Noble deeds are most estimable when hidden. When I see some of these in history, they please me greatly. But after all they have not been quite hidden, since they have been known; and though people have done what they could to hide them, the little publication of them spoils all, for what was best in them was the wish to hide them.

Hersheleh Kutin was a great artist. He did paintings for rich people. But he didn’t live like a rich person. People didn’t like him because he wouldn’t give money to charity. Some people hated him. When he died no one cried for him. But the week he died the poor people of the town went to the butcher and the baker for their food for Shabbos—and they were very surprised. For years the butcher and the baker were giving the poor people meat and bread for free. Now they suddenly stopped. Because Hersheleh Kutin the artist was paying for it secretly and now he was dead. And the people were sorry they had said bad things about him.

Quite often when we do some trifling thing our right hand promptly tells the whole world about it: ‘Look what I’ve done. Look what I’ve done!’ Oh yes, giving is easy enough, I mean giving as a tree gives shade from our loftiness downwards. But how hard it is to give without humiliating as a brother only doing his duty sharing with brothers and sisters what in fact belongs to them too.

Santa Claus is a means by which the left hand might not know what the left hand is doing.

This has to do, I think, with our rightful fear of being misunderstood or too simply understood, or of having our profoundest experience misvalued. This, surely, is one of the reasons for Christ’s insistence on the privacy of prayer. It is a part of our deepest and most precious integrity that we should speak (if we wish) for ourselves. We do not want self-appointed spokesmen for our souls.

It is unbelievable what a person of prayer can achieve if he would but close the doors behind him.

With the exception of the Lord’s Prayer, which is meant for a group, [Jesus] is always depicted as a practitioner of individual prayer either in solitude or at least at some distance from other people. We see him praying in the desert (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:15), on a mountain (Mark 6:46; Matt. 14:23; Luke 6:12), and in a garden away from his disciples (Mark 14:35; Matt. 26:39; Luke 22:41).

But I gae mad at their grimaces,
Their sighin’, cantin’ grace-proud faces,
Their three-mile prayers, an’ hauf-mile graces,

It is theologically possible to see the relationship between God and his people being tested by sin. Neither partner seeks a testing. Temptation is not to be played with; it is truly a threat to the relationship and could destroy it. But temptations and trials are inevitable. Sin is deeply embedded in the human condition and its principle work is to disturb the creator-creature relationship. This double sentiment of not wanting the test but knowing that it will arrive is succinctly expressed in the ending of Matthew’s version of Our Father: “Subject us not to the trial, but deliver us from the evil one.” (p. 206)

Our Father, you are in heaven
Our Mother, you call us home
Our Brother, you are the first there
Our Sister, your kingdom come.

Our Father you are in my heart
Our Mother I love your name
Our Brother, you love us so much
Our Sister we do the same.

Forgive us all
The things we do
That break the chain
Of hands with you

Give us this day
Our daily bread
And hold us close
Just like you said.

Dewitt Clinton, “In My Father’s House,” p. 298
Rubén Darío, “Paternoster to Pan,” p. 293
René Depestre, “Agoué-Taroyo,” p. 296
Hjalmar Flax, “Our Father,” p. 297
D. H. Lawrence, “Lord’s Prayer,” p. 295
Charles Péguy, I Am Their Father, Says God,” p. 300

God does not make it his business to see that his name is kept hallowed, that his kingdom come, that his will be done— unless these things are, at the same time, the request of man.

God needs man to disclose him, complete him, and fulfill him, Teilhard said. His friend Abbé Paul Grenet paraphrased his thinking about God: “His name is holy, but it is up to us to sanctify it; his reign is universal, but it is up to us to make him reign; his will is done, but it is up to us to accomplish it.” “Little by little,” the paleontologist himself said, “the work is being done.”

The first purpose of our lives must be, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” This is never a passive statement of endurance or of mere agreement to submit to whatever happens. It is a positive statement of the will to reach out for that which will bring glory to God.

May that which thou art, God, which the earth until now has only blasphemed, at last become that which alone is consecrated.

I am their father, says God Our Father who art in Heaven. My son told them often enough that I was their father.
I am their judge. My son told them so. I am also their father.
I am especially their father.
Well, I am their father. He who is a father is above all a father. Our Father who art in Heaven. He who has once been a father can be nothing else but a father.
…
And now I must judge them like a father. As if a father were any good as a judge.

Let never day nor night unhallowed pass
but still remember what the Lord hathe done.

The commandment of Heaven always interprets the real and unseen possibilities of the situation.

