Heaven On Earth

Jon Meacham searches for it:

If heaven is understood more as God’s space on earth than as an ethereal region apart from the essential reality we know, then what happens on earth matters even more than we think, for the Christian life becomes a continuation of the unfolding work of Jesus, who will one day return to set the world to rights. If you begin to think about the drama of life in such terms, you begin to invest more meaning in the here and now — not in the “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” pagan way, but as a way of infusing everything with potentially sacred meaning. The love of friends, the brush of your spouse’s hand, the eyes of a young child — these become not hints or glimpses of what heaven may be like as a posthumous region but of what earth may be like if light and love achieve dominion over darkness and envy.

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"What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?"

T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman (via proustitute)

(via word-digest)

"The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness."

T. S. Eliot, from “Gerontion” (via weissewiese)

(via proustitute)

St. Francis Preaching to the Birds (detail), Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) 

NATURE AS MIRROR

Can you feel the spiritual ecology we’ve been talking about? If you live in a fully connected world, you’re saved every day, just by playing your part. You are grabbed by God, and you belong to this universe, along with everything else. I was recently feeling discouraged and irritated, and I went out to my garden and spotted a green “stick bug” happily chewing on my flowers, almost completely camouflaged next to the stem. This bug’s simple but amazing existence completely took away all of my negativity. Life was again wondrous and miraculous.

At a recent retreat I gave on the Scottish island of Iona—which was the center point for the diffusion of Celtic Christianity—the attendees remarked how the Celtic “knot” was found on most crosses, gravestones, in manuscripts, and on jewelry. It was apparently their artistic way of saying that all is connected, everything belongs, and all is one in God. They knew about ecosystems long before we did. ALL was held together inside the divine knot that made it one.

T.S. Eliot ends his famous “Four Quartets” quoting Dame Julian, and saying the same: “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / into the crowned knot of fire.”

From Richard Rohr:  In the Footsteps of Francis: Awakening to Creation webcast
(CD, DVD, MP3)

"Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."

T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (via the-final-sentence)

(via hummingsoftly)

Ash Wednesday

[fragment from T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”]

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the 
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Ash Wednesday
T.S. Eliot

Rhapsody On A Windy Night

The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,”
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

~from T.S. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night (via waltzingcat)

"Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."

T.S. Eliot (via myriadflesh)