Holidays

Well, it's that time of year again. Thanksgiving's over and now Advent begins once more. From the top. Adagio con brio. What may turn up this year I wonder? Depends on the key, I suppose.

To help set the tone I return once more to my two favorite poems for the season; Mary's Song, by Lucy Shaw, and this one which seems especially poignant this year:


Christmas Fills the Empty Chair
by Connie J. Hessevick


Christmas reminds me of Grandma

winters of lefse, krumkake, fattimand...

My father’s memories

handed down through my imagination

bring me the Grandma I never met

to share Göd Jul



I sit at the table

in a house fresh with baking

you offer me coffee or lingonberry wine

homemade lefse unrolled from checkered towels

Butter?

Sugar?



Five boys fill your home

the eldest son tall, pink and hearty

labors at the wood pile

the steady sounds of axe to wood

our music for the evening



My young father on the quilt

turns the pages of a book

you are stern with him

he’ll not damage the pictures of the Old Land

slim heritage of a young bride bound for America

Norsk woman’s pride stares squarely at the Proctor son

a son who smiles his blue grey eyes

gingerly turns another page

and knows it is a holiday



Two round faced boys burst in from the cold

snow deep in every fold of their bundling

you help them inside out

seat them chattering by the stove

give hot milk and chocolate shavings

as they begin their "What if..." game

"Just what if snow came down as milk and chocolate?"



I share your thoughts on things the boys don’t hear

of the youngest son

in the Proctor earth now

of the empty chair

Just what if their father would knock on the door

Just what if he had not worked on the railroad

Just what if he had not tried to unionize

if he had not been black balled

would he be here now?

Or would he have gone for other reasons

as he had gone from Norway

we can share this story of men

who have reason to go

and not enough reason to return

We turn to warm milk and hard tack

and ease the slow burning in our bellies



The evening stills

And the thin son lights the candles on the tree

Makes shadows of his father around the room

All of the family

Gathered together

For a Christmas Eve



Just as you join me

fill my empty chair

bringing the family together again

I sprinkle the fattimand with powdered sugar

and offer you coffee

Milk?

Sugar?


Reprinted with permission from "Gentle Spirit" magazine.

Are You Experienced? Have you Ever Been Experienced?

Whatever happened to Jimi, anyway. Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

Reading a couple cool books (yeah I'm back to reading books these days - it's alright) and since my memory isn't what it used to be (they say it's the second thing to go... I forgot what the first was - heh-heh!) I thought I'd write out the more salient passages in here for focus and future reference.

These quotes are from Spiritual Direction & the Encounter With God: A Theological Inquiry, written by William A. Barry, S.J., published by Paulist Press:

Modern philosophy has been grappling with the question of how we can be sure of our knowledge of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason Emmanuel Kant set the problem by showing rather convincingly that we can only know the phenomenal world, the world of our experience, but have no way of knowing by reason whether this phenomenal world corresponds to the real world. John Macmurray, the Scottish philosopher who died in 1976, came to the conclusion that modern philosophy had started down a blind alley when it accepted Dscartes' dictum, "I think, therefore I am" as the foundation stone for the knowledge of reality and thus of any system of philosophy. With such a starting point Kant's critique is virtually unassailable... starting down this blind alley leads to a dead end.

If my primary knowledge is of myself as thinker then I have no immediate knowledge of aything outside myself. I have to argue to the existence of the outside world, and any argument one uses, Kant has shown, is problematic. If the very existence of a world outside myself is problematic, the existence of God is even more problematic. Agnosticism and atheism are close at hand.

Quoting Macmurray: The reason is that the adoption of the "I think" as the center of reference and starting-point of his philosophy makes it formally impossible to do justice to religious experience. For thought is inherently private; and any philosophy which takes its stand on the primacy of thought, which defines the Self as the Thinker, is committed formally to an extreme logical individualism. It is necessarily egocentric.

In the political realm Macmurray argues that the dead end is totalitarian government.

