Songs for the Darkness

Going to work one recent morning along my tree-lined avenue I was abuzz with a bright, calm sense of happiness. The world was ablaze with autumnal colour, the river and sky a dazzling blue. Most of all that morning I was grateful that poetry existed. I often am but that more it was specifically Biblical poetry -- the reading of the day had been arrestingly beautiful, beginning 'Wisdom, the Fashioner of All Things, taught me' and ending with 'And she orders all things well.' How could one fail to have faith in a cosmos where this kind of praise exists? The passage was packed (and I mean packed!) with adjectives and was written with soul-stirring feminine pronouns. How marvelous it is to have words that lift us onto the very lap of Wisdom. Oh, that piece really got me and made me glad, glad, glad!

The text had been paired, as is the format on the wonderful Pray As You Go podcasts, with a song, a chant from the always beautiful Taize community. I love Taize chants and find them on my tongue in all sorts of unexpected times and places bubbling up from my heart. There was a phrase in this chant, however, that struck a perplexing note and I've been trying to figure out why. The phrase was: "Do not let my darkness speak to me."

(To be fair you should know that I am taking the lines out of the context. The thrust of the chant begins and ends with welcoming Christ, the 'inner light' -- but still, I can't help thinking . . . and maybe such a purposively light-saturated blog such as is and will be contained in this Ten Thousand Halos blog, is not the place to reflect on darkness? Or, perhaps it is.)

What it was, I think, that had the impact was the word 'my' in front of darkness. I believe that my darkness is no less precious than my light; neither of which I know, or can know, ultimately. I cannot really imagine one without the other. This may simply be a limitation of language. It may as well be a limitation of my imagination.

Now, I'm not really of the generation that would have the words "Hello, Darkness, my old friend" springing up as an association (though New Scientist's December edition on The Night jogged the memory.) At this time of the year in the northern hemisphere we do well to cultivate friendship with the dark. Instead of Simon & Garfunkel, I found myself remembering Prospero's words from The Tempest,

"This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine." 

The season of Advent marks the deepest darkness settling on the northern hemisphere of our planet . . . I like it, this beginning in darkness, small soul seeds beginning to buzz. But no, it was not this aspect that had me in its grip. It was, instead, MY darkness. So I listened some more on a long afternoon walk one day. And there is a voice there, sounding pain, fears, fragilities. It washes through me, a moving stream. 

I decided then to enter another kind of moving stream, the internet, and I offered up the chain of words that had been bothering me. And up from the shallows a glimmer of understanding arose from an article about [Taizé founder] Brother Roger, a luminous and extraordinary man. For him, I read, the chant was a favourite. As I understand it, this was because of the risks entailed in the radical obedience to Christ he lived. When one draws near Truth, darkness becomes, well, more chatty, to put it lightly. 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God' (Hebrews 10:31, NRSV) we are told, and in a truly illuminating interview with Sarah Coakley on prayer she notes that

"one of the most important things to happen in [learning how to pray] is a barely perceptible sharpening or transformation of the senses and the mind, partly because what we now call the unconscious is welling up and forcing itself to be integrated. . . "

For Br. Roger, the darkness took the form of 'insinuations of doubt.' We are each woven of strands of light & darkness, a reality Br. Roger was very much in touch with. He knew that no unity is possible without reconciliation on interpersonal and intrapersonal levels. We are called upon as people of faith to examine our assumptions and the illusions that keep us from the experience of growing together, of unity. And though we can never say we have reached the end of this process of reconciliation, forgiveness liberates 'the depths of the human heart that are made for goodness.' 

----

I entitled this post 'Songs for the Darkness' because one night between then and now a couple of angels appeared to me in the dark one night. A late afternoon walk had gone on longer than I had anticipated and I found myself on the home straits walking in the dark. I heard them before I saw them, singing softly, sweetly and in harmony. I felt warmly accompanied, for this was an evening I had opened myself up to some deeper currents . . . and as I saw them I realised beside me were two adolescent boys, uniformed and humpbacked with their athletic gear in large bags behind them, peddling slowly home along the river. They passed in moments but their unexpected presence and the sweetness of the encounter, I still taste. 

Have I veered away from the snag of the phrase? What I wanted to say was: in and out of darkness songs escape us, and this is a good thing. A very good thing! Songs like the Taize chants remind us that we float on the breath, and so, 'do not let my darkness speak to me' at the close of this reflection has come to mean, not a kind of 'denial' as I had initially taken it, but rather, do not allow my darkness either to overwhelm or undermine the divine goodness I carry.

With gratitude then, I dare say: Wisdom has thus taught me.

Earth is Crammed with Heaven

Early mornings, rosy dawned, are crisp and sweet. like apples. Before you have started sinking upward from your dark bear slumbers, there's smoke, just a hint, from the outlying farmlands. It wakes you saying, 'the harvest is in'. A new beginning is wafting about: arise, awake! Opening the curtains, there are layers of blue, the hills in the distance. Have they been pillow-fighting in the night? A fluffy cloud of mist rises between two of them. Gazing out as the kettle boils for tea, there are greens, reds, oranges and splashes of yellow on the trees. They are curling toward splendour.

It is the last, and the best, of basking weather for the year. Turtles on rocks in ponds do it. People with books and barbecues on riverbanks do it. Birds breast-deep in rivers seem to do it, those knee-deep fishers, too. Blue herons do it flying it seems, their great wings on a low, slow beat, tips grazing the water, their reflections glimmering, transforming them into signs like the eight of infinity. Basking is highly recommended. It is through and through softening: bellies soften, breath softens, lips soften, smiles happen. Time dissolves and you are gentled.

Yesterday, I sat on the banks of the river under a tree on a stone throne, alone. Along the path had been elegant pampas grass poking out of the wilderness like paintbrushes loaded with light. There were stretches of cheerful yellow goldenrod and leafless persimmon trees extravagant with fruit, swaying bamboo, a recently pruned smart-smelling pine, some rickety boats with fishing nets stowed, a few ancient-looking ever- peaceful stone jizo, a red bridge and a few fishermen. From my perch, hills filled my view. Green from afar, closer they showed signs of creeping autumnal rust. Under a perfect blue sky and backdropped by the nearby hills I beheld -yes, beheld!- the first shocking 'burning bush' of the season. Ducks made their funny little kazoo sounds, crows harped and harped, a cormorant erupted flapping from the water, a heron barked as it came in for landing. An ordinary day in bird land it was.

