*
3 ladies move synchronously in the studio while their light clothing, consisting of blue exercise bikinis, moves silently with them, hardly a beat behind. And as they dance they are very mildly disturbed by the sense of shadows on the periphery: men watching. They ever so slightly wish the men would go away.
And the men watching the 3 ladies think the world is perfect, beautiful, couldn't be better. They watch and watch, they take a breath and then watch.
The thing about our maker is that he is so quiet, so reticent. There are long swatches of our lives in which he doesn't impose his presence, doesn't impose. It is easy to play with the fantasy that his attention has been drawn away, for a moment or two -- that he is at least provisionally absent. As though things were explicable all by themselves.
The men imagine the ladies dancing forever. All will be well, no one will die, nothing intends to change, beauty moves like the workings in a clock. The ladies while they dance try to think of nothing at all.
*
In the shower the men wash themselves slowly and think of themselves as very ugly, which they are not. But this is the way they seem to themselves.
*
In the foyer, a woman with blue eyes discreetly adjusts her wrinkles and her jewels. She exudes the smell of money: a metallic mixture of flowers. How it intimidates by not being anything you can quite describe! I would like to join your little gym today, she says. I plan to become oh so very buff and, I don't know, drop 20 years from my age. Just like this.
Wrinkles like fled insects. Cut through the air. Standing in front of the stupefied clerk, Duessa does just that: drops 20 years in an instant. It is as shocking as if she'd disrobed. Look how terrified he is. His soul dangles a foot away. She thinks of tossing it into her mouth like a snack, devouring him. He sags into his chair. Not sure why. Not sure why.
Why doesn't she feel any pleasure? She has all this power to demolish people or, better still, make them small and leave them half alive, so that their death can be played with and savored. But it doesn't feel good anymore. It isn't fun. It doesn't give her any satisfaction to be bad.
It is as though evil were nothing more than a low fashion that had had its very short day. And when the day is past the fashion addict needs to go onto something new but suddenly there is nothing new. Because evil has eaten up the world and left no residue, nothing at least that an evil person can recognize. So there is nowhere to go and nothing to develop. The cultural entity is bankrupt.
She stands paralyzed. Her daughter, who doesn't even see her, walks past her and leaves the workplace heading for home, walking as though to a goal, walking as though having a goal, and so having something that her mother no longer has.
Damn you forever, you rotten little wretch, her mother says, watching her daughter transcend her.
*
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Dance as worship
*
It is worship. The person doing it does not even have to ask. Let's say a dancing master's instruction says to connect with movement space A and space B. It can always be done without grace. But then there is a way with every movement that fills it from within and turns it into how and not what. The movement is not merely done but done with a line that makes it beautiful and whole. You can feel that that movement has come from the world that God created perfect, "very good".
No words adhere to that movement. It is itself.
Of that movement you do not have to ask why does it exist? why was it made?
It completes its own why by being made.
An entire day can seem justified if you have made such a movement once. Making it is a privilege and a thrill. One two three, one two three.
*
However, every such movement also has a fluttering dark underside, like a ribbon.
The question always has to be faced: is movement like speaking in tongues? Is it, even though connected to God, not very edifying to the world? What work does it really do for the person watching it? Is it sterile? Is it, God forbid, "art"?
(Keep your head up, dear. Tighten those abs.)
Even if it is worship, is it a worship that is needed by anyone? Is it more like some musician showing off?
When a dancer has such a thought, her movement breaks and falters. It loses its involute quality, it hesitates and speaks.
(One two three, keep counting, love. At least you have that.)
"E cosa seria il ballo," dancing is serious business. The statement of a complete fool. Dancing isn't serious at all.
Nobody is farther from worship than the rich pagan who gets disturbed during her lovely yoga class because some child has run by and turned her divine serenity into a chicken salad. How could anything be worship that can't accommodate a child??? Or a noise? Or randomness? Or ugliness?
If it shuts out the world it simply can't be worship. The heavy lady lumbering to the altar for eucharist, she is a thousand times better dancer than you. She breaks the heavenly line and God rushes in, utterly happy to cushion the springs of her mountain. Always the low he likes to make high. So the crippled are better dancers than I. One two three, oh well. Start again. Incorporate your fall in your spiritual growth. You will do it again, be ready.
Elf the dance teacher floats through the training room. Generally she makes one mistake after another. The mistakes are the beautiful part.
Even if you don't make them, the mistakes are all still there. They are in the room hovering over you even though you don't make them. When you do make them it's just that they become visible.
