Bernini and Teresa of Avila..

Bernini’s sculpture of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa of Avila in Cappella Cornaro Della Vittoria, Rome

 

"Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one's house for love, it would be utterly scorned." 

~ Song of Songs 

 

“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”

~ Teresa of Avila, Autobiography



 (All photos from: Idle Speculations)

 

 

Oh Exceeding Beauty ~ by Teresa of Avila

 

 Oh Beauty exceeding

All other beauties!

Paining, but You wound not

Free of pain You destroy

The love of creatures.

 

Oh, knot that binds

Two so different,

Why do You become unbound

For when held fast You strengthen

Making injuries seem good.

 

Bind the one without being

With being unending;

Finish, without finishing,

Love, without having to love,

Magnify our nothingness.

 



Ragged...

 

Everything means something

And there is nothing which is not everything

So I have failed

Not merely at something

Which would have been tragic enough

But at everything

Whenever I was to turn right

I turned left

Feeble life of abstraction

The ground too near the heart for adoration

My soles worn ragged running to stand still

 

 

Seven...



(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

 

 

 

Breathing metaphors

Exhaling symbols

Weighing words

Intimating truth

Capturing beauty

 Exhuming memories

Writing poetry

 

 

Lines...

 

We need thicker lines

Like thick dark lines of a tattoo

Thicker lines in life

Lines bringing depth and profoundness and lush compassion

Deep thick lines of fluidity and becoming

Lines that can just be without encumbering

Liberating lines with no beginning or end

 Tracing the story of our journey

 Drawn on our bodies with imperishable ink

 

 

Epistemological Humility ~ Einstein and Feynman…

(Photo: Photos of Einstein)



 

“However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.

But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.”

~ Albert Einstein, Letter 1936 (Open Culture)

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong…. I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose.”

~ Richard Feynman









 

"The Big Bang is a much more exciting story to many people than the tales which other people used to make up, when wondering about the universe we lived in on the back of a turtle or something like that. They were wonderful stories, but the truth is so much more remarkable. And, so, what’s the wonder in physics to me is that it’s revealed the truth is so remarkable.”

~ Richard Feynman

Simon & Garfunkel ~ Two Songs for Ennui...

 

“And boredom, ennui, depression

Are long slow vibrations of pain

The possess the whole body

And cannot be localized.”

~ D.H. Lawrence

 

 

(Music: Paul Simon ~ I Am A Rock)

 

(Music: Simon & Garfunkel ~ An American Tune)

 

 



 



Rain...

 

Rain

Sways moods

Rain

Soaks dirt

Rain

Swells rivers

Rain

Melts snow

Rain

Interrupts life

Rain

Conceals tears

Rain

Drowns poets

Rain

 

 

Year...

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)


 

 

 

A year is like a dream

All the places

All the faces

Lost in memory

Journal filled pages

Coffee stained stories

Days...

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

 

 

 

 

The days slip away now

Like retreating soldiers

Fatigued and broken from war

Thomas Merton...

 

“We should let ourselves be led naked and unarmed into the center of that anxiety where we stand alone in our nothingness before God.”

~ Thomas Merton

(Photo: PBS )

Abyss...

“…if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

~  Friedrich Nietzsche

 

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

 

Are you afraid?

Of symmetry and opposites

 To look

To stare

Not at a pleasant pool like Narcissus

But at the unveiling of your soul

In the abyss

Which stares back

Not a reflection

An interrogation

Of darkness and light

Of love and hate

Within self and God

 

 

Blind...

 

"I love to see your hair shining ~ In the long summer's light

I love to watch the stars fill the sky ~ On a summer night

The music sways you take his hand

I watch how you touch him as you start to dance

And I wish I were blind ~ When I see you with your man..."

~ Bruce Springsteen

 

(Music: Bruce Springsteen ~ I Wish I Were Blind)

 

 

Ironically, the album Human Touch by Bruce Springsteen was the first music I bought twenty some years ago after Patti and I were married. At the time I had no way of knowing how prophetic the

lyrics were and how haunted I should have been by the melody.

Life turns in unexpected twists and unwelcomed happenstances and then something captures your imagination like a song which eviscerates your soul with the truth and pain invoked by the singer whose imagery is too real and emotion to honest not to cause an emotive and cognitive response – tears and reflection.

