As weakness itself

The nominal Christian pays homage to something about Jesus,
rather than worshipping the man himself. For this reason,
nominal Christians will extol the moral teachings of Jesus,
the faith of Jesus, the personality of Jesus, the compassion
of Jesus, the world view of Jesus, the self-understanding
of Jesus, etc. None of these worships Jesus as the Christ,
but only something about him, something peripheral to the
actual flesh-and-blood man. This is why when the almighty
God came into the world in Jesus, he came as the lowest of
the low, as weakness itself, as a complete and utter
nothing, in order that we would be forced into the crucial
decision about him alone and would not be able to worship
anything about him.
- Robert L. Short, "Gospel According to Peanuts"

The Pruned Tree

As a torn paper might seal up its side,
Or a streak of water stich itself to silk
And disappear, my wound has been healing,
And I am made more beautiful by losses.
See the flat water in the distance nodding
Approval, the light that fell in love with statues,
Seeing me alive, turn its motion toward me.
Shorn, I rejoice in what was taken from me.

What can the moonlight do with my new shape
But trace and retrace its miracles of order?
I stand, waiting for the strange reaction
Of insects who knew me in my larger self,
Unkempt, in a naturalness I did not love.
Even the dog's voice rings with a new echo,
And all the little leaves I shed are singing,
Singing to the moon of shapely newness.

Somewhere what I lost I hope is springing
To life again. The roofs, astonished by me,
Are taking new bearings in the night, the owl
Is crying for a further wisdom, the lilac
Putting forth its strongest scent to find me.
Butterflies, like sails in grooves, are winging
Out of the water to wash me, wash me.
Now, I am stirring like a seed in China.

~Harold Moss

The very narrow way

There remains for us only the very narrow way,
often extremely difficult to find, of living
every day as though it were our last, and yet
living in faith and responsibility as though
there were to be a great future.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), "After Ten Years"

Which Path

"The immature think that knowledge and action are different, but the wise see them as the same. The person who is established in one path will attain the rewards of both. The goal of knowledge and the goal of service are the same; those who fail to see this are blind."

~Bhagavad Gita

So chaotic that God cannot

There is no situation so chaotic that God cannot
from that situation create something that is
surpassingly good. He did it at the creation.
He did it at the cross. He is doing it today.
- Handley Moule (1841-1920)

Grace and Peace

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest win the grace of the world, and am free.


~Wendell Berry

Desire

"When God fills and adept with the desire to comprehend His essence, knowledge becomes vision, vision, revelation, revelation contemplation, and contemplation existence in God. Words are hushed to silence, life becomes death, explanations come to an end, signs are effaced and disputes are cleared up."

~Junayd from "Rabi'a the Mystic"

A great solemn gladness

To us here, death is the most terrible word we know.
But when we have tasted its reality, it will mean to
us birth, deliverance, a new creation of ourselves.
It will be what health is to the sick man. It will be
what home is to the exile. It will be what the loved
one given back is to the bereaved. As we draw near to
it, a great solemn gladness should fill our hearts.
It is God's great morning lighting up the sky.
- George Spring Merriam (1843-1914),
"A Living Faith" [1876]

The Spirit of Love

. . . and you have not the Spirit of Love in you till you
have this will to all goodness at all times and on all occasions.
You may indeed do many works of love and delight in them,
especially at such times as they are not inconvenient to your
state or temper or occurrences in life. But the Spirit of Love
is not in you till it is the spirit of your life, till you live
freely, willingly, and universally according to it.
- William Law (1686-1761), "The Spirit of Love" [1752-4]

Hope in Perspective

How easy it is to lose perspective--the wisdom perspective. It is in our DNA to move down into the details of life and temporal existence (and we should and we do go there)... but what wisdom wants from us is that at the same time we are living there, to "keep perspective" (to be awake to the larger, grander vision of things -- to the cosmic perspective).

How easy it is to lose it. Perhaps we lose it and find it every day, several times a day... I go back to sleep into our "granular worldview" and that is all we can or do see [for awhile, until I am reawakened by someone/something--the divine Spirit, perhaps].