So what is beautiful here is by no means made by you. It's yours as a gift. But only if you keep counting!
*
It is worship. The person doing it does not even have to ask. Let's say a dancing master's instruction says to connect with movement space A and space B. It can always be done without grace. But then there is a way with every movement that fills it from within and turns it into how and not what. The movement is not merely done but done with a line that makes it beautiful and whole. You can feel that that movement has come from the world that God created perfect, "very good".
No words adhere to that movement. It is itself.
Of that movement you do not have to ask why does it exist? why was it made?
It completes its own why by being made.
An entire day can seem justified if you have made such a movement once. Making it is a privilege and a thrill. One two three, one two three.
*
However, every such movement also has a fluttering dark underside, like a ribbon.
The question always has to be faced: is movement like speaking in tongues? Is it, even though connected to God, not very edifying to the world? What work does it really do for the person watching it? Is it sterile? Is it, God forbid, "art"?
(Keep your head up, dear. Tighten those abs.)
Even if it is worship, is it a worship that is needed by anyone? Is it more like some musician showing off?
When a dancer has such a thought, her movement breaks and falters. It loses its involute quality, it hesitates and speaks.
(One two three, keep counting, love. At least you have that.)
"E cosa seria il ballo," dancing is serious business. The statement of a complete fool. Dancing isn't serious at all.
Nobody is farther from worship than the rich pagan who gets disturbed during her lovely yoga class because some child has run by and turned her divine serenity into a chicken salad. How could anything be worship that can't accommodate a child??? Or a noise? Or randomness? Or ugliness?
If it shuts out the world it simply can't be worship. The heavy lady lumbering to the altar for eucharist, she is a thousand times better dancer than you. She breaks the heavenly line and God rushes in, utterly happy to cushion the springs of her mountain. Always the low he likes to make high. So the crippled are better dancers than I. One two three, oh well. Start again. Incorporate your fall in your spiritual growth. You will do it again, be ready.
Elf the dance teacher floats through the training room. Generally she makes one mistake after another. The mistakes are the beautiful part.
Even if you don't make them, the mistakes are all still there. They are in the room hovering over you even though you don't make them. When you do make them it's just that they become visible.
So what is beautiful here is by no means made by you. It's yours as a gift. But only if you keep counting!
*
The self as cracked
*
Imagine yourself as the softest substance, raw egg within its shell. When the egg cracks you fall through the white pieces of your container. You do not cease to exist, the self still exists, but you lose all control over this self that exists. You fall into God's hands.
The substance is now cupped in God's hands.
It will now be God who acts, not you. If the hands open and the self dissolves, it will be God's act, not your own.
How happy is the soft substance of the self, knowing that the acts that will occur will now be God's acts. The justice on earth that the self always wanted, without knowing exactly how or exactly what -- not knowing the least detail of its concrete shape -- that justice is now possible. The one who knows what it is will now be in a position to bring it about. Some blockage has been removed. Not you but your blockage, that has been removed.
And look: everyone is still alive.
*
Imagine yourself as the softest substance, raw egg within its shell. When the egg cracks you fall through the white pieces of your container. You do not cease to exist, the self still exists, but you lose all control over this self that exists. You fall into God's hands.
The substance is now cupped in God's hands.
It will now be God who acts, not you. If the hands open and the self dissolves, it will be God's act, not your own.
How happy is the soft substance of the self, knowing that the acts that will occur will now be God's acts. The justice on earth that the self always wanted, without knowing exactly how or exactly what -- not knowing the least detail of its concrete shape -- that justice is now possible. The one who knows what it is will now be in a position to bring it about. Some blockage has been removed. Not you but your blockage, that has been removed.
And look: everyone is still alive.
*
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
A vow about vows
*
So one vows not to vow. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." So I will do exactly that, I tell the Lord. Indeed I will not vow, I promise you, I will simply do what I am supposed to do. Yes, but your old conundrum emerges like a sea monster, your vow not to vow is itself a vow. You must get out of words, Mr Soul, and let Body do the talking. Behave like a Christian, don't just talk like one. And Mr Soul nods his head and says: Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. I will follow what you say. I promise. I promise!
*
Tongue, you sharpened razor. Go back into your sheath!
*
So one vows not to vow. "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." So I will do exactly that, I tell the Lord. Indeed I will not vow, I promise you, I will simply do what I am supposed to do. Yes, but your old conundrum emerges like a sea monster, your vow not to vow is itself a vow. You must get out of words, Mr Soul, and let Body do the talking. Behave like a Christian, don't just talk like one. And Mr Soul nods his head and says: Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. I will follow what you say. I promise. I promise!
