blessings

The Bright Field, R.S. Thomas

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the

pearl of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realise now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after

an imagined past. It is the turning

aside like Moses to the miracle

of the lit bush, to a brightness

that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Falmouth Road, Windham, ME

poverty is a success

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Thomas Merton ~

When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.

Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.

Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.

What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.

it pisses God off….

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I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool in the world can see [God is] always trying to please us back…. always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect it.   – Alice Walker, from The Color Purple

solitude is….

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Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute non connection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself.   – John O’Donohue, from Anam Cara

escaping the cage of the ego

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Sometimes our spiritual programs take us far away from our inner belonging. We become addicted to the methods and programs of psychology and religion. We become so desperate to learn how to be, that our lives pass, and we neglect the practice of being. One of the lovely things in the Celtic mind is its sense of spontaneity, which is one of the greatest spiritual gifts. To be spontaneous is to escape the cage of the ego by trusting that which is beyond the self. One of the greatest enemies of spiritual belonging is the ego. The ego does not reflect the real shape of one’s individuality. The ego is the false self born out of fear and defensiveness. The ego is a protective crust that we draw around our affections. It is created out of timidity, the failure to trust the Other and to respect our own Otherness. One of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul. The ego is threatened, competitive, and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more toward surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh. Real soul has humor, irony, and no obsessive self-seriousness. It avoids what is weary, worn, or repetitive. The image of the well breaking out of the hard, crusted ground is an illuminating image for the freshness that can suddenly dawn within the heart that remains open to experience. – John O’Donohue from Anam Cara

growing old

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But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.The best way to overcome it—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.  

Bertrand Russell, from How to Grow Old

On the Feast of St. James the Greater (for Joe C., who died on this day in 2000)

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striped bass

On the Feast of St. James the Greater
(for Joe C.)

This is where
he would have fished

imagine
him in the dark

gathering gear
stripers transfiguring

the moon’s
light he loses

all balance and
bearings thunder

muffling the dry
night sky

what we heard
is in the mist

blowing over
Ram Island

disappearing
like walks

we’ll never take

Inexhaustible Forgiveness

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Al-Ghaffar is inexhaustible forgiveness. It is repetitive. Even though you may repeat the same error over and over again, you never come to the end of God’s forgiveness, which is inexhaustible. A form of the root of al-Ghaffar means a substance bees make that the Arabs used to fill in the cracks of a dried- out, old leather water skin, so that it no longer leaks. Divine forgiveness repairs human dryness and brittleness in a similar way

Invocation of Ya Ghaffar offers a healing salve that is an antidote for self-loathing, guilt, and blame. It is especially useful to bring this emanation of divine forgiveness into the places where you have been marked by impressions of self-deficiency that have been reinforced time and again. Al-Ghaffar brings moisture back into the system. An even more complete realization of the nature of divine forgiveness may occur when this Name is paired in repetition with Ya Ghafur, which shares the same root.

From Physicians of the Heart: A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah