A Simple Matter of Trust...

dis·cern·ment

diˈsərnmənt/

noun

noun: discernment

1               
the ability to judge well."an astonishing lack of discernment"





2. 
(in Christian contexts) perception in the absence of judgment with a view to
 obtaining spiritual direction and understanding."without providing for a time of 
healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present 
moment without a shattering of our common life"

co·in·ci·dence

kōˈinsədəns/

noun

noun: coincidence; plural noun: coincidences; noun: co-incidence; plural noun:
co-incidences

     1 
a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without  

       apparent causal connection

2      correspondence in nature or in time of occurrence.

OK, Let’s see if we can make some sense of this and that it doesn’t get too confusing. 
This pilgrim was going through the exercise of planning to outline the purpose and 
approach to the next blog post. Eventually, somehow, the proposed topics were
 narrowed down to a select three. So, as this exercise has gone in the past, an outline
 was drafted for each of the topics and possible approaches were thought about for
 each. Just as the stage of preliminary drafting was to commence the worldly distractions
 began like the rains and floods of early spring.It seemed that all the ideas and potential
 narratives had become flotsam and jetsam that could never be retrieved.

It wasn’t that the distractions were necessarily bad but they did interfere with the standard
plan and approach. Discomfort was first to surface and then a sense of anxiety increased. 
What to do? The words always seem to appear once that flame of inspiration is mystically
lit. Then it is a matter of human knowledge that attempts to arrange the words in a 
meaningful, grammatically correct and maybe even an impactful way. No words were 
conjured and the flame was barely visible by that inner eye.

Three topics remained….a good ole standard for the beginning of November  -
“Gratitude.”Another topic surfaced addressed the “After Glow of Pope Francis’ visit to
the United States.” Then there was a related topic about “Compassion, Mercy and serving 
the poor.” Still, nothing!

So when in doubt…that inner voices continued to whisper “let go.” There is an 
Ignatianexercise (The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius) on the discernment of the spirits
that proposes letting go three days and let God, that magnificent miracle of the universe
somehow mysteriously,provide the answer. In other words, don’t worry about it, don’t pray 
about it, stop trying to force it…just trust God. If you believe and you trust - the answer will 
become obvious. There is this story where a father of a sick boy wants the disciples or Jesus 
to heal his son. Jesus says to the man,“All things are possible for those who believe .” 
This is where the pilgrim completely
identifies with that boy’s father as it is reported that the father responds “I do believe;
it is trust I lack (help my unbelief.”) Mark 9:24.

So, the pilgrim went on with trying to be present to the moment. The topics and outlines
for the forthcoming blog post lay dormant on scraps of paper and in a word document 
on hiscomputer. The weekend came filled with creative energy that was directed at 
another passion, the writing, performing and recording of music. This activity filled the 
moments and hours for three full days. On the night of the third day he was drained, 
exhausted as all energy was spent on the music projects. He hoped that it was all 
worthwhile as he went to bed there was a memory flash about the blog. Without 
thinking about it any further he decided to focus his attention to
the writing of the post in the morning.

The next morning the routine of making coffee and grabbing his journal as he settled in  his
“quiet time” was a mechanical response to waking and rising. Before settling into serious 
reflection, meditation, prayer and writing in his journal he would always like to “warm up “ 
with a smile by reading the online comics (cartoons from the daily newspapers) that he 
received automatically on his computer and smart phone.

These are what he saw immediately that morning … 

 He thought "Sometimes we need to just trust our own hearts."

The rest of words fell into place, as it was this brief journey that is his story.

…. Enough said

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous
                    - Albert Einstein

We Sanctify all we are grateful for
                   - Anthony De Mello SJ

                                      Looking For My Life - G. Harricon ( Smart Phones click on link)

                                                        https://youtu.be/zcXN-nAJ2R8

                                  Any Road – George Harrison (Smart Phones Click on link)

                                               from G. Harrison's last live TV performance

                                                          https://youtu.be/BldrJGDhIME

Suscipe (St. Ignatius of Loyola)

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

my memory, my understanding

and my entire will,

All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.

To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

Give me only your love and your grace.

That is enough for me.

amdg ….. 

Copyright 2015 JF Sobecki

The Emmaus Dialogues: Act II Scene 1 “Credentials” – draft 5.1

( the following is a sneak peak of an extract from the yet unpublished play "The Emmaus Dialogues")

                                                                                   

So two pilgrims walk into a bar….

