
There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone.
Shine on, shine on,
There is work to be done in the dark before dawn.
(Daisy May Erlewine)

I learned a long time ago that one of the biggest faults we human beings have, that winds up leading to even bigger problems in the long run, is this two-pronged approach we take to life––avoiding pain and augmenting pleasure. If you think about it, you could almost fit your whole day into one of those two categories––avoiding pain and augmenting pleasure.

“What are you up to today?”
“Avoiding pain. How ‘bout you?”
“Augmenting pleasure…”

We are forever trying to build up a life of ease and comfort, padding our nests and battening down our hatches. We are forever trying to get away from hard things, and we especially want to get rid of any kind of pain as soon as we get a hint of it, whether by an aspirin or by a drink or some harder drug, or some kind of diversion that gets our mind off it. I have two close friends who say almost the same thing: one, who endured the death of several of her family members, a difficult divorce and just had a ling transplant, says, “It’s only pain”; and the other says, “Sometimes things just hurt.” Like a death, or a dysfunctional family, or a debilitating disease. Sometimes we just have to feel the pain, grieve, wail, cry, so that it can pass.

The poet David Whyte says when we are little children we get a little black bag strapped to our waists and everything frightening or painful we throw in the black bag. And it stretches and stretches so that by the time we are adults we can barely fit through the door because the bag is so large. We try to keep on avoiding looking at all those things that we fear or that are going to be difficult for us to face, but at some point––let’s hope this doesn’t have to wait until our deaths––we’re going to have to face it all, and deal with it, and let go of it. And we’re going to have to let go of the pleasures we’ve been clinging to as well, even the legitimate pleasures, loved ones, careers, sometimes even health of mind and body. As Teilhard wrote in The Divine Milieu, “The Master of Death will come soon enough––and perhaps we can already hear his footsteps. There is no need to forestall his hour nor fear it.”

There’s a lot of sweetness and light in the readings we read in church today. First is the prophet Isaiah in Chapter 8, proclaiming that the Gentiles are going to see a great light. This is a passage that is used liturgically also at Christmas time: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in darkness a light has shone.” Later in the text those famous lines come that is not quoted here––I remember it well because some friends of mine and I were working with this text during the summer of 2006 when Israel was in the process of bombing the smithereens out of Lebanon (with the US’s tacit approval), just the opposite of what is going on here, where: “For every boot that trampled in battle, every cloak rolled in blood shall be burnt as fuel for flames. For unto us a child is given, to us a child is born…” And in the Gospel of Matthew we see Jesus is going into the land of the Gentiles, bringing his light, a light that is now going to be for all people, not just for the chosen few.

I’ve heard is said that the dark side of modern spirituality is that it has no dark side. Lest we get too comfortable, there are three little correctives to the sweetness and light in the readings today. In the Isaiah reading, this light shines where there has first been great degradation, great darkness, and Isaiah says it is specifically by the hand of the lord that this degradation and darkness had come, like John the Baptist’s axe laid to the root of the tree. And Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel (4:12-23) is sending his disciples out not just to announce the light, but to call people to repentance so that they can actually make room for this light. And we sneak St Paul’s words in from the end of the second reading (1 Cor 1: 17)––so that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power. In this context it seems to me that the repentance could be just what I mentioned earlier. It’s time to get real! It’s time to open that black bag of fears and avoidances you’ve been carrying around, empty it out and face the reality of life. Or as Jesus puts it in another place, “Take up your cross and follow me.” So that the cross of Christ not be emptied of its meaning. Repent may mean to stop clinging to pleasure, even to legitimate pleasure. Stop worrying about what to wear or what to eat or tomorrow––do not live in fear, my little flock! So that the cross of Christ may not be emptied of its power. It’s just pain, it’s just a cross, and it may kill you but it will not destroy you.

There’s a song a friend of mine introduced me to recently and I can’t stop singing it. It also seems to fit so well with today’s readings. It strikes me as an announcement of the gospel, of the good news, even if it doesn’t specifically mention Jesus, because it mentions Jesus’ way. It’s called “Shine On.”

Knocked me off of my feet
But I think it's time for me to start walking again,
Stop running away from things.
Next time you see me,
I will be singing a new song
I am learning to shine on.

Shine on, shine on,
There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone.
Shine on, shine on,
There is work to be done in the dark before dawn.

It's been hard not to give in,
And it ain't easy living in hard times.
I know it's weighing on your mind.
Next time you see me,
I'll be uplifting, yes I will give you hope!
I am learning as I go to shine on.

I know how dark it seems,
Feel it coming up inside of me,
And I feel it in you too, in everything you do.
Next time you see me,
We'll both be laughing, oh just to be alive!
We are learning to shine, shine on.

I think this would be a good thing for us to sing to the world right now. I my circle, there are many people despairing, many people hurting, many people hopeless about life. But so that the cross of Christ not be emptied of its meaning, I think we should be announcing this good news to the world: Shine on, shine on. / There'll be time enough for darkness when everything's gone. / Shine on, shine on. / There is work to be done in the dark before dawn. And that work to be done is just what Jesus sent his apostles out to do: preaching that the reign of God is at hand, curing disease and illness among the people, especially the dis-ease of despair, the illness of hopelessness, so that the people who walk in darkness can see the great light of Christ, through us, with us and in us.

the great transformation, the great archetypes

2011-01-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

Would you become a pilgrim on the road to Love?
The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.
(Ansari of Heart)

Karen Armstrong has a little different version of what the Perennial Philosophy is in her magisterial book on the Axial Period called The Great Transformation. A simple version of her view is the realization that every single person, every object, and every experience on earth is actually but a replica––a pale shadow, at that––of a reality in another realm or sphere of existence––let’s call it the divine world. That sacred world is then understood as the prototype of human existence, and it is richer, stronger, and more enduring than anything on earth. And because it is so men and women wanted desperately to participate in it. (The Great Transformation, p. xxi) Armstrong points out for example how even in modern times, when we seem to have abandoned the perennial philosophy, “people slavishly follow the dictates of fashion and even do violence to their faces and figures in order to reproduce the current standard of beauty. The cult of celebrity shows that we still revere models who epitomize ‘superhumanity,’” our cult of entertainment and sports celebrity, for example. “People sometimes go to great lengths to see their idols, and feel an ecstatic enhancement of being in their presence. They imitate their dress and behavior. It seems that human beings naturally tend toward the archetypal and paradigmatic.” (GT, p. xxi) But ultimately, at least as the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches it, the human person is created in the image of God, who is a perfect being (in the first story of creation), and in whom the Holy Spirit is breathed into the center (the second story of Creation). And so even the great archetype of the Purusha, the Christ, Adam Kadmon, al-Insan al-Kamil––the prototypes of humanity that we are meant to follow and imitate, not merely worship, who are somehow also the pattern of our existence, the “image of God” that is the center of our beings.

I ran into a beautiful little book in a bookstore in Phoenix last week. I didn’t buy but I read enough of it to be dangerous and think I knew what it was all about, enough to quote it! It was called The Heart of Philosophy, by the famous Jacob Needleman, some of whose writings I have already read. In the introduction to the book he writes about two different approaches to philosophy, two different levels really. There is the philosophy that deals with the surface level, our ordinary consciousness, things as they are. And then there is the philosophy that deals with the “heart of the matter,” the prime things, the Self of the self (what Huxley will call “autology” as opposed to “psychology”). The thing that really interested me about this distinction, though, was the names he gives them. The first type of philosophy is of the ego; the second type he categorizes as––are you ready?––eros. Eros is the deep down stuff, the realm of the archetypes and prototypes and the Self of the self, that toward which we are striving and longing. Yes, you could even say the gods, the daemons (as opposed to demons), the devas.

Now we are back in the realm of Hederman’s (MPH) thought on eros, and its deeper meaning as well. Our own longing, our loves, even our infatuations are siren calls from that level of meaning. Even someone with whom we fall in love is somehow a symbol of a fullness that we are not yet, and we are called to be in relationship with that, as well as with her or him. In some way, the one with whom we are infatuated or in love is a kind of god/dess (in the loosest sense of the word), and this is why their attention or rejection is so powerful to us––it is like being seen by God! Or being rejected by God! Of course he or she are not God, but our innards don’t know that. Our hearts (our deepest hearts) only know that there is something else we are longing for. What healthy psychosexual development and emotional growth teach us is exactly what MPH was talking about, recognizing the other as subject and not object, which means pulling back our projections of perfection and realizing that the other is also a human striving for perfection, and not an object to be consumed, just as our desire is not something to be satisfied (and therefore done away with, killed!). The other spurs us on to who, what we could be, can be, if we are stay in that tense relationship with that which calls us into being, into fullness of being. Because ultimately, since the human person is created in the image of God, who is a perfect being (in the first story of creation), our eros is really directed at the divine, the fulfillment, not just the satisfaction, of our desire. And so, again, the great archetype of the Purusha, the Christ, Adam Kadmon, al-Insan al-Kamil––the prototypes of humanity that we are meant to follow and imitate, not merely worship, who are somehow also the pattern of our existence, the “image of God” that is the center of our beings. And so no less an orthodox Christian writer than Saint Basil the Great wrote that we achieve what is beyond our wildest imaginings––we become God. Whether it is by participation as orthodox Judaism, Christianity, and Islam teach, or because we share the same substance as the monistic traditions teach, doesn’t matter much to me (doesn’t really seem to matter much to Huxley either––“something similar to or even identical with divine Reality), and doesn’t seem to alter the path very much. This of course is again the telos and scopos, by the way.) I feel content with the fact that if I stay on the right path I am going to become God.

the ache we feel: reflections on Perennial Philosophy

2011-01-10T14:38:00.000-08:00

There’s no true love affair which will not break your heart.
There’s no marriage that will not eventually break your heart…
There’s no good work in the world that will not break your heart.
There’s no way of parenting a child without them breaking your heart,
and you breaking yours.
And there’s no way of coming to know yourself in that internal marriage
without going through that existential sense of disappointment about who you’ve discovered you are.
There’s no way forward without a real sense of vulnerable heartbreak.
(David Whyte)

So, there are two ways that I want to tie the last entry in with Huxley.

The first is his discourse about our relationship to Nature in Chapter IV, on “God in the World.” He exposes it first by telling the strange little story (pp. 76ff.) from the writings of Chuang Tzu about Shu and Hu boring holes in Chaos and consequently killing him. Chaos is Nature, and Shu and Hu represent our inadvertent attempts to improve on it. The Taoists and the other proponents of the Perennial philosophy have “no desire to bully Nature into subsertving ill-considered temporal ends, at variance with the final end of [human being] as formulated by the Perennial Philosophy… to work with Nature, so as to produce material and social conditions in which individuals may realize Tao on every level from the physiological up to the spiritual.” (PP, 77) Contrast that to the Westerners/Christians (of course!), the believers in “Inevitable Progress” who

… thought they would improve on Nature by turning prairies into wheat fields and produced deserts; who proudly proclaimed the Conquest of the Air, and then discovered that they had defeated civilization; who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda… the devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress, and their creed is the Kingdom of Heaven outside you, and in the future.

Let’s please leave East and West, Taoists versus Christian, prophetic versus mystical, out of this for a second (I have images of the banks of the Ganges and the streets of Bangkok covered with garbage and endless construction…), and just call it this: The difference lies in human beings who start believing in Progress as our final end as opposed to what the Perennial Philosophy offers as our end, our goal (scopos and telos):

The important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness… but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals in their advance toward [our] final end… (PP, 80)

Part and parcel of this, looking back at Hederman’s language (again, henceforth MPH), is that we unfortunately see Nature as an object to be had to satisfy our needs and desires, rather than a subject in its own right, to be lived with, to be in being with. Expand the image of the apple to be eaten out to the entire created world. And the best of Christian mystical theology in relation to the world and Nature, in modern times as articulated by Teilhard de Chardin, but from the get-go as articulated by Paul in the letter to the Romans is this: all creation is groaning and in agony while we await the redemption of our bodies. Creation is a being in its own right, and even if we do posit a certain, though debated, privileged position to the “precious human birth” (Buddhism), in the “priesthood of humanity,” right relationship is to be servant of creation, abiding with creation, not creation’s master/despoiler. Our monastic community belongs to the Four Winds Council, an interfaith group that advocates for the wilderness, and part of our mission statement refers to Nature as a precious resource. Some people quibbled with that word, because even seeing Nature as a “resource” somehow views it as a commodity and an object in relation to humanity, not as being in its own right. Creation has its own eros, its own thrust forward, and our evolution and Her evolution are intimately tied together. And so, it would be well for us to move in that regard too from having to being.

The other place where MPH’s writings struck me as resonating with Huxley is in the latter’s comments on love or, rather, on “Charity,” in Chapter V, and here we move from the apple to the human being. Applying the same sensibility––that in our relationships, from casual friendships all the way through our deepest loves and infatuations, we need to move from loving as “wanting you” to loving as “wanting for you,” from “having you” to “being with you”––Huxley’s meditation is brilliant and moving:

We can only love what we know, and we can never know completely what we do not love. Love is a mode of knowledge and when the love is sufficiently disinterested and sufficiently intense, the knowledge becomes unitive knowledge and so takes on the quality of infallibility. (PP, 81)

While disinterested here sounds cold and indifferent, it is not. It means, I have no agenda for you, I do not want you. I still remember that classic definition of agape that I learned when I was 15 years old: to love without asking for anyting in return. That’s what Huxley means here by “disinterested.”

The ache that we feel that call “love” is the ache of our own selves groaning, and perhaps all of creation groaning with us while we await the redemption of our bodies. It is the ache of desire; it is our growing pains, the pain of evolution stretching our bones and those of all creation. And we want to take away the ache, and we think we can take away the ache by having something or someone. But we are only killing the ache temporarily. It shall return, maybe in a fiercer way, maybe disguised as a compulsion or an addiction, maybe as a sickness or neurosis. The ideal, it seems to me, is to hold our pleasure with open hands, let it slip in and be grateful and in awe of it when it comes as well as when it goes away on its own trajectory––what does Mary Oliver say, “Doesn’t everything die / and too soon?”––and also learn to live with the ache, and recognize it as the “wound of love,” the wound that pulls us forward into being. As David Whyte says, to end the quote that I cited above, to sum this up:

It can be a tremendously good thing to tell yourself, to remind yourself,
a blessed thing, a merciful thing, to remind yourself
that heartbreak is actually a normal phenomenon of any sincere human path,
and that we should just be ready for the particular form that it takes…

solo ai poveri

2011-01-09T17:12:00.000-08:00

The nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.
(Aldous Huxley)

Today in the Christian tradition we clebrate the Baptism of the Lord. There are two texts about this feast that I love to quote. The first one is this: The voice of God the Father made itself heard over Christ at the moment of his Baptism so as to reach humanity on earth by means of him and in him: “This is my Beloved!” Jesus did not receive this title for himself, but to give its glory to us. Now if I had read that out of context I might have made some kind of joke about it being a bunch of New Age hooey––“Oh sure, it’s all about me! It’s all about us. Perfect for the Me Generation and our navel gazing culture!”––except for the fact that it’s from St Cyril of Jerusalem, and it wasn’t a slip of the tongue or the pen. It’s in the Catechism, which follows it up by saying that Everything that happened to [Jesus] lets us know that, after the bath of water, the Holy Spirit swoops down upon us from high heaven and that, adopted by the Father’s voice, we become children of God. (CCC, 537) So it is all about us! Everything that happened to Jesus happened so that we would know that we become children of God. Jesus didn’t receive the title “Beloved” for himself; he received it to give its glory to us.

