laughing baby

Nothing like a laughing baby

No Man Is An Island

Thomas Merton

"We too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often dictated by our false selves.

Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like. On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable almost all of the time. This would never be so if my will had not been created to use its own freedom in the love of others."

Merton is an fascinating figure in our modern spiritual landscape. Living at his monastery for awhile enabled me to witness the assortment of characters for whom he has become a spiritual mentor. He is claimed by Catholic conservatives, inter-religious dialogue liberals, new age seekers, poets, and Buddhists to name a few. Like Flannery O'Connor his appeal has stretched well beyond his death. More information on him can be found here.

Flannery O'Connor

One author I continue to return to is Flannery O'Connor. She belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition and her work deftly weaves the comic, the tragic, and the brutal. O'Connor is considered a master of the short story. While her stories are not overtly Catholic, one can nevertheless discern her faith through her work. The morally challenged characters, the unlikely heros, and the ironic endings create stories that I adore. She battled Lupus and died at thirty-nine years old. More information on her and her stories can be found here.

Her letters reveal a complex, thoughtful, and sometimes shockingly forthright persona.

From All Things Considered May 12, 2007 · "Emory University made public Saturday a previously sealed collection of letters from the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor. The letters contained correspondence with a seemingly unremarkable file clerk named Betty Hester. She was, in fact, a passionate, private intellectual who enjoyed a deep friendship with O'Connor.

Steve Enniss of Emory University speaks with Jacki Lyden about the letters." Transcribed from this interview:

"Letter to Elizabeth Hester...
Compared to what you have experienced in the way of radical misery, I have never had anything to bear in my life but minor irritations — but there are times when the worst suffering is not to suffer, and the worst affliction, not to be afflicted. Job’s comforters were worse off than he was, though they did not know it. If in any sense my knowing your burden can make your burden lighter, then I am doubly glad I know it. You were right to tell me, but I’m glad you didn’t tell me until I knew you well. Where you are wrong is in saying that you are the history of horror. The meaning of the redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history, and nothing is plainer to me than that you are not your history. "

Morning Edition March 28, 2008 ·

"Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn. He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth."

Listen to or read the rest of the story.

Politics and Spirituality

True cost of low prices

From The True Cost of Low Prices, The Violence of Globalization:

"The first step toward understanding injustice in our world is to realize that wheather or not people are hungry, whether or not they have health care, education, and safe water depends upon decisions made by the powerful and weathly. It is hard and at times seemingly impossible for those who are well off to recognize that they are part of an economic and political system that treats people so poorly. Instead we would like to think that poverty exists because women have too many children. Or that poor people are not so smart, that they are lazy, or that their countries lack natural resources."

Some statistics that demonstate that females bear a heavy burden of this injustice:

"-In Latin America, 71 percent of female children are underweight; 17 percent of male children are.

-In India, in the state of Punjab, 21 percent of girls in low income families suffer severe malnutrition; 3 percent of boys do.

-Nine hundred million people in the world cannot read. Two-thirds are women.

-In China, South Asia, and West Asia, there are only ninety-four women for every one hundred men. Harvard economists Amartya Sen has estimated that in Asia, there are 100 million women 'missing"-49 million in China alone. Since these societies value boys more than girls, female babies are aborted or abandoned."

the real voyage of....

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust

The Story of Stuff - Ch.5: Consumption

more paradoxes- don't just do something, sit there

From punk rock zen teacher Brad Warner's blog:

"I got one question at Karuna that I get a lot. It went something like, "If I take up this zazen practice what will it do for me?"

There are a million variations and every Zen teacher gets them all the time. My friend Greg Fain up at San Francisco Zen Center said that the more you practice zazen the harder it is to answer that question. Lots of times Zen teachers will give what seem like flippant, dismissive answers. "Nothing!" is a pretty common response. But we're not being flippant, really, just honest.

Most meditation teachers try to sell you on their technique, so they have nice pat answers to that question. They'll tell you about reaching equanimity, establishing peace of mind, even reaching Enlightenment. In the long run zazen has all of these benefits too. But I hate to stress them because if you're looking for those things in your practice, the very activity of looking for them prevents you from ever achieving them. It is precisely because you're always looking for peace of mind outside of your own real state of mind that you're never peaceful. It's because you look for Enlightenment outside of this moment that you're never enlightened. You certainly can achieve weird states of mind that unscrupulous teachers will tell you are the states you're seeking. But I wouldn't listen to any of them. What do they know about your state of mind anyway?"

On some level you may indeed be able to say you "get something" out of the daily practice of zazen. I certainly wouldn't have kept it up for 25 years if it was a complete waste of time. But in order to get anything out of it, you need to drop the idea that you'll ever get anything out of it. Just see clearly where you are at this moment. That's enough."

be what you already are

"Oct 2, 1958. Feast of the Guardian Angels

Brilliant and gorgeous day, bright sun, breeze making all the leaves and high brown grasses shine. Singing of the wind in the cedars. Exultant day in which even a puddle in the pig lot shines like precious silver.

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself. For it is the unaccepted self that stands in my way will continue to do so as long as it is not accepted. When it has been accepted - it is my own stepping stone to what is above me. Because this is the way humans have been made by God. Original sin was the effort to surpass oneself by being "like god" - , unlike oneself. But our godlikeness begins at home. We must first become like ourselves and stop living "beside ourselves".

