Today grant work to laborers, bread to the hungry, joy to the sorrowful,
— grace and redemption to all people.
prayer
The truth is formed in silence
The truth is formed in silence and work and suffering – with which we become true. But we interfere with God’s work by talking too much about ourselves – even telling God what we ought to do – advising God how to make us perfect and listening for God’s voice to answer us with approval. We soon grow impatient and turn aside from the silence that disturbs us (the silence in which God’s work can best be done), and we invent the answer and the approval which will never come. Thomas Merton, journal entry November 12, 1952
Give us strength in temptation, endurance in trial, and gratitude in prosperity.
Help us to spend this day in the spirit of joy.
photo: Solvang, CA December 2017
quail
I went out on the porch before dawn to think of these things, and the words of Ezekiel (22:30): “And I sought among them for a man that might set up a hedge and stand in the gap before me in favor of the land that I might not destroy it, and I found none.” And while I was standing there, quails began to whistle all over the field and in the wood. I had not heard any for weeks and thought sure they were all dead, for there have been hunters everywhere. No, there they are! Signs of life, of gentleness, of helplessness, of providence, of love. They just keep on existing and loving and making more quails and whistling in the bushes. – Thomas Merton, journal entry November 7, 1965
The house without a window is Hell…
The house without a window is Hell:
to make a window is the foundation of true religion.
Don’t thrust your axe upon every thicket:
come, use your axe to cut open a window.
~ Rumi
Photo: Assisi 2005
a fellowship of the weak
Fear, shame, and guilt often make us stay in our isolation and prevent us from realizing that our handicap, whatever it is, can always become the way to an intimate and healing fellowship in which we come to know one another as humans. After all, everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual, physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. Only when we use these symptoms of mortality to form a fellowship of the weak can hope emerge. It is in the confession of our brokenness that the real strength of new and everlasting life can be affirmed and made visible. – Henri Nouwen
Photo: Portland, ME – November 2017
Something inside the moth…
A Mystic and a Drunk – Rumi
The universe turns on an axis.
Let my soul circle around a table
like a beggar, like a planet
rolling in the vast, totally helpless and free.
The Knight and the castle move jaggedly
about the chessboard, but they’re actually
centered on the king. They circle.
If love is your center, a ring
gets put on your finger.
Something inside the moth
is made of fire.
A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.
A drunkard thinks peeing is absolution.
Lord, take these impurities from me.
The lord replies, First, understand
the nature of impurity. If your key is bent,
the lock will not open.
I fall silent.
King Shams has come.
Always when I close, he opens.
Photo: Alba Street, Portland, ME – September 2013
Return to the most human
Return, return to the deep sources, nothing less
Will teach the stiff hands a new way to serve,
To carve into our lives the forms of tenderness
And still that ancient necessary pain preserve.
We must go down into the dungeons of the heart,
To the dark places where modern mind imprisons
All that is not defined and thought apart.
We must let out the terrible creative visions.
Return to the most human, nothing less
Will teach the angry spirit, the bewildered heart,
The torn mind, to accept the whole of its duress,
And pierced with anguish, at last act for love.
– May Sarton, Santos: New Mexico
Monastery of Christ in The Desert (crosses)
Edge of Atlantic 