There are two more sayings that I like to add to this, which again I have been quoting over and over again these past few weeks. St Basil the Great is even bolder than St Cyril: he writes that by the gift of the Holy Spirit of Jesus we become citizens of heaven; by the gift of the Holy Spirit of Jesus we are admitted into the company of angels... Through the Spirit we acquire a likeness to God; indeed we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations––by the gift of the Holy Spirit of Jesus we become God. I might have thought that that was a slip of the pen too, except that that is quoted in a prayer book called the Office of Readings, the official prayer book of the Church. Then there’s one more little text that I love to quote, and it happens right at Mass when the priest pours water into the wine (If I’ve mentioned this once I’ve mentioned it a thousand times): By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share the divinity of Christ who came to share in our humanity. That’s what this whole thing is about! Sharing in divinity!

Now, I often wonder why we don’t talk about all those things more. Last week at Holy Cross I preached about the mystery and the secret of Jesus’ message, all these same things: that we are called to be participants in the divine nature, that this is all about us, that the kingdom of heaven is among us and within us. And I told folks that they should go and tell everybody, and I still stand by that, too. That prayer of the priest, for instance, is one of those prayers that used to be called the “secret” prayers, and I was saying that they aren’t secret anymore.

But there’s also some validity to it being a secret too, because the wrong part of us hears those things, the unregenerate part of us, the part of us that doesn’t want to reform or repent. And that’s where the real meaning of Baptism comes in. All that was the Good News. Here’s the bad news…

We often forget that Baptism is a symbol of death before it is a symbol of new life. It’s a symbol of drowning. Water itself mythologically is both a symbol of life and of death. Think of the River Styx in Greek mythology that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld or Hades, with its ferryman Charon. That became part of the description of hell in the Christian West as well, in Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Blake’s Paradise Lost. But I am specifically thinking of the Red Sea: the Hebrews cross safely, but the Pharoah’s charioteers were drowned. It’s that event that gets remembered at Easter and at our Baptism. I’m also thinking of Jesus walking across the waters so many times in the Gospels, as if he were the new Charon and the new Moses, walking across the waters of death and guiding others safely across, too. But it’s almost as if he couldn’t do that––walk across the waters––until he had immersed himself in it first, allowed himself to drown. And so for us: somehow it’s only by drowning gracefully that we can walk the roads of earth with ease and grace as disciples of Jesus. It is only by something in us dying that we can access all that is promised to us by those other great writers: being divinized, participating in the divine nature, owning our real inheritance, becoming who we are.

Of course I can’t forget the diksha of sannyasa initiation when the renunciate goes into the water and strips off all the clothes and comes back out naked to be sent off wandering, dead to the world. I found out that according to classic Indian tradition you would feed a sannyasi with your left hand, the dirty hand, because the sannyasi is dead, and you wouldn’t want to touch a corpse and get defiled.

There’s a beautiful saying of St Clare of Assisi: Ne sono sicurissima il Regno dei cieli il Signore lo promette e lo dona solo ai poveri––“Of this I am sure, that the Lord promises and grants the Reign of heaven only to the poor.” We could say it this other way, too: the Lord promises and grants the Reign of heaven only to those who have drowned gracefully in the waters of Baptism, only those who have died in some way. Died to what? Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy points out that in all traditions––though he points mostly to the life of Jesus and to many Christian saints––Ultimate Reality is only clearly understood by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit. (PP, x) “… it is a fact which cannot be fully realized or directly experienced, except by souls… who have fulfilled certain conditions.” Then he quotes the famous phrase of St Augustine: Ama et fac quod vis––“Love and do what you will”; but he says you can only do this “when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart, and your neighbor as yourself…” (PP, 71) That is the baptismal death we have to undergo, over and over again.

The reason, perhaps, that we don’t shout all those other things about our sharing in divinity from the rooftops is because we might end up deifying our ego! We might think that we can just coast on this salvation that is granted us; we might think that we can rest back on our laurels and enjoy our exalted status. But it doesn’t work that way, at least not for us mere mortals. “Love and do what you will”; but you can only do this “when you have learnt the infinitely difficult art of loving God with all your mind and heart, and your neighbor as yourself…” That is the baptismal death we have to undergo over and over again in order to share in Jesus’ divinity. The Lord promises and grants the Reign of heaven only to the poor.

We should also hear this other thing too though, in the depths of our being, these words that Jesus was supposed to pass on to all humanity: You are my Beloved! Those words and that knowledge that we are the beloved, the knowledge that we are destined to inherit the reign of God, should make us want to find our real self, should make us long to discover that self that is already in some way already in union with God, created in God’s image, should make us want to know what it means to be a participant in the divine nature––and die to everything else but that in the waters of Baptism.

So, in a sense, Jesus says, Come on in! The water is fine––you may drown, but you won’t die. You real self, hidden in God, will arise, as a participant in divine nature.

mad crazy love; reflections on the Perennial Philosophy

2011-01-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

It is truly the Beloved who visits you.
Yes, but he comes invisible, hidden, and incomprehensible.
He comes to touch you, not to be seen,
he makes you taste of him, not to pour himself out in you entirely.
He comes to draw your affection not to satisfy your desire.
(Hugh of St Victor)

(Someone suggested that I put more effort into keeping up the blog when I am not on the road. I am not sure I can do this consistently, but here I am giving it a try. Since the Sangha is reading Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy together I thought that might give me some fodder and inspire some commentary. We’ll see how it goes…)

I’ve been reading a second book of Abbot Mark Patrick Hederman recently, this one entitled “Manikon Eros: Mad Crazy Love.” (The first one I read about which I wrote some while on the road was Underground Cathedrals.) I'm taking these ideas mainly from Chapter 3 of this new book, "Pleasure for Pleasure." He writes quite a but about eros, that breed of love that I have been rather fascinated with intellectually and personally for some ten years. There is a title of a book in Italian that sort of sums up my quest: “Eros Redento––Eros Redeemed.” It all started out with a few sentences of

Bede Griffiths written to his beloved Russill:
Agape without eros simply does not work. It leaves our human nature starved. Of course, eros without agape is equally disastrous. It leaves us to the compulsion of human and sexual love . . . In meditation we can learn to let our own natural desires, our eros, awaken and surrender it to God, that is, let it be taken up into agape. It must neither be suppressed nor indulged. It is surrender that is called for . . .

These sentences were also the basis of an article I wrote called “Awaken and Surrender.” That coupled with the mystic Dionysius the Areopagite who wrote in the “Divine Names” that “In God, eros is outgoing, ecstatic. Because of it lovers no longer belong to themselves but to those whom they love.” Hederman (henceforth MPH) is addressing all forms of eros, at its most primal sexual as well as our eros for God and God’s eros for us.

There is a slippery slope here that I keep running into, and that is the “knife-edge,” to use a phrase Huxley mentions several times, between liberty-freedom and license. In other words, the awakening is one aspect; the surrendering is quite another.

MPH is using Aquinas’ three-fold understanding of the soul, that the soul is vegetal, sensory and spiritual. (Not too far a stretch to see the Spirit, Soul and Body anthropology applying, is it?) Traditionally Western Greek philosophy speaks of three parts of the soul; I like to think of the three functions of the soul: the vegetal, the sensory and the spiritual.

And then he distinguished between needs and desires.
• The vegetal part of the soul has needs, biological needs.
• The spiritual part of the soul has desires, the desire for ultimate happiness.
• Between those two is the sensory soul that has both needs and desires.

Now, here I take off in my own language and use of this model.
• The biological needs of the vegetal soul are obvious, and always, though sometimes grudgingly acknowledged as such by spiritual traditions––though there is always the danger of “angelism” and excesses of mortification.
• The needs of the sensory soul are the normal emotional psycho-sexual needs of human development and growth, real needs, the love of the mother, the security of the father, the mirroring.
• The desires, on the other hand, are for pleasure, but I think those pleasures are intimately tied to those needs. Sometimes religious traditions will refer to them as “legitimate pleasures.” But MPH is suggesting that they are beyond legitimate––they are necessary. I think right away of the great work of Thomas More in his books Care of the Soul and Soul Mates, how he opened up for me the whole realm of soul-making, from psychology through the arts on up into spirituality. And also of Bede’s phrase: “Agape without eros simply does not work. It leaves our human nature starved.”
• But there is a contradiction that makes up the nature of desire: we must have pleasure or our souls will starve; but pleasure can satisfy only for a time––it is never infinite nor absolute.
• Here we make a distinction here between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure means finite, evanescent things. Happiness on the other hand means eternal, everlasting things. Also, pleasures are “satisfied,” temporary fixes, if you will; happiness instead is fulfillment, eternal. And that of course is the domain of the spiritual part of the soul––happiness, fulfillment, the thirst for the eternal, the everlasting.

There is another contradiction: in “satisfying” a desire, we are actually killing two things: we have killed our desire, and we have also killed that which we have possessed to satisfy that desire. MPH uses the example of an apple (which has now forever changed the way I see and eat apples!). I want an apple. I am the subject, and the apple is the object. I want an apple! In wanting to eat the apple I am actually trying to annihilate, get rid of, kill my desire for that apple. Do you see? I am uncomfortable with desire, so I want to get rid of it by satisfying it. But if I could for a moment stop seeing the apple in relationship to me––the object of my desire––perhaps suddenly the apple could become a subject itself. Without me, what is it? Something protecting its own seed with a beautiful protective red or yellow or green coating. If I eat it, it is no longer that. I have killed both my desire and the apple. Of course it should be a pretty easy shift over to applying this human relationships. Aquinas, again, distinguished between imperfect and perfect love. Imperfect love is when I am drawn to you for the good you can do me. Perfect love is when I am drawn to the good that you are in and of yourself.

My language for this: imperfect love is when “I love you” means “I want you.” Perfect love is when “I love you” means “I want for you,” when I see you not as an object that I want to possess––and devour and kill!––but as a subject with your own being, your own desire, your own trajectory.

The problem is also that we think of desire as the desire to have something, to possess something. And MPH is suggesting that we need to move from having desires to recognizing desire is the very stuff and thrust of our being, because our perfection is not in the possession of a thing or an object. In the book by Joseph Chu-Cong that I’ve quoted so often now, he lays this whole dynamic out, quoting Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves, Rollo May’s Love and Will as well as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, all to make the point that eros is a heavenly force that gets misdirected. When we think of eros as sex, we think of eros as tension that wants to be released––or an desire that wants to be satisfied by being annihilated by eating the apple, drinking a glass of wine, having sex. But if we think of eros as the very force of our being, it is the love that is a longing to beget, to engender, a love that in some way does not want to be satisfied. The spiritual life purifies our desire, ‘til it becomes an expression of the very fullness of God.

This is what I mean by Christian tantra.

But, and this is a subtle point, neither is our perfection in complete “dispossession of ourselves,” he says, “some kind of emptiness.” I struggled with that because those words are so important to me both in terms of the kenotic language of the Gospel and the monastic way east and west, but bear with it with me. Maybe we only need to reconfigure our own sense of emptiness. Our perfection, he says, instead lies in an act of relationship with what really is. Our perfection lies in an act of love, an act that is in itself renunciation, allowing something, or someone, simply to “be,” without possessing it, without killing both it and our desire. What I am renouncing is my “having,” to allow both my being as desire and your being as subject to continue to live.

Ah now, I just came back to the kenosis of Jesus that Paul speaks of: he did not cling to godliness! What we renounce is clinging, selfish clinging. Siddhartha Guatama just walked in the room with his second noble truth.

(Mind you, I am riffing on this in a way that MPH didn’t, but I don’t think it is far from his thinking, since he also writes about the nature of “being in love” and infatuation.)

So we must move from having to being. He is suggesting that the very nature of our being is desire–eros. I see this as an outward self-transcending thrust that is the power of personal growth and all evolution, personal and of consciousness, even cosmic consciousness. And fulfillment, as opposed to satisfaction, and happiness, as opposed to mere pleasure, can only come when I move from grasping and clinging so as to possess, to being. This is being in love: love that sees another and all other objects not as objects to be had by me, but as subjects themselves, driven by this same evolutionary thrust. And we are being to being, shoulder to shoulder, moving forward to our fulfillment and happiness. Our relationships then become relationships of being to being, built on mutual understanding of the other as subject: how can I help you move forward? What is it in me that pulls you forward? What is it in my attraction you that calls forth the rest of my being? My desire for an other can then be seen as a reminder of my own desire to be, a movement toward something other or beyond myself that the other exemplifies. We allow desire to inform us. Love then is a dis-position that allows reality to inform me of its real presence––not my projected need, not as an object in my sphere of existence to grasped and consumed and annihilated, but as a signpost to a fullness, a fulfillment of myself. Love is essence in relationship with essence, who I really am in relationship with who you really are.

What does this have to do with the Perennial Philosophy? More to come...

what's the secret?

2011-01-02T17:18:00.000-08:00

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
(David Whyte, "What to Remember When Waking")

The word “epiphany” is such a dense word. I like to think that words don’t just have multiple meanings in various situations, but that they somehow mean a whole bunch of things at the same time. Like the word “realize,” which I’ve grown so fond of these days. To realize something means two things. I can mean to become aware of something, like, “I suddenly realized that…” But it also can mean “to make something real,” as in when we realize a dream or realize a plan. But maybe those are not two different meanings; maybe when we become aware of something it really becomes real.

So, “epiphany” means for the Christian tradition today this feast, which used to always be celebrated on January 6th, 12 days after Christmas, commemorating the visit of the three magi from the east to Jesus in Bethlehem. But in its origin––and this is why Christianity borrowed the word from the Greek––an epiphany meant any manifestation or appearance of a divine being or some kind of supernatural reality. And then later it comes to mean a flash of insight, but not a mere moment of ordinary inspiration. Epiphany means a realization of the essence of something, even a glimpse at the essence of reality itself, a sudden flash of understanding of the big picture, the ground of being and consciousness maybe. To understand for a moment what it’s all about. The Carmelite author and teacher William MacNamara described contemplative prayer and meditation as a “long loving glance at the really real.” That’s it: God is the Really Real, and when we take a long loving glance we may catch of glimpse of Ultimate Reality. It may be akin to the enlightenment experience that out Asian traditions speak of, or the experience of kensho or satori in the Japanese Buddhist tradition.

