How does a seed give thanks?

To give thanks is to recognize what has come to you.... How does the seed give thanks? It flowers. You take what you have, who you are, and you respond to the gift of that beingness with a course of action that aligns with it. You do what is in your nature.


Source: Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life


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A profound mystery

The leavening of yeast must have seemed to ancient men a profound mystery, and yet something on which they could always depend. Just so does the supernatural enter our natural life, working in the hiddenness, forcing the new life into every corner and making the dough expand.

If the dough were endowed with consciousness, it would not feel very comfortable while the yeast was working. Nor, as a rule, does our human nature feel very comfortable under the transforming action of God, steadily turning one kind of love into another kind of love--desire into charity, clutch into generosity, Eros into Agape.

Creation is change, and change is often painful and mysterious to us. Spiritual creation means a series of changes, which at last produce a Holiness, God's aim for us.

Source: Evelyn Underhill, The School of Charity

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Live Slowly

	God help us to live slowly: To move simply: To look softly: To allow emptiness: To let the heart create for us. Amen Source: Michael Leunig, The Prayer Tree Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Beatrice and Virgil - Yann Martel

Long awaited (by me) new book by Yann Martel - Beatrice and Virgil - reviewed here by The Rabbit Room - love this quote oh so much:

I leave you with Martel’s own words via Beatrice, a donkey accompanying his monkey companion, Virgil, during their walking conversation.

Virgil: I was thinking about faith.

Beatrice: Were you?

Virgil: Faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow? Can you shake that area of darkness that clings to you, always shaped like, as if constantly to remind you of yourself? You can’t. This shadow is doubt. And it goes wherever you go as long as you stay in the sun. And who wouldn’t want to be in the sun?

When ideas become defenses

We operate with the assumption that giving people new ideas changes people. It doesn’t. Believing ideas is, in fact, a way of not having to change in any significant way, especially if you can argue about them. Ideas become defenses.

If you have the right words, you are considered an orthodox and law-abiding Christian. We burned people at the stake for not having the right words, but never to my knowledge for failing to love or forgive, or to care for the poor. Religion has had a love affair with words and correct ideas, whereas Jesus loved people, who are always imperfect.

You do not have to substantially change to think some new ideas. You always have to change to love and forgive ordinary people. We love any religion that asks us to change other people. We avoid any religion that keeps telling us to change.

Richard Rohr, Adapted from How Men Change: A Thin Time (CD, DVD, MP3)

Just lengthen the chain

Here Is Where We Meet, John Berger,

The mother says, “Let a few things be repaired. A few is a lot. One thing repaired changes a thousand others.” The son replies, “So?” And out flows a maternal speech:

"The dog down there is on too short a chain. Change it, lengthen it. Then he’ll be able to reach the shade, and he’ll lie down and he’ll stop barking. And the silence will remind the mother she wanted a canary in a cage in the kitchen. And when the canary sings, she’ll do more ironing. And the father’s shoulders in a freshly ironed shirt will ache less when he goes to work. And so when he comes home he’ll sometimes joke, like he used to, with his teenage daughter. And the daughter will change her mind and decide, just this once, to bring her love home one evening. And on another evening, the father will propose to the young man that they go fishing together… Who in the wide world knows? Just lengthen the chain."

In this season of peace, may you lengthen a dog’s chain. And then see what happens.

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This is why the questions are important

If the world is to change, first I have to change. The way I change (often kicking and screaming) is by coming to where the abyss of faith is located. I believe in a new way: not by suppressing the questions and the doubts, but by living more and more deeply into the questions and the doubts. I come to faith in a God who is paradoxically revealed in the very struggle to name God. The closer I get, the more I am questioned in my questioning, the more I am probed in my probing. I begin to wonder how it all fits together, especially when I don't fit together too well myself. I feel naked and exposed and frightened....

My fear and anger are very useful, provided I am able to resist that first panicked impulse to run. If I stand still in whatever cave I've been pushed into, my anger and fear can be a means to my understanding more clearly and with precision what is going on, not only within me but in the world.... Doesn't God reveal God's self in the areas of our greatest weakness--in our questioning, our probing, our suffering and our anger? I believe God does. This is why the questions are important. They stretch and enlarge the heart so that it is capable of receiving a deeper revelation. They expand our horizons. It would be strange if we didn't find this enlarging and expanding process deeply disturbing.

