…And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. – Romans 5:3-5
we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
~ Psalm 66:12
Photo by Steve Johnson on Pexels.com
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? – Romans 8:35
Be still and know that I am God. – Psalm 46:10
Don’t judge a life as if you knew
Like you were there and saw it through
Measure a life by what was best
When they were better than the rest
Reserve your wrath for those who judge
Those quick to point and hold a grudge
Take them to task who only lead
While others pay, while others bleed
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
Time to catch my breath, slow my step. Stay tuned.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
“In a Zen koan, someone said that an enlightened man is not one who seeks Buddha or finds Buddha, but simply an ordinary man who has nothing left to do. Yet stopping is not arriving. To stop is to stay a million miles from it and to do nothing is to miss it by the whole width of the universe.
“As for arriving, when you arrive you are ruined. Yet how close the solution is: how simple it would be to have nothing more to do if only one had really nothing more to do.
“The man who is unripe cannot get there, no matter what he does or does not do. But the ripe fruit falls out of the tree without even thinking about it. Why?
“The man who is ripe discovers there was never anything to be done from the very beginning.”
– Thomas Merton’s Journal, March 10, 1963
“Every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest for those who search.”
– Gregory of Nyssa
“When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go” (John 21:18)
Edge of Atlantic 