Bring low the mountains of our pride.
My God, the children of the earth
find refuge in the shelter of your wings.
– Psalm 35
Moving Forward – Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
maranatha
Come, Lord Jesus, of the people…
bare trees in the hopeful sun
From Thomas Merton’s journal, November 25, 1967:
Strange feeling! Recapturing the freshness of those days when my whole monastic life was ahead of me, when all was still open: but now it is all behind me, and the years have closed in upon their silly, unsatisfactory history, one by one. But the air is like spring and fresh as ever. And I was amazed at it. Had to stop to gaze and wonder: loblolly pines we planted ten or fifteen years ago are twenty feet high…Flashing water of the lake. A blue jay flying down as bright as metal. I went over to the wood where the Jonathan Daniel sculptures are now, and read some selections from Origen. And again stood amazed at the quiet, the bright sun, the spring-like light. The sharp outline of the pasture. Knolls, the brightness of bare trees in the hopeful sun. And yet it is not spring. We are on the threshold of a harsh winter.
stillness
- Still my unforgiving thoughts, the grudges I nurse from my past, from the betrayals I’ve suffered, from the negativity and abuses I’ve been subject to. Quiet in me the guilt I carry from my own betrayals. Still in me all that’s wounded, unresolved, bitter, and unforgiving. Give the quiet that comes from forgiveness. from “A prayer for stillness” by Ronald Rolheiser (http://ronrolheiser.com/a-prayer-for-stillness/#.XALNfGhKiM8)
Bravo!
how did you find me here?
Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” John 21:12
Story XI. The Lion who Hunted with the Wolf and the Fox – Rumi
A lion took a wolf and a fox with him on a hunting excursion, and succeeded in catching a wild ox, an ibex, and a hare. He then directed the wolf to divide the prey. The wolf proposed to award the ox to the lion, the ibex to himself, and the hare to the fox. The lion was enraged with the wolf because he had presumed to talk of “I” and “Thou” and “My share” and “Thy share,” when it all belonged of right to the lion, and he slew the wolf with one blow of his paw. Then, turning to the fox, he ordered him to make the division. The fox, rendered wary by the fate of the wolf, replied that the whole should be the portion of the lion. The lion, pleased with his self-abnegation, gave it all up to him, saying, “Thou art no longer a fox, but myself.”
“Till man destroys ‘self’ he is no true friend of God.”
Once a man came and knocked at the door of his friend.
His friend said, “Who art thou, O faithful one?”
He said, “‘Tis I.” He answered, “There is no admittance.
There is no room for the ‘raw’ at my well-cooked feast.
Naught but fire of separation and absence
Can cook the raw one and free him from hypocrisy!
Since thy ‘self’ has not yet left thee,
Thou must be burned in fiery flames.”
The poor man went away, and for one whole year
Journeyed burning with grief for his friend’s absence.
His heart burned till it was cooked; then he went again
And drew near to the house of his friend.
He knocked at the door in fear and trepidation
Lest some careless word might fall from his lips.
His friend shouted, “Who is that at the door?”
He answered, “‘Tis Thou who art at the door, O Beloved!”
The friend said, “Since ‘tis I, let me come in,
There is not room for two ‘I’s in one house.”
Edge of Atlantic 