onehouse

Level of cost, level of involvement

I came across this interview (July 2003) with Martin Sheen while looking for the West Wing Transcript site:

Sheen was a featured speaker at an anti-war rally January 18 in San Francisco. His stirring oratory was met with thunderous applause. He delivered similar mini-sermons at subsequent peace gatherings in Los Angeles and in San Francisco prior to the bombing of Iraq. For this interview, I met up with him at the annual National Religious Education Congress in Anaheim following his talk before 900 Catholics in a workshop on spirituality and justice.

Question: Why are you so active in social justice and peace issues?

Martin Sheen: I do it because I can't seem to live with myself if I do not. I don't know any other way to be. It isn't something you can explain; it is just something that you do; it is something that you are.

Q: You've been arrested more than sixty times, in opposition to the School of the Americas in Georgia, apartheid, racism, homelessness, nuclear testing. Do you recall your first time?

Sheen: My first civil disobedience arrest for social justice was in 1986 for protesting the SDI [Reagan's Star Wars initiative]. It was on Forty-second Street at the McGraw-Hill Building in New York. That arrest was one of the happiest moments of my life and, equally, one of the scariest.

Q: What are your views on nonviolent civil disobedience?

Sheen: It is one of the only tools that is available to us where you can express a deeply personal, deeply moral opinion and be held accountable. You have to be prepared for the consequences. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.

Q: What did you mean when you said, "Your faith has to cost you something, otherwise you have to question its value"?

Sheen: Once you follow a path of nonviolence and social justice, it won't take you long before you come into conflict with the culture, with the society. You can't know what is at stake or how much it is going to cost you until you get in the game. That's the only way, and the level of cost is equal to the level of involvement.

Nunc Dimittis

A story from Waiter Rant:

Three priests walk into my bistro.

No, this isn’t a setup for some awful joke – three padres sit in my section. They’re dressed in civilian clothes but I make them instantly. Former Catholic seminarians can spot priests a mile away. Perhaps it’s the clothes; the standard off duty Dockers and conservative button down shirts. Maybe it’s the odor of sanctity about them. Perhaps it’s because they’re always slightly uptight in public. God forbid someone sees them acting out of character; tell a dirty joke or have too much to drink.

“Hello Fathers” I say merrily.

The eldest of the trio smiles broadly. They’re busted.

“How did you know?” he says.

“Once a Catholic…..” I shrug.

Keep Reading...

(Via Jordon)

An American Catholic in Rome

Joan Chittister is reporting from Rome this week. I liked this statement:

To have a transition going on in the church that does not also touch the world around it, is to have only public spectacle, not social transformation.

The Gospel According to Anna

This article has made it around the blogworld but I liked the challenge to look at the The Gospel According to the many around me:

In this world of many gospels, I have been given a unique and wonderful gift. For I am one of only a handful of pilgrims who have seen the mysterious “Gospel According to Anna.”

 

This precious manuscript, upon which only three sets of eyes had ever gazed, was given to me in the modest kitchen of my dear friends, Chris and Ellen. It was handed to me with solemn dignity by Anna herself, who remembered at the last moment that I might want a bookmark to keep my place in her gospel. She fetched a nice pink ribbon and placed it between the center pages of her little folio.

The best part was actually seeing Anna's gospel - inspiration to go running for the 64 pack of crayons.

Mercy.

Update: try WorldChanging's summary post for a list of news sources and blogger updates.

Sri Lanka has a population of 20 million people. This little block of text from the CBC has been playing in my head all day:

Invisibly, do the right thing.

Via Bruderhof's Daily Dig by Danusha Veronica Goska:

I go to a food bank every two weeks to get my food. I have no car. Every week, I get a ride home from other food bank patrons. These folks don't pause for a second to sigh, "Oh, problems are so big, I'm so powerless. Will it really help anything if I give you this ride?" They don't look around to make sure someone is watching. They just, invisibly, do the right thing.

Sometimes we convince ourselves that the "unnoticed" gestures of "insignificant" people mean nothing. It's not enough to recycle our soda cans; we must Stop Global Warming Now. Since we can't Stop Global Warming Now, we may as well not recycle our soda cans. It's not enough to be our best selves; we have to be Gandhi. And yet when we study the biographies of our heroes, we learn that they spent years doing tiny, decent things before history propelled them to center stage.

