Monthly Archives: July 2016

Jul212016

Self-worth

Today is a birthday, never meaning that much. Another year gone past. My laptop is being repaired, forcing smart phone documentation and posting. I have distanced myself from posting personal revelations, enjoying a marvelous vacation. Effervescent, thoughts bubble and burst. Prayer roots itself as a grounding. In discretely, lacking concrete form, ideas from Healing the Eight Stages of Life settle upon consciousness, including the subconscious

Besides being divided into thinkers and feelers, we are also divided into intuitives and sensates. Intuitive people dream, live in the future, and have considered all the possible questions even before the teacher ask one. They are ready and can respond quickly. In contrast, sensate people live in the present, taking in all the data. A sensate is considered not about the question the teacher is going to write on the blackboard, but that no one has erased the blackboard well and that the chalk is too short. It takes an intuitive person only one second to answer the teacher’s question, but even if a sensate knows the answer it takes three seconds to give it–three times as long. Many teachers won’t wait three times as long, but instead label the student as slow and therefore will ask another student….

We can be hurt not because we don’t have gifts, but because we don’t have the gifts that school rewards….Hurts in this stage, especially those which lead us to earn love by working harder, may lead to a Type A personality striving, always obsessed with achievement and duty regarding God’s love..

While Type A people often succeed and learn to earn love by trying hard, other less successful people learn not to try at all. You might call them Type Z. The Type Z person learns that he will fail at whatever he tries, so he tends to say, “Let them do it. I don’t want to try anything new because I will probably fail”.  Both Type A and Type Z need to discover that they are good and their worth doesn’t depend on success or failure. They both need GK Chesterton advice that “if something is worth doing at all, it is worth doing poorly”.

We can also relate to God with the perfectionism of Type A or the sloth of Type Z. We can mistakenly feel God is reacting like a teacher or parent, loving us more if we do well and less if we fail. We go to mass or do good works to earn God’s love rather than his grateful responses to God loving us so much. But God’s love doesn’t turn on and off like a water faucet. God is a father who sun rises on the just and unjust (Mt 5:45) and a mother who loves us whether we are competent or incompetent, whether we have worked a full day or an hour (Mt 20:1-17). God’s love doesn’t fluctuate but rather we fluctuate in our capacity to receive God’s love. Sunday mass and good works are not to convince God to love us. Rather, they open us to receive God’s ever-present, infinite love and enable us to share it….

While the Type A person is tempted to Pelagian earning of God’s love by trying to work and pray more perfectly, the Type Z person is tempted to dismiss the value of any work or prayer. The Type Z will dismiss her ability to pray, to listen to God in Scripture, to have a personal relationship with God, or to learn more about God. In contrast, the true mystic doesn’t rely on her ability to pray well, nor does she give up because she can’t pray well. The true mystic knows that God’s love is an unknown gift and she longs to pray even when she can’t pray.

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Jul202016

Books

All the books of the world
will not bring you happiness,
but build a secret path toward your heart.

What you need is in you:
the sun, the stars, the moon,
the illumination you were seeking shines up from within you.

The quest for wisdom
made you comb the libraries.
Now every page speaks the truth
that flashes forth from you.

–Herman Hesse

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Jul202016

Living burdened

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in the nest of a backyard hen. The eagle hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the backyard chickens did, thinking he was a backyard chicken. He scratched the Earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the Eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old Eagle looked up in the awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds, ” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth–we are chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

–Healing the Eight Stages of Life quoting Anthony DeMello ‘The Song of the Bird’

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Jul182016

Today’s Gospel reading: Jonah in the belly of the whale–Something Greater

Some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus,
“Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.”
He said to them in reply,
“An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign,
but no sign will be given it
except the sign of Jonah the prophet.
Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights,
so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth
three days and three nights.
At the judgment, the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation
and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah;
and there is something greater than Jonah here.
At the judgment the queen of the south will arise with this generation
and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth
to hear the wisdom of Solomon;
and there is something greater than Solomon here.”

JonahandChrist

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Jul182016

Moby Dick: grace perfects nature

504px-Lookoutboy

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—

“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.”

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Crammer’s (Thomas Cranmer) sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! –Herman Mellvile

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Jul172016

‘The lesson of Jonah to all sinners’

I have spent hours aplenty the last couple days in the Mystic Seaport, a 19th century replication of Connecticut coastal operations. It proved pleasant. A condensed version of Moby Dick, theatrically played out of doors by a small troupe of impressive young actors, highlighted events, expressivly making evident the crossing of borders present in the presence of the vastness of an ocean. Whaling, salty water, sailing, depths, storms, and the doings of men beneath the immensity of stars. Here are two quotes from a collection of artwork devoted to life immersed within the sea.

Kramer_MalabarX

Searching my heart for its true sorrow,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people
Sick of the city, waiting for sea,
Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness,
Of the strong wind and shattered spray,
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound,
Of the big surf that breaks all day,
If I could see the weedy mussels,
Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,
Hear once again the hungry crying
Overhead of the wheeling gulls,
… I should be happy–that was happy
All day long on the coast of Maine!
I have a need to hold and handle,
Shells and anchors and ships again!

–Edna St. Vincent Millay

They have cradled you with custom, they have primed you with the preaching.

They have soaked you with convention through and through.

They have put you in a showcase, you’re a credit to their teaching.

But you can’t hear the wild? –it’s calling you.

Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us.

Let us journey to a lovely land I know.
There’s a whisper on the night wind, there’s a star agleam to guide us,

And the Wild is calling, calling…let us go.

–Robert Service

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