silence

true self/false self

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment
Chama River, Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Abiquiu, NM

The false self is your psychological creation of yourself in space and time. It comes from your early conditioning, family, roles, education, mind, culture, and religion. The false self is who you think you are! But thinking doesn’t make it so. The false self dies and passes away. Yet it is the raw material through which you discover your True Self in God, so you must not hate it or kill it. Just learn from it. Of itself, it does not know how to pray, because it does not understand simple presence, communion, or relationship. The false self is all about utility and “What can I get out of this?” Not bad, but very incomplete.
The True Self is not created by anything you have done right or wrong. Nor can you lose it by doing anything good or bad. The True Self is not formed by adhering to any requirements; it’s about relationship itself—the quality and capacity for connection. Only the True Self can pray. The false self will say prayers but the True Self is a prayer and looks out at reality from a different pair of eyes larger than its own. This is why in Ephesians it can say “pray always” (6:18). We pray always whenever we act in conscious and loving union with things—which eventually can be all the time. Then whatever you do is a prayer, not a recited prayer but a full-bodied, bigger-than-mind, contemplative prayer. When you are in your True Self, your prayer and your breath are the same thing.
– R. Rohr

Without Solitude

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone, and thus the measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.  –  Henri Nouwen, from The Genesee Diaries

solitude is….

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

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

Sweetness by Stephen Dunn

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear 
   one more friend 
waking with a tumor, one more maniac 

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness 
   has come 
and changed nothing in the world 

except the way I stumbled through it, 
   for a while lost 
in the ignorance of loving 

someone or something, the world shrunk 
   to mouth-size, 
hand-size, and never seeming small. 

I acknowledge there is no sweetness 
   that doesn’t leave a stain, 
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet …. 

Tonight a friend called to say his lover 
   was killed in a car 
he was driving. His voice was low 

and guttural, he repeated what he needed 
   to repeat, and I repeated 
the one or two words we have for such grief 

until we were speaking only in tones. 
   Often a sweetness comes 
as if on loan, stays just long enough 

to make sense of what it means to be alive, 
   then returns to its dark 
source. As for me, I don’t care 

where it’s been, or what bitter road 
   it’s traveled 
to come so far, to taste so good.

Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Chama River

To say that the world…

/ Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

“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.