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Reflections from Book of Job, one of the wisdom texts we’re studying together

By jacksonnhccPosted on Posted in Adult, Home, Weekly MeditationsTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
We must cultivate our garden. — Voltaire, Candide
The most famous line in Voltaire’s ”Candide” is the final one: ”We must cultivate our garden.” That is Candide’s response to the philosopher Pangloss, who tries again and again to prove that we live in the best of all possible worlds, no matter what disasters befall us. — Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times

SONGS about SUFFERING & HURTING:

SONGS about HEALING & HOPE:

 

WAGE PEACE — Judyth Hill
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and
flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music; memorize the words for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the out breath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

Interrelationship – Thich Nhat Hanh
You are me, and I am you.
Isn’t it obvious that we “inter-are”?

You cultivate the flower in yourself,
so that I will be beautiful.
I transform the garbage in myself,
so that you will not have to suffer.

I support you;
you support me.
I am in this world to offer you peace;
you are in this world to bring me joy.

GOD’S PART in SUFFERING (from Book of Job):

Excerpt from commentary by BibleProject (full article: https://bibleproject.com/articles/gods-gives-job-tour-wise-world/)
… Job claimed that God has fallen asleep at the wheel in running the universe, and because of this divine neglect he’s had to endure unjust suffering. God’s response is indirect, and it shows how his attention is actually on every single detail of the operations of the universe. In fact, God is privy to all kinds of perspectives and details that Job has never even imagined and never will…
As it turns out, Job doesn’t know as much as he thought, even about the world he lives in and should be familiar with. … God has made his first point. Job’s many accusations of divine neglect or incompetence have failed. As it turns out, God is intimately familiar with every molecule and creature in his world and knows more about them than Job can comprehend. This is an important moment in the story so far. Whatever reasons God has for having allowed Job’s suffering, neglect is not a viable option.
    Job never does find out why he suffered and neither does the reader. The goal of the book was never to offer us that information
 … This means all of our claims to evaluate God’s rule over human history are always limited, and will therefore fall short. I don’t have a wide enough vantage point to accuse God of incompetence, and I never will.
God responds again, this time inviting Job to take up the divine throne and run the universe for a day. Let Job enforce the strict “retribution principle” he thinks God ought to use in directing the cosmos: “Clothe yourself with honor and majesty. Pour out your anger to overflowing, And look on everyone who is proud, and make him low. Look on everyone who is proud, and humble him, and tread down the wicked where they stand.”
Job will find the task impossible. It would require a second-by-second micromanagement approach that would essentially result in no more human beings on the planet. Job doesn’t know what he’s asking for when he demands that God uses the strict principle of retribution to reward every good deed and punish every bad one. In theory it sounds right, but in execution, it would create a universe where no human would ever have a chance for trial and error or, more importantly, for growth and change.
… Apparently, God’s world is ordered enough for the human project to flourish, but chaos has not been eradicated entirely from God’s world. The tohu-va-vohu (Hebrew for “formless and void” in Gen 1:2

Genesis 1:2) wilderness wasteland of Genesis 1 wasn’t eliminated when God made the world. Rather, a space for garden-order was carved out and given over to humans who were commissioned to spread that divine order further out. Leviathan is out there, raw and dangerous, and you just might encounter it. It has the power to wreak havoc on your life, but what you cannot conclude from a run-in with Leviathan is that God is punishing you, or that this creature is evil. Neither is the case. You just bumped into Leviathan, and it unleashed chaos, tooth, and claw into your life, and your body…
Hebrew Bible scholar John Walton puts it this way in his commentary on Job: God’s answer to Job does not explain why righteous people suffer, because the cosmos is not designed to prevent righteous people from suffering. Job questioned God’s design, and God responded that Job had insufficient knowledge to do so. Job questioned God’s justice, and God responded that Job needs to trust him, and that he should not arrogantly think that God can be domesticated to conform to Job’s feeble perceptions of how the cosmos should run. God asks for trust, not understanding, and states the cosmos is founded on his wisdom, not his justice. [adapted quote]
Human pain and suffering does not always happen as a clear consequence of anyone’s sin. There may be a reason, but there may not be. God himself said that Job’s suffering was not warranted for “any reason” (Job 2:3. The conversation with the satan certainly did not provide a reason. That dialogue simply set the stage for the real question of the book: Does God operate the universe according to the principle of retribution?
The answer to this story is no. Sometimes terrible things happen for no reason discernible to any human. The point is that God’s world is very good, but it’s not perfect, or always safe. It has order and beauty, but it’s also wild and sometimes dangerous, like the two fantastic creatures he avows. So back to the big question of Job’s or anyone’s suffering: why is there suffering in the world? Whether from earthquakes, or wild animals, or from one another? God doesn’t explain why. He says we live in an incredibly complex, amazing world that at this stage at least, is not designed to prevent suffering.
…. So, the book doesn’t unlock the puzzle of why bad things happen to good people. Rather, it does invite us to trust God’s wisdom when we encounter suffering rather than trying to figure out the “reasons” for it.
When we search for reasons, we tend to either simplify God like the friends or, like Job, accuse God based on limited evidence. The book invites us to honestly bring our pain and grief to God and to trust that he cares, realizing that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS about HUMAN SUFFERING and GOD’s ROLE

