I’m wondering…what is it about the value of something that we seem to need to know?
One of the things I do is curate ideas. But, at some point, something isn’t working in my activity related to that (or, at least, there is a question in mind about it). At times, I can feel a lurking question; what is the value of it—either the curation itself or whatever it is that I am curating?
I’ve noticed…that I am often inspired by those who can articulate the value of what they are doing. Because, for me, the ability to articulate that value is often what is so compelling to others about the ideas that are driving the good activity that often results.
A while ago, I watched the movie, The Antidote, where what people are doing in communities to help others was, in my estimation, powerfully described in terms of the purpose and reason for doing what they’re doing. The recent movie Soul pulled on a similar thread for me (at the very least, it appears I'm not alone regarding my value question!).
I find myself wishing I had more of an ability to describe, or even create, the value of what I do. I'm typically not very self-promoting, but that isn't really the core of what's involved here.
So, I'm wondering what this can look like for me now going forward...I feel the need to know.
You can't out-pace the sadness of the world.
Our greatest confidence is enabled by experience.
Few things clarify quite like adversity.
If it’s true that we are all just a couple of choices away from some serious life problems, how much more is it true that we are just a couple of choices away from brilliance?
Prior Randoms...
At the threshold moment, when the true self within is demanding emergence, things can go either way; we can let the crisis thrust us into the heart of transformation or we can regress into our same old patterns.
-- Sue Monk Kidd
You may not be wrong...but, are you right?
In other words, not being wrong can become a thing all unto itself...and completely miss the ‘what is right’ that needs to be done.
In other words, a non-negative is not the same thing as a positive.
It seems like claiming that I didn't actually do this or that isn't really enough.
Example—I may not consciously disparage the poor or the needy, but do I actually help them?
Or, I can claim "I don't hate...". But, the real question is closer to, "Do I love?"
One may not require much, but the other does.
If you put the jelly on before the peanut butter, the sandwich will fail.
And if you try to spread the peanut butter on the plate and then add the bread, it will fail even worse.
Like so many things, the order is not optional.
And yet, we often do the least-scary or easiest parts first, regardless of what the order of operations tells us.
-- Seth Godin, The order of operations
I've noticed...that I need to be more presumptuous.
It's likely not so much that this is the case as it is that I try too hard not to be, which is too self-serving.
Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
-- Luke 6:38
Humans can be so beautiful (yes, what that isn't saying is also true).
The point of self-wareness isn't about working hard at who we're trying not to be, as it is on accepting who we are.
Rest is not as much about inactivity as it is about replenishment and restoration, which is a very active thing—a transforming kind of energy.
Prone to so many answers, why don't we ask more questions?
Prior Randoms...
'Poem for the week' -- "Songs for the People":
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.
Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.
Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life’s fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.
Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o’er life’s highway.
I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.
Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.
Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.
-- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you, if you realized how seldom they do.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:
There is something so seemingly satisfying about short-term prospects, especially when compared with the likelihood of long-term fulfillment.
Because what if the long-term never happens?
Isn't that the age-old question?
And yet, at times, it seems so conspicuous that short-term satisfaction seems to directly compete with long-term fulfillment. Not to mention, that short-satisfaction is, by definition, short-term and, therefore, relatively un-satisfying over the long haul.
But, we want to fill or feel something right now, which often leads to a later feeling of something like, "I wish I hadn't done that...".
And, so, the dilemma continues...sometimes round and round and round.
The reality seems to be that two things are actually in play at the same time—something I want right now AND something I also want later. Sometimes these aren't mutually exclusive; but, sometimes they are.
So, where does this leave us?
In my experience, I can feel the push (from outside...and inside) to deny one over the other. I think this is the bigger problem (than trying to determine which to appease). Denial is rarely a good thing; awareness, on the other hand, often is. Listen to yourself, interact with yourself, engage your self. Make a choice. Make a different choice next time. But, don't just deny one reality over the other.
We don’t learn much when everything goes right. We learn most when things go wrong.
-- Simon Sinek
Ever noticed...our tendency to think if we can get there faster, the more we'll get to see?
When, actually, the faster we are moving, the less we seem to notice.
Disappointment needs space to breathe or it gets by-passed for more intense emotions.
Sometimes you have to stop long enough, in one spot, to see what is really there—to sit in things for a while and discover what is going on.
Faith should never become a closed system, for then it is no longer faith.
You may not be wrong; but, are you right?
Prior Randoms...
It was among the most jarring scenes of the Capitol invasion, on January 6th. As rioters milled about on the Senate floor, a long-haired man in a red ski cap bellowed, from the dais, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” A man to his right––the so-called QAnon Shaman, wearing a fur hat and bull horns atop his head, and holding an American flag—raised a megaphone and began to pray. Others in the chamber bowed their heads. “Thank you, heavenly Father, for being the inspiration needed to these police officers to allow us into the building, to allow us to exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the Communists, and the globalists, that this is our nation, not theirs, that we will not allow the America, the American way of the United States of America, to go down,” he said. “Thank you, divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and love Christ.”
Falsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read “In God We Trust,” “Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,” and “Make America Godly Again”; some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.
A recent survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, found that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump has been secretly battling “a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites,” a core tenet of...continue here.
-- Michael Luo
Wealth among traditional people is measured by having enough to give away. The generosity of the earth is not an invitation to take it all.
-- Robin Wall Kimmerer
If it doesn’t include all of us, then it doesn’t include some of us. And, if it doesn’t include some of us, isn't it only a matter time before the question becomes whether it includes me?
It really has to be good for everyone, in order for it to truly be good for me.
Because, the other way around, doesn't really work for long.
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.
-- Alex Hickey
Mindful of the recent 56th anniversary of Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I'm wondering...if my next major hurdle is a better understanding of my response when people despise me or say that I am not something that I should be.
I wrote this a while ago—how am I doing?
Self-diagnosis is hard—we tend to be either too hard or too easy on ourselves. It is helpful, but also conspicuously tempting, to need the perspective of others.
Sorting it all out; the magic in this dilemma seems to be in trying to be as open and aware as we can be AND still being willing to take risks. An imperfect process to be sure, but perhaps therein lies the secret.
John of the Cross says that the dark night is God’s best gift to you, intended for your liberation.
-- Barbara Brown Taylor
The highest good is not to know thyself, but you can’t get to the highest good if you don’t.
The more and longer we hold onto things, the tighter we have to become.
Accumulation occurs, even naturally. But, it should never end up being about consumption; it should be about helping those in need.
What are things we do to ourselves that make us smaller than we are?
Prior Randoms...
At one point in her new book, the NPR journalist Michaeleen Doucleff suggests that parents consider throwing out most of the toys they’ve bought for their kids. It’s an extreme piece of advice, but the way Doucleff frames it, it seems entirely sensible: “Kids spent two hundred thousand years without these items,” she writes.
Her deeply researched book, Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, contains many moments like this, in which an American child-rearing strategy comes away looking at best bizarre and at worst counterproductive. “Our culture often has things backward when it comes to kids,” she writes.
Doucleff arrives at this conclusion while traveling, with her then-3-year-old daughter, to meet and learn from parents in a Maya village on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; in an Inuit town in a northern Canadian territory; and in a community of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. During her outings, she witnesses well-adjusted, drama-free kids share generously with their siblings and do chores without being asked.
She takes care to portray her subjects not as curiosities “frozen in time,” but instead as modern-day families who have held on to invaluable child-rearing techniques that likely date back tens of thousands of years.
One of the craziest things we do is praise children constantly. Continue here....
-- Joe Pinsker
Anything considered above criticism will soon become demonic.
-- Richard Rohr
The very thing I feel I need is not what I really need—especially when I believe I need it from outside of myself.
What I really need is sourced within myself.
I catch myself wanting to make it about what others are not doing for me, how they make hard for me, etc. (blame is so handy, isn't it?). But, if they can’t provide what I want, they just can’t (they’re self-preoccupied, physically or emotionally incapable, exhausted, or even just disinterested)—whatever the reason, if they can’t, they can’t.
