"Holy, the Firm"

Another saint has joined the Beloved Community Beyond. Rest in Peace, Annie Dillard.

“Here is the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam.”

“Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.”

“...The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. 

The answer must be, I think, 
that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. 
The least we can do is try to be there.”

“I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.”

Rest in the Peace of Wild Things

NOTE: It appears to me that people can not current post comments on blogger. Not sure why. Hopefully that will get fixed.

We lost a giant this week, in a week long blitz of great people passing.

Rest in peace, St Wendell. Join the beloved community, the membership of saints, along with Dolly, Tim and Gloria.

But do the Lords of War in fact hate the world?

That would be easy to bear, if so.

If they hated their children and

the flowers that grow in the warming light,

that would be easy to bear.

For then we could hate the haters and be right.

What is hard is to imagine the Lords of War may

love the things that they destroy.

As I have read the Gospels over the years, 
the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion 
but came instead to found an unorganized one. 
He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples 
into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, 
into the houses of sinners and publicans, 
into the town and the wilderness, 
toward the membership of all that is here. 
Well, you can read and see what you think.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: 
namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be 
destroyed by acquiescence.

The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" 
is not a book that any human will ever write; 
it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; 
it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. 
It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of 
the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, 
which is the fundamental economic virtue, 
and how very little they have to say about 
community, compassion, and mutual help.

And having returned from the woods, 
we remember with regret its restfulness. 
For all creatures there are in place, hence at rest. 
In their most strenuous striving, sleeping and waking, dead and living, 
they are at rest. 
In the circle of the human we are weary with striving, and are without rest.

A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.