How little is your faith

As love moves the sun and the other stars, so true faith moves mountains...

Italian poet, Dante, has it that there is love which moves the sun and the other stars: L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.
More than a millennium before, a man who's been believed, not by all people (perhaps we are included here), as the Son of God said that if your faith is the size of a mustard seed you will say to this mountain,"Move from here to there," and it will move; nothing will be impossible for you. Awesome!!!

Both statements about love and faith are not exactly the same, but they are not totally different either. They require hermeneutics which is freed from any reductionism. Love is more than business between man and woman. It is business of universe. That's why Love moves the sun and the other stars. Faith is more than belief systems embedded in our head. It is a system of involvement with the on-going creation of this universe. Therefore, both love and faith are closely related to the universe. To narrow our love and faith within the boundaries of family, country, nation, even planet means to undermine the supremacy of love and faith.

Love becomes the revelation of the Universe and Faith realizes our response to the Universe. This relationship between Love and Faith does not allow us to comprehend the Universe as an abstract object of anonymity. The Universe is not impersonal object whatever we call it: emptiness, happiness, peace, freedom, democracy, etc. The Universe is personal subject who is called God (or its synonyms) by some human beings. Its power, that is, Love, really moves the sun and the other stars and in turn gives power to everything it embraces. Human beings belong to the Universe but they are the only creation who have potentiality to break the law of the Universe, that is, Love.

Why should human beings break the law of the Universe and why do they break the law precisely in the name of love?

If we lack faith, we get too much of ambition to control the Universe. Lack of faith does not kill us, but it castrate our ability to cooperate with the Universe. In that case, we think, we act as if we were the owner and the boss of the Universe. In fact, we do belong to the Universe and so the others, whatever their religions and denominations. To have faith to the Universe means to let other creations be part of the Universe. That's why, in the bottom line, we don't kill, we're not supposed to put other human beings to death.

If we have faith, that is, if we surrender to the Universe, we may receive anything which seems impossible for us but might happen, thanks to the power of the Universe. So the point about faith is that it enables us to entrust the Universe that will apply its principle of subsidiarity: it respects our autonomy and takes over the job that we can't do. Believe it or not!

Message for pilgrims

 

....for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

"It is proper to the evil Angel, who forms himself under the appearance of an angel of light, to enter with the devout soul and go out with himself: that is to say, to bring good and holy thoughts, conformable to such just soul, and then little by little he aims at coming out drawing the soul to his covert deceits and perverse intentions." (Ignatius of Loyola)

We are all pilgrims whose life is a being-in-tensions like a pendulum which swings from one end to its opposite. Superficiality, individualism, communism, fundamentalism, terrorism, racism, chauvinism, rationalism, spiritualism, or materialism rest precisely in the end of the sway, struggling with the opposite power to pull them to another end. As a matter of fact, sometimes such a conversion leads us to another extreme, bearing the same law of gravity so that  we are pulled back to previous end. Not really the previous point, for sure, because the power of constraint decreases.

Maturity and the depth of life lay in the moderation, that is, when the distance of pendulum's movement is getting shorter. The deeper our life, the more mature ourselves, the more stable the pendulum and at the end, there will be no movement. However, no movement in this world means death whereas maturity and the depth of life is in no way a death. Before reaching the threshold of death, maturity and the depth of life still do have movement. The difference is that this movement of maturity and the depth of life derives from within, from the fire inside, sparkling and splashing out.

The power of constraint, then, does not come from any extreme standpoint (fundamentalism, rationalism, spiritualism, etc), but from the guts which animates us to choose: not just between good and bad, but between good and better. We certainly argue about the criteria of good and bad, but unless we reach the maturity and depth of life, we never grasp the moderation of our being-in-tensions. We don't easily feel at home with our choice. We don't enjoy tension, we escape from the constraints, because we don't even think that endurance is possible until we reach the moderation. Things we enjoy in moderation usually last long, whereas extreme standpoints have potentially fast exhaustion.

Many happy returns to the day, Friend. Javanese puppet-show has so many stories which illustrate subtle movements within ourselves. The power of evil may take advantage of very good reasons to choose, to decide, to take a stand. Even for the sake of moderation, in the long run it leads us astray. I hope you understand that we are spiritual beings on a human pilgrimage.

Looking for what we are lacking

One day the padishah (i.e. the king) asked Afanti, the wise man of the kingdom,
"Afanti, if you were offered money or righteousness, which one would you choose: the former or the latter?"
"MONEY," Afanti replied without thinking.
"What's the matter with you, Afanti?" the padishah said,"If I were choosing I would choose the latter, that is, righteousness. I wouldn't chosen money. What's so rare about money? Righteousness is not easy to find, you know!"
"People always wish to obtain what they are lacking, Your Highness." Afanti said,"What you wish to obtain is just what you are lacking."
[cf. Zhong Qin, Everyday Chinese Selected Prose Readings, 1985]

What are you looking for?

 

Our life's between birth and death, as well as between right and left. It's sometimes a struggle between the worst and the best, as if there were a war between East and West.

Perhaps we have no experience of being poor, striving for being rich. We'd like to have our heart so pure just because it's qualifying as a bitch.

We don't care about divine nature alongside our human body. We neglect our fine venture, placing ourselves as noddy.

O, restless soul of Augustine, look beyond the world of your lifespan: people cry, people laugh, some fly while others quaff; they make war to seek peace, they create whores to corrupt the bliss.

O, pilgrim soul, what is there between birth and death? Is it narcissist fear of death or fundamentalist escape of life? Is scapegoat a real necessity in the absence of a future-shaping goal?

What are you looking for, my soul?

You proudly make every attempt to posses the whole world, but you are afraid of losing it. You prepare your own performance stages out of fear of being unrecognized, abandoned. You fight for freedom but you're imprisoned by it. You're glad to be rich but afraid of poverty. You appreciate healthy so much that you might be frozen by sickness.

Our life's between birth and death in this earth where we take breath. What are you looking for?