Parinama

Faith is not some hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures….as in the natural order of things, so too faith is folded into change, is the mutable and messy process of our lives rather than any fixed, mental product. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss Unfortunately, faith became a matter of believing impossible or strange things (which was supposed to please God, somehow), instead of an entranceway into a very different way of knowing altogether. Richard Rohr, Naked Now I am wondering, “What is it that I have faith in?”  The root of the word faith is “to trust or promise” or later in its evolution “the assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence.”   While “belief” and “faith” are often used interchangeably, to me they point to very different philosophies of things.  The root of belief, “confidence reposed in a pe...

Yesterday, I visited the camp I went to as a child.  It is a holy place for me. A place where I encountered God’s presence as a child.  Not that I would have called it God back then or even have known what presence was.  All I knew was the presence of the long deep lake, the cry of the loons at dusk, children’s singing and playing. I knew presence from the tall pines, the sweet ferns, the soft sanded paths that wound through camp. I found presence in horse trots, ice-cream, naked night swims, and laughter when we should have been sleeping.  And the presences in the solitude during the quiet resting part of the day when I heard the water lapping on the stone shore, birdsong, creaks of old cabin floorboards. This was all made available to us through the nurturing and constant rhythm of each day, care of counselors who taught us how to care for each other, the radical belonging of everyone.  The safe container to be your silly, disheveled, made-up, fancy, not all t...

Amelia is my missing grandmother. She was already gone when I was born, dying when my father was only 12 years old from a wasting disease.  They didn’t know to call in Anorexia then but at some point, Amelia just stopped eating enough.  I recall only one picture of her in my house growing up.  Sepia toned and fraying at the edges, it is a small portrait taken when she got engaged to Louie.  She wears a beret, slightly off kilter, her short brown hair cropped short around her ears.  She couldn’t have been more than 20 and was already pregnant with Mikey when this picture was taken. Maybe it was because of her pregnancy that she was getting married to Louie.  What other choice would she have had?  Not something my father or Louie ever spoke of.  But the story seeped down to me a through the waters of extended family gossip.   My father spoke very little about his mother.  What he did say was about how sad and hard her life had been. H...

What you give someone when you give them love is the gift of yourself....It means you give them space. You give them a place where they can be themselves. Herbert McCabe, God Matters Love as spaciousness, presence, compassion, patience.  This Agape love (from the Greek) so different from the other definitions of love flooding our culture and consumption society which focus more on what we get out of a relationship is  rather an unconditional love for another that flows out from the deepest parts of our being.  In the Christian contemplative tradition, it describes the way in our very being is created out of God’s love for life.  When we are able through practice to open ourselves to this love, soften the hard grasping egocentric parts, of this kind of loving will naturally flow out into our relationships with all others, with the Earth, and back with God.  It can come to supersede egocentric love, loves for the sake of gain from another.  Filled with God’s ...

  What if you rearranged past and future in your consciousness as an experiment?  The Aymara indigenous people of the Andes see the past and their ancestors in front of them because they know they can learn from them and they see the unknown future that they imagine as behind them yet unseen.  Carmen Acevedo Butcher How strange it feels to imagine myself walking towards my past, my back to the future. I am surprised at the comfort it gives me, to sense lost beloveds and precious memories coming towards me ever new, to experience and be with again. In these moments, I am re(collected) with parts of myself long neglected, the past with my present, the future following.  I find myself and healed and full in this new integration.  Transported into the past, I am filled with longings for what has changed, lost, and in need of repair (the regrets).  For those sweet memories, my imagination is rich.  As I go towards the past, I smell and feel the warmth of a ...

  On the night before he was arrested, Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.  It was an act of great humility, love and care.  In this tender act, he demonstrated to his disciples what it meant to be a teacher, one who guides others with deference, earthiness, mercy.  Jesus also allowed his own feet to be washed.  Six days before his death, he allowed Mary, Martha’s sister, to wash his feet with the most expensive of perfumed oils.  Judas had objected saying that all that money could have been used to feed the poor.  My understanding of what Jesus told him is that while the poor need our care, we also must take care of ourselves so that our work in the world, our love, care, social justice, is integrated with the innermostself, the soul.  With that intimacy with the soul our movements and actions in the world integration will embody both integrity and humility.  As Mary prepared Jesus’ feet for his death, I imagine her tears flowing onto th...