Recently when working in a client’s home I began to speak of Rumi and my client spoke of Rumi and Wayne Dyer. This discussion was joined again last Friday night at half time of a basketball game as I met my client again. He offered to give me some CDs that contained some talks by Dr. Wayne Dyer. Continue reading “The way”
The people groan
The following prophetic words came from Sojourners today. I get a regular mail from Sojourners and many days like today the quotes really speak to what is going on in my life or in our national political dialog. Today was no exception.
When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked rule, the people groan.- Proverbs 29:2-2
Recently I heard one party describing themselves as pro-life and another as pro-choice. The pro-life party seems to be unconcerned with life after birth. As long as your unborn you have rights, but after that your rights quickly fade. You’re not entitled to health care. It’s okay for ten million children to have no health care. It’s okay to forget about the health care of war veterans. Funding for more wars is all that occupies these pro-lifers. There is a well written piece at Just Plain Foolish that talks about some of these problems in more detail.These pro-lifers are pro-capital punishment, pro-war, pro-greed. The pro-choice seems perfectly willing to talk about choice but not really provide one. They use euphemisms like “veto proof” majority to evade their responsibility both under the United States Constitution and common morality.
An enlightened person
To say that one practices zazen in order to become an enlightened person is like saying one practices medicine to become a doctor. To practice medicine is to be a doctor. To practice zazen is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is not a static state of achievement; it is the active undertaking of the way exemplified in zazen.
— T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action, Zen Person (University Press of Hawaii, 1981), 78
Sanity
This is poignant and timely. Every time I hear pundits and politicians speak of war in Iraq or war with Iran I hear the same sort of self-justification for destruction as is described here. There is always some reason why this all makes sense to them.
One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . . . .
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
Thomas Merton. “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann” in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964: 45, 46-47.
Never the same
We are always at the beginning. It is always the very first time. Truly, there are no repetitions. When I play the piano, I often come to a repeat sign. Can that passage be repeated? If I am teaching a piano student and we see a repeat sign, I tell the student that there are no repeats. We return to the beginning of a certain passage, but it’s never the same. It’s always fresh. Someone asked me, “Don’t you get tired of answering the same questions day after day—what is Zen, how do we practice?” Never! It’s never the same question, because it’s always coming from a different person, in a different moment; and each person asks the question from his or her own state of mind. The words may sound alike, but each time they are coming from somewhere unique.
–Maurine Stuart, Subtle Sound, ed. Roko Sherry Chayat (Shambhala, 1996), 16
All beings everywhere
May all beings everywhere , With whom we are inseparably
interconnected, Be fulfilled, awakened, liberated, and free.
May there be peace in this world and throughout the entire universe.And may we all together complete the spiritual journey.–A traditional Buddhist Prayer
Listen to the rain
A couple of nights ago I woke up to the sound of rain and I thought of Thomas Merton. Whenever it rains I think of Merton.
I came up here [to his hermitage] from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.–Thomas Merton. “Rain and the Rhinocerous” in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964: 9-10.
Picnic
This afternoon my wife and I got in our PT Cruiser and drove down the road to Salamanca, New York in the general direction of Allegany State Park. On the way there we stopped at Subway for what we call the “lazyman’s picnic.” Continue reading “Picnic”
So unlike your Christ
I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.–Gandhi
Earlier in the week I wrote about an archbishop’s decision to withhold a sacramental rite from a politician got me to thinking again about some of the apparent contradictions between the prophetic church and the pathetic church. Continue reading “So unlike your Christ”
Feast day
Today is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi.