Repentance in Two Haiku

Do not talk to me
My life is a deck of cards
I turn my back: Shhhh…

I turn back to You
My heart opens Niagara
The Springs rush to Sea

Radical Acceptance

In Haiku:

To Open Your Eyes
Is Radical Acceptance
And To Close Your Eyes

In Prose:

A realization I had…
When you are awake your eyes are open.
When you are asleep your eyes are closed.
When you are awake you don’t have to fight to keep your eyes open, only when you are resisting sleep do you struggle to keep your eyes open.
When you are asleep and start to wake, but do not feel like getting out of bed you force yourself to keep your eyelids closed, just to savor that last sip of sleep. Continuing to force your eyes closed even after it is time to wake up, generally produces a headache and fogginess.
Then you go about your waking life in misery, confusion and grumpiness because you still refuse to open your eyes even after you have opened your eyes.
So open your eyes when awake and close your eyes when asleep.

This is radical acceptance.

Life is like this.

Thank you so much.

Sentences from Merton

“

Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of “memories.” If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten.  Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past.  A memory that is not alive to the present does not “remember” its true identity, is not memory at all.  He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia.

We are so convinced that past evils must repeat themselves that we make them repeat themselves.  We dare not risk a new life in which the evils of the past are totally forgotten; a new life seems to imply new evils, and we would rather face evils that are already familiar.  Heance we cling to the evil that has already become ours, and renew it from day to day, until we become identified with it and change is no longer thinkable.

“

- Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Ch. 15 “Sentences”, pg. 106

To a young unbeloved self

If you were married or had a Beloved you would come to realize…

The good you do for your beloved is the same good or actually better than the good you do for yourself.

Why serve yourself for the moment, when the fruits of serving your beloved in the midst of suffering, make your heart and belly full of peace, love, joy and satisfaction?

To serve The Beloved is to serve my beloved. To serve my beloved is to serve The Beloved and to serve My Beloved beats serving myself.  If only I could finally learn this lesson…

may you have deep peace…

Of Crime and Punishment

To be a manager at Starbucks always teaches me of the tension between justice and mercy, judgment and grace.  It helps me to learn the subtlety of loving people, while still holding them accountable.  That we be accountable to the corporation I could care less, fuck “The Corporation”.  Rather that we would be accountable to God in our own hearts or (at least) to each other out of the intrinsic god-person in the core of each human heart (whether you acknowledge God or not).  This tension constantly pulls at the sinews of this god-muscle.

So with that I present this chapter of Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet”

“

Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said, “Speak to us of Crime and Punishment.”

And he answered saying:

It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind,

That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself.

And for that wrong committed must you knock and wait a while unheeded at the gate of the blessed.

Like the ocean is your god-self;

It remains for ever undefiled.

And like the ether it lifts but the winged.

Even like the sun is your god-self;

It knows not the ways of the mole nor seeks it the holes of the serpent.

But your god-self does not dwell alone in your being.

Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,

But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening.

And of the man in you would I now speak.

For it is he and not your god-self nor the pigmy in the mist, that knows crime and the punishment of crime.

Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,

So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.

Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.

You are the way and the wayfarers.

And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.

Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.

And this also, though the word lie heavy upon your hearts:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,

And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.

The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,

And the white-handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.

Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,

And still more often the condemned is the burden-bearer for the guiltless and unblamed.

You cannot separate the just from the unjust and the good from the wicked;

For they stand together before the face of the sun even as the black thread and the white are woven together.

And when the black thread breaks, the weaver shall look into the whole cloth, and he shall examine the loom also.

If any of you would bring judgment the unfaithful wife,

Let him also weight the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

And let him who would lash the offender look unto the spirit of the offended.

And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the ax unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;

And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.

And you judges who would be just,

What judgment pronounce you upon him who though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit?

What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit?

And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor,

Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged?

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?

Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law which you would fain serve?

Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty.

Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.

And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?

Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self,

And that the corner-stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

Water, Purity, Righteousness, Longing and Freedom

After watching an Indian film (called, ‘Water’) about Hindu widows, my heart got to thinking and asking…

“

“What if your conscience conflicts with your faith?”
–quote from ‘Water’

“I used to think that God was Truth, but now I know that Truth is God.”
–Ghandi (paraphrased)

“

If one seeks truth above all else, does one find God? Not necessarily…? Then how does one find Truth? Purely by God’s grace. Purely by God’s predestined grace!

Abraham  was a righteous man. God loved and blessed him for his righteousness. How did Abraham find righteousness outside of ‘religion’? (The same goes for Buddha.) Why does everyone after him need religion to find righteousness? (what about relationship?) Is it about a guarantee or a ‘get out of jail free card’ or a ‘life insurance policy’? What does Jesus say about righteousness in the context of his cultural Judaism and outside that same context? Can we trust the ‘Christian Gospels’?

Legalism is bullshit, a mockery of the Truth and the Law. A mockery of the Heart. But what of purity? Is righteousness found in one Man? In returning to the purity of God’s creation that He called ‘Good’? In the many idols of mankind? Or in the act of TRYING?? Is it found in the depths of the longing of the Heart of Hearts? Is Righteousness found in the Heart? Can God put it there to be found if He so pleases? Does He do so in everyone? Where is righteousness to be found? How is righteousness to be found?