But saying, “I had an epiphany” is not exactly correct. It’s like saying, “I had a dream!” No, you didn’t do anything; you were asleep and a dream had you. It’s the same with an epiphany. It signifies that the Divine, God, Ultimate Reality is revealing itself, and we are passive in the process. We can prepare ourselves, but an epiphany is a startling ambush of grace.

These are some of my favorite epiphanies in the scriptures: Moses before the burning bush, and again when he climbs Mount Zion and God is revealed in the dark cloud and fire; Jacob wrestling with the angel; Elijah waiting for God in the cave and God is not in the firestorm or the raging wind or in the earthquake, but in the sound of sheer silence, the still small voice; or Mary conceiving by the Holy Spirit; and this baby that the wise men from the east find with his mother in Bethlehem.

A baby! I can’t think of a better epiphany than what we learn from, how we are amazed by a baby, especially a newborn baby. This is very significant, that glimpsing at a baby we would somehow get a glimpse of Absolute Reality, that everything is somehow summed up in this child, that gazing at this baby we might understand what its all about. This is not just about baby Jesus: this is also about us, about all humanity, all of flesh and all creation, since “Christ is the first born of all creation.” You see, just as we say about the Baptism of the Lord, that what Jesus undergoes he undergoes for all flesh, so it applies here too: who Jesus is he is for all humanity, for all flesh, for all creation; what Jesus achieves he achieves for all humanity, for all flesh, for all creation; what Jesus receives he receives for all humanity, for all flesh, for all creation. This is Christian mysticism at its most refined.

I’ve recently been struck by how many times Saint Paul especially uses the word “secret” or “mystery.” Even in the reading from Ephesians we heard for the feast of Epiphany––“the mystery hidden before all ages, now revealed in Jesus.” It’s a new way of seeing Jesus, isn’t it? That he came to reveal a secret, to uncover a mystery that had not been made known before. So when Philip asks Jesus to “show us the Father” Jesus tells him, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” If we see Jesus, if we really realize who Jesus is, we will be able to figure out what God is like. “I’m what God is like,” Jesus is saying. But it is also true, since we are branches on the vine, according to Jesus, that if we see Jesus we also realize what it means to be a human being. If we take a long loving glance at Jesus we will realize both what God is and who we are.

So, what’s the secret? What’s the secret?!?

Here it is:

The Father is glad to give you the kingdom!! The gates of heaven are not locked! They’re open! As a matter of fact the kingdom of heaven is among you, within you! (Excuse all these exclamation marks but there is no other way to convey this unless I write in capital letters in bold font… MAYBE I WILL!!!)

What’s the secret?! We are beloved daughters, beloved sons, precious in God’s sight, branches on the vine, and how far could a branch be from the vine?!

What’s the secret? Peter says it quietly in his epistle, we are meant to be PARTICIPANTS IN THE DIVINE NATURE!! If we really realized what that meant it would become real! Divinity is not just something to be adored. It is something to be participated in!!!!!

What’s the secret, what’s the big mystery? Only this, as the priest says when pouring the water into the wine (one of the old “secret prayers” at Mass), we are meant to share in the divinity of Christ who came to share in our humanity. Saint Augustine said it even bolder: Christ became a human child so that every human being might become God! Saint Basil says the same thing, we receive what is beyond our wildest dreams: we become God; we are divinized! I have said it so many times––I have no idea what that means, but I can’t wait to find out! If we only realized that, whew, what a difference it would make.

What’s the big secret? What’s the mystery? That God’s temple is holy, but the temple is not a building; God’s temple is holy, Paul says, AND YOU ARE THAT TEMPLE!!!! YOU ARE THAT TEMPLE!!!! What’s the secret? That the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit living in us, and from there is flows form out of our hearts like a stream of life giving water bringing healing to the whole world.

If only we could realize these things––become aware of them, make them real… Well, to realize them, all we have to do is follow the way of Jesus, which to me involves two steps. First realize our own dignity, realize who we are, become aware of it and make it real. Then, allow ourselves to be emptied, die to the little self we have thought we were up ‘til now so that our real self, hidden with Christ in God can emerge, the real self that is a participant in divine nature, so that we too could become instruments of God’s peace and healing for our world, yeast in the dough, salt for the earth, light for the world. May this epiphany happen to us, and may we realize what it is, and who we are because of it––to be aware, to make it real in ourselves and in our world.

every moment is a moment of crisis

2011-01-02T07:21:00.000-08:00

And because you are children,
God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts,
crying, “Abba! Father!”
So you are no longer a slave, but a child,
and if a child, then an heir, through God.
(Gal 4:6-7)

On New Year’s Day in the Roman Catholic tradition we celebrate two things at once, the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God and the World Day of Peace. Last night we held our 6th annual Interfaith Meditation Vigil for Peace in the wonderful hall at Holy Cross parish, with presenters from Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Bah’ai and Christianity. I know there were also At the same time events going on at Santa Cruz Zen Center around the corner, and up at Mount Madonna, and at the Land of Medicine Buddha. I don’t remember things like that going on when I was a kid. New Year’s Eve was all about partying, not spent in spiritual practice. That leads me to think that we are going somewhere––that there’s some kind of evolution of consciousness going on, that we would spend New Year’s Eve doing spiritual practice instead of getting wasted or eating a bunch of sweets and staying up watching TV all night.

I was thinking that all of us are people who believe that we can change the consciousness of the world by starting with ourselves, and then finding each other. That’s the true meaning of satsang in the Hindu tradition––the community of those who seek the truth, of the Sangha in which Buddhists take refuge, or the koinonia–community of Christianity. We’re standing together, supporting each others’ paths, with our arms linked together, marching in the same direction.

I know that Pope Benedict is not very popular. Folks think of him as some old conservative German guy. One of my friends teases me all the time about how much I bring him up in public by saying to me, “You know, people don’t like him!” But, you know, in spite of the fact that he frustrates me a lot too and I don’t always agree with his positions on things, I recognize that he is very brilliant and comes out with some insights that are unexpected for an old conservative German guy. Besides that, I always make it a point to cite the most conservative sources possible for a progressive point of view. I especially like to read his New Year’s message every year and mine it for gems, and this year was no exception. Last year his talk was entitled “If you want peace, protect the environment,” and he used the phrase “global solidarity” several times. This year he mainly addressed religious freedom, but he didn’t simply talk about the persecution of Christians (which he could have given the deaths in Iraq and now just yesterday in Egypt as well); he addressed religious freedom as a common patrimony of the whole family of the earth’s peoples. He spoke about it as “an essential element of a constitutional state” that cannot be denied without “at the same time encroaching on all fundamental rights and freedoms,” and “the litmus test for the respect of all the other human rights,” “the attainment of an integral development which concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension.” These are marvelous phrases, because what he is addressing is solidarity with every human being.

So I found it also significant and powerful that those of us who were gathered together for these events last night were from different faith traditions. Especially given the fact that there is so much violence done in the name of religion in this day and age, and isn’t the history of Christianity itself stained with it? We of different traditions may not agree between us on the big theological and philosophical questions, but there are so many purely human questions that we can face together that our common humanity, our good sense, and our intelligence can lead us to agree on. We all know intrinsically that it is not good for children to starve, for example. We know that it is not good for people to be displaced from their homeland because of the exploitation of nature. We know that it is not a good thing to blow up somebody’s place of worship or murder people while they are praying, let alone any time. And, on this World Day of Peace it’s also important to note that if we really think about it, we have to admit that the “military industrial complex,” which President Eisenhower warned us about in his famous farewell speech in 1960, has yet to come up with any permanent, lasting solutions to the world’s problem, only stop gap short term ones.

What we and our friends were proposing in our gatherings for peace is that an essential ingredient in our evolution of consciousness, in our forward march into the future, is being right with God, being in right relationship with Spirit––whatever our traditions calls that source of life, Ultimate Reality, the Ground of our Being, that deepest element of ourselves. For most of us, especially those not granted the luxury or the call of a cloistered monastic life, we don’t have the luxury of escaping the exigencies of daily living in order to get our spiritual life before we engage in the world, but in our spiritual practice and in our spiritual gatherings we are remembering that while we are building our lives “in the world” we also need to make sure that our spiritual life is right, that that is an essential element in the equation, and if it is right it will affect everything and help steer everything in the right direction.

My friends and I have started to study Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy lately. In one of the early chapters he writes about how soldiers in crisis situations in war can somehow immediately transcend or drop down below their individual idiosyncrasies and differences for a time and rise to extraordinary unquestioning heroism. And then he makes an analogy to saints, saying something similar goes on in the life of sanctity. But whereas the objectives of military training are limited and relatively simple, at least focused, the aim of the spiritual life is much less narrowly specialized:

Here the aim is primarily to bring human beings to a state in which, because there are no longer any God-eclipsing obstacles between themselves and Reality, they are able to be aware continuously of the divine Ground of their own an all other beings; secondarily, as a means to this end, to meet all, even the most trivial circumstances of daily living without malice, greed, self-assertion or voluntary ignorance, but consistently with love and understanding. Because its objectives are not limited, because, for the lover of God, every moment is a moment of crisis, spiritually training is incomparably more difficult and searching than military training. There are a good many soldiers, few saints. (Perennial Philosophy, 43)

I guess that’s what we were and are up to, I like to think of us as “spiritual warriors,” aiming toward sanctity, for ourselves and for the world, to be able to meet everything and everyone without malice or greed or self-assertion––Blessed are the poor in spirit!––to meet everything and everyone with love and understanding. A good goal to start the new year with: renewing our commitment to our spiritual practice that will help us go beyond our small self to discover the peace that surpasses all understanding that is the ground of our being¬––the Spirit in our hearts, crying, “Abba!”; to renew our commitment to our satsang, Sangha, community, those whom we are walking with and sharing in mutual support; and allowing all that to be the yeast in the dough of our lives so that we can be the yeast n the dough of the world.

the eros of advent

2010-12-24T20:46:00.001-08:00

Past and future veil God from our sight;
burn up both of them with fire. How long
will you be partitioned by these segments, like a reed?
So long as a reed is partitioned, it is not privy to secrets,
nor is it vocal in response to lip and breathing.
(Rumi)

I read a beautiful little book this year by a Chinese Trappist named Joseph Chu-Cong called “The Contemplative Experience.” The title did not do justice to the subject matter; as a faithful son of Bernard of Clairvaux he was writing about the Song of Songs and how the Greek concept of love as eros is operative in the spiritual life. This is another topic I have been fascinated with these years, these different types of love––libido, philia, eros, agape. It started with Fr Bede’s insistence that eros leads into agape, and then a discovery that the ancient Christian writers spoke about God’s eros–longing for us and our eros-longing for God. Hence why the Song of Songs would be included in the Bible at all, how romantic love is only a symbol of the greater longing. As a matter of fact Pope Benedict wrote his first encyclical on this, too, and got roundly criticized. One earnest conservative writer wrote that we needed from the pope was a whole lot more discipline and a lot less “love and Mozart.” (I disagree vehemently: I think we need a lot more love and Mozart, or some kind of music and art.)

Anyway, someone like Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian says that eros simply is the love that is a “movement of that which is lower in power and meaning to that which is higher.” That puts all of our other erotic impulses in a new light doesn’t it, but also makes it apply all the more to the spiritual quest. The “movement of that which is lower in power and meaning to that which is higher.” Simple enough to say it is the love that is a longing, but it is a longing that draws us out of ourselves, toward ecstasy as much as if not more than enstasy. What was interesting about Fr Chu-Cong’s notion of eros was that he said it was a longing that doesn’t really want to be satisfied: but that eros wants their to be more and more longing, that somehow the longing is the thing, the longing is the impulse, the drive, the evolution, if you will, the impetus toward higher and higher and more sublime things. Because often we find that when we have what we think we wanted we are left dissatisfied. We didn’t really want the desire to be fulfilled, at least not yet, or not in that way. Fr Bede would say eros is meant to constellate in agape–the love that is self-donation, and the Yogic tradition would say that it rises ever higher and higher to meet the descent of Divine grace, when in the “tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high breaks upon us.” The “movement of that which is lower in power and meaning to that which is higher,” but then that which is higher bends down to meet us.

What does this have to do with Advent? St Benedict says that a monk’s whole life should be a little Lent. I always think of two former monks of our community during Advent. One is Fr Aelred who used to weep the first time we sang the Conditor Alme Siderum. And the other is Peter-Damian, because he and I agreed that if we were to write the Rule we would say “the monk’s whole life should be a little Advent.” It is this watching and waiting that somehow characterize our whole life, the long hours of vigil, listening, watching, waiting, preparing… I love the longing the eros, if you will, embedded both in the monastic life and in Advent, and I usually find myself a little disappointed when Christmas rolls around because our celebrations can’t possibly capture that for which we are really longing. It’s not about what happened so much as it is about what will happen–in me, in us. We hear so much from Luke’s Gospel the last week of Advent, because Luke’s Gospel is all about the fulfillment of promises. I have to realize that what I am waiting for is not another celebration of some moment in past history after all; the promise I have been waiting to be fulfilled is for that Word to really take root in my heart, and for me to become wholly incarnate myself, for me myself to be a vessel of God’s power and peace, an echo of God’s love and grace. That’s when the Incarnation happens anew and anew and again and again and eternally.

This was the last day of Advent. I savored it. I recommend that we try not to let Christmas distract us from starting the waiting all over again after the celebrations of Christmas, but instead let Christmas be a reminder of what we are really waiting for––for this lowly being of ours to be transfigured into a glorious copy of Jesus’ own being, who came to share in our humanity so that we might share in his divinity. And let’s not settle for anything less than that.

barren wombs

2010-12-23T17:33:00.000-08:00

God has confused the proud in their inmost thoughts,
cast the mighty from their thrones
and raised the lowly to high places;
the hungry ones are given everything they need to live
while the rich are sent away with empty hands.
(Lk 1:52)

I’ve been fascinated for some time with this idea of the Axial Period, the idea that beginning around 2500 years ago a certain evolution in human and spiritual consciousness took place. It was marked first of all by the piercing of the rational mind through the mythical one, and also the beginning of being able to chart an individual spiritual course removed from the tribe––hence the birth of monasticism in Buddhism and Hinduism, for instance. This development in consciousness also brought with it a movement away from the earth, and consequently away from the body as well, and it had a decidedly more masculine bent to it. Henceforth the spiritual itinerary would be marked by ascending, climbing mountains, and the lotus flower that sticks its lovely head out of the water far away from the mud. Later on in the mystical treatises of Christianity we see this same course plotted out––John Climacus’ The Ladder of Perfection, John of the Cross’ Ascent of Mount Carmel, even a woman gets in on this “masculine” approach in The Interior Castle of Teresa of Ávila, all the way up to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Implicit in all of these teachings is the stress laid on separation from the world with all its temptations and distractions.

