onehouse

The hills are alive...

This is where I chose to do hill training today. I used google's distance measurement tool and tried to find a 400 metre hill a little closer to home and then proceeded to walk up and down it six times -one orange mark to the other. I stayed off the sidewalk and walked on the grass, past the tennis courts where people wondered who the crazy lady was, past the ever expanding cemetery where no one wondered anything, and up to the corner of the dog park where everyone was too busy running around and barking to care about me at all.

Concrete sidewalks are the worst things for your bones. I usually walk that path past the baseball diamond and on into Confederation Park which is off the lower left corner of this photo. It has nice asphalt walking paths which are much easier on the body and I don't have to watch for or listen to traffic. The little pink mark is a set of trees that I enjoy. There are many, many trees in the park ahead but these ones always catch my eye and I've always meant to photograph or draw them.

Today I listened to a Tapestry podcast with Laurence Freeman on Christian Meditation. I liked the part where he quotes John Cassian saying that the two dangers of the spiritual life are "the lethal sleep" and "the pernicious peace" referring to the temptation to create a foggy alternate reality or escape - the three scotch feeling I believe he called it - and to only be peaceful when separated from the world and its needs. Those who do not use their practices as escape will experience conversion and transformation that keeps them doing real inner and outer work.  A good warning.

A Short Story.

The Preacher and the Heretic

Spirituality, it seemed to me, was as fleeting as fashion. Fear, rather than love, was the enticement to start looking for supernatural help. I had more faith in aliens and The Force than I did in the cross, but peer pressure is an amazing thing.

The Centre of a Seed

This is one of my favorite songs right now. You can only find a 30 second clip on the band's website so this live clip (with backup by Sarah Harmer as on the CD) will have to do. Someone called this whole album "zen americana" which works for me.  Lyrics below.

I Became Awake
Great Lake Swimmers
CD: Ongiara

I became awake,
From a very dark place, a patchwork of fear, of poorly conceived ideas.
With a blister of water, the mark of working hands,
Ready to catch, or cut.
The senses aligned, the animal urgency, and voices picked up,
Flowing over the static, late, quiet.

I became awake.
Fingers are open, eyes they are open, the firing if images, an orchestra of scribbles.
The guts of an engine, the veins of a leaf, light onto paper, exposed.
A filament in a bulb, up above or in the ground.
Together we are magic, together we are dreaming, together we reach enlessly,
The centre of a seed, so full of possibilities.

I became awake.
I thought I was sleeping, but I was only forming a structure with no ceiling,
With words like a runway, a cloud of a person drifting away.
I was heavy, but now I am light.
I was heavy, but now I am light

Beyond answers to understanding.

A few bits that jumped off the page from Joan Chittister's Called to Question:

As a result over time, I've come to a new awareness: I am not the only person who has gone through life watching as one certainty after another is dismantled and turns to dust. Nor am I alone in the realization that there is another kind of certainty that grows stronger in us every day as we begin to make a new spiritual vessel out of the shards of the old one. I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith. I knew with crystal clarity one thing and one thing only: There is such a thing as a spiritual life that is deeper--and truer to the demands of the world around it--than simply the routines of religious discipline and I wanted it.

Love/Hate

I often wonder why some adults seem so personally attached to things they are passionate about - opinion, idea, art, religion, relationship and on and on. Much of it, especially dysfunctional relationships, are not full of life but thrive on misery and a sort of tension and then ultimately life-sucking fatigue.

This quotes helps with the understanding. Often what we say we love, we actually hold in contempt. Calvin Miler wrote (not fond of Calvin Miller's writing so this is the only thing I remembered - speaking of opinion), "Hate sometimes stands quite close to love. God, too, stands often near to evil—like silent chessmen—side by side. Only the color of the squares is different."

From Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith by Frederich Buechner:

Hate is as all-absorbing as love, as irrational, and in its own way as satisfying. As lovers thrive on the presence of the beloved, haters revel in encounters with the ones they hate. They confirm them in all their darkest suspicions. They add fuel to all their most burning animosities. The anticipation of them makes the hating heart pound. The memory of them can be as sweet as young love.

The major difference between hating and loving is perhaps that, whereas to love somebody is to be fulfilled and enriched by the experience, to hate somebody is to be diminished and drained by it. Lovers, by losing themselves in their loving, find themselves, become themselves. Haters imply lose themselves. Theirs is the ultimate consuming passion.