It usually begins something like that doesn’t it? 

Pilgrim 1:  So my mother is in the hospital and she says that her doctor is “very nice” and that the food is excellent and that she is quite pleased to be there. I ask if she is doing any better and about her prognosis. She answers, “I don’t know. I didn’t ask and no one ever said. But, the doctor is very nice.”

Pilgrim 2:  I think I know what you mean. Sometimes if we look at what is important to us it might indicate to us what we really need.

Pilgrim 1:  Oh, I don’t know if that is what I meant at all.  I believe we can easily get focused on the wrong things. My mother should be focused on getting the medical treatment she is paying for and getting healed and not nice personalities and good food.

Pilgrim 2:  Yeh, I guess that just because a doctor has his or her medical doctoral degree and passed some type of examination that the credentials aren’t really a guarantee of proper treatment. Besides, just because the hospital has all it’s beds filled doesn’t mean it is a “good hospital.”

Pilgrim 1: It seems to me that the problem is that we live in a  “credentialed society” and it seems that our culture demands “seals of approval” or “Certificates of completion” as some type of indication of qualification and we don’t really go any deeper than that.

Pilgrim 2: By the way why are we going into this bar? I would prefer to go to the one down the street where the bartenders are all graduates of some hoity-toity college of mixology and spirits. You know that bar where all the formerly employed investment banker MBA’s hang out.

Pilgrim 1: But you and I both know this bar’s reputation precedes itself. I have a great looking bar tenderess who always pretends to listen well when you complain about something personal. Besides they have a great Irish troubadour for entertainment.

The two find a table with three empty chairs and sit….

The exchange continues without missing a beat

Pilgrim 2: I guess it doesn’t make any difference what bar we are in when all we are doing is drinking is Guinness from a bottle !

Pilgrim 1:  You are right! What’s the big deal about credentials anyway? Life is about doing your best with what you have while remembering always that it is never about you…but how you treat others.

Pilgrim 2: What? Aren’t we missing a discussion about competence and how, when and why do we trust others?

Pilgrim 1: Fine, I know society relies on and needs credentials, ratings and rankings because we have thrown true integrity and conscience out the window. We would need less reliance on credentials and such if we all just focused on doing the right thing, for the right reason and doing it the right way?

Pilgrim 2: Now you sound like a Buddhist…

Pilgrim 1: Or…remember what the teacher told us to just love others as you would love yourself…You know, treat others, as you want to be treated.

Pilgrim 2: OMG! Are you some kind of outrageous ethicist or moralist?

Pilgrim 1: Well, I wonder what would have happened to the great teacher if everyone demanded to see a holy certificate or a “license to heal anyone ?” But, you know, what I do know is that in this world the focus on competition has gotten everything twisted…. you know competition and greed… pushes us all off course. I really think these competitive and greedy aspects drive most of us to rely on credentials of all kinds to prove ourselves worthy.

Pilgrim 2: Yeh I guess. So you wanna just split a pitcher instead?

Pilgrim 1: OK as long as you are the “dd”

Pilgrim 2: Sure, but remember I have a DUI and my drivers license is suspended. Anyway, Here’s to your mom! She was right…. as long as she likes the doctor and the hospital food is good…. and of course if they “do no harm”…who cares about the credentials!

Pilgrim 1: Salute’

Pilgrim 2: Cent’ anni!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

(and now for your viewing and listening pleasure - no credentials required!)

amdg

The Hungry Heart’s Game Changer

The prodigal pilgrim sailor packs away the scrolled maps he bought long ago that promised a course to a supposed hidden treasure somewhere on some uncharted island .He blows the dust from his passage trusted weathered weary compass securing her in a box for storage wondering if the stars lied. Forty-eight months have passed at sea since his vessel about to be lost unrecorded wreckage was graced with another chance by great-unseen hand.

What seems to be an obscure lost dream in the blink of an eye the cracking open of his chest as if he were some about to be consumed lobster was what a member of the band would label a “game changer.”  The light at the end of the tunnel continues to slowly increase in size as his vessel proceeds in becalmed and stormy seas alike. The passage continues as he grows in acceptance of the impermanence.

The priests say it is their prayers and his attempt at faith that healed and saved him. The sisters of the Holy Trinity believe it was their love that kept him on course. The member of the band protests the proposition of any role in feeding the pilgrim’s fire.