Excerpts from chapter 13 of Biblical Wisdom Literature by Joseph Koterski (the Great Courses):

“We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, Job doesn’t know how its going to turn out. One of the problems that is presented by life as wellas text of Job, how God in his goodness could allow innocent suffering at all. Or hos God can permit those situations in which there is massive sufferings. We might think of famines. We might think of various forms of genocide, whether it be the Holocaust in Germany, whether it be the Armenian genocide, or some of the ones that seem to be happening now. Or even just the massive wars. The Book of Job poses this sort of problem in that opening scene … not trying to give historical perspective but to ask this philosophical problem. These Biblical wisdom books, Job in versy special way, as that part of the Bible that is most philosophical, that it’s a kind of philosophical debate within Israel in which various opositions will be explored and examined, including the divine position, in so far as this is divine revelation…
[Liebniz] has established for us some of the important terms. These three claims that God is all powerful, that God is all knowing, and that God is all good are crucial to the problem… And then of course the problem is more than just the triangle, you have to work in the way in which human freedom is related to these three parts of the internal attributes of God.
If there is nothing cannot God cannot do, because he is all powerful, if there is God does not know because he is omniscient, and if there is no limit to God’s mercy, because he is all good, why are there instances of suffering that are outrageous in their extent and disproportionate to anything we might reasonably expect?
[Koterski’s opinion] … this is a world that God made for a certain precise purpose, I think the purpose was to have creatures like ourselves capable of freedom, but that freedom with which we’re made will make it so that there will be destructions, there will be sometimes the opportunities to operate badly as well as to operate well, that this is the risk of freedom.
Hartshorne and other process thinkers [philosophers] have argued that apparently we simply need to change our picture of God. In regard to one of those three attributes, something has got to give. Should it be God’s knowledge? Should it be God’s power? Should it be God’s justice? … For myself, I think It does grave notion to the idea of God… [Koterski opinion]I would try to make the argument is incoherent philosophically … it is fundamentally at odds with the view of God that is presented by the Bible and by the mainstream traditions of Judaism and Christianity…
Rabbi Harold Kushner [author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People] … repudiates the notion that suffering is a punishment by God for anyone’s misdeeds. He also … rejects … the view that God sometimes uses suffering to teach people some important lessons. … Instead Rabbi Kushner holds that suffering is simply an intrinsic part of the world that God created, but that it is by random chance that one person suffers and another does not … there was no particular design to it. … Furthermore, Kushner holds that human beings are unique in this world by virtue of having the power to make free choices, and that God refuses to intervene in these choices … [Koterski opinion] Kushner is probably quite right in saying that our freedom is protected by the fact that God allows us to do what we do… Kushner does agree that God can grant us sufficient strength to deal with the troubles in our life, and yes, it does make sense to pray.
C.S.Lewis … second chapter The Problem of Pain … general outline of his views can be sketched in the following way:

