From the American poet, Robert Lax:

Unconditional love. That’s the bottom line. Everything is here because of love. That’s why we were created — to love. Love keeps things going, not just for now, but forever. Love gives life and makes sure what’s around today will be around tomorrow. It’s all about compassion. That’s what the cosmos best responds to. 

Every moment is a gift. Relax, get into the moment, and do all you can to listen to it. I mean, really, really listen. Be present to the moment with everything you are.
It takes practice. After you’ve listened for a while, you start responding. I think you start working your gifts in response to what you’ve heard. You become appreciative of the moment. You give back because you begin to see how everything is on loan, a gift from God. 

Learn how to look. Take time to look to see what’s right there in front of you, to let what you see sink in. When you look at a flower opening or a tree moving with the wind, you just relax and take it all in. Try and see everything like that, if you can. 

Looking and listening lead into everything….. You become more totally aware of reality. It’s so true — everything we need to live well is already within our possession. Wisdom is right before our very eyes. 

Be gentle and patient both with yourself and with others, no matter what comes along. In this way, waiting becomes a fulfilling, very meaningful experience. If you live gently, honorably, focusing on the cultivation of your heart, good things are sure to follow. 

Prayer is a way of doing instantaneous good for all things in all places. It’s a way of sending out love everywhere at one. It’s a power that everyone has access to, and it can transfigure the world. Prayer makes everything you do more real, lasting, meaningful and fruitful. Through prayer, everything just flowers and flows. 

Try to live as purely and as simply and as gently as you can. Relax. Be flexible. Be forgiving. Be creative. Be loving. You are a peacemaker. Those who cross your path may need you. 

Listen, be discerning, use all the radar you can generate in your waking moments. Try to keep the balance. The whole world’s watching, counting on you to do the right thing, the loving thing. So let in the light whenever, wherever you can.

From http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/wisdom-robert-lax-cultivate-exercise-compassion and based on “The Way of the Dreamcatcher: Spirit Lessons with Robert Lax, Poet, Peacemaker and Sage” by Steve Georgiou.

Christ in the Desert

Earlier this month I visited this monastery in Abiquiu, New Mexico.

"The place was chosen with careful deliberation, and it is admirable. Thirteen miles by dirt road from the nearest highway, the monastery rises at the point where the canyon narrows and road vanishes into rock and brush. Still surrounded by visible traces of an ancient Pueblo culture, it is at the frontier on which the Pueblos had to protect their country against marauding Apaches. 

"The rocky land is even more lonely and desolate today than it was then (for the Indian villages have disappeared). The monastic Church, designed by the Japanese architect George Nakashima, fits perfectly into its setting. Stark, lonely, stately in its simplicity, it gazes out over the sparse irrigated fields into the widening valley. The tower is like a watchman looking for something or someone of whom it does not speak. This architectural masterpiece is a perfect expression, in adobe brick and plaster, of the monastic spirit. 

"Monastic hospitality does not conflict with the "desert spirit" -- on the contrary, it is an essential element in the desert tradition, for the first monks had to be concerned for the welfare of those who got lost in the desert, or came to them in spiritual crisis."

- Thomas Merton, who visited this monastery in 1968

Here are some more photos of the monastery:

 I had always assumed that this was a Trappist monastery, since Merton made special effort to visit here before his trip to Asia in 1968.  However after seeing how different these monks looked (and acted), dressed all in black rather than the black and white habit of the Trappist, I found out that they were a Benedictine order of monks.

I've come to the conclusion that Merton made the visit more from an artistic than religious interest (as if the two can be separated in him).  The monastery was built in 1964, the church designed by George Nakashima, a Japanese American woodworker and architect.

Merton also hoped to visit with Georgia O'Keeffe while he was in Abiquiu, but that didn't work out.

The monastery is 13 miles off the main road, deep in the quiet wildness of the northern New Mexico desert.  Not an easy place to get to.

Website of George Nakashima

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