Posts tagged drink

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not drink the light that is in the water.


“You flowers and trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks, and wild birds, you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you.

The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depth of my will tries to swing my deepest self away from God and direct it to your love.  

I try to touch you with the deep fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary, and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.


But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and are mirrors of His beauty.

He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water: but if I try to drink the light that is in the water, I only shatter the reflection.



And so I live alone and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things, knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to one of them or all of them.

The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart.

It is an unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it.  It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven, where all things will belong to us in their highest causes.”                                              Thomas Merton, Journal II, September 14, 368-69

…surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not drink the light that is in the water.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Drink from the chalice of vulnerability.

“Christ was effective because Christ was vulnerable.

He was also often in anguish.


It is interesting that the only ritual Christ asks us to repeat over and over again is the Eucharist.  

In it we remember him as broken, poured out, empty, heartbroken, frightened, humiliated, vulnerable, in anguish.  To celebrate this ritual properly we need to have in our hearts what Christ had in his at the first Eucharist.  


What was he feeling then?


Joy and thanksgiving.  

Yes.  


Love for those at the table with him.  

Surely.  


But beyond this, his heart felt anguish, deep longing and fear at the prospect of the pain that was now a certainty before intimacy and community could be achieved.  

It would perhaps do all of us good occasionally when we leave the Eucharist, instead of going to a lively meal with the folks, to go off as Jesus did after the first Eucharist, to a lonely place to have an agony in the garden and to sweat some blood as we ask for strength to drink from the real chalice - the chalice of vulnerability.


But this involves a painful breaking down of all that keeps us apart.  


At a Eucharist we may not protect ourselves.  Our hurts and hates must be revealed and absorbed.  When this happens hearts of stone will turn to hearts of flesh, bitterness to charity.

But livelier liturgies, better homilies and more singing will not, by themselves, bring that about.  The complaint that liturgy is meaningless goes deeper.  At its root lies the fact that people will celebrate as a community only when self-protectiveness, mutual suspicion and macho posturing are first broken down.  But that requires new birth.


In birth, there are tears and anguish.  

Before the real dance comes the anguish.”  Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies





Let’s talk… 

How about a cup of coffee?








…the chalice may look like a coffee cup, but the drink tastes of vulnerability.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to drink from the chalice of vulnerability.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Taste the coffee I drink.


“Thomas Merton, journeying during an extended period of solitude, wrote:

It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed.  Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and drinking it.  Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying.  I live as my ancestors have lived on this earth, until eventually I die.  Amen.  There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially about is as mine, though doubtless it is not somebody else’s.  I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice. (Quoted in J.H. Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, Latitudes Press, 1983)


Rarely is life enough for us.  Rarely are we able to live restfully the spirit of our own lives.  Most often what, where, and how we are living seem small, insignificant, petty and depressingly domestic.  We seldom notice our hunger and sleep, cold and warmth.  

Rarely do we taste the coffee we drink.

Instead we go through our days too preoccupied, too compulsive, too driven and too dissatisfied to really be able to be present to and celebrate our own lives.  Always, it seems, we are somehow missing out on life.”  Ronald Rolheiser, Forgotten Among the Lilies

How does your coffee “taste”?

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to taste the coffee I drink.