Be Still And Drink The Quiet

PEACE

'Tis not in seeking,
'Tis not in endless striving,
Thy quest is found:
Be still and listen;

This World Of Dew

Life is temporary and fragile, like a dewdrop. This whole world is temporary and fragile. Getting attached to life and this world is silly, or so Issa would like to believe. So his Buddhism taught him. His philosophy created the ideals of non-resistance and unsurprised acceptance of suffering in this transient world. After all, nothing could last.

Still, his heart would cry out against the tyranny of such a philosophy. His heart didn't mirror the ideals.

After Studying The World

I know I've talked about him before, but let me do it again.

One of the most vibrant sites devoted to poetry on the whole of the WWW is Poefrika run by Rethabile Masilo. Continually, for years on end

'Twas Whispered In Heaven

Grace put me in the mood for riddles. Here is one I've never been able to solve. Who can help me?



'Twas whispered in Heaven,
'twas muttered in hell,
And echo caught faintly
the sound as it fell;
On the confines of earth
'twas permitted to rest,
And in the depths of the ocean

This Complicated World

As long as I'm posting Muslim poets . . .


Who are we in this complicated world?
if we come to sleep we are His drowsy ones.
and if we come to wake we are in His hands.
if we come to weeping,

Without Cause God Gave Us Being

In a mood to read Rumi this evening. He is of course THE poet of love. And for that I adore him. But it is amazing how there is always a variety of totally unrelated but captivating thoughts that one can take away from him. For that I am in awe of him!


LOVE IS RECKLESS

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,

Soak Into My Pores

In discussing the way that different authors in the Old Testament are constantly quoting, arguing, and alluding to each other's writing, Walter Brueggemann says:


Those who are outsiders to the text may spot only the most explicit quotations, but those who are situated deeply and imaginatively

Ivory Tower Book-Heads

I just got an email from Richard Weikart that his new book has just come out. Four years ago I reviewed his book FROM DARWIN TO HITLER for Christianity and Society Journal. It really rocked my world and helped to clarify my focus in my own work on a book about God's image. As I just told Weikart, part of my goal became to present a Christian antithesis to the fascist ethic that Weikart had described.

So I am eagerly waiting for my copy of his new book, HITLER'S ETHIC: THE NAZI PURSUIT OF EVOLUTIONARY PROGRESS

Strange Peace And Rest

The poetry of Edward Rowland Sill was quite popular during his lifetime, the late 1800's. His work appeared in the popular magazines under many pseudonyms, though it seems that these pen names were generally recognized as being his signatures. No one seems to have been fooled.

But in the years that followed, the world's taste in poetry took a sharp turn toward the intellectual. TS Eliot began writing; Hopkins was finally printed; James Joyce and Ezra Pound became the new status quo. Modernism was born

Our Master Lies Asleep

MARY MAGDALENE AND THE OTHER MARY.
A SONG FOR ALL MARIES

Our Master lies asleep and is at rest:
His heart has ceased to bleed, His Eye to weep:
The sun ashamed has dropt in the west:
Our Master lies asleep.

Contemplative Bible Study

Don't we Americans often have a very goal-oriented approach to life? Every undertaking is evaluated based on the projected outcomes. We have all asked ourselves, "What did I expect would happen?"

This is good to an extent. We shouldn't be absolutely random in our approach to life.

But sometimes it doesn't seem to fit the situation. A man I know has decided to become my friend in order to get me to enter into a business with him. My entering will help him. He is being very goal-oriented. Very American. Very Western.

A New Review

Just today I saw a new review of my book "Covenant and Community." It came out a couple of days ago in Tradition and Discovery journal, a journal dedicated to the philosophy of Michael Polanyi.

Polanyi's insights concerning "indwelling"

Coraline Was Bored

Rereading CORALINE for the umpteenth time. Haven't seen the movie yet; I'm a little nervous that it will taint the way I see the story in my own mind.

Here is one of my favorite scenes from early in the book, before the adventure begins.



Coraline was bored.

She flipped through a book

Glory Be To God For Dappled Things

Another from Gerard Manley Hopkins.



PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

Christ At All Hazards

Gerard Manley Hopkins was converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and soon committed himself to the strict life of a Jesuit monk. Along with his renunciation of the world, he renounced poetry, though he secretly longed to be reunited with it, until such a time as his superiors would give it back to him. In fact he burned most of his earlier poetry (what a loss to the world!).

In reality, there was nothing in the vows that forbade poetry. He was free to pursue a literary life and be a devout Jesuit. It seems that he turned his back on poetry in some sort of extrapolation of a vow of silence. He makes a couple of veiled references to a similar idea.

But while he longed to return to poetry

The Kind Of Thing That Always Does Take Place

"Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don't think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children,

Naw Sir, I Ain't Got It Yit

I found that Zora Neale Hurston story I was looking for.

Hurston was many things: poet, fiction writer, public speaker, political essayist, social critic, center of the Harlem Renaisance, America's premier folklorist. And she was a first rate anthropologist.

As a folklorist and anthropologist she travelled the American south collecting the old tales that had been passed down through the African American community since the days of slavery. And thank God she did, for within a few years it would have been impossible to collect such stories from people who had been born under slavery. Not only did she collect the stories,

Upon Nothing

Aphra Behn based some of the most baudy characters in her plays on John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, whom she knew because they were both among the most notable figures of the court of Charles II. Wilmot was, in a court of outrageous hooligans, perhaps the most perverse of them all.

Yet, I am reminded of Salieri's complaint, that God should have chosen to give such talent to such a childish reprehensible fool as Mozart. (At least such a rephrehensible fool as the movie version of Mozart.) For Wilmot's talent as a wordsmith is great,

Love In Fantastic Triumph Sate

Aphra Behn wrote in the days just after Shakespeare. She was, by all accounts, not your average woman.

As a Tory she staunchly defended the King, against the Parliament. She believed in kings in the abstract sense. Which king it happened to be made little difference. He could be a good king or a bad king, a wise king or a foolish king. In fact this particular king was neither good nor wise, as Aphra Behn would learn. Charles II perfectly fit his epitaph, written by his close friend John Wilmot the Earl of Rochester:

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,
Whose word no man relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

O Captain! My Captain! Rise Up And Hear The Bells!

The Revolution was fought to procure "freedom" for the inhabitants of America. But it was eighty years before that freedom was extended to a very large segment of the American population.

Somehow much of the white population was content to live in the freedom that we had gained, but felt no need to see that freedom made universal. Really that isn't much different than the Church, is it? Don't we all to often get comfortable in our own freedom but feel little need to see that freedom made universal? If the apathy of the majority of Americans in our first eighty years seems pathetic (and it does!) then what of our own apathy?