Walking in light

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A poem for this Easter Monday, traditionally in Italy “Lunedì dell’Angelo”, (Monday of the Angel), a day for going for a walk,  remembering the road to Emmaus story in the New Testament

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light.

Wendell Berry, Now you Know the Worst

Sunday Quote: New worlds

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When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferberg, 1923 – 2010, American counterculture poet and author.

Our reality as humans

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The period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday shows us all the aspects of human life, from darkness to light:

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth

 

The limits to our understanding

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If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word,

if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness,

if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths ...

we have misunderstood the words of Christianity. 

For they all speak of the unknown God who only reveals to give himself as the abiding mystery.

Karl Rahner sj., 1904 – 1984 Jesuit Theologian, Poetry and the Christian.

Connected

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Live in the nowhere that you come from,

even though you have an address here.

Rumi

Security and insecurity

Karl Duffy1 Comment
There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity… If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I,” but it is just the feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid… To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.

 

Alan Watts