3/29/2018 On the Third MorningON THE THIRD MORNINGOn the Third Morning John 20: 1-18 and Luke 24:1-12 On the third morning The women came first, Somehow knowing in their wisdom As women often do! Anxious with sorrow, Walking in the stillness of night Just before dawn And the movement of day. They came, Looking for their Lord. Where they found the stone turned, Rolled from His tomb. Their Lord’s body gone, Taken away! Two disciples came later, to learn That this was more than an “idle tale,” Of women, unbelieved. When entering the tomb, they too saw The linens that once wrapped His body, Lying where he was laid. Then Returned home in amazement, Not recalling the scriptures Or the words of Jesus, Even the one whom he most loved. While Mary stayed, weeping outside, to See angels sitting in the tomb Where once her Lord’s body lay. Jesus speaks, calling Mary by name after asking; “Woman, why do you weep? Whom do you seek? The living are not Among the dead.” She sees him now, Rabbouni, her teacher, Moving to embrace him, at last knowing his face and voice. He says; “Hold me not, for I must ascend to my Father. Go, and tell my brothers, what you have seen and heard.” He has Risen, He has Risen! He has risen from the places of the dead and dying, He has risen from the solitude of the tomb. He has Risen, to his Father and our Father. He has Risen, to his God and our God. Hallelujah, Christ is Risen! Let us rise as well, above the noises and distractions of life to understand that God calls us too to death and resurrection. Calling us to die immeasurable times; To die daily in ourselves. Let there be a death to our egos and selfishness, A death to our poverty of spirit and faithlessness, A death to doubt, hopelessness, and sorrow, A death to grief where grief can no longer be borne, A death to intolerance and “the wish to kill,” A death to violence and war, and fearful hearts, A death to abused and unloved hearts. Let there be a death to it all! Let the illusion and suffering of life be washed away by the Passion of Christ, creating in us the mind of Christ! So that we me may join with Him In many Resurrections, Let there be Resurrections upon Resurrections One after another and another, let there be resurrections without end. Ron Starbuck (C) 2016 from There Is Something About Being An Episcopalian. He, Qi. Empty Tomb, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46107 [retrieved March 26, 2016]. Original source: heqigallery.com. 12/25/2017 A WHITE COLT'S TALE
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Title: In the Bleak Midwinter Album: Mystic Christmas Artists: Mystic Harmony Year Recorded: 2008 Genre: World Original Release Date: December 10, 2008 Release Date: January 13, 2009 Label: Mister Carmody Productions, Llc Copyright: (C) 2008 Mister Carmody Productions, Llc |
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12/17/2017
A Poet & An Episcopalian Speaks of Mystery
Ron Starbuck – Saint Julian Press – © December 17, 2017
Of the Father's Heart Begotten
Every poet and writer I know has a story to tell, and tells his or her story through the formation of a personal mythology. As we travel through life, our life changes. Our identity shifts, our sense of who we are as a person, turns with the seasons of events and people who enter into that life.
This is the impermanence of the self, which Buddhist philosophy teaches. It is a vital theme and awareness at work throughout and within the whole concept of Pratītyasamutpāda – Dependent Arising. Being – Becoming – Existence: The infinite possibilities of all things held within creation.
"If this exists, that exists; if this ceases to exist, that also ceases to exist."
Buddhism directs us toward the concept of Śūnyatā–Nirvana–Emptiness–Openness, celebrated in the Heart Sutra. The impermanence of emptiness teaches us that our sense of self as being permanent is false. The self, whom we actively identify with, is empty of such permanence. Buddhism refers to this false self as not–self, or no–self, anattā (uhn-uht-tah). It is an ego clinging self, leading to suffering, misperceptions, and deceitful projections.
In the Christian tradition, there is a similar concept, kenosis, the Greek word for emptiness. Kenosis is ‘self–emptying’ one’s own will in becoming receptive to the divine, to be in unity and union with the divine. Christ emptied himself to become a servant of all humankind.
