Jesus and Buddha as Brothers

 Map of Matter in the Universe

Full sky map from ESA Plank mission showing matter between the earth and the edge of the observable universe.

The bread that Jesus handed to you, to us, is real bread, and if you can eat real bread you have real life. But we are not able to eat real bread. We only try to eat the word bread or the notion of bread. Even when we are celebrating the Eucharist, we are still eating notions and ideas. “Take, my friends, this is my flesh, this is my blood.” Can there be any more drastic language in order to wake you up? What could Jesus have said that is better than that? You have been eating ideas and notions, and I want you to eat real bread so that you become alive. If you come back to the present moment, fully alive, you will realize this is real bread, this piece of bread is the body of the whole cosmos.

If Christ is the body of God, which he is, then the bread he offers is also the body of the cosmos. Look deeply and you notice the sunshine in the bread, the blue sky in the bread, the cloud and the great earth in the bread. Can you tell me what is not in a piece of bread? The whole cosmos has come together in order to bring to you this piece of bread. You eat it in such a way that you become alive, truly alive. . . . Eat in such a way that the Holy Spirit becomes an energy within you and then the piece of bread that Jesus gives to you will stop being an idea, a notion. 

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999), 106–107

HT: Richard Rohr OFM

Feast of the Epiphany

“Today the Magi find, crying in the manger, the one they have followed as he shone in the sky. 

Today the Magi see clearly, in swaddling clothes, the one they have long awaited as he lay hidden among the stars. 

Today the Magi gaze in deep wonder at what they see: heaven on earth, earth in heaven, man in God, God in man, one whom the universe cannot contain now enclosed in a tiny body. 

As they look, they believe and do not question, as their symbolic gifts bear witness: incense for God, gold for a king, myrrh for one who is to die.”

- St. Peter Chrysologus

Merton's 3rd level of Silence

Still deeper down, Merton was aware of a third level,

"Swimming in the rich darkness
which is no longer thick like water
but pure, like air.

Starlight
and you do not know where it is coming from.

Moonlight is in this prayer,
stillness,
waiting for the Redeemer ...

Everything is charged with intelligence,
though all is night.

There is no speculation here.
There is vigilance ...
Everything is spirit.

Here God is adored,
His coming is recognized,
He is received as soon as He is expected
and because He is expected He is receieved,
but He has passed by sooner than He arrived,
He was gone before He came.
He returned forever.
He never yet passed by
and already He had disappeared for all eternity.

He is and He is not.

Everything and Nothing.

Not light not dark,
not high not low,
not this side not that side.

Forever and forever.

In the wind of His passing the angels cry,
"The Holy One is gone."

Therefore I lie dead in the air of their wings ...

It is a strange awakening to find the sky inside you
and beneath you
and above you
and all around you
so that your spirit is one with the sky,
and all is positive night."

---

From an essay by Jim Forest, "Thomas Merton: One Foot in the Wilderness, One Foot in the World."

Merton's quoted words from Sign of Jonas, 338-39

Merton's 2nd level of Silence

Photo by Thomas Merton

February, 1952

Siting on a cedar log under a tree
gazing out at light blue hills in the distance,
Merton saw his true self
as a kind of 
solitary sea creature
dwelling in a water cavern
which knows of the world of dry land
only by faint rumor.

When he got free of plans and projects 
-- the first level of the sea with its troubled surface --
then he entered a deeper second level,
the deep waters out of reach of storms
where there was ...

"peace, peace, peace ...
We pray therein, slightly waving among the fish ...
Words, as I think, do not spring from this second level.
They are only meant to drown there."

"The question of socialization does not concern
these waters.
They are nobody's property."

"No questions whatever
perturb their holy botany.
Neutral territory.
No man's sea."

"I think God meant me to write about this second level."

From an essay by Jim Forest, "Thomas Merton: One Foot in the Wilderness, One Foot in the World."

Merton's quoted words from Sign of Jonas, 338-39

On the Road with Thomas Merton

 Photo by Thomas Merton - New Mexico 1968

This is really well done.

On the Road with Thomas Merton
Film by Jeremy Seifert
Essay by Fred Bahnson

I, too, have made my way to some of the places in California that Merton visited and to the Christ in the Desert monastery in New Mexico. I, too, was inspired by Merton's 1968 spring trip. I wanted to see what he saw when he ventured out of his Gethsemane monastery those months before he died.

There are many good Merton thoughts in this film and essay. Many good reflections. Many Merton photos I had not seen before. Even some Merton words that are new to me.

"Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of “origin,” the “home” where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication with heaven, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life."

- Thomas Merton, from the essay, "From Pilgrimage to Crusade"

nameless & no where: the paradise tree

Photo by Thomas Merton

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place
and there
You do not enter except without a story
To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is there is homeless for he has no door
and no identity
with which to go out and to come in.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist
except as unborn:
No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

Bue he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are
securely established!

