Posts filed under 'Spirituality'
July 10th, 2008
…with speech smoother than butter,
but with a heart set on war;
with words that were softer than oil,
but in fact were drawn swords. (Psalm 55)
…just wondering, apocalyptically, about this morning’s Psalm in context of the Corporation
Thank the poet, standing on the ruined ancestral halls of civilization to see clear as crystal the conjured testimony of the ancient system, the corpus-Corporation.
The poet observes…
…that when the smooth words that justify personal comfort at any cost are finally etched into our unconscious constitutions, our own hearts will stand ready for war. Our flaccid faces will hide drawn swords.
Are they not already drawn?
We’ve perjured ourselves, not in poverty or struggle, or even in the quest for happiness, but in the backwash of prosperity. The generations squandered in becoming Capital-Believers will be swept away in a single backfired hour. The engines of war built by our own silent complicity will burst into flame on our gilded doorsteps.
Are they not already bursting?
Yet, even as the flames lick at our archways, still not knowing quite when to stop, hiding from the discovery that we are truly Conservative, we remain as confident in progress as Ptolemy was in a geocentric universe. And not yet ready to draw the swords on ourselves, not yet ready for a mercy-less raid on our own acquisitive desires we stumble ahead by habit.
Mercy-less raid?
Let’s be clear, mercy for all sentient beings and animate life, absolutely, but for the bloated System blind to its own avarice consumption, self-protected by sets of subsets, wherein the flesh of all chiefs and labourers slowly turn grey; wherever this anti-Christ pops up may it die by the singular disbelief of its own, I mean us. May we all laugh it into the very oblivion it prepares for us.
June 23rd, 2008
The existential lack you wake up with is real enough. The thing you fill it with is not. The thing, whether object or being has no substance. You look and see and desire and look to another to know what it is you should desire and it is all helium. Up it goes, no hanging on or retrieval. But you tell yourself the romantic lie that in fact you did hang on and that it is now what is filling you and giving you your bit of buoyancy. And without knowing what you’re doing you add to the lie by convincing yourself that if only you could acquire a bit more of whatever that was, you would finally satisfy that deficiency and come into yourself discovering your trueness. And without knowing you’re doing it you cast about to see who it is that is leading the fulfilled life and seize upon your neighbour three doors down. Your neighbour two doors down you know well enough to conclude he has his own problems. In fact one time you caught him giving you the envy-eye so you know his environ is a dead end. But she, of the next-door-to-the-two-doors-down looks altogether put together. She had seemed average enough but you caught something else, something more the day you passed her on the sidewalk outside your office. What was it you wonder? You catch yourself looking for an answer but not really looking and not conscious that you’re looking yet one morning at 3:30 AM you wake up and wonder what kind of salad she eats. What’s her breakfast? She might as well have her own line of clothes, fragrance, hair products, so well is she pieced and plaited! Where did she find her poise you wonder? What’s her regime? Her program? Her magazines? Yes, obviously, she lacks the lack you wake up with. Can’t be. Can it? It is! Has her own line of clothes? Silly! Go back to sleep! You press all this down far under the threshold of awareness from where it came and you get on with your day. Except without knowing it you allow the play of the romantic lie and you make little raids on the inarticulate something that tells you of her preeminence. And now you move beyond her surface to the substance of things and consider her friends, her intimacies–yes, of course hers are the right friends and intimacies and soulish powers and here lies her secret. But just how did she acquire them? No, that’s the wrong question…she has them…how do you get them? Now we’re getting someplace. And then the conclusion comes naturally enough, almost divine in its revelatory shimmer with you self-possessed and in control of your innocent desires not trying to evince a solution in any way, and now you know that in order to be yourself it’s her being you must possess. And so in every way you must kill her off. Your existential completeness is just that close. Three doors down. This is your awakening that you remain unaware of.
June 19th, 2008
This morning I read…
If the LORD had not been my help,
my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.
When I thought, “My foot is slipping,”
your steadfast love, O LORD, held me up.
When the cares of my heart are many,
your consolations cheer my soul. (Ps 94)
But LORD how does this work for Brian? How can you remove the slick black emotional tumour stuck fast within his ribcage?