  1. First point. The free choices that we make on all soprts of issues large and small wouldn’t be free unless our actions have consequences…
  2. Secondly, for actions to have their consequneces, there needs to be a world with stable natural laws, that govern how one thing interacts with another…
  3. Third thing, the action on one being on the other may well cause injury, may well cause suffering.
  4. Fourth, it will not do to have divine agency interfering with the consequences all the time … to prevent the suffering that occurs when some beinghs interact with other beings, for instance when a volcano buries a town, when a lion kills its prey, or when a microbe infects  aperson with some disease, or when an armed robber kills an innocent bystander …
  5. Fifth point, in short, for God to have created a world in which he chose there to be beings endowed with the power of freedom of choice, God has also chosen to allow any numbers of innocent suffering.
  6. Sixth, it is not that God does not know any of this … nor is it that God couldn’t do something about any one of them … God can do, and frequently has done, miracles … in this respect … the highest level of goodness is free choice. So what this system does is that God in his goodness has made a creature that is in, this respect, like himself, this creature possesses free choice, and that’s a greater good, even though there are going to be some defects and clashes at other levels.

What an argument like this does is put the problem of evil and of suffering into a certain pserpective that can give us a sense of why God, in general, allows suffering. … It does not try to answer the question why this person or that person or some other has as much suffering as any one of these individuals might. To try to answer the particular problems and personal problems, religion is needed. Real prayer. Good friends. Solid spiritual counsel. We need to have that assistance to get through it. … CS Lewis gives us the bigger picture, why there is suffering in the world, not why I am suffering….

NTERCONNECTED Reflections

Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. ― Nadeem Aslam

To understand just one life you have to swallow the world … do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child? ― Salman Rushdie

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. — Yasutani Roshi

When we help another, we are helped. If we harm another, we harm ourselves. Perhaps harder to grasp—if we harm ourselves, we harm the whole universe. ― Rachel Wooten

… nature is interconnections.― Lisa Kemmerer

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. — Rev. Dr. Martin Liuther King, Jr.

Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet. ― Bertrand Russell

Interbeing is the understanding that nothing exists separately from anything else. We are all interconnected. By taking care of another person, you take care of yourself. By taking care of yourself, you take care of the other person. Happiness and safety are not individual matters. If you suffer, I suffer. If you are not safe, I am not safe. There is no way for me to be truly happy if you are suffering. If you can smile, I can smile too. The understanding of interbeing is very important. It helps us to remove the illusion of loneliness, and transform the anger that comes from the feeling of separation. — Thich Nhat Hanh

In today’s interconnected and globalized world, it is now commonplace for people of dissimilar world views, faiths and races to live side by side. It is a matter of great urgency, therefore, that we find ways to cooperate with one another in a spirit of mutual acceptance and respect. — Dalai Lama

DIRECT, STRUCTURAL, and CULTURAL FORMS of VIOLENCE & PEACE

Often referred to as the “Father of Peace Studies,” Norwegian theorist Johan Galtung has developed a three pronged typology of violence that represents how a confluence of malleable factors merge in particular cultural/historical moments to shape the conditions for the promotion of violence (and, by inference, peace) to function as normative.

  • Direct Violence represents behaviors that serve to threaten life itself and/or to diminish one’s capacity to meet basic human needs. Examples include killing, maiming, bullying, sexual assault, and emotional manipulation.
  • Structural Violence represents the systematic ways in which some groups are hindered from equal access to opportunities, goods, and services that enable the fulfillment of basic human needs. These can be formal as in legal structures that enforce marginalization (such as apartheid in South Africa) or they could be culturally functional but without legal mandate (such as limited access to education or health care for marginalized groups).
  • Cultural Violence represents the existence of prevailing or prominent social norms that make direct and structural violence seem “natural” or “right” or at least acceptable. For example, the belief that Africans are primitive and intellectually inferior to Caucasians gave sanction to the African slave trade.  Galtung’s understanding of cultural violence helps explain how prominent beliefs can become so embedded in a given culture that they function as absolute and inevitable and are reproduced uncritically across generations.

From Rev Gail Doktor’s notes:

Galtung’s definition of lasting peace is built on individual, structural, and cultural aspects of peace.

  • Individual peace seeks to preserve life itself and promote human and planetary flourishing.
  • Structural peace represents the systematic ways that all groups have equal access to opportunities, goods, and services that enable the fulfillment of basic human needs.
  • Cultural peace signifies the existence of prevailing, persistent social norms that make the hallmarks of individual and structural peace seem ‘natural’, ‘right’, or ‘good’.