But I, in the presence of this fiery and most resplendent glory took off my shoes. Arise, awake the tree said and the choir sang (serendipitously?) Byrd's Haec Dies. "This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us be glad and rejoice in it. Alleluia!" Captivated, I had no desire except to surrender. Shadows lengthened, the waters turned to liquid gold. I laid down this day, in the presence of a gracious, gentle refining fire, joining the wisdom and delight of creation, and I basked.

Farewell, then, to fine feeling and higher thoughts

 . . . until the heat breaks and you emerge on the other side. 

This was the fragment I wrote this morning before I began this post. By breakfast one is in the amorous embraces of the heat, adorned in a sheen of perspiration, aglow. And yet, I find that however wide my window is opened, my feet still need to walk, my crown to orient itself with the celestial dome. Earlier this year I wrote:

I hardly know my thoughts or prayers before the earth massages my soles and the sky strokes my hair . . .

That holds true even in this brutal weather. Mornings are best. The mind resists surrendering but how happy it is once we consent. I've just returned from an impromptu morning meditation sitting riverside, shoes off, feet dangling over the side, watching fish and pond-skaters and a white egret glide by, with a cloudless blue sky, the lazy river and greenery looking its gladdest, my company. Not much in the way of breeziness today, alas, but what a pleasure is even the faintest of stirrings . . . my body becomes a sail that catches it!

We have recently enjoyed summer carnival here in town. (I use 'carnival' purposefully because there's nothing quite like a Japanese summer to prioritise the flesh.)

First, there is the Fire-flower show (a.k.a. in English, "fireworks" - but lacking in poetry, no?). There is nothing quite like them for inducing in me a wonder-filled childlike delight. I love looking up at them unfolding at speed into any number of shapes and sizes and colours. I love the boom-boom sound of the big ones being fired off, and in the audience spontaneous gasps and exclamations and applause with each new beautiful projectile. The happiness of a group enjoying itself is a powerful reminder of how good and kind and beautiful human beings are. Becoming like little children really is to feel oneself closer to heaven.

The Uraja dances were next. Hordes of people take to the streets in teams in a manner similar to, though much smaller than Brazil's pre-lenten extravaganza of Mardi Gras. Our event is noisy, sweaty and mad. Why would anyone exert themselves in this manner at this time of year? Dancers appear in colourful and often outlandish gear, all of their faces painted to signal their habitation of the legendary 'oni' (demon) whom our town's hero, the Son of a Peach (yes, really), Momotaro, conquered. When I think on the 'oni', I think he must be a heat monster and I should very much like it if he were made tamer! The word 'uraja' is in the local dialect, ura meaning demon, ja meaning there. It has, I am determined, at least a shade of meaning 'Get Lost!' (I am rather fond of my own biblical gloss which fits just fine, as 'ura' in standard Japanese also means behind, and the picture definitely hints, doesn't it, at "Get behind me"?)

What does the oni say?

Part of the madness of these dances are the miles of smiles you encounter on the faces of the dancers in the parades. It is an exuberant and joy-filled time that goes on far too long usually in excessive heat. A large proportion of the dancers are university students who have been practicing for months, choreographing dances, designing and making costumes, and so, when the day comes, it is a blowout, an exorcism by joy of the heat monsters -- and a marvellous gift to the community. I welled up immediately as I stood watching the parade for all the energy spent and for the enthusiasm, the effort but most of all the -impossible to imagine- joy of the occasion. It was BEAUTIFUL!

The final summer celebration event I took part in was an Incense Ceremony. A few posts ago I mentioned Tea Master Rikyu's directions that "Summer should be Cool" - and to attend a ceremony in this season is to participate intimately in the order he envisaged. Since discrimination of the scents is the point of the ceremony, no air conditioning is used, something I confess I was dreading, but, by the time I was in the middle of things, drinking up the fragrances, my mind was far removed from the heat. . . this is part of the magic that the ceremonies do.

Walking in, the atmosphere has quite a formal feel to it. The presence of children I found reassuring, despite the fact that, as a grown-up, I, too sat up in seiza (straight backed with feet tucked under your body), showing respect and trying to be good. It is part of the Master's hospitality to invite you to relax. (I'm never quite sure whether I should take this literally, or not. Sometimes, making meaning from what is said or understood can go awry! A delicate business, especially with ceremonial manners!) Nevertheless, I was ever so glad to be invited, unfolded my feet from under me and assumed the cross-legged position which is much more comfortable even though it makes for rather raggedy looking bowing . . . something done quite a bit and much easier from seiza position where the hips are higher than the knees and the spine is straight. The relaxation of the guests is key the Master tells us because we're all just here to have a bit of fun together following the old ways.

I could feel myself unfurling in the quiet and then the game began with a story. Always a story to engage the imagination and animate the senses . . . A lovely synaesthesia is brought out further by the mysterious Japanese verb 'kiku' which means to hear, listen and ask. To listen to a fragrance? Yes! Why not? Fitting then, too, was the story which told of a man who was walking in the mountains one day when he heard the call of the bush warbler (hototoguisu, in Japanese). So sweet was this call that he waited to hear it again. (I myself have done this many times, so I was fully immersed!) The name of the incense the guests were invited to 'hear': bush warbler, hototoguisu.

Ceramic pots containing a hot coal covered in ash are passed around from person to person. The first round's fragrance is the bird's initial call. Five successive pots come around, with only one fragrance matching the first. The game is to find the match, or, following the storyline, to hear the bird's call again. After six pots have passed you use your dainty little calligraphy set and on a carefully folded piece of paper on which you have already written your name with the brush, you write down the number of the pot that corresponds to the original 'call'. One of my friends and I guessed correctly - a small, simple and surprisingly satisfying accomplishment! And then the scribe makes you an old style hand-made certificate to add to your memorabilia.

                                                         
The summer celebrations all involve honouring fire in some way: in the sky, in the body and in the mind. It is a reminder perhaps that we living things, one and all, are creations of the original fire-ball. The incense ceremony brought me home to the centre, a quiet and steady place in the mind -- the kind it does a heart good to remember in the carnal chaos that is high summer here.

Summertime & the Living is . . . Easy?

Oh, Miss Ella - would that it were so! With numbers like these, "Ain't no cure for the summer time blues" feels closer to the truth. 

But listening to your soothing lullaby, and seeing you have the grace to perspire 

and hold the note 

in beauty 

and take your sweet time 

I come to know

 the best way

 to meet the heat, is not to beat it, but

  simply to surrender;

 to melt 

and

 to let go 

of all plans of doing 

and 

just 

to be.