But there are those who think that this “masculine” approach has perhaps reached its apogee, its height, and may even have passed its usefulness. While we don’t want to leave the rational mind behind nor any of the gains of this 1st Axial consciousness, now its time, for instance, to recover the earth that we’ve treated as a distraction––seeing what a mess we have made out of it and recognizing that our own survival as a race depends on a better relationship with our planetary home. Perhaps in our day and age its time to recover the body and bodiliness in general––seeing how we have grown so far from living according to our nature (kata physin, as the ancient Greeks would say), seeing how so many of our young people indulge more and more in self-mutilation, and how the growth and spread of diseases such as cancer are only increasing. Perhaps it’s time to understand this mass movement of an uprising of the feminine in a new way––not just an end to the obvious exploitation and abuse of women (what Abbot Mark Hederer calls our innate tendency to “gyno-cide”) but a real recognition of a whole aspect of and approach to reality that we easily ignore in our race to the top of the mountain, knocking all over contenders off on the way. Once we get to the top of that mountain, if we ever do, we might find and have found ourselves left rather barren. And so these thinkers propose that we are in a new axial period in this day and age, an age of descent added to the ascent. This all reminds me again of the new mysticism proposed by William Johnson that he dreamed would be more rooted in social justice, and a kataphatic mysticism of light, and more rooted in the earth like the theology of Teilhard de Chardin, and that, finally, would be more feminine.

All that to say, I don’t think this second Axial period is just getting started now: I think it started back in the stories of the birth of Jesus, which were already serving as a corrective to the upward-only arc. So much of the story revolves around the males not getting it, of the women getting it, and the Divine choosing to take root in seemingly barren wombs. While we are racing to the top, in these stories God is “coming down” in the humblest, darkest, warmest places, in Hannah the mother of the prophet Samuel, in Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist, and finally the fullness of the godhead dwelling bodily in the humble dark warm womb of this virginal heart––Mary. Just as the triumph of Jesus’ flesh in the resurrection and ascension is not just Jesus’ flesh but somehow all flesh and all of creation that is groaning and in agony as we await the redemption of our bodies, so too now in the story of Mary being pregnant with Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Divine is already manifesting, not just in one woman’s body, but in flesh itself, and in earth itself, even before Jesus is immersed in the waters of the Jordan and mixes with the mud, the Word is already turning the water of our humanity into the wine of divinity and coming to be buried in the heart of the earth. It’s already happening.

The wombs that have really proven to be barren are the three things that get mentioned in Mary’s canticle: our pride, our might, and our riches. Especially our intellectual pride that thinks it can build an architecture to contain the Divine and keep out all the surprises that don’t fit into our neat categories; our might, which has not yet proven to be capable of producing a lasting peace anywhere on the planet has shown itself to be really barren; and our riches, our prosperity has not led to the real prosperity of happiness and has left us barren. So in Mary’s song, as in the Song of Hannah and Psalm 112, which were its inspiration, God’s mighty foolishness shows its power against the barren womb of our intellectual arrogance; the mighty are cast from their thrones and in their place are lifted up the weak who seemed to be barren; the rich are sent away empty and the starving are lifted up, the ones who seemed to be barren!

In order for the Word to take flesh anew in our world, and to take place in our very own selves, we first have to see and admit our own barrenness, the barrenness of our whole trajectory at times, the barrenness of our goals, of our motives, of our energies. Admit how we have tried to escape the mundane, lowly, weak, seemingly barren places where, to our surprise, God has actually chosen to dwell; admit how often we have failed to recognize how holy everything around us is––that the world is not just a temptation and a distraction to be avoided but the very garden where the seed of the Word gets planted. Then we prepare for the Word to plant itself, root itself, manifest itself, here, there, everywhere.

ireland, part II: Askeaton and Glenstal

2010-11-25T04:20:00.000-08:00

Human lives are essentially not to be summed up,
but to be known, as they are lived,
in many curious partial and inarticulate ways.
(Iris Murdoch)

I was free then until the concert on Monday evening and as planned I took a train down from Dublin to Limerick, to visit Glenstal Abbey, Noirin ni Rian and Brother Emmaus. It broke out into sunshine again as soon as I got on the train, so I was treated to two hours of the most gorgeous view of the Irish countryside heading south and east out of Dublin. Green, flat and more green, some little villages that looked as cookie cutter as Romeoville, Illinois where I grew up as a boy, and some obviously ancient with a crumbly church or cloister in the middle of it, flocks of sheep and flocks of freckly faced T-Bone, Mike and Kathy McGoverns on bicycles. (My good old friends in Phoenix whose father's passing we celebrated just before I left). Noirin had offered to meet me at Limerick Junction, which is by the way in the middle of nowhere in County Tipperary, and nowhere near Limerick.

I was under the impression that Noirin and I had met at one point, and I was a little embarrassed that I couldn't remember her. She is a very well known Irish singer (please see her website), some there say the most well-known singer of Irish music. She has recorded numerous albums, some of them with the monks of Glenstal Abbey (the ones I know the best), some with her two sons and several of course on her own. As it turns out we had never met. She had stayed for a short time with our brothers at Incarnation in Berkeley, and knew me and my music only through them. So we both knew each other only through mutual friends and CDs. But we still greeted each other like old friends, and indeed by now we have many common connections, including Liam Lawton with whom I worked last year and Paul Winter with whom she worked for some years in New York and John Pennington and I will be working with at the Animas Festival in the Spring, and almost everyone I had met at All Hallows and Milltown. She buzzed me right off the Glenstal Abbey, where she has been living for some years as a teacher and sort of artist-in-residence. There the former abbot Christopher, who is now the guest master, guided me off to Midday Prayer in abbey church, followed by another delicious but quick meal in the reception area. Then Noirin had a concert that afternoon in a nearby village and invited me to join her. It sounded like a great opportunity, especially to see her perform, so we were off pretty quickly.

What a great afternoon that was, something I would hazard to say not a lot of tourists might get to take part in. The county Arts Council has commissioned three woman performers, Noirin, an actress and a poet, to do a series of programs in various venues around the county. We were in a little town called Askeaton, in an ancient (and chilly) Church of Ireland, joined by the local woman’s choir, another Arts Council Funded project led by a young woman with a guitar and an African djembe strung around her neck. I just don’t think something like this would happen in rural America. They were all really good, including the women’s chorus, doing mostly African songs and spirituals. The actress was even a little bawdy for an event taking place in a church, but the audience seemed to take it in stride. Noirin also turned over one of her turns to me, as a “special guest from America.” I sang Awakening for them, to rave reviews, and then played guitar with the women’s chorus on their last piece as well.

As evidenced both by some of songs and comments at the event, and affirmed by my conversation with Noirin and others, the thing that is on everybody’s mind is the collapse of the Irish economy. (As a matter of fact, one of the headlines this moring on Yahoo news is, "Ireland on the Verge of Bankruptcy.") The IMF arrived the same day that I did, as at least one person noted, saying, “I hope you have brought us better news.” What may not be so evident to us outsiders is the fact that here, not 100 years after independence, someone else is coming in to make the rules for them and tell them how to handle their economy. Just at the same time that the church has lost its credibility, the politicians have shown themselves unworthy of trust as well. When Bernadette and Michael were showing me around Dublin they were so proud of all the things that the Celtic Tiger had produced in that fair city, the convention center, the beautiful Samuel Beckett Bridge shaped like an Irish harp, and then had to keep adding “before the whole economy collapsed,” with a genuine sadness. Americans were outraged; my impression the Irish were embarrassed, sad and feel betrayed––again.

The biggest beacon of hope though was Glenstal Abbey. They have a new abbot these past two years, Patrick Mark Hederman. Canon law requires that an abbot be an ordained priest as well as a monk in solemn vows (something that we’ve been fighting for years). Mark Patrick was not, and no one considered him even to be a candidate for abbot. But that is who the community chose, and so he was ordained and installed. He is a philosopher and an English professor by avocation, reportedly an enthralling speaker, and an author. Before I left I was given a book of his and I read half of it on the plane coming home––The Underground Cathedral. Because it was so unexpected, both he and others consider his election to be the work of the Holy Spirit, and he seems rather fearless because of that in pursuing a new vision of what a monastery can be. Indeed, more than one person told me that they thought that the solution for the church in Ireland was to come from the monasteries and monasticism, and particularly held up Glenstal as an example. Mark Patrick’s vision, as articulated in an earlier book called Walkabout, Life as Holy Spirit, is centered around the arts, in which he dreams that Glenstal could become

a place where the abbot and the community help the artist to anchor the altar. The monastery becomes a place where artists hope to tie whatever kite they happen to be flying to a firm and stable anchor. The monastery as a silent hub of that firework display which art and culture need to scatter with reckless flamboyancy into the night.

A medieval vision come true.

The thing that strikes me is that these folks, unlike many church leaders in America, do not seem to be afraid of the long arm of Rome and the conservative climate of theological debate in the church, which has been increasingly more the response and reaction of the American Catholic hierarchy. Maybe this fearlessness is not as wide spread in Ireland as it seemed to me, having only met a select group of people, or maybe the Irish just feel as if they have nothing left to lose––the churches are empty and the hierarchy has let them down––and they are quite willing to envision the whole thing in a new way.

I had a wonderful long visit with Brother Emmaus when I got back, who was a member of our community in Big Sur for some years before returning to Ireland and now re-doing his novitiate there at Glenstal. Besides being a wonderful and prolific artist, he is far more articulate, well read and insightful than many people would have known from his time with us, since he is also rather shy. He situates the problem with not being able to keep a foot firmly planted in a tradition that one loves and respects and doesn’t need to deconstruct or destroy, while reaching prophetically into the future. Case in point, the abuse crisis in Ireland, which comes up often in The Underground Cathedral. When Abbot Mark was interviewed on television, the interviewer immediately latched right on to his critiques of the former archbishop of Dublin (and “Ruler of Catholic Ireland,” as he is known), John McQuaid, and the part he played in covering up the abuses. But Abbot Mark wouldn’t take that bait and made the point firmly, as he does in the book, the Archbishop McQuaid too was not just a product but also a victim of the system, and that everyone was complicit in perpetuating the system. This includes the laity who turned a blind eye to the corruption of absolute power and were content with “the semblance of unity through the invention and imposition of an idea of unsullied Irishness” which the Irish author Peggy O’Brien says was really an “ersatz racial purity” through a particular brand of Catholicism that resulted in “cultural xenophobia.” Ouch. Obviously there is something to be said for conservatism and I have my own streaks of it, but that could describe conservatism at its worse in any country. I was thinking this is also the potential danger of something like the strikingly mostly-white Tea Party and its marriage to certain forms of evangelical Christianity and conservative Catholicism. We must be careful of cultural xenophobia and attempts to protect our own ersatz super race.

The next morning I got a wonderful tour of the abbey complex from a Brother Colmàn, who is a medievologist (isn’t that a word?). The abbey is built around a Victorian era mock castle that an wealthy Anglo-Irish family built in the 19th century, modeled after Windsor Castle. (Noirin told me as we pulled in, “They were hoping Queen Victoria would come to visit.”) There is a tragic story of why they abandoned the property. Their daughter was engaged to an English officer, and one day while they were driving back to the castle together in his car in his car, the daughter was wearing his captain’s hat, and an anti-British sniper shot her, mistaking her for him, and then shot him as well. The family left in grief and despair. The monks have been there since the early 20th century, and have turned the castle into a boarding school for boys worthy of comparisons with Hogwarts, and built the monastery around it. Someone also donated a large collection of valuable icons to the monastery for which they have built a crypt chapel that is kept locked and dimly lit. Everyone had told me to be sure to get a tour of it and Colmàn, who is an expert on the icons there, ushered me in and let me stay for a good long visit.

After that I did a presentation for the school. There is a pretty serious choir––meaning the director, Fr Columba, teaches them a classical sacred music repetoire––of about 40 members, but he set me loose with them for about 50 minutes. And I did what I do with my guitar on a chair in the middle of a great room––I told stories and sang songs, focusing almost entirely on songs that had participation. The boys sang along wonderfully and seemed to enjoy the program. Three monks and Noirin sat through it all as well. I was delightfully thinking of three levels of meaning to presentations such as that: hopefully I am giving them a little taste of some pretty good music, singing, guitar playing and songwriting; but I get to tell them about other religious traditions, and more and more I get to tell them about other parts of the world, India, Lebanon, France. I keep remembering that comment from the woman in Tetbury, “We are so parochial.” We all of us are. And I keep remembering Maalouf’s solution to the crisis of identity in our modern age, to encourage local culture through language, art and even cuisine on the one hand, but also to encourage a sense of belonging to the global village, even to be able to enjoy the technological highway that connects us and use it as a way of building this universal community. As I’ve been saying as an introduction to “The Ground We Share,” I want to help people realize that the ground we share is our basic humanity, the human condition.

Mass and another quick delicious lunch, and then I had another luxurious train ride back up north to Dublin. I had one final concert that night at the Milltown Institute. I was glad to see a lot of familiar faces from Saturday and I felt a sense of satisfaction and closure bringing an end to this five-week odyssey that arched from Lebanon to Ireland.

I was happy to see my cold cold little cabin for a night, but I came right down to be with the brothers at Big Sur for Thanksgiving, which seemed very appropriate to let some of this sink in. The jet lag isn’t too bad, and at least has made it possible for me to finish these blog entries and try to start to make it through a pile of e-mail. I’ll add a couple of more little tidbits perhaps if I get the chance. I’m still trying to process it all myself and see what sticks and what morphs and what will come out of it all. With thanks for all, wishing you and all our friends around the world well today and tomorrow and tomorrow.

ireland, part I: the underground cathedral

2010-11-24T20:04:00.000-08:00

(I'm gonna try in the next few days to finish up these blogs and post them... Happy Thanksgiving all. I'm actually home now, [well, in Big Sur anyway] safe and sound.)

Our most precious heritage can only be expressed by poetry.
The Word of God can never be relayed through prose.
If this means that the message is sometimes obscure,
that is not because the poet is being deliberately obscurantist,
it is because we are moving in a borderland area
for which ordinary language is not designed.
(Mark Patrick Hederman)

On board Aer Lingus flight back to London and then home. My gosh, there is so much to write about these past four whirlwind days in Ireland. It may take a few blogs to spare your eyes.

Having been chased by rain and cold since Paris (for which I was blamed), I was expecting even worse weather in Ireland; but the reality was that I arrived in Dublin last Friday to glorious sunshine (for which I took credit). A gentleman named Michael, who I was to encounter several times over the next four days, met me at the airport with a sign bearing my name and whisked me away to All Hallows College where I was to be staying. All Hallows used to be a venerable old seminary run by the Vincentians that sent many a priest over to the mission countries of America and Africa back in the day. I was told that if I looked at the class pictures I would no doubt find an Irish pastor or two with whom I would be familiar. It was founded in the 19th century by a famous Catholic rights advocate, Daniel McConnell. This is during the English colonization period, about which I was to hear much during my stay, when Catholics were severely persecuted and oppressed financially, socially, economically. Again, may I insist that this was not about theology, but about power and control and some not-very evolved imperialists (in this case the British) using religion as a weapon. With all due respect to my English friends, I realize that this is the Irish side of the story, but it would take a lot to convince me that this was not a wrong-headed policy and polity. And I have heard as much from many British as well.

