Wager

Perhaps I should have learned by now not to have put so much hope in earthly things, looking for too thorough an indication of the Redemption in the here and now - people loving one another by the millions and all that, hope for history, a civilization of love. We should, of course, talk and exhort in that direction; otherwise things would be worse than they are. But such hopes are rarely realized in any developed sense.

We love our loved ones. We enjoy our life together. It lasts only so long. Then something more or less deadly intervenes. This at first glance rather cruel fact is possibly explained as a sign that we are meant for a further, better, enduring level of life beyond this life that we know. If I put my hope in such a better beyond, then I must be ready to let go, slowly or suddenly, and make the passage. If I have no such hope, then I will cling desperately to this only life I know. I will kill and fight for it. I will lie, I will steal. And even so, in the end I will lose. I will die. Foolish wager.

Walking

The difference between walking and just sitting in a scene to stare at it is that in walking the walker re-creates the scene step by step, moving it around by moving around within it. In every moment the angle changes on what there is to see, even if what there is to see exercises the stronger force. Nonetheless, walking is a sweet exchange between place and viewer. And the viewer who walks increases in power and control over the place. The world opens more fully to the one who moves, to the one who enters it.
I am walking now with greater awareness of my control over how I will be in a scene, and this gives me peace and makes me grateful. Walking. Talking. Everyone moving. The unforgettable light when the light is right. And oddly, I feel an emptiness that doesn't hurt. What might it mean? Possibly, without my trying, my center is shifting from myself to some only dim perception of God's continual and vast work of sustaining all things in being: myself among them, but not at the center. God is the center and the all, the center which is everywhere. I can only let it be, consent to it. I only understand a little. I will never understand a lot. I am at peace. I accept it. I keep walking around and looking.

Washington D. C.

In mind and heart I have been deep inside the liturgy of Christ the King for several days now since we celebrated the feast, and I feel helped by the Holy Spirit to detect a little more than usual. I don't often have an especially strong response to this feast. But this year I have that strong sense we are meant to have ofbeing in heaven while we pray, even while we remain on earth and exactly here. That sense is quiet, clear, steady. We surround the Lamb on his throne, and the whole universe cries out to him. How odd this feels alongside where I was a week ago today, in Washington D.C., and more specifically, on Capitol Hill. All that can be weird in the culture of America was pressing in on me, together with a sense of the immense power that is wielded from the Capitol. A visit to the East Wing Gallery reminded me of how beautiful it all could be and how much America is or once was capable of. But I felt as if I was visiting and moving around an empty center. The cold and the bleak gray sky only contributed to this feeling. In the airport, coming back, half the people were on cell phones, having more or less the same conversations, seemingly wanting to be heard as much by their bystanders as by those they were talking to. It was vapid talk, an imitation of somebody else, a fictitious somebody seen talking that way on television. Who from those scenes could believe and understand how much more real and rich the liturgy is?

We

It is possible to say we in a mistaken and dangerous way. This would be the we of a nation or any group that is said at the expense of the individual subject, the individual I. There are no Is in this we; their only identity is in their we. Sometimes people are forced into such a we, as with totalitarian governments; at other times they choose it, as in a radical and mindless belonging to a group. When there is this kind of we, it is possible to look at others as only a they, and individuals are ignored, trammeled, and even easily killed. It is easy to kill 10,000 people if they are only a they; virtually impossible if the pain and anguish of 10,000 individuals is taken into account.
The only valid we is the we made up of real Is, real subjects, who know that their deepest subjectivity is engaged precisely in a relationship with others, a relationship that achieves a true and fruitful saying of we, indeed a saying in which each I knows that there is no being an I unless I say we in this way.
Of course, to say only I and never we is equally as mistaken and dangerous.

Weather

It is a widespread opinion that talk about the weather is always something of a nervous and banal space-filler in labored conversations. I have never thought this and was therefore glad to find the following in The Journals of Thomas Merton, entered on February 27, 1963:
Our mentioning the weather - our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is, are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is gray, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all. It is certainly part of my life of prayer.

White

Words

I'm an hour away from the beginning of Holy Thursday Mass, and I feel a quiet excitement in me about it. After this, Good Friday and then Easter. All is very plain and stark within me. Mostly I seem to get nothing, but sometimes there is a pure receptivity and something as if from heaven strikes me. Simple words or short phrases come to me as I think with excitement about the upcoming prayers and celebrations. They are the words we hear all the time, but what profound and extraordinary and moving words they are!

World

Monasteries are traditionally located away from city centers, removed from society's central focus. Monks tend to locate out in the country and will often choose a "strong site" which can achieve, through the passage of time, a kind of symbolic force. The genius of a place is drawn out, and the whole construct and location become an expression of the monastery's dedication to a way of life different from what is found in the world. This is a place on the edge of the world - but an the edge, not aver it. It is not that monks do not care about the rest of the world. They care very much. But they know that there are possibilities along the edge that cannot be had at the center. They are willing to share those possibilities with any who come, but the sense of edge or margin must be maintained. Nature's remove helps this. The sense of quiet and conditions for solitude and recollection reinforce it. A dialogue or kind of dance is begun in which the partners are land, nature, buildings, the city's center, and a place removed. To approach a monastery for a visit is to join this dance. To live at a monastery is to move within this dance's moods. To leave a monastery after a visit is to return elsewhere, hopefully renewed and refreshed.

Writing

Perhaps we write to conjure away something we fear. Or at least some of our writing has this scope. I should examine myself in this regard. There is nothing necessarily wrong in writing for this reason, but it would be wrong to fail to notice.