Thus the power of story, poetry and music for all who dance with the human experience and too often only in retrospect and in a conflagration of expectations know what the singer was singing and the melody was teaching.

 

“We struggle here but all our love's in vain ~ Oh these eyes that once filled me with your beauty

Now fill me with pain ~ And the light that once entered here ~ Is banished from me

And this darkness is all baby that my heart sees

And though this world is filled ~ With the grace and beauty of God's hand

Oh I wish I were blind ~ When I see you with your man…”

~ Bruce Springsteen

 

What I Have Been Reading Lately...

 

The Hunger Games ~ Suzanne Collins

“The Blind, Lame and Paralyzed” (John5:3): John’s Gospel, Disability Studies, and Post Colonial Perspectives by Warren Carter in Disability Studies and Biblical Literature Ed. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper

From Brokenness to Community ~ Jean Vanier

The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective ~ Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert

The History of Christian Thought ~ Paul Tillich

 

Paul: In A Fresh Perspective ~ N.T. Wright

Parker’s Back ~ Flannery O’Conner

Book of Acts ~ Common English Bible

Apostle of the Crucified: A Theological Introduction to Paul and His Letters ~ Michael J. Gorman

Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts ~ Reta Halteman Finger

The Healing Path of the Romantic: Type Four of the Enneagram Personality Type ~ Donna M Fisher-Jackson

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle ~ Chris Hedges

A Better Atonement ~ Tony Jones

Community in the Inventive Age ~ Doug Pagitt

Fidelity of Betrayal ~ Peter Rollins

Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism ~ James A.K. Smith

The Great Emergence ~ Phyllis Tickle

A New Kind of Christian ~ Brian D. McLaren

What Would Jesus Deconstruct ~ John D. Caputo

The Unbearable Lightness of Being ~ Milan Kundera

Book of Job ~ NRSV

Psalms ~ NRSV

II Corinthians ~ TNIV

Franny and Zooey ~ J.D. Salinger

The Bell Jar ~ Sylvia Plath

The Fall ~ Albert Camus

Sylvia Plath Poems ~ Online

Anne Sexton Poems ~ Online

Cutting For Stone ~ Abraham Verghese

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ~ William Blake

Christianity and the Postmodern Turn ~ Myron B. Penner

Candide ~ Voltaire

Answer to Job ~ C.G. Jung

 

What Kind of Book Reader Are You?

From The Atlantic Wire comes this: What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide

About books and those who read them ~ Jen Doll writes:

The New Yorker's Page-Turner blog includes a book-reader coinage that got us thinking about our own reading styles. There, Mark O'Connell confesses his dirty little reading secret: He doesn't finish books; he's a "promiscuous reader," a book abandoner. He writes, "I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else." But it's not the books, it's him. "I like reading too much. I can’t say no," he writes. "I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket." He justifies his behavior in the end, as you'd expect of a "book cheater," by saying that maybe occasionally this is a good thing. When he finally meets the book whose fickleness meets his own, well, perhaps he's met his match.

We understand. We, too, have occasionally set one good book down and picked up another, and forgotten the first nearly entirely, even though we'd been quite smitten with it before. Sometimes we engage in threeways, fourways, or even orgies of reading, in which there are so many books involved, well, we might not even be keeping track. It's horrible, isn't it? But, for as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?

Find out what reading type you are here: What Kind of Book Reader Are You? A Diagnostics Guide

Human Beings...

 

"We need to have a funeral for things in our lives that hold us back."

~ Catherine Barkley

 

 

Is it not better to care about who someone is and not what someone does? Does it not become irritating to be asked -what do you do or what are you doing or what are you going to do?  Why not ask, who are you - what energizes you - what makes you alive - what is your story - what has your journey been like?

Why not engage people like human beings and not human doings?

 

 

 

“The most important part of education: learning to discern a way of life worth living. But who is talking about that?”

~ Miroslav Volf

 

 

Unexpected...