They find themselves in streets. They are licensed
To proceed from place to place
They now know their own names
They can name several friends and know
Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at
once and
all cars crash at one crossing:
If all cities explode and fly away in dust
Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and number
for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes
for ashes:
Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?
Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn
flower of nothing:
This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words
end and arguments are silent.

- Merton, "The Fall", In the Dark before the Dawn, pp. 184-185

active solitude

photo by Thomas Merton

He loved the loneliness of the night. It taught him to view solitude as act, and to conclude that the reason no one really understood solitude was because men viewed it as a condition, something one elected to undergo -- like standing under a shower. Actually, solitude was for him a realization; even a kind of creation as well as a liberation of active forces within him. As a mere condition, solitude could be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of coma. To avoid this condition, he had to work actively at solitude.

Thus, a need for discipline, for techniques of integration that keep body and soul together, harmonizing their powers to bring into one deep resonance, oriented to the root of being.

Freedom began for Fr. Louis with the willingness to realize and experience his life as totally absurd in relation to the apparent meaning which had been thrown over life by society and by illusions. But that could be only a starting point leading to a deeper realization of that root reality in himself and in all life "which I do not know and cannot know ... This implies the capacity to see that realizing and knowing are not the same ... solitude itself is the fullness of realization. In solitude I become fully able to realize what I cannot know". 

-- John Howard Griffin, writing about Merton in "Follow the Ecstacy"

when the trees say nothing

Photo by BQ Cioffoletti

"We do not realize that the fields and the trees have fought and still fight for their respective places on this map—which, by natural right, belong entirely to the trees. We do not remember that these little clumps and groves are the fifth column of the aboriginal forest that wants to return. It is nice to think of, for a moment. But what could be more desperate than a journey, mile after mile, without hills, as rough as all those trees, and never know where you are going. But now it is wide open. I do not commit myself, though. I am perhaps still on the side of the trees."
- Merton, Thomas (2003-02-01). When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature (p. 106). Ave Maria Press - A. Kindle Edition. 

"Why do I live alone? I don’t know.... In some mysterious way I am condemned to it.... I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough, and to add something else is to mess it all up. It would be so much more wonderful to be all tied up in someone ... and I know inexorably that this is not for me. It is a kind of life from which I am absolutely excluded. I can’t desire it. I can only desire this absurd business of trees that say nothing, of birds that sing, of a field in which nothing ever happens (except perhaps that a fox comes and plays, or a deer passes by). This is crazy. It is lamentable. I am flawed, I am nuts. I can’t help it. Here I am, now, ... happy as a coot. The whole business of saying I am flawed is a lie. I am happy. I cannot explain it.... Freedom, darling. This is what the woods mean to me. I am free, free, a wild being, and that is all that I ever can really be. I am dedicated to it, addicted to it, sworn to it, and sold to it. It is the freedom in me that loves you.... Darling, I am telling you: this life in the woods is IT. It is the only way. It is the way everybody has lost. ... It is life, this thing in the woods. I do not claim it is real. All I say is that it is the life that has chosen itself for me."  A Midsummer Diary for M. June 23, 1966

Merton, Thomas (2003-02-01). When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature (pp. 135-136). Ave Maria Press - A. Kindle Edition.

Tom Stone photogrpahy

 Robert Lax - photo by Tom Stone

Tom Stone (born July 12, 1971) is an American humanitarian photography. His work depicts the discrepancy between the American dream and the American reality, clearly captured through the telling faces of those living on the fringes of society. He is most widely known for his documentary photography of outsider, displaced and homeless populations in California.

• On Poverty

I think there’s a decided middle spectrum of humanity where circumstance, luck, and small choices conspire to vastly differing fates. We’re all imperfect, and most of us are only a shadow of who we’d hoped we’d be.

To my thinking, the original human trauma is our separation. We are too close not to need each other; and too far to trust each other.

I count it as a measure of our ignorance, the depth of poverty in the world. It’s a glaring marker to how far we have not come.

The younger you are the more you are affected by the sight of poverty and homelessness. Pay attention to how children react to folks on the street. I try to be disturbed by the same things that disturb kids.

• On Photography

The photo is a memento of the interaction.

A cloudy reflection is sometimes better than none.

 from Wikipedia 

Tom Stone Gallery

Lax photography

Robert Lax (1915-2000), Untitled, 1970s; black and white photograph, 11 x 17 inches; Robert Lax Archives. St. Bonaventure University

https://www.burchfieldpenney.org/exhibitions/exhibition:04-13-2018-08-26-2018-merton-and-lax-image-and-word/

East & West

Photo by Thomas Merton

 "If I can unite in myself the thought and devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russian and the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians.

