Tag: inspiration

A space for beauty

Karl Duffy1 Comment

Here one of the greatest theologians of the last Century reminds us to create some space for leisure and a beauty that is greater than us. If we get caught up in the drive for achievement and efficiency, we risk building a life that alienates us from our deepest selves by a focus on utility and speed for its own sake.

Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself,  a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness.  We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past – whether he or she admits it or not –  can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A thrological Aesthetics

Sunday Quote: Within

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Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,

we must carry it with us or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We become our choices

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You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief, the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness, clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.
 
Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live, each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.
 
This rebus – slip and stubbornness, bottom of river, my own consumed life –
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.
 
As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues, this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.
 
The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.
 
How can I enter this question the clay has asked?
Jane Hirshfield,  Given Sugar, Given Salt
Image taken from http://www.videojug.com

Subday Quote: Not always thinking about life

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We must be content to live,

without watching ourselves live.

Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

Do less and less

Karl Duffy5 Comments
P1000426A lovely quote from the Ox and Window by the 17th century Zen master Hakuin Ekaku, which came to me through Zen teacher David Rynick’s Blog. It has a  delightful message, contrary to the rushing, achievement focus of most early January messages:
This year, I am determined to be more unproductive.  My goal is to do less and less – to move slower and slower until everything stops.  I and the whole world will come to a sweet and silent stillness.  And in this stillness, a great shout of joy will arise.  We will all be free – free from the advice of ancient ages, free from the whining voices, free from the incessant objections of the responsible ones. In this new world, it will be abundantly clear that the bare branches of the winter trees are our teachers.  In their daily dance of moving here and there, we will see once again the true meaning of our life.  In the wind song of their being, we will hear God’s unmistakable voice.  We will follow what appears before us – what had once been difficult will now unfold with ease.

Sunday Quote: A Project for the New Year

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The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white.

Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Lao Tzu