Questions are not a sign of doubt.
Doubt is not a lack of Faith.
Faith is not a sign of Truth.
Truth is not a lack of Questions.

…and the Dharma wheel turns…

Why do people seem to need a system to find God? Do people who search for God in a system really find Him?

Many people in the system will find God, Truth, Al-Haqq, but many may not.  Many people outside the system will find God, Truth, Al-Haqq, but many may not. Are there no guarantees of God’s predestination to His Will? (this definitely isn’t a path for discipleship)

I feel like a spiritual or religious outcast. An untouchable. Caught between systems. I cling ever so tightly to the Lord of Outcasts and Untouchables, Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God and Man.

A Weldspot On A Wedding Ring

I am looking at my wedding ring. It tells a story. it tells the the story of the tension between singularity and plurality. This is why i consider myself a “traditionalist”.
I remember when I received the weld spot on my wedding ring. It was while I was Ironworking for Lewis Herrera. I was tack welding a jig for some job… near the end of the day… very mundane work… no fuss, no grand piece of art. it was “just” a jig. a “tool” which was created for one specific job and would be discarded after the job was done. I was rushing along tacking my jig together (without gloves, because whats the chance that I would injure myself from a few tack welds) and suddenly… INTENSE PAIN on my left hand… on my ring finger.
OH MY GOD IT WON’T STOP! FUCK IT HURTS FUCK FUCK FUCK!
A piece of weld spatter had stuck to my 18K white gold wedding band and had supper heated it and burned a semi-circular scar into my finger. I couldn’t flick it off, I couldn’t make the pain stop until the red hot ring of fire had cooled on its own. Then I thought of plunging my hand into the quench tank, but by then it was already cooled.

The pain is gone and even the scare is mostly gone, but the spot of hard steel remains on the soft tissue of my wedding ring.
It reminds me of the sacrifice that my beloved has made for me to follow my dreams and how she has never once held it against me or used them as cannon fodder for her rage.

Thank you my sweet. I love you with all my Heart!

-john

Saturn

Oh Saturn my heart is your moon,

a satellite that drifts round through the heavens.

In the clutch of your cool refuge gravity pulls me

close into the blinding damp, midst your earthen roots

weave a baskets for my cradle

your fog is a cloak of protection shielding me

as I drift through the unknown my body is

pelted and cratered from the impact of suffering,

the soul mourns for the loss of youth,

the heart cries for bombing of beauty,

the spirit groans too deep for words…

rest you say

-jfs

Oh Captain, My Captain…

Once a friend of mine whom I love, said to me (i’m paraphrasing), “I pray that you don’t go down with the ship, I’m not suggesting anything, but I hope that if she decides to go down she doesn’t take you with her. All I’m saying is that you never know how thing’s will work out and you should be prepared for the possibility that your marriage may not work out.” Let me say I love this person and accept their advise from the standpoint of the their life experience. But I have to disagree… not with their stance as a realist, but with the reluctance to throw ones entire lot in with the body of Christ, though it is painful and gut-wrenching to say. I don’t mean to judge, but if the Body of Jesus cannot contain or exist in the downward spiral, death, despair, anxiety and depression, delusion, illusion of humanity…             …then Jesus failed.

I believe he did not.

If I am to be christ to my wife as Christ is to His Body, then that means indeed going down with the ship if the ship is going down; Just as Christ went down with this earthship! And when all hope is lost, the new hope of the kingdom of God rises from the depths of the ocean that is the spirit and grace of God.

There are times I think I should have become a monk. That I could have learned more of God or become closer to Him or that my life would be more closely aligned with Him or that the sign of my trials… her trials… means I made a mistake and God is… or I am just reaping the the harvest of my choices. Really it’s a dream of a cop out. An addiction. Because I somehow think that then I wouldn’t have to face the hardship or suffering that I and my beloved face today. In addition there’s so much that I feel I would be the poorer for if I had not married Her. Frankly even though I have no experience in this and am a total fool saying this… But that is… that if followed with much love, dedication and sobriety of spirit, marriage to a wife is just as deeply and mystically refining, perfecting and rewarding as marriage to Christ through monasticism. It is marriage to Christ either way. One can be a David or Judas in both. One can be a saint or a satan in either.

The Truth is, when my beloved is suffering and I have to choose either shirking my love and covenant to her or swallowing my self-ness, fatigue, frustration, anger, resentment, bitterness… I cannot swallow anything really. The only way I am able to love my beloved in these moments (I am poor in myself, forgive me) is through Christ, through Christ living in me, through sacrificing my self with Christ in the moments of despair and rage and bitterness.

… and I fail miserably at this… the battle between forgiveness and bitterness, between rage and acceptance, erupts in my chest.

أيها الرب يسوع المسيح ابن الله, إرحمني أنا الخاطئ – Ayyuha-r-Rabbu Yasū` al-Masīħ, Ibnu-l-Lāh, irħamnī ana-l-khāti’ – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner

I Love You,
Your Beloved

I need my Brothers and Sisters to remind me of what the Reign of God is.

Thank you immensely for doing so.