From Eckhart Tolle and Patrick McDonnell, Guardians of Being
Another perfect day
Author: Karl Möller
At all costs avoid success
Be anything you like …, but at all costs avoid one thing: success …. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
The sky got crowded and complained
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –
Now!
From ‘Someone Should Start Laughing’
Last night,
So many tears took flight because of Joy
That the sky got crowded and complained
When I discovered God hiding again in my heart
And I could not cease to celebrate.
From ‘Dance, Dervish Dance’
Both poems are from Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy. Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky
Suffering and transformation
Transformed life can only be found through confusion, struggle, literal and metaphorical deaths because we understand only from within the constellation of our present suffering.
Mark Vernon in Third Way, October 2013
Multitasking and the divided self
Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.
This again is from Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now. ‘Full attention given to nothing’ – as a teacher I’d say this is one of the most debilitating faults of our 24/7 society.
Members of any race, nation, gender or social condition
Commenting on Isaiah 56:3-8, which talks about the inclusion of foreigners and eunuchs among God’s people, foreigners and eunuchs, that is, who keep the Sabbath and the covenant, Walter Brueggemann notes that:
the community welcomes members of any race or nation, any gender or social condition, so long as that person is defined by justice, mercy, and compassion, and not competition, achievement, production, or acquisition. (Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now)
Quite so! Brueggemann is also right, it seems to me, to suggest that this ‘stance of generous inclusiveness’ is a direct contradiction of the Mosaic rules in Deuteronomy 23:1-8. Isaiah’s words are an example of prophetic critique of Israel’s ancient traditions, the kind of critique that Jesus was to continue some centuries later.
Free to be
Those who remember and keep Sabbath find they are less driven, less coerced, less frantic to meet deadlines, free to be, rather than to do.
Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all of social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity.
Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now
Brief thoughts & quotes … 