I and THOU: Relational

… I and Thou, is a book by Martin Buber,….— Wikipedia,com

… Buber’s main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

  1. The attitude of the “I” towards an “It”, towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
  2. The attitude of the “I” towards “Thou”, in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In Buber’s view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou. Martin Buber said that every time someone says Thou, they are indirectly addressing God. People can address God as Thou or as God, Buber emphasized how, “You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life.”
One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In Buber’s view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou. Martin Buber said that every time someone says Thou, they are indirectly addressing God. People can address God as Thou or as God, Buber emphasized how, “You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life.”
Buber explains that humans are defined by two word pairs: I–It and I–Thou.
The “It” of I–It refers to the world of experience and sensation. I–It describes entities as discrete objects drawn from a defined set (e.g., he, she or any other objective entity defined by what makes it measurably different from other entities). It can be said that “I” have as many distinct and different relationships with each “It” as there are “Its” in one’s life. Fundamentally, “It” refers to the world as we experience it.
By contrast, the word pair I–Thou describes the world of relations. This is the “I” that does not objectify any “It” but rather acknowledges a living relationship. I–Thou relationships are sustained in the spirit and mind of an “I” for however long the feeling or idea of relationship is the dominant mode of perception. A person sitting next to a complete stranger on a park bench may enter into an “I–Thou” relationship with the stranger merely by beginning to think positively about people in general. The stranger is a person as well, and gets instantaneously drawn into a mental or spiritual relationship with the person whose positive thoughts necessarily include the stranger as a member of the set of persons about whom positive thoughts are directed. It is not necessary for the stranger to have any idea that he is being drawn into an “I–Thou” relationship for such a relationship to arise. But what is crucial to understand is the word pair “I–Thou” can refer to a relationship with a tree, the sky, or the park bench itself as much as it can refer to the relationship between two individuals. The essential character of “I–Thou” is the abandonment of the world of sensation, the melting of the between, so that the relationship with another “I” is foremost.

INTERBEING: Inter-connection as a Buddhist concept articultaed by Thich Nhat Hanh

… Rather than signifying a lack or a void, [Thich Nhat Hanh] took emptiness to be a state of inextricable and fundamental interconnectedness in which it is impossible to identify a single, separate entity. — thedewdrop.cpm

Below is an excerpt from the chapter on INTERBEING from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, The Art of Living.

Imagine, for a moment, a beautiful flower. That flower might be an orchid or a rose, or even a simple little daisy growing beside a path. Looking into a flower, we can see that it is full of life. It contains soil, rain, and sunshine. It is also full of clouds, oceans, and minerals. It is even full of space and time. In fact, the whole cosmos is present in this one little flower. If we took out just one of these “non-flower” elements, the flower would not be there. Without the soil’s nutrients, the flower could not grow. Without rain and sunshine, the flower would die. And if we removed all the non-flower elements, there would be nothing substantive left that we could call a “flower.” So our observation tells us that the flower is full of the whole cosmos, while at the same time it is empty of a separate self-existence. The flower cannot exist by itself alone.

We too are full of so many things and yet empty of a separate self. Like the flower, we contain earth, water, air, sunlight, and warmth. We contain space and consciousness. We contain our ancestors, our parents and grandparents, education, food, and culture. The whole cosmos has come together to create the wonderful manifestation that we are. If we remove any of these “non-us” elements, we will find there is no “us” left.

Emptiness does not mean nothingness. Saying that we are empty does not mean that we do not exist. No matter if something is full or empty, that thing clearly needs to be there in the first place. When we say a cup is empty, the cup must be there in order to be empty. When we say that we are empty, it means that we must be there in order to be empty of a permanent, separate self.

About thirty years ago I was looking for an English word to describe our deep interconnection with everything else. I liked the word “togetherness,” but I finally came up with the word “interbeing.” The verb “to be” can be misleading, because we cannot be by ourselves, alone. “To be” is always to “inter-be.” If we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be,” we have a new verb, “inter-be.” To inter-be reflects reality more accurately. We inter-are with one another and with all life.