And, in the end, they can't anyway. Because what I really need is already within me.
So, I can only live from a source within.
Why is this so hard to accept? In part perhaps because, in some way, demanding it from others transfers something away from myself and, thereby, keeps the locus of the issue in the wrong place. This culturally convenient construction is a deceptive, insidious, and onerous thing. No one can give me what I essentially need because they were not, after all, designed to do so. And, I am not designed to receive it from them.
Do I want things from others? Yes. Things that make me feel good? Yes. Things that make me feel better about myself? Yes.
Can others satisfy these levels of need with me? No.
Our sense of need is so often misdirected, as is our sense of solution for it so often misplaced.
The truth is, I already have everything I need—the challenge is learning to fully acknowledge this and turning to the work of discovering what this means. I am something at my core. What am I? Who am I? What do I need? That's my work (not somebody else's).
In other words, the answer is not so much out there...as it is in here.
You don't need to be perfect to inspire others. Let people get inspired by how you deal with your imperfections.
-- Wilson Kanadi
I've noticed...that I want to be noticed, more than I realized—evidenced by catching myself holding it against people who don’t.
"That's not true!" ...ah, but it is, isn't it? Why so defensive?
The truth is, most everyone wants to be noticed. It's probably more when you feel taken-for-granted that things get...a little dicey (for the ego). As I argue with myself about it, perhaps that's some of what I'm feeling today.
Perplexity, I realized, was working like an X-ray of my soul, exposing much of my so-called spirituality as a vanity project of my ego, an expression of my arrogant desire to always be right, my desperate and fearful need to always be in control, my unexamined drive to tame the wildness of life by naming it and dominating it with words.
You actually need this purgation and unknowing to prepare you for a new depth of living, knowing, and loving.
-- Brian McLaren
Humility is too often just a hobby.
The irony is that it often feels like it is people that both activate our larger insecurities AND relieve them.
Over time, it seems conspicuous that so much of the efficacy of what feels dark is actually about the imminency of light—a kind of break-through relationship between the two.
What are we observing when we experience drivenness—in ourselves or in others?
Prior Randoms...
'Poem for the week' -- "Realization":
Three-quarter size. Full size would break the heart.
She, still bare-breasted from the auction block,
sits staring, perhaps realizing what
will happen to them next. There is no child,
though there must be a child who will be left
behind, or who was auctioned separately.
Her arms are limp, defeated, her thin hands
lie still in surrender.
He cowers at her side,
his head under her arm,
his body pressed to hers
like a boy hiding behind his mother.
He should protect his woman. He is strong,
his shoulder and arm muscled from hard work,
his hand, thickened by labor, on her thigh
as if to comfort, though he can’t protect.
His brow is furrowed, his eyes blank, unfocused.
What words are there to describe hopelessness?
A word that means both bull-whipped and spat on?
Is there a name for mute, depthless abyss?
A word that means Where the hell are you, God?
What would they ask God, if they could believe?
But how can they believe, while the blue sky
smiles innocently, pretends nothing is wrong.
They stood stripped up there, as they were described
like animals who couldn’t understand
how cheap a life can be made.
Their naked feet. Her collarbone. The vein
traveling his bicep. Gussie’s answer
to presidents on Mount Rushmore,
to monumental generals whose stars
and sabers say black pain
did not then and still does not matter.
-- Marilyn Nelson
You cannot build a deep connection with someone who is disconnected from themselves.
-- yung pueblo
And if you're frustrated by an unfulfilled desire for deep connection with others, maybe that's an invitation to discover the ways that you're disconnected from yourself.
-- Jason Miller
So, back to our discussion on morality:
Why is moral authority so universally appealing?
For one thing, moral authority is just so easy to grab at...and then hold on to. In fact, often, it’s something that is put right into your hand. Institutions use it and do this all the time.
It works because it is tangible—defined, understandable.
It’s systemic—using the powers of critical mass to achieve its goals by simply being overwhelming.
It objectifies things, including people.