Moments, as if animate, use the prepared to tilt empires. Ironically, saints we worship today, heroes we admire, were often ridiculed, tortured, or ignored in their own lifetimes. St. John of the Cross gave the world the spiritual classic The Dark Night of the Soul. It was inspired by his own experience of being imprisoned by the members of his own religious order. Before Solidarity, Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who helped bring down communism, was a non-entity, a blue-collar worker in an oft-ridiculed Eastern European backwater. He was always active; one moment changed this man's otherwise small-time, invisible activism into the kind of wedge that can topple a giant.

Creative Silence

An excellent article by Thomas Merton is available online:

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding, but we are more or less “there.” We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything, and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet, we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are “part” of something, although we are not quite able to define what that something is—and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercial which pass for “reality.”

Of course, this is not enough to keep us completely forgetful of the other unwelcome self that remains so largely unconscious. The disquieting presence of our deep self keeps forcing its way almost to the surface of awareness. To exorcise this presence we need a more definite stimulation, a distraction, a drink, a drug, a gimmick, a game, a routine of acting out our sense of alienation and trouble. Then it goes away for the time being and we forget who we are.

All of this can be described as “noise,” as commotion and jamming which drown out the deep, secret, and insistent demand of the inner self.

With this inner self we have to come to terms in silence. That is the reason for choosing silence. In silence we face and admit that gap between the depths of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is so often untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with the mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love.

------------------------------------

And a word to the church (emphasis added):

What is much more serious is Bonhoeffer’s observation that the church itself engaged in too much empty talk. The church, in fighting to preserve and assert it position, seemed to him to make self-preservation an end in itself. The church talked more and more about itself and more and more for itself, less and less for the kingdom. He said the church had “thereby lost its chance to speak a word of reconciliation to mankind and the world at large.” Bonhoeffer foresaw that this would lead the church—all the churches—into a realm of silence, confusion, and apparent helplessness in which “traditional language must perforce become powerless and remain silent.” He wisely saw that the real purpose of this period of relative silence was a deepening of prayer, a return to the roots of our being, in order that out of silence, prayer, and hope we might once more receive from God new words and a new way of stating not our message, but His.

Holy indifference

Chittister on detachment and discernment:

From Clement of Alexandria in the second century, to Meister Eckhart in the 13th, to Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th, the idea of spiritual indifference -- openness to the many manifestations of the will of God -- has been respected. There were many ways to live, not simply one, the spiritual theory taught, all of them good, some of them better than others from one moment to the next. The marrow of the spiritual life was determining which of life’s many possibilities were most suitable to the will of God in the present situation. The root of the exercise was "holy indifference," awareness of the multiple gifts of God and openness to all of them. This is a spirituality with enduring psychological value as well.

The isolation that marks any serious struggle is a call to recognize that life is full of gifts that come and go, come and go as we ourselves come and go through the many stages of living. Detachment from the idea that there is only one way for me to go through life joyfully is key. The pain of loss is a real and a present thing. It manacles my soul and breaks my heart, yes. But holy indifference -- detachment -- teaches me that there is no room for isolation, abandonment, death of the spirit when I lose one thing because I know that there is something else waiting for me in its place. If only I can allow myself to watch for it, to wait for it, to grasp it when it comes.

Designed to enable a person to regard all of life with an open mind and a willing heart, detachment -- holy indifference -- is the foundation of spiritual discernment. To discern is to choose between available options on the grounds that both are good but that one is more likely at this time to be preferable. It is the willingness to accept the idea that one option is more likely to result in growth at this time than the other, though both are good possibilities. Discernment and detachment are lifelines out of the pit of loss and the island of isolation to which it threatens to doom us.

Detachment teaches us to let go. Let go of unwavering answers. Let go of present achievements. Let go of life’s little hoards of trinkets. Let go of the now which is frozen in emotion for the sake of a future freed from old chains. It is the ability to see that there are many things of value in our lives, some of them more suited to one time than to another.

Discernment is based on the awareness that we cannot always have what we want, true, but also that there is enduring, sometimes hidden, always surprising spiritual value in what we do have. Discernment asks us to love many things for many different reasons and to choose what is the best of them for this instance.

The important mark of discernment is that it involves choice. It involves independence of judgment, the ability to maintain breadth of vision even in the midst of crisis, the awareness that we are not enslaved to our past. We can dream again. We can go on without leaning, without withering. We can summon up from within ourselves parts of ourselves that have yet to see the light of life. It means that despite the depth of our struggles, we must come out of our insulating isolation and live again or we shall have died, no matter how long we live.