Now All Hallows is a humble little liberal arts college associated with Dublin City College, with about 300 students, mostly lay with a few seminarians, and certainly, decidedly, co-ed. It was a beautiful little campus with a sumptuous chapel that reminded me of St John's in Camarillo (hmmmm... Vincentians, Irish...?) as did the refectory. The guest accommodations were wonderful, clean, simple, the guesthouse serving as much as a hostel and retreat space, and the staff was wonderfully hospitable. As a matter of fact, I must say, and I said several times, for anywhere I have been in the world, to a person the Irish struck me as the most sincerely friendly warm people I have yet met.

The food was also delicious. Again, I had my expectations low (prejudice, I know, but low expectations lead to numerous surprises, and I did grow up with boiled potatoes and cabbage as exemplar of Irish cooking), but from the first bowl of creamed cauliflower soup through the brown bread and porridge and moist brown sugar and white cheddar cheese, I was overfed embarrassingly well. I also must say, with all due respect, I do prefer Irish breakfast tea, it's stronger and fuller. I asked someone at one point why the Irish tea is so much stronger than English tea and the answer given, with more humor than rancor, was, “Well, I suppose it's because the English starved us to death for so many years the only thing we had was our tea and we had to make it strong to fill us up.”

My host was one Bernadette Flanagan, a little powerhouse of a woman who belongs to the Presentation sisters. She now works in the research and development department of All Hallows, though she had previously been on staff at Milltown Institute, the honored Jesuit institution across town where we were to hold both of our events. Her expertise is in spirituality, and the events I was to do were actually not sponsored by All Hallows but by an organization--really a movement--that she heads up called “The New Monasticisms.” Friday evening Bernadette and one of her colleagues, a sharp Jesuit named Michael O'Sullivan, took me for dinner and a good long visit. They were happy to share and I was happy to pick their brains about the state of things in Ireland. If I may summarize: right now they are sandwiched between two things. First, historically this is a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic country. There was a church with a tall steeple and cross in the middle of the airport, for God’s sake! It is very much a part of the Irish identity, very much a part of the whole struggle for civil rights and independence from the 19th century on (remembering my reading of Maalouf’s book “On Identity” while in Lebanon, it was amazing the resonances); and of course a major element of what is gently called “the Troubles” from the 1960s through 2000 with the IRA and Northern Ireland. Again, this is religion being used as an identifier and not theological issues being debated. On this end there is also Catholicism as the final arbiter in every argument, with priests deciding who got hired and fired, who would marry whom, including putting women who were considered of questionable repute away in the Magdalene laundries (of recent cinematic fame), power more often than not yielded not very gracefully or healthily, but power submitted to nonetheless because it was part and parcel of ethnic and cultural identity. (It’s also interesting to note that that is a lot of the Catholicism that was exported to America.)

On the other hand--it is that very institution that has received an even harsher verdict on sexual and other abuse in the past months than what the US went through, widespread, ancient abuse in seminaries, orphanages and other institutions, and not just perpetrated by priests. And so, that which the people of Ireland struggled so hard to hold on to and uphold and defend has suddenly shown itself to be corrupt, or as Abbot Patrick Mark Hederman put it, in a book called the Underground Cathedral" which I will refer to again below I am sure, “the official idiom of the church in terms of chastity, purity and celibacy, especially with regard to the priesthood as a national shrine met up with an underworld of sexual depravity to monstrous to be entertained.” Ah, but here’s the rub: at least from the vantage point that I was offered, on the ground level, though the moral authority of and faith in the hierarchy and the “institution” is practically gone, the faith is strong. Case in point, this “New Monasticisms Ireland” program. 120 people gathered, some of them traveling from as far away as Galway, for this day that I led. The Spirit is alive and working.

Hederman suggests that while the “pretentious over-elaborate architecture” of twentieth century Catholicism is collapsing, “secret agents of the Holy Spirit” have been constructing an underground cathedral “where the true God might be worshiped in spirit and truth.” This program on Saturday was a roomful of those secret agents. And it occurred to me that I have spent a lot of time in these underground cathedrals with these secret agents over the past few weeks, from the Forum 104 in Paris, to the Abbey in Oxfordshire and Patrick Eastman's Zen Christian group in Tetbury, not to mention the three weeks in almost completely foreign territory in Lebanon and Syria. And I like it there, very comfortable underground.

I structured the day like one of our regular SSB sessions, framed in the prayer service. They are a more unused to the Universal Wisdom approach—drawing examples and practices from other traditions—though it’s not absent completely, but I didn’t shirk away from it. Instead I tried to show how both meanings of the universal call to contemplation—that is for everyone and that it is found in all traditions--is or at least can be part of the birth of the new mysticism or new spirituality (which term I prefer to “monasticism”). And then a short excursus also on the spirit, soul and body anthropology as practical aid in building a personal spiritual practice, something portable and personal (not to mention holistic) that we can carry with us anywhere and that is not dependent on someone else to supply to us. We are all pilgrims now. What did Merton say to the monks just before he died in Thailand? “From now on it's every man for himself.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but I was stressing Bruno's point, that all our institutions, rites, dogmas exist only—“only” I repeated three times for emphasis--to lead us to that inner awakening. They are our servants, as Jesus made abundantly clear about leadership, too. That’s why everything that can be revised—language, way of life, ritual—must be revised for a new generation, for new modes of consciousness that are still evolving. And this is a country that is near devoid of priests in many areas. The Roman authorities have stepped in with investigations and admonitions to return to popular devotions and piety, but the people that I talked to aren’t having any of it. It’s time to build the underground cathedral. I found it all very exciting.

I began and ended the day feeling very humbled, by their energy and resilience. (Many of them had already read my book, which is still kind of a mind-blowing thing to me.) At the beginning I said, “I suppose it’s fitting that I should be speaking to a gathering called the New Monasticism, because, for better or worse, I am one of the new monks. I don’t say that to brag; I'm not saying I am a good example. I just am one of them.” And I ended fielding questions, and some very deep questions about profound issues concerning ecclesiology and Christology, and said to them then as well, “I am not even sure I am qualified to answer these questions but I will tell you as best I can...” I was thinking, “Why would anyone want my opinion?” What a privileged and possibly dangerous position to be in! I was staying very close to then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s “Questions on Meditation” (“These other ways may be taken up as long the Christian conception of prayer, it's logic and requirements, are kept in mind.") and John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio,” (“Just because Christianity was first articulated using Greek philosophy does not mean that it is the only way... My mind turns first to India.”), asserting that I always try to find the most conservative support I can for a progressive position. Then I ended by quoting our former prior general Emanuele Bargellini from my meeting with him as I was beginning my exclaustration in 2002: “Cipriano, monachesimo non è un contenitore; è un energia—Monasticism isn’t a container; it’s an energy”; and then his successor Don Bernadino’s admonition to me in 2005 when I was allowed, encouraged, even mandated to continue as I am, when he told me not to change anything, to watch my balance between work and prayer, solitude and travel, “and this,” he said, “will be your stability now.” To use Rolheiser’s image, we all need to find that balance between the energy and the container (the “stability,” if you will), and then carefully monitor and discern and ride on that balance. Our particular way may not look exactly like anything that went before us, or anything around us—though chances are we are not alone and it will—but our commitment to it, with discernment in relationship with our community, our sangha, our tradition, is what will lead us to realize our true self, hidden (with Christ) in God.

the divinization of our activities

2010-11-19T23:28:00.000-08:00

I don't know what I want;
I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive;
I like the indefinite, the boundless;
I like continual uncertainty.
(Gerard Richter, German painter)

from All Hallows College, Dublin

I had a couple of happy days tromping around London. Since I had a few days before the next engagement, we had found me an inexpensive guest house just off the train line a little north of the city from which I had easy access to everything in central London. I'm actually pretty comfortable getting around London by now and it felt like an old friend. Julia from Paris had lent me her "Oyster Pass" for the Tube, so I could happily ride up and down all day long as long as I kept topping it off. Mostly I walked a lot, though I also got a 24 hour pass to a gym (I had to fight to get them to let me use it twice...)

The highlights: I spent a marvelous afternoon at the Tate Modern Art Museum, which is thankfully free except for special exhibits.There were two exhibits on Level 3. The first one was called "Poetry in Motion," and it was mostly Surrealism. I am not a huge fan of that era, but I knew some of the artists from my brief period working the art auctions in San Francisco--Calder and Miro, for instance. And there were some stunning pieces--several Dali, for instance--and interesting displays. I was heading down the long escalator after an hour or so when I suddenly realized I had only seen half of the 3rd Level; there was a whole other exhibit I had missed. By this point I was tired (I had midjudged the distance to get there and had walked a long way to arrive there from the Tube already) but I thought I had better check it out. As I walked in the gallery, I groaned. I knew I was stuck. It was all post-war Abstract Expressionists, with some Cubism and Fauvism thrown in. I wound up spending another good long time there; really I lost track of time. There were several painting of that German school I have liked so much for years, Die Brucke, several early Jackson Pollack, one whole room devoted to new panels by the English painter I have liked so much, Cy Twombley, some very late Picasso, Matisse's cut-outs, one of Monet's large water lily panels, and one whole room devoted to panels that the German painter Gerard Richter had made for John Cage, that were mesmerizing. I was taking pictures of them on my iPhone. (Richter is the one I quoted above; it reminded me of Eugenio Montale's poem: "This only we can tell you: who we are not; what we don't want.") I forget how much I love that era, kind of like how entranced I was when I first heard the 12 tone music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Music and art always go together for me--Debussey and Ravel are the sound track to the Impressionists in my mind--and beautiful art like that makes me want to compose music. I left there feeling disturbed and peaceful at the same time. (Ziggy, if you're reading, I was tempted to send you a text message in the middle of it...)

The other highlight then came following on that. I continued walking across the foot bridge over the Thames that leads right up to Saint Paul's Cathedral--what a stunning view at sunset! I also captures that on my iPhone. I had never actually gotten into St Paul's on my last visits but I went in this time, just in time for the beginning of choral Vespers by the pristine boys choir. That liturgical style is for the most part "not my cup of tea" (a phrase that seems overly appropriate for that part of the world), but I surrendered to it, more as a passive participant than a full, active and conscious one, and it was beautiful. I was told by someone the next day that the combination that you get in that part of England that you cannot match anywhere else is actually the way the diction with which these boys grow up, the way they use their mouths to form words. It's that that gives boys' choir here that distinctive open sound in their singing. After that I walked a long way again in the drizzly early evening to find the next available Tube station, picked up a veggie bhiryani at the Indian restaurant near my guest house (it was the absolute worst Indian food I have ever eaten, to my surprise), and called it a night.

Then before I got on my bus out of town early in the morning I headed down to the area around Victoria station, which was a delight all of itself, to get my coach ticket and then spend the morning at Westminster Cathderal. I am not sure what it is about that place, but I love it so much. Maybe it has something to do with Roman Catholcism being a beleagured minority there, but in spite of the size of the place it has a chastity about it, a humility, a quietness. It's a very new building in the scheme of things, designed in the early Christian Byzantine style and opened only in 1903. There is a constant round of Masses and other devotional activites going on all the time, as well as some cultural ones. To my regret, they were staging performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem there that very night (regret, because I would have loved to be there but my coach out was at 1:30). They were setting up for it as I was walking around. Right at the entrance and to the right there is the chapel with the tomb of the saintly monk Cardinal Basil Hume, very lightsome and optimistic, it seemed to me, and then a whole series of small chapels up the aisles, dedicated to the church of Ireland and Scotland, to the English martyrs, the war dead, etc. As I sat in the Blessed Sacrament chapel I was thinking how it's been funny to watch my resistance to classic Western religious art slowly melt, like the experience at Rheims last week. I still don't think my place in Christendom is to be part of the pageantry and hierarchy--I feel in the right place being a and a forest dweller and a vagabond with a backback and guitar--but it's okay. It doesn't have to be an enemy.

It was a bit of a waste of time and Tube, but after a good visit there I went back uptown and retrieved my backpack and guitar, checked out of my room, and then headed straight back down to kill some hours hanging out at Victoria Station while I waited for my bus. Let me say it again: I love train stations, and at perfectly at peace traveling by bus or train. If there were only a tunnel under the Atlantic to get home...

Then I spent the next two days in the Cotswald, guest of Patrick Eastman and his wife Maureen. Patrick I know first of all through his visits to New Camaldoli (he reminded me that he was having an extended stay there while I was composing The Song of Luke in 2001). He is a former Anglican priest who came into communion with Rome many years ago now, partially due to the influence of Cardinal Hume, as a matter of fact. He then affiliated with the diocese of Tulsa, and was a close friend of Sr Pascaline and Osage monastery. Patrick is a long time student of Zen Buddhism and is a sensei himself, having just finally received dhrama transmission this past year, in the same lineage as Robert Kennedy, SJ and Bernie Glassman. He used to head up a group called Monos in Tulsa, that published a journal and met regularly to explore contemplative spirituality. He now runs a Christian Zen group in his area. He is one of the most well read people I have ever met, and right in my line of thinking, and within a half an hour of arriving at their house I was heading to my room with a pile of books under my arm. He had brought me to Tulsa a number of times to do various things, including a performance of the Song of Luke, and also had me here to do some work for him when I was coming through in 2006. On Thursday we went up to visit Priknash Abbey, Fr Bede's home monastery. I had been there once before with Fr George of Shantivanam in 2006 also, when we were here for Bede centenary celebration at Gaunt's House in Dorset. The monks, only a dozen left, have now moved back into the humble old 12th century monastery (the former hunting lodge of the abbot of Gloucester) and out of the gargantuan building in which they have been living, built in some kind of fit of hysterical optimism in the 1960's. We had a visit with Abbot Francis and the kindly elderly former abbot Althelm, who is an old friend of Patrick. They all seem very happy about being back in the old monastery.

Then that night a beautiful concert at Patrick's new parish in Tetbury. We seemed to drive for miles and miles on wet country roads to get there, and I thought it was in the middle of nowhere and that no one was going to come. But instead, there was nearly a full church, and a great mixture of a crowd, Anglicans, Catholics and Buddhists. I met one Anglican woman priest whose book comparing Dogen and Dionysius I had been reading all day, and another man, a psychotherapist, who was student of Amasamy, the Jesuit Zen master from South India (the one, incidentally, who gave me his shirt last year at the Abhishiktananda centenary at Shantivanam). Go figger. I didn't realize it (since I have still not replaced my broken watch since last winter I wasn't keeping track of time), but I went well over an hour and a half. I didn't notice any agitation from the crowd, and as a mmater of fact it was someone from the audeince who said to me later how surprised she was that so much time had passed. It was one of the magical evenings. By this time, though I have something in front of me just in case of a brain warp, I don't need to use a note or a cheat sheet. And after this trip to Lebanon and Syria, for some reason, I love telling the stories. Patrick noted too how given the folk tradition in this part of the world there is a long history of singer-storytellers, so a crowd would be more used to soemthing like that. In the conversations with people afterward I heard over and over again how much they appreciated learning about the common ground that we share with other traditions, while respecting the differences.