Thomas Merton

My mind seems to come up with ideals of how I should be. Once I reach the ideal my mind produces another one. Consquently, I constantly live in the future and this never becomes the present because there is always another future once I reach the present. I wish I would/could/should be more....this list is without end....and if I'm paying attention, I judge myself for producing those thoughts. This contructs another measuring stick (how I should be) instead of accepting how I am right now. This acceptence, as Merton points out, is the only way I can ever 'surpass' myself and truly be who I am.

Parenting has provided me with a container to see this in action. I couldn't wait till Jonah could wave. And then walk. And then say a word. Now I am looking forward to him putting together two word phrases. All these future thoughts steal the present and create the condition of living 'beside' myself.

stuff white people like....

This website pokes fun at things white liberal middle class people are into. Currently the blogs lists 91 items and counting. To have much of what I enjoy and am about parodied, on some level, is not pleasant. It was tough to read at points (for instance, every TV show I like was mentioned-the wire, arrested development, Colbert report, daily show, sopranos, six feet under). But realizing that many of the attitudes and ideas that drift through my head are only part of a broader culture is liberating and perhaps it is worthy of ridicule.


#75 Threatening to move to Canada

Often times, white people get frustrated with the state of their country. They do not like the President, or Congress, or the health care system, or the illegal status of Marijuana. Whenever they are presented with a situation that seems unreasonable to them, their first instinct is to threaten to move to Canada.

For example, if you are watching TV with white people and there is a piece on the news about that they do not agree with, they are likely to declare “OK, that’s it, I’m moving to Canada.”

#60
The Toyota Prius
"Over the years, white people have gone through a number of official cars. In the 1980s it was the Saab and the Volvo. By the 1990s it was the Volkswagen Jetta or a Subaru 4wd station wagon. But these days, there is only one car for white people. One car that defines all that they love: the Toyota Prius.

#57
'Juno'
"As 2007’s Indie hit, it is alternative mainstream and white people love it when low budget movies do well, even though the $7 million budget is enough to feed thousands of villages in East Africa for a year,'' "White people, especially ones over 30, also love movies that take them back to a time when there was zero hip hop influence in white high schools.''

#2 Religion their parents don't belong to

White people will often say they are “spiritual” but not religious. Which usually means that they will believe any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus. Popular choices include Buddhism, Hinduism, Kabbalah and, to a lesser extent, Scientology. A few even dip into Islam, but it’s much more rare since you have to give stuff up and actually go to Mosque. Mostly they are into religion that fits really well into their homes or wardrobe and doesn’t require them to do very much.

cohen interview

I recently heard a quote about Bernie Glassman. Someone who knows him well went to hear him speak. During the talk he said that he was going to confess his greatest addiction. The narrator thought, "cigars? Pepproni?" But instead, Glassman said his greatest addiction was himself. We take this to olympic levels in our culture. I found this clip of an interview in my 'documents' and, sadly, don't know its origins but it speaks to this addiction we all share:

"You never went to a therapist?" "For one reason or another, I didn't have any confidence in the therapeutic model. Therapy seems to affirm the idea unconditionally of a self that has to be worked on and repaired. And my inclination was that it was holding that notion to begin with that was the problem -- that there was this self that needed some kind of radical adjustment. It didn't appeal to me for some oddreason."

Up on Mount Baldy, Cohen found a notion of the self -- or non-self -- more conducive to his way of thinking than the one handed down by Freud et al."Events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof," he told me, quoting Buddha. Not curing the self, but releasing one's grip on it --that was the solution. Also of help was the monastery's rigorous daily schedule, so filled with menial chores that he had no time to think about his problems. And then there was his friendship with Roshi, and the companionship of the other monks.

For Cohen, one of the beauties of Zen is that, because there is no discussion of a deity, it has never threatened his own Judaism, which has strengthened over time. "It just deepens," he said almost dreamily. "You just enter into that 4,000-year-old conversation with God and the sages."

The Ladder of Divine Perfection

One day I saw three monks insulted and humiliated in the same way at the same moment. The first felt he had been cruelly hurt; he was distressed but managed not to say anything. The second was happy for himself but grieved for the one who had insulted him. The third thought only of the harm suffered by his neighbour, and wept with the most ardent compassion. The first was prompted by fear; the second was urged on by the hope of reward; the third was moved by love.

John Climacus

The Ladder of Divine Perfection, 8th step (pg. 73).

Fear, apparently, drives much of what I do. If I am even silent about a preceived slight that seems to take a sysphian effort. I fail. Often. To transform my small, reptilian mind, and forgive challenges my habitual way of operating in the world. To transform this initial reaction...would be quite a change. Perhaps, the message of Easter should provide us the hope that we can die to our rote way of responding and transfigure ourselves.

Song for Nobody

by Thomas Merton



A yellow flower(Light and spirit)

Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun

In whose dark eye

Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven

Sings by itself

A song to nobody.

Desolation Row

When I stayed at Gethsemani Abbey for several months, I chanted in the choir with the monks, and I stood next to Fr. Matthew. To say he was interesting would be an understatement. He would amble into the church in big black cowboy boots if he was feeling particularly masculine or slide into his spot in petite Chinese slippers if he felt in touch with his feminine side. The thick Boston accent from the city of his birth was present eighty years later and compounded by his propensity to mumble.

