Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
christianity
The Spiritual Practice Of Care-filled Speaking
For an enlightening read on this practice, see:
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People
Book by Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji
JOY
Joy is exemplified by a group of friends playing, or a carefree young girl singing to herself while engaged in her work. The happiness is rising from within and spreading out into the world! Joy comes into the world through gentle means, but springs from a solid sense of self. The power of joy should never be underestimated.
I Ching 58. Joy
Hands Out Of Pockets: A Call To Justice
Hand tucked casually in pocket
While knee on neck snuffs out
The breath of another human being.
Just business as usual
In the neighborhood.
The spiritual life is not
A casual meandering
Down a safe garden path.
Our path must diverge into acts of justice
Lest the spiritual life become self-serving.
Take your hand out of your pocket.
Amen.
c. rita h kowats 6-2-20
Photo Credit: Facebook/Darnella Frazier/AFP via Getty Images in the NY Post
A Spirituality Of Aging
I stand here
Outside of myself
And watch as I commence
the journey
Into venerable vulnerability-
At least that’s what the young call it;
It doesn’t feel venerable yet.
I watch with surprise
That this old body that once
Could stave off
All manner of ailment
Bouncing back stronger,
Now fights a succession of infections
On a pilgrimage to commune
With the bones
Of my once stately cathedral.
I stand here
Outside of myself
And watch as I
Cry through the loss
Like an ancient willow wailing
Over limbs taken by thankless winds.
I feel the phantom sensations
Of my coveted limbs tingle
With strength, endurance and joy.
If I stand here
Outside of myself long enough
I will see green-leafed limbs
Poke through the paneless windows
Of my bone cathedral,
Stretching toward
patience, acceptance and resignation.
I stand here
Outside of myself
Awestruck by this holy episode
We call life.
c. Rita H Kowats May 18, 2020
Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons
Empty Is Full
At some point in our spiritual journey we may feel the terror of falling into empty space without a net. Without landing. Just falling, falling, falling. Until we hear that voice of the divine, “I’ve got ya.”
I experienced this dream as a child, plagued by the fallout of PTSD. I can’t identify when I heard the voice or how it manifested, but the dream stopped. Instead of falling into empty space my spirit began expanding to reclaim it. No doubt my daytime world had become safer. No doubt I had discovered the Divine.
Sometimes the voice has to rise above some unhealthy ego chattering and I don’t hear it, but I know it’s always there. Perhaps the spiritual journey is a journey toward embracing the fall. Like the nimbleness of a child whose muscles and bones relax into a fall, we train our spirits to be nimble and let go.
Something for us to ponder today. Blessings on you and yours.
The Country of Uncertainty
Figure at a Window Salvador Dali
I love Rilke because he responded with integrity to the call he heard from the country of uncertainty. We have no control over that call. We especially have no control over it in this time of pandemic. I am, at least sometimes successfully, choosing to embrace the uncertainty and the lessons it offers me. It’s a good end-of-this-life practice, I think. Luke’s story of the prodigal son is here
The Departure of the Prodigal Son
To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.
From all that clings like burrs and brambles—
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see—
so familiar it had become.
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.
Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.
What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,
a dark need, the incapacity to understand.
To bow to all this.
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.
Is this the start of a new life?
New Poems
Rainer Maria Rilke in A Year with Rilke Translated and Edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
Weeping Willow Meditation
Weeping Willow Meditation
My seven-year-old self often sat
Settled under the swaying, trailing branches
Of the weeping willow that stood guard
In the center of her backyard.
The wispy caresses of the supple branches
Danced on the gentle wind,
Soughing a message unheard
On the other, unsettled wind
That gusted through the house-
You are loved. You are whole.
My seventy-five year old self
Now sits before a willow weeping
For a world not supple,
A world bending to its breaking point.
Trailing branches whip and slap,
Howls replace affirming whispers.
The weeping will wane
With every sway of every branch.
Hope will caress us again.
Weeping and rejoicing are One.
Live through each,
You become the Other.
© Rita Hemmer Kowats 4-30-2020
Photo Credit: Photo by Daria Sannikova from Pexels
Effacement
EFFACEMENT/ Hafiz
Effacement
Is a golden gun.
It was not easy to hold it against my head
And fire!
I needed great faith in my master
To suffocate myself
With his holy bag
Full of truth.
I needed great courage
To go out into the dark
Tracking God into the unknown
And not panic or get lost
In all the startling new scents, sounds,
Sights,
Or lose my temper
Tripping on those scheming
Night and day around me.
Hafiz,
Effacement is the emerald dagger
You need to plunge
Deep into yourself upon
This path to divine Recovery—
Upon this path
To God.
efface[ ih-feys ]
verb (used with object), ef·faced, ef·fac·ing.
to wipe out; do away with; expunge:
to efface one’s unhappy memories.
to rub out, erase, or obliterate (outlines, traces, inscriptions, etc.).
to make (oneself) inconspicuous; withdraw (oneself) modestly or shyly.
Dictionary.com
Response
Ever So Dear Hafiz,
In principle I experience this experience you’ve opened up for us; however, as a creature of the twenty-first century and one schooled in psychology, I am compelled to qualify. For me, it is the unhealthy manifestations of ego that I seek to efface, not my Self, the deepest self where divinity makes its home, if I let it.
With that said, dear sage, I now offer a way beyond this pandemic surging through our world today. In spite of the attention many pay to the needs of the common good, this virus has also unleashed a dis-ease of the worst kind. It has loosened the already tentative grip we had on the virtue of selflessness. Ego selfishness gravely threatens body and soul.
So, yes, let us efface, I say. Let us efface selfishness and greed and take on the posture of a parent who would sacrifice anything for the good of their child. We are all one another’s child now. Let us walk this path to “Divine Recovery” together.
Photo Credit: https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/events/2018/03/05/the-common-good-an-anglican-understanding
Respite
How do we cope with the pace of covid 19? This poem was my outlet. It is heavy, but the times are heavy and allowing myself to feel puts me in solidarity with the suffering of others, and my own suffering. I hold all of you in my prayer.
Respite
(Upon seeing Aid Units take neighbors to hospitals)
Last night
Lopsided Luna
Had shrunk to a sliver
While I rested safely
In the crook of her crescent elbow.
Yet today, as sometimes happens here,
Sol soars above the Salish Sea
In full, bold brilliance
Prompting squints to soothe and temper.
But try as we might to temper traffic-
The Aid Units keep on coming.
How I long to stagger the relentless surge
Of this viral onslaught.
Let me linger longer in that calm crescent cave
Where raw sadness can live its way back to hope,
Where I can hone the creed
That all is well-
Regardless.
C. Rita Hemmer Kowats 4-20-2020
Birthday of my father George J. Kowats +1988
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