"From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians.

"If we want to bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other. If we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all the divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ."
 
- Thomas Merton, "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander", p. 12

A Door

Photo by Eugene Meatyard, The Fraenkel Gallery

 A door opens in the center of our being and we seem to fall through it into immense depths which, although they are infinite, are all accessible to us; all eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. God moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us.

— Thomas Merton

New Seeds of Contemplation

Pharisaism

Photograph of Gal Vihara by Thomas Merton

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.

Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as "an intelligent being"!)

But actually, what we desire is not "the truth" so much as "to be in the right."

To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.

What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness. This is not "the truth." It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."

And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong?

Because we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned.

We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as "truth."

What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved "right," and our iniquity be vindicated as "just."

No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!

And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us.

Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.

-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 78

photographs tangibly link the present to very precise moments of the past

Wendall Berry, Denise Levertov, Thomas Merton
Photo by Eugene Meatyard

"Monasticism. I see more and more the danger of identifying the monastic vocation and spirit with a particular kind of monastic consciousness -- a particular tradition, however "authentic." ... Maybe monasticism needs to be stated all over again in a new way. I have no way of knowing how to tackle this idea. It is just beginning to dawn on me." - Merton, February 6, 1967

Photo by Eugene Meatyard

"I myself am open and closed. When I reveal most I hide most. There is still something I have not said: but what it is I don't know, and maybe I have to say it by not saying. Word play won't do it. Writing this is most fun for me now, because in it I have finally got away from self-consciousness and introversion. It may be my final liberation from all diaries. Maybe that is my one remaining task." - Merton, October 2, 1967

The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us

Photograph by Thomas Merton 

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.

—	Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild. With thanks to Beyond the Fields We Know.

The art of living is based on rhythm

Photo by Thomas Merton

The art of living is based on rhythm - on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, ‘the dance of life,’ metamorphosis. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly. But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender. 

— Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart. With gratitude to Whiskey River.

sunrise

Picture taken at Kopua Monastery, New Zealand

http://neitherusenorornament.wordpress.com

The Sufi tell of the disciple who asked the elder, “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?”

“As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.”

“Then, of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?”

“To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.”

Joan Chittister

Anything you can grasp is not it

Photo of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

"Gene Meatyard's photographs, with their use of chance, motion, and multiple exposures, mirror the ever-changing ephemeral nature of the Self, which we normally fool ourselves into imagining as fixed and stable. When we open a book of photographic portraits, we are used to looking for how the photographer has captured the essence of his subject in a given image. 

These pictures don't do that. 

Rather than gratify what Merton called "the hunger of having a clear satisfying idea of who and what he is and where he stands," they subvert the whole notion of Essence, or of a Self to be captured. While some of the photographs tantalize us by catching Merton in what we imagine to be an especially revealing or even "spiritual" moment, others offer a blur, an awkward or even apparently unexpressive scene. Taken together, they present the lesson that Merton, like all of us, like any moment, cannot be grasped or fixed by an image, whether photographic or mental. 

Anything you can grasp is not it. 

Go after the Essence and you'll just come up with another moment's mask. (Ask Lucybell Crater.)"

- Barry Magid, from the Preface to "Father Louie, Photographs of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. 1991 Timken Publishers

time is the sphere of spontaneity

Photo of Thomas Merton by Eugene Meatyard

"… when the human being recovers, in Christ, the freedom of the Child of God, she lives in time without predetermination, because grace will always protect her freedom against the tyranny of evil. The Christian then knows that time does not murmur an implicit threat of enslavement and final destruction. Time on the contrary gives scope for her freedom and her love. Time gives free play to gratitude and to that sacrifice of praise which is the full expression of the Christian’s childship in the Spirit. In other words time does not limit freedom, but gives it scope for its exercise and for choice. Time for the Christian is then the sphere of her spontaneity, a sacramental gift in which she can allow her freedom to deploy itself in joy, in the creative virtuosity of choice that is always blessed with the full consciousness that God wants God's children to be free, that God is glorified by their freedom. For God takes pleasure not in dictating predetermined solutions to providential riddles, but in giving human beings the opportunity to choose and create for themselves solutions that are glorious in their very contingency."

Merton, Thomas (2010-04-01). Seasons of Celebration (p. 46). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Ordinary Life (Meatyard & Merton)

Photograph of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

"…Who was Gene Meatyard, or Thomas Merton, or Louie? 

I don't know. 

Their shared genius was to defy definition, to remain a blur, unpredictably and mysteriously alive. But don't think there was anything special about them. 

Emptied of the pursuit of specialness, we receive the grace of ordinary life, "as if existence itself were heavenliness."

- Barry Magid, from the Preface to "Father Louie, Photographs of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. 1991 Timken Publishers