One afternoon I went out with him and the cellar to purchase some supplies for the monastery. We stopped by a drug store and Fr. Matthew, then in his mid-eighties, walked out with a carton of cigarettes. On his three hour morning walk he told me, he enjoyed one and felt it provided him with a little pep in his step. This shattered all my ideas about piety and holiness. For this I am forever grateful.

He has published several books of his talks including Sermons in a Monastery and The Call of Wild Geese. The following talk provides the unlikely marriage of one of my favorite musicians, Bob Dylan, and a cloistered monk speaking about spirituality. It certainly fits for Good Friday; this is simply the beginning of the talk the rest can be found here. Enjoy.

A Retreat Conference of Fr. Matthew Kelty, O.C.S.O. given at Gethsemani: January, 1970]
Desolation Row 1

Every scribe trained for the Kingdom of God is like a householder who brings out of his treasure things both new and old.2—Here is something old... It struck me for the first time in talking to you and in preparing a few more[conferences] for [the monastery of] Ava, that I say the same thing over and over again in a different way. It's like playing a guitar with one string: I play it sometimes loud and sometimes soft, sometimes quick and sometimes slow. But it seems to be the same string. It occurs to me that I'm much of a gatherer rather than a creator. I'm a primitive type. I don't cultivate and sow and reap. I walk up and down the beach and see what I can find — and every now and then I think I find something pretty good. And I look at it... And so I stumbled on this [song] Desolation Row 3 by Bob Dylan. I don't know anything about Bob Dylan, but this song is very good, and he wrote it. I think some people loathe him, others adore him. But most admit, I think, that his gifts are great and unusual. I don't know what has become of the song in the last couple of years, but it is a series of images more or less connected. Listening to it, you try to get what the message is. And it seems to be a song about the failure of love, and that admission of failure in love is the beginning of healing, and therefore the way to genuine love.


There's a lot of stanzas that describe various characters: some of them from history, some from literature, some of them just types — of all kinds. And the overall indictment seems to be: they failed in love. And what happens when people discover they failed in love? They look for someone to hang it on, someone to punish for their own failure. But Dylan's point seems to be — at least as I read it; you may read it completely differently — that this is not the answer at all. The answer is in the admission that you yourself have failed, and that desolation is not the characteristic of someone else's heart, but of your own. And you realize that you live on Desolation Row. To admit this is to shed pretense and to open the way to a genuine understanding of what love is.


I find it remarkable that so young a man — he was only in his early 20's when he wrote it — should be so shrewd an observer, so keen in his look into the human heart, so aware of contemporary need. I believe he would know what I was talking about if I told him that I thought monastic choir was a lot like Desolation Row.


In the song they are hanging Casanova because he failed in love. Often enough we act this out in our lives. We seek a Casanova that we can hang with good conscience: we hang the abbot, or the house, or the Order, or the religious life, or the Church, or the priesthood, or the community. Anyone, just so long as it is someone else. For if there is one thing we try by all means to make clear it is this: we do not live on Desolation Row. That's why the song ends: "Don't write me no more letters — no, not unless you mail them from Desolation Row." (Not very good English, but it has a message.)


It is by being wretched that we win the Mercy of Christ, and by admitting and accepting our wretchedness that we are healed. You know: you go out into the sunshine and you reveal your wounds. And the sun heals them.

What do you do when you discover that Desolation Row is not only the name of a song, but also the name of the street you live on? When you discover after years in holy vows, pledged to chastity, that you still hunger for affection and seek it greedily, that you have no genuine love? It is a shocking thing to grow into maturity (as I am doing) and discover in your past life that you've had little love. What do you do when you realize honestly that you have no love at all for poverty? That you want it as nice as you can make it under the circumstances? What do you do when you realize truthfully that you live in constant fear that some day God may ask you to do something you don't want to do? That is to say: What do you do when it comes home to you that the field of dry bones4 is yourself? That the abomination of desolation5 is you? That Lazarus6, three days dead in the tomb and stinking is not Lazarus at all, but a man with your name? What do you do, in other words, when you learn you are not real, and that the relation between you and the place you live in and the clothes you wear and the things you do, is no relation at all? When it suddenly dawns on you: I am a resident of Desolation Row? What do you do?? Why, you thank God and you sing out for joy that liberation has come, that the day of redemption is at hand!


Discovery that one lives on Desolation Row is a common experience today, because it is a time of judgment: krisis — as in the Greek: "crisis". But the response to this discovery is not always one of gratitude. Sometimes it's flight: people flee from marriage, flee from vows, from Sacred Orders, from society, with the feeling that in this way they will escape the phony. They are mistaken. Marriage is not phony, nor are the vows of Religion, nor Sacred Orders, nor society. It is rather man [who is phony]. God made the world. It's not phony. There's a lot of phoniness in it. Most of it has two legs. Man is not delivered from the phony by taking a trip! If anything, this will make even more clear his unreality.


—Which is one reason why men come to the monastic desert: not to escape their phoniness, but to discover it. Not because they are real, but because they wish to become so. That's when men in a monastery begin to discover the dimensions of their own reality. Running does not always seem to be the appropriate answer. Sooner or later you've got to stop running. And "running" anyhow is just a way of talking; it need not be understood literally. Many people who are running as fast as their legs will carry them are not even moving. Even their running has something unreal about it. Which does not mean everyone leaving the monastery is necessarily running. Nor everyone remaining, holding his ground.


