Haloed by love aflame
When will is one Thy Kingdom comes
And by this, the birth of heaven
Father
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Haloed by love aflame
When will is one Thy Kingdom comes
And by this, the birth of heaven
Monthly Archives: April 2023
Haloed by love aflame
When will is one Thy Kingdom comes
And by this, the birth of heaven
Liberal Love
Liberal societies are healthy streams. Free flowing, oft times turbulent – but with a clarity and purity of involvement and liquid cohesion.
These are though under threat from two directions – Capitalism above, and Nationalism below.
Capitalism freezes flow and movemeent; cutting communities off from the clear air and creating false inward reflections and strange refracted images from the external world (where others are walking on the icy outer surface).
And below, Nationalism – the stirring of the rotting sediment of dead fears. Racism, an appeal to the worst archetypes of the other. Muddying and reducing visibility, so that all are trapped in isolation and separation.
How do we keep the liberal stream flowing, with our eye on the common good of shared humanity?
Whatever your faith – look to wisdom from our ancestors.
“ Love your neighbour as your self” Christ
“those who worship Me with love and devotion are very close to Me, and I am also very close to them” Bhagavad-Gita
Narcissism and Loneliness
Research discussed in Psychology Today from 2017 indicates that narcissism appears to be linked to reduced emotional empathy and feelings of loneliness. (Link to article below). It seems, if I understand it properly, that this all flows from a state called “borderline personality organisation”, where our sense of self is unstable or threatened. I take it that this leads then to narcissism as a kind of retreat or defensive mechanism.
This is an odd thought for this day which celebrates and reflects the ultimate act of emotional empathy and love and connection. I wonder why I was drawn to that article. No matter. Happy Easter! X
Boundless Life
This is how I imagine consciousness. There is a “self”, but it’s a force that attracts and captures stories – narratives. What others mostly perceive as us, and which our ego reinforces – is actually (I think) a bundle, a quiver of stories. Why then is death an illusion? Because our “ego” doesn’t really exist anyway. The ego dies, but what is it in the first place; a phantasm that acquires a will to continue. What we think of as “life”, that of our ego – doesn’t exist. Neither then does death. What of the rest, the real stuff. Well the stories – the ideas weaving together – persist. As for the force that attracts – well that’s a mystery beyond this bodies imagining. I don’t believe it dies though. I think – like the Hindus – that it is a droplet of existence that returns to the ocean. And there, dear Heart, is a joyous thought. This life is lonely. We are boundaried. If at our body’s dissolution, as ego fades – so then evaporates our boundary. To the loving infinite. To each other. Then: Bring it on. Comrades. Sisters. Namaste.
Little Gidding
A meditation on the meaning of time and the timeless. Imagine that time is a mirage, and that we already exist eternally and are infinitely connected. Our ego traps us into believing that we are separate, that all is material and that – heaven help us – we are the centre of everything. I can occasionally step outside my “self” – and there lies peace and belonging and joy.
You?
Dry Salvages
“The distant rote in the granite teeth, and the wailing warning from the approaching headland are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner rounded Howard’s, and the seagull; And under the oppression of the silent fog the tolling bell measures time, not our time, rung by the unhurried ground swell” Dry Salvages TS Eliot
“No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main….therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” For Whom the Bell Tolls John Donne
“Time and the bell have buried the day, the black cloud carries the sun away…After the kingfisher’s wing has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still at the still point of the turning world” Burnt Norton TS Eliot
East Coker
In my end is my beginning.
“Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning” TS Eliot
Burnt Norton
“what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous”
Parmenides
Lost and Found
Image
And then, when all was said and done
The tulips wilting on the table
Incandescent setting suns
Resolving edges
Sugar cubes melting into memory
And falling, fading, failing
I was found
Thou, my love
The Jewish existentialist Martin Buber said “To man the world is two-fold .. the attitude of man is two-fold .. the one primary word is the combination I-Thou, the other is the combination I-It”.
I-thou is a relationship of inner to inner, an authentic encounter that is the touchstone of existence. (I-thou creating “our”).
Of course, Buber wrote in German and Du has currency in contrast to Sie or Es, whereas in English we now reserve intimate addressing for our relationship with God. How ironic!
In our English language how can we now mark the transition in relationships between the formality of “you are” and the caress of “thou art”? And when and why did we lose the rich language of intimacy?
Surely thou-ness was clear in the minds of the scholars constructing the King James Bible in 1611. Perhaps the slow death of this way of celebrating friendship is linked to the four hundred year rise of materialism since the reformation?
Perhaps as the smoke clears and we see the I-It debris left by capitalism and atheism a new expression of thou-ness will appear.
Let us pray so.
