If you see someone going up to heaven by his own will, grab his leg and pull him down again.
– John Kolobos, one of the desert fathers
pull him down
A gentle person
Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu.
Gentle is the one who does “not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick” (Matthew 12:20). Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force. Let’s dress ourselves with gentleness. In our tough and often unbending world our gentleness can be a vivid reminder of the presence of God among us.
– Henri Nouwen
sometimes a man – Rilke
Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.
square water
As another sacred hadith has Allah say, “I am as my loving servant imagines me to be.” The water takes on the quality of the cup. Blue cup, blue water. Square cup, square water.
– physicians of the heart, p. 193
be careful
Until yesterday you were distracted, so although so much of the bardo state has appeared you have not recognised, and you have so much fear. If you are distracted now, the rope of compassion will be cut off and you will go to a place where there is no liberation, so be careful.
– Tibetan Book of The Dead
Hu
“Hu,” the aspirant, breathy sound made at the end of the word Allah, is a sound that is hidden as a divine Name within each recitation of Allah. The relationship that Allah and Hu have with each other describes the nature of ecstasy. It does so by conveying that there is a secret within the secret. The subtle way the sound “Hu” arises at the end of the invocation “Allah” also suggests an infinite process of essence of essence of essence…
– physicians of the heart, p. 190
if you don’t have – Rumi
if you don’t have
enough madness in you
go and rehabilitate yourself
if you’ve lost a hundred times
the chess game of this life
be prepared to lose one more
if you’re the wounded string
of a harp on this stage
play once more then resonate no more
if you’re that exhausted bird
fighting a falcon for too long
make a comeback and be strong
you’ve carved a wooden horse
riding and calling it real
fooling yourself in life
though only a wooden horse
ride it again my friend
and gallop to the next post
you’ve never really listened
to what God has always
tried to tell you
yet you keep hoping
after your mock prayers
salvation will arrive
how was YOUR day?
Rumi
The man who writes…
The man who writes has an oppressive and unhappy fate. This is because the nature of his work obliges him to use words; that is, to convert his inner surge into immobility. Every word is an adamantine shell which encloses a great explosive force. To discover its meaning you must let it burst inside you like a bomb and in this way liberate the soul which it imprisons.
Once there was a rabbi who always made his will and tearfully bade farewell to his wife and children before he went to the synagogue to pray, for he never knew if he would emerge from the prayer alive. As he used to say, “When I pronounce a word, for instance Lord, this word shatters my heart. I am terror-stricken and do not know if I shall be able to make the leap to the following words: have pity on me.”
O for the person able to read a poem in this way, or the word massacre, or a letter from the woman he loves-or this Report by a man who struggled much in his life and yet managed to accomplish so very little!
– Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
Edge of Atlantic 