Of the Father's Heart Begotten
Divinum Mysterium – Aurelius Prudentius
He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created,
Might not perish utterly,
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie,
Evermore and evermore.
Both heaven and nirvana are alike when we understand them as a spiritual path towards non-duality, to this union with the divine ultimate mystery out of which all things arise.
In writing a poem, the poet goes through multiple stages and feelings, crafting their words together, until the poem itself comes to its end. As any poet knows, the poem is never quite finished. It is almost always incomplete in some sense. The poet simply has to let go of it and trust that the creative process goes on within the people who may read their humble efforts.
I offer this thought in a spirit of humility. All our works as poets and writers are a continuation of other works that came before us, the voices of humanity that have been passed down from one generation to another.
We are simple gatherers who have gathered from those poets, writers, and storytellers that came before us. Even the greatest among us have been inspired through learning and reading the literary works of humankind. And we, we humble few, are following in their footsteps. There is something more going on of course.
Each poem, in and of itself, begins in silence, in stillness, in emptiness, in an open place waiting to be filled, on a blank page, or as an even deeper divine memory perhaps. And we, we are full participants in its creation. There is I think a deeper mystery at work here, an inspiration. To be creatively inspired, is to be filled by the spirit of something more, something beyond the mundane and ourselves.
Please let me share with you with this thought. As much as any poem, you write, is your own work, it is also not your work. You have been inspired. You have heard the whispering of the gods, of God or the muses of antiquity. And now you are modestly returning to humankind the voices spoken before in a newer voice.
There are perhaps no accidents in life, merely a continuation of one life into and with another, in a continuation of consciousness grounded in the divine. Grounded in the great mystery of creation, we cannot quite name, written within us. The Holy Spirit perhaps praying in and with and through us, when we know not how to prayer ourselves.
The words, you speak or write, are not your own; they have been fashioned before. They abide and rest in a universal divine consciousness and spirit that dwell within us each. They were written upon your soul, deep within your spirit, on your heart, and in your mind long ago.
And now, now you have been inspired to return them to humankind, in a healing for humankind. The poet within you has heeded deeply the stillness and silence of creation. Out of such a listening comes a word, a verse, a poem. Each poem is composed as an act of creation, a loving act of giving, an act of healing and repairing the world.
Let me leave you please with these opening words from the Gospel of John, with an understanding that they too are a poetic metaphor and a symbol pointing us towards a deeper mystery in which we reside and that dwells within us.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” – (NIV)
You too are this light.
And then there is this great Christmas Carol that touches on the Mystery of Christ.
Why indeed did God come in human form to serve humankind with an open and humble heart, to empty himself?
This is one answer, given in the mystical language and poetry of the Anglican – Spiritual tradition.
Of the Father's Heart Begotten alternatively known as Of the Father's Love Begotten is a Christmas carol based on the Latin poem Corde natus by the Roman poet Aurelius Prudentius.
Of the Father's Heart Begotten
~ Divinum Mysterium ~
Translation by Roby Furley Davis
Of the Father's heart begotten,
Ere the world from chaos rose,
He is Alpha, from that Fountain
All that is and hath been flows;
He is Omega, of all things,
Yet to come the mystic Close,
Evermore and evermore.
By His Word was all created
He commanded and 'twas done;
Earth and sky and boundless ocean,
Universe of three in one,
All that sees the moon's soft radiance,
All that breathes beneath the sun,
Evermore and evermore.
He assumed this mortal body,
Frail and feeble, doomed to die,
That the race from dust created,
Might not perish utterly,
Which the dreadful Law had sentenced
In the depths of hell to lie,
Evermore and evermore.
O how blest that wondrous birthday,
When the Maid the curse retrieved,
Brought to birth mankind's salvation
By the Holy Ghost conceived,
And the Babe, the world's Redeemer
In her loving arms received,
Evermore and evermore.
Sing, ye heights of heaven, his praises;
Angels and Archangels, sing!