It’s binary—keeps things simple and tries to frame things in terms of good and evil.
It doesn’t really require anything of you, other than loyalty (or even just tacit consent).
In that way, it fosters a false contentment and disengagement—a kind of passivity because it lets other people (the authoritative ones) do the work.
So, why is moral authority appealing? Too often, it is effectively a cheap means to a desired end (even if it is expensive).
At this point, it might be helpful to add that morality, in and of itself, is likely actually amoral. Because it is a mechanism, it simply functions. The content of morality is highly fluid across time, even if it does tend to revolve around a fairly small set of common things—things often way more designed to manage power than to manage the content itself. Isn't that why so many who claim authoritative mantras don't even try to live up to them personally—is that why 'righteous indignation' is so necessary?
Is morality, then, good or bad? Does it become one or the other only when moral authority is involved? When is authority good (we know when it's bad)?
All to say, while the answers to these questions remain open (like all good questions seem to), the appetite we have for such things seems pretty high because moral authority is SO appealing.
For individuals, character is destiny; for organizations, culture is destiny.
-- Tony Hsieh, Zappos
35 years of marriage, as of today; more knowing and more mystery than ever...almost as if the two are somehow secret companions.
Both involve rhythms; rhythms that can be trusted—that need to be trusted, as their gaps widen with time. Some of them feel time-tested; some feel new. Some feel deeply centering; some feel scary.
Not surprisingly, I hadn't imagined some of this. But, I am grateful that predictability and certainty are not the highest forms of the good that comes from long-term commitment.
And, I am grateful for the kind of strength that is growing within each of us. Of course, I trust more of it in Tami than I do in myself. But, that's kind of a human thing, isn't it (to privately doubt yourself more than others...or is that just me)?—evidence, after all, is quite selective. The divine thing (that I see in Tami) is the real thing AND the most human thing.
When we grow into the divine, we actually become because it is the root of our truest essence. The path to this occurs in many forms. Marriage is certainly one of them, because of its capacity to lead toward love.
Thank you, Tami, for being willing (the essence of love?) to just walk with me.
Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
-- James 1:19-21, 27
There is something so seemingly satisfying about short-term prospects, especially when compared with the likelihood of long-term fulfillment.
Self-diagnosis is hard—we tend to be either too hard or too easy on ourselves.
We all have ways of arriving at meaning—some are common, some are not.
I've been contemplating; how significant is my existence?
Prior Randoms...
Referring to Rush Limbaugh, who died this week:
He was with me right from the beginning. And he liked what I said and he agreed with what I said. And he was just a great gentleman. Great man.
-- Donald Trump
Um, nothing more really needs to be said...about what is important to Donald Trump (more on that tomorrow).
History will speak for itself on the legacy of both men; who strike me, at the very least, as opportunists (though, like all obvious understatement, there is plenty more to consider than just that...).
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
-- E.E. Cummings
Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:
Why is moral authority so universally appealing?
But first, what is morality anyway?
How about a short version AND a longer version?
Short version:
To me, it looks like morality is mostly a device, a mechanism, a construct—created by a group of people to achieve a goal.
The goal seems to be oriented to something the group maintains as an ideal, usually some presumed kind of good. If something violates an ideal of the group, it is deemed immoral (it is bad). To be moral, among other things, often is not to be immoral.
When someone is described as a moral person, it tends to mean that the person is in some particular way a representation of what is good, as defined by a group. Those that maintain the morality of the group reinforce the ideals of the group and are accepted by the group. Those that are immoral are not accepted by the group because they don't reinforce the ideals of the group.
This question has likely created no small amount of debate and discussion throughout time, especially when the details involved seem to vary—over time or across cultures. Rather than attempt a historical review, I'm going to just wing it here a bit.
It seems to me that morality is a sense of something that relates to goodness, that that goodness involves something larger than just what is good for only one person, and that it includes a certain kind of actionability. In other words, it is more than just ideas about what is good.
When we believe, for example, personally or collectively that something is good, we also tend to believe that such goodness should be manifest and available to something between just me and all of humanity. Because it is good (whatever it is), it should be reinforced for the benefit of everyone.
