*
And so the yoga instructor held a class on Christmas day and the atmosphere was very strange. A special day, yes, but in what way exactly? Everything shut down and everyone withdrawn into a familial warmth, except for those without family. For them, all strange.
Was there joy? Merely strangeness?
The teacher went through a sun salutation but there was no sun anywhere. Then she stretched what would not stretch.
Do not force the muscle, treat it like a gentle beast -- it resists when you push hard but there is always a way to coax.
But first of course you must coax the thing that coaxes -- that is the will, the coaxer. It too resists prodding but responds to persuasion. An exasperating donkey of an organ. You must not push past without respect.
Bend the knee and, if you can, lift the foot. Lift it rather high and hold it in your arms, rock back and forth. Hold it with both hands.
Hold it like a baby. You are like a mother, holding this thing, this self, in loving arms, and rocking it with infinite tenderness. Not the self but something closer than the self. Try to love what you have.
So the day rocked within an enormous tenderness that no one quite understood. And you were its child.
*
Monday, December 26, 2005
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Kenosis
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
She walked into the path, the Place, and found herself empty, even deliberately emptied herself. It was called for. It was necessary. "Depression", whatever that was, had to be a valley one walked through and finally left behind. So the emptiness was like an exhalation, making space for the joy that one would soon inhale. It took a kind of courage.
As for "Depression" (whatever that really was!) did you medicate it? Of course you medicated it, if you had to, if the alternative was a collapse into death. But there would always remain the concern that this painful kneading you walked into was not something to deflect but something to walk through -- that medication might be an evasion of a truth that needed instead to be faced.
There was an odd truth inside the atrocious pun of your "equal" relationship with God: "I need God -- and God kneads me".
*
Friday, December 23, 2005
Lord Kelvin's casino
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Life is like a casino (I say -- pretending to be some big expert on this -- never having gambled in my entire life -- but understanding it the way an obedient priest understands sex). The kids in the casino are playing a losing game, because the percentages are set at 51% for "the house", so if you play long enough, there is no uncertainty to this: you will lose. But all the players think they are exceptions somehow and maybe manage to be, for awhile.
But if you continue to play you are going to lose. What you most like about your body, or your mind, or your circumstances, that is what you are certain to lose -- the better it is the bigger the loss.
And when the casino closes for the night, all the takings are gathered -- where?
What is this "house" that always wins? Not God, nothing to do with God. Whoever runs the house, that person too is also playing, and also guaranteed to lose. So the game makes no sense and something else entirely has to be operating.
You could create an indirect proof for the existence of miracles by proving how exhausted, empty and non-existent is the alternative world, the one where people play against the "house" and lose.
The "house" is where people go who are turning away from God. So of course one loses there!
*
In Lord Kelvin's Casino, everybody play the laws of thermodynamics and everybody loses. The players lose, the house loses, the owners lose, even people who are just looking on, they also lose. So don't play that game. Maybe you walk through a space where those laws reign but you don't have to live there -- living by definition takes place where there is the possibility of life -- in a casino there is none. Life is elsewhere, in a garden of faith, where abundance somehow knows how to bloom itself even out of destitution. And there, everybody wins.
*
Through death?
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Christianity is in essence to move through death into life. Well, I've got the death part down. I have memorized death. I know this immersion. Death is clear. What I need to learn is that next movement. This is hard.
Death has got me down. But if you stop there everything before it also dies. Move on, it is imperative to move on.
*
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Dear Christian, imagine...
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Dear Christian, imagine what it would be like to really *be* a Christian. You yourself are not yet a Christian, though you believe you are....
*
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.
Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.
His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.
For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.
Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.
You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.
*
Monday, December 05, 2005
Like rain like drought
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Grace like rain, it falls like rain. But is sometimes disguised as drought. Very very effectively disguised. Very very oh so dry now.
*
Still must be grace, even so. Only this drymouth feels like reading Oswald Chambers every morning, leaves you feeling hopeless by comparison to real Christians (where are they now?), you seem to be an F-student in sanctification. Hopeless? Or is that emotion merely a ladder to the floor above, which is itself hope and not just hope but grounded hope? And suddenly your mouth floods with words.
But she cared about what it really was, not how it felt.
*
Sunday, December 04, 2005
The holy drought
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
Have you ever shucked off all caution and stood outside in the drought, as that girl did, and let it fall down, fall on top of you? To stand in the drought, feel it fall down, let it cover you and soak you till your clothes are heavy and your shoes make an unhappy squishing sound. In the drought, penetrated by the drought, feeling it fall and accepting it as a gift.
As one of the things God has given. A dryness that is not dry at all.
She walked through it steadily, not pretending it wasn't there, but not seeing it as ultimate either. Drought has a fruit of its own, drought has (I hope it has) a purpose, a measure that measures a kind of abundance, also a direction, a slant, a way of cleaning you off as it moves through. So say it, thank you for this dryness, thank you for the emptiness and the hunger and even for this dull feeling inside me that doesn't want to thank you at all, that feels a bit like dying, even thinks it is already dead, there is even a submerged and sullen thankfulness hidden inside that, waiting to be savored.
And the drought came on coming down. Month after month after month. The path to the garden covered with dust.
*
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