Two stories about the parochial

Two incidents in the past week have had me reflecting on the notion of parochiality. 

I have recently come across Japan being described as parochial, a designation that has startling accuracy in certain senses, even while its use is utterly secular. Or is it really secular? What a people identifies with and worships and how and where they do it surely informs the concept of 'the parish'. Ideally, the parish is the first home from home. It's an idea that makes me wistful and doubtless informs some of my admiration for Japan's great spirit of neighbourliness. Over the years I've learned that having a mono-cultural milieu makes neighbourliness much easier even while it tends to drive discrimination of various stripes into dark and impossible to access places. I suppose any group identity is vulnerable to its shadows, the parish no less than others . . .

The first incident concerns a species of parochiality that may well be frequently encountered in the small pockets of 'Anywheresville'. It's something that reminds me of the question of the relevance of certain kinds of knowledge. I remember reading many years ago about some kids in a rurally situated school doing poorly on some British standardised test; the point being that had they been asked about stuff that was relevant to them --sheep and wool, say, or planting or harvesting or husbandry-- they would have aced the questions and those in the 'centre' would have performed predictably poorly. Situatedness in learning promotes community and out of community arises a wealth of opportunity. 

So, I went by the police station recently to pick up my renewed drivers' licence. It was an easy and pleasant encounter if, in retrospect, also curious and slightly baffling. There seemed that day a distinct resemblance in Japanese bureaucracy to Alice's experience down the Rabbit Hole. The officer at the desk said, looking at my carefully filled in paperwork, "Soooo, where were you born?" Naturally, I'd had to write the town and country of origin, and I read it aloud for her as she pointed at it. "Oh, is that in America?" It stands to reason [in Wonderland] that all people who look like me --non Asian and/or non Japanese--must be from America (aka, The Foreign Country).

"No, not America," said I. "It's in Africa." 

"Well, your passport says you're British.  You must have been born in England (* presumably in America.) Please cross out where you said you come from and write England because you cannot come from where you say you come from. For one thing," pointed out the officer patiently, "it doesn't match that maroon passport of yours."

[* Caveat: Liberties taken in mindreading.]

Well, this information was evidently outside the box of the officer's professional and geographical remit and she could not make the sum of my white, African, British parts add up to anything sensible. Why should I mind the gap? I took the path of least resistance--the way of harmony--and why not? Who was I to add (further?) to the confusion of the world? I crossed out my birthplace, replaced it with "England" and we parted on friendly terms. She, having set the worlds to right, and me licenced to the motors.

Then, there was another incident--another mind the gap event, in fact--that made me proud of good human beings, this time acting in concert. Taking a break at work a few days ago I came across this story of a woman falling between the platform and the train in Tokyo rush hour traffic. I would have been gripped by terror were it not for the picture --the ultimate reassurance--of commuters leaning on the train to make space for her extraction. It happened at the time that a rendition by the Salvation Army of Nessun Dorma (none shall sleep) was playing on the radio. A remarkable, and I confess, rather emotional synchronicity, knowing that at that hour of the day in that metropolis people are in, at best, liminal states of consciousness . . . but lo & behold, the clarion call came and it was all hands on deck. 

And, despite the gaps, we all lived, happily ever after.

'Summer should be cool': so says Tea Master Rikyu

Note to the gods?. . . Deluded Weather Forecaster? . . . or, simply Wishful Thinking?
 
Over the past week you could be forgiven for wondering which of the above applied. The rainy season ended abruptly and a particularly beastly start to the summer emerged. There were seven continuous days at 35C or more. Nighttime temps drop to a balmy 24 on a 'cool' night, but mostly hover around 26C-ish. Ugh.

One of the teahouses at Korakuen

What could the tea master have meant? There is a memorable aphorism penned by John Milton in Paradise Lost that has some bearing on the tea master's claim: 'the mind is its own place, and it itself/ Can make a heaven of hell' . . . Not that suffering (the heat) is by any means all in the mind, nor exactly do I believe that heaven is a state of mind, nor hell. It's just that since we have minds, and this is what we can know (in some sense), we might as well use them to participate with the place we find ourselves (as best we can . . . though I acknowledge that any application of the mind in climates of high heat and humidity feels like a tall order!)

Paper Scroll made by local artist, Umeda san

In Sanmi Sasaki's magisterial book on the way of tea we find in each season a treasure trove. One is introduced here to a beautiful sense of the poetry at the heart of traditional Japan. The way of tea, it is said, is basically concerned with activities that are a part of everyday life, yet to master these requires great cultivation and diligence.

I asked a friend about her tea lesson recently, 'Hot,' she replied. 'You may imagine that it's not pleasant to be near the kettle in this season. Nevertheless, we felt really refreshed afterward. When we hear the kettle boiling we imagine waves rolling in toward the pine trees on the coast line. We call that sound 松 涛 (show-toh).' Pines, waves - so the characters say - what you imagine is really up to you . . . But it is kind of cooling, isn't it?

The tea celebrant is to be mindfully centred in the summer in the principle of Ryou-ichimi, which means something like effortlessly exuding (via careful preparation) simplicity and a sense of cool that in turn imparts a sense of relief & refreshment. Master Rikyu taught that the mind of the host enables coolness at tea and this is enhanced by coolness in imagery and also in the poetry shared for the occasion.

Lotus leaf, silver rain puddle & drop

In this season guests might like to see pictures of, for example, plum trees drawn in indigo ink, or fire flies, or singing frogs. There may be a scroll that speaks of cool mountain breezes. The pottery may be of earthy appearance and wet through. Hanging boat-shaped vases may also turn the mind to cooler climes. For the waiting room, guests may get into the mood for tea seeing images such as green rice shoots with the wind combing them; a white heron on the water; a silver kettle; blue-green or white porcelain and a cup for sipping water. "This might," his instructions go, "be enough to generate coolness."


Master Rikyu's followers in the Urasenke tradition hold that

"Instead of shielding ourselves from climate or circumstances, or complaining about them, we accept them and find some enjoyment in them. We can do this for ourselves anytime, any place, simply being where we are and accepting what comes our way. If we can appreciate a slight breeze in the heat of summer, or the feel of a warm bowl of tea in the midst of winter, how much more our enjoyment of life will be."

Old Stone Pond at Zuishin Temple

Deep, cool, indigo thoughts to you friends in the warmer of the northern climes. 

Keep your flow fresh, the incense burning and your spirits up!