Our longing will be satisfied only when the whole earth comes under the rulership of God, not the rulership of force.

It is important for us to decide whether we want only a nice church with Jesus as its king or the way of the cross.

[Me: Is Jesus King of the Church or is he King of the Universe with the church as his XO?]

Jesus did not promise to build his church on Peter, the superior apostle, but on Peter the confessor of messianic authority. …

Jesus gave the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” (16:19; 18:18) to this community of disciples who recognize his authority to inaugurate the rule of God “on earth as it is in heaven.”

If we are to live well on and from our land, we must live by faith in the ceaselessness of these processes and by faith in our own willingness and ability to collaborate with them. Christ’s prayer for “daily bread” is an affirmation of such faith, just as it is a repudiation of faith in “much goods laid up.”

God gives us our daily bread without our asking, even to the wicked. But in this prayer we ask that he let us recognize and receive his gift with thanksgiving.

We used to ask—remember? We said,
“… our daily bread.” And it came
Now we want more, and security too:
“You can’t be too sure.” And,
“Why should we trust?—Who says?”
And Old-Who doesn’t speak any more.

Nothing left to eat;
Today’s sunrise.

There was a king who planted a garden
in which he took great pride.
He hired a certain man to care for it:
to plant, to trim, to cultivate the earth
Now the gardener needed sustenance for himself
and various supplies to tend the royal garden.
Should he be ashamed to come before the king
each day and seek that which he needs?
It is for the king himself that he is working!

In his conversations with Richard Etulain there is a passage in which Mr. Stegner names several of his old students, speaks of their accomplishments, and then says, “I try not to take credit for any of that.” In the mouths of some people that statement would not be trustworthy; in the mouths of some it would contradict itself. Coming from Mr. Stegner it is trustworthy, for in fact he has not been a taker of credit. The fellows have been left to their ways. They have come, benefited as they were able, and left free of obligation.

Christian charity does not seek to create grateful debtors, but to share unconditionally with the world.

[Me:  Christian charity does not seek to create grateful debtors but to ‘create debt-free, powerful ministers of God’s blessing.’]

“To forgive oneself”—? No, that doesn’t work: we have to be forgiven. But we can only bleieve this is possible if we ourselves can forgive. (p. 156)

Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who “forgives” you—out of love—takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself. (p. 197)

Soon
Soon you will pass from the darkened room
to another world. Freed from debts
and contacts.

Behold from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves one’s neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss. For a man does not serve that he may put men under obligations.

[Me: … and neither does God of course]

In the early days there were no snacks in the kitchen at Tassajara, so sometimes I’d send cookies to a friend of mine there. I began to wonder why she didn’t write to say how great I was. Then I thought, how selfish of me. I’m not being generous; there are strings attached. I just want something back.

I told Suzuki Roshi about this, and he said, “It’s all right for you to take care of her, but first you have to take care of yourself!” His voice rose as he said this, and then he got right in my face to say loudly, “Do you understand?”

This includes not only remitting the reparation of offences we think we have suffered; it is also letting go of the recognition for the good that we think we have done; and in a completely general way, all that we expect from people and things, everything we believe is our due, the absence of which has given us the sense of having been frustrated.  (p. 109)

… there is always an imaginary claim of the past on the future. It is this that we must renounce.  (p. 110)

Forgiveness of debts is the renunciation of our own personality.  (p. 111)

Was it the way of your world too,
old master, that everyone had to be
a villain in someone else’s life?

It is the way of ours apparently. Such
is the pressure of evil on our spirits now.

… the only time God tries us is when there is something in our hearts that needs revealing.

… Therefore the prayer, “lead us not into temptation,” means this: Lord, may there be nothing in me that will force you to put me to the test in order to reveal what is in my heart.”

Save me
from the doubts
that swarm
like maggots
feeding on a wound

Our prayer would read:
give us this day
our daily darkness,
deliver us not
from temptation.

A student asked him [Pinhas of Koretz] “What am I to do? I am pursued by evil temptations.” And he answered, “Are you sure? Are you sure it is not the other way around?”

Jesus says, “Forgive, and you will also be forgiven” (Mt. 6:14). That is to say, forgiveness is forgiveness. Your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive. If you wholeheartedly forgive your enemy, you may dare hope for your own forgiveness, for it is one and the same. God forgives you neither more nor less than as you forgive your trespassers.