There is a biologist named Lewis Thomas, whose work I appreciate very much. He describes how our human bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by countless other tiny organisms, without whom we couldn’t “move a muscle, drum a finger, or think a thought.” Our body is a community, and the trillions of non-human cells in our body are even more numerous than the human cells. Without them, we could not be here in this moment. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to think, to feel, or to speak. There are, he says, no solitary beings. The whole planet is one giant, living, breathing cell, with all its working parts linked in symbiosis.

We can observe emptiness and interbeing everywhere in our daily life. If we look at a child, it’s easy to see the child’s mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, in her. The way she looks, the way she acts, the things she says. Even her skills and talents are the same as her parents’. If at times we cannot understand why the child is acting a certain way, it is helpful to remember that she is not a separate selfentity. She is a continuation. Her parents and ancestors are inside her. When she walks and talks, they walk and talk as well. Looking into the child, we can be in touch with her parents and ancestors, but equally, looking into the parent, we can see the child. We do not exist independently. We inter-are. Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.

I remember one time when I was in London, doing walking meditation along the street, and I saw a book displayed in a bookshop window with the title My Mother, Myself. I didn’t buy the book because I felt I already knew what was inside. It’s true that each one of us is a continuation of our mother; we are our mother. And so whenever we are angry at our mother or father, we are also being angry at ourselves. Whatever we do, our parents are doing it with us. This may be hard to accept, but it’s the truth. We can’t say we don’t want to have anything to do with our parents. They are in us, and we are in them. We are the continuation of all our ancestors. Thanks to impermanence, we have a chance to transform our inheritance in a beautiful direction.

Every time I offer incense or prostrate before the altar in my hermitage, I do not do this as an individual self but as a whole lineage. Whenever I walk, sit, eat, or practice calligraphy, I do so with the awareness that all my ancestors are within me in that moment. I am their continuation. Whatever I am doing, the energy of mindfulness enables me to do it as “us,” not as “me.” When I hold a calligraphy brush, I know I cannot remove my father from my hand. I know I cannot remove my mother or my ancestors from me. They are present in all my cells, in my gestures, in my capacity to draw a beautiful circle. Nor can I remove my spiritual teachers from my hand. They are there in the peace, concentration, and mindfulness I enjoy as I make the circle. We are all drawing the circle together. There is no separate self doing it. While practicing calligraphy, I touch the profound insight of no self. It becomes a deep practice of meditation.

Whether we’re at work or at home, we can practice to see all our ancestors and teachers present in our actions. We can see their presence when we express a talent or skill they have transmitted to us. We can see their hands in ours as we prepare a meal or wash the dishes. We can experience profound connection and free ourselves from the idea that we are a separate self.

  1. Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.
  2. Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrowness.
  3. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering, including personal contact, visits, images, and sounds. By such means, awaken yourself and others to the reality of suffering in the world.
  4. Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need.
  5. Do not maintain anger or hatred. Learn to penetrate and transform them when they are still seeds in your consciousness. As soon as they arise, turn your attention to your breath in order to see and understand the nature of your anger and hatred and the nature of the persons who have caused your anger and hatred.
  6. Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Practice mindful breathing to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you. Plant seeds of joy, peace, and understanding in yourself in order to facilitate the work of transformation in the depths of your consciousness.
  7. Do not utter words that can create discord and cause the community to break. Make every effort to reconcile and resolve all conflicts, however small.
  8. Do not say untruthful things for the sake of personal interest or to impress people. Do not utter words that cause division and hatred. Do not spread news that you do not know to be certain. Do not criticize or condemn things of which you are not sure. Always speak truthfully and constructively. Have the courage to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may threaten your own safety.
  9. Do not use the Buddhist community for personal gain or profit, or transform your community into a political party. A religious community, however, should take a clear stand against oppression and injustice and should strive to change the situation without engaging in partisan conflicts.
  10. Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realize your ideal of compassion.
  11. Do not kill. Do not let others kill. Find whatever means possible to protect life and prevent war.
  12. Possess nothing that should belong to others. Respect the property of others, but prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.
  13. Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body only as an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and a long-term commitment. In sexual relationships, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitments of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

Continue reading “Reflections from Book of Job, one of the wisdom texts we’re studying together”

Meditation on sacred bodies: loving our bodies, caring for other bodies & living in the communal body (themes from 1 Corinthians 12 and Luke 4)

By jacksonnhccPosted on Posted in Home, Weekly MeditationsTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.
― St. Teresa of Avila