It seems to me that the acceptance of desolation is not merely an accessory to the monastic life, but of its very structure. It is so because that is the point in Christ's redemption. For Christ's life, death and resurrection was not just an "adjustment," a "tune-up," but a complete, entire rebirth. And this rebirth was begun in our death and birth-to-life in Baptism and continues all our life. It will never be complete until the last act by which we at once die and are born to life eternal. But while we live we are constantly being put to death, and constantly being born to life. And the two actions are generally so interwoven and so interlaced, that it is usually impossible to know what is going on. What we take to be our death, may be our new birth. And what we interpret as a new lease on life, may be the beginning of the end. This is certainly true of our residence on Desolation Row. Not many are too anxious to accept the truth of the situation. And when they do, too often it is in terms of being the ultimate catastrophe.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Sarah Coakley

Sarah Coakley is a priest and professor. I can relate to her lament of finding anyway possible to avoid.....meditation and prayer. The human"impossibility" of prayer ironically makes true prayer possible.

Dialogue
Ordinary Within the Extraordinary
by Sarah A. Coakley

For we do not know how to pray. . .but [the] Spirit intercedes
with sighs too deep for words. (Romans 8:26)

No, we do not know how to pray; and doubtless this is why Teresa of Avila remains so attractive and approachable a Christian witness. For so much of her first, autobiographical work, The Life—inspired, of course, by Augustine's Confessions, but so delightfully different from them—is about the frank impossibility of prayer. Or rather, it is about our endless subterfuges to avoid it, to think of utterly convincing and really good reasons not to do it, to run away as fast as our legs will carry us from that pressure of the Spirit of which Paul speaks, the source and goal of all our longings. Perhaps better than any before or since, Teresa tells us—in glorious and homely detail—how not to be a saint, before she shows us what it costs to be one.

And that's the joke; because, as Teresa herself became increasingly aware in the development of her prayer towards union, the running away that we all do never quite does the trick. The Spirit is always there, closer to us than we are to ourselves, closer than kissing, constantly begging permission to pray in us. And so our excuses, our evasions, our dryness, our declaring of prayer as impossible, are themselves ironic witnesses to the Spirit's ever-effacing willingness to "come to our aid." It is not the fact that God is absent, but rather so uncontrollably present, that discomforts us. It reminds us of our weakness, of our lack of control, of the various traces of death that we politely circumnavigate. As Teresa herself puts it in one of her "Spiritual Testimonies" (no. 25), hearing these words from God: "Don't think, daughter, that [only] union lies in being very close to me. For those, too, who offend me are close, although they may not want to be."

To acknowledge then that our not wanting the Spirit is the backside of our deepest desire to hand over to it, a token of our very closeness to God, is precisely the paradox of which Paul speaks. It is also the wellspring of Teresa's long account of her
gradual ceding of control to the same Spirit. The human impossibility of prayer becomes the space of divine prayer. And what initially led (when Teresa turned back to prayer in earnest) to spiritual high jinks—raptures and "favors"—finally becomes, at the end of Teresa's busy life—simple "repose" in the Spirit, humdrum and ostensibly unremarkable. And so almost to her own dismay, Teresa discovers, at the end of The Interior Castle, that ceding to the Spirit makes one, in union, more extraordinarily ordinary than one could have imagined. Life goes on, with all its trials and irritations. It is just that God has finally taken up residence in the deepest part of one's soul, and nothing can move it.

"We do not know how to pray." True; but fortunately God the Spirit does, and will make us saints if we dare. Of this Teresa is unambiguous and alluring witness. Or, in the feisty words of her own parting shot on "union": "You may think what you want. What I have said is true" (Interior Castle, vii: 2). So be it. Amen.

St. Bonaventure

The Soul's Journey Into God

If you wish to know how these things come about,
ask grace not instruction,
desire not understanding,
the groaning of prayer not diligent reading,
the Spouse not the teacher,
God not humans,
darkness not clarity,
not light but the fire
that totally inflames and carries us into God.

dotCommonweal

This is from the comment section of the dotcommonweal blog:

by Bernard Dauenhauer on March 18th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Reports of some of Rev. Wright’s remarks certainly bothered me at first. I’m a comfortable white male whose life has been, relatively speaking, easy. But then I realized that when my wife and I talk together about a number of facets of American life, for example the constant expression in the media of America’s moral greatness and generosity, we can barely contain our anger at the travesty. That Rev. Wright, with a perspective generated by a lifetime in confronting wretched conditions, would express outrage is hardly a reason for me, or anyone, to denounce him as somehow “unAmerican.” What about the kinds of things that Dorothy Day regularly said and wrote? Frankly, when I think hard about God’s justice, I have to pray hard for His mercy, since I have lived in such comfort while so many of the poor that He loves so much and live so near me have not led me to protest more vigorously and act more resolutely to aid them.This is not a campaign speech for Obama. It is, instead, a reflection on the hypocrisy to which so many of us comfortable Christian Americans are so constantly tempted.

Obama's Historical Speech On Race 3-18-08 Pt. 1 of 4

wow...amazing speech.

