Showing posts with label A Contemplative Moment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Contemplative Moment. Show all posts

12 September 2023

A Contemplative Moment: The Necessity of Relationships

The Necessity of Relationships
by
Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam
The Eremitic Life

Human freedom is founded on two indispensable pillars: the ability to possess oneself and the ability to overcome oneself. This is why every human being is, by his very nature, a person of dialogue and relationships. Both dialogue and relationships express the great potential for love of the human heart, a heart that is free.

The seclusion and solitude that constitute the eremitic life do not aim at negating the fundamental dynamism of human existence, with its entering into dialogue and relationships. On the contrary, eremitic isolation and solitude form the basis of that dynamism. As was said, one of the most important motives for undertaking the life of the desert is the burning desire to find one's own identity. In the course of time, however, we discover that we are unable to realize that task unaided. The only way of learning anything important about oneself is to look at another person's face** with love and attention.

As mentioned before, the hermit's solitude can never be a sign of withdrawal and isolation from the world and its affairs. The hermit, since he wants to serve other people, must arrive at a profound understanding of his own nature and his relation to God and the world. That is why his solitude is not at all a barrier, but it is rather the element that encourages openness toward others. The hermit, changed by the gift of meeting God, knows how to address the lonely hearts of those who come to seek his help and support. His solitude is not therefore a lifeless emptiness, but it is related to the most vital aspects of the human spirit. It is related to those spheres of human personality that can exist only if they are open to meeting God and the world in love.

_________________________________________________

**The reference to seeking another's face is from an earlier section of the book where Wencel speaks of a quote by J. Tischner: [[To meet someone means to experience the person's face. Experiencing the other's face means experiencing his truth. What is necessary to make the meeting happen is mutuality; if we want to see the other's face we have to uncover our own face, and the other must have the intention to accept what has been revealed. . .The meeting introduces us to the depths of all the mysteries of existence, where questions about the sense and nonsense of everything are born.]] For Wencel, the paradox of eremitical solitude is the fact that it serves the hermit's quest and desire for love, and that implies "meeting and dialogue with God and with the human other."

05 June 2023

A Contemplative Moment: On Behalf of the Renewal


"On Behalf of the Renewal"
from The Eremitic Life
by Cornelius Wencel, Er  Cam


If we want to live the eremitic life maturely and responsibly, so rich in the forms as it can be, we cannot aim at cultivating our own individual conceptions, projects, or ideas, nor at fulfilling our individual needs or tasks. Not in order to achieve his own perfection does the hermit set out on his solitary voyage. On the contrary, he considers his way and mission to be part of a great common effort to change and renew the cultural and spiritual life of humanity. Therefore, the eremitic life seems to be one of those underlying factors that really influence the social structures so that people can fruitfully work and multiply the common material and spiritual good. The hermit does not want -- and in fact is not even able --- to separate himself from the concrete experiences of modern people: from touching the toil, conflicts, and struggles they face. He takes part in all those experiences just because, through his existential meeting with Christ, he gains a new perspective and a new sensibility, and so he becomes more open to the problems of the modern world.

So, we can hardly take the hermit for a person who limits his entire mission to a few prayers he recites and to some daily routines necessary in everyday life. The hermit has to take into account all the difficult problems endangering the world today. But the hazards the modern world faces, which cause fear and can bring about a catastrophe of culture and civilization or even the total annihilation of mankind, do not paralyze his activity to improve the world. It is just the opposite: realizing how deeply he is rooted in the life of society and how greatly responsible he should be for the world and its future, the hermit wants to take part in coping with the difficulties and anxieties of today.

Of course, the hermit is much more a person of prayer than a person of activity, but he is far from neglecting any creative action toward changing the world for the better. When he undertakes a task, he does not aim at performing a great many actions for an immediate and striking effect. He is not an activist who lives on organizing neurotically different actions and events that are in fact inspired by his inner chaos and anxiety. The hermit strongly opposes misdirected work, which aspires only to achieve success, domination, prestige, and fame, and which can easily destroy other people's good.