I Sing the Body Electric — Walt Whitman(1 – excerpt) …
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
… The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; Such-like I love … (7 – excerpt)
…  This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless
embodiments and enjoyments. How do you know who shall come from the offspring
of his offspring through the centuries? (Who might you find you have come from yourself,
if you could trace back through the centuries?) (8 – excerpt)
A woman’s body … She too is not only herself,
she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow
and be mates to the mothers.
Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man? Do you not see that these are exactly the same
to all in all nations and times all over the earth?
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred …

Except for the Body — Mary Oliver

Except for the body of someone you love,
including all its expressions in privacy and in public,

trees, I think, are the most beautiful
forms on the earth.

Though, admittedly, if this were a contest,
the trees would come in an extremely distant second.

I Got Kin — Hafiz
Plant: so that your own heart will grow.
Love: so God will think,
“Ahhhhhh, I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul
over for coffee and rolls.”
Sing: because this is a food our starving world needs.
Laugh: because that is the purest sound.

Solitude — Nancy Wood
Do not be afraid to embrace the arms of loneliness.
Do not be concerned with the thorns of solitude.
Why worry that you will miss something?
Learn to be at home with yourself without a hand to hold.
Learn to endure isolation with only the stars for friends.
Happiness comes from understanding unity.
Love arrives on the footprints of your fears.
Beauty arises from the ashes of despair.
Solitude brings the clarity of still waters.
Wisdom completes the circle of your dreams.

Our Bodies As Sacred

There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.” — Barbara Brown Taylor

May you see in what you do the beauty of your own soul. — John O’Donohue

If you have a body, you are entitled to the full range of feelings. It comes with the package. ― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually)

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. ― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Breath is the gift of life from the one who created us – from the God who is both our origin and our destination … some Rabbis teach that Yahweh is not even really a word at all.  It is literally breath itself. Yah – exhale. Weh – inhale. Yah – exhale. Weh – inhale. Which would make sense – since the closest translation of its [Yahweh’s] meaning is The One Who Causes to Become. There is just something about being known by God and animated by God’s breath in our birth and in our death that wouldn’t leave me this week as I thought about talking to you all here in this room today … This is the comfort I thought of this week as I bore witness to both birth and death. That the God whose name is our very breath – who breathed the words let there be light, who breathed into dust to create humanity, is present when we breath our first breath and present when we breathe our last – I believe that our final exhale is Yah – and that God completes God’s name inhaling Weh – and carries us on God’s divine breath into the heart of God from where we came to begin with. … Amen. — Nadia Bolz-Weber

All great spirituality teaches about letting go of what you don’t need and who you are not. Then, when you can get little enough and naked enough and poor enough, you’ll find that the little place where you really are is ironically more than enough and is all that you need. At that place, you will have nothing to prove to anybody and nothing to protect. That place is called freedom. It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody … ― Richard Rohr, Healing Our Violence through the Journey of Centering Prayer

Caring for Other Bodies As Sacred: Serving the Communal Body

We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech.
― William Carlos Williams

Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes. — Maggie Kuhn

… I see [God] here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find [God] — Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. — Thomas Merton

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. — Fred Rodgers

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God. — Stanley Hauerwas

This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony. — James Baldwin

The lack of material well-being among the poor reflects a lack of spiritual well-being among the rest. — William Sloane Coffin

God does not look at your forms and possessions but he looks at your hearts and your deeds. — Prophet Muhammad 

Loving with Body & Soul, Heart & Mind: Holy Acts

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn – by practice and careful contemplations – the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don’t. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest … Amen. ― Toni Morrison, Paradise
On Interdependence
When this is, that is.
From the arising of this comes the arising of that.
When this isn’t, that isn’t.
From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.
— Buddha, Assutava Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya 12.2

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born toeternal life. Amen. — St Francis, Prayer
Madhyamika means “middle way,” and it examines the nature of existence. Madhyamika tells us that nothing has an intrinsic, permanent self-nature. Instead, all phenomena — including beings, including people — are temporary confluences of conditions that take identity as individual things from their relationship to other things. — Barbara O’Brien, Interbeing: The Inter-existence of All Things (essay excerpt)
Clouds In Each Paper  —  Thich Nhat Hanh
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.  “Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be”, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.  If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

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