Morality, then, is a mechanism that enables that manifestation, either by access or by enforcement. And, attendant to what is good is often the prevention of whatever disables that goodness, or of what might be termed badness.
It is right at this point, that morality's actionability seeks efficacy. It acquires a goal; a goal designed to promote the good and inhibit the bad.
And, often, it is here where morality seems to beg for a little push—as it takes on an element of authority to achieve this goal. Moral authority, then, emerges as a means of helping secure the desired good (and constricting threats to it—whatever is deemed bad).
Moral authority comes in many shapes and sizes. Religion, for example, has often been used as an authoritative way of maintaining morality. But, other social structures use similar dynamics (or, is it the other way around?). What is interesting is that moral authority seems to often become fixated more on immorality—on preventing what it perceives to be bad (even to the point where what it claims is bad actually isn't necessarily bad)—than it does on what is good.
Perhaps, some 'moral' issues may be of use.
Drinking: getting drunk may be viewed as immoral, because of its potentially 'bad' consequences. A moral authority, then, may say that drinking is immoral, too, because it can lead to drunkenness. But, another version of moral authority may counter-claim that as long as drinking (or being drunk) doesn't hurt anyone, then it isn't immoral. Is drinking inherently good?
Sex: morality might state that sexuality is not immoral, but at the same time that there is such a thing as sexual immorality. The distinction again might be that as long as someone doesn't get hurt (bad), moral authority should claim that sexuality, in and of itself, is not immoral and more than having a drink is.
How about a bigger one—war, or abortion: The morality of either is often determined by an appeal to some type of authority that attempts to make one perspective normative for all. Each perspective uses the basis of the goal of a common good that is either achieved or violated by each.
In the end, there is what seems to be a givenness that there is some kind of common good that is desired and that that good should be available to all and protected from that which would inhibit it. In order to achieve that, some basis of authority needs to be maintained in order to normalize it.
This, it seems to me, is the essence of what morality is or, at least, how it seems to function. And, for good or bad, morality and moral authority seem to go hand in glove.
Perhaps, now, we can return to the original question:
Why is moral authority so universally appealing?
The deepest truth is our union with the Absolute, Infinite Being, with God. That’s the root of our reality.
-- Beatrice Bruteau
'Poem for the week' -- "Then":
The afternoon was a medium.
You made it to the beach. You made to it
an invertebrate overture. Lay down slug
-like, slit belly, what gave.
You were entering what then was called
the universal. A bit
pendulous. You felt a motion that wasn’t
negative pulling you toward the ancient texts
you had discovered floating in some sewage.
They were from the heyday of psychology.
You laughed at this. An animal filament
flickered at the edge of sea. By sea
they had meant mind. You laughed at this.
You observed frothing something. Universal. Stung
your toes. Something universal at the edge you nip
your toes in. Something universal this way you become.
-- Aditi Machado
Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. Growth germinates not in tent dwelling but in upheaval. Yet the seduction is always security rather than venturing, instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting.
-- Sue Monk Kidd
I'm wondering...how many of us live most of our lives in fear of the most full expression of who we are or of what we want?
...another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms....
Isn't it the case that our most full expression of ourselves is often restrained because of the criticism or rejection we anticipate from others. And, rejection from others inhibits our sense of ourselves. The mere potential of rejection is such a powerful influence in our lives.
We often equate criticism with rejection. And, there probably is some reason to do that. However, they are actually not the same thing.
What If...we lived enough from our desire (what we want to express) that we were able to discover the difference between criticism and rejection? What if we actually prospered from that discovery?
Can we even be fully ourselves when we're maintaining our sense-of-self primarily coming from someone outside of us?
What if our sense of self cannot be developed until we find something more innate about where it comes from. If it doesn't come primarily from the outside, where does it come from?
Our sense of self is much more rooted in the true nature of what we are connected to. Of course, when we lose our sense of that (when we are not aware of our true connectedness), it seems to naturally follow that we seek it via other ways where connection looks possible.