Six word autobiography

Some blogger whom I don't know came up with the six word memoir. Appreciating the ability to communicate sparsely but in a deep manner/ I can see this as an interesting exercise. Those of us who enjoy poetry understand as do those of us who find bumper stickers an art form. I labored over this for awhile.....a tough task for those of us that appreciate brevity from afar but aren't used to containing our own words. Here is my attempt:



Tears triumph disappointment
Elation sorrow compassion



Anyone else care to try? My brother, Matt, often has trouble being too verbose, perhaps this might be a beneficial exercise for him?

The Dude Abides

The Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, sees much wisdom in the movie, The Big Lebowski, and specifically in the character played by Jeff Bridges, the Dude. This blog, the dude abides explains some of the insights he sees in the movie. It is worth checking out if your interested in zen, koans, or The Big Lebowski.

The Big Lebowski The Dude's Version

The Forest

I saw this picture of Michel de Broin's 2004 sculpture on Andrew Sullivan's site and thought it fitting for Palm Sunday. Here's the artist's description of the work:

Upon invitation to reflect on the notion of transparency, that led me into the forest to envelop the contour of a large stone with fragments of mirror. The large stone,tucked away deep in the woods, became a reflective surface for its surroundings. In this play of splintered radiance, the rock disappears in its reflections. Because it reflects, one cannot be misled by its presence,
yet we cannot seize it, rather it is the rock that reflects us.

Unhappy Meals

Micheal Pollen is an author who writes about the anthropology and politics of food. I've read two of his books The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma. Sara recently received his latest book, In Defense of Food, as a gift from my parents. After reading his books, articles, and blog, I've found myself viewing food and my shopping trips differently. How and where we purchase our food is a political act. How do I want to vote with my food dollars? Today, he was referenced in an nytimes article about 20 and 30 somethings becoming organic farmers.

This is the end of a lengthy article from the New York Times Magazine and is a good overview of the general tenor of his work. It is worth reading in its entirety. The following nine pieces of advice seem not only reasonable but wise:

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier
said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b)unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the
scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health?Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Anger

I enjoy being angry. It enables me to avoid what the anger is covering up...hurt, disappointment or some underlying fear or anxiety. Anger feels so much better than facing any of those emotions.

There is a wonderful story of a Christian monk who had great difficulty with anger. He was continually and constantly angry with his fellow monks. He thought, "If only I didn't have to live with such unkind and insentitive people I wouldn't have this problem with anger." (this sounds familiar doesn't it...if only my house was bigger, if only my boss wasn't rude, if only my spouse was more understanding or worked less....then everything would be alright). The Abbott of the monastry allowed him to live as a hermit. One day a few weeks later, one of the monks went out to the cave where he was staying to pay a visit and deliver some food. As he came upon the dwelling he heard a great crash and much cursing. The monk was angry at the fire. What this story points out for me is that other people aren't the problem.

No matter how much I want to project my anger onto others, ultimately it is my own darkness that I see when I am angry.

I heard this from Joko Beck and found it in a talk on anger by one of her dharma successors, Ezra Bayda. The entire article can be found here. I've found taking these steps to be helpful in dealing with anger:

Break down the re-created emotional experience into three components: the objective situation, the emotion itself, and the behavioral strategy that followed the emotional reaction. This helps bring clarity to the process.

For example, your mate or coworker criticizes you, and before you know it, you're in an angry exchange. Later, when you re-create this experience, you first ask yourself, "What was the objective situation? What actually happened?" Often all that happened is that words were spoken, or even more objectively, sounds connected with the tympanic membrane in your ear. The words themselves had no emotional load. You grafted the emotional reaction onto the objective events. Once you see this, you can then look at the second component: the emotional reaction itself. What specific emotion or emotions did you feel? Be as precise and honest as you can in identifying your feelings; often we don't even know what they are. Then move to the third component, the behavioral strategy. What was your strategy -- to comply, to attack, to withdraw? Though the strategy is not
the same as the reaction, they are often connected in the same predictable pattern.

When we're caught in the behavioral strategy, we have little hope of clarifying our anger. This is especially true if our strategy entails blaming
and self-justifying, with that accompanying sense of power in being right. If we can refrain from blaming, we can focus on the initial reaction itself. We first ask, "What are the believed thoughts?" Sometimes the believed thoughts are right on the surface; other times they may not be accessible. Either way, the next and most crucial step is to enter the physical
experience of the emotion. Truly residing in our anger has the potential to take us down to the core fears that are often driving our surface reactions. Practicing this way repeatedly will enlarge the sense of spaciousness around our angry reactions. As we regard them less as "me", we become less likely to get caught up in them.

When we see clearly how anger arises simply because life is not fitting our little pictures, dropping the anger is not so difficult. What is difficult is that we want to be angry. We can see how our anger comes from our unfulfilled pictures and from our wanting to justify the anger. We can also see that when anger arises, we don't have to express it, nor do we have to justify it by defending the believed thoughts.

God of the Gaps

This year's Templeton Prize has been awarded to Polish physicist and Catholic priest Michal Heller. The Templeton website. From The New York Times:

The $1.6 million Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a cause?”

Michael Heller, 72, winner of this year’s prize. He says science and religion “are prerequisites of the decent existence.” The John Templeton Foundation, which awards grants to encourage scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and
philosophy, commended Professor Heller, who is from Poland, for his extensive writings that have “evoked new and important consideration of some of humankind’s most profound concepts.”

