Stop Earning

Unless we feel we deserve and that we do not have to keep earning, there is no sense of ever being anyone on our own.  It would all be striving but never attaining.

Children

Despite what we say there remains a tendency to act as though children were, if not adults (albeit short ones), then very much in training to become adults -- the people we seek to develop rather than the ones who are actually here.

A Feeling to Identify With

He seems more comfortable with his depression than he had been with other feelings.  Although it must be as uncomfortable as he says, it may offer a familiarity he finds comforting and the depression fosters a passivity that may be more in line with his way of being.  It seems self-reinforcing and maybe the depression has become an obligation as well as a reaction.  It is an unhappy home, but having been here so often it is maybe less threatening than other places might be.

There are others settling the same way into their anger.  Maybe each person acquires a favored or characterizing feeling, one upon which they can center and by which they define themselves.  This happens to the detriment of more thorough and satisfying development as individuals and as members of a society that is not really better for their perfecting of this sad or hostile aspect.

No Answers

There are perhaps no answers to really important questions.  They refer to more essential things than words can contain.

On The Journey

Elijah went a day into the desert and thought he had arrived.  God sent a messenger to say he had hardly begun.  Elijah had found a place in which to die.  That was not the point of the journey.

A Roadside Chapel and God's Love

The times I think of what Eucharist should be I recall Mike Higgins offering the cup in consecration at Sabana Grande.  It was a roadside chapel and hardly filled, except with God's love and Michael's offering of what God would have most wanted to be.  A gentle invitation to share in his life as well as his presence, a very welcoming gesture saying that God, in this celebration, was delighted he had come.

Faith But No Joy

She was belting out the hymns and proclaiming those responses as though their being heard was a personal responsibility.  At the sign of peace, I thought her eyes would jump right out with all the intensity of sincerity they were intended to convey.  In between she criticized her child, and for all the noise and despite the mask there seemed no joy in her celebration.

God's Bread

Gold told Moses he would send them bread, but when in the morning it was there on the ground they wondered what it was.  It did not look like bread.  It had not been made as bread was.  It may not even have had the taste of bread, but God is sometimes like that.  Things are not what they seem and words change their meaning with very little notice.

The Child Who Doesn't Fight

There was a child today on the playground, intent upon playing and being involved in what the game should have been.  But every so often his friend would grab him and want to wrestle, as though wrestling were a parallel game, something one did as an interlude -- a way to pretend (but not really make believe) there was a contest or challenge as important as that game where they mostly laughed and where the rules had prevailed.

It was disconcerting to the boy and he seemed not to know how he ought to respond.  Fighting, even if couched as a game, seemed foreign to him.  Watching, I sometimes wished he would pick up his friend and hurl him the length of the playground.  I was also glad it was not in his heart to fight, and in those moments I hoped that fighting would never become a choice he would make.  It can be hard, I thought, to have his sensitivity, especially in those moments when others might rather be more primitive, but it is in that sensitivity that the world will find its future if it is planning to become more than a desert.

Wealthy But Not Rich

People who might not mind being wealthy do not really want the trouble of becoming rich.  It says something favorable about priorities.

Unlikely Heroes

For awhile it looked as though business people -- the lions of Wall Street -- were going to be the heroes of the half-decade, as truckers were for awhile in the seventies.

Faith In Ourselves

Life is a simple process, one into which we invite complications on the assumption that it gives us a measure of importance, or perhaps we cannot easily tolerate the simplicity of it.  We are maybe unwilling to believe it can be this easy, but it is best lived by eliminating the pretense that we have choices we do not have, or that we live lives other than our own.  We should live our lives and make choices in ways that are faithful to ourselves, and trust that other people in their lives will do the same.

Changing

No matter its intensity or duration, change does not occur in the discussion or planning of it.  Change takes place in changing.

We have no debt to the craziness of our lives

Far Within

Far within is where the universe lies.