Fragrant Delight

There is a line in one of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems: 'God explodes from his hiding place.' This same explosion happened in fragrant and delightful beauty right upon our dining room table!

Two Encounters with Pilgrimmage

Straw sandals traditionally used by pilgrims in Japan hanging on a temple gate. 

The Ancients well knew that the combination of energies, both human and divine, required for pilgrimage prepare the path to insight like nothing else. This sacred, time out of time journey, must be a marvellous zone of space-time for close encounters with ten thousand halos! The demands on one's attention, enthusiasm, body and the mind are surely concentrating, and loosening, and shaking up of the you you thought you knew. New dimensions of what it means to be human and alive are, by all accounts, to be anticipated.

So I believe. I'm also encouraged to believe it is a thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. I've done one memorably long walk on the Annapurna circuit  in the Himalayas, and I wonder if is it mere fantasy to dream that an added dimension exists on pilgrimage, drawing the heart to higher, deeper things? I felt myself raised by the experience of that long walk, but I have not put my mind to doing pilgrimage (yet?) despite my more or less regular practice of praying with my feet. I live a train ride away from a very well-known Japanese pilgrim trail and even nearer to parts of a lesser known walk dedicated to the bodhisattva Kannon. Pilgrimage is, I think, a particular grace, a calling of a kind. And not, from all I have read, to be undertaken casually. Why on earth bother? It should be purposeful. Still, I suppose there are as many reasons for the journey as there are pilgrims.

In the past week I have been reflecting on a terrific interview with a pilgrim (Ailsa Piper) who completed the Santiago de Compostela in Spain and wrote a book about her experiences. The interview, done by the inimitable Rachel Kohn on the Australian Radio National show called The Spirit of Things, was, as usual, excellent. I highly recommend a listen. It runs about an hour.

There's something very fragile about describing a spiritual journey to a general audience for there are hazards aplenty in autobiographical writing. Not the least of them being the temptation of self-deception. I have recently finished a book whose author ran crashingly into many, if not all, of these hazards while recounting her pilgrimage (run) around the 88 temples on the island of Shikoku. The final straw came at temple 88, the final and symbolic point of Enlightenment, a point she used to regale us with the (humourous?) cat & mousing of television crews trying to get  footage of her approach to 'Enlightenment'. Certainly, and perhaps unconsciously on her part, we are left in no doubt about who the star of the show was meant to be: HER! The writer had made occasional reference to the dying necessarily involved in pilgrimage. But the most apparent form of dying that she shared occurred in her frequent references to blisters. The whole 'dying to self' appeared to have been a hastily swallowed but poorly digested insight.

I'm trying to work out why it felt cheap and disappointing, quite apart from its rather obvious self-aggrandising bent. I had high hopes. I suppose one reason could be that, when you read a book about pilgrimage you want to feel like you are traveling with the traveler/writer and sharing in some way in their experience of transformation. Being lifted somehow from your own daily cares and carried along. I did not connect with the folksy tone the writer adopted at times including interjections like "Whoa Nelly!" and "Shit! I forgot to pray for X-san", the constant name-dropping (nice for those involved, but with no context, actually meaningless for the reading public) and nor did I get the point of untranslated lines of prayer peppered in the narrative, particularly concentrated toward the end. (I suspect there was some kind of superstitious 'seasoning' going on here. If it was, the magic dust failed to transport me beyond the jejune character of the narrative.)

The end of the road in this book was one Great Relief.

Good autobiographical writing, like the painted icon, points beyond the writing itself to deeper truths that allow for the weaving of insight. There is something immensely powerful and positively transformative about a likable and trustworthy narrator who bears the heart and bears it humbly. This seems to me to be particularly important to the pilgrimage narrative. I don't know if this kind of writing can honestly be done in a secular way, or via an adopted practice (Esoteric Shingon Buddhism in this case). Anyway, I am looking forward to reading Ailsa Piper's book when I can get my hands on it.

I'm not going to mention the locally written book by name because it is hard work to write a book. However, if you are into a sort of Japanese da Vinci Code cracker set around the same areas in Japan and taking in a good bit of the 88 temple journey, I did enjoy Hidden Buddhas by Liza Dalby. She has written a couple of very enjoyable novels centered in Japan which I can heartily recommend.

June firsts

People In The Know, know that, among many things, one of the things the Japanese do best are the seasons. Students will proudly confess, as if no one else in the world had ever experienced seasons, "We have four seasons in Japan." Truth be told, it is quite possible that outside of Japan, you probably have not experienced the particulars of each season with quite the attention and love in which they are celebrated  here.

My favourite name for the season we are in presently is Bai-u, the 'plum rain', and I had occasion to see, for the first time, in the Plum Grove in the garden a few days ago, the ground sprinkled with a good number of the small golden fruits fallen from the trees. Most of the green, unripe so-called 'blue plums' had already been harvested for the early summertime activity of making the delicious plum cordial called ume-shu. 

We have just emerged from 3 days of typhoon heavy rain into a beautiful cool morning, for which I am most grateful. I was out early for a walk and to take some snaps. I do love the adornment of raindrops on flowers, don't you? Yesterday, browsing through the Sasaki Sanmi's great manual on Chado: the Way of Tea, I was transported into reverie by this:

. . .  the sound of rain falling from the eaves and the singing of the kettle calm your mind. Isn't it fun to hear the occasional falling of ume (a plum) to the ground?

Just passing the time of day during the early summer rain is apt to lead to joy in the pleasure of tea and the way of tea . . .

Here are some of the gifts of June that have done my spirit good:

• For the nose: 
• the first good wafts of roadside gardenia and a promising pot plant with buds waiting to burst             
• on dry days, an evening coolness descending with the rising of the fragrances of the twilight
• strains of incense burnt to lift the spirits after the rain
• For the mouth:
•  the first cherries of the season
• the first (ever) ripened golden plum fallen from a tree in the Garden's orchard
• oka-hijiki
• For the eyes: 
• Hydrangeas all over the show, in every possible hue and variation, and a weekly bouquet from Mimi's garden
• Irises in best bloom
• Lush, voluptuous greenery
• For the ears:
• Whispering fans and softly roaring air-conditioning vents
• Singing and 'quacking' frogs and crickety bugs at night
• Rain slapping wetly down 
• For the heart:
• Rice sprouts are planted 
• Lotuses have begun to bloom
• Dashing and darting swallows after the rain & the sight of an osprey outside the window at breakfast this morning
• Clear/er skies for the solstice weekend supermoon 

Also, wonder-fully, I begin another year of life walking the earth, DG!