It is an illusion to imagine that you have forgiveness while you are slack in forgiving others. No, there is not a more exact agreement between the sky above and its reflection in the sea below, than there is between forgiveness and forgiving. Is it not pure conceit to believe in your own forgiveness when you will not forgive others? For how in truth can you believe in forgiveness if your own life is a refutation of the existence of forgiveness?! (p. 116)

Christ abandoned “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” and turned the relationship around. He introduced a different like-for-like: as you relate yourself to others, so God relates himself to you. Forgiveness is to forgive. (p. 284)

These ifs have only one side, like a Möbius strip. Jesus doesn’t mean that if you do condemn, God will condemn you. He is pointing to a spiritual fact: when we condemn, we create a world of condemnation for ourselves, and we attract the condemnation of others; when we cling to an offense, we are clinging to precisely what separates us from our own fulfillment. Letting go means not only releasing the person who has wronged us, but releasing ourselves.

Here I want to underscore fasting as a means of helping us to suffer joyfully.

All creatures live by God’s spirit portioned out to them and breathe His breath. To “lay up … treasures in heaven,” then cannot mean to be spiritual at the earth’s expense or to despise or condemn the earth for the sake of heaven. It means exactly the opposite: do not desecrate or deprecate these gifts which take part with us in the being of God by turning them into worldly “treasure”; do not reduce life to money or to any other mere quantity.

As Jim Wallis insistently reminds us, budgets are moral documents, our acts of worship—where our treasures are and where our hearts are,

As long as we are unwilling to admit great areas of ourselves into our lives to conjoin sunside and nightside it is difficult for us not to put our trust in that which will rust and decay where thieves break in and steal.

[My parents] reared me under the constant counsel to trust spiritual values ahead of material ones, and to look to the land for shelter. “A house can burn down,” they said, “but a piece of land will always be there.” …

I’ve internalized my parents’ message in a way that is not precisely personal … and have spent a lifetime learning to believe in things that can never burn down. I can invest my heart’s desire and the work of my hands in things that will outlive me.

When our hearts are empty, we collect things.

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power …
… We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things …
…  All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity.  …
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard and full of meanness.

… they were without possessions in which to invest their trust.

If there is true desire—if the object of desire is truly the light—the desire for light produces light. There is true desire whenever there is an effort of attention.It is truly the light that is desired if all other motives are absent. Even when the efforts at attention remain sterile in appearance for years, one day a light exactly proportional to this effort inundates the soul. Each effort adds a little gold to the treasure that nothing in the world can steal.

Follow the star and you shall see
His gift of grace to you and me.
Follow the star that followed the youth
Who gave us love and taught us truth.
Follow the star that follows the man
Who takes us where none other can
To where our hopes and treasures are.
Follow, o follow, the star.

Children
Sitting cheerfully
Around the fire—
The only treasures of the house.

…   When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

Let thine eye be single, serve God, seek God, know God only, and thy whole body shall be full of light.

The eyes of my eyes are opened.

From Plotinus, Augustine had learned that man’s reason is like the soul’s flashlight,

I said his outward life became simplified, and used the passive voice intentionally. He didn’t have to struggle, and renounce, and strain to achieve simplicity. He yielded to the Center and his life became simple. it was synoptic. It had singleness of eye. “If thine eye be single thy whole body shall be full of light.” His many selves were integrated into a single true self, whose whole aim was humbly walking in the presence and guidance and will of God.

From this I could see (and tell her) that she had a simple open eye and noticed everything with quiet pleasure and put it down as she saw it.

(note: She didn’t try to be struck. It just quietly happened.)

… do the first thing first. Say nothing of investigation till you have made sure of being grounded everlastingly and with completely whole intent in the principle of right doing as a principle.

… For this is what Christ calls the single eye, and the whole body is inevitably full of light. How surely and how fast fly away the doubts even as fogs are burned away by the sun.

Your
Eye
Is so wise
It keeps turning, turning
Needing to touch
Beauty.

Neither of us [Wes Jackson and Wendell] believes that either art or science can be “neutral.” Influence and consequence are inescapable. History continues. You cannot serve both God and Mammon, and you cannot work without serving one or the other.

Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.

And what is it supposed to mean that a man treats money, which is un-being incarnate, “as if it were God”? What does the voluptuous delight of rapacity and hoarding have in common with the joy over the presence of that which is present? Can mammon’s slave say You to money? And what could God be to him if he does not know how to say You? He cannot serve two masters—not even one after the other; he must first learn to serve differently.

“You buried your heart where you hid your treasure.” (p. 118)

I have translated the saying negatively. I understand it not just as stating the truism that treasures are treasured but as challenging us to ponder the conjunction between a treasure buried, and therefore safe, and a heart buried, and therefore dead. (p. 165)

I do not know how to espouse freedom and slavery together. I do not know how to worship God and Mammon at the same time.

