My Privilege Is To Have No Privilege

My Privilege Is To Have No Privilege

  

The sign of how much I love God is how much I love those I love the least.
Dorothy Day

even in heaven
hers was a minority viewpoint

she knew her Aquinas --
that to contemplate

the just punishment of the wicked
adds to the joy of the blessed

not her idea of paradise.

so without fanfare
Dorothy Day
took up residence in the infernal regions
rented a rundown storefront
taped a sign in the broken window
'House of Hospitality'.

she walked a daily picket line
protesting stiffling heat  

insatiable thirst  bad working conditions  

eternal torment

passed out copies

of her penny-newspaper
to any of the demon-harried 

who would take one

worked the soup-line
poured endless cups of coffee
scrounged cookies and day-old donuts
from a sympathetic archangel

listened patiently

to the piteous complaints

of the damned

she was last seen
at suppertime

hunched over a table

showing a weeping dictator
photos of his grandchildren.

Longing is the Core of Mystery

Longing is the core of mystery

Longing itself brings the cure.

The only rule is: Suffer the pain.

Your desire must be disciplined,

and what you want to happen

In time, sacrificed.

                                                Rumi

 

Its been two weeks since my wife Paula and I were in Sitka for the Sitka Rumi Festival.  ( Due to the ferry schedule we  only made Day Three of the festival.  But we did have the chance to listen to Coleman Barks, Rumi's best known American translator/interpreter read from his poetry.  Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Mevlana or Rumi, was a 13th century Sufi mystic, Islamic scholar and poet. He lived and wrote during an amazing flowering of Christian, Jewish and Muslim mystical writing and poetry.  

In our own time, Rumi (in Bark"s modern translations) has reportedly become the most popular poet in the United States.  The increasing enthusiasm for this Persian mystical poet has been occurring during a marked decrease in religious observance/identification by Americans, as more and more people, especially millenials, identify as 'spiritual but not religious.'  It would be easy to dismiss the popularity of a mystic like Rumi as yet another example of the desire for individual mystical experience, for ecstatic experience without the demanding discipline and self-denial required of anyone serious about the spiritual life.

But I wonder if the compelling attraction of a mystical poet like Rumi can be attributed more to amazement that religion has a mystical dimension at all.  I wonder if for too many Christians, faith in Jesus has been presented more like a series of philosophical propositions or moral regulations than as a deep and unquenchable longing for friendship and communion with God filled with paradox, wonder, ecstatic joy and perplexing unknowing.  Unfortunately, our own rich and abundant mystical tradition embodied in the writings of mystics such as St, Bernard of Clairvaulx, St.Francis of Assisi, St.Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and many, many others is unknown to too many followers of Jesus.  

That Fountain, Filling, Running, Although It Is The Night.

The sad news this morning of the death of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

I hadn't thought about it quite this way until this morning but I've been a reader of his for decades.  His voice has been a  steady presence in my life and I'm grateful for his writing and the witness of it, especially during the 'Troubles' in the north of Ireland.  

The eleventh canto from his 1984 poem "Station Island" is one of my favorite poems by him.  For me, it is a poetic meditation not only on the poetry of St. John of the Cross but on the fathomless depths of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, that overflowing wellspring of life and love. 

XI

As if the prisms of the kaleidoscope

I plunged once in a butt of muddied water

surfaced like a marvelous lightship

and out of its silted crystals a monk's face

that had spoken years ago from behind a grille

spoke again about the need and chance

to salvage everything, to re-envisage

the zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift

mistakenly abased...

What came to nothing could always be replenished.

'Read poems as prayers,' he said, 'and for your penance

translate me something by Juan de la Cruz.'

Now his sandalled passage stirred me to this:

How well I know that fountain, filling, running,

although it is the night.

That eternal fountain, hidden away,

I know its haven and its secrecy

although it is the night.

But not its source because it does not have one,

which is all sources' source and origin

although it is the night.

No other thing can be so beautiful.

Here the earth and heaven drink their fill

although it is the night.

So pellucid it never can be muddied,

and I know that all light radiates from it

although it is the night.

I know no sounding-line can find its bottom,

nobody ford or plumb its deepest fathom

although it is the night.

And its current so in flood it overspills

to water hell and heaven and all peoples

although it is the night.

And the current that is generated there

as far as it wills to, it can flow that far

although it is the night.

And from these two a third current proceeds

which neither of these two, I know, precedes

although it is the night.

Here it calling out to every creature.

And they drink these waters, although it is dark here

because it is the night.

I am repining for this living fountain.

Within this bread of life I see it plain

although it is the night.