Words of peace, connection, faithful joy or faithful sorrow

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees 

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

     love what it loves.                         

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

When the moon pulls you close and you 

rise as ocean tides that sink and swirl 

at the edge of the earth…

When you have more than one personality 

each with unfulfilled dreams…

When your appetite for life is ravenous 

won't fit in the squares of a linear week…

When you have mood swings that mimic

the weather, one minute you're breezy

as October leaves, before long fog lumbers

through throwing wintery hail…

Your heart despairs mid changing 

temps, so you wither and freeze 

as a bullfrog hanging on for dear, dear life.

"Contemplative prayer is a process of interior transformation, a conversion initiated by God and leading, if we consent, to divine union. One’s way of seeing reality changes in this process. A restructuring of consciousness takes place which empowers one to perceive, relate, and respond to everyday life with increasing sensitivity to the divine presence in, through, and beyond everything that happens.”

Thomas Keating

from Open Mind, Open Heart

German scholar Heinrich Zimmer (1890–1943) studied sacred images and their relationship to spirituality. He said, “The best things can’t be told: the second-best are misunderstood.” [1] So we settle for talking about the “third-best things,” which, in my culture, I suppose are things like sports, television, the weather, and other safe topics.

The best things can’t be talked about—they can only be experienced. And then if we try to talk about them, we know that we see “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Our best attempts will still be merely stammering, grasping for good enough words. But one of the great difficulties of theology and spirituality is that its subject matter is precisely those “best things” that cannot be talked about. If religion does not have humility about knowing, it ends up being smug, silly, and superstitious.

The second-best things which, according to Zimmer, “are misunderstood,” are those things that merely point to the first-best things. These belong to philosophy, theology, psychology, art, and poetry, all of which—like sacred Scripture—are so easily misunderstood. Yet what I have tried to do in my work is to use those second-best things that point to and clarify the first-best things. What else can we do? All our words, beliefs, and rituals are merely “fingers pointing to the moon.”