What are your June firsts?

From my Deep Pocket, this week

I have a wonderfully/woefully stuffed Pocket App, that gets fatter and fatter as weeks pass. What to do, what to do? A visit to the dentist last week and I was informed that Deep Pockets are 'undesirable,' contrary to what the dictionary tells me about deep pockets symbolising 'abundant financial resources'. Here is an effort to put my deep pocket/s (app) to work! (If it all gets a spot overwhelming: try some Mental Floss ;).

Here are the articles that I am going to attend to in the next week. If anything tickles your fancy, I'll be glad. I might even work up a post about one or two of them. Perhaps we could 'conversate' in the comments or on email?

It's commencement season in the U.S. and it's impossible not to notice the humanities picking up the gauntlet and facing the seductions of Technology or at least saying, 'hang on a minute'. To humanize is one of the most important functions of the Humanities. For that time is needed; thought is needed. Humans are needed! (Apply within! ha!)

Here are the 7 links:

• Physics's pangolin
• The Humanities in Transition
• Richard Kearney on Imagination and Catharsis & Evil, Ethics and the Imagination
• Donald Kagan on Liberal Education
• Another defense of the Humanities from TNR
• Listened to a rather disappointing interview of Tom Sheehan on Entitled Opinions (one of my favourite podcasts) about Heidegger and Technology a week or so ago. All was not lost, however, as my interest in Hannah Arendt was reignited by the great host of the show, Robert Harrison. Also, Jason Goroncy, one of my most visited Antipodean bloggers is excited for the film. (Might be a while until it gets over here, alas).
• James Gleick's review of Lee Smolin's latest, entitled Time Regained.

Enjoy your reading homework. 

True Recreation

This great description from A Thomas Merton Reader,* which speaks to that great exercise of unclenching the fist of the mind:

"It was wonderful, the silence, and peace, and happiness that pervaded this sunny room, where so many men were together without speaking. Far from there being any sense of restraint, of awkwardness, of strain, you felt flooded with a deep sense of ease and quiet and restful well-being. There was absolutely no kind of tension between those who sat together in silence: they were all absorbed in their books or their thoughts or their writing. And their very activities were marked by a kind of restful quality: they were not imprisoned by any fierce concentration, not driven before the face of some storm of hurry and anxiety. Their eyes rested on the page with a quiet, detached attention; or else they looked away from the book, in thought; or they entered into themselves, or wrote something down." (148)

To be so absorbed and effortlessly in the flow -- how beautiful!

* Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell

Platinum skies & The Grand Frogs' Chorus

It had only just been announced on the television set above the counter in the old sushi shop where we were celebrating the Master's 70th birthday, that the official start to the rainy season had begun, almost 2 weeks earlier than usual! The frogs, of course, felt it in their waters.

Walking home after dark

Along a garden path,

From an unseen amphibian amphitheater

The sweet, squelching song of summertime frogs

Squeaked and swelled.

Rainy season!

The scent of sandalwood blossoms.

It did not occur to me until I set down the words, that the noun for frog and the verb for 'homing' (coming or going) sound the same in Japanese - kaeru-  but looks different (frog = 蛙, and homing = 帰). I should get out my brushes in honor of their little ditty shared with me.

D'où parlez vous?

Where do you speak from? The question - intriguing, knotty, gnarly - (note the silent unpronounced letters) has been on my mind for months now but, like those silent, unpronounceables, I have begun to notice that there is quite a bit more to it than meets the eye. I am no expert in French, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it seemed important to set the title question down as such - 'original' of course to Ricouer, but foreign, if not exactly alien, to me. Richard Kearney, student and translator of Paul Ricouer, opens his book Anatheism with this question and describes it as one that has haunted him. Like the ghost letters of the adjectives I used to describe it, I find that it too has had a haunting effect on me.

It is a question that requires a willingness to look closely at the threads of one's life. It doesn't mean "Where do you come from?" or "What is your mother tongue?", questions frequently asked of foreigners which can be answered factually. (And, often, if not usually, filed away in code. In Japan, at least, this is true to my experience. As a white African, I don't fit so well in the file cabinet.) Ricouer's question, however, asks for something truer than fact.

I was at last granted a release and an insight into what had begun to seem like a cumbersome koan-like question listening to a dharma talk by Mary-Grace Orr taking a lush green early morning walk recently. In the talk I was given to understand that the self is made up of a collection of stories that we are more or less attached to. Ah ha! Thinking about stories allowed me to re-gain a sense of spaciousness around keeping the question company.

It seems you apply the question to a position taken. Kearney applies it to the question of returning to God (after God). It asks: what are you speaking about, who to and from which angle are you coming at it? What is it in your sense of self, your identity -your story- that is animated in your speaking? I have thought that in our shrinking, hyper-connected world the question may serve as a role as clarifying as smelling salts.

The American philosopher Stanley Cavell, too, has shed some light on my preliminary explorations of the question, linking philosophy and autobiography, and demonstrating a model of a self that is like a nexus in a network whose arrangement shifts and adapts with each change to it, its sensitivity reminiscent of the influence of the flapping butterfly's wings in the Amazon causing storms in far off places. (Yes, chaos theory!) In Cavell's view, there is a sense of improvisation, that is appealing, an ongoing 'process of self and language in translation'. [You could read Naoko Saito's article on Cavell available here as a taster, as I did. My copy is liberally scribbled over. It's interesting, quite technical but I know I've not quite digested it sufficiently. I may return to it here another time.]

The notion of translation drew me, quite naturally, embedded as I am in a language community far beyond my youthful imaginings. Much of my life is lived quite literally in translation, improvising and between the worlds, and this is but one of the reasons why D'où parlez vous? has felt like a bit of a snake in the grass in some respects. Nevertheless, in principle, the serpent might be just the critter to assist my thinking on the topic, looking as I tend to do on the whole Apple Incident as an opportunity to enter into the adventure of full humanity.

Thoughts circumambulating this question have been roiling since Pentecost, that great feast of comm-uni-cation. You may expect further notes and queries: the language question is central to where and how I make my living.