Will you run these words about steadfast-love through a fine glass tube and inject them straight into that heavy mass? And will they kill the all those cagey cells and melt the growth?
He’s lived with that swelling for so long and the street has stitched it so tight to his organs so that it’s hard to know where his heart leaves off and the malignancy begins.
And yet, when I talk to him he sees a kind of hope in the day, and we agree that in every physical and natural way, it’s a beautiful morning. And it’s almost as though I need this hope of his for himself more than he does.
I sometimes fear that if Brian losses all hope I’ll lose my faith. Almost as if he’s my anchor to sanity today?
Your words…can they break curses and hold us all up? We need you Lord…need your your present moment, your eternity–need your ground, your earthness, your hereness–need to look back to you and forward to you. But you’re so silent.
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Psalm 94
June 17th, 2008
…I seem to be following a thread from yesterday’s post.
Years ago I came across a quote, which I can no longer locate, that said something to the effect that we need to ask for forgiveness from those we care for.
On this, initial confusion has given way to some clarity: When I started work as manager of a homeless shelter, the work was, in my mind, something far more noble than the industry I was leaving. I relished comments like, “Oh, the work you do is so difficult…but it must be rewarding.” And I didn’t resist the implication that other work, by virtue of its secularity or its attention to widgets, was socially (and spiritually) inferior.
Thankfully, over time, a number of small rancorous events served to reflect my attitude back to me. What I see now, a thing of distress to me and an irony that escaped me entirely, was that this rarefied attitude automatically undermined my compassion for the people I tried to serve. If inwardly, I saw “my work” as elevated above the kind of gainful employment I encouraged “street people” to seek, of what use was that? Worse, if I fell (which I did) for the accompanying inside message that told me that my identity is all about my work? well, now it’s not just what I do that’s more important, it’s that I’m more important. And what does all this project into the ether?
Of course it’s easy enough for those on the so-called receiving side to detect the smell of this attitude–an attitude which is really a subjugating spirit that extends a hand only through condescension.
But anyone in a position of helping another person is in a position of power. And so any sort of giving outside of some humility is mere self-congratulating care. The help may be received but not welcomed. Received, but resented. Think of America’s bewilderment at not being liked even after dropping bags of rice on drought-gutted African countries. A sense of social and spiritual superiority is a creeping vine. It takes time and perhaps outright in-the-face hostility, and then a willingness for reflection, to cut it off at the base.
Care that is condescending, that draws attention to itself and so unduly points out need in others just sets up and reinforces socio-spiritual class systems. No, the only way through this is acquiring, through contemplation and practice and much rehearsal and many refresher courses, a transformational understanding that knows, in the thick of human encounter, that we are all one.
June 16th, 2008
On a highway outside of Edmonton is a large sign that says, “Farmers feed cities.” It’s a reminder worth more than a billboard because we do forget this fact, or we take it for granted, which is a form of forgetting. What’s more is that in a world ruled by financial and corporate institutions, a farmer, even a farmer who farms on a corporate level, is still at the lower end of the mercantile caste. That is, upon the grand estate of commercial enterprise, farmers live in the servant quarters. But this old work hierarchy holds true in social and religious spheres as well.
It’s almost a tedious thing to be reminded about the real intrinsic worth of all honest work…because even while we give it a nod, too few of us believe it at depth. But what if we did believe it, absorb it? Wouldn’t it have a modifying and humanizing effect upon our social structures? Wouldn’t it soften the hard edges of our competitive proclivities?
I’m not saying that all work is alike, or should be rewarded in the same fashion. And I suppose, on some level, especially today, not all work is essential. But what is true is that any work that adds something to the flower-bed of humanity–that place of curiosity and surprise, where not everything that looks useful is, and where many of the things that seem useless are not–is ultimately indispensable and valuable and worthy of respect. It’s this important bit of gleaning that I didn’t truly get.
In my case it’s taken me a long time to realize that working in a grain elevator–something that I did for 12 years before my near score of years at a mission–was truly of worth. Not that I saw it as demeaning, it was just, I thought, a low rung on the vocational ladder. But beyond this, I had ingested the churchly-message that buying grain was something less spiritual therefore less valuable.