Much of Professor Heller’s career has been dedicated to reconciling the known scientific world with the unknowable dimensions of God. In doing so, he has argued against a “God of the gaps” strategy for relating science and religion, a view that uses God to explain what science cannot. Professor Heller said he believed, for example, that the religious objection to teaching evolution “is one of the greatest
misunderstandings” because it “introduces a contradiction or opposition between
God and chance.”

In a telephone interview, Professor Heller explained his affinity for the two fields: “I always wanted to do the most important things, and what can be more important than science and religion? Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.” Professor Heller said he planned to use his prize to create a center for the study of science and theology at the Pontifical Academy of Theology, in Krakow, Poland, where he is a faculty member. Professor Heller was born in 1936 in Tarnow, Poland, one of five children in a deeply religious
family devoted to intellectual interests. His mother, a schoolteacher, and his father, a mechanical and electrical engineer, fled to Russia in 1939 before the Nazi occupation.
On returning years later to Poland, where Communist authorities sought to oppress intellectuals and priests, Professor Heller found shelter for his work in the Catholic Church. He was ordained at 23, but spent just one year ministering to a parish before he felt compelled to return to academia.
“It was one of the most difficult years of my life,” Professor
Heller said. “This confrontation of this highly idealistic approach to life with everyday life is very painful.”
“When I was asked to attend to a dying
person,” he said, “I was not prepared for life myself, so I had a difficult time
to prepare someone to pass away. When you are confronted with such an immediate
fact, you never think about the high goals of your life.”
The prize will be officially awarded in London by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a private ceremony on May 7 at Buckingham Palace.

He Reached Down - Iris DeMent

We recently took in a Iris Dement concert. She introduced this song by saying, "This is what it is all about." I agree.

Skin Deep

This database independently tests body care products for the presence of known toxins and potentially hazardous ingredients. After looking up the baby shampoo we use, we were shocked to find it had among the worst ratings. http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/index.php

The same people, The Enviromnental Working Group, publish a parent newsletter and a food guide:

An EWG simulation of thousands of consumers eating high and low pesticide diets shows that people can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 90 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead.

Joko Beck

To some degree we all find life difficult, perplexing, and oppressive. Even when it goes well, as it may for a time, we worry that it probably won't keep on that way. Depending on our personal history, we arrive at adulthood with very mixed feelings about this life. If I were to tell you that your life is already perfect, whole, and complete just as it is, you would think I was crazy. Nobody believes his or her life is perfect. And yet there is something within each of us that basically knows we are limitless. We are caught in the contradiction of finding life a rather perplexing puzzle which causes us a lot of misery, and at the same time being dimly aware of the limitless nature of life.

So we begin looking for an answer to the puzzle. The first way of looking is to seek a solution outside ourselves. At first this may be on a very ordinary level. There are many people in the world who feel that if only they had a bigger car, a nicer house, better vacations, a more understanding boss, or a more interesting partner, then their life would work. We all go through that one. Slowly we wear out most of our "if onlies." "If only I had this, or that, then my life would work Not one of us isn't, to some degree, still wearing out our "if onlies." First of all we wear out those on the gross levels. Then we shift our search to more subtle levels. Finally, in looking for the thing outside of ourselves that we hope is going to complete us, we turn to a spiritual discipline. Unfortunately we tend to bring into this new search the same orientation as before.

We have all spent many years building up a conditioned view of life. There is "me" and there is this "thing" out there that is either hurting me or pleasing me. We tend to run our whole life trying to avoid all that hurts or displeases us, noticing the objects, people, or situations that we think will give us pain or pleasure, avoiding one and pursuing the other. Without exception, we all do this. We remain separate from our life, looking at it, analyzing it, judging it, seeking to answer the questions, 'What am I going to get out of it? Is it going to give me pleasure or comfort or should I run away from it?" We do this from morning until night.

Underneath our nice, friendly facades there is great unease. If I were to scratch below the surface of anyone I would find fear, pain, and anxiety running amok. We all have ways to cover them up. We overeat, over-drink, overwork; we watch too much television. We are always doing something to cover up our basic existential anxiety. Some people live that way until the day they die.

As the years go by, it gets worse and worse. What might not look so bad when you are twenty-five looks awful by the time you are fifty. We all know people who might as well be dead; they have so contracted into their limited viewpoints that it is as painful for those around them as it is for themselves. The flexibility and joy and flow of life are gone. And that rather grim possibility faces all of us, unless we wake up to the fact that we need to work with our life, we need to practice.

Charlotte Joko Beck

Everyday Zen

A Moment

I hustled down the stairs to
the basement below our flat
A wire and plywood enclosure guarded our stuff
from the dank and mildewed room
I paused
behind the furnace

the stone and mortar wall

stood there, boundless and complete

(perfect)
I watched
for a

second
then opened the door to the cage
and climbed in to find the suitcases
We were going on a trip

I was in a hurry.

Freedom

Yesterday, Pope Benedict visited a youth center in Rome. He ad-libbed his homily, Teresa Benedetta has translanted, an excerpt:

In John’s Gospel, the Lord says: “I have come so that you may have life, and have life in abundance.” A life in abundance is not, as some may think, to consume everything, to have everything, to do everything one pleases. In such a case, we would live for dead things, we would live for death.