Pentecost, inspirations

•  A link to the beautiful poetry of Malcom Guite, "Our Mother-tongue is Love"
• And here, Jan Richardson's soulful and true paintings and a blessing - "When we breathe together" - for the feast we celebrate today. 
• Kayla McClurg's reflection for Pentecost over at Church of the Saviour entitled "The One Who Comes"

Flourishing

Mike Higton gives a lovely account of the kind of theology I am especially interested in. It is one that

concerns itself with giving an account of human flourishing, of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Christian theology . . . cannot talk about human flourishing without talking about God; . . . it cannot talk about human flourishing fully without thinking about the broadest and deepest possible contexts for that flourishing.

I think that persons with halos are most certainly to be counted amongst The Flourishers, don't you?

Of course, one need not be a believer to subscribe to and fully appreciate the good, the true and the beautiful, but the tradition is a gift I was born to, have come to love, find interesting and rather good company. And I'm sure that it must be true that there are 'certain foundational commitments [which] foster rather than obstruct such paying of attention to the world.'

Higton reminds us that theological truth is, or at least should be, "conversational" in the sense that 'theological claims must remain, above all, open to judgment: open to the possibility that something else might be the case.' He adds that theology is, importantly, 'not primarily about the defense of a single voice, but rather about the practitioners of different forms of life taking one another seriously, holding one another to account.'

These insights have my attention as I have recently been quite engrossed by a question Paul Ricouer posed to his students: D'où parlez vous? Literally, from where do you speak? Or, more colloquially, perhaps, where are you coming from? It is a question that I am finding, the more I stay with it, intriguing and rather central to my situation. More forthcoming.

Leave it to the Saints!

I am a great believer in allowing space for things to happen and unfold in their own time, so it was a thrill to encounter the lovely serendipity happened upon this morning via a tweet from the reliably inspiring Clair Bangasser that led me to discover three new and wonderful things: yet another thing of beauty inspired by Catherine of Siena--do yourself a favour and take a look at it over at The Painted Prayerbook, and wonder of wonders, it centers on a tree! The second gift was the blessing written by Jan Richardson that accompanies the artwork (Jan, the artist, she who is the Praying Painter, also writes!); and thirdly, I found out that it is, on May 4th, World Labyrinth Day. I, like many, have found great, great gifts upon those beautiful paths.

Why don't you try an online experience if you can't make it to walk a labyrinth on terra firma? There's a gathering at 1pm on Saturday afternoon in whatever time zone you find yourself in: join and enjoy! It is a truly magnificent way to pray.

For the love of a tree

"I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn't not. It was in blossom."

 Ali Smith

 'may' (a short story)

I know exactly how she feels. Welcome, May.

P.S. How's about some Tree Lore, just for fun?

'Every step of the way to heaven is heaven'

So goes the wisdom of our 14th century saint, Catherine of Siena, another haloed wonder, whose feast we celebrate on April 29th. Her day coincides annually with the Green Day holiday in Japan (now a commemoration of one of the former Emperor's birthdays) and we enjoyed a grand potluck picnic feast out under the (now) fully leaved sakura trees in a forest at the local garden. These days in my town it is easy to relate to Catherine's heavenly passage through life and to be fully present to the vitality coming in.

What Catherine didn't say was that every step along the way felt like heaven. Just that it was: whether or not you knew or felt it.

Seeking an image for this post, I came across the beautiful icon by the New York-based artist Eileen McGuckin. I love the vibrant blues she has used in the background and the deep indigo of the cloak. 'God,' said Catherine, 'is closer to us than water to a fish.' The light shines beautifully through and calls to me in a way that I can sense so much better!

My interest in halos is, in part, due to the mystery-filled wonder windows that icons are. I am greatly attracted by them even while a lot of the time I don't really 'get' them in the way I think I could. My 'access' for the time being feels limited. That said, for now, there's something I quite like about feeling a bit disoriented by them. My interest in Catherine, other than the fact we share the name, is Dominican (for women of this tradition schooled me, consoled and grew me.) This, I was informed, was my name feast. But imagine my teenage disappointment laying eyes on this Andrea di Valli rendering of a  pale, rather sad looking and terrifically sombre soul. Consequently, I never formed much of a rapport with this particular saint, in part due that image and also because of a perhaps typically grotesque and dodgy fourteenth century hagiography that is hard to swallow. (I feel more connected with my fellow African, the much older Catherine of Alexandria--but more on that another time.)

From Ben Myers' chapter on Saints in Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams a reminder, or a challenge to stay open (and keep chewing!):

Much of what we call 'God' is fantasy, a self-protective projection of our own wishes and anxieties. But the anguish with which these 'holy neurotics' stand before God, the traumatic reshaping of their identities, the appalling purgation of their loves and desires --all this shows that their God could not possibly be just another instance of Freudian wish fulfilment. 'If they take God that seriously, at least this isn't some cosy made-up way of making yourself feel better.'

I'm leaving room for the possibility that we namesakes may become friends one day/ (I do like that icon. Thank you, Icon Drawer!) Catherine is a saint for nurses and the sick, for those with eating disorders and who have suffered miscarriages, for firefighters and female theologians (strong Dominican connection between love and knowledge).

For anyone interested there are a number of resources housed at the site called 'Drawn by Love' which is devoted to Catherine's life and mysticism.

This lady's FOR turning

Further to the topic of turning I happened recently upon a most enjoyable and enlightening interview on CBC with the theologian, Richard Kearney [available here and about an hour long. He's Irish, widely read and a pleasure to listen to.] The topic of the talk is anatheism, a word I'd never come across. The prefix 'ana', from the Greek, means something along the lines of to go up/back/again; it encompasses the actions of re-turn and re-peat and re-member. The book on which the talk is based can be previewed here and you will see that the subtitle is 'Returning to God after God'. Kearney holds that atheism is part of religion, the part that embraces the absence of God. I find I can go along with him because I appreciate that he addresses the question of the ways trauma influences the life of faith. At some time in life, for many of us, God may (and perhaps should!) become a stranger, we may encounter a dark night of the soul, or possibly even come to an experience of the extreme in the so called 'death of God.' What, where and how are we to be once our lives have been ruptured?

Kearney communicates the dynamic of the Absence and Presence of God using the metaphor of dance . . .  and my imagination filled with images of the passion of flamenco, that wild, strict, strong, sad and fierce form, rather than anything conventional, pretty and 'nice'. [Listened to an interview with this photographer the other day, Lena Herzog, and you can take a look at her flamenco pix here]

I also thought of the beautiful Sufi form of prayer, the zikr. I did not know that the word meant remembrance in Persian: beautiful. Turning, revolving, is a fundamental condition of our existence.

There is no being which does not revolve and spiral and whirl -- from the dance of our deepest atoms, to the circulation of our blood, from our soft spinning on the planet to the far flung spiral galaxies' splashing out in space.