There is nothing more foreign to the hermit than the clownery of a glittering career, success, and all those vulgar illusions that tempt the modern world. For the hermit, his work is one of elementary and daily activities, necessary for his own sanctification as well as sanctification of the world. . . .it is . . . a way of realizing his life's calling and approaching his life's fulfillment. Thus the hermit becomes a sign of protest against all the vulgar tendencies of modern civilization, which view work only in terms of productivity and money. Such a way of thinking, and consequently of acting, testifies to how much worldly affairs have degenerated and have gone far astray from what would be a humanitarian and harmonious course of events.

19 May 2023

A Contemplative Moment: Seeing the World with New Eyes


"The Desert: Transformation"
from The Eremitic Life
by
Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam


[[The Christian anchorite is not a gnostic, whose isolation from the world takes precedence in order that [she] can secure for [her]self the possibility of reaching "the land of pure spirituality". Such an approach is obviously an illusion which, detected too late, will certainly lead all who adopt it to spiritual disaster. Even provided we agree on the illusionary character of the created world, such an assumption may be justified only if we take into account its relativity. It is true that created things can deceive and beguile us, though it is not because they are deceitful all by themselves, but because the human heart, tangled up in webs of sin and greed, is eager to take pleasure and satisfaction in them. The anchorite never gives up and renounces the world of things out of contempt for them. [She] does so in order to achieve the inner space necessary to appreciate their real value and inner beauty.

Leaving the world and inner renunciation are the path to discovering the logic and truth of the created world. Fathoming inner structures and meanings, the hermit realizes still more clearly that the ultimate value of the world is not constituted by the world itself, but it transcends the world soundlessly. What is essential for human being is the perception of things that last and are eternal. What is needed is a certain distance providing space for authentic freedom of mind and heart, in order to perceive the world and all its problems in truth and love, which means in God. By finding the whole creation at its very Source, the hermit becomes the person able to contemplate. The hermit's contemplation of reality is [her] special way of perceiving it through the eyes of faith. This kind of perception reveals to [her]  the rays of God's magnificence and glory. . . .This truth, however, should be understood and proclaimed not just verbally or intellectually, but above all by means of humbly accepting the gift of our own existence. The acceptance of the gift brings about the inner necessity of giving it back to its donor in love. The need to make such a sacrifice is the essence of  Christian ascetic life and inner conversion.]]

Note: I chose this reading from Cornelius Wencel for several reasons. The main one has to do with the Solemnity of the Ascension and the way it demands that we learn to see everything with new eyes. The disciples had to get their eyes out of the clouds and onto the world newly constituted around them. In Christ, they (and we) are gradually taught to see all of reality with the eyes of an artist like Bro Mickey McGrath, osfs (see Solemnity of the Ascension). 

05 May 2023

A Contemplative Moment: Sometimes


Sometimes

by David Whyte


Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
where the only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

~David Whyte from Everything is Waiting for You

06 July 2022

A Contemplative Moment: The Silence of Solitude

 
The Silence of Solitude

"Solitude has nothing to do with existential neurosis, but is rather a creative search for the flame of love that burns in God's heart. . . .What occupies the center. . .is the existential solitude of God himself. This is what the human heart wants to absorb and this is where it wants to rest. The eremitic solitude is in no case a fruitless and spiritually empty isolation, a cold indifference toward people and the world, or a selfish passiveness. Just the opposite, it is a space of redemption, full of spiritual life and meant to accept and change any human distress, sorrow, or fear."

"Solitude, which paradoxically we happen to notice most intensely when we relate to another "thou", is a fertile soil in which grows our authentic life's calling of solitude by choice. Only one who is fully aware of the great value of human relationships, bonds, and connections can decide on giving them up in order to find them anew in an even fuller way. So, the choice of an eremitic calling should be made in freedom and humility. The person who is called to remain alone and makes his independent choice for solitude is, above all, a herald of the absolutely precious and meaningful love that is continuously going on in the depths of the triune God. . . .

To be a hermit means to relate to the mystery that is present in every human life and makes one feel small and powerless. To see with the eyes of faith the marvelous and eternal beauty of God means to be invited to come out of oneself and to give oneself up to God. . . .. In this sense, the eremitic calling is a consequence of meeting the original depths of the Trinity's solitude. . . . The reality of God is thus the original source of any solitude, an impenetrable abyss that calls to the profound depths of solitude of the human heart. Having heard that existential call of God's solitude, people respond to it by opening up the whole secret of their hearts."

