god talk

. I just read an article about how the liberal church is dying the phrase: "perhaps they should pause, amid their frantic renovations, and consider not just what they would change about historic Christianity, but what they would defend and offer uncompromisingly to the world." I think that is the question I have been trying to articulate and understand about my relationship to Christ.

There is a Thomas Merton writing:
"Lady, the night has got us by the heart.
The whole wide world is tumbling down.
Words turn to ice in my dry throat
Praying for a land without prayer,

Walking to you on water all winter
In a year that wants more war."

For some reason I resonate deeply with that prayer-- the imagery, the thirst, the desire. I do believe that there is something uncompromisingly unique in the message of Jesus if we can look at it fully, look at it with eyes that value others and this earth... I do think there is no salvation under any other name than Love (and that love that is not the cliche, consumed offering of desire to be loved-- but a self-sacrificing, forgiving, relentlessly and radically hospitable love... I know that the symbol of Jesus has formed me, has led me to healing, to reconciliation, to forgiveness, has even led me to my body. But, it is so so tangled in misuse. I need Jesus, as a symbol outside of myself that reminds me that God is with us, that the sacred is incarnated, that we must learn to love greater than our fears. But what does that mean? Because the message is also irrelevant if it doesn't recognize the context and history of the church, of excluded voices, etc. We need both to be critical and wise and merciful (serpents and doves) towards ourselves (as the Church) and towards others-- as equally valid and loved vessels of the divine.

Mercy. Mercy.

in the realm of hungry ghosts

 My small act of insurrection this month is getting food stamps, which I qualify for, but is also a means of there being less government money for the insanity of the US military complex. And! Roy and I did our grocery shopping at Trader Joe's... (Brookster, in your honor I am devouring a box of Barbara's shredded oats which I'd forgotten about since HA.) Delicious nutritious Food Not bombs!

Community life is really hard. Some days I want to escape from being around everyone. When my superiority/ego/ideals rise to the surface... which is more often then I'd like... I am reminded of how a true community is not easy work. In order to create beauty in Chinatown we have to cultivate an atmosphere of contagious love (something like what must've been happening among 1st century Christians) but that love comes at a very high price-- all of us working on ourselves, building friendships where we learn to truly trust and sacrifice for each other. It requires incredible patience, and willingness to see people without holding on to my idea of them (or their motivations)-- allowing people to change not binding them to a version of their self. It requires noticing the constricting of my heart, the narrowing, enduring together, sharing (the material and immaterial things of life.) Love reaches past the tit-for-tat of reciprocity and asks for a life of dying to the self so love can be reborn over and over. How much am I actually committed to that? How invested in honesty, in learning to walk uncomfortably until the way becomes clearer am I? How willing am I to admit to failures, to take responsibility for my action, to not delegate the difficulties of communicating uneasy things off on others?

Today I went with Rick & Roy to the Buddhist Temple for Buddha's birthday.  The dharma talk was thought-provoking.  He talked about how difficult it is to be born in human form, but how the celebration of the birth reminds us how miraculous our own life is, that we are here to become human. There are six or seven realms in their cosmology (though its metaphorical)... something like hell, then the realm of the hungry ghosts, and animals, and titans/warriors, then humans, and heavenly... (the titans or warriors are people who by being obsessed with power are lacking full humanity or something like that) and the heavenly can also be negative in the sense of being so spirit-minded we sit in a content bliss while others suffer... but the uniqueness of being human, of a realm where is suffering and birthing-- is a beautiful thing-- the only realm where we can learn to be conscious and awakened. To often we live in the other realms, live hellishly, live as wandering, hungry ghosts, searching, live as warriors consumed with lust for power.  

Rick wrote a poem that I've been dwelling on that contains these lines... "You smile at me and say: Love is the sweetest of all paths! I turn on you a stern glance and ask: how much pain are you prepared to endure? ... we would rather crucify Love than walk this world under Love's burden of pain." Many days I do not desire Love at all. To follow Jesus is more difficult than any endeavor. Recently I have been asking myself how I can survive the stories I carry... how to be faithful to the vulnerability of others-- to remain open, to keep baring my heart to the moment... when that looks like talking to a 20-yr old pregnant heroin addict about parenting, or helping an ill and drunk woman clean shit off her shoes and scrubbing the bathroom floor while she tells me how she was molested for years of her childhood, or a woman showing me the scar that runs down her neck where a jealous boyfriend cut her? Love is a tricky thing-- accompanying myself and others through the different realms.

 There is a 'dharma gate' called "the intuitive tolerance of the complete incomprehensibility of all things." Yes. Yes.