29. The beauty of the unconscious

The beauty of the unconscious is that it knows a great deal—whether personal or collective—but it always knows that it does not know, cannot say, and dare not try to prove or assert too strongly; because what it does know is that there is always more—and all words will fall short. The contemplative is precisely the person who agrees to live in that unique kind of brightness (a combination of light and dark that is brighter still!). The Paradox, of course, is that it does not feel like brightness at all, but what John of the Cross calls a “luminous darkness,” or others call “learned ignorance.”

In summary, you cannot grow in the great art form, the integration of action and contemplation, without 1) a strong tolerance for ambiguity; 2) an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety; and 3) a willingness to not know and not even need to know. This is how you allow and encounter mystery. All else is mere religion.

Fr. Richard Rohr

26. Watch

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

        –unknown

 

24. Enlightenment is Un-knowing

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is more about entering a vast mystery than arriving at a mental certitude. Enlightenment knows that grace is everywhere, and the only reasonable response is gratitude and the acknowledgment that there is more depth and meaning to everything.

Fr. Richard Rohr

22. Aesthetic and Religious Experience

Although I'm continuing to post my "found" small stones and an occasional photograph every day this month, I wanted to leave this post at the top of the blog for a few days to try to encourage more of you to leave a comment and to read the ones that have been left so far. I've spent a lifetime trying to develop my own "natural aptitude" for music and art and self-expression, but also for spirituality — and trying to explore the connections between these areas, which I find self-evident but I realize many do not. However, I'd argue that everyone is born with the potential for creativity and spirituality — some with more natural aptitude, to be sure — but life (often in the form of teachers and institutions) destroys our joy, dulls our senses, and undermines our confidence. Unfortunately that often happens at such an early age that people can never find their way again. This happens, I would argue, with gifts of the spirit just as much as with gifts of creativity, and is even more problematic in societies where spirituality is confused with organized religion, difficult to speak about, and where "masters" are rare or unrecognized because they don't necessarily go around wearing robes or clerical collars…

 

 "His kind of faith is a gift. It’s like an ear for music or the talent to draw"
Crimes and Misdemeanors, Woody Allen

Profound aesthetic experiences, no less than the religious experiences of which James wrote, deserve to be thought of as gifts to the spirit. They may engender a sense of awe and mystery, and of the sublime; they may provoke a feeling of being privileged and so of gratitude. The experience may be at once elevating and humbling. These represent important points of contact with religious moments.

The points of contact are not limited to such reactions. Artistic and religious virtuosity both involve, even begin with, natural aptitude, as noted in the quotation from Crimes and Misdemeanors. Some are more given to these things than others. And in both domains, hard work, genuine focus — at times single-minded — is essential if one is to approach one’s potential. We are less apt to think this way about the religious domain than the artistic. But a religious giant, a Mozart of the spirit, is a rare find; she is (certainly typically) one who has labored strenuously in pursuit of excellence.  And just as one who is tone-deaf can appreciate the musically gifted as responding to something of substance, one who is less able than another in matters of the spirit can recognize the latter’s accomplishment. Needless to say, being tonedeaf is a rare condition in either domain. Ordinarily people occupy an intermediate position within a wide spectrum of which being tone-deaf is at one extreme.

from "The Significance of Religious Experience" by Howard Wettstein, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside.

What do you think?

 

 

15.

The career of a sage is of two kinds:
He is either honored by all in the world,
Like a flower waving its head,
Or else he disappears into the silent forest. 

Lao Tzu

8.

Resolve to Live a Life of Great Love

We must learn to be able to think and behave like Jesus, who is the archetypal human. This becomes the journey of great love and great suffering. This journey leads us to a universal love where we just don’t love those who love us. We must learn to participate in a larger love—divine love.

If we remain autonomous, independent, self-sufficient, we cannot know God nor can we love God. St. John of the Cross says: “God refuses to be known; God can only be loved.”

Any journey of great love or great suffering make us go deeper into our faith and eventually into what can only be called universal truth. Love and suffering are finally the same, because those who love deeply are committing themselves to eventual suffering. Those who suffer often become the greatest lovers.

Fr. Richard Rohr

I hope you aren't too put off by the religious words in this quote, because there's so much to think about in it. The main point, as Rohr says in his title for this meditation, is to "Resolve to Live a Life of Great Love." That resonated with me because it's what I've tried to do for a long time, without having heard it put quite this way: to love more and more deeply — and more and more selflessly — all other beings, the earth, the beauty of own creations, and whatever we call the force that connects us: that force Paul Tillich called "the ground of all being." A life of great love means loving yourself, too. Giving your heart to loving greatly means taking a lot of risks, but I think the rewards are worth it.

(Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and founding director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He writes regularly for Sojourners, Tikkun, and the Huffington Post.)

 

 

5.

Cynicism salves the pain of unrealized hope. If we convince ourselves that nothing can change, we don't have to risk acting on our dreams. But the more we accept this, the more we deny core parts of ourselves. We deny even the possibility that our choices can matter….

As the poet and essayist Lewis Hyde points out, [cynicism] becomes "the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." Accordingly, we might think of a modern cynic as someone who's given up all hope of finding a door, much less a key. And we might remember that there are better ways to live.

from Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time, by Paul Loeb, St. Martin's Press, 1999. Read the whole excerpt here, at Earth Island Journal. Thanks to Chris Clarke for the link.

