our proper business: curiosity and awareness

What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude –

that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

Art’s purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.

One shouldn’t go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

Out of the work comes the work.

- John Cage

Dorothy Day died 32 years ago today, UPDATED

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us? When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we truly say, 'Now I have begun'"

-- Dorothy Day
Loaves and Fishes, p 210 (the last chapter, titled "Our Day")

 Dorothy Day funeral, photo by Jim Forest

Photo of Cardinal Terence Cooke outside the Nativity Catholic Church before Dorothy's funeral Mass.  Paul Moore, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, is beside him.

From Robert Ellsburg: "I don't know whether Cardinal Cooke wanted to hold the funeral at St. Patrick's. I know he offered to celebrate the funeral mass [at Nativity Church on 2nd Avenue, close to the Catholic Worker] but wanted to change the time because of a prior commitment. This would have interfered with the schedule for the soup line and Tamar [Dorothy's daughter] among others didn't want to do that. Cooke did graciously offer to come down and bless her casket at the entrance to the church. … I don't know whether Cooke greeted everyone who arrived. I thought he left after the blessing of the casket. Some people have said they believe he stuck his head in the side door of the church during the service. I didn't see this, but it is possible. He later celebrated a memorial mass for Dorothy at the cathedral."

HT: Jim Forest

The Berrigans and the Catholic Left

A trip back in time: In 1971 Phil Berrigan and six others were tried in Harrisburg, PA, for conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger and to cause explosions in heating tunnels in Washington DC. After a mistrial, with only two jurors supporting conviction, the charges were dropped. From J.Edgar Hoover announcing the charges to the conclusion of the trial two years later, the story was headline news.

In 1973 Jim Forest wrote a detailed account of the events that led up to the trial -- "The Harrisburg Case: The Berrigans and the Catholic Left." The piece was published in March 1973 by WIN magazine, journal of the War Resisters League. Recently a friend in Ililnois found the article, photocopied it and e-mailed it to Jim. Using OCR software, the text has now been been added to the "Jim's Essays" section of the Jim & Nancy web site:

http://www.jimandnancyforest.com/2012/11/16/berrigans-caholic-left/

Can you imagine if they had managed to kidnap Kissinger??!! (I'm very glad to have that Time magazine cover added to the eclectic lore of louie. )

humility

"To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence.  It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves.  Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.

"In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way.  Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses.  The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable."

- Dag Hammarskjold, "Markings", p. 174

enlightenment (according to lax)

Robert Lax, Photo by Hartmut Geerken

to be "enlightened" is not to shine; nor to bring multitudes to the hill where one sits cross-legged, to listen.

it is rather to know what one is doing (& even, perhaps, to enjoy it.)

- robert lax, from "love had a compass, journals and poetry", page 209

to be fully human

From Archbishop Rowan Williams' lecture to the Synod in Rome, October 10, 2012.  The full text is HERE.

" ... In his autobiography Thomas Merton describes an experience not long after he had entered the monastery where he was to spend the rest of his life (Elected Silence, p.303). He had contracted flu, and was confined to the infirmary for a few days, and, he says, he felt a ‘secret joy’ at the opportunity this gave him for prayer – and ‘to do everything that I want to do, without having to run all over the place answering bells.’ He is forced to recognise that this attitude reveals that ‘All my bad habits … had sneaked into the monastery with me and had received the religious vesture along with me: spiritual gluttony, spiritual sensuality, spiritual pride.’ In other words, he is trying to live the Christian life with the emotional equipment of someone still deeply wedded to the search for individual satisfaction. It is a powerful warning: we have to be every careful in our evangelisation not simply to persuade people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama, excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily lives. It was expressed even more forcefully some decades ago by the American scholar of religion, Jacob Needleman, in a controversial and challenging book called Lost Christianity: the words of the Gospel, he says, are addressed to human beings who ‘do not yet exist’. That is to say, responding in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and imaginings. To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and others through Jesus Christ.

"Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinise and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me – this is to allow God to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to come alive in me. Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s light and love penetrate my inner life. Only as this begins to happen will I be delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people. And as this process unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St Augustine (Confessions IV.7)—to ‘love human beings in a human way’, to love them not for what they may promise me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover (as we noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its roots."

what the word "answer" means

Karl Barth

Someone sent this little snippet to me the other day.  It seems to intuit the profoundly intimate and deeply mysterious way in which our own lives are united with, and even mutually dependent, upon God.  (Although I'm sure that there are plenty of theologians who would insist that God does not need us in order to be God.  I'm not so sure.)

Let us approach the subject of prayer from the given fact that God answers.


God is not deaf, but listens; more than that, he acts.


God does not act in the same way whether we pray or not.


Prayer exerts an influence upon God's action, even upon his existence.


This is what the word 'answer' means.

- Karl Barth
From Prayer