*
Tongue, you sharpened razor. Go back into your sheath!
*
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Do not do it!
*
Duessa as if threw her eyeball over the bus line from city to city, a remote device to watch the man she knew was corresponding with her daughter. And the poor man never knew. He merely shivered and faltered.
*
"You are good and you bring forth good." Father Sam made a vow during the previous Lent neither to touch alcohol nor to let the thought of alcohol remotely touch *him*. What a worthy vow. He would walk around strutting even when in fact he was sitting down. A dynamite vow! I am so proud!
Progress! I have made progress!
There was now less blocking of his own presence in the divine presence. And this presence was the summation of his faith. It was an inundation. Every Christian knows that belief in God actually follows from the presence, felt first, which is why all our proof arguments seem so futile and misdirected. The presence is the proof.
Look at me, Sam said. I am on the way to health.
And a step closer to my Lord. Because "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word."
Then came a bad day, when a stranger went ballistic on him in the corner store and his paychecks stopped and his health began to shrink inward. Lent felt shredded and full of holes, not forever, but just for an instant -- a tiny interval that was wide enough to fall through. My holiness is just a front and this I have always known. The stranger walked away, almost mindless -- like a robot that the devil had infected and used.
Poor Sam, how the bar called tohim now. He was inside drinking before he'd even made the decision to do it or refrain. There wasn't time to say Don't do it! There was no space for any vow. The devil moves at the speed of light or probably faster still, this is the privilege of its utter depravity. I will leave you now, please take care, Satan said. Such a soft spoken and caring person. Walked out of the bar, leaving his new friend bereft and hardly upright.
But in the morning Sam found himself on an old parishioner's couch. Shaken awake. Each second more more conscious of who he was and what he had just done. No no no. Only a complete moron would succumb so *easily* and be such a soft touch for evil. The shame of being so *easily* corrupted.
But Father you are never really cured of this one, his parishioner said. You have to step down from your little dais now.
But I made a vow! Sam said.
Oh but there can be no more vows like yours. A broken vow is just bad behavior. Why not try to behave from moment to moment until this turns into day to day, and then week to week? Save your vowing breath and use it to perform what it behooves you to do. Not so much later as right now.
Give it a try? Why not?
*
And the sight of a bottle finally came to turn Sam's stomach, so that he had less need of a vow and no need to break it. The pain had broken things in advance so that it was not a vow that now occurred but a different kind of revulsion, a turning away. And he let his body lead his soul away.
*
Duessa as if threw her eyeball over the bus line from city to city, a remote device to watch the man she knew was corresponding with her daughter. And the poor man never knew. He merely shivered and faltered.
*
"You are good and you bring forth good." Father Sam made a vow during the previous Lent neither to touch alcohol nor to let the thought of alcohol remotely touch *him*. What a worthy vow. He would walk around strutting even when in fact he was sitting down. A dynamite vow! I am so proud!
Progress! I have made progress!
There was now less blocking of his own presence in the divine presence. And this presence was the summation of his faith. It was an inundation. Every Christian knows that belief in God actually follows from the presence, felt first, which is why all our proof arguments seem so futile and misdirected. The presence is the proof.
Look at me, Sam said. I am on the way to health.
And a step closer to my Lord. Because "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word."
Then came a bad day, when a stranger went ballistic on him in the corner store and his paychecks stopped and his health began to shrink inward. Lent felt shredded and full of holes, not forever, but just for an instant -- a tiny interval that was wide enough to fall through. My holiness is just a front and this I have always known. The stranger walked away, almost mindless -- like a robot that the devil had infected and used.
Poor Sam, how the bar called tohim now. He was inside drinking before he'd even made the decision to do it or refrain. There wasn't time to say Don't do it! There was no space for any vow. The devil moves at the speed of light or probably faster still, this is the privilege of its utter depravity. I will leave you now, please take care, Satan said. Such a soft spoken and caring person. Walked out of the bar, leaving his new friend bereft and hardly upright.
But in the morning Sam found himself on an old parishioner's couch. Shaken awake. Each second more more conscious of who he was and what he had just done. No no no. Only a complete moron would succumb so *easily* and be such a soft touch for evil. The shame of being so *easily* corrupted.
But Father you are never really cured of this one, his parishioner said. You have to step down from your little dais now.
