Mistrust. About trust.

Have we had this one before? It's worth repeating anyway:

Mistrust    Rainer Maria Rilke

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient-myths that stand at the beginning of all races—the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you've ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Veni Veni Emmanuel

First Sunday: Happy Advent!

Abiding in fellowship

The practice of "being with", neither evading nor invading the integrity of others, is transformative. It is transformative in those situations that cannot be fixed -- when someone is dying, or living with dementia, or suffering depression or profound grief. This is because it keeps the person suffering in fellowship with the rest of us. They are not left to suffer alone as if we can no longer bear to be present to them, and this means that they can continue to be present, less fearfully, to their own experience. And it is likewise transformative for those situations in which taking some kind of action is a possibility. Action that arises from having attended deeply and non-compulsively to the reality of a situation is very different from the re-action driven by my anxiety to assert control and so deal with my helplessness and other unmet needs. 

Contemplative practice forms us for "being with" reality, letting it and ourselves be. It enables us to discern more clearly when there is something to be done and when there is not. And it enables us to distinguish more clearly between our own needs and the needs of the world. As I am able to be increasingly with my own feelings, of frustration, grief and powerlessness, so I can be in situations that cannot just be fixed at will with a greater measure of peace and freedom... Living contemplatively in the tragic gap opens the possibility of joy in the midst of sorrow and suffering, and of remaining there even when the prospects of "success" seem distant and uncertain. 

Sarah Bachelard, "Experiencing God in a time of crisis", Continuum press, 2012, pp. 103-104. 

There will always be cheerful people who would want to "sort you out", fix and mend it, find a solution; they will patiently and at length explain you what your problem is, and what, in their opinion, you ought to do, and how best to go about it. There will be others who would just disappear -- gone with the wind, faded away; because they "cannot deal with it". Both will send you on a guilt trip: sorry guys, I see you are trying very hard to fix me, but I must be hopeless; sorry again, what's wrong with me, bubonic plague or what else makes you avoid me? Both will be acting out their own fear to find themselves where you are now: helpless and in pain, gasping for meaning, unable to make the ends meet. 

Now maybe one, just one will simply sit with you through the darkest hours of the night, dealing with nothing, offering no advice or remedy; in silence linking you to the rest of humanity. 

Does meditation help?

To the question « how does meditation help you? » I can only answer by a shrug – it doesn’t, and I did not ask for help when I started to meditate. I asked for freedom and for conversion, I wanted enlightenment and experience of God. These things now are all coming about, but saying that they “help” sounds to me grotesquely, comically absurd. They don’t, honestly. They make my life more complicated than ever, they confront me to the questions I really do not want to face, they lead me to the places no one in their right mind would choose to be. Meditation set in motion forces and processes that I cannot control and only partially understand. Whatever wisdom I acquired thereby, it is the wisdom of insecurity. No, clearly, meditation does not “help”; God is no-thing, and cannot be summoned to fix my life…  What emerges instead is a sense of happiness which does not depend on events and circumstances of my chaotic life, a touch of the fundamental joy of being that lies deep within and can be shared with others in a simple act of presence. That's what it is about, really.

On fulfilment, or "Babette's feast"

It seems absolutely incredible to me that there are people who do not understand what it means, "to be fulfilled in and by doing" something; who cannot believe that some things are done for the mere joy of doing them. Not to be approved, not to be thanked or appreciated, not to be praised and accepted, but simply because just doing it fulfills us and makes our craving for approval redundant… 

I am reminded of Babette, in the awesome film "Babette's feast", sitting in the kitchen after having cooked a gastronomic meal for a bunch of strangers. Nobody thanked her, and she did not expect or need thanks: because she represents the lavishness, the ever-abounding bounty of God who does not care about approval. 

I agree with a sigh: these things that are done with no desire for approval are rare, and it is debatable how much of this inglorious motivation we conceal from ourselves when we think we have none. But they do exist; in them we participate in the abundant, luxuriant divine life, where being and doing are absolutely unconditional, therefore absolutely free. 

Hidden Things (from St Beuno)

From St Beuno, with love. The chant and prayer above spell out one of the messages I received during this retreat; a chant that seems to pervade subtly my days since I am back. On the other (thinking) hand, the data is being processed :)), and a more detailed post about what happened there is being written somewhere in the left hemisphere of my brain. Meanwhile, let's share the chant.  

Book of Memory, by Rebecca Hazelton (Once I saw I couldn't unsee..)

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank

with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift,

there were words for cover which ripped them off,

there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed,

promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name

for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice,

that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn’t unsee

and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters

left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs

of this time, and I can only go by what others

tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle

of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate,

I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls

were under siege from smaller men who called themselves

heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked

up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world.

I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it

as around my fortifications one man pulled another man

behind his chariot. If they say that’s how I was,

that’s how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror

who apes me every morning. She’s not the one I remember

imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee

how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall,

which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear,

and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse

had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers,

and he turned from my beauty and said my name.

Rebecca Hazelton, “Book of Memory” from Vow. Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Hazelton. 

An amazing voice; just watch, just hear the feverish, delirious flow of this poem, the force and the helplessness with which the thought, the words are circling around an experience so powerful that only the ancient myths can come close to its burning intensity. A lucid, crafty and intricate poem too. I am so happy people still want to take language to these liminal spaces...