GOD'S WILL

Thomas Merton asks:

“How am I to know the will of God? Even where there is no more explicit claim on my obedience, such as a legitimate command, the very nature of each situation usually bears written into itself some indication of God’s will. For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true, or to speak truth, or to at least seek it. To obey Him is to respond to His will expressed in the need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. For the rights of another man is the expression of God’s love and God’s will. In demanding that I respect the rights of another God is not merely asking me to conform to some abstract arbitrary law: He is enabling me to share, as His son, in His own care for my brother. No man who ignores the rights and needs of others can hope to walk in the light of contemplation, because his way has turned away from truth, from compassion, and therefore from God.” In The New Seeds of Contemplation.

If I was to judge the Republican candidates by Thomas Merton’s criteria, I’m afraid they would all come up short. Very, very short.

JUNGIAN INSPIRED ARCHETYPES

Jungian inspired archetypes

Any of these archetypes can include male/female overtones.

Self/feminine/anima: This corresponds to the female ego, the individual, mothering, birthing, beauty, receptivity, or acceptance. Common symbols in nature would include complete meadows, forests or habitats. Individual trees, plants, a totem plant or animal. Feminine archetypes can include caves, holes in a tree or a tunnel. They may also include blossoming plants, archways, bushes, nests, eggs, pods, ponds or lakes. The night, the moon, water and/or female plants or animals. If you know enough about plants to know the difference between female and male plants.

Self/masculine/animus: This corresponds to male ego, the individual, fathering, initiating, organizing, fertilizing. Common symbols might also include complete landscapes; meadows, forest or other landscapes. Individual trees, or plants, your totem animals or plants. Common symbols in nature might include seeds or pollinations. You man dream or see tall trees, or plants, the sun, stems of plants fire or mountains. Your dream or vision might take place during the day and include male plants or animals. Again, that’s if you know enough about plants to tell the difference.

Fourth is the hero. This can correspond to facing difficulties in a positive way, overcoming them or healing some illness or injury. Common symbols in nature would be healing plants and herbs. Coming across immature plants or animals. Being caught in a storm or coming across half grown or struggling plants or animals.

Fifth is the adversary. This can correspond to being an agent of change, facing the unexpected, tearing things down, or facing an obstacle. You may confront stinging or thorny plants, storms, overgrown areas, swamps, natural disasters, erosion, struggling plants or animals.

Sixth is death and rebirth. This can correspond to endings and beginnings, some kind of sacrifice, a crisis or new life. You may confront marshlands, the cycles of the seasons, perennial plants, bogs, environmental changes, border areas or natural intersections.

Seventh is the journey. This can correspond to movement, development, or aging. You may confront pathways, hills, mountains, rivers, streams, animal trails, the wind, growth, or perennial plants.

WHO IS SHE?

I don't know who she is, this woman who appears when I close my eyes. She's bathed in star light, spirit light, I'm not sure. She's standing on a headland, waves crashing on the rocks, facing into the wind, hair blown back like a cloak trying to break free. Her skirt kilted, feet sandal shod. Until today I thought she was an avatar of me, my spirit sister. Now? I'm not so sure. I wonder if it's some racial memory. An ancestor. A woman born, Goddess, how many centuries ago. And where? The highlands? The Western Isles? Who are you, lady? Will I ever see your face?

THE SOUL FRIEND

Can you really call a blog a soul friend? Not really, but since the closest thing I have to an anamchara lives half a state away, this will have to do for now. I have other blogs, but this one is for speculating, standing on bridge, looking over the edge.

AS LONG AS ONE IS LEFT

"If they ever take away our radio, suspend our newspaper, silence us, put to death all of us priests-bishop included, and you are left alone-a people without priests-then each of you will have to be God's microphone. Each of you will have to be a messenger, a prophet. The church will always live as long as one baptized person is left alive."

Oscar Romero, quoted in Messengers to the Kingdom by Jon Sobrino S.J.

I begin to understand by Romero scared the bejeesus out of some of the Vatican Curia in the three years he was archbishop of San Salvador. And I wonder how closely Morris West, author of the Clowns of God, followed the persecution of the church in Central America. Because he echoes that message in the novel. When the time comes, the little people, the lay people will have to carry on the work and the sacraments of the church whether they are ordained or not. Imagine how well that went over with old men who had spent their lives climbing the ladders

THE GREAT JOY

"Nor are the tidings of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the massed crowd there are always new tiding of joy and disaster. Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements. Where every day’s disaster is beyond compare, every day’s danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero. News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, so that eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the “good News,” the Great Joy." Thomas Merton written for the Advent season in 1967

I can't imagine what Merton would make of our 24/7 news cycle and "reality" programming.

WHAT IS FAITH

This was written by Thomas Merton, a Cistercian monk, social critic and prolific author, as a preface to his collection of essays in Faith and Violence. He wrote it for the Advent season of 1967. His last as it happens, before his death in Thailand in 1968. Merton was writing at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the beginnings of the opposition to the Viet Nam war. Now we’re faced with the one percent vs the ninety nine percent, occupy Wall Street, the war on terrorism; doesn’t seem that much has changed in the forty odd years since Merton wrote this essay. “The Hassidic rabbi Baal She Tov, once told the following story. Two men were traveling through a forest. One was drunk and the other was sober. As they went, they were attacked by robbers, beaten, robbed of all they had including their clothing. When they emerged, people asked them if they got through the woods without trouble. The drunken man said: “Everything was fine;; nothing went wrong; we had no trouble at all.” They said: “How does it happen that you are naked and covered with blood?” He did not have an answer. The sober man said: “Do not believe him he is drunk. It was a disaster. Robbers beat us without mercy and took everything we had. Be warned by what happened to us, and look out for yourselves.” For some “faithful”-and for some unbelievers too-“faith” seems to be a kind of drunkenness, an anesthetic, that keeps you from realizing and believing that anything can every go wrong. Such faith can be immersed in a world of violence and make no objection: the violence is perfectly all right. It is quite normal-unless of course it happens to be exercised by Negroes. Then it must be immediately put down instantly be superior force. The drunkenness of this kind of faith-whether in a religious message of in a political ideology-enables us to go to life without seeing our own violence is a disaster and that overwhelming force by which we seek to assert ourselves and our own self interest may well be our ruin. Is faith a narcotic dream in a world of heavily armed robbers, or is it an awakening? Is faith a convenient nightmare in which we are attacked and obliged to destroy our attackers? What if we awaken to discover that we are the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root of hate in ourselves?” Abbey of Gethsemane Advent 1967 I read this for the first time several years ago. Rereading this tied to my own searching it really shook me this