Why a rule of life can be so valuable

The Society of St. John the Evangelist is an Episcopal monastic order for men. This particular monastery is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.



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Keeping a holy Lent

Artist: Margret Hofheinz-Döring

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Hmmm. Has anybody ever thought of giving up hurry for Lent?

"To be impatient is to be hooked on the future."

— Gerald Jampolsky

All of the great spiritual teachers I've ever studied have emphasized the importance and, indeed, the holiness of the present moment. May I suggest that we use whatever Lenten discipline we may have chosen as a way of helping us be truly mindful of the here and now.
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Spiritual reflection on Downton Abbey

Artist: George Hendrik Breitner

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Today I happened to come across a short piece by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, the authors of the outstanding website entitled "Spirituality and Practice".  Do take a look:

10 Spiritual Takes on Downton Abbey

Here's a sample:

6. The series as a whole provides a poignant and diverse presentation of the dynamics of emotional literacy as played out in the lives of the upstairs aristocracy and the downstairs staff.

7. We realize that the web of life revolves around our relationships with others and that we should see others not as adversaries but as fellow-travelers on the path of wisdom and insight.
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9. The variety of characters in the drama show us the irrational and disturbing aspects of our behavior and give us glimpses of our hidden shadow sides.

There is material for our spiritual lives and for doing our inner work absolutely everywhere.
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The importance of mystery in a person's life

Artist: Heinrich Tomec

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Do pardon the repeated use of generic masculine language in this passage by G. K. Chesterton and consider the times in which it was written. (It is just too good, in my opinion, not to it use it for that reason alone.)

From what I can discern, by "the ordinary man", Chesterton is referring to the person who is not particularly sophisticated in the sense, perhaps, of being thoroughly up to date in some regard. He seems to contrast this with "the morbid logician" to which he refers toward the end of this passage:

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus, he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus, he believes that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.

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Really believing that we are accepted

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Today, I'd like to share with you a couple of brief excerpts from a sermon I preached some time ago. I stumbled upon it this morning while looking for something else.

I feel as strongly about this today as I did when I first preached it.

I'd love to hear some response about Tillich's great "acceptance" passage if anyone is so inclined!

Here you go:

“Sometimes… a wave of light breaks into our darkness and it is as if a voice were saying, ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you… Do not seek for anything…; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.’” 

The great theologian Paul Tillich said that. And as far as I’m concerned nothing else he wrote comes close to the power, the startling, staggering, perfect truth of this famous “acceptance” statement. If I were the rector of a Church I think I would be tempted to repeat this quote to the same people every Sunday for a year, I think it is so important.
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Can you accept the fact that you are accepted? It sounds so simple – perhaps too simple. But this acceptance is exactly what Paul is talking about when he says, “if justification comes through the law, then Christ died for nothing.”
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What an extraordinary a gift it is to be accepted! How dare we think it is too easy! Surely there is something else we have to do! Do you think Tillich’s statement is too easy? “Accept that you are accepted?” I did. Until I tried it. Anyone who has spent much time in silent meditation knows how difficult it is to be completely aware of our own thoughts and feelings and then to accept them – unconditionally. I cannot sit for five minutes – probably not even one minute – in such a total acceptance. Yes, the way of acceptance is a crucifixion. It hurts. It kills. And what it kills is that which must die if we are ever to say, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

In case you want to know, this part of the sermon was referring to Galatians 2:11-21.
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The importance of keeping our heart open

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Something about happiness

Artist: Gerrit van Honthorst

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I found this wonderful little paragraph by Thomas Keating over on Inward/Outward - a website hosted by the forward thinking Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C.

Keating's observation is very much in line with the meditative principle that suffering arises from grasping and attachments. I also really like his compassion in recognizing that one reason people are caught up in grasping is because they've been deprived. We can truly benefit from giving a like compassion to ourselves:

"We are made for happiness and there is nothing wrong in reaching out for it. Unfortunately, most of us are so deprived of happiness that as soon as it comes along, we reach out for it with all our strength and try to hang on to it for dear life. That is the mistake. The best way to receive it is to give it away. If you give everything back to God, you will always be empty, and when you are empty, there is more room for God."

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A living and vigilant silence

Artist: Olof Hermelin

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Oh, this passage by Thomas Merton is so, so beautiful. As much as I once wished for it, the life he describes here has not turned out to be my year-round, routine, life vocation. But I've had enough extended periods like this to cherish its value very deeply indeed:

"To deliver oneself up, hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hill, or sea, or desert: to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence."

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Something about understanding the universe

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here are two very interesting quotations taken from an interview of the mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme:

The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light... It's just bizarre... a particle has it's own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light... there's no time. That's bizarre ... that we can, right now, as you know, see — interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So ... from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation.
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So I do think I do think absolutely that ... there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that ... some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated.

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Something about self-pity

Artist: Henri d Toulouse-Lautrec

Image from Wikimedia Commons

One of my Facebook friends posted the following today by Inayat Khan. I do think it is a very insightful observation:

"If one studies one's surroundings one finds that those who are happy are so because they have less thought of self. If they are unhappy it is because they think of themselves too much. A person is more bearable when he thinks less of himself. And a person is unbearable when he is always thinking of himself. There are many miseries in life, but the greatest misery is self-pity."