I feel like this is the other side of very important work: whereas it is important to build bridges and roads with other traditions and have occasions of dialogue and sharing, it is also important sometimes to be in some mostly Christian environments and expose Christians to what else is out there. It is not necessary for anyone to have to make zazen or Yoga or dhikr a part of their spiritual practice, let alone study texts from other traditions (though that might be of help), but in this day and age it is so important that we understand and appreciate what is going on around us. One woman said to me afterward, in a gently self-deprecating way, "You made me realize--we are so parrochial."

I've been reading Teilhard's "The Divine Milieu" these days. I was quite struck by his notion that what we do lives on. This is a powerful antedote to world-denying asceticism. Our works, our activities--these are all things that are part of the evolution of consciousness, part of our journey to the Omega point, part of building the reign of God on earth, and they live on in that way. I am deeply moved by the optimism of that, that essentially prophetic mystical notion that time is a sacrament, heading toward something, and I see Basil Hume's grave, and the panels of Gerard Richter, and I hear strains of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and the beautiful harp shaped Beckett Bridge here in Dublin, and the book on Dogen and Dionysius, and all the good people quietly doing their work, in factories and offices, feeding the poor, caring for the sick, raising their children and caring for their elderly, and I am filled with a sense of optimism, and my hope is rejuvenated. Our asceticism is about right relationship, so that we can come back to our place in the world with detachment, our activities sanctified. When that come to pass, Teilhard says, "there will be little to separate life in the cloister from life in the world."

The more nobly we will and act, the more avid we become for great and sublime aims to pursue. We will no longer be content with family, country and the remunerative aspect of our work. We will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend. So, gradually, the workers no longer belong to themselves. Little by little the great breath of the universe insinuates itself in us through the fissure of our humble but faithful action, broadened us, raises us up, bears us on.

spirit and beauty

2010-11-15T02:24:00.001-08:00

The essential marvel of the divine milieu is the ease with which it assembles and harmonises within itself qualities which appear to us to be contradictory.
(Teilhard de Chardin)

last morning at The Abbey, Oxfordshire

I'm packed up and ready to leave for London, the last remnants of my morning fire still glowing in the hearth. How I have enjoyed the time here at the Abbey. My room has been this corner one with a large window full of plants overlooking the garden and another smaller window on the side, both sequestered at night behind heavy curtains to keep out the chilly breeze that creeps through the edges; a couple of sitting chairs, a desk, and a fireplace with a lot of open space in the middle for yoga mat and guitar. The heat gets turned off every night some time after I go to bed and this drafty old place is cold in the early morning, so since there are no activities here until 8 I've had those first few hours in monastic paradise, making a cup of tea in the warm kitchen downstairs and then building a fire to last for the few hours until the heat comes on to do my morning rituals.

There are only three other community members living here right now--Brad, Dylan and Charlotte--though there is are office workers, a board of directors and a whole host of volunteers. Though it was started with a loose Christian foundation, there is not necessarily any spirituality that holds the place together now, outside of the thrice daily meditation periods. There is some indefinite desire for a stronger spiritual practice to unite the place, but it seems more from the board and volunteers than from the resident staff. The place has its own spirit, you might say, a safe and nurturing place for self-inquiry and one's own spiritual practice, whatever that might be. Christian, Buddhist and Yogic spirituality all seem equally welcome and represented. Since there is a regular turnover of resident staff, like a monastery this place somehow has to hold its own presence, a palpable presence that people sense when they come here, as do I.

My retreat weekend went very well, I think. It was loosely based on my book and all the common themes I talk about. Friday night was both the first night of the retreat and an open public talk. I used the normal prayer service and meditation to frame it, and did the universal call and the spirit, soul and body introductions. Because it was for a larger group we used the Great Hall. I shall dream enviously of that great room. It probably dates back to the 16th century, big enough for an intimate chamber music concert for 50 or so people or a yoga class of 25, with a baby grand piano in one corner, a large fireplace, floor to ceiling curtains on two very large windows, and nooks and crannies, crevices and sills filled with candles and icons and statuary. It also has a minstrel gallery up above, right off my bedroom actually. Saturday we had a full day of conferences and meditations in the smaller meditation room, but the evening session was a concert, again open to the public and in the Great Hall. Sunday after the last session we had a simnple eucharist in the meditation room--it felt very much like our Sangha retreats, on a smaller scale and without group yoga at 6:30 AM. (Though I thought about it...)

Brad is the warm host, and Dylan with Charlotte's help is a wonderful chef, very creative and delicious vegetarian cooking. It could rival Esalen or Tassajara. The three of them hold court in the kitchen with classical music playing on BBC3 all day, and a big bowl of popcorn sitting on the counter next to the tea kettle in the late afternoon. I went in often just to sit and chat with them. Brad has a beautiful gentle north England accent (I told him he could tell me to go jump in a lake and it would sounds like a compliment), Charlotte is like an exotic bird who has lived in Paris and Tuscany, and Dylan is orginally from Kansas though eh has been here for twnety years and replaced his flat Kansas accent an English one. They were all very erudite, urbane and yet down to earth, witty and delightful company. They had arranged, not unusual for this place, for some friends of their's to perform here last night--the Cavaleri string quarter doing a piece by Zemlinsky, who is of the Viennese school spanning the time from Brahms to Schoenberg and Berg; and then the famous Ravel op. 124 (?) with the famous pizzicato second movement. I was thinking in Paris, as I was staring at the Chagall windows in awe, and again last night, this is somehow what I have been searching for my whole life, that marriage of beauty and spirit, the spirit that manifests as beauty, the beauty that is a reflection of the divine. It was a beautiful end to the weekend.

In between, after lunch yesterday, Adrian picked me up and took me over to Oxford to have tea with our friend Shirley Duboulay, the famous biographer of both Fr Bede and Abhishiktananda. Adrian I met at Shantivanam and is rathewr closely related to Fr Bede. His paretns were good friends of his when he was a monk at Prinknash. As a matter of fact Adrian's middle name is Bede, though his mother first wanted to name him Charles after Charles Williams. (Fr Bede talked her out of that silly name...) I have met Shirley on a number of occasions now, and we were very glad to see each other. Sitting and talking with her I also feel somehow in the presence of somehow who holds some of the lineage as well, her own deep roots in Oxford and the Royal Academy of Music in addition to her work on spiritual biographies of St Teresa as well as Bede and Abhsihiktananda, and her friendships with so many of their intimates, including Murray Rogers who lived just down the road in Oxford at the end of his life; besides her own spiritual itinerary, which she is beginning to write down. Among the various artifacts she still is in possession of--letters and books--she brought out something very special that was bequeathed to her by Murray when he died: the tiny paten and chalice of Abhishiktananda, the set he bought in Uttarkashi and carried with him everywhere, including, we assume, the one he used to celebrate Mass at the source of the Ganges with Pannikar. As I told a friend, forget rock stars and royalty: that's the lineage that fascinates me.

I have been able to clear up a few myths. English people do not toast their bread only on one side, but they seem to universally loathe peanut butter. They also think that I drink my tea far too strong, but at least I haven't done anything scandalous to it this time... yet. Really the folks have been so warm and gracious. By now I have grown used to the fact that most audiences, perhaps especially the British, are less interactive (and reactive) than American ones. It does make me slow down a bit and be a little more patient. That being said, the folks here for the weekend were very appreciative and the residents here at the Abbey and I have mutually expressed our enjoyment of each others' company. I'm heading down to London for two nights and then out west to Cirencester for some more work, then Dublin on the weekend. It feels like I am making my way home for Thanksgiving.

enstasy and ecstasy

2010-11-12T03:28:00.000-08:00

This collective awakening,
similar to that which makes each individual realize the true dimensions of his or her own life,
must inevitably have a profound religious reaction on the mass of humankind
--either to cast down or exalt.
(Teilhard de Chardin)

The Abbey, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England

Last Fall I had to go to Denmark to do a week's worth of work there. It was blustery and cold--the Danes were calling it "refrigerator weather," damp, dark and cold, but not cold enough to freeze or snow. I had, as usual going that direction, a very hard time getting over the time change and so hadn't gotten a full night's sleep for the whole week. From there I went on to England where I worked with the Psallite folks. We were housed at a little place called St John's Convent near Windsor Castle. The sisters there ran a home for retired priests and a retreat house. They spoiled the stuffing out of us and gave me an upper room with the coziest warmest bed in the whole world. I had much the same impression of comfort upon arriving here at the Abbey that I had then, walking into the warm kitchen with a pot of carrot soup, and a Spanish stew with ciccarones (chick peas) and a loaf of brown bread waiting, and--finally!--a decent cup of tea. The folks around the table were surprised, after my time in the Mideast and Paris, when I told them that that was the best meal I had had in a month. It was like eating at Esalen or Tassajara... or Corralitos. But I'm a little ahead of myself...

Wednesday, my last day in France, I took a trip up north to the ancient city of Reims. There were three reasons for the excursion: to see a little something more of France other than Paris, to see the historic Gothic cathedral and basilica, and to visit our young Italian friend Allessandro, who was an exchange student at St Francis High School last year and is now studying at the American Political Science College in Reims. I got up to the Gare de l'Est train station early, just for fun because I love train stations as much as I love travelling on trains, the exact inverse of how I've grown to loathe airports and airplanes. It was a short trip up really, made all the quicker by my seat mate. I was trying to figure out how to send Allessandro a text message on my phone but I couldn't figure out the numbers, so the young French woman next to me offered to help and eventually even sent the text message from her phone instead. We got to talking, since she spoke excellent English, having studied in London for some years. Turns out she is a professional classical singer and her husband a very successful concert violist, so we had a wonderful conversation about music: singing in French as opposed to Italian or German, both of our preference for Dawn Upshaw over Kathleen Battle, the exigencies of life on the road, and the Hindemith viola concerti which she and her husband, joining us by text, were quite impressed that I knew. (Well, I do listen to something other than Ben Harper and yoga music once in a while...)

Allessandro met me at the station and we went off for a good lunch at a creperie, the two of us both laughably struggling to order in French, and had a good long visit. Afterward we went to the great Cathedral of Our Lady of Rheims, which is "one of the most stunning masterpieces of 13th century Gothic art." Historically speaking its importance lies in the fact that this is where King Clovis was baptised and all the kings of France were crowned, including Saint Louis the King in 1226, all the way to Charles X in 1825. Much of it was destroyed in World War I and later refurbished. It's also the palce where Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenaur celebrated the Franco-German Reconciliation in 1962. The cathedral was astounding in its sweep, but my favorite moment was to come upon the stained glass windows by Marc Chagall in the apse. In them he traces the royal line from Abraham and David through Jesus and on through to the kings of France. They brought tears to my eyes, even more delightful having been a surprise. I left Allessandro off at school and then continued on to the basilica of Saint Remi, which dates from the 11th century, also a prime example of French Gothic architecture. It was once a Benedictine Abbey and houses the relics of the great bishop Remy's relics. I enjoyed the visit there to the basilica even more; it was quieter and simple in a way.

I was thinking of that quote of Carl Jung, comparing eastern and western mysticism. He wrote that whereas in the India the Holy of Holies is deep in the ground, symbolizing the way of interiority and enstasy, in the west it is the act of being swept up and out of ourselves in ecstasy that is emblematic. I think the first authentic Gothic cathedral I visited was in Bath and, perhaps just because of the state of mind I was in, it didn't do much for me, but here I could feel it viscerally. Perhaps I was better able to surrender to the soaring lightsomeness of the space and allow my chest to open and my spirit soar. Surely there is a place for both the enstasy and the ecstasy. Maybe that is the difference: the older I get, the more I come to appreciate that surely there is a place for both.

Yesterday was Armistice Day, the celebration so important in this part of the world of the end of World War I. I noticed it twice. Julia was coming to pick me up by taxi to usher me to the Eurostar bound for London, but I had to stand on the corner since the police had all the streets blocked off, preparing security for the grand events to take place later on the Champs Elysee. I must admit, I felt a little awkward and suspicious-looking myself standing acrosds from two policemen on the corner of Rue Jean Mermoz and Rue de Ponthieu with my guitar and backpack. It was a long comfortable trip from the other, even grander, train station, Gare du Nord, out of Paris north to the crossing point at Calais. The time under the English Channel was actually surprisingly short and when we surfaced in England the weather was even worse! I had to make a connection (besides detalied instructions from Michaela, Julia had explained it to me patiently three or four times, all but pinning it to my sweater): from the arrival station at Saint Pancras to Paddington via the Tube, to catch another train west to Didcot. Before I got on the Tube I stopped to use the loo and get a cuppa, and as I was coming back out into the station proper I noticed that everyone was standing still, dead quiet and all looking in one direction. It was weird and I wondered what was going on, if some kind of disaster had happened. Then I realized everyone was observing a moment of silence, right at 11:00 on the 11th day of the 11th month, in honor of the armistice. It still touches people here in this part of the world in a way that it rarely touches us in the States, having rarely seen combat on our own soil, save now, unfortunately, for our memorial of September 11th.

So, I am now at the Abbey, "A Centre for Transformation" here in Oxfordshire. I'm quite happy to be here. It's a funky, drafty, 13th century manor that can house up to 20 guests besides staff, a place dedicated to personal transformative spiritual work and ecological consciousness. I feel very much at home here. There is a meditation room and a tall ceilinged library, floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall covered with shelves of books two deep. My own room is on the top floor with a fire place (roaring now since 5 AM to stave off the blustery weather) and a too-comfy bed, right down the corridor from the "minstrel gallery" that overlooks the great hall where the lord and lady would have and have been entertained, and where I shall do a public talk tonight and a concert tomorrow, all part of a weekend retreat. More on all that later.

Paris

2010-11-10T00:23:00.000-08:00

In the process of listening to myself
I came to the conclusion that my soul or my heart
was always yearning for something new.
I was constantly hoping for some new event,
some new information, some renewed courage.
(Isaac Bashevis Singer)

It still seems weird to me to write that: "Paris." A woman named Julia Thompson ran into my name and music at Shantivanam and through mutual friends in India, and when she somehow found out that I was going to be in the area--on my way to England from Lebanon--she invited me to stop by Paris and do one, maybe two, concerts here. I readily agreed, partially because I knew I was going to have some time between engagements, and of course because I would have loved to see Paris. I had studied French in high school and our wonderful French teacher, Suzanne Kosmerl, who was a Parisienne herself, had steeped us in French culture, including trips to the Art Institute in Chicago, as part of our French class. I had had visions of myself as a turn of the century artiste of sorts for years (turn of the 19th century, that is). I had read biographies of many of the Impressionist artists, and the French music of that era was my entre into legitimate "classical" music--Debussy, Ravel, and Eric Satie (whom I emulated), later Messiaen and some of the great sacred literature of that period. And then, of course, in later years I have had dreams of doing a monastic tour of France, not only the great Benedictine and Cistercian spots, but also Taize, Paray le Monial and Thich Nhat Hahn's Plum Village. That latter will have to wait, but at least I have these few days here, mostly in Paris.