Isolation erodes spiritual independence. In fact, it is dependence of the highest, most destructive order. Isolation blocks us from moving in the present because we are dependent on the past, trapped in the past. Or, it means that having fallen into isolation, we do not move newly into the present because we have chosen instead to be dependent on the world around us. We have chosen to be carried rather than to stand. We have chosen to give up on ourselves, to let other people carry us rather than to take care of’ ourselves. We deny or overlook or ignore the gift of independence, the place of detachment, in human development.

Isolation leaves us feeling cut off from the human race, aloof, withdrawn, at the mercy of the universe. Independence, on the other hand, emerges out of an awareness that there are other things to live for and we have within ourselves the ability to reach out and grasp them, if only we will.

Over the centuries, detachment lost its spiritual glow. Distorted by the excesses of extreme asceticism but at the same time, paradoxically, always regarded in its classical sense not as a way to deny the world but as the spiritual key to living in it more freely, detachment became the counterfeit coin of the happy life. It dampened feelings rather than sharpening them, its critics said -- and not without reason. Jansenism, with its emphasis on ascetic discipline, became popular among French Catholics in the 18th century. In the name of holiness, it suppressed emotions rather than listening to them. It rendered the world dour and made living an act of denial. In doing so it destroyed what is needed most in a time of struggle: the will to live because the world is bountiful. Detachment based on negation rather than an awareness of endless abundance is not a solution. At its healthiest, the human spirit is irrepressible and the human heart seeks hope, not desolation, however disguised dearth may be in the trappings of holiness.

But the truth remains: Nothing lasts. No single thing can consume our entire life’s meaning. No single thing can give us total satisfaction. Nothing is worth everything: neither past, nor present nor future. It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again. It is only a matter of being detached enough from one thing to be open to everything else.

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us.

Reagan Remembered.

Remembrance can be a matter of perspective. E3liacin translates Ernesto Cardenal's version of Psalm 5 saying:

Ernesto Cardenal was Minister of Culture during the Sandinista Goverment in Nicaragua. Before that he was part of the trappist monks in Gethsemani, KY. He was a close friend to Thomas Merton.

The great mystic poet Cardenal wrote this under the terrible dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. This was a regime supported by the Reagan administration Prohibido Olvidar. The very loose translation is mine.

Psalm 5
By Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua

Listen to my words O Lord

Listen to my groans

Listen to my protest
Because you are not a God in favor of dictators
Neither a friend of their politics
Nor influenced by their the propaganda
Nor are You in society with the gangster

There is no sincerity in their speeches
Nor in their declarations of war

They speak peace in speeches
While they increase their war production

They speak peace in the Conferences of Peace
And in secret they are prepared for the war

Their liars radio programs roar at night
Their writing-desks are full of criminal plans and sinister files

But you have saved to me of their plans

They speak with the mouth of the machine guns
Their bright tongues are bayonets

Punish them oh God
Spoil their politics Confound their memorandums
Prevent their programs

At the time of the Siren of Alarm Your will be with me
You will be my refuge the day of the Bomb

To him who does not believes in the lies of his commercial announcements
Neither in their advertising campaigns nor in their politic campaigns

You bless him
You will surround him with your your love
Like with armored tanks

Preaching to the converted.

I also posted this at the Beyond blog. It's just too brilliant. Thank you to Darren at Long Pauses for bringing this Tony Kushner quote to our attention:

Since I started doing interviews, I’ve answered the "preaching to the converted" question more than any other. It seems to me predicated on an unthinking use of the terms "preaching" and "converted." It’s not as if all preachers, including for instance John Donne, were merely dispensers of predigested, soundbite rhetoric and cliche; good preachers are gifted articulators of the thorniest, juiciest, most dangerous, most contradictory problems, dilemmas, controversies.

It’s not as if the "converted" are always only Moonies lacking any sort of spiritual liveliness or freedom of thought. Quite the contrary. The converted, the congregation, united by certain beliefs, share amongst themselves bewilderment, despair, hope needing amplification, confusion needing examination and elucidation, and avenues of interesting and productive inquiry. Lockstep congregations are a sure sign of a moribund faith, of the absence of anything Divine. A good preacher rattles her congregants’ smugness and complacency, and congregants to do the same for the preacher. Good preachers are exhilarating to listen to, and the converted have a lot to think about. So this "preaching to the converted" question doesn’t address all religious practice, or all theater — just crummy religion and inept theater.

From 10 Questions for Tony Kushner