When I'm down in my granularity-without-vision -- into the temporal details (which are still given to me to oversee)... the only perspective that remains, typically, is my own egoic view... "how everything effects me" ... I just simply, naturally return to that ordinary vision of things and respond from there. It is there, too, that I lose hope—for I cannot see past myself, and past the overwhelming conditions that sometimes overtake me.

It is so easy to go there, into that closed space. So we must fight for breath in the wider, cosmic-wisdom vision. Recover it, if we can. Sometimes do and sometimes I don't. Sometimes when we do it fades away quickly, and so we’re back into the smaller, narrower seeing. Perhaps were back into the darkness.

The only real control we have (and it comes and goes, as I said), is to seek to maintain this perspective, the wider vision. It is, of course, a struggle, especially when you get pulled down into the mundane details – "how is everything affecting ME." But then, there is hope, for we are raised by the Sacred Spirit into new seeing, into new hope over and over again.

He accompanies him everywhere

Some souls think that the Holy Spirit is very far away,
far, far, up above. Actually he is, we might say, the
divine Person who is most closely present to the creature.
He accompanies him everywhere. He penetrates him with
himself. He calls him, he protects him. He makes of him
his living temple. He defends him. He helps him. He guards
him from all his enemies. He is closer to him than his own
soul. All the good a soul accomplishes, it carries out
under his inspiration, in his light, by his grace and
his help.
- Concepcion Cabrera de Armida

God's house is a place of peace

After a hard day scrambling to find your way
around in the world, it's assuring to come
home to a place you know. God can be equally
familiar to you. With time you can learn where
to go for nourishment, where to hide for
protection , where to turn for guidance. Just
as your earthly house is a place of refuge,
so God's house is a place of peace.
- Max Lucado

Evolution

"If you look back at the great jumps in the spiral of evolution--from pre-life to life, or single cell to animal, or animal to human--there are recurring patterns. When a species is young, it's rapacious, territorial, and competitive, and then it hits a limit to its own growth. Then, either it learns to negotiate and cooperate with its competitors and unify at a higher level, or it goes extinct. So the set of global conditions, althought they're unprecendented for us, are actually like a fractal of patterns that have occurred in the past. It's natural that an intelligent species would be successful enought to hit the limits of its own growth without knowing it was going to do so. It's natural that through our successes we have over industrialized, over populated, polluted and used up our environment. It may be that the whole predicament is a natural and that this intelligent species, which has finally gained an understanding of the atom, the gene, and the brain, in now getting a signal: evolve or die."

~Barbara Marx Hubbard

Movement

The movement which is the existence of the universe
is the movement of love.

--Ibn al-'Arabi, Fusûs al-Hikam

The Heart (Kardia) Is "Smart"

"The Heart holds All to itself, making no distinction between manifest and unmanifest, good or evil. At the same time, it is perfectly discriminating, because it is not at all entranced. It is not entranced because the origin of the Heart is not personal but transcendent. The Heart is not a product of history but of Emptiness. Emptiness means 'without exception'. Therefore, there is no landmark to limit the Heart. When the Heart is Empty, every way is the Way."

~Jason Shulman, The Instruction Manual For Receiving God

Spiritual Confidence

"Spiritual confidence is the unique and palpable sense of absolute conviction that cannot be affected by external or internal fluctuations. It's knowing, before you know, that you know. It's the highest gift and blessing that comes only from the deepest insight into the true nature of things, that destroys existential doubt and frees the human soul. It's a confidence that comes from knowing that mystery which is ungraspable. The kind of spiritual confidence I'm speaking about is different from any other kind of confidence we might be familiar with, because it comes from a very different source and from a very different part of the self."

~ Andrew Cohen

Hindu "Sermon on the Mount"?

Negative feelings, such as violence, are damaging to life, whether we act upon them ourselves, or cause or condone them in others. They are born of greed, anger, or delusion, and may be slight, moderate, or intense. Their fruit is endless ignorance and suffering. To remember this is to cultivate the opposite.

- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Only His bare Word

He commonly brings His help in our greatest extremity,
and that His finger may plainly appear in our deliverance.
And this method He chooses that we may not trust upon
anything that we see or feel, as we are always apt to do,
but only His bare Word, which we may depend upon
in every state.
- A. H. Von Bogatzky