June 6th, 2008
There’s someone swaying by your
side, lips that say Mashallah
Mashalla wonderful, god inside
attraction, a spring no one knew
of wells up on the valley floor,
lights inside a tent lovers move
toward. The refuse of Damascus
gets turned over in the sun; be
like that yourself. Say mercy,
mercy to the one who guides your
soul, who keeps time. Move, make
a mistake, look up. Checkmate. -Rumi
I fear. I fear upsetting people, making people wait, frustrating people, disrupting people. I fear being thought inept, silly, irrelevant, stupid, tedious. I fear being found guilty. I fear shame. I fear having my life work defined by a mistake. I fear a loss of reputation; I fear not having one. I fear being disgraced. I fear losing all confidence. I fear being forgotten. I fear exiting in disgrace. And I fear staying in ignominy.
What all of this is, of course, is refuse. It’s the wet, uncomposted litter lying at the bottom of my soul. It’s the stuff that needs to be turned over in the sun. It needs to be moved, stirred up. And yes, in the process there is risk. Mistakes will be made…
…but what the hell, is there not mercy enough? If the refuse is left, nothing grows. No chance. No possible valley floor with surprising springs. No love, no light in the tent, no swaying, no lips whispering divinity in your ear.
Damn fine of Rumi to point all this out don’t you think?
(Mashallah: may the Divine stir and grow and keep you.)
June 3rd, 2008
I know little of morphic fields, and have long since given up morphia. And so I seek inspiration from what surrounds me. For instance, this morning’s absence of broken glass in the alley: a hopeful thing. And so I walked, waking, with each step. My ichabod-crane-body leaving a slight wake in the still air. I am, I thought, a passing guest. And sometimes I’m so fine with it.
I arrive at my table and before first thoughts at coffee I hear the ring of a twelve-string guitar. Like the one I bought with the money from a season of custom harvesting. The only money I had left after smashing into my boss’s pick-up with a loaded grain truck. I was driving blind in a wide open field, the sunset deep, way past my eyes, deep in my head, colouring the back of my skull. And then a stop so sudden… That sunset cost me everything except a twelve-string guitar. I didn’t think twice, it was alright and I sailed the hull of that Yamaki to the coast where I continued a lazy apprenticeship in noticing.
Noticing a precise moment, as delicate as the scent of jasmine on a sleepy breeze. Its contents is a large brown purse slung over a shoulder and a DATS bus that is apparently on time. It picks up a slight body wearing a red coat cinched with a four inch belt, shoulder straps and large black buttons. She sports painted black hair and damned-if-I-care rouge. Ready to engage this raggedy world once more.
Her day is one more page in an epic. I pray it will be worthy of a bookmark. Personally I’ve known too many blank pages (dog-eared days). Sometimes a train of days will go unnoticed.
But sometimes in the full blush of a moment, one must drive blindly into a sunset–or stall that train. Hope for train robbers on horseback to catch us, steal the gold, tie up the engineer, and send us hurtling down the track without any knowledge of what is around the bend…a Holstein cow perhaps…a guy taking a crap, or a holystone on the rail that sends the train down the embankment. Because who knows what the valley holds?
May 28th, 2008
Empathy and consideration for the life of another person is hard to keep in possession. The daily pull into myself and the world-of-my-life can only be balanced by a daily encounter with another human face.
And so this morning when I stopped to talk I made myself conscious of the accumulation of your joys and sorrows that were soft-sculpted into your face. I saw both the nuances and the patencies of your history. All those experiences etched in.
You were half a block away. When I crossed the street and stepped up on the curb I saw the inevitability of your approach. You walked toward me, your self-consciousness a forgotten thing, and one of the reasons you looked out of joint with time and place.
Your face, that unfinished painting through which you look at me and the world, revealed some dark passages. I often mask my own face–and we all have our veneers–but yours was far more vulnerable. Yours, a far thinner veneer.
Your story, the details of which are all unique and varied, beg some tragic questions. Asked, you told me how they look to you now. You drifted here from a northern reserve, a reserve you say is dying, hopeless. You said there was nothing for you there…but I understood that this was not nothing in the way I told my friends a half-generation ago when I left my own town, saying, “there is nothing for me here.” Your nothing is on a scale I can’t grasp.