I had a red-eye out of Lebanon Sunday morning at 3:45. Fadi picked me up from Saint Mouron and drove me into Beirut one last time, where we headed straight for Nayla's house, who prepared one last simple meal for us all. We had one last intense conversation as well, about some questions I had yet unresolved about Islamic philosophy. I urged Fadi to get me to the airport good and early so he didn't have to sit up and lose sleep waiting, so I had a good long time at the airport before my flight. It was kind of a time warp; they oddly served breakfast on the plane right away (at 4:30 AM) and then turned out the lights, at which point I went into an unusually deep sleep for an airplane. When we finally got to Paris via Frankfurt, six or so hours later, Julia thought I would take longer than I did getting through baggage and customs, so by the time she got there I had already installed myself at the first coffee bar and had mustered enough French to begin my comparative tests between Italian and French coffee and pastries.

Julia is British, but has been living here in Paris over six years now. She knows the city well, is used to acting as tour guide and trip planner for guests, and of course has a seemingly perfect command of the language. Through another friend Julia had managed to procure for me the use of a flat right off the Champs Elysee, midway between the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe. By the time we arrived at the apartment it was pouring down a very cold rain, which boded the same for rest of my stay here, by the way. The apartment is owned by an American woman who uses it only rarely, and it is pretty near what I imagined an apartment in Paris to be like, a small kitchen and bathroom, but a generous living-dining room and bedroom. There is a large photgraph of an elderly Pablo Picasso on the wall in the living room and assorted prints of his drawing on the walls around. Julia supplied me with more than enough food, and in those first few hours of just taking a nap and settling in I thought for a moment that it would be enough to sit in this flat off the Champs Elysee with my guitar, books, laptop and Yoga mat for the next four days. But Julia came back for me in the mid-afternoon and we set off on foot across town. Even more than London, it did feel as if one could at least see the major sections and sites of the city on foot in one day. We walked up along the Seine, past the Palais and exhibition hall, through the Louvre (without stopping since the lines were so long--the first Sunday of the month is free admission), and then the Tulieries Gardens, straight up to Notre Dame. Notre Dame was also very crowded--tourists plus an organ recital going on--so we only stayed long enough to make a slow walk around the entire nave and sanctuary past all the side altars, wonderful organ music playing throughout, with a promise to come back for more later. Then across the river for a delicious bowl of (what we would call "French") onion soup and a cup of tea before heading back to my part of town on the Metro for an early night's sleep.

Yesterday, Monday, was pretty much my only work day, so after most of the morning to myself and a nice easy run along the Seine, Julia met me again and ushered me over to Forum 104, the site and organization that sponsored and hosted the concert. Forum 104 is the brainchild of the Marist missionary congregation. This particular large building in which they are housed at one time was the home of a thriving community of Marist brothers and fathers, but as their numbers there dwindled and aged, some year ago they decided to do something different with the space. So they created Forum 104, and center that hosts all types of cultural and spiritual exchanges, round tables, conferences, study sessions, artistic endeavors and meditation groups. They also rent the space out to all kinds of groups as well, and the flyers that are posted advertising the upcoming events were pretty impressive in their variety--dance and Tibetan meditation, Yoga and music events. From what I understand, the only stipulation is that any group that uses the space be open to people from other groups taking part in their activities and an exchange of ideas. It's really marvelous. Here is a sample of some of soirees coming up: "The Notion of Energy in Hinduism and Christianity," The Recognition of Life in the Face of the Aggression of Inequality and Discrimination," led by a Buddhistm a Jew, a Muslim and a Chrsitian, "The Poems of Ramana Maharshi," "Philosophy and Spirituality: Is Dialogue Pssible?," "The Consciousness of the Heart in Energetic Chinese Arts," "The Bhagavad Gita: What is Right Action?" Given the theological climate in the US right now, I can almost not imagine such an exchange of ideas going on there led by a Catholic group, except at an occasional Franciscan retreat house.

We met with Pere Bernard, a tall friendly Frenchman who is the director of the place. He was quite gracious and kind to me from the start, joking with me either in halting but good English or speaking very slowly and deliberately to me in French. I get a lot of it, especially is someone really wants me to understand, though I get a little frustrated that I can't respond in French. The concert that evening was in the adjoining small but high ceilinged church of Notre Dame des Anges. It was well attended and, with Julia's help both translating and singing along, we even got good audience participation. It was one of those buildings where the guitar sounds like an orchestra. The audience was quite a mixed group, as is drawn to the Forum. There was a good handful of Anglophones there as well, Americans, Australians and British, and afterward I spoke mainly with them. One couple in particular had just returned from Armenia, and was trying to convince me both of its beauty--"the oldest Christian country," they told me--and of my need to go there and sing my songs for them. We'll see about that... right now, a lot of California sounds like the right next move.

Today was pretty much a free day, though Julia had scheduled for us to have lunch with and meet the brothers of the Community of Jerusalem here in Paris. I had met their confreres in Florence and attended their liturgies of the hours a number of time at the Badia Fiorentina. This is the mixed community that started here in Paris in 1975 (as a matter of fact I met the founder today at lunch!). The men and women live in separate communities but quite near each other so that they pray and sing together publicly three times a day. It is beautiful Byzantine styled part singing, as far as I know all written by the French comper Andre Gouzes, and it is stunningly beautiful, especially when you hear it for the first time. (Like anything, I suppose you get used to it...) As in Florence, the community sits on the ground on prayer benches in their choir robes, men on the left, women on the right, with the assembly behind on stools. They are at Saint Gervais here in Paris, a dark and drafty space with a generous acoustic, very much like the Badia Fiorentina. They are also at Vezelay and have been given custody of the famous monastery at Mont Saint Michel as well. I was told today that they still only have about 200 women and men, but still, I think they are a great success story in the Roman church. Many of them work outside the community during the day, in full habit, but they are pretty strict about not going out outside of that. Actually originally Julia was trying to have me stay there with them, which would have been nice as well, but they would not have been able to allow me to come and go for the concert or for any sight-seeing. But they were very welcoming at lunch, and afterward during recreation and coffee in the sunroom (meals are silent with table reading) two of the brothers, one Spanish and one French, who spoke excellent English, came and spoke with me the whole time, asking lots of questions and answering mine. The young French brother, Marc Abraham, actually spoke English with an Irish brogue, having lived at a monastery in Ireland before joining the Jerusalem community.

In the morning, before Julia came for me, I had already taken a long walk in the light but steady rain, basically in the same direction as we had gone on Sunday but a little deeper away from the river. I was mainly in search of a pastry and a quiet church to say morning prayers, and I found both, the latter being the beautiful Eglise Saint Roche. Then after lunch with the brothers, I headed out on my own, armed with a good map and an umbrella, some general directions from Julia and two pair of socks under my walking shoes. I first went once more for a quick visit to Notre Dame, and then I headed up to the Gare de l'Est to buy my train ticket to Reims for tomorrow. (More on that later.) It was fun figuring out the Metro and, like Roma Termini, I felt like I could have spent all day in the train station. But I resisted and headed back down to my main event of the day--a visit to the Musee D'Orsay. Of all the museums to choose from, this is the one I wanted to see. This is the converted train station that became the home of the Impressionists and mainly still concentrates on work from the turn of the 19th century. What might have at first seemed like unfortunate timing, they are doing major rennovation of some of the major galleries, but that meant that had set up temporary galleries of the most famous artists down at the first and second level. One whole section was devoted just to Gaugin and Van Gogh, during the tumultuous period when they lived together. Some of the most famous Van Gogh's are there, including one self-portrait, the portrait of his doctor patron and the well known painting of the Cathedral at Auverns with its deep blue sky, that he painted just a month before he suicided. The other side of the gallery was amazing: Renoir, Cezzane, Degas Toulouse-Latrec, Manet, Monet, Sisley, Seurat, and many lesser known names. It was quite a visual feast, more gourmand than gourmet perhaps, but I felt like I had fulfilled a thirty year old dream. I then spent the rest of the evening wandering the Latin Quarter, past the Sorbonne and the Curie Centre, the Pantheon and the Cluny Museum with its excavated Roman baths, with a short stop in at the beautiful church of Saint Severin. I must admit, I don't know anything about either Saint Roche or Saint Severin, except that the latter was a hermit, but as soon as I get some internet acess I'll look 'em up. The artist's name wasn't listed but I am quite sure that the stunning numbered black and white prints of the life of Christ that hung around the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament were by Roualt. I treated myself to crepes for dinner at a creperie off on a side street--one with spinach, egg and Emmental cheese, and a second with just butter and burnt sugar. After a long cold day of walking, they were as delicious as anything I've ever eaten.

Tomorrow I head up to Reims on the train for the day to visit a young friend studying there, and an excuse to see a little but more of France, and then on to England and back to work on Thursday.

november 6: some last random notes from the mountain

2010-11-06T16:16:00.000-07:00

"The basic postulate of universality is that there exist inherent rights to human dignity that no one may deny to their fellow creatures, whether on the grounds of religion, colour, nationaltiy or sex, or on any other consideration. This means, among other things, that any attack on the fundamental rights of men and women in the name of some tradition--religious or other--is contrary to the spirit of universality. There cannot be on the one hand an overall general charter of human rights and on the other hand special and particular charters for Muslims, Jews, Christians, Africans, Asians and the rest...
Everything that has to do with fundamental rights--the right to live as a full citizen on the soil of one's fathers, free of persecution or discrimination; the right to live with dignity anywhere; the right to choose one's life and loves and beliefs freely, while respecting the rights of others; the right of free access to knowledge, health and a decent and honourable life--none of this, and the list is not exhaustive, may be denied to our fellow human beings on the pretext of preserving a belief, an ancestral practice or a tradition." (Maalouf, 88-89)

At a social level, no matter how we describe the Beginning and the End, creation and heaven, we should be able to agree on this much, this is ground we have to share, built on our basic humanity. Without this there is little left to discuss, and at times we are impelled to wrest our rights and the rights of others out of the clenched totalitarian fists of despots and warlords. Hence the UN Charter on the Family, the Millenium Development Goals, the Assisi Decalogue of Peace, the Global Ethic, etc. Our traditions deserve to be respected only insofar as they are respectable, only insofar as they themselves respect the fundamental rights of human beings, Maalouf says.

At a personal level, this little section from Robert Frager's introduction to "The Essential Sufism" fell right into my trap, both using the word "goal" and dealing with the self. He says that "the goal of all mysticism is to cleanse the heart, to educate or transform the self, and to find God." Then he distinguishes between the lower and higher level of self. "The lowest level of the self is dominated by pride, egotism, and totally self-centered greed and lust." This level is the part within each person that leads away from Truth, that in us which is focused out instead of in. "The lowest level of the self, the ego or lower personality, is made up of impulses, or drives, to satisfy desires. These drives dominate reason or judgment and are defined as the forces in one's nature that must be brought under control. The self must be transformed--this is the ideal. The self is like a wild horse; it is powerful and virtually uncontrollable." But as the lower self becomes trained, it becomes capable of serving the individual and revealing the higher self, the true self. The highest level, on the other hand, is the pure self, and at this level there is no duality, no separation from God. (Essential Sufism, 19, 20)

I wonder, is that only the goal of mysticism or the goal of spirituality or is that the real goal of religion in general? The transformation of the self, the revealing of the true self, the higher self, the self hidden in God, the seed of our real being, of who we really are.

Amin Maalouf, as he ties up this book "On Identity," explains how religion fulfills two needs in the human being: the need for transcendence and the need for belonging, identity; and he dreams that religion can rid itself of that latter, to stop being a means of identity so that it can function as a pure spirituality unencumbered by egoistic cravings. He contrasts universality with uniformity, and dreams that we can still fight for the universality of values and even the sharing of cultural riches--in music, in art, in cuisine, in literature--while fighting against uniformity: the impoverishment of standardization, hegemony, conformism and anything that threatens the individual richness of each civilization. So we can find a way of belonging, a new universal way to identify ourselves--as belonging to the human race!--that still celebrates our diversity. I wonder, at a cultural level is it just or mainly us in the US that exports uniformity--Macdonalds, Starbucks, KFC, Dunkin Donuts, soap operas and sitcoms--while other cultures export food, music, art, dance, fashion, language, spirituality? Of course there is always jazz and all the other music that came out of the unfortuante marriage of the peoples of Africa with the slave trade of the New World, (Maalouf points to it as well), but does the credit, as its roots, actually go back to Africa? I'm embarrassed by that, but also heartened that the US embassy here in Lebanon is bringing in cultural envoys such as John to show something deeper of our culture; and I am happy to not only be here as a Catholic Christian, but also as an American, to show that we have something else to offer at a cultural and intellectual level.

Kahil Gibran, who often has a dark view of humanity, writes about it more poetically yet in his essay "the Voice of the Poet":

Human beings separate into factions and tribes and adhere to countries and regions whereas I see my essence as foreign to any one land and alien to any single popele. The entire earth is my homeland and the human family is my clan. For I have found human beings to be weak, and it is small minded for them to divide themselves up; the earth is cramped, so that only ignorance leads people to partition it into realms and principalities.

I'll have one more little trek up the mountain this afternoon to the Chapel of the Hermitage, now on the weekend full of visitors; but especially a little more time on the slope coming down where I've found a great spot behind the ruins of one of the old hermitages. Sitting on this spot some 4000 feet above the sea and valleys of Lebanon below, the sounds of construction and farm equipment and tour busses drifting up, the breeze blowing around the precipice, even the bustling monastery and guest house below, reaffirms to me why monks head up mountains and out into deserts and forests. It's not simply to escape the world, though there is an element of escape involved ("Fuga mundi!" was the old monastic cry.) It's to cleanse the palate, to fast and to reconnect with the deeper aspects of our human being, our being human. And if we are impelled or called or pulled out into the world for love or in service, we carry that silence with us, the silence that most everybody else does not or cannot access. One wonders sometimes at the various manifestations of Christianity, what they actually have to do with Jesus. I must confess that I think this often about the pomp and hierarchical pageantry of Roman liturgy. Well, monks go to the mountain to try to be like Jesus, to try and have Jesus' experience, to try to hear that still small voice that whispers deep at the entrance of the cave of the heart. I was contemplating the beatific face of Charbel and his confrere Estaban, and imagining them even leaving the monastery to live a quieter and simpler life still in a more inaccessible spot, and I was guessing from the smiles on their faces that they had had an experience of that deepest part of themselves that is already somehow in union with God, available to Spirit.