Life in abundance is to be in communion with true life, with infinite love. It is this way that we truly enter into the abundance of life and we become bearers of life even for others.

While I disagree with the Pope about alot (embarrassing that I need to trot out my liberal resume after quoting him) he has some profound ideas. We don't hear much about his critiques of our consumer culture in the North American press.

This part of the homiliy is precisely why religion matters to me. It offers me an alternative to our cultural assumptions and, as David Tracy puts it, "subverts the ego". We are inundated with ads demonstrating how happy this cream or that car will make you. The implied message that all of us are inadaquate unless we consume. The Pope correctly points out by doing this, "we live for dead things."

Freedom to purchase what you want and do what you want is certainly freedom but not the kind I'm curious about. The freedom to be who we are and love others boundlessly is the freedom that I attempt to be orientated to and this homiliy speaks about. Most spiritual disciplines and authentic religions attempt to,"subvert the ego." Cracking us open to be available to the Other and in doing so, practice boundless love--this is true freedom.

But is it real.....?

My brother, Matt, is living with us while working on his final part of his PhD. Matt and I went out with my friend, John, to a local pub. John is an atheist and Matt is earning his degree in Theology. John is an avowed conservative and Matt is a hardline liberal. John is from Dublin while Matt is from Dayton. Both Matt and John enjoy arguing. Needless to say, I thought it would be entertaining to get them together for some beers.

At the beginning of the evening, we spent what seemed like an hour discussing if the pint of beer in front of me was in fact a pint a beer and how we might prove it. The debate meanandered on. Four or five hours came and went and while no one changed the other's mind, viewpoints were exchanged at a more sophisticated and nuanced level than your average NPR or cable news show. Cheers to not knowing if the garbage, the fence, or the pint are real but plodding on anyhow.

Czeslaw Milosz

Learning

To believe you are magnificent. And gradually discover that
you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Czeslaw Milosz
The Road-side Dog

Discreet Charm of Nihilism

A prophet, as he called himself, of European nihilism, Nietzsche used to say with pride "we, nihilists" and defined what would be the "most blatant form of nihilism." It would be "a view according to which any belief, any conviction would be by necessity false, simply because there is no true world." He called this "a godlike way of thinking."

He would probably not be very happy with the use made of his oeuvre during the hundred years since his death. After all, what he valued was courage. and today courage is required to dissent from his views.

Czeslaw Milosz--The Road-side Dog

One of my favorite books, A Book of Luminous Things, is a poetry anthology complied by Czeslaw Milosz. I've picked up several of his books since Sara introduced me to him with that anthology. His poetry and prose are striking in their beauty and more so for the way they speak to our current cultural situation. Czeslaw died in 2004 at the age of 93. The book the quotes are from was written when he was 86! More information on him can be found here

I've encountered my fair share of atheists and scientific-reductionists since moving to Chicago. I have nothing against either view: I'd be more concerned with how they act and behave in the world than worrying about their opinions on ontology, poetry, or the Heart Sutra. Take heart Nietzsche... hopefully I am courageous in spite of the fact that I am a dinosaur in my beliefs.

Everyday Blessings

There are many different ways to view what we often call 'difficult' or 'negative' behaviors in our children. What might be completely unacceptable to someone else might be normal behavior to me, and vice versa. Very often we're locked into seeing things in only one way, conditioned by views and feelings that are frequently unexamined, and that often put social decorum--what other people might think, or how embarrassed we are feeling--above the emotional well-being of our children.

How we see things will completely affect what we choose to do. When a baby is crying, do we see it as a willful attempt to control us or as a cry for help? When children begin crawling and exploring the world around them, do we view their unstoppable curiosity as a sign of intelligence, strength, and spirit, or as a threat to our control, as an act of disobedience? How do we view it when a son is wildly teasing his sisters, or when a teenage daughter is moodly and distant, critical and demanding, or when a child is so angry that she threatens to run away from home?

Accepting our children as they are. It sounds so simple. But how often do we find ourselves wanting our cildren to act, look, or be different from the way they actually are in that moment? How often do we want them to be, or look, or relate the way they were in a different moment, at a different time, and not accepting--despite all the evidence--that right here, right now, things are not the way we want them to be but are undeniably the way they are?

Everyday Blessings
Myla and Jon Kabat-Zinn

Fr. Louis

How can I find One Who is nowhere? If I find Him, I myself will also be nowhere. And if I am nowhere how will I be able to say that 'I' am still 'I'? Will I exsist to rejoice in having found Him? How can I find Him who is everywhere? If He is everywhere, He is indeed close to me, and with me, and in me: perhaps He will turn out to be, in some mysterious way, my own self.

Merton, The Silent Life

We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his faith and for “finding himself.” You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who you are. Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.

Merton, No Man is an Island

I find both quotes poignant in how they deal with the question of self-identity. Who am I? What a wonderful question to explore. Father, husband, son, brother, grandson, nephew, friend, customer.....all accurate but all labels. Who am I beyond and behind these ideas and roles? I find that the 'names and numbers' others provide me pale in comparsion to the labels I provide for myself. However, I do box others in as much as I do myself. It makes it so much easier to say "oh that's John, he's....... In that moment I lose the freedom to to find out who he truly is, right now. Perhaps, watching the assumptions I make about myself and others is a beginning in discovering who I truly am?

