Random Thoughts (3)

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Source: http://www.lovethispic.com/image/36213/leaves-in-the-wind

The most unmistakable expression of Love is compassion. If I do not suffer with the other or at the very least if I do not try to alleviate the pain of the other the best I can, I have done nothing. My art, too, it will mean nothing.

A friendship which demands ‘my enemies are your enemies too’ is one that needs to be quickly broken. It will destroy the one and rob the other. Do not permit for another to exercise any form of dominion over the arc of your embrace.

The world resists us all, both the righteous and the unrighteous. We are all subject to gravity and to the unbearable weight of grief and loss. There is none amongst us who desires to be hated more than the need to be loved. And in the middle of all this we shift between the states of lukewarm.

We make use of noise to numb us to our wounds. We are all wounded and seek out different ways to forget. This is one of the principal reasons why social media has taken hold of the world and choking it of its life-force. It has become increasingly painful to think and to swim upstream.

First the eye becomes corrupted then the heart. That is, the flesh first wages war against us and then should we lose this battle, it is the turn of the heart which is the seat of the soul. This is where the hardest of all battles are to be fought, that is, in the heart. Here it is where most is to be gained and most is to be lost.

Why is it we so quickly tire of carnality and become too soon bored with all manner of sensual pleasure? Is it not the case that we are for the most part looking for someone to speak to? To say: this is who I am, see me, in all of my nakedness and trembling.

The other of the great deceptions is that technology will solve most of our problems. But we have found that for every advance new problems are created. And even more alarmingly we are creating autonomous systems which will neither thirst nor hunger. On top of all of this, they will not forget.

And yet life really is beautiful, to be celebrated and to be lived out to its end. Satisfying your thirst with an icy glass of water; moments spent loving another human being; saying I love you for the very first time. For such simple pleasures as these and many more, life can really be beautiful.

Do not die without trying your best to become the man and woman you were meant to become. Aim for the highest in you and make that good reach towards the fullness of your capacity. For one day beginning with those moments just before your death, the man or woman you were intended to become will confront you for the last time. They will give you their hand and you will be left with no other option but to take it.

Few things are sweeter than the practice of forgiveness from a heart which overflows with the rivers of mercy. Few things are bitterer to the spirit than a forgiveness which is given but not forgotten. We find forgiveness difficult because we often confuse it as a pardon for the act itself.

At any given moment when you look into the eyes of your neighbor irrespective of their office in life, there you see the Christ before you. You will discern Him more clearly in the eyes of those who mourn (Matt. 5:4). To think too highly of ourselves is the surest way to becoming lost.

Rocks and pebbles exist in a community of cooperation. They do not discriminate in the presence of the other, nor do they heckle or shove for position. They wait in quiet offering shade and protection to the life around them. Some are under the soil, others covered in moss, and many are under the water shifting only under the draw of nature. They wait patiently to be discovered one afternoon as you recite the Beatitudes.

A thousand winters, written like this, could be no more than a week. All of a sudden, perspective is God.

Random Thoughts

In the first instance some random thoughts to myself:

Oh sweetest Jesus to exist in that moment when we act and are moved by selfless love alone.

Pure self-love is to practise compassion on your dying self.

Pure selfless love is difficult to practise because like light it reveals all which is not clean in our hearts. For a season this divine disclosure can hurt more than physical pain.

We shall be given a second chance to embrace the magnificence of humility as our death draws near. Let us hope our deaths are not sudden.

Few things are more beneficial for the soul than to pray for our adversaries that they might outlive and outshine us, but it is not easy and the revelation of that hour might disappear for many years.

We cannot practise love or any of the virtues outside our encounter with the other. Your spouse, your neighbour, the brother or sister at the check-out counter, the cook in the café, and particularly those who might will us harm.

Vengeance clouds the mind and is a sure step to a catastrophe. It has nothing to do with justice.

It is oftentimes more difficult to forgive ourselves than to forgive those who have trespassed against us. Outside our Creator nobody knows the depth and extent of our transgressions better than I who has committed them. So we continue to unnecessarily punish ourselves and without mercy.

It is a temptation which goes under many names, to dismiss the spiritual insights of those outside our own community of believers, but in so doing we would hold to no account the beckoning call of the Holy Ghost to all His children.

If we cannot acknowledge the Creator in the presence of our brother and sister through acts of charity and mercy, we would have accomplished nothing even if we should have gained the whole world.

Hold no high expectations from people, and particularly from those nearest to you, for similarly to you they are struggling and fighting to survive. This is one of the surest ways to peace, to recollect and to reflect upon our shared moral infirmity. To meditate upon our common brokenness.

It is important to remember the distinction between solitude [which is good] and isolation [which is bad]. Such is the difference as is between angels and demons. There can be community in solitude, but not in isolation.

Do not be deceived by those sleek presentations which promise fast paths to ‘inner knowledge’. In the beginning the path to inner knowledge is strewn with difficulties and it can be offending and brutal. At the start it is not at all comely to look at. Few would want to have anything to do with it.

The search for truth does not end, it starts afresh from a higher vantage point as revelation increases. We must be careful that ‘truth’ does not become our comfortable resting bed.

Belief comes before faith, like prayer comes before the heart which doubts.

Philosophy cannot teach us how to pray or to offer up ourselves as a living sacrifice. But prayer can reveal the truth of philosophy to us.

Truth and interior silence are synonyms. Noise is the great enemy.

Ego and pride will be the last to go. “Who am I?” When you are gone the world will go on without you. Who will weep for you?

Hope is not an illusion or a fantasy. I can place my trust in hope but not in an illusion or a fantasy.