Holding On To Hurt

If they cannot yet forget the pain they have caused each other, they are not obliged to remember its vividness, stirring up the hurt to fuel their anger.  Things are remembered, acknowledged, and can be allowed to fade even if they will never entirely disappear.  To recall them, to avert the prospect of forgetting, is a different process, one which empowers the hatred, forcing it to the center of the stage where it no longer belongs.  He says, "Don't think I have forgotten."  She says, "Don't you think I ever will."  Perhaps anger is all they feel able to share.  Maybe they think it is all they ever really had, and as they fan the flame time is going by.  It is time contaminated by the hurt, the recrimination and so whatever years remain are now mortgaged to the pain they feel and that they think must be inflicted.  The only saving grace may be the inability to make this rage a legacy, to pass it on as do some nations and peoples who feel the curse must be treasured and enshrined, given to the trust of children in danger, they feel, of loving instead.

Finding Faith In Ourselves

We stand in our way.  The prospect of change is more frightening than is the familiarity of that failure that guarantees our weakness, our incompleteness.  If we let go, we would be as faithful to ourselves, only now to who we can be rather than to whom we may have been, that part that has so far wanted to be the entire self.  If we would become our failings and treasure our limitations, it is perhaps because we have no appreciation of our value, the meaning we have in ourselves and in God.  To hold so tightly to limitation is to lack faith in us, to have been too wary, too frightened to hope.

Being Loved

Don't be so afraid to be loved.

To Fill A Heart

He speaks well but it is as yet only from the fullness of his head.  If ever he can add the fullness of his heart it will ring that much truer.  But it takes time and any number of experiences, plus a measure of pain, to fill a heart.

Starting Over

Starting over again.  It is not a new experience.  It has in fact become routine.  Perhaps it would be better to see starting over as the rule and so be less surprised each time new beginnings are called for.

Losing Time

Time has stopped being so very important.  The future reaches to tomorrow, or maybe a week.  Nothing more than a week ago calls me, unless it is something so very far in the past that it was filled with us together.  Future might in some ways be never.  What is over is often as vital as anything today might offer.

Less Intense

Does less intensity mean greater understanding?

About Things

About the things in life we can ask are they necessary, to what extent do they complete us and to what aspect do they contribute.  If they are not essential, we need not get rid of them but we should know that we could, that we have a choice to do without them.  We would be no less were we to make that choice, and might even more more if it would bring us closer to the center of our being.

Being Right

He not only wants to be right.  He also wants people to agree that he is.  Can't win there since it conditions his choice and minimizes the rightness available.  Better he just be right on his own terms.

Rising Above Nationhood

Nations are not unlike individuals.  The terrorized become terrorists.  The powerless seizing control become as ruthless in their wielding of it.  But neither individuals nor nations have a right to the justifications they offer.  Knowing the cause does not permit our continuing what went wrong.  We can appreciate what it has meant and how the rage developed but containing, stopping, and moving beyond violence are of greater value and provide dignity to who we will become, in spite of what happened before.

Public Judgment

That idea of a general judgment seems so in line with our tradition, so steeped in the power of guilt, a guilt made more powerful for the potential of its being so public.  Intruding on those secret moments, the solitary and hidden weakness rather than the already public crimes, the ones some may not see as crimes at all but tolerable and perhaps applaudable signs of one's cunning and power.

Your Responsibility

If I do not feel responsible for you, it does not mean I am indifferent to your needs.  It means only that I do not feel responsible.

Argument Regret

The conversation, if that is what we would call it, lasted no more than a minute or two but in that time I was offered five arguments if I was willing to have them.  None was over anything significant.  We might have pretended we were engaged in essential points of discussion, exchanged some guilt, talked more loudly than was necessary and for a moment felt more justified than there was reason to.  Better to have declined.

Welcoming Nothingness

Nothingness is not a negative state, nor is emptiness something to avoid.  This being without is instead a goal.  It is the elimination of what is extraneous, the achieving of an equanimity unavailable when life (and ourselves as individuals) are filled with, or obscured by, what would draw us from our more essential being.  So, it is at this point of nothingness that we are in balance and when empty there is no threat to what might be lost since it is not loss after all.

The Choice Not to Correct Someone

If they are wrong, if they are so much less perfect than we want, if they are so lacking in whatever regard, are they made more complete for our telling them so?

No Longer A Crisis

When a crisis regularly occurs it is no longer a crisis.  When you are continually frantic it should stop seeming a surprise.  This is the routine, the normal course of your life.  Better to treat it as such, or to wonder might you still do well on a more even keel.  Being this hectic makes you memorable enough, but it does not increase your significance.  Stop getting ready to jump and you may not need to.