Madeleine L'Engle Quote

A friend shared this quote with me today, and I feel its worth passing along. 

"There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation." - Madeleine L'Engle

Simplicity

Alastair Humphreys edited this superb piece (I've copied it from him) on simple living by Pico Eyer. Read the full New York Times article here.

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”

     The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later.
    When I was 29, I began to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense.
    “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”
    I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

    So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

    I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart.

    When the phone does ring — once a week — I’m thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven’t missed much at all. While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

    Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.
    I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

    Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

    If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

Quoting Aristotle

"For the things which we have to learn before we can do them we learn by doing: people become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self control, and courageous by performing acts of courage."
-Aristotle

Values

"We may believe very strongly in certain values, but it is only as we inhabit an environment that encourages those values, an environment that also 'believes' in those values, that we are able to engage in lasting change."

Peter Rollins

I've left that quote on the "weekly quote" section for a few weeks now. Partly because I'm lazy, but partly because I find it to be such an exposing statement. And also, in part, because before I took it down I wanted to say a few things about it.

First - We all have certain values. They may have come to reside with us through a powerful life experience, perhaps something our parents taught us, or maybe just some bit of truth that we have come to identify with and can't seem to let go of. Whatever it is, when we are within an environment that contradicts or is separate from these values it can cause what I will call: internal turmoil.  Robert Pirsig explains this further considering the value of progress:

"... a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance..."  (From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

That might seem a little extreme, but is it? Take to mind that it was written nearly 35 years ago.  How many of those things have happened since 1974 in one way or another. So I must ask: are we progressing as a culture? And, is  progress a value that we (you or I) hold dear.  And if it isn't, now what?

Obviously, progress is good right? We have eradicated certain diseases and contained many others. I didn't have to make a fire to cook my dinner last night. But still I ask, are getting somewhere? It seems to be a question I am not yet able to answer.

Second: Being encouraged in our values: When I hear the word encouraged, I like to break it down even further thanks to a friend who once told me to encourage is to "impart courage." To give it. To create it where it did not exist before. I'm fortunate to say that on occasion I have been given courage. I've probably received more than I've given. (I hope that changes). However, in those moments when some one reaches out and gives you hope or courage in an area of your life that you really long to have it, a window to a whole new world opens up. And that world is the place where we actually get to engage in lasting change.

Third: Engaging in lasting change: In some senses it can be hard to separate that statement from the idea of progress. It seems they have become entwined. To change something is to move it forward, to affect it. Or so we've been told. But lasting change seems to be so much simpler than affecting the future outcome. I guess what I'm saying is in effect, change is not so much a course correction, as it is a mode of transportation. Its not where you go, its how you go about getting there. Its how you see things when you're on a walk versus on a run. On a motorcycle versus in a car.

So for reasons such as these, the quote from Peter Rollins is important and I don't want to forget it.

Thoughts from: Brennan Manning

"Naturally, the risk-takers are unnerving to the palace guards, who are threatened by anyone who trusts in God rather than the law.  The latter tend to despise men and women who are not as cautious as they.  They elevate themselves above the sinner and the nonconformist.  Because of this reliance on self, coupled with a lack of self-knowledge, the legalists render themselves incapable of receiving grace; they do not and dare not live by trust in a loving God.  They shake their heads, invoke hallowed traditions, and gratuitously employ their most potent and cruel weapon: guilt-tripping.  Threatened by the freedom of anyone who trusts in God rather than the law, legalists warn of dire consequences and howl like a wolf pack in the night.

The disciple, however, no longer plagued by the desire to please others and valuing God's approval more than the disapproval of humans, moves on with eyes fixed on Jesus, 'the author and pioneer of our trust.'"