{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
Commenting on Wisdom, which in Proverbs 8 is said to be playing in the world and before God at all times, Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation, writes:
We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts.
From you
I don’t want anything new
no more gifts
nor the scent of landscapes
rising to fill us,
no bouquets of insight
left by my head
in the tenderness of morning
no intoxication
of thoughts that open horizons
where rooms are low,
nor the sever of spring
under the grid of old words
that has set on our skin,
nor my favourite blue,
the cobalt
colour of silence.
No.
All I want
is your two hands
pulsing in mine,
the two of us
back in a circle
round our love.
From: John O’Donohue, Echoes of Memory
Here’s my final post offering thoughts from Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise.
I was struck by this wise statement on community by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which she quotes:
The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community wherever they go.
Brené Brown, one of Tippett’s interviewees, studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame – and has this to say about courage and vulnerability:
I cannot find a single example of courage, moral courage, spiritual courage, leadership courage, relational courage, I cannot find a single example of courage that was not born completely of vulnerability. We buy into some mythology about vulnerability being weakness and being gullibility and being frailty because it gives us permission not to do it.
Even more powerfully, she makes the point that:
the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath.
Brown is well worth listening to, as she has demonstrated in her TED talks on The power of vulnerability and Listening to shame.
Lastly, Tippett addresses another important issue when she says:
There is a fine line between saving the world and manipulating other lives, however well-meaningly, in our own image.
And she reflects on Courtney Martin rejecting the notion that the world divides into ‘savers and those who need to be saved’. As Martin herself says:
Our charge is not ‘to save the world’ …. It is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.
.
John O’Donohue is one of the most evocative writers I know. His books, his thoughts, his phraseology are like beautiful cathedrals to me, beautiful cathedrals made of words. Here are some passages from ‘Air: The Breath of God’, the first essay of The Four Elements.
Most of the brutalization that occurs externally in the world is usually subsequent to a prior brutalization that has happened within the heart.
On fundamentalism:
One of the terrible deficiencies of most fundamentalism is that the … flow and risk of life get totally managed and programmed into categories.
Talking about Jesus, O’Donohue points out that ‘any place he appeared, his presence became a challenge’. A challenge, one might add, that is as unwelcome in institutionalised religion (the Church) today as it was at the time, a challenge we so often are quick to tame, contain or ignore.
I love these observations on territorial and spiritual colonisation:
We believe that salvation can only come from outside. This is the great falsity of colonization, be it territorial or spiritual. It robs the native land, or the native soul, of the sense of its own indigenous treasures and resources. Against all attempts at programmes and methods, the great art of holiness is to let oneself be.
And here is what O’Donohue has to say about religion vis-à-vis the truly inspired, the eternal:
Something inspired has the surprise, vitality and warmth of the eternal within it. … There is none of the deadness, seriousness or narrowness which affects so much religion and which has nothing to do with the eternal, but everything to do with the fears and competitiveness of the ego.
Finally, some words about loss, the art of letting go and receiving back a hundredfold:
We need to learn to be creative about loss …. The art at the heart of the mystical is letting go. If you learn to develop this art, you will receive back again a hundredfold everything you released. If you love something, let it go, and it will return to you. … This is the free art of presence in love and friendship. The Kingdom of God is about the transfiguration of Nothingness and loss into the fecundity of possibility.
The ‘fecundity of possibility’ – something to hope for and trust in, I suppose.
Here are some passages from Krista Tippett’s book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living, passages that struck, inspired, challenged me.
In connection with the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue, she mentions his belief in ‘the possibility of creating our own inner landscapes of beauty, to keep us vital in the midst of bleak and dangerous surroundings and experiences’, a need that, as many of us know only too well, may arise at any time.
Talking about the work of philosopher and L’Arche founder Jean Vanier, she quotes his vitally important vision ‘to educate people to relate, to listen, to help people to become themselves’ rather than, as is so often the case, to subject them to a preconceived agenda, whatever that may be.
And she quotes john a. powell, Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, who notes that:
people are looking for community, right now, though we don’t have confidence in love. We have much more confidence in anger and hate. We believe anger is powerful. We believe hate is powerful. And we believe love is wimpy. And so if we’re engaged in the world, we believe it’s much better to sort of organize around anger and hate.
Lovers, by contrast, as Tippett herself points out are artists who are ‘reaching out to enemies, embracing complexity, creativity, and risk’.
Lastly, here are some words from geophysicist Xavier Le Pichon, also taken from Tippett’s book, words whose truth I have come to know in my own experience:
once you enter into this way of, I would call it companionship, walking with the suffering person who has come into your life and whom you have not rejected, your heart progressively gets educated by them. They teach you a new way of being.
We have to be educated by the other. My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them, and to let yourself be immersed in their world so that they can get into our world, then you begin to share something very deep.
Some thoughts from André Gorz’s book Letter to D: A Love Story.
On love and life together:
I understood that pleasure is not something you give or take. It’s a way of giving yourself and calling forth the gift of self from the other person.
What captivated me about you was that you opened the door to another world for me.
You gave all of yourself to help me become myself.
You opened up the richness of life for me and I loved life through you – unless it was the reverse and I loved you through all living things (but that comes down to the same thing).
It’s fairly safe to say I probably haven’t lived up to the resolution I made 30 years ago: to live completely at one with the present, mindful above all of the wealth of our shared life.
On finitude:
You have to accept being finite: being here and nowhere else, doing this and not something else, now and not always or never … having only this life.
On writing:
… you knew that a person who wanted to be a writer needs to be able to shut themselves away in seclusion, to make notes at any hour of the day or night; that their work with language goes on well after they’ve laid down their pen and can take complete possession of them without warning, in the middle of a meal or a conversation.
‘When everything’s said, everything remains to be said, everything always remains to be said’. In other words: it’s the saying that matters, not the said. What I’d written interested me a lot less than what I might write next.
On theory:
… theory always runs the risk of blinding us to the shifting complexities of the real world.
.
To quote Malcom Guite one more time, here’s an excerpt from his poem ‘Maundy Thursday’, also published in The Word in the Wilderness:
In vain we search the heavens high above,
The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray him, though it is the night.
He meets us here and loves us into light.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 