 

Unexpected

 

 

Tears

Chills

Goosebumps

Touches

Smiles

Kisses

 

 

All come from the same place

A repository of beauty and truth

Deep within the unknown

Rarely experienced in authenticity

Barely felt in naked simplicity

 

 

Yet

 

 

When experienced ~ when known

A spark of creative transformation echoes in the soul

The ground of being has uttered in opaque silence

 

 

She is deep

In the sea beneath the waves and breakers

Where, “…deep calls to deep…”

Surfacing mystically ~ poetically

 

 

In these

Unexpected moments

 

 

Black Bangs...

 

 

She stood in the enclave

Waiting for a table

In the late summer sun

 

 

 

 

Unaware of my glance

At her black bangs

 

Nothing else noticed

Nothing else mattered

 

Only black bangs

On a white face

 

 

Dogs and Camus...

 

“I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.”

~ Albert Camus

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher -- Lola)


 

Razor...

The razor cuts neatly

The vein the needle betrayed

The warm water receives my life

While turning the pain to sleep

 “When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”

~ Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 

 

Ultraviolet...

 

(Video: Christopher Fletcher -- Music: U2 -- Images: Internet)

 

 

 



Without A Master...



 

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)





“…for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style. Besides, that word has lost its meaning; it’s not worth the risk of shocking anyone. Take our moral philosophers, for instance, so serious, loving their neighbor and all the rest – nothing distinguishes them from Christians, except that they don’t preach in churches.”

~ Albert Camus, The Fall

 

 

Religion's Wrong Track...

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

“Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. You were speaking of the Last Judgment. Allow me to laugh respectfully. I shall wait for it resolutely, for I have known what is worse, the judgment of men….Well, God’s sole usefulness would be to guarantee innocence, and I am inclined to see religion rather as a huge laundering venture – as it was once briefly, for exactly three years, and it wasn’t called religion. Since then, soap has been lacking, our faces are dirty, and we wipe one another’s noses….Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”
~ Albert Camus, The Fall

 

 

Cafe Atheists...

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

“Above all, I used to force myself to visit regularly the special cafes where our professional humanitarian free thinkers gathered. My good past record assured me of welcome. There, without seeming to, I would let fly a forbidden expression: ‘Thank God…’ I would say, or more simply: ‘My God…’ You know what little children our café atheists are. A moment of amazement would follow that outrageous expression, they would look at one another dumbfounded then the tumult would burst forth. Some would flee the café, others would gabble indignantly without listening to anything, and all would writhe in convulsions like the devil in holy water.”

~ Albert Camus, The Fall

The Church of Hard Work...

From the The Daily Dish comes this:

To every age its virtue. For the Greeks, courage; the Romans, duty; the Middle Ages, piety. Our virtue is industriousness, in the industrial age. (It is one that would have been incomprehensible to other times. The Greeks had a word for people who worked harder than anyone else: slaves.) It is the Protestant ethic, in other words, made general by the Victorians as the factories rose. That it is a virtue, not merely a value, is proved by the aura of righteousness that surrounds it.

Read more here: The Church of Hard Work

Reading Like A Writer...

“All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another.”

~ Francine Prose

 

(Photo: Christopher Fletcher)

 

In  Brain Pickings Maria Popova writes, 

In Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them, Francine Prose sets out to explore “how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught” and lays out a roadmap to learning the art of writing not through some prescriptive, didactic methodology but by absorbing, digesting, and appropriating the very qualities that make great literature great — from Flannery O’Connor’s mastery of detail to George Eliot’s exquisite character development to Philip Roth’s magical sentence structure.

 Read the whole article here: How To Read Like A Writer


 

Žižek: Documentary...

 

 

 

The Problem With Atheists...

 

 

In the The Guardian ~ Books section there is a worthwhile read for Atheist and non-Atheist alike The Trouble With Atheists ~

Francis Spufford writes,

And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove.

 

Read the full article here: Guardian Article

 

Peter Rollins: Refusing to Know What we Know...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stephen Fry: On Mental Illness ~ The Secret Life of Manic Depression...

Part One:

 

 

Part Two:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The BBC published a helpful companion booklet that explores what it means to live with and manage bipolar disorder - you can access it here: The Secret Life of Manic Depression

 

 





Picasso...

 

Afana. Visit To Picasso from Foxysmile on Vimeo.