Kiss the Ground

"Today like every other day you wake up joyless and feeling unsafe. Don’t open the door to the study and start reading again. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we DO.

There are hundreds of ways to kiss the ground.”

- Rumi    (Coleman Barks' translations)

I'm wondering if today's version of the study is not the computer, the cell phone.  So often when I turn off and away from my computer, I sense a new and different world opening itself up to me.  Even the way of movement through this world becomes a source of awe.  Just breathing, moving, just seeing and listening and being here.

When the Soul of the Serene Disciple

On Tuesday mornings, while I am in PA, I join a local group of people for centering prayer.  After praying, we listen to CDs (or watch DVDs) of spiritual teachers.  This morning, I heard Richard Rohr, while speaking of the further journey, describe the four stages of life as depicted in the windows of Hindu church: (1) the student, (2) the householder, (3) the forest dweller who gives up the status quo, and (4) the wise sage.  He followed with this poem by Thomas Merton:

When the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say
the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.

Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.

Be still:
There is no longer
any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo
with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a momorandum.

There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an
affliction.

What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary
is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without vision.

-Thomas Merton

the crucified people

Fr. Jon Sobrino S.J.

Jon Sobrino is a the sole Jesuit priest at the University of Central America to survive the 1989 massacre that killed 6 of his Jesuit brothers, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador. He is a liberation theologian and was notified by the Vatican in 2007 that his writing may be “erroneous or dangerous or may cause harm to the faithful”.

In his book, No Salvation Outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays (Orbis Books), he writes poignantly about his Jesuit brother Ignacio Ellacuria, the theologian and university president killed with the others in 1989:

"When Ellacuria 'took hold of the reality' of the Third World, he grasped it in an important way as a 'crucified people' … Ellacuria said that the crucified people are one of the main features of our time, not merely something factual that we may consider, but something central that must be considered, without which we do not have a full grasp of reality,"

city of the sun

In 1992, with a small Pax Christi group, I visited City Soleil in Port-au-Prince Haiti.  It was late in the afternoon, and I remember the high "energy" - tension, noise - that I felt as we walked down the narrow passageways, crammed with people and smells.  We were so barraged by people begging from us that we had to hold onto each other.  Something tells me that this is how it was during the actual Crucifixion of Christ: this intensity, violence, despair and suffering.

I often wonder if I could survive for one day (or night) in this place, and what of the people who live their whole lives there, never knowing any where else.  My brothers and sisters.  Knowing this place is some kind of blessing and grace that touches the soul.

You can read more about the documentary film Mud Pies and Kites on Gerry Straub's blog here.

image of Christ crucified

 brush drawing by Thomas Merton

(image size 6 1/2" h x 4 1/4" w)

Notes from Roger Lipsey
“This perfectly grand image of the Crucifixion was found in a booklet, a kind of diary of drawings, as just one among ten or so brush drawings, the others of no special interest. Though monumental in “feel” and impact, it is factually a small print produced by inking and printing with the edge of an envelope or something of the kind. The method could hardly be simpler; the result could hardly be more majestic. This image recalls medieval carvings of the Crucifixion to which Merton was exposed as a boy in France, especially of the Romanesque period before the elaborations of Gothic art.
… this image of Christ Crucified draws together, remarkably, the values he most cared for as a contemporary artist and the values he most cared for as a monk …”

(Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton, by Roger Lipsey, p. 53)

from the darkness comes light

 brush drawing by Thomas Merton

(image size: 8 1/2" h x 5" w, on gray card)

The monk who is truly a man of prayer and who seriously faces the challenge of his vocation in all its depth is by that very fact exposed to existential dread. He experiences in himself the emptiness, the lack of authenticity, the quest for fidelity, the “lostness” of modern man. … The monk confronts his own humanity and that of his world at the deepest and most central point where the void seems to open out into black despair. The monk confronts this serious possibility, and rejects it … The option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope by the pure and humble supplication of monastic prayer. The monk faces the worst, and discovers in it the hope of the best. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gift of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new, to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ. (The Climate of Monastic Prayer, p. 25)

Notes from Roger Lipsey:
“ … the Celtic cross reflects what Merton once called Zen Catholicism – a phrase borrowed from Dom Ailred Graham, a Benedictine abbot and author whom Merton admired. This is a magnificent rendering, uncanny but still comfortable and settled in its fusion of freely brushed Zen calligraphy with the unique design of the Irish medieval cross. Here is the Zen brush-drawn circle yet again, at home in an unexpected place. …”(Angelic Mistakes, The Art of Thomas Merton, by Roger Lipsey, pp. 48-49)

one moment passes by robert lax

Filmmaker: Susanne Wiegner