But, if our connectedness is truly not external but rather, internal, then we have to pursue something there.
Looking in the right place is key to finding...things like our most full expression.
“Your faith has healed you.”
-- Luke 8:48
In at least one case, he said, "...saved you". Did this not uncommon response from Jesus surprise the person he said it to?
Would it surprise you?
Poems companion us.
-- Edward Hirsch
'Poem for the week' -- "The Winter Bird":
Thou sing’st alone on the bare wintry bough,
As if Spring with its leaves were around thee now;|
And its voice that was heard in the laughing rill,
And the breeze as it whispered o’er meadow and hill,
Still fell on thine ear, as it murmured along
To join the sweet tide of thine own gushing song.
|Sing on—though its sweetness was lost on the blast,
And the storm has not heeded thy song as it passed,
Yet its music awoke in a heart that was near,
A thought whose remembrance will ever prove dear;
Though the brook may be frozen, though silent its voice,
And the gales through the meadows no longer rejoice,
Still I felt, as my ear caught thy glad note of glee,
That my heart in life’s winter might carol like thee.
-- Jones Very
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Passion tends to burn out. Passion-lessness tends to be uninspiring.
Over time, there’s a balance; between the two or from the two or with the two.
In the end, we need to recognize that passion expresses itself in different ways, at different times, over the course of time.
Understanding things like passion exclusively with normative definitions isn't really useful.
When mythic material remains latent, unused and unexplored, it can lead to pathological behavior.
-- Jean Houston
I've noticed...there is so much about taking up space that I am uncomfortable with. Why?
Some of this has to do with my type of personality, but I suspect it also reflects something about where I still need to grow.
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever.
-- Archimedes
Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), a Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that if a lever was balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, it could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.
The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted. To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our “private room” (Matthew 6:6). However, in order for this not to become escapism, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. The fulcrum, that balancing point, must be in the real world.
True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn’t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality—as it is—without ideology, denial, or fantasy.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true “delivery systems,” as Bill Plotkin calls them, by which to move our world. We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive. Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice—for example, those in monasteries—often don’t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world. We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.
Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just “inner” people. Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16)? God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; and God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.
-- Richard Rohr
Forgiveness is like reaching out and grabbing someone’s hand.
In the end, you really can’t legislate sexuality.
What is true about things that are true is that they are true across time and space...a sense of universality.
What really makes something valuable?
Prior Randoms...
'Poem for the week' -- "To Rebuild":
The house was built,
Brick by brick, pane by pane,
Initially withstanding winds,
The force of a hurricane.
But over time, the faults are found
As storm after storm
Assails, the craftsmanship outdated,
In need of reform.
The windows break, one by one,
Under the weight of wrongs, the structure strains,
Until one day fire catches,
And only the foundation of good intentions remains.
While easiest would be to walk,
To abandon, moving on to rebuild,
The value is seen by those who have called it
Home, desires to be fulfilled.
Remembering the mistakes,
Maintaining the hope of freedom,
Hand in hand, we work,
Entering a new season.
The work is not complete until
The walls protect all who live there,
No exceptions. Abandonment of all
Unnecessary despair.
A job led by all, not by one,
We work long days turn long nights.
The creation of our hands
Proving more than surface level acknowledgment of rights.
The past is not buried
But underlies
What we have transformed
Before our eyes.
-- Hallie Knight
About the author:
Hallie Knight is a high school senior from Florida. Her poem “To Rebuild” was the winner of the 2021 Inaugural Poem Contest for Students.
“What a powerful analogy Hallie Knight has drawn for us: our country imagined as a house that we built together and has been figuratively destroyed. Yet the foundations of our hopes, ideals, and perseverance remain intact, allowing us to rebuild our country, our home, echoing Abraham Lincoln’s powerful words: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’”
-- Richard Blanco
Art saves us...a way to help people feel less alone.
-- Brandy Clark, On 'Remember Me Beautiful,' Brandy Clark Processes Death And Celebrates Life
...a worthwhile listen, by the way.