Open minds

“The dread of being open to the ideas of others generally comes from our hidden insecurity about our own convictions. We fear that we may be ‘converted’ – or perverted – by a pernicious doctrine. On the other hand, if we are mature and objective in our open-mindedness, we might find that viewing things from a basically different perspective – that of our adversary – we discover our own truth in a new light and are able to understand our own ideal more realistically.”

-Thomas Merton

The something old days...

Sunday mornings past were all about dragging myself out of bed to sit in a room filled with angst and performance anxiety of all kinds. I can't remember enjoying very many Sunday mornings out of the thousands and thousands of services I attended. Habit. And then as I was older the sheer pressure, "But you'll like it here."  "But we're real here." "But we engage pop culture here." Fill in the blank and now with more riboflavin.

There is no part of me that misses it anymore. I've been having conversations with a few people about this lately and I guess that is why it is back on the radar. Maybe you miss the singing for a bit once you leave but then as you listen to those old songs, you realize they hold no meaning for  you. It would be like re-listening to some boy band from when you were twelve. It's all nostalgia but nothing else.

It can be such a relief to know you've moved on. To talk with friends on a Sunday morning, read good books, walk in the neighborhood, and actually talk to people without trying to push them through some maze to get them to some holy cheese at the end. I don't miss the old days one bit.

Tattoo.

The Big Kahuna, the movie adapted from the play Hospitality Suite, was on TV here and I caught the final monlogue. Get the movie if you've never seen it.

Phil: He’s honest Bob; he’s blunt as well. That sometimes is part of being honest, because there are a lot of people who are blunt. But not honest. Larry is not one of those. Larry is an honest man. You too are an honest man, Bob. I believe that, that somewhere down deep inside you is something that strives to be honest. The question you have to ask yourself is, has it touched the whole of my life? That means that you preaching Jesus is no different than Larry or anybody else preaching lubricants. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling Jesus or buddah or civil rights or how to make money in real estate with no money down. That doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a marketing rep. If you want to talk to someone honestly, as a human being… ask him about his kids. Find out what his dreams are. Just to find out. For no other reason. Because as soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it. It’s not a conversation anymore. It’s a pitch, and you’re not a human being, you’re a marketing rep. We were talking before about character. You were asking me about character. And we were speaking of faces. But the question is much deeper than that. The question is, do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion Bob, you do not. For the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet. You’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don't know what they are. It's when you discover them. When you see the folly in something you've done. And you wish you had it to do over. But you know you can't because it's too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you. To remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don't matter in the end. Then you will attain character because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face. Until that day however, you cannot expect to go beyond a certain point.

(I mentioned this quote last year in regards to hospitality and Fred Clark's blog Slacktivist. If you're not reading Fred Clark, you are missing actual blog writing as opposed to the blog muddling around that most of us do.)

Devoted to the impossible.

I had this hidden somewhere in the blog and just had to bring it up again so I remember. 

From Spiritual Literacy.

(Of all the spiritual practices we bring to act acts of service, perhaps the most important is hope.)   I remember talking with a friend who has worked for many years at the Catholic Worker, a ministry to the poor in New York City.  Daily she tries to respond to waves of human misery that are as ceaseless as surf in that community.  Out of my deep not-knowing I asked her how she could keep doing a work that never showed any results, a work that never showed any results, a work in which the problems keep getting worse instead of better.  I will never forget her enigmatic answer:  "The thing you don't understand, Parker, is that just because something is impossible doesn't mean you shouldn't do it!" - Parker J. Palmer in The Active Life

 

Further fringe thoughts

Many days and nights ago when I was teaching in front of actual folks in chairs, I did something on the upside down kingdom of God. I talked about how Jesus said the children should be allowed to come to him because "such was the kingdom of God." We usually see that story through our own eyes - children are beautiful and innocent and isn't it great that Jesus likes kids and we should too.

But children were not and are not always valued in some societies. (Perhaps if we are honest, our own view of children is often overly sentimental and not through the eyes of true religion that does the hard work of caring for widows and orphans.) They were shooed away, seen and not heard from until they could be counted into adult society. They were often on the fringes, discounted and sometimes disposable. These are the kids that Buechner writes about when he says:

“When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crowd and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child’s eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don’t bother to ask.”

And he adds:

And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn’t shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time...Are you the king of the Jews...You with the pants that don’t fit and the split lip...

Such is the Kingdom. Look to the fringes. But be careful. We may get turned upside down and as the change falls out of our pockets and the blood rushes to our heads,  we may catch ourselves seeing something that we missed the first time around. We may find ourselves being converted.