Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
My morning practice often includes reading from American Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön. Here is this morning’s reading from The Pocket Pema Chödrön.
…Loneliness
Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. Its restless and pregnant
and hot with the desire to escape
We’re all stuck on hold.
The pioneers thrust out
with their usual
armed vengeance,
no clear purpose
except to recreate
the old world
in the new.
The rest of us wait
You don’t know what will happen if you go down that road. That’s why you should go there.
Why do what you have already done?
The world never changes, and it is never the same. Each step opens a new door to the same old life. Infinite variations on the same thing.
Remember Bill
…About a month ago I made a mistake. It happened sometime between my early morning preparation for waiting worship and the rise of Meeting.
The concept of the transpersonal is one which I have thought I understood intellectually for decades, going back to my naïve fascination with mystical paths in the 1970s, and maturing through years of contemplation and study.
That First Day, though, the concept became viscerally alive as I read a selection in The Essential Ken
…In the comments to the latest post on the Quaker Universalist Fellowship blog, I posted my current approximation of a 60-second answer to “What do Quakers believe?:
…
Quakerism is not so much a set of beliefs as a form of spiritual practice.
We sit silently, putting aside our personal or social or political or religious concerns, and wait.
This past year, I’ve been using C.S. Lewis’ anthology of selections from the writings of George MacDonald as my morning devotion. Mom gave me a copy of this book years ago, and this is probably the third time I’ve read through it.
How silently,
how silently
the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts
to human hearts
the blessings of his heaven.No ear may hear his coming,
but in this world of sin,
where meeks souls will
receive him still
the dear Christ enters in.—Phillips Brooks, 1868
A couple summers ago, I wrote “On waiting and squirming” about “periods during which I have difficulty finding God’s reassuring
…Being of melancholic temperament, my Quaker practice is occasionally reduced to long periods of inner struggle between faith and circumstance.
These are not periods of doubting God or of doubting that I can rely upon God.
Rather, they are periods during which I have difficulty finding God’s reassuring silence in the midst of my own emotional noise. Or, sometimes, in the midst of a kind of emotional shut-downness, when prolonged distress has dulled itself into exhaustion.
As
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