Fr Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam: The Eremitic Life

23 January 2022

A Contemplative Moment: The Way of Paradox


The Way of Paradox
from The Eremic Life
by Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam

The hermit's life is full of different paradoxes and apparent contradictions. Some of them may surprise the hermit himself and even cause a certain uneasiness in him not to mention others who look at his life from "outside", To many people who look at this way of life and want to be impartial observers of it, the eremitic experience of the desert seems to be an absurdity.

We have already mentioned. . . that the basic motive for choosing a solitary and silent life in a hermitage consists in an existential longing to meet and talk to God. The hermit chooses silence in order to enter fully into a dialogue; he chooses solitude in order to meet closely a personal presence. The way of the desert is thus not a stray and arid path, it does not lead to the negation of all the values of the world and of other people. Just the opposite: it is the way of mutual presence, dialogue, and friendship that shines where two freedoms and two hearts, divine and human, meet. The dialogue between hermit and God means that two persons truly entrust themselves to each other in love, because unconditional trust is a necessary condition of every authentic dialogue. 

For the hermit the gift of faith determines not merely the choice of the way of life, but also an elementary personal dynamism that enables him to go on and finish his journey successfully. The gift of faith makes it possible for us to open our hearts so that we are still better and better prepared to accept God, who wants to entrust Himself to us. Where faith is a dialogue, with two personal mysteries calling upon each other, God is the one who initiates the meeting, and the human respondent should only be obedient. 

01 March 2021

A Contemplative Moment: Being Led into the Desert


 With joy and by the Spirit led the Church of Christ seeks desert paths,
all else forgotten, God alone to worship and to follow there. Amen

There silence shall set free the will,
the heart to one desire restore.
There each restraint shall purify
and strengthen those who seek the Lord.

There bread from heaven shall sustain
and water from the rock be struck
There shall his people hear his word,
 the living God encounter there.

All praise to God who calls his church
to make exodus from sin,
that tested, fasting, and prepared,
she may go up to keep the feast. Amen.

from the Camaldolese OSB office book
Lauds Lenten Hymn for Mondays and Thursdays

05 January 2021

A Contemplative Moment: The Winter of Listening

 



The Winter of Listening
by David Whyte

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own."

From The House of Belonging

30 October 2020

A Contemplative Moment: Solace (reprised from May 2016)

 

Solace

 
is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of the world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor, when longing does not come to fruition  in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.
 
Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp or make sense of.
 
Solace is a beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body's innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of a death, each note an essence of mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating into the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us
 
To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not sooth falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.
 
To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape  our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?


by David Whyte in
Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

03 March 2019

A Contemplative Moment: Solitude is not Separation

 
Solitude is Not Separation
by
Thomas Merton
  
Some (persons) have become hermits with the thought that sanctity could only be attained by escape from other (persons). But the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but other (people). If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils.
 
Man seeks unity because he is the image of the One God. Unity implies solitude, and hence the need to be physically alone. But unity and solitude are not metaphysical isolation. He who isolates himself in order to enjoy a kind of independence in his egotistic and external self does not find unity at all, for he disintegrates into a multiplicity  of conflicting passions and finally ends in confusion and total unreality. Solitude is not and can never be a narcissistic dialogue of the ego with itself. Such self-contemplation is a futile attempt to establish the finite self as infinite, to make it permanently independent of all other beings. And this is madness. Note, however that it is not a madness peculiar to solitaries --- it is much more common to those who try to assert their own unique excellence by dominating others. this is the more usual sin.
 
. . .True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist. The person is constituted by a uniquely subsisting capacity to love --- by a radical ability to care for all beings made by God and loved by Him. Such a capacity is destroyed by the loss of perspective. . . Go into the desert not to escape other (people) but in order to find them in God.
 
. . .There is no true solitude except interior solitude. And interior solitude is not possible for anyone who does not accept (her) right place in relation to other(s). There is no true peace possible for the (one) who still imagines that some accident of talent or grace or virtue segregates (her) from other(s) and places (her) above them. Solitude is not separation. God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body. I do not wash my feet to make them more beautiful than my face.



