After spending this afternoon and early evening together, The Human & the Holy spiritual formation community completed our 13th year together. What a blessing these people are to each other and to me as we come together once a month from September to May to explore the deeper meanings and implications of Jesus’ invitation to abundant life and to encourage one another to live lives of contemplative awareness and compassionate action.
This year our theme was “A Rabbi, a Priest, a Poet, and a Tender Heart Walk into a Bar.” We drew our chairs close to eavesdrop on an imaginary nine-month conversation between Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Catholic monk Thomas Merton, American poet Mary Oliver, and tenderhearted companion of the anawim Jean Vanier and then entered into the conversation ourselves. Here are a few selected quotes from each of our wise sages:
Thomas Merton
♦ If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.
♦ To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
Jean Vanier
♦ Over the last thirty-four years, my experience has been primarily with men and women who have intellectual disabilities. In August 1964, I founded L’Arche: a network of small homes and communities where we live together, men and women with intellectual disabilities and those who feel called to share their lives with them. . . The belief in the inner beauty of each and every human being is at the heart of L’Arche, at the heart of all true education and at the heart of being human. As soon as we start choosing and judging people instead of welcoming them as they are – with their sometimes hidden beauty, as well as their more frequently visible weaknesses – we are reducing life, not fostering it. When we reveal to people our belief in them, their hidden beauty rises to the surface where it may be more clearly seen by all.
Abraham Heschel
♦ It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion—its message becomes meaningless.
♦ God is hiding in the world. Our task is to let the divine emerge from our deeds.
♦ How should we live in a way which is compatible with our being a likeness of God?
♦ The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.
Mary Oliver
♦ When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
~ excerpt from “When Death Comes”
♦ Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
Extravagant Blessings,
Dan