From Daniel Ladinsky's translation of Hafiz's poetry called The Gift, these few verses from the poem, ZIKR:

Remembrance lowers the cup into

His luminous sky-well.

The mind often becomes plagued and can deny
The all-pervading beauty
Of God

When the great work of zikr
Is forgotten.

I have chained my every dancing atom
Into a divine seat in the Beloved's Tavern.

*

Practices for The Faithful Incarnate: Part 2

Nobody's halo shines all the time. Well, maybe not nobody's, but it is a rare and precious person's that does, at least this side of heaven. Reaching effortlessness (or 'practicing death' as it is rather ominously put in the last post) takes a LOT of effort, because, yes, it is hard to get out of one's own way and to be where one is. The work is never done, it seems.

The next practice suggested by the scene in the garden in which Mary Magdalene meets Jesus is, as Coakley writes, the ability to 'turn and turn again, as Mary did twice before she saw that it was Jesus right in front of her'. At first she did not recognize Jesus at all; nor was she the only one who failed to see him. There were others too who just could not quite wrap their minds around the possibility that the promises had come true. Things don't get much odder. But, wait: there's more --

    "This is another very strange thought: that the risen Christ, being God's Son, is here all the time but that we have to 'turn' and keep 'turning' toward his gaze, until our sense and mind and soul and heart are so attuned and magnetized to his presence that we too can say Rabbouni! - not to grasp and hold him, not to constrain him within our restricted human categories, but to worship and adore him."

I had an experience last week after a particularly long day when I took myself off for a stroll in the nearby garden. I know that there's not much that a walk can't loosen or cure. Also, there is something magical about the time of long shadows in my town. My feet found their way over to the poets' pavilion, a simple wooden shelter built in the traditional style, which is bisected into two facing floors separated by a flowing stream in which sit a few beautifully expressive rocks. There was a time when poets gathered in the heart of the garden, with cups of floating sake for inspiration and lubrication, where the creation and recitation of poetry was enjoyed.

 It was late afternoon and not many others were in the garden. I removed my shoes and sat on the wooden floor feeling weary and a bit blue. After a short while, I suddenly became aware of the sound of trickling water, of birdsong, warmth, light, the green and red colours of new leaves. What was amazing to me was that nothing around me had changed. The scene was just so, but sitting quietly I was suddenly able to make sense of what was around me. Where had I been before that? Wrapped up in my own concerns, I suppose, not unlike Mary that momentous and emotional morning. Nothing had changed around me except my ability to tune in to the present. Opening to it brought on the sweet surprise of something rising in my spirit as if a crust had cracked; it felt like making way/space, like coming home, like a quenching of thirst. What had happened? How was it that I was able to breathe again? That I felt re-membered, all the fragments gathered and at once, calm. Could it really have been the simple recognition of being present in the moment?

I often wonder 'What keeps us apart from this current in the daily round?' and I wonder in the wake of my 'coming around' whether this resembles the Magdalene's dawning perception, the perception that was only possible once she had made the turn, allowed herself to momentarily be distracted from her full feeling and entranced by the reality before her?

    "… To turn is to keep longing for and loving him, even in despair . . . to keep discerning the wind of Christ's Spirit and leaning into it, until love and knowledge and     sensuality all align and we can know as we are known in him."

Practises for The Faithful Incarnate: Part 1

Sarah Coakley wrote a ravishing set of meditations for Easter entitled "Meaning beyond meaning" available here. Oh, do read them - and slowly - if you have a chance. I have found the ones I have read and spent time with rich and rewarding. The last section is the Noli me tangere incident and it has provided sure guidance and deepened my own reflections on the question I left off with in the last post.

I had an inkling that the key was going to be Practice. Coakley encourages us to believe in 3 possible, (and yes, granted,) extraordinarily demanding things; and not only to believe them, but to practise them, with soul and mind and body, on and on up to your life's end, until you come to "see the Lord" face to face. Practice of what, specifically? Three specific things based on the first encounter with the resurrected Jesus. They are

• the practice of death and
• the practice of turning, and finally
• allowing for these prior practices to open the heart and the mind to enable a vision of Christ 

In the next few posts I'll share how these make sense for the time being for me. As to the third point, that is a constantly unfolding mystery and one that I do not think I can approach any way but 'slant'.

*

To 'practice death' might seem a strange idea but it is not without Biblical foundation. Paul in his epistle to the Romans writes that we are 'to die with Christ' and be 'baptized into his death'. As Coakley notes, Paul's call is uncomfortably at odds with the individualizing drive in modern (particularly western) societies. For me, however, there is something recognizable in the call, something familiar that I have witnessed and learned from living in this far eastern milieu. Here, where people take belonging to the land, the culture, the family and the group with the utmost seriousness, the self is not at the centre in the same way as it is in western (and invariably more multi-cultural) societies. As the stereotype goes, the Japanese are a group-oriented people. I catch glimpses every now and then and think that this might well resemble what the early church looked like for is not this strong sense of dependence and interdependence within the group surely at the root of the word 'religion' (Old French: 'obligation, bond, reverence; Latin: to bind)?

There are these informing virtues, too, that (ideally? in my opinion and experience?) flavour Japanese morality and which have had great and lasting impact particularly on the traditional arts. I remember being shocked in my early days here talking with a lady who was going to 'a tea lesson'. I asked her how long she had been taking lessons and she told me she'd been a student for more than 25 years. I confess my younger self did wonder whether she was an inordinately slow learner, or, giving her the benefit of the doubt, if 'making tea' was especially hard to learn.

Mastery, I have since learned, is intimately connected to the practice of death. I took up calligraphy, Japanese brush writing, and learned something of the lesson there. You practice and practice and practice, and then practice some more, and then some, until, like the line from Yeats--"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"--you are at one with what is true. Coakley notes that it is only by 'handing ourselves over', into a seeming loss of selfhood, absorbing ourselves in the practice (prayer, sacraments and service) that we will 'find our true selves - the living Christ-like selves that God longs us to be.' But note well, you do not know how that is going to look or how it is going to feel. Therein lies the rub.