The pilgrim sailor’s journal scribblings attempt to articulate the confusion of new labyrinth meanderings and concern about the possible lack of progress. Recent readings provide some elucidation while meditating at dawn the comings and goings and songs of the birds of the first light and how the great mother sun gradually illuminates everything without judgment. He does not command - his heart to beat, his blood to flow, and his lungs to breathe. Somehow they know their purpose. 

“Something bigger than everything is at work here.”

It is the wonder-filling peace and mustard seed rooted gratitude that begin to flourish around, within and through him as he tries just to be. The fog that encompassed the affirmation that he was not here for himself was burning away.

[On July 31, 2008 the family enjoyed an evening of celebration of hope in the “land of giants” by the Boss. The program’s tee shirt with the three swords and a heart was an appropriate garb, as the father would have a CABG (coronary artery bypass surgery) at dawn on August 4, 2008. That celebration was part of what promoters called “Magic Tour”…. and he believed.]

         








                        Epitaph on the gravestone of St. Ignatius of Loyola


     “Non coerceri a maximo, contineri tamen a minimo, divinum est.”

(Loose translation…. Not to be daunted or held back by the greatest challenge and yet to      be concerned with the nitty-gritty, that is the path to holiness.)

********************************* 

Autumn Poem

In the last jovial, clear-sky days of autumn
the mockingbird
in his monk-gray coat
and his arrowy wings

flies
from the hedge to the top of the pine
and begins to sing — but it's neither loose, nor lilting, nor lovely —

it's more like whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges.
All birds are birds of heaven
but this one, especially, adores the earth so well
he would imitate, for half the day and on into the
evening,

its ticks and wheezings,
and so I have to wait a long time
for the soft, true voice
of his own glossy life

to come through,
and of course I do.
I don't know what it is that makes him, finally, look
inward

to the sweet spring of himself, that mirror of heaven,
but when it happens —
when he lifts his head
and the feathers of his throat tremble,

and he begins, like Saint Francis,
little flutterings and leapings from the pine's forelock,
resettling his strong feet each time among the branches,
I am recalled,

from so many wrong paths I can't count them,
simply to stand, and listen.
All my life I have lived in a kind of haste and darkness
of desire, ambition, accomplishment.

Now the bird is singing, but not anymore of this world.
And something inside myself is fluttering and leaping, is
trying

to type it down, in lumped-up language,
in outcry, in patience, in music, in a snow-white book.

                  -  Mary Oliver

*******************************************

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.

Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?

Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.

Hugh Fennyman: How?

Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

  - Shakespeare in Love

                                           http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCVJny3Va4I

                                         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W7_XgXfH38

amdg

Unexpected Windfall: New Chapter/ New Year

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning."
                                            —T.S. Eliot

Where is Joseph Campbell when we need him? Great myths remain to be explicated!

So many queries need to be resolved and a substantive discernment is imperative in order to examine the convoluted origins of purpose.

Some unpublished storyteller continues to weave the fable about that lost boy pilgrim dreaming of canvas tightening to catch the breeze just right to head out onto uncharted waters. Another myth had that boy watching in wonder the effortless soaring of God’s favored feathered friends. “To be free” was the oft whispered mantra .”An inner voice said “Just think good thoughts.” Maybe these storyteller are just confused .

Paintings of sloops and ketches would stop the boy dead in his tracks. His trance would transport him into the painting on the shore or even on the deck with the salted wind brushing his face as he prepared to come about on a starboard tack. When in the actual presence of real vessels either moored or under sail offshore he felt as if he was standing at the gates of heaven. Though surrounded by lakes, ponds and bays he remained landlocked as those odyssean dreams dissolved.

Beguiling guitars and girls gradually goaded the pilgrim into another world.

He was also quick to break his covenant concerning passing that math test and committing to priesthood. No one explained to him how God does not forget and how God also forgives. There was a plan, or at least an outline of a potential chartered course that would remain a mystery. What the lost boy didn’t disclose was that the fears, the gratitude and peculiar perceptions concerning these dreams and distractions would be secretly recorded in once virginal volumes. The storytellers said that they may hold the key…but again the musings within those pages might be a diversion.( maybe the Hawk Hill girls will eventually decide the veracity and worth-whileness .)