Your drama, your paths, have to do with deep and complex breakage’s. I offer you so little, except a bit of time and spare change; you awaken a piece of humanity within me.
You know, of course, why you’re resented by many. And sometimes by me. You arouse emotions within me that I would sooner put aside. You are a constant reminder of a reality I want to forget. I don’t like being forced to notice the base poverty of my response to you. And so I ultimately blame you for my lack of compassion for you.
May 25th, 2008
We meet gems in life, people who by their own dint take paths other than the deep-rutted ones. Grow Mercy cheers, salutes and encourages you.
This is meant to encourage you: for you have chosen to lead your lives in the messy intersections of human community. This is to salute you: for you have taken the more difficult path of willingly entering that jumble-of-souls with your presuppositions and preconceptions in check–a reflex of humility.
This is to honour you for preferring to learn through listening, to discover through personal engagement, and for being receptive to the present. To you who’s experience has taught you the peerless value of honouring people in their rich and odd paths, to you who refuse to pave over human distinctiveness and peculiarities, we raise our cups.
You, who risk being okay with chaos, letting it have its say; you, who are patient with with loose ends, who understand that chaos and loose ends finally reveal their own solutions and work their own balm…you are our social beacons. You, who seek consensus through a simple coming together are our cultures unheralded leaders. You, who do not miss the faces for the crowd are our agents of grace.
This post is meant to encourage you, and salute you, because in our mercantile world you are misunderstood. This is meant to give you space, because in places where zero-sum is the convening article, where vertical organizational charts are capitulated to, you will be marginalized, even ostracized.
Your allegiance to interconnections, your respect for the organism is a threat to the “bottom line,” the so called “tight ship.” But this allegiance is your candle and our illumination, and it must be protected. And so sometimes you must leave our “tight ships” to their tightness. Perhaps then, when constant constriction cuts off all lubrication and the “lean machine” cracks apart, there may yet be hope. At this point the lesson of liberality and karmic abundance may yet be learned. It is at this point that those who control through diversion and concealment and scapegoating may transcend their fears.
We can hope all this because of pearls like you.
May 17th, 2008
There is something translucent and innocent in the way light from a new-day sun flows down the brassy sides of the high buildings of the city. I’ve lived here for three years (still believing in the goodness of the city) while occupying and honouring this life-season and its change. Change will come again, perhaps a lasting call from the skunk, or the weasel, but for now the towering windows made wavy by light and warmth are my reality, and at moments they are, as well, my enchantment. 
It’s late spring and folks are waking earlier. The early energy that pushes leaves from sheaths and green shoots from hard-pack is moving toward its first apex, and as it does it spills over and moves into our cells and opens passages long closed from dry cold. And this is the energy I tap to visualize the release of pain for my own daughter who reluctantly sends me lines of poetry I’ve asked for, knowing that in them I’ll see a dark-tinged mind, a shadowed soul, and all the blueness brought on by pain. That “…cold of deepening blue [that] closes around [her] thoughts,” is what she hopes to hide from her company. To protect them, this mastitised knot of pain she keeps secret.
But because dark and shadowy is precisely what she is not, I meditate for her. I visualize the dark-red recesses and as I go deep within I plant small prayer-balms, like seeds, smaller than sweet-clover. And then I see their growth and how they reopen channels…and you might just now think of an episode of “House” where the camera apparently races through arteries and capillaries to an oily-black clot…the clot’s deliquescence the resolution–but this scene is inadequate. The energy I envision is different. It’s fillagreed energy, delicate and inviolable. You may call it God’s own poem, the lines of which wash down the calcified sides of hurt and find a way through the crusts of pain.
–
On those early mornings, when the hours are still dark and I’m half-mad with scenarios, I meditate and visualize–a friend calls it beseeching the universe– first for my own, and then, for calm and peace and mercy for the many. Because, as my daughter has taught me (especially through the months she was caring for a painfully incapacitated woman) you can’t empathize globally until you embrace the particular. (And here’s your particular embrace.)
Previous Posts
Thank the poet, standing on the ruined ancestral halls of civilization to see clear as crystal the conjured testimony of the ancient system, the corpus-Corporation.
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
