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Theme: Following light is conversation with silence.
Light slowly reaches lengthening
afternoons in Maine.
- Space Shuttle disintegrates
with seven lives
- Security Council at United
Nations deliberates military action with Iraq.
- American administration
officials make case for war.
- Military munitions ready
for use.
- Protestations from Iraq
demure.
- Anti-war feelings around
world grow, mull, advance, withdraw, and struggle with the nearness
of war.
Utterance and reflective responsive utterance -- what
we call conversation -- is what is needed to emerge from univocal and
unilateral pronouncement and denial in world politics, national policy,
and personal life.
Will we finally come to real conversation as a model of humankind’s willingness
and ability to live authentically?
Here are three translations of an excerpt from Goethe's Fairy Tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily:
| 1. | "What is nobler than
gold?" asked the King.
|
| 2. | No sooner had the
snake beheld this venerable image than the king began to speak and
asked:
|
| 3. |
Steiner introduced children to Goethe's Fairy Tale
of "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily" because of it's important
message. This magical tale tells of a group of people whose world
has turned upside down and who must bring about spiritual and social
renewal. When the Green Snake is asked by the Gold King, What is
more precious than light? she replies, Conversation! We come to
life when we really meet one another in true dialogue...
|
Conversation, true dialogue, is what is missing in the
precipice pronouncements heard daily. It seems most media can only provide
shouting match or copy with loud snarl intended to intimidate the unbelieving
into agreement with a formulated opinion. Models of reliable renewal and
open consideration are hidden behind defensive denial and provocative
accusation. Scant are examples of engaged conversation.
In the beginning was the word. And the word emerged from silence. True
word and root silence are united in sacredness of conversation.
It is in that sacredness our hearts long for God, each other, all
sentient beings, the very earth itself, and all celestial bodies in our
vast and unending expanding multiverse.
If so, then faith (that elusive virtue) is trust in abiding sacred resonance
between silence and reciprocal response. This interaction is emitted from
the word in flesh, in action, in conversation.
We co-respond only when there is faith something worthwhile might emerge.
Not to recognize or allow faith and true conversation is to grow brambles
around self-importance and the one-view/my-view rule of dictatorship.
“I’ll tell you what to do!” and “I’ll tell you what to think!” are sentences
describing the destruction of true faith.
Brambles should be cut away,
Removing even the sprouts.
Within essence there naturally blooms
A beautiful lotus blossom.
One day there will suddenly appear
An image of light;
When you know that,
You yourself are it.- Sun Bu-er
It is what we are.
Suddenly!
The story is told of one young man coming for instruction and Macarius told him to go to a burial place and insult the dead. After that he was to praise them. The young man did as he was told and when he returned Macarius asked what the dead had answered. The man replied, "nothing," and Macarius then encouraged him to do the same when anyone hurled abuse or flattery on him.
( - about St. Macarius the Elder, January 29) (Monastery of Christ in the Desert)
Recently, after dusk we
are in Seal Harbor walking the closed carriage path snow below tall
pine below the enormity of heavens with illimitable stars and planets.
The four of us walk in silence. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
The dead keep silent. Macarius (born about the year 300) counted on
that for the lesson at hand. I think of this fact each time I pass or
walk in a cemetery. If the dead are with God it is no surprise their
silence. Realization of sacred presence evokes a silence of sensory
noise. The sacred presence and silence of God is realizing, engaging,
and serving this reality in all its forms and emptiness.
This is why some bow. This is why some genuflect. This is why the body
hunches, head to ground, hands with palms upraised.
No words convey what the body senses.
Reverence with silence.
In gratitude, we bow to each and all this February,
, Sando 
, Cesco , Mu-ge 
and all who grace Meetingbrook,
Email (mono@meetingbrook.org)
or mail to
Meetingbrook, 50 Bayview St. Camden, Maine 04843.
January 2003 Update
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