The most useful tears are those that dry like herbs.

Despair, too, like all things, it will pass. It is not who you are, it is a response to those painful things which presently surround you. 

To practise discernment is to recognise that alongside the dumbfounding beauty of the world there also exists dreadful wickedness. And then to be able to judge well between the two.

To contemplate upon the great mystery of existence, and to look inwardly to discover that Creation has not stopped. You are aflame with stardust.

Compassion is the key to unlocking the deeper mysteries of love.

Gift your neighbour the benefit of the doubt and a thousand lives will be saved.

MGM

The realms of unconditional love

Gerringong, NSW

I was fortunate that this truth stumbled upon me when I was broken enough to receive it. Pride is a barrier to all things really important and is never wholly defeated. One of the most difficult and ‘objectionable’ of prayers aimed directly at the ego: Lord, I pray for anonymity.[1] Had I been a younger man when I feigned to be inclusive of my heterodox brethren and when in reality I was fundamentalist almost to the core, I would have been too proud or too arrogant, probably both, to get off the high-horse and see past my own life-legend.[2] This truth which presses on us is amazingly straightforward yet one of the hardest challenges to a member of a believing community, in particular to a believer who has invested years in the building and defending of their life-legend. This is not difficult to understand.

Good religious people with sincere and honest intentions want for their ‘Myth’ to be the right one,[3] for this will validate their life and give reason and meaning to the suffering and to the wounds along the way. It has been correctly pointed out for instance, that if we are to look for the unifying theme in the writings of Dostoyevsky, it is his exploration of the human condition centred about the need to be sure of at least one thing. Kierkegaard before him would ask a similar question of his readers, do we will the one thing and what is this one thing? And yet a believer need not abandon the consolation of their spiritual home to concede that others may make comparable claims as to the comprehension of the Right Way. Here is found the delicious irony: the truer and more profound one’s own religious experience within the believing community, that is for instance, the ‘more’ Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim… the more humble and cognizant one is of their own lowly position before the Almighty Creator. Some like the German-Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon have spoken of that which underlies religion, the religio perennis, or the religion of the heart, the religio cordis. 

Within this atmosphere of the mutual understanding of the uniqueness and preciousness of our neighbour, the more tender and compassionate does the heart become in acknowledging the right of the other to exist and to explore and to love. At its crux, terrorism has nothing to do with the practice of religion but is a movement of violence which makes use of and exploits both religious rhetoric and sacred paradigms. This is exactly what the ‘anti-theists’ have not been able or have not wanted to understand. Cultural Marxism (at least in the West and certainly post 1920’s) has played a big part in the establishment of the “religion is violent” narrative. Diving deeper into the Divine (or into “the Aleph” as some mystics might say) takes you further into the realms of unconditional Love and into the opposite direction of the bomb makers whatever their stripe. Ultimately, the greatest force for change on earth which neither yields nor breaks and is ancient even beyond the oldest stars, is that energy which has its source in the Light. Let us then not underestimate our own possibilities, for light  too we have learnt, can be reflected from dust.

One of the great joys in my teaching life was when one of my under-graduate students at the University of Wollongong (UOW) came to my office to thank me for re-igniting the religious zeal in her heart. I was surprised but more so very deeply moved. This student was a Muslim and I her teacher a Christian. This gifted young lady would go on to earn a highly commended doctorate and inspired both Katina and myself, her two thesis supervisors, in equal measure. The busier we are trying to live and to work out our own religion, the less time we will have to bury our neighbour’s. On the problematical question of religious plurality or ‘Ecumenism’ I am in free-fall somewhere between Karl Rahner’s “Anonymous Christian”, and John Hick’s “mutually inclusive inclusivism”. For many years I have held to the Apokatastasis.[4] Not as a dogma, but as a theologoumenon which is a theological opinion. Nowhere am I suggesting that doctrine is not important. Precisely because it is that we should not spend our time fighting over it, but rather we should be immersing ourselves in the understanding of its eschatological and soteriological implications.

There is an extraordinarily beautiful and telling admonition aimed at Peter by Jesus in the last chapter in the Gospel of John which proved defining for me as I battled with issues of my own faith and ministry. Peter, pointing to the younger disciple John and curious as to his future, asks Christ, “But Lord, what about this man?” Jesus said to him, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you? You follow me” (Jn 21:21-22). In other words: mind your own business, and go about your work.

George, Eleni, and Jeremy, my three beautiful children, should you ever read these little reflections from your dad when you are grown up, this is all that I would want for you to take away: hold fast onto the faith you have received and exchange it for nothing of the world and for nil of its promises; at the same time do not close your ears or limit your wonder to the unique stories of others who have gone on a different journey nor shut your eyes or your heart to the divine presence in the other who is standing before you; and be the first to offer to fill your neighbour’s cup with cool water. This alone would have made my life worth living.

[1] This little prayer uttered by an idealistic young clergyman in a hotel room in Athens one evening, might be better understood nowadays given the internet and the rise of social media, as more of a condition of the spirit and state of mind rather than an actuality or a possibility.

[2] By life-legend I simply want to term the story we write for ourselves to describe and to justify our decision making and personal history. That is, all of that which goes into the creation and development of our identity and world-view.  

[3] I will normally use myth close to the intentions of Carl Jung for whom “mythmaking” was a pathway for the unconscious part of our psyche to express itself. It is one of the ways of how the collective unconscious strives to become conscious.

[4] For an excellent summary of this theological opinion held by a number of the Church Fathers, see Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, (Penguin Books: London, 1993), 261-263.