As an alternative to the Cartesian starting-point Macmurray proposes that philosophy begin with what is primary in our experience; we are not primarily thinkers, we are doers, but knowing doers, that is, agents. Thus philosophy begins with "I do" rather than "I think". Action includes knowledge: "To do, and to know that I do, are two aspects of one and the same experience. This knowledge is absolute and necessary. It is not, however, knowledge of an object but what we may call "knowledge in action," ie., the unreflective primary knowledge of any experience of action. When I act, I know that I am acting and what I intend. Action is the actualizing of a possibility, the determining of a future. The possibility of action implies free will. "To deny free-will is to deny the possibility of action... that I am free is an immediate implication of the 'I do'; and to deny freedom is to assert that no one ever does anything, that no one is capable even of thinking or observing." I am not free with regard to the past. But the future, precisely as future, is not yet determined; it is something determined by action. Thus the condition of possibility for action is my freedom.

When I act, I know that I exist and I also know that what is Not-I (the Other) exists. In action I encounter you.

The primary sense is not sight, but touch. At all times I am in touch with the Other since I am supported by the forces of gravity, the ground upon which I stand or the chair upon which I sit. Touch is the primary sense by which I encounter the other.

In order to act we must regard the world as a unity of action because our action requires the cooperation of the world of which we are a part. If we could not rely on the world outside us we could not act in it.

Our own actions [are] our own contributions to the one inclusive action which is the history of the world.

If we understand the world as one action of God, we mean that God has a unitary intention for the whole creation and that his one action includes and is constituted by all the actions of every created agent and all the events that will ever occur in the history of the universe. The one action of God (the Universal Agent) includes the free actions of all us human beings. Because we really are agents, the future of God's action is not determined, since only the past is determined. So in some mysterious way God's action depends on us.

No created being is excluded from the one action which is the world. The Kingdom of God preached by Jesus can be understood as God's one action. We can understand the Kingdom of God as God's intention for the universe, or rather as God's one action which is the universe.

God is present because the world is God's action.

Any human experience can have a religious dimension, can be an encounter with God...

There is no human experience that is not an encounter. Human beings are part and parcel of the reality of this universe. Even the most "subjective" experience, for example, an hallucination, happens to a person who is encountering the air, the ground, the forces of gravity, etc., of the universe, and these "objective" elements impinge on and condition the experience...

God is not only transcendent but also immanent in his created universe ...the world as one action informed by one intention...

Any action of ours occurs within a universe which is one action of God. Hence at every moment every human being encounters the creator whose action the universe is. Whether we know it or not, God is ingredient in every human experience... Experience is at the least a dyadic affair and it is even possible that it is irreducibly triadic in character...

Quoting John E. Smith: 'Revelation in the religious sense does involve something out of the ordinary, but it is unlikely that the manifestation of God would be intelligible to us at all if it happened only at times when human capacities for experience and understanding are totally suspended. It is more likely that revelation would require, not the suspension of human capabilities but rather their participation in an intensified form... Whatever is totally different from all we can experience and apprehend must be something that we neither experience nor apprehend and, far from calling this God, we should call it nothing at all...'

Smith again: 'There is no experience of God that is not at the same time experience of something else.' By this he means that every experience of God is mediated. We might say that every experience of God is sacramental... there is no experience of anything that is not at the same time an encounter with God. We may not and cannot always be aware that we are encountering God; not every experience has a religious dimension for us. But every human experience can have a religious dimension because God is always present and active in the universe which is God's one action.

Any human experience, hence any medium, can disclose God. It may tax our ingenuity to discern the presence of God in some experiences, but the difficulty should not blind us to the truth... The kataphatic tradition of prayer advocates the use of contemplation of nature and imaginative reading and contemplation of scripture... The apophatic tradition of imageless prayer cannot avoid some mediation if the experience of the Mystery we call God... the difference in the two traditions lies in the desire of the apophatic tradition to bypass the other dimensions to get to the heart of the Mystery, and that of the kataphatic to try to discern the religious dimension within the other dimensions.

Precisely because God is the perfect community, God had no need to create anything else. God creates the universe for no other motive than God's own gratuitous and unfathomable love. It is as if the three Persons said to one another: "Our community is so good; why don't we create a universe where we can invite others to share our community."

In this universe we encounter the Triune God who continually calls us into community.

At the heart of the universe is the creative desire of God to draw us into the universal community whose motive is love and whose intention is community.
[end quotes]

Wait... one more. This one's going on the fridge:

All knowledge is for the sake of action.
And all action is for the sake of friendship.
And all action, for the sake of friendship, is service.

more later...