But I made a vow! Sam said.
Oh but there can be no more vows like yours. A broken vow is just bad behavior. Why not try to behave from moment to moment until this turns into day to day, and then week to week? Save your vowing breath and use it to perform what it behooves you to do. Not so much later as right now.
Give it a try? Why not?
*
And the sight of a bottle finally came to turn Sam's stomach, so that he had less need of a vow and no need to break it. The pain had broken things in advance so that it was not a vow that now occurred but a different kind of revulsion, a turning away. And he let his body lead his soul away.
*
Sonnet of postponed joy
*
The rain cries out Postpone
postpone postpone! and those who are depressed
decide to be depressed another day.
They know the sun will come indeed they feel
the sun remotely -- like a coil
of time whose darkness just repeats
our darkness of last year in silvery beats
a pulse to which the soul submits
so gladly secretly -- postpone
the happiness postpone postpone
the joy -- have it but not
quite yet have it but not quite yet
just savor do not have and so
joy comes and comes but faintly does it flow.
*
The rain cries out Postpone
postpone postpone! and those who are depressed
decide to be depressed another day.
They know the sun will come indeed they feel
the sun remotely -- like a coil
of time whose darkness just repeats
our darkness of last year in silvery beats
a pulse to which the soul submits
so gladly secretly -- postpone
the happiness postpone postpone
the joy -- have it but not
quite yet have it but not quite yet
just savor do not have and so
joy comes and comes but faintly does it flow.
*
Monday, April 11, 2005
This thing – this routine -- called “Worship”
*
Old time members told the story – for it wasn’t deep enough to be a parable, it was just a story – of the lady who’d lost her mother and father in less than a week’s time. The surviving family had come together to grieve and then her brother had slapped her with a lawsuit, some sort of pre-emptive move to secure all of the inheritance. That spring she would always seem to be heaving the dry offspew of blocked tears into her tissue with one hand while warding off the blows of her brother’s lawyers with the other. Only someone who has been through this can know how unfunny and grim it feels. And is.
She gained 30 pounds in 3 months. She stopped sleeping and thinking. Her little prayer book whispered to her and couldn’t console her – because in the first months nothing could – but it did keep her alive. Because those little prayers, she couldn’t feel them but somehow she could still distantly *know* them – know that their comfort still existed on the other side of a locked door. A door temporarily locked. And someday “they” were going to unlock that door and embrace her again. It was a promise. It got her through. But she admitted, just barely.
Meanwhile what? Driving to clerks and appointments, driving to offices, filling out forms. Living the semblance of a forward daily life. She seemed to spend hours in her car.
She would turn her ignition and corny Christian rock would come on and then her blocked tears flowed at last, because here was the place for her: the last solitary place left on earth is a car. And just listen to those songs! When she reached her destination she would turn the key counterclockwise and just like that the tears snapped shut, her face was dry. It was a routine as chaste as a rosary. A grasp of an invisible hand. And so very slowly she got through the terrible months until a sort of attachment to life returned (and the frivolous nasty suit was dismissed). She told her friends that she stopped listening to the songs but that they play inside her continuously nonetheless. Or like a lifted needle you could say they hover ready until they are needed again. (And they will be.)
Why did these songs turn her feelings on like a spigot? Why did she need the mechanism of the radio to enable her to feel what she actually felt?
She didn’t tell us that. But sometimes she would ask the other ladies what they thought: why do you suppose it is that when we already do in fact worship, when our faith is already a fact, why do you suppose it is that we need this routine, this entity, this weekly impetus and prodding – this *worship*? Why do we need this routine so very badly?
*
Old time members told the story – for it wasn’t deep enough to be a parable, it was just a story – of the lady who’d lost her mother and father in less than a week’s time. The surviving family had come together to grieve and then her brother had slapped her with a lawsuit, some sort of pre-emptive move to secure all of the inheritance. That spring she would always seem to be heaving the dry offspew of blocked tears into her tissue with one hand while warding off the blows of her brother’s lawyers with the other. Only someone who has been through this can know how unfunny and grim it feels. And is.
She gained 30 pounds in 3 months. She stopped sleeping and thinking. Her little prayer book whispered to her and couldn’t console her – because in the first months nothing could – but it did keep her alive. Because those little prayers, she couldn’t feel them but somehow she could still distantly *know* them – know that their comfort still existed on the other side of a locked door. A door temporarily locked. And someday “they” were going to unlock that door and embrace her again. It was a promise. It got her through. But she admitted, just barely.