The simple truth is that reality reveals its secrets to us in proportion to the level of our willingness to ask questions. We receive "answers" to fit the kind of "questions" we pose. If our questions are narrowly and unimaginatively conceived, the answers will be, too.

Source: Alan Jones, Soul Making

via inward/outward

When the mind and heart are one

This echos so much of what I said in my last talk at church - I agree wholeheartedly and find that comfort with which we divide ourselves is so commonplace that we don't even question it any more.

Richard Rohr:

When our brain is separated from our heart we will invariably think dualistically, because we ourselves are split. The last 500 years, when we came to rely upon printed words for truth, rational thinking was idealized into what we ironically call “The Enlightenment” (largely beginning in the18th century). This period separated the mind from the heart rather totally, and we might add, since this time war has been almost non stop, and Christianity began to divide into all head people or all heart people, as we often still have today. Both lose half of the picture.

When the human person is split, we find ourselves either in a “war culture”—or in the culture wars that we have in America today—or both. It seems we have to hate somebody or something when we cannot resolve the contradictions that are everywhere—first of all within ourselves. As Jesus said, “the lamp of the body is the eye” (Luke 11:34). And the eye sees most truthfully when it looks out from that place where the mind and the heart are one.

Raising my voice

When a man is singing and cannot lift his voice, and another comes and sings with him, another who can lift his voice, the first will be able to lift his voice too. That is the secret of the bond between spirits.

Source: Martin Buber, Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings

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First with ourselves

Openness is the sign of a fully human life. It leads to the capacity to give life to others. It is important to know our own selves, and that we are different from others, and to be compassionate, first with ourselves.

- Jean Vanier, A Human Future, November 04.

My new tag line

Blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.

Groucho Marx

Renovatus

“The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”

- Samuel Beckett

via Today I Love

Clear a decent shelter

You must be able to bear your sorrow; even if it seems to crush you, you will be able to stand up again, for human beings are so strong, and your sorrow must become an integral part of yourself, part of your body and your soul, you mustn't run away from it, but bear it like an adult.... Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.

But if you do not clear a decent shelter for your sorrow, and instead reserve most of the space inside you for hatred and thoughts of revenge--from which new sorrows will be born for others--then sorrow will never cease in this world and will multiply. And if you have given sorrow the space its gentle origins demand, then you may truly say: life is beautiful and so rich. So beautiful and so rich that it makes you want to believe in God.

Source: Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

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Lighten up

"Humor is the prelude to faith
and laughter is the beginning of prayer"

Reinhold Neibuhr

Perspective

At night, as I lie in the camp on my plank bed, surrounded by women and girls...dreaming aloud, quietly sobbing and tossing and turning, I am sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness. And I lie awake for hours, letting the impressions of a much-too-long day wash over me. And I pray, "Let me, oh Lord, be the thinking heart of these barracks." That's what I want to be.... The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp. I lie here patiently, and now calmly, and feel a lot better. I feel strength returning. I've stopped making plans and worrying about risks. Happen what may, it's bound to be for the good.

Source: An Interrupted Life: the Journal of a Young Jewish Woman, Etty Hillesum

This is exactly what I needed today - perspective.

Oh to be a thinking heart in the midst of my circumstances.

via Inward/Outward

Sunbeams

It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

- Robert Southey (1774-1843, From A Word A Day)

via Deegy

Running against the wind

via vol. 25 (quote credit) (image credit)

One giant step

"Sometimes we have to "step over" our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there. Then we become the "offended one," "the forgotten one," or the "discarded one." Yes, we can get attached to these negative identities and even take morbid pleasure in them. It might be good to have a look at these dark feelings and explore where they come from, but there comes a moment to step over them, leave them behind and travel on."

Henri Nouwen

Merry Christmas!

Miracles are a retelling
in small letters
of the very same story
which is written across
the whole world
in letters too large
for some of us to see.

C S Lewis

Red Energy

“Someday, after we have mastered the wind, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the human race, we will have discovered fire.”

Pierre Teilhard Chardin

via Divine Nobodies