Paul Goodman –
Suppose you had the revolution you are talking and dreaming about. Suppose your side had won, and you had the kind of society that you wanted. How would you live, you personally, in that society? Start living that way now!
mercy
Today a Leaf (for William Merwin) – Gerald Stern
Today it was just a dry leaf that told me
I should live for love.
It wasn’t the six birds sitting like little angels
in the white birch tree,
or the knife I use to carve my pear with.
It was a leaf, that had read Tolstoi, and Krishnamurti,
that had loved William James,
and put sweet Jesus under him where he could be safe forever.
“The world is so bright,” he said. “You should see the light.”
“We are born without defenses, both babies and leaves.”
“The branch is necessary but it’s in the way.”
“I am not afraid. I am never afraid.”
The he stretched his imaginary body
this way and that.
He weighs half a gram, is brown and green,
with two large mold spots on one side, and a stem
that curls away, as if with a little pride,
and he could be easily swept up and forgotten,
but oh he taught me love for two good hours,
and helped me with starvation, and dread, and dancing.
As far as I’m concerned his grave is here
beside me,
next to the telephone and the cupful of yellow pencils,
under the window, in the rich and lovely presence
of Franz Joseph Haydn and Domenico Scarlatti and Gustav Mahler
forever.
Photo: Grindstone, Maine – September 2019
Many will Come – Rachel Srubas
Today, may I walk in right paths, in God’s light. May peace prosper the steps of my family and friends, in city streets and buildings, and among all nations.
Today, may people stream from east and west to converge in God’s neighborhood. May nations labor to dismantle barricades. May our city be a just, peaceable center, united and vibrant. May my friends and relations strive for the good of each other, and may I remember I am neither higher nor lower than a servant.
Today, may east and west meet in my right and left hands, complementing, comprehending one another.
In my body, may north and south correspond, lifting my mind above worry, grounding my feet on the earth.
Today may I know what I am: created, not self-made, instructed to walk and work in God’s ways.
May I hammer old knives into new spoons, old enmities into love.
May I respect the least functional part of myself as surely as Jesus cherishes a paralytic slave and saves him with a word.
May the shriveled and disused part of my heart be bathed in God’s mercy today, that I might see sunlight for what it is: the gaze that beholds and heals us all.
In a banquet hall spacious enough for a whole world of nations, may I rest among neighbors and strangers, friends and relations.
May we feast among prophets on food grown in plowed mountain soil, reaped with weapons repurposed as tools.
Photo by Airam Dato-on on Pexels.com
Our suffering today is psychological, relational, and addictive; it is the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. This is a crisis of meaninglessness, which leads us to seek meaning in possessions, perks, prestige, and power-all things that lie outside the self. When these things fail to give us meaning, we turn to ingesting food, drink, or drugs, or we become mass consumers to fill the emptiness within. Bill Wilson and his Alcoholics Anonymous movement have shown us that the only way to stop seeking, needing, or abusing outer power is to find the real power within. The movement’s twelve-step program walks us back out of our addictive society. Like all steps toward truth and Spirit, the twelve steps lead us downward, to the power within, which the program rightly refers to as our Higher Power. – Richard Rohr
People who are oppressed or poor know every day that the current system is not just. They have little to lose and everything to gain by seeking justice. People on the top invariably support the status quo. Why wouldn’t they? It’s working for them. You will always want to “conserve” the system that has got you where you are. Without empathy for those Jesus called “the least of the brothers and sisters,” our politics on left or right will reflect self-interest and show little concern for the actual common good. Starting with the Exodus, and Yahweh’s identification with the enslaved Israelites, the Scriptures consistently show a rather clear bias toward the bottom of society as the necessary starting point. Any other starting point has far too much to protect and cannot hear or speak what is necessary for the common good. – Richard Rohr
between dog and wolf
Feast of St. George
A happy feast day to all my dear Companions of St. George, wherever you are in the world – Let faith be your shield and let joy be your steed ‘gainst the dragons of anger and the ogres of greed. And let me set free with the sword of my youth, from the castle of darkness the power of truth.
Saint Judas – James Wright
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.
spiritual privacy
Secrecy and solitude are values that belong to the very essence of personality.
A person is a person in so far as he has a secret and is a solitude of his own that cannot be communicated to anyone else. If I love a person, I will love that which most makes him a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of his own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand.
A love that breaks into the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open all his secrets and besiege his solitude with importunity does not love him: it seeks to destroy what is best in him, and what is most intimately his. – Thomas Merton
Edge of Atlantic 