Now, I want to hasten to add that self-pity is not the same as self-compassion. It's very important that we have compassion for ourselves because (among other reasons) if we don't, we are likely to project that lack of compassion onto others.

Self-pity is not only unattractive, it is profoundly dis-empowering.

When you think about it, Jesus was never given to self-pity. But he certainly had compassion on himself as well as on others.
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Spiritual practice idea

Artist: Georg Friedrich Kersting

Image from Wikimedia Commons

My goodness. I have actually done this (and it is a work in progress). I didn't realize before that Ralph Waldo Emerson recommended the practice:

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

I have benefited hugely from my little collection, by the way. I really do urge everyone to try it.
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The power of empathy

Artist: Alexej Kondratjewitsch Sawrassow

Image from Wikimedia Commons

All right. The following is actually a Zen koan but just think about it for a while and I think it will come to you why I put it here.

One day Chao-chou fell down in the snow and called out, "Help me up! Help me up!" A monk came and lay down beside him Chao-chou got up and went away.

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The big problem with self-righteousness

Artist: Nicolas Poussin

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The late William Sloane Coffin was (and still is) one of my heroes in life. Here's something he said that I'm not sure I ever came across before today:

The temptation to moralize is strong; it is emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems, to seek out culprits rather than flaws in the system. God knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that nourishes itself on the blood of sinners. But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can be spiritually devastating.

Yes, it is spiritually devastating to judge others and, more than that, to justify judging others. Oh, certainly we can be intensely provoked at times. I suppose what really matters is if, upon recognizing how judgmental we have become, we are grieved by that state of affairs or whether we are determined to continue feeling smug and gratified.
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Radiating from one center

Artist: Henri Rousseau

Image from Wikimedia Commons

For what it's worth, this really resonates with me:

Mystics report that every bit of the world radiates from one center - every cricket, every grain of dust, every dream, every image, everything under the sun or beyond the sun, all art and myth and wildness.  If they are right, then we have no more important task than to seek that center.

-- Scott Russell Sanders
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The delicacy of Christ

Artist: Albert Edelfelt

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I know I post a lot about silence on this blog. I want to mention here that a person does not have to have an aptitude or preference for long periods of silence to benefit from the principle so beautifully honored in the quotation below.  Just a minute or so of intentional silence from time to time makes a huge difference in a person's life. Please trust me on this one!

"It is only in identifying with Christ, it is only by plunging into the great silence of God within myself, that I can love and identify with others. It is by listening to the great silence of God, and having this strange, passive dialogue in which I become aware of the silence which is the speech of God--it is only by listening to this that I am able to speak to my brother. It is only by listening to this silence that I can acquire the ingenuity of love, the delicacy of Christ in my human relationships. In this silence I become identified with Christ, I acquire a listening heart."

-- Catherine de Hueck Doherty

Interconnectedness

Artist: Caspar David Friedrich

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here is a passage from a book by Terence Grant entitled The Silence of Unknowing. I think he's saying something terribly important here. Our collective lack of comprehension regarding how fundamentally connected we are is directly responsible for the prevailing belief that we can only succeed through competition and hostility.

Christ is the vine, we are the branches. We labor under the delusion that we are isolated from other people. The consequences are fear, suspicion and conflict--all of which are destroying our world today. Imagine what would happen if people were to drop this fantasy of separateness. What if even just the Christians were to let go of this delusion? What if we were to move beyond our little, separate self to discover our true Self, this shining sun that each of us is? There would be a revolution.

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Something about purpose

Artist: Fritz von Uhde

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I'm quite certain I've posted the following before but I'm not sure where. I think it is utterly true and worthy of ongoing reflection:

"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?"

-- George Eliot

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Making friends with silence

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes I think that the loveliest, wisest, most generous thing we can do for ourselves is to make friends with silence. I see much suffering taking place within and also surrounding those unfortunates who cannot tolerate the depth and richness of experience with true silence. Here are a few thoughts and observations:

Silence is exhilarating at first - as noise is - but there is a sweetness to silence outlasting exhilaration, akin to the sweetness of listening and the velvet of sleep.- Edward Hoagland

Not merely an absence of noise, Real Silence begins when a reasonable being withdraws from the noise in order to find peace and order in his inner sanctuary.- Peter Minard

Silence is as deep as eternity; speech, shallow as time. - Thomas Carlyle

Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment. - Henry David Thoreau

And then, of course, there is my favorite (and this has been said by many but it was first told me by Bishop Mark Dyer):

"Silence is the language of God; anything else is a bad translation."
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Twelfth Night reflections

From an essay by Dan Clendenin:

As I think about Epiphany, the disclosure or unveiling of the birth of Christ in all its multi-faceted dimensions, it is clear to me that the experience of disclosure is a life long journey. It is an always unfinished task. The issues of exclusion and power above are only the tip of the iceberg. Every day we ask the Lord to reveal, to unveil to us, aspects of our lives that the Christ Child claims—work, money, family, use of our time, friendships, and on and on. We pray that he would remove the scales from our spiritual eyes so that by some miracle we understand our own lives in the same manner that He does, as far as that is possible for fallen human beings.

(Image above from Wikimedia Commons)
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Receptivity to the Christ

Artist: Donatello

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Is this not, perhaps, what we mean at Christmas time when we ask Christ to be born in us?

We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near. We can be kind to each other. We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen.

-- Frederick Buechner

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