Amounting to Nothing, Brother Paul

 

Brother Paul Quenon, Photo by Rhonda J. Miller. 

Sorry monk that I am, I never amounted to nothing.

Somebody must have laid a curse on me and said, 

‘You'll never amount to nothing,’ 

which was my life ambition. 

But I'm still too much of something.

So this is, you know, 

there's a kind of undercurrent of a mystical tradition there. 

That is especially like in Zen Buddhism, 

where you just lose the, you know, 

slough off the ego and these false outer selves 

that we contrive for ourselves 

to get along and society, 

or to get ahead in the world. 

And amounting to nothing is, you know, 

the ultimate degree of humility is to, you know, 

be so free of myself, 

that God can fill the self. 

From: Aged in KY