But it was the admiration of the freedom of the flight of the feathered friends that changed everything, or so it seems. Growing into a classical type “A” , things needed to be controlled and the pilgrim decided to take things into his own hands. Student of DaVinci and Audubon the lessons commenced on the art of flight. He quickly learned that it took more than  “thinking good thoughts.” It was more like $50/hr for lessons in a Cessna 172! After a few hours of freedom coasting with the angels a day  of reckoning  called “power off stalls”  arrived. The plane would intentionally lose power and lift and fall from the sky. “Relaxation and response”, everything was almost counter intuitive – such as pointing the nose of the plane down. The next week the lost boy was found wondering at the docks of the local lake looking at weekend sloops. So much for taking things into one’s own hands! “Well, the principle of Bournelli’s Theorem applies to flying and sailing” he rationalized. He finally  fulfilled that boyhood dream of discovering the Southern Cross of peace in the wind on the water.

Though the earth has turned more than a thousand times since that day, the wind still speaks to him through the song of the chimes of freedom . The words now flow  effortlessly into the new freshly opened journal with wonder in gratitude about how often he has been distracted  and how he accidentally comes back to the point where he belongs .

“Another year gone by. Another year begins tomorrow.”

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained”

       - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The Voice of the Devil, William Blake

amdg

Faithful Companion

The following is an edited excerpt from a chapter in my yet to be published manuscript ...and I dedicate this to my faithful companion .

.......................................

"The word companion is said to have it’s roots in the latin
'cum – pane', or 'with bread', meaning two or more sharing bread(meals) on their journey together. "

The Society of Jesus(The Jesuits) was originally called “The Company of Jesus." Some have suggested that this name comes from St. Ignatius roots in the military (company) and the Jesuits were known as “soldiers of Christ.” But the Jesuits thought of themselves as “companions” of Jesus being broken and being fed by Jesus on their journey together. Jesuits are well known as ones who share in their journey as partners and friends of Jesus with all they encounter. Maybe it had to do with that they were sharing in the “bread of Christ”. ....

...The term companion implies intimacy, mutual unconditional dedication and love. In some dictionaries the definition includes examples of spousal relationships to demonstrate the lifelong commitment. In the Catholic Church , and many religions, marriage is a “sacrament”, a consecrated relationship. When one speaks of having a companion we automatically associate that this relationship has a special connection with a bond that exceeds that of all other relationships. This bond doesn’t need words to be said to affirm that this relationship , as this association is a spiritual one with those involved. Those "companions" know that they are called together for a purpose that is greater than themselves as individuals.

There are all different kinds of companions who join us on different kinds of journeys. Companions can be found in spouses, religious congregations, intimate friends, companies, organizations and any group of two or more with a common mission. But I believe that core qualities that qualify the relationship to be that of a “companion” are for the relationship to be:

* One with a synergistic mission (a common single purpose objective or essence) of the duo or group

* Intimacy – mutual trust and unconditional respect and love,

* Collaborative – true sharing and giving without want or desire of return to help achieve the common good.

I have a very special companion. He has the uncanny ability to sit and listen to me. If I complain about this or that, he listens intently. When I am lonely or sad he is quick to lend a comforting ear. If it is a time when I just want to explore and talk about the interconnectedness of the universe or the lack of spirituality in politics he pays attention to every word. He is quick to forgive my moodiness and just as quick to celebrate a laugh and smile. In the silence of the early morning hours he accompanies me in the solitude of prayer. Did you ever have a soul mate that mirrors your own feelings and perspectives? That’s my companion. When my daughters come home for an extended stay I must admit his enthusiasm is much more demonstrable than my own but he reflects what is in my own heart.

There have been sometimes when I have confided in him solely. He need not say a word to show his compassion. Just his presence is “compassion” enough. He makes no demands of me. We just enjoy being together. Early on in our relationship he was filled with youthful exuberance and would push the behavior envelope but we learned to adjust to each other. He is loyal to me to a fault. I have no doubt that he is a spirit sent by God .He is companion in every sense of the term. Patient friend, confidante, collaborator, protector, faithful and supportive. His spirit is more authentic than mine. We are all creatures of God and this creature is a blessing to me and all he encounters. He is my true companion. He is a Labrador Retriever. His name is Dylan Valentine. Yes, and we do share our food, mine for him and some of his for me!"

copyright 2008

................

For my dear friend and companion Dylan Valentine who left this world after 12 wonder-filling years on May 28,2009( and for all faithfull companions.)

Though I miss him his spirit remains. I thank him for his unconditional love.

.................

I am not there

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I do not die.
- - Mary Elizabeth Frye

amdg