Wheresoe’er ye be, ye faithful,
Let your joyous anthems ring,
Every tongue his name confessing,
Countless voices answering,
Evermore and evermore.
This is He, whom seer and sibyl
Sang in ages long gone by,;
This is He of old revealed
In the page of prophecy;
Lo! He comes the promised Saviour;
Let the world his praises cry!
Evermore and evermore.
Hail! Thou Judge of souls departed;
Hail! of all the living King!
On the Father's right hand throned,
Through his courts thy praises ring,
Till at last for all offences
Righteous judgement thou shalt bring,
Evermore and evermore.
Now let old and young uniting
Chant to thee harmonious lays
Maid and matron hymn Thy glory,
Infant lips their anthem raise,
Boys and girls together singing
With pure heart their song of praise,
Evermore and evermore.
Let the storm and summer sunshine,
Gliding stream and sounding shore,
Sea and forest, frost and zephyr,
Day and night their Lord alone;
Let creation join to laud thee
Through the ages evermore,
Evermore and evermore.
Of the Father's Heart Begotten - Wellington School Chapel Choir
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away–
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing–
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Burnt Norton
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Musical Background ~
The Essential Yo-Yo Ma ~ Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Sleepers Awake). Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Ton Koopman & Yo-Yo Ma
Year: 2004
12/15/2017
DREAMLAND TRASH BY DYLAN KRIEGER
Houston: Press Release
Praise for dreamland trash
This is the opposite of a sophomore slump. Like the latest subatomic experiments in above-the-speed-of-light velocity, for a fraction of a second, when the same particle is in two places at the same time, Dylan Krieger will be there and elsewhere. As if Giving Godhead weren't good enough, suddenly she hits out past light-years of stratospheres and reproductive insanities of biology back to the “invertebrate mother” and the lunacy of a planet organized largely around humanoid self-destruction. The scale becomes both precise and enormous, echoes of things heard as if through water in a glass. You will have to think about the sound of it all for a few days, it is both so familiar and so volatile. dreamland trash is one of the most perfect IED’s ever made.
Thomas Simmons – NOW
“Holding whole generations up at sexpoint,” dreamland trash is ingenious, witty, and electric. We are just as likely to wake up next to a moaning unicorn as we are to be abducted by deranged YouTube automatic captions. It’s in this derangement that we begin to see the late-capitalist world inside out and upside down, for its cheap thrills and absolute devaluation of the self. Abandon and alienation are rendered in a linguistically dense, gothic style, deeply aware of the “day-glo chokehold” we are all in.
Sandra Simonds – Further Problems with Pleasure, Steal It Back
Dylan Krieger is a transistor radio picking up alien frequencies in south Louisiana, where she earned her MFA from LSU and now sunlights as a trade magazine editor. Her debut poetry collection, Giving Godhead (Delete Press, 2017), won LSU’s 2015 Robert Penn Warren Award and was dubbed “the best collection of poetry to appear in English in 2017” by the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of no ledge left to love (Ping Pong Free Press, forthcoming) and an autobiographical meditation on the Church of Euthanasia called The Mother Wart. Find her at www.dylankrieger.com.
dreamland trash by Dylan Krieger * ISBN-13: 978-0-9986404-4-0 * ISBN: 0-9986404-4-1
Saint Julian Press, Inc. * 2053 Cortlandt, Suite 200 * Houston, TX 77008 * Ron Starbuck ~ Publisher-CEO
Phone: 281-734-8721 * Email: ronstarbuck@saintjulianpress.com * www.saintjulianpress.com
Publisher's Blog
Ron Starbuck is an author, poet, the Publisher-CEO of Saint Julian Press, and an Episcopalian with certain Buddhist leanings who values comparative literature and literary dialogues in many forms.
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All Anglican Anglican Communion Books Buddhism Christianity Christmas Easter Episcopalian Ghost Story Interbeing Interconnections Interfaith Dialogue Jesus John Cobb Literature Mystery Nativity Paul F. Knitter Paul Knitter Poems Poetry Theology Thich Nhat Hanh Vietnam War