connecting the dots

On this day that we honor, celebrate, and vow to continue to struggle the 50th anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King, we must remember something that was not heard in the official commemorations in Washington today: the way in which the struggle here at home in terms of poverty is related to the struggle abroad in terms of America’s militarism. 

We have to connect the dots between what Martin called the triple giant of evil: racism, materialism, and militarism.
Martin was pressured not to make this link, and in fact it took him from 1963 till the famed 1967 Riverside church speech to speak “against the apathy of my own soul” and break his own silence against the war in Vietnam. 

The result was powerful, controversial, and as of today, still a task for all the real followers of Martin to heed. 

- See more at: http://omidsafi.religionnews.com/2013/08/28/connectingdots/#comment-36876

See: The Martin Luther King connection 

Wonder

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder.  The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted.  Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. 

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.  It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension.  The greatest hindrance to such awareness is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches.  Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is therefore a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel

not knowing

NOT KNOWING

how would it be to allow for knowing
and not knowing:
allowing room
for the mystery
of creating
to be able to wonder
softly
without needing to understand everything
to trust in the process
to trust in love
to trust in the mystery and wonder
of the universe
that beats softly wildly
true
all round about us,
that is hidden
in the mists
in the clouds and the rain
in the wind blowing and the rain lashing down on your window,
reminding you
poetically
prosaically
that this is where you are,
on the island,
at the edge,
in a place of finding
and refinding,
and remembering
to remember
the feel of the mist, wind and rain.

—John O’Donohue

via: parabola-magazine.

thinking

from the Eckhart Tolle website.

learning to engage contemplatively in the dilemma of how difficult it is to live contemplatively

Sculpture by Jeanne Dueber SL

"... Here is a more generous, more robust approach to the dilemma of our ignorance.  This more generous approach consists, not of attempts to overcome our ignorance, but rather of a willingness to gaze deeply within it, learning its ways as we learn to get up with it in the morning and go to bed with it at night.  The tonality of this approach is not about methods of attainment but is the tonality of a willingness to see and accept the dark divinity of our plight of being trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of the life we are living. 

"In this humble self-knowledge there is the growing realization that this whole journey of contemplative self-transformation is not simply or primarily about "me" in my private quest for inner peace.  Rather it is about entering into the homelessness of the whole world being uniquely expressed in my experience of it.  Likewise, we begin to discover that the journey of which we find ourselves is not one of rising above or leaving behind our unaware self.  Rather, the journey consists of waking up and coming home to the divinity at once hidden and revealed in the dance of the now so near now so far away, the noble now so Oh-my-God-what-have-I-done stuff of our own life and the lives of those around us.." 

-James Finley, The Contemplative Heart, pp. 39

the contemplative loop

Sculpture by Jeanne Dueber, SL

" ... Sooner or later (usually sooner) our plan for contemplative living leads us directly into all the obstacles, within and without, which undermine our efforts. Those of us who have been on this contemplative journey for very long know full well how ineffective our plans for contemplative living tend to be. We can look back over our shoulder to see a trail of abandoned spiritualities, like so many cars that have run out of gas. Each, for an enthusiastic moment, seeming to be the long awaited point of arrival. Each leaving us, all too quickly, once again a malcontent in discovering ourselves to be, even after all our efforts, our plain old distracted self.

"But the realization of the extent to which our path seems to be paved with the shards of enthusiastic beginnings come to naught is not the only shortcoming to be faced. For this is, as well, the shortcoming of self-absorption. If we are not careful our efforts to commit ourselves to living a more contemplative way of life become suspiciously limited to an exclusionary process of attempting to rise above or leave behind all that is broken and lost within ourselves and others. In such approach our very efforts to overcome our ignorance become sublimated variations of the ignorance we are attempting to overcome."

- Jim Finley, The Contemplative Heart,  pp. 38-39

The lived experience of Church (we don't do this alone)

What is the lived experience of truly encountering the Church?

It is an experience of being loved unconditionally by a group of people who draw an unknown strength from their relationship together in the name of Jesus Christ.  It is an experience of coming home, of finding one’s place in the universe and in one’s own skin.  It is what we have always looked for without knowing it.  It is the delight and pain of being accepted by those who can see through us and know us better than we know ourselves.  It is the realization that we can be who we are because we are called by the experience itself to become who we are.  We can accept ourselves and everything that has happened to us and every thing we have done and not done.   

Thus, a Christian community is a group of people who seek to love one another as Jesus loves: incarnated unconditional love - mercy.  But true mercy only exists when we truly confront the sin and evil within us, calling it by name and helping each other to know truth about ourselves.  It is by sharing that unconditional life-giving love that the Church announces Jesus Christ to the world. 

- Martha Driscoll, OSCO (from the Gethsemani Visitors Center)