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
What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash–at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.
–Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
When we give a thing a name we imagine we have got hold of it. We imagine that we have got hold of being. Perhaps we should do better not to flatter ourselves too soon that we can name God.
–Gregory of Nyssa
We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us. Their presence awakens silence in us. They refresh our courage with the purity of their detachment. – Andrew Harvey
a memory of Van Gogh by Anton Kerssemakers, found in “Van Gogh: a self portrait, letters revealing his life as a painter, selected by W.H. Auden”
In those days he was starving like a true Bohemian, and more than once it happened that he did not see meat (for the purpose of eating) for six weeks on end, always just dry bread with a chunk of cheese. It won’t go bad on the road, he would say. The following story may serve as proof that he was quite accustomed to this and would not have it otherwise. Once in Nuenen, when we were about to set out on a ramble-it was in the afternoon at the height of summer-I said, “To begin with we’ll have a pot of coffee made in that inn over there, and eat a lot of bread and butter with trimmings, then we shall be able to keep going until late this evening.”
No sooner said than done, for he invariably consented to whatever you proposed.
The table was well furnished with various kinds of bread, cheese, sliced ham and so on.
When I looked, I saw he was eating dry bread and cheese, and I said, “Come on, Vincent, do take some ham, and butter your bread, and put some sugar in your coffee; after all, it has to be paid for whether you eat it or not.”
“No,” he said, “that would be coddling myself too much: bread and cheese is what I am used to,” and he calmly went on eating.
“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?
Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?
And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.
It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Wisdom 13:2-5
…but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.
And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them.
For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.
Pale sunlight, pale the wall.
Love moves away. The light changes.
I need more grace than I thought.
In Italy halfway
between Firenze
and Greccio
woodsmoke
settles in valleys
like mist in
fallow fields
a cold sun rising
on the 12th day
of Christmas
time to
put the baby
back in the box
with the animals
saints angels
all you holy people
hush
Edge of Atlantic 