2. Arnaud Desjardins: ne jugez pas

A small stone from the French Advaita Vedanta Master Arnaud Desjardins, who died on August 10, 2011 at the age of 86.

Ne jugez pas. Ne jugez pas les autres et ne vous jugez plus vous-mêmes. Essayez d'aimer les autres tels qu'ils sont et de vous aimer tels que vous êtes, essayez de comprendre les autres tels qu'ils sont et de vous comprendre tels que vous êtes. La comprehension conduit à la sympathie, la sympathie conduit à l'amour. C'est vrai dans votre relation avec les autres, c'est vrai dans votre relation avec vous-mêmes.

(Don't judge. Don't judge others, and don't judge yourselves. Try to love others as they are, and to love yourself as you are, try to understand others as they are and to understand yourself as you are. Understanding leads to sympathic feeling, sympathy leads to love. It's true in your relationship with others, and it's true in your relationship with yourselves.)

Arnaud Desjardins, Pour une vie réussie (La Table Ronde, 1985)

If this sounds like the Christian Gospels, that's because Desjardins started out as a Protestant and his spiritual work and teaching involved going being the dogma to the core of the truths found in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I've found his work and writings extremely enlightening and very helpful; unfortunately only a few of his books have been translated from the French.

A New Year

J. and me, slightly wet, in the rift between continental plates at Thingvellir, Iceland: another moment of looking in two directions.

Well, here we are, a dozen years after the start of the new millenium. That's almost as hard to imagine as the fact that I'll celebrate my 60th birthday in 2012. I don't understand how time passes so quickly: neither the minutes in an hour nor the years that pile up into decades and, astoundingly, half-centuries. I find myself pondering the rushing water of time more often these days, but I'm also reminded of that old James Taylor song: "the secret of life/is enjoying the passing of time." I'm not sure it's the whole secret, but it's certainly part of it.

Like Janus I'm looking backward at the year just past and looking forward with anticipation and hopefulness to 2012. The Arab spring and the Occupy movement were hopeful signs in a world rife with problems; closer to home I feel good about being part of a new social justice initiative at our cathedral.

I'm glad that, for the most part, my family and friends are healthy and doing well; my dad, at 87, continues to inspire me to keep moving, busy, and looking forward: he is a remarkable example of what daily exercise and activity can do for health. I'm proud of many of friends, like V. who not only made her weight-loss goal this year but has made great strides in organizing her life and working toward other goals. My sister-in-law has been starting a whole new chapter in her life, spending a sabbatical year in Beirut studying Arabic and reconnecting to her family roots — how admirable and exciting! J. has worked very hard on a book of photographs that will be published by Phoenicia later in 2012, wth essays from invited guest contributors and edited by me; I can't wait to help him share that with the world…

I'm grateful for new and deeper friendship with a number of people, aided both by correspondence and by our wonderful trip this year to Iceland and London. The fact that we have a bit more time now and have settled in, finally, to our new life in Montreal, means more energy and time for other people as well as for our own art, and that feels good. We also had a short but happy trip to Florida to visit family last March, and a great trip to New York to visit friends and be present at the launch of Teju Cole's Open City.

J. and Aunt MaryAnne picking grapefruits in Florida

We've loved having Manon, the beautiful calico, come into our lives, and hope she's as happy to be living with us as we are to have her with us! I learn a lot from her non-human presence; she's a comfort and a joy.

It was a rewarding and memorable year for me on the art front, where I began making relief prints again and have steadily worked on drawings, many of which you've seen here. And I'm now pursuing a long-form project which has finally gotten me out of the funk I was in about writing something substantial. More about that eventually.

It was an intense year of making music with my choir, of progressing as a musician, of gaining confidence: it really helps to be singing with some of the city's top professionals. My sight-reading, which is pretty good, went up a notch; I learned more about some of my weaknesses and tried to work on them; and got better at reading plainchant, something that has bugged me ever since I joined the choir. I haven't played the piano nearly as much as I'd like, so that's definitely something to try to make room for next year. I love how in the arts you can always, always improve.

Finally, it was a huge pleasure to work with other writers and artists on various internet-based projects, and especially at qarrtiluni, where we had another successful chapbook contest this past summer, and at my small press, Phoenicia Publishing, where I'm very proud of the books we published in 2011.

Spiritually, artistically, and emotionally it was a year of a certain amount of struggle, some of which has been expressed here and some of which remains personal and private. A lot of that has had to do with coming to terms with things I don't like at all but can't change: getting older, mortality, certain limits that time places upon us. I found sustenance in reading, talking, writing; in the love of my husband and close friends; the natural world, music and art, retreat and meditation; and the fact that I know it's a process, not a destination. The best help is staying in the moment, keeping busy, loving life and people, and finding things to work hard on and look forward to. Like everyone, I have my difficult moments, but I'm awfully glad to be here today, looking ahead to tomorrow.

—

January brings a new River of Stones challenge. Last year I took part, writing a small observation every day. This year I think making that commitment would cut into the time I've allotted for my own writing project too much, but through themonth I'm going to be looking for "found" stones: short poems or quotes to share. Yesterday I found "An Anthology of World Poetry" on my shelves – this volume, published in 1928, belonged to my great-aunt Inez, and was edited by Mark Van Doren, a close friend of Thomas Merton from their Columbia University days. So here is my first "found" small stone, from that book and 9th century Japan:

The beloved person must I think
Have entered
The summer mountain:
For the cuckoo is singing
With a louder note.

 

Happy New Year to all!

Christmas Peace to All