A draft sketch on unstretched paper and below, a photo, of the mounted verse

Once upon a time I found a poem, or part of a poem, by the Zen Buddhist master, Dogen. It read: 'Forget the self. Become one with ten thousand things.' (I do love those ten thousand things!) I decided it would be a nice reminder and went about thinking about the ideograms I could use that would come close enough to what I heard Dogen's words trying to say. With my teacher's advice I settled on 'mu ga mu shin'. Muga means selflessness, self-effacement, self-renunciation, 'no self' -- the Buddhist concept that in nothing does there exist an inherent self, soul, ego. All of which may be easier to digest in the words of John Muir, he of the Californian woods, who said, 'When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.' Mu shin means a kind of freedom or innocence, something like the kind of heaven Jesus recognizes as most fit for children (Matt. 18:3). In adultspeak, mushin means to be free from obstructive thoughts. I am not a Buddhist but I find I am surrounded by the ethos and it is gentle and it has gentled me.

But this verse made me wretched. The painting became a painful reminder of the chasm between my vision and ambition and what came out of my brushes. My teacher saw no such thing; she liked what I had painted so much she deemed it worthy of framing on a scroll. Why, oh why did I ever agree? And having had it mounted on a silk scroll, I then had to sit with it in an exhibition for days on end. Oh, the woe of it, the burning shame of it. I couldn't stand to look at it. But what I learned was what Dogen had to teach, I suppose, though for a time those ten thousand things bugged the hell out of me and I confess to having been filled with 'obstructive thoughts'!

Coakley writes

But when, in all the difficulties and agonies that authentic prayer brings, we realize that persevering in it means "handing over" the reins of control to God and just letting Christ's Spirit pray within us, then we begin to see that our false, conscious, striving self has to go. And as that self is worn away in a process that feels like death, something unimaginably mysterious starts to emerge - the new life of selfhood that is Christ's own and which transcends all individualism. To be a Christian is to "practise death" in this way, until we are no longer afraid of death; and when we are no longer afraid of death, we are no longer afraid of life - the ecstatic, abundant Life that Jesus holds out to us.

 *

"Be brave, cherry blossoms
 and fall!"


the little trout
~Issa

                                                           心して桜ちれちれ鮎小鮎

                                                kokoro shite sakura chire-chire ayu ko ayu

If you've ever wondered . . .

What ten thousand halos looked like, this picture will give you some idea . . .

A communion of saints, a riot of cherry blossoms . . .

How to be a faithful incarnate?

On the first Sunday after Easter the Church remembers the story of Thomas. I love the mind-bending materializations Jesus effects after the event of the cross: how better to express triumph? I am truly tickled by his impossible-made-possible appearances. I love the lightning energy involved in the (delayed) recognitions and am full of wonder at the moments between the perception and rupture understanding brings. Can you imagine the shattering of the minds which accompany the revelation--that which has been dreamed of and hoped for, that which is totally new--breaking in. Breathtaking!

There are two stories that stand out for me from the events following the resurrection which I have been thinking about over the past week, each concerning touch and the struggle to apprehend a reality utterly new and yet materially embodied and present. The first is Mary Magdalene's mistaking the Master for the gardener on Easter morning. The story shows the truth dawning on Mary once she hears her name spoken by Jesus. She cries out the name of her beloved teacher with love and shock and then there follows the perplexing Noli me tangere scene in which Jesus wards off Mary's touch dispatching her instead on a mission to inform the disciples of her encounter with the Risen One. (So much for the text but rifle though archives though I have, I have not (yet?) been able to find any art done by a woman of this scene and this leaves me feeling a little wobbly about well, predictable things regarding gender.) Could the 'do not cling to me' message at this powerfully vulnerable point in the narrative be a message about the necessity of letting go, of Jesus' 'launching' Mary, of allowing, if in a rather forceful manner, a new form of relationship to emerge? Could it be about Christ's trust in Mary's ability to integrate the reality of who and what this encounter meant? Did keeping his distance cost Jesus as much as it must have done Mary?

I found this image by Sustris from the sixteenth century which I particularly liked because of the labyrinth, the archetypal symbol for the journey that takes place inwardly and outwardly that, despite what appears as a set of tangling paths, always and only leads home.

On the Church clock a week later, invisibility cloak shed once more, Jesus unexpectedly appears to the twelve within the four walls of a locked room. We learn that Thomas the Twin had missed out on some of the previous showings and had declared in an endearingly blockheaded way, with a swaggering bravado so instantly recognizable in the human family that, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails and place my hand into his side, I will never believe." (John 20.25)  The story is most memorably expressed in Caravaggio's arresting painting, The Incredulity of Thomas, (below) which has kept me company for some days now. (In the meantime, I have learned that this event is called in the Orthodox tradition, The Assurance of Thomas. A smile-worthy shift in the usual perspective regarding doubt, I find.) Who does not totally identify with Thomas' demands? The Church fathers found his doubt not at all unreasonable and we are given Jesus responding to him in effect saying, 'Here, let me show you'. I read Jesus as telling Thomas to get over himself and, commending those who 'have not seen and yet have believed', is surely subtly reminding him of all the things that Thomas had witnessed and experienced while Jesus was journeying fully in the same dimension as the apostles. To his credit, Thomas does truly see and know, his inner walls collapse, he remembers himself, says the Name and freely abandons all previous resistance.

The ascension - has it taken place, or not? Mary cannot touch him because Jesus says the ascension, though imminent, has not happened. Thomas, by contrast, is guided to the wounds (has the ascension happened? Is that still the point, or have things moved on in the sense that there is a different teaching for a different person and/or need?) 

Are these stories about
    •    ways of knowing and believing - specifically, the involvement of the senses in knowing. Does perceiving Jesus' presence demand a heightening of the senses, as Suzanne Guthrie has suggested?
    •    the ability which some personalities have to be with uncertainty while others cannot stand too much;
    •    the foundations grounding relationship? In Mary's recognition of the Master her ripeness for mission is affirmed whereas Thomas' stubborn ultimatum points to an 'iffiness' that God reaches out for.

These stories are connected in my mind as I reflect on the current status of higher education in the Humanities, which finds itself in a skeptical and scientistic mood (called 'practical' by its supporters) by which I mean there are demands for 'concrete proof' (yaargh!) that what is real is real, worth-while (yes, indeed, in terms of 'silver pieces') and, and er, if it's not too much to ask, certain to bear predictable results. Like a building or a parking lot.

Or a gash to the body.

Looking at Caravaggio's painting and thinking about Mary's belated recognition, I wonder about prohibitions, invitations, commands, the relationship one cultivates with one's self, letting go, ultimata, matters of belief, knowing, the role of sense perception, the various strengths of women and men, art, the centrality of the body and our participation in relationship and the question: How to be a faithful incarnate?