Solitude or Isolation?

 There is a difference between solitude and isolation. One continuing impact of covid is that many of us remain isolated - disconnected or only tangentially related to the living breathing community of "our" people.  Solitude is a blessing.  Isolation can make us ill.

                                        Photo: © Ann Cahill  -  County Clare, Ireland - 2007   

From Blessed John O'Donohue....

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us. In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.

Excerpt from his book, Anam Cara, 25th Anniversary Edition.  Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/anam-cara

A Blessed Pentecost to You !

Icon by Kelly Latimore

 

Annual Clergy Retreat - The Episcopal Diocese of SC

 

Just returned from our annual Clergy Retreat and it was a fine time.  The average age of our clergy is decreasing and the joy among us is increasing.  TBTG!

Thou knowest, Lord.

 

A perfect anthem for Lent from Henry Purcell.. the text from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Burial Office, Rite One.  

The text is one of the Anglican funeral sentences from the Book of Common Prayer. Early versions began possibly in 1672 and were revised twice before 1680. Purcell composed his last version, in a different style, for the 1695 Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary II.   From HERE

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts;

shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer;

but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty,

O holy and merciful Savior,

thou most worthy Judge eternal.

Suffer us not, at our last hour,

through any pains of death, to fall from thee.

The Feast Day of George Herbert -February 27.

 

Today is the feast day of George Herbert - 1593-1633 - one of my favorite poets.  At the link is a good write up about him.  His poem Unkindness is one that convicts me every single time I read and ponder it..

More about George Herbert

Unkindnesse

Lord, make me coy and tender to offend:

In friendship, first I think, if that agree,

Which I intend,

Unto my friends intent and end.

I would not use a friend, as I use Thee.

If any touch my friend, or his good name,

It is my honour and my love to free

His blasted fame

From the least spot or thought of blame.

I could not use a friend, as I use Thee.

My friend may spit upon my curious floor:

Would he have gold? I lend it instantly;

But let the poore,

And thou within them, starve at doore.

I cannot use a friend, as I use Thee.

When that my friend pretendeth to a place,

I quit my interest, and leave it free:

But when thy grace

Sues for my heart, I thee displace,

Nor would I use a friend, as I use Thee.

Yet can a friend what thou hast done fulfill?

O write in brasse, My God upon a tree

His bloud did spill

Onely to purchase my good-will.

Yet use I not my foes, as I use Thee.

This Demented Inn

 

                                                                Art: Fritz Eichenberg

"Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world."  -  Thomas Merton

Post is from here:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/thomasmertonpropheticwitness

Simone Weil on Attention and Grace

 

                                                        Simone Weil (1909-1943)

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote in her beautiful elegy for her soul mate, “is only a report.” To fully feel life course through us, indeed, we ought to befriend our own attention, that “intentional, unapologetic discriminator.”

More than half a century before Oliver, another enchantress of the human spirit — the French philosopher Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943), a mind of unparalleled intellectual elegance and a sort of modern saint whom Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our times” — wrote beautifully of attention as contemplative practice through which we reap the deepest rewards of our humanity.

In First and Last Notebooks  — the out-of-print treasure that gave us Weil on the key to discipline and how to make use of our suffering — she writes:  Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

This piercing thought comes fully abloom in Gravity and Grace  — a posthumous 1952 collection of Weil’s enduring ideas, culled from her notebooks by Gustave Thibon, the farmer whom she entrusted with her writings before her untimely death.  Weil considers the superiority of attention over the will as the ultimate tool of self-transformation:

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The will only controls a few movements of a few muscles, and these movements are associated with the idea of the change of position of nearby objects. I can will to put my hand flat on the table. If inner purity, inspiration or truth of thought were necessarily associated with attitudes of this kind, they might be the object of will. As this is not the case, we can only beg for them… Or should we cease to desire them? What could be worse? Inner supplication is the only reasonable way, for it avoids stiffening muscles which have nothing to do with the matter. What could be more stupid than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue, or poetry, or the solution of a problem. Attention is something quite different.  Pride is a tightening up of this kind. There is a lack of grace (we can give the word its double meaning here) in the proud man. It is the result of a mistake.

 

Weil turns to attention as the counterpoint to this graceless will — where the will contracts the spirit, she argues, attention expands it: Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

Gravity and Grace is one of the most spiritually nourishing texts ever published. Complement it with Weil on temptation and true genius, then revisit writer Melissa Pritchard on art as a form of active prayer and cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on reawakening our capacity for attention.