And this from a psychology conference!

Human beings are containers for the Mystery expressing itself in all its myriad ways. The more flexible our containers (our capacity to bear catastrophic change), the more can manifest through us.

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The container is an internalizing, integrating function. It is that which turns the soul towards the Good.

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The opposite is the dis-integrating tendency to evacuate experience. As such, it is evil (as Fr. Joseph defined it).

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There is a dimension of ourselves that exceeds mere existence, an inviolate core which refuses to be known. It is only interested in becoming - becoming in the direction of the mystery.

On the Divine Image

Question: How can human beings be in the image of God when they are so wretched and so ugly?

Reply: We are raw stuff, like a piece of wood, and God is carving us all the time. He is constantly perfecting the image that can only be a reflection of Himself, since there is nothing other than God. But we have to fully consent to be so shaped.

Oct 12, 4:47 PM (Ordinary Time)

The monks were discussing The Matrix over dinner in hushed but excited voices. Yes, the movie. And it was the elder monk who was filling in the younger ones. The others kept asking for a clarification of the basic premise, i.e., who is actually “real” while in the Matrix. This vexed several of them and they wanted examples. The elder monk delivered an earnest explanation about body plugs and lifetimes spent in sleep.

Only if you were born into the Matrix and then liberated from it could you go between the two worlds.

Insomnia: robber of clarity, attention, precision. Hence a robber of the apprehension of beauty, since the good, the true, and the beautiful can only be discerned through a disciplined and sustained concentration. This being the case, I am puzzling about why the world’s contemplative traditions prescribe so much sleeplessness. There are orders of the Benedictines whose first services begin at 3:30 AM. The monks at Abhayagiri stay up all night long once a month. When I try it, the world is simply a weary blur. I don’t much care for the beauty and the divine order because the order of the mechanism of my body and my senses is in disarray.

Today started with despair that the uprootedness had gone so deep that I might never be touched by beauty again.

Look: the sun has spread its wings
over the earth to dispel the darkness.

Like a great tree, with its roots in heaven,
and its branches reaching down to the earth.

~Judah Al-Harizi

I told her I was afraid of visions of banquets, lusty fatty steak fantasies, mounds of bread smothered with creamy butter assaulting my imagination and hijacking my attention away from the beauty of the world.

She said she fasted for ten days once. On the third day she could not stop seeing herself chasing a rabbit, pouncing on it, ripping it open with her bare hands. The delights of raw rabbit flesh pursued her relentlessly for days, then waned as the body submitted to the fact of its provisional existence, here on Earth.

Just as I had fallen – oh again! – into forgetting, the languid light of October streaked against the row of windows, hard and penetrating. And the soul said yes, this is why you’re here. This moment, this instant of bursting radiance.

Uprootedness, part 3

Uprootedness, part 2

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul

~Simone Weil
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Fear loves noise because it stops the fear from being heard

~Carl Jung