[I write a lot here about the difference between solitude and isolation, eremitism and individualism, and these are a couple of the things I am asked about most frequently --- especially as folks discern the distinction between being a hermit and being a lone or solitary individual -- no matter how pious. Similar questions are posed on the idea of eremitical hiddenness and the distinction between that and anonymity and disengagement. Thomas Merton speaks to all of these ideas. He wrote about Solitude in Seeds of Contemplation but in New Seeds of Contemplation he wrote a new essay called "Solitude is not Separation". The differences between the two are striking; while complementary essays, they show such incredible shifts and development in his understanding and experience of eremitical solitude! The above post consists of excerpts from that second essay.]

12 December 2018

A Contemplative Moment: Into the Eye of God


  Into the Eye of God
by Sister Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB

For your prayer
     your journey into God,
    may you be given a small storm
    a little hurricane
      named after you,
     persistent enough
      to get your attention
    violent enough
       to awaken you to new depths
      strong enough
       to shake you to the roots
     majestic enough
       to remind you of your origin:


      made of the earth
      yet steeped in eternity
      frail human dust
       yet soaked with infinity.

     You begin your storm
      under the Eye of God.
      A watchful, caring eye
      gazes in your direction
   as you wrestle
        with the life force within.

In the midst of these holy winds
In the midst of this divine wrestling
    your storm journey
    like all hurricanes
       leads you into the eye,   
   Into the Eye of God
     where all is calm and quiet.

A stillness beyond imagining!
Into the Eye of God
after the storm
Into the silent, beautiful darkness
  Into the Eye of God.


I used this poem for prayer a few evenings ago. It is taken from Macrina Wiederkehr's A Tree Full of Angels, Seeing the Holy in the Ordinary. Advent seems to me a fine time to consider the presence of the Holy in the Ordinary moments and moods of reality. Sister is a monastic of St Scholastica Monastery, Fort Smith, Arkansas.

23 June 2017

A Contemplative Moment: The Crimson Heart


 

"CRIMSON MYSTERY OF ALL THINGS"

 --- the Church speaks in a hymn by Gertrude von le Fort ---
"solitary Heart, all-knowing Heart, world-conquering Heart.". . .

The "heart" is the name we give to the unifying element in the human person's diversity. The heart is the ultimate ground of a person's being. Her diversity of character, thought, and activity springs from this ground. All that she is and does unfolds from this source. Her diversity, originally one in its source, remains one even in its unfolding and it ultimately returns to this unity.

The "heart" is the name we give to the inner ground of an individual's character, wherein a person is really himself, unique and alone. The human being's apartness, his individuality, his interiority, his solitariness --- this is what we call the heart. This characteristic of the heart reveals and at the same time veils itself in everything the person is and does. For the human being's total diversity in being and activity would be nothing if it did not blossom forth from the heart as from a living ground, and at the same time veil his hidden ground.It must be veiled because its water doesn't flow on the surface of what we commonly speak of as the human person's being and activity.

An individual's uniqueness, her individuality, is her heart. That is why one is always alone and solitary --- alone and solitary in the meaning that everyday life gives gives to the words, in the idiom of the marketplace, which no longer suspects the abysses concealed in human words. For there is a realm where the person is entirely himself, where he himself is his solitary destiny. In this realm where he can no longer bring himself and his fragmentary world to the marketplace of everyday life --- in the realm therefore where his heart is --- the person is alone and solitary because of this apartness. . . .

The center of our hearts has to be God; the heart of the world has to be the heart of our hearts. He must send us his heart so that our hearts may be at rest. It has to be his heart. . . .He must let it enter into our narrow confines, so that it can be the center of our life without destroying the narrow house of our finitude, in which alone we can live and breathe. And he has done it. And the name of his heart is Jesus Christ! It is a finite heart, and yet it is the heart of God. When it loves us and thus becomes the center of our hearts. every need, every distress, every misery of our hearts is taken from us. For his heart is God's heart. and yet it does not have the terrifying ambiguity of his infinity. Up from this heart and out from this heart human words have arisen, intimate words, words of the heart, words of God that have only one meaning, a meaning that gladdens and blesses.

Our heart becomes calm and rests in this heart, in his heart. When it loves us then we know that the love of such a heart is only love and nothing else. In him the enigmatic mystery of the world's heart which is God becomes the crimson mystery of all things, the mystery that God has loved the world in its destitution.