Meanwhile what? Driving to clerks and appointments, driving to offices, filling out forms. Living the semblance of a forward daily life. She seemed to spend hours in her car.
She would turn her ignition and corny Christian rock would come on and then her blocked tears flowed at last, because here was the place for her: the last solitary place left on earth is a car. And just listen to those songs! When she reached her destination she would turn the key counterclockwise and just like that the tears snapped shut, her face was dry. It was a routine as chaste as a rosary. A grasp of an invisible hand. And so very slowly she got through the terrible months until a sort of attachment to life returned (and the frivolous nasty suit was dismissed). She told her friends that she stopped listening to the songs but that they play inside her continuously nonetheless. Or like a lifted needle you could say they hover ready until they are needed again. (And they will be.)
Why did these songs turn her feelings on like a spigot? Why did she need the mechanism of the radio to enable her to feel what she actually felt?
She didn’t tell us that. But sometimes she would ask the other ladies what they thought: why do you suppose it is that when we already do in fact worship, when our faith is already a fact, why do you suppose it is that we need this routine, this entity, this weekly impetus and prodding – this *worship*? Why do we need this routine so very badly?
*
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Poor rich poor -- sad happy sad
*
She was poor but she was rich. Her being rich was poor in that she didn't know how long (or even whether) it would last. So there was an inner poverty to the comfort she temporarily felt, a feeling of its only being for a time. Meanwhile her being poor was rich.
Poverty was rich insofar as it didn't worry and didn't bother about worrying. It was actually sufficient, for now and now and now. It was comfortable not because it was but because it had decided to be, no matter what. It didn't fret about what it didn't have. The moment it fretted it became poor, even if its supply of money was bottomless. Bottomless!
So the sense of being well off was a state of mind that had nothing really to do with money. Except that the state of mind itself was a bit like money, in that it could be collected or spent.
And if she thought about it in that finite way ("collected or spent") then she became poor no matter how much she had.
But there was always a point at which poverty stopped. And that point was always rich.
*
Prayer and behavior -- in the world -- they must be a single seamless entity, a garment with no seam. If you "withdraw" into prayer, well, a valid prayer does not *leave* you there, abandoned and withdrawn. Prayer is action, prayer is behavior. "Prayer changes things". What doesn't change must not have become prayer.
*
When I am happy I am sad. The happiness stops at a point. The world stands outside. Ummm, the sadness has an inner red seam that is already happy or at least will be. Not will be, is. It is there. And the self is always ready to turn inside out. The transience -- that men are "a puff of wind" -- that is part of the definition, intrinsic. The discipline to accept that sadness and live with that is... well, that's what happiness is.
The closer you approach the One who puts reality off and on like a garment, the happier you will be, even not to be happy. And the sadness -- that too is something you cherish and do not readily surrender. So it continues.
*
She was poor but she was rich. Her being rich was poor in that she didn't know how long (or even whether) it would last. So there was an inner poverty to the comfort she temporarily felt, a feeling of its only being for a time. Meanwhile her being poor was rich.
Poverty was rich insofar as it didn't worry and didn't bother about worrying. It was actually sufficient, for now and now and now. It was comfortable not because it was but because it had decided to be, no matter what. It didn't fret about what it didn't have. The moment it fretted it became poor, even if its supply of money was bottomless. Bottomless!
So the sense of being well off was a state of mind that had nothing really to do with money. Except that the state of mind itself was a bit like money, in that it could be collected or spent.
And if she thought about it in that finite way ("collected or spent") then she became poor no matter how much she had.
But there was always a point at which poverty stopped. And that point was always rich.
*
Prayer and behavior -- in the world -- they must be a single seamless entity, a garment with no seam. If you "withdraw" into prayer, well, a valid prayer does not *leave* you there, abandoned and withdrawn. Prayer is action, prayer is behavior. "Prayer changes things". What doesn't change must not have become prayer.
*
When I am happy I am sad. The happiness stops at a point. The world stands outside. Ummm, the sadness has an inner red seam that is already happy or at least will be. Not will be, is. It is there. And the self is always ready to turn inside out. The transience -- that men are "a puff of wind" -- that is part of the definition, intrinsic. The discipline to accept that sadness and live with that is... well, that's what happiness is.
The closer you approach the One who puts reality off and on like a garment, the happier you will be, even not to be happy. And the sadness -- that too is something you cherish and do not readily surrender. So it continues.
*
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