It is said of Muhammad that, after his experiences on Mount Hira, outwardly he was still only a man--bashar, but inwardly he was in perfect union with God, and so became al-insan al-kamil--the universal person, the full realization of human-ness. The perfect person is the one who is in union with God who dwells in the heart, because the heart is the arsh al-rahman--the throne of the Compassionate. This is an ideal held out to all of us, because we carry within us all the Divine attributes and all multiple states of being; we are mirrors of God in which God looks and sees God, and we are a microcosm of the macrocosm and of the metacosm. But I could also imagine a Buddhist monk sitting in my little spot in the ruins, dropping off body and mind at the feet of the Buddha, smiling inwardly at the realization of surrender to the waves of origination, of being and becoming, in wisdom and compassion. I could imagine an Indian sannyasi chanting the OM along with the resonance in the mountain itself, vibrating with the being, knowledge and bliss that is Source and Summit, Ground of Being and Consciousness. As I could imagine Jesus abiding there with his Abba, dancing on the edge of eternity, sensing the breeze carressing him and telling him, "You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased."

I didn't tell you about the doves, did I? They're all over the place here. One beautiful white one just swooped past my open window, wing to wing with some black bird, the two of them dancing merrily in the breeze.

novmber 5: further up the mountain

2010-11-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

Love and what generates it.
Rebellion and what creates it.
Liberty and what nourishes it.
Three manifestations of God.
And God is the conscience of the rational world.
(Kahil Gibran)

5 november

So, a little more about this place. In 1811, two young men decided to devote themselves totally to God by living as hermits up on this mountain, Ruoais. They built a little church on the ruins of an old temple and made some dwellings near the church, calling the place the hermitage of Ss Peter and Paul. Fadi told me that there was quite a tradition of hermit monks here in Lebanon, as in Syria, but not much cenobitic (communal) monasticism until the late 17th century with the founding of the Lebanese Maronite Order. The two hermits then asked the local patriarch to send them a priest, but he instead sent them to the Maronite monks, who agreed to their request and also accepted them into their order. In the 1820's the Maronites decided to build a monastery on the same land, but the spot that the hermits had chosen was too inaccesible and exposed to the elements, so they chose a spot about 3 km lower near the village of Annaya. Obviously a lot like Camaldoli, the two communities lived concurrent lives. After Charbel Marklouf was beatified in 1965, the number of pilgrims making their way here increased steadily, so eventually the monks also built a large church next to the monstery. It's a modern, circular building, beautiful but sober, with tasteful stained glass windows. The last thing to be built on the property was the Oasis guest house, where I am staying, with its adjoining snack bar. Overall the whole place is quite tasteful; though a lot of the popular religious art of this region tends to be a little kitchy, there is not an abundance of it here. For the most part there is a monastic sobriety and noble simplicity throughout, which I appreciate a lot.

The great saint Charbel, whose repute overshadows everything here, was born the same year that the monastery started being built, 1828. He entered the monastery as a young man, but after some years asked to go and live in the hermitage instead. There he spent 23 years, until his death, and gained a reputation for great sancitity. After he died, on Christmas Eve, 1898, he was buried down below, in front of the monastery. Four months after he was buried lights started appearing on his grave. He was exhumed and reburied a number of times, and each time they found the clothes that he was buried in to be drenched with sweat and blood. This, of course, was conisidered to be a miracle. Many healings have been attributed to his intercession, and the museum below the monastery is full of letters attesting to healings as well as glass cases displaying the blood stained garments that were removed from his exhumed body. His present tomb has the coffin fixed on a base of cedar wood, which is in turn on a base of marble (from Verona, Italy, so we're told), all of which is separated from visitors by an iron gate with panes of glass. There is pretty much only one image of Charbel that is used, with his hood up, eyes downcast, white beard flowing, very pacific, and that image is ubiquitous here, even on seemingly every candle on the altars and in niches, besides banners on the roadisde, clock faces, calendars and bookmarks. There is another saint slightly less venerated here, actually a "blessed"--Blessed Estaban. I know nothing about him except that the image of him that is also prevalent is an old photo that shows him with a kindly face with smiling eyes between his hooded head and full black beard. What struck me about both of these saintly images is how peaceful and happy they look, as opposed to the anguished or treacly pious iconography of old Europe. I bought a small image of Estaban and a votive candle for my cell, so he is keeping watch over me these days.

So I trudged up the road to the hermitage and spent a pretty good afternoon up there. It's a bit of a museum in that the adjoining cells are blocked off and full of displays--Here is where St Charbel worked, here is where he lived, here is where he died. But it was very quiet except for the noise of construction and farm equipment drifting up from the villages in valley below. The little stone church itself is gorgeous, kind of Romanesque style, with rough wooden benches throughout. I don't know if it is ever used anymore. After a group of tourists came up, unable to comply with the countless signs in Arabic, French and English that asked for silence, I slipped out and sat in the park in front of the hermitage for a time as well. The lady at the counter down below had said to me, in French, that there was the road and then there was also the "rue au foret," the road through the forest. I couldn't muster up enough French to either ask or understand the answer to the question, "How do you find the rue au foret?" But I slipped off the main road on the way down and stumbled upon it. It led further up the mountain yet to the site of the ruins of two small cells, which I supposed to be the first hermitages, and then a huge plastic cross wired to the peak of the mountain, and then a path all the way down that at the last was sheer rock, but not difficult to descend at all.

I'm enjoying the "fast" from speaking a lot, almost as much as my "fast" of Pringles and biscuits. I'll confess to popping on my ear buds every now and again to listen to a piece of music on my iPhone but other than no outer stimulation. There is morning prayer with the monks in the monastery chapel at 7, followed petit dejeuner in the sunny refectoire at the Oasis each morning. An elderly woman is bound and determined for me to hear more of her story than I can possibly understand, but also speaks slowly and politely to explain everything there is to offer for breakfast: fresh cheese and lebneh (the thick yogurt spread for which, along with a few other Lebanese things, I cannot re-acquire a taste after the illness), a little bowl of delicious olives, a packet of what we would called pita bread (here it is just "bread"), a small bowl of some kind of marmalade, a plate of sweet sesame bread sticks, a pot of tea and one pat of butter. I've been slipping the sesame bread sticks into my coat pocket to save for my afternoon snack when she is not looking. I was trying to think of some way of nabbing half of the hunk of cheese too but I was afraid it might be obvious and go bad in my room. I've been attending Mass in the evening (yes, just "attending" since I have no idea what's being said and only the vaguest idea what's being done, the Maronite rite in Arabic; ex opere operato), and then eating the same sajj at the snack bar each night--"zaatar et fromage extra," thyme and cheese with fresh cucumbers and tomatoes inside. Rolled up it's almost a foot long, cut in four pieces and very satisfying. After that there is evening prayers and then the great silence of the night. It's all lovely, but still nothing to rival my beautiful life in the woods in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

november 4: up the mountain

2010-11-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

To hate intelligence is to hate the most precious gift God has given to us. It is in Christian terms to sin against the Holy Ghost, and it is the attitude farthest removed from the real meaning of humility in tasawwuf--the Sufi path.
(Seyyed Hossein Nasr)

4 november, 2010, annaya, lebanon
couvent di saint maroun, oasis di saint charbel

In its earliest dreaming/planning stages, this trip started out as a trip to Lebanon, Syria and Jerusalem. When Steve and Ace and I talked about it, even though Imam Naveed had dropped out and there was no work for me in Jerusalem, we still talked about going on to Jordan and perhaps even sneaking into Isreal from there. When they decided not to try that, I still had a half-baked plan (about which I didn't tell anyone because I was so afraid I'd let it slip at the border) to go on to the Holy Land myself and somehow switch my plane tickets to depart from Tel Aviv instead of flying out of Beirut, which would have been quite difficult at that point. In the end, I discussed it with Steve and Ace, but when Fadi came up with the idea of getting me a place to make retreat for a few days before I left for France, and then when we all got sick, I just let it go. Even our time in Syria was cut short by the sickness and the government, so it has wound up being a good long stay just in Lebanon, with a brief jaunt into Syria, and I feel pretty good about that now.

Young Petter came and got me around noon yesterday and spent two hours giving me a tour of his favorite parts of Beirut. (He's the bright young Danish journalism student who is finishing up his Master's Degree here in Lebanon at American University of Beirut.) We hitched a ride on a bus--it was pretty much a mini-van with a big number 4 attached to the window, capable of holding about 12 people in a squeeze--up to a neighborhood called Archifiye, and then walked into another neighborhood called Gemmayze. (I may have these spellings wrong, but I gave my Lonely Planet guide to Steve to take home with him so I can't check... Apologies.) What Petter likes about these neighborhoods, he says, is that one can still see the early 20th century French architecture at its most resplendent, though he lamented often that ugly modern buildings were sprouting up like weeds among the wheat. We passed by several gated courtyards and garden, shuttered windows and balconies, shops and restaurants which indeed did call to mind what I would imagine that era to be like. There were also many little niches that contained Christian shrines to various saints or Our Lady, of which Petter was also quite fond. He led me to the apartment that he is sharing with two flatmates. It had that empty feeling of a college-era flophouse, where people are more squatting that actually living. I guess it's that way all over the world. There was an open package of Oreo's on the table which Petter said were his French roommates: "They love their cakes with tea, you know." Then we made a long trek back to Hamra, via the streets where all the clubs are--it was actually pretty hip looking and I wish Steve and Ace had seen it--and then through downtown around the edge of Solidaire again. It was the first time I had walked from that area back to the hotel, and I was surprised to find out that it was relatively close and easy to walk, less than a half hour. We stopped at a street stand for a sajj, a kind of Lebanese fast food, somewhere between a pizza and a crepe, and then said goodbye when he got me back to the hotel.

Then Fadi picked me up and we made the long drive here to Annaya. The worst of it was getting out of Beirut and its environs. The traffic was maddeningly slow, even for him. But well north of Beirut, just on the southern edge of the coastal city of Byblos, we headed inland and up into the hills. We first made a quick stop at Fadi's own village, where he had some personal business to attend to, and then continued up into the hills until we arrived here at the Monastery of Saint Maroun on Mount Rouais. It's really breathtakingly beautiful up here, and I was so happy to finally be well out of the city. Everything kept reminding me a little of the hills of Tuscany and a little of the mountain paths on our hike from Rajpur to Mussorie in northern India. We watched a spectacular sunset over the Mediterranean, and at one point Fadi pointed to the coast to our south, the peninsula that is Beirut--though it's over 50 km it didn't seem that far away--and the tip of it which was the Hamra district where we were staying and where I walked the corniche every morning. But now we were almost 1200 metres high, over 4000 feet by my crude math.

We had a good long talk during the drive. At one point in the conversation I let slip the phrase, concerning dialogue with other traditions, "How could it be that the top of the mountain could look so different if the way up looks so similar?" Fadi immediately jumped on that and asked me to explain, and I had to launch into my whole telos-scopos-praxis theory again, how we describe the end differently, but I am fascinated to find out how much ground we share in terms of the goal and even the practice. Fadi thought that this was a pretty unique approach, because they are so used to saying that the end is the same--union with God; it is only at the practical level that we are divided. He gave me a lot of new insights just from peppering me with questions and from his own work. For example, he was talking about a study he is reading now that suggests the main difficulty between Muslims and Christians is an anthropological one. (Did my face light up! Anthropological issues!) I just ran into this in Dr Nasr's book too, by the way. The study Fadi is reading is called something like "Son versus Khalifa." For Islam, the human person is a theomorphic being (in the image of God) who is, you might say, the viceregent of God (that's one translation of "khalifah"), even a theophany of God's names and qualities. But Islam does not accept the idea of a filial relationship, that we are sons and daughters of God, or that we can. Even in regards Jesus, though the Qur'an calls him the ruah Allah-"the spirit of God," a name not give any of the other prophets, he is still not Son, which would destroy the belief in the absolute transcendence of the Divine Essence. Islam never emphasizes the descent of the Absolute or the manifestation of the Absolute, nor the incarnation of God in history. I was also asking him how he understood the doctrine of tawid-the unity of God in terms of these anthropological questions, but he says really this is a practical doctrine, not an ontological one, in other words, tawid is more about an all embracing way of life that covers every aspect of existence than it is a statement about the unity of nature in being. (I hope to have one more conversation with Nayla when she picks me up Saturday about this last bit, and wonder if there is any speculation about advaita and tawid.)

As soon as we got here I was so happy to be here, for a number of reasons besides the silence. I am staying in the Oasis Saint Charbel, which reminds me so much of a foresteria in one of our monasteries in Italy, the smell, even the design of it. As a matter of fact there is much about this place that reminds me of our Italian houses. Right next store is the monastery itself, a modest but impressive stone structure built in the mid-19th century, seemingly built right out of the stone of the mountain. We went right away to the monastery church which is a barrel vaulted beautiful resonant place, reminiscent of many crypt chapels I've seen in Italy. One of the monks was leading the Mass in the Maronite rite there. Everything of course is Maronite rite and in Arabic, except that the signs and literature are also in French, and the staff all speak French as well. Not much English... There is also a snack bar next to the Oasis called Agape Saint Charbel, where they serve sajj and chips and burgers, etc., for pretty decent prices. Fadi set me up in my room, helped me order a sajj for dinner and a packet of digestive biscuits for my cell, and then told me that the monks knew I was here so I should just go to Vespers at 6 in the church and one of them would find me. I was to take lunch with the monks each day. So I sat through Vespers, with its beautiful chanting and clouds of incense, and then sat trying to look obvious afterward, but no one came forward. So I slipped away and went to my room. It is spacious though simple, with the most comfortable bed and pillows I have encountered yet here in Lebanon and I was happy to slip off to sleep early in the cool mountain air under a pile of blankets.

I keep saying I am feeling 100 per cent better, but I must not have been. I slept ten full hours! When I finally got up, I went down for breakfast in the refectoire below, took a little walk and went back to my room to say my prayers, and promptly fell asleep again! By the time I checked my clock it was noon. And I could have kept sleeping. I stumbled through asking the woman at the counter how I was supposed to get lunch and I understood that it was at 12:30 in the monastery, and again I should just go over there and stand around. I put on my nice shirt and walked over to the monastery again. Just as I was walking up a big black Mercedes pulled up and a portly monk got out of the back seat and was greeted by all of the local monks coming out of the door of the monastery as well as by various lay people standing around, with kisses and hugs and blessings. Fadi had said that the monks had something special going on this week, and I assumed this was it, maybe the visit of the equivalent of their prior general or some such thing. Again I stood in the hallway trying to look obvious but everyone just swept by, very caught up in the flurry of this man's arrival. They made a short stop at the chapel, a visit down to the chapel of Saint Charbel's tomb, and then rushed off en masse into the cloister, followed again by some lay people. At one point an old woman who could barely catch her breath asked me something in Arabic, and then in French, which I didn't make out either, at which point I felt pretty useless and walked away. I suppose I could have asked someone or just walked into the monastery myself following the crowd but, to be honest, I was so happy to be alone. So I went and changed into my walking clothes, bought a container of Pringles (that's right, I said "Pringles," salt vinegar flavored!) and a bottle of blackberry juice at the Agape Saint Charbel, and happily headed up further the mountain.