Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
surrender
stopping is not arriving
“In a Zen koan, someone said that an enlightened man is not one who seeks Buddha or finds Buddha, but simply an ordinary man who has nothing left to do. Yet stopping is not arriving. To stop is to stay a million miles from it and to do nothing is to miss it by the whole width of the universe.
“As for arriving, when you arrive you are ruined. Yet how close the solution is: how simple it would be to have nothing more to do if only one had really nothing more to do.
“The man who is unripe cannot get there, no matter what he does or does not do. But the ripe fruit falls out of the tree without even thinking about it. Why?
“The man who is ripe discovers there was never anything to be done from the very beginning.”
– Thomas Merton’s Journal, March 10, 1963
“Every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest for those who search.”
– Gregory of Nyssa
transformation
“When you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go” (John 21:18)
Breathing Underwater by Sr. Carol Bieleck, RSCJ
I built my house by the sea.
Not on the sands, mind you,
not on the shifting sand.
And I built it of rock.
A strong house
by a strong sea.
And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.
Good neighbors.
Not that we spoke much.
We met in silences,
respectful, keeping our distance
but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.
Always the fence of sand our barrier,
always the sand between.
And then one day
(and I still don’t know how it happened)
The sea came.
Without warning.
Without welcome even.
Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,
less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.
Slow, but flowing like an open wound.
And I thought of flight, and I thought of drowning, and I thought of death.
But while I thought, the sea crept higher till it reached my door.
And I knew that there was neither flight nor death nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling you stop being good neighbors,
Well acquainted, friendly from a distance neighbors.
And you give your house for a coral castle
And you learn to breathe under water.
You can purchase Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and The Twelve Steps by Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Action and Contemplation Book Store http://store.cac.org/Breathing-Under-Water_p_15.html
First, there is the fall…
“First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!” – Lady Julian of Norwich
Listen to the spirit – Henri Nouwen
Living a spiritual life requires a change of heart, a conversion. Such a conversion may be marked by a sudden inner change, or it can take place through a long, quiet process of transformation. But it always involves an inner experience of oneness. We realize that we are in the center, and that from there all that is and all that takes place can be seen and understood as part of the mystery of God’s life with us. Our conflicts and pains, our tasks and promises, our families and friends, our activities and projects, our hopes and aspirations, no longer appear to us a fatiguing variety of things that we can barely keep together, but rather as affirmations and revelations of the new life of the Spirit in us. “All these other things,” which so occupied and preoccupied us, now come as gifts or challenges that strengthen and deepen the new life that we have discovered. This does not mean that the spiritual life makes things easier or takes our struggles and pains away. The lives of Jesus’ disciples clearly show that suffering does not diminish because of conversion. Sometimes it even becomes more intense. But our attention is no longer directed to the “more or less.” What matters is to listen attentively to the Spirit and to go obediently where we are being led, whether to a joyful or a painful place.
The only requirement is…
The only requirement for membership in AA is a desire to stop drinking.
Let me sum up, then, the foundational ways that I believe Jesus and the Twelve Steps of A.A. are saying the same thing but with different vocabulary:
We suffer to get well. We surrender to win. We die to live. We give it away to keep it.
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied, and avoided, until it is forced upon us – by some reality over which we are powerless – and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full reality. – Richard Rohr OFM, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
Wait
Wait – Galway Kinnell
Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.
Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.
Examen for the end of the week
I’ll meet you there
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there. – Rumi
I go to this field most every day looking for the person who introduced me to this line of Rumi’s. And I’m alone.
I’ll continue to go.
Edge of Atlantic 