Serving Humanity

How can I best serve humanity?
By being a healer, a teacher, a friend, a loving spouse and a loving parent. I can serve by leading by example, by being genuine and authentic.
By being prepared to expose myself, to break down the persona, to peel back the layers and living the real truth of who I am.
By walking through this world with a quiet mind and open heart.
To live in the now, to face my perceived fears, to feel compassion, to see the divine in all of life.
To see the divine in all of humanity - no matter what the colour, race, sexuality, creed, age, or walk of life they may come from.
To look into the eyes of another human being, and look into the depths of their soul, to see the divine with in.
To talk with passion and not just speak, to listen without judgment and not just hear, to look with the eyes of wonderment and not just see.
To live from a place of truth, respect, forgiveness, acceptance, freedom, harmony, spiritual connection and love.

Mark Coleman

The Life and Work of a Monk

This morning in my reading I came across this wonderful quote:

The ascetic [the monk] is simply a stunningly normal person who expresses "a kind of Zen in the art of maintaining a life of 'right worship' [or praxis]" in the face of an abnormal world in which violence, greed, and arrogance have become the norm. ... the asceticism at issue here has as its goal the activation of aesthetic capacities that lie dormant in all of us. Such an ascetic wants to be rooted, embodied, alive, real. The goal is not "faith in God" or "belief" in a doctrine, or even to discover the "meaning" of life, but the simple enactment of a form of life, a life of "right worship," which provides the living foundation for all doctrine, all belief, all theology, and without which they are empty shells. -- After Prophecy, by Tom Cheetham, p. 46.

Light

The light of God is an ornament of wisdom. That is the meaning of "light upon light." The light of reason draws toward the earth. The light of God carries you aloft. Things of reason are of the lower world. The light of God is an ocean, reason merely a dewdrop.

-Rumi

The Idol Called "God"

Our recent discussions have certainly added many voices to an interesting and critical issue: what is the future of the Order? Related to this, of course, is what is the future of religion itself, and in particular the Abrahamic faiths? We have a capacity in the Order to look at the three Abrahamic faiths as manifestations of a single stream of sacred tradition, and in certain ways we have been doing that with some ease.

Recently I have been reading Tom Cheetham's new book, After Prophecy, and have benefited from a similar discussion in his writing. His question is, what happens after the conclusion of the prophetic traditions themselves? What becomes of prophecy? His answers are interesting and his exploration is through the work of a very important 20th century scholar, Henry Corbin. In this text Cheetham also references Thomas Merton's comment that we may be being brought to the point where we need to create a "new language of prayer" which Merton feels transcends all our traditions but comes out of the "immediacy of love." Corbin called this new language Harmonia Abrahamica. And Cheetham says about this new language, for example:

An idolatrous version of the personal God of the monotheistic tradition can stand in the way of our entry into the plenitude of life in which we are immersed. For too may people, "God" has bcome reduced to the image of an infinite ego. The word "God" is so compromised, so covered over with our images and projections, our confused hopes and self-centered desires, that we are blinded to the immensities in which we breathe. The new language of prayer that Merton was searching for beyond all the traditions can perhaps be found by letting go even of the idea of God (p. 31).

This is an astounding statement, and one that perhaps impinges on our discussion even about the use of the word "Christianity." Could the same be said of that word? If we began to use a "higher language" here, what would it be?

Karen Armstrong on TED Talks

People want to be religious,
says scholar Karen Armstrong;
we should act to help make religion a force for harmony.
She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion --
to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious do.
Karen Armstrong is a provocative,
original thinker on the role of religion in the modern world


http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/234

A Christian

Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists--
A Poet a Painter a Musician and Architect:
the Man or Woman who is not one of these
is not a Christian.
--William Blake