Appalling Barbarity

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Thus we became highly disciplined, organized, and rational on one side, but the other side remained a suppressed primitive, cut off from education and civilization.

This explains our many relapses into the most appalling barbarity, and it also explains the really terrible fact that, the higher we climb the mountain of scientific and technical achievement, the more dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inventions. Think of the great triumph of the human mind, the power to fly: we have accomplished the age-old dream of humanity! And think of the bombing raids of modern warfare! Is this what civilization means? Is it not rather a convincing demonstration of the fact that, when our mind went up to conquer the skies, our other man, that suppressed barbarous individual, went down to hell? Certainly our civilization can be proud of its achievements, yet we have to be ashamed of ourselves.
– Carl Jung, from Psychology and the East

Authentic freedom

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Authentic freedom and love will not be captured by attachment. Therefore, the journey homeward does not lead toward new, more sophisticated addictions. If it is truly homeward, it leads toward liberation from addiction altogether. Obviously, it is a lifelong process… There is a strange sadness in this growing freedom. Our souls may have been scarred […]

Authentic freedom

A prayer for Holy Saturday by Kathleen Norris –

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We praise and thank you, Lord, for the uncertain, in-between times in our lives when we can be still and know that you are God. We praise and thank you for the hidden wonders of each day. We praise and thank you for acts of kindness, great and small, that serve to bring about your kingdom. We praise and thank you for the courage to place ourselves under your protection, not allowing fear to have the upper hand. We praise and thank you for your patience with our weakness, for being willing to work in and through us in ways we do not understand. We praise and thank you for our emptiness, which will one day be filled with your love. We praise and thank you for the silent wonders you work in us, preparing us for a life that will find its completion in you. Amen.

Saint Judas by James Wright

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When I went out to kill myself, I caught
A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.
Running to spare his suffering, I forgot
My name, my number, how my day began,
How soldiers milled around the garden stone
And sang amusing songs; how all that day
Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone
Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,
Stripped, kneed, and left to cry.  Dropping my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh.  Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms.

wrestling with God

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“Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makários?” I asked him.

“Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength…. I wrestle with God.”

“With God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?”

“I hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.”

– Nikos Kazantzakis, from Report to Greco

If

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If there are obstacles, it cannot be space

If there are numbers, it cannot be stars

If it moves and shakes, it cannot be a mountain

If it grows and shrinks, it cannot be an ocean

If it must be crossed by a bridge, it cannot be a river

If it can be grasped, it cannot be a rainbow

These are the six parables of outer perception

-Milarepa

…in order to arrive

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In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
– T.S. Eliot, from East Coker