Excerpted from
 "The Mystery of the Heart" by Karl Rahner, SJ
The Great Church Year, the Best of Karl Rahner's Homilies
Sermons and Meditations
(Please read the entire essay! I have excerpted a text in which every word is important and none are wasted. Though not my intention it is a betrayal of Rahner's text.)

24 February 2017

A Contemplative Moment: On the Essence of Spiritual Direction

 

To “listen” another’s soul
into a condition
of disclosure and discovery
may be almost the greatest
service that any human being
ever performs for another.
 
by Douglas Steere in
 Gleanings, A Random Harvest

12 September 2016

A Contemplative Moment: The Silence of Solitude

 
The Silence of Solitude

"Solitude has nothing to do with existential neurosis, but is rather a creative search for the flame of love that burns in God's heart. . . .What occupies the center. . .is the existential solitude of God himself. This is what the human heart wants to absorb and this is where it wants to rest. The eremitic solitude is in no case a fruitless and spiritually empty isolation, a cold indifference toward people and the world, or a selfish passiveness. Just the opposite, it is a space of redemption, full of spiritual life and meant to accept and change any human distress, sorrow, or fear."

Fr Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam: The Eremitic Life

30 July 2016

A Contemplative Moment: Silence


Silence
 
is frightening, an intimation of the end, the grave yard of fixed identities. real silence puts any present understanding to shame, orphans from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives. Silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant. Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant horn in the busy harbor, or the watching eye and listening ear of a puzzled loved one.
 
In silence, essence speaks to us of essence and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. as the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye. an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.
 
Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing listening elemental powers.
 
To become deeply silent is not to become still but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives. reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.
 
by David Whyte,
Consolations, Nourishment, and Underlying
Meaning of Everyday Words

02 July 2016

A Contemplative Moment: Vulnerability

 
Vulnerability
 
is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.
 
To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.
 
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.
 
by
David Whyte
Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment,
and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words

30 May 2016

A Contemplative Moment: Solace



Solace
 
is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of the world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor, when longing does not come to fruition  in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.
 
Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp or make sense of.
 
Solace is a beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body's innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of a death, each note an essence of mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating into the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us
 
To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not sooth falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.
 
To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape  our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?


by David Whyte in
Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

23 April 2016

A Contemplative Moment: Courage

 
Courage
 
is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstances. . .
 
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
 
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
 
The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive. . ..
 
by David Whyte in
Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

10 April 2016

A Contemplative Moment: Aloneness

 
Alone
 
is a word that stands by itself, carrying the austere, solitary beauty of its own meaning even as it is spoken to another. It is a word that can be felt at the same time as an invitation to depth and as an imminent threat, as in 'all alone', with its returned echo of abandonment. 'Alone' is a word that rings with strange finality, especially when contained in that haunting aggregate, 'left all alone', as if the state once experienced begins to define and engender its own inescapable world. The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.
 
Being alone is a difficult discipline: a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown, but the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment. To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously deeply afraid.
 
To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live with our bodies as a question rather than a statement.
 
The permeability of being alone asks us to reimagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence. For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly, to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone.
 
To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether. To begin with, aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing, unknown self, looking back at us in the silent mirror.
 
One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves. Aloneness begins in puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful unlooked for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light. . . .
 
from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte 


25 November 2015

A Contemplative Moment: Renunciation


Renunciation

". . .neither the way to contemplation nor contemplation itself should be thought of as either dramatic or strange. In fact, if we enter the contemplative life with our minds too full of the language and poetry of a St John of the Cross we are apt to get side-tracked by our own imagination and wander for the rest of our days in an austere and misguided dream. If instead of translating the language of St John of the Cross into practice we become attached to its figures for the poetic pleasure our own minds absorb from them, we shall be no further advanced than we were before. 

It is easy to stand St John of the Cross on his own head by becoming attached to his doctrine of detachment. . . . In practice the way to contemplation is an obscurity that is so obscure it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing left in it that can be grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so, for a contemplative, there is supreme value in the ordinary routine of work and poverty and hardship and monotony that characterize the lives of all poor and uninteresting and forgotten people in the world.

Father (Louis) Thomas Merton, OCSO, Seeds of Contemplation