Book of Mercy

Found a CBC radio broadcast with my man, Leonard Cohen, about The Book of Mercy. When the interviewer comments that the book resulting from an 'experience' is “not necessarily the work of a believer, this is not a demonstration of faith or conviction, is it?”, Leonard replies:

“Those kinds of questions - I believe or I don’t believe - those belong to the mind, and, appropriately to the mind but…when you find yourself in that landscape where the only thing you can do is prayer, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or not, because you’re not using that faculty that evaluates the
reality of faith or the reality of God or not - it’s a completely different landscape; it is a cry, and there is an object of the
cry, and it’s a certainty in that place.”
“One is not interested in proving or not proving the existence of the object; if you address yourself to the source of mercy, you might have the good luck to discover that there is a
source of mercy… There is a source of mercy as I experienced it, and these poems are the document of that address and that kind of deliverance.”

find the whole interview here

contemplation and social justice

One of the issues that I struggle with is the Gospel call to end suffering and injustice and the contemplative stance of not knowing. How are these two reconciled in my life? Often these two calls seem to contradict each other. Not knowing seems to preclude me from telling someone they are wrong. Social justice seems to push me to point out the inequities in our lives and society. How are the two welded together? I constantly ponder this question. The Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, has an answer.

While we cannot say that you are wrong, we can say, and often need to say, “From my point of view, I/our children/the community are being, or are going to be, affected in a very in destructive way. From my point of view, this must change.” Obviously from the perpetrators viewpoint which is based on their conditioning and experiences, their actions are in some way good or necessary, or they would not be doing them. As the Dude says, “It is just your opinion, man!” however bad it appears.
If our vow is to enhance life, this may mean restraining those that are dangerous and causing harm while we work to find a resolution that benefits all.

The manner and means of communicating and enacting our view however are crucial to the outcome. Not knowing, bearing witness and loving action are here, as always, a powerful way to proceed. Dropping our first reactive opinions, from a place of not-knowing, we need to open and bear witness to our own and others viewpoints and actions, to motivation, and to where these create suffering or harmony for all. Then we are empowered to act lovingly to the best of our ability, while being able to respond also to unpredicted consequences of our own and others actions. We will make mistakes, we will fail to achieve our aims over and over, but we will live a passionate, loving, and meaningful life, and inspire others to do so too, including maybe, even those of opposing view.

There are as many ways of putting forward or enacting our views skillfully as there are people. We each need to look at our strengths, skills, and resources and chose our most effective way of taking healing action. Some of us can organize, some can write, or speak in public, some can express artistically, understand and use the law, vote, analyze the parameters, use the media well, persuade friends who are influential, donate money, inspire others to put forward their views or change their actions, teach the children, tend to the suffering or dying, devise ceremonies of awareness or experiential healing, listen from the heart to dissension, organize celebration of resolution, or simply enact harmony within the situation in every encounter. Every morsel of nourishment offered feeds us all in ways we will never know.

When action comes from the heart with passion, expresses love and inclusion of all beings, remarkable changes can be wrought. Slavery can end, a Constitution can be written, women can be enfranchised, universal education and health care provided, the homeless can become part of community, age old enemies become friends, and maybe even a war can be ended, and further global warming halted.

Philosophizing aside, the real question is, what are the issues resonating in your life? How will you act?

Amen.

St. Augustine of Hippo

If after examining your conscience you find that you are among the weeds, don’t be afraid to change. The order has not yet been given to cut the field down; the harvest has not yet come. Don’t be today what you were yesterday, and don’t be tomorrow what you are today. (Sermon 5, 2 Caillou)

By examining our habits of mind we will change beyond the inevitable becoming ill, aging, and dying. Perhaps through this attention we can resurrect our true selves.

Catholics at the ballot box

Intriguing article by a law professor from Loyola of Chicago about the Bishop's statement on voting. "Even if having or performing an abortion is intrinsically evil, opposing the criminalization of abortion is not intrinsically wrong.Before declaring that someone is wrong for opposing anti-abortion laws, two questions must be asked:Is criminalization effective in stopping abortions?Is criminalization the only effective means of stopping abortion?The answer to both is no.When a politician states that he or she believes that abortion should be "legal, safe, and rare," this is not an intrinsically evil position. I would argue that this position, when coupled with advocacy for adequate social services, is a pro-life position that could reduce abortions."

The rest can be found here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-bishops_thinkfeb24,0,1465124.story?page=1

The Cobweb

by Raymond Carver

A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck

of the house. From there I could see and hear the water

,and everything that's happened to me all these years.

It was hot and still. The tide was out.

No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing

a cobweb touched my forehead.

It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned

and went inside. There was no wind. The sea

was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.

Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath

touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.

Before long, before anyone realizes,

I'll be gone from here.



While not old in the strict sense of the word, I am old enough. A friend was over the other day and exclaimed how young I look in a wedding photo. Wrinkles and one or two gray hairs have shown up. Poems like this and thoughts like Annie Dillard's, "How you spend your days is how you spend your life." are sober reminders that we are all simply passing through. How does this impact me? I don't know other than to say it reminds me. Take pleasure in small and everyday occurrences. That warm cup of coffee. The smile of Jonah on the playground. The first cold breath outside.....