[man kneeling by bedside with hands folded in prayer] “And now, if I may, I’d like to put You on hold for a moment while I have a few words with Mammon.”

God and emperors just do not get along. They do not get along because they both want it all.  (p. 270)

Wealth just turns out to be another word for emperor.  …
Christian accommodation that results from playing the game called “Caesar’s coin” insures that the separation of church and state will make Christians faithful servants of states that allegedly give the church freedom.  (p. 272)

No, a person must choose, for in this way God retains his honor while at the same time has a fatherly concern for human-kind. Though God has lowered himself to being that which can be chosen, yet each person must on his part choose. God is not mocked. Therefore the matter stands thus: If a person avoids choosing, this is the same as the presumption of choosing the world.

Each person must choose between God and the world, God and mammon. This is the eternal, unchangeable condition of choice that can never be evaded – no, never in all eternity. No one can say, “God and world, they are not, after all, so absolutely different. One can combine them both in one choice.” This is to refrain from choosing. When there is a choice between two, then to want to choose both is just to shrink from the choice “to one’s own destruction” (Heb. 10:39).

The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggle between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter.

The modern world worships a two-faced god: time-and-money.

[Me: In quantity only, hours (κρονος) and $, not seasons (καιρος) and abundance (shalom).]

MAMMON Material goods which the Church says you can’t serve while serving God. This from a multi-million-dollar institution that doesn’t pay taxes. (p. 77) MATERIALISM A sin American Catholics are preoccupied with— according to the guy with his own city. (p. 80)

Silent and sad,
When all are glad,
And the earth is dressed in flowers;
When the gay birds sing
Till the forests ring,
As they rest in woodland bowers.

Oh, why these tears,
And these idle fears
For what may come to-morrow?
The birds find food F
rom God so good,
And the flowers know no sorrow

If He clothes these
And the leafy trees,
Will He not cherish thee?
Why doubt His care;
It is everywhere,
Though the way we may not see.
(poem written at the age of eleven)

(written 40 years ago by author who is now 90. She had MS for 40 years.)

1. Thou shalt not worry, for worry is the most unproductive of all human behaviors.

2. Thou shalt not be fearful. Most of the things we fear never come to pass.

3. Thou shalt not cross bridges before you get to them. No one has ever succeeded in accomplishing that.

4. Thou shalt face each problem as it comes. You can only handle one at a time anyway.

5. Thou shalt not take problems to bed with you. They make very poor bedfellows.

6. Thou shalt not borrow other people’s problems. They can take better care of them than you can.

7. Thou shalt not try to relive yesterday. For good or ill, it is gone. Concentrate on what is happening in your life today.

8. Thou shalt count thy blessings. Never overlook the small ones, for a lot of small blessings add up to a big one.

9. Thou shalt be a good listener for only when you listen do you hear ideas different from your own. It’s very hard to learn something new when you are talking.

10. Thou shalt not become bogged down by frustration. 90% is rooted in self-pity and it will only interfere with positive action.

If he [Wes Jackson] had a text in mind, it must have been the sixth chapter of Matthew, in which, after speaking of God’s care for nature, the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field, Jesus says: “Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or Wherewithal shall we be clothed? … But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

There is an attitude that sees in this text a denial of the value of any economy of this world, but this attitude makes the text useless and meaningless to humans who must live in this world. These verses make usable sense only if we read them as a statement of considerable practical import about the real nature of worldly economy. If this passage meant for us to seek only the Kingdom of God, it would have the odd result of making good people not only feckless but also dependent upon bad people busy with quite other seekings. It says, rather, to seek the Kingdom of God first; that is, it gives an obvious necessary priority to the Great Economy over any little economy made within it.

It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust: how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree,
that we, driving or driven, despise
in our greed to live, our haste
to die. To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.

from “The Peace of the Wild Things (p. 69)

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.

from “Window Poems # 7” [speaking about birds]

But they understand only
what is free and he
can give only as they
will take. Thus they have
enlightened him. He buys
the seed to make it free. (p. 78)

from “Window Poems, #9” (p. 79)

He imagines
a necessary joy
in things that must fly
to eat (p. 79)

Against such cold and mercurial mornings,
watch the wind whirl one leaf
across the landscape,
then, in a breath, let it go.
The color in the opaque sky
seems almost not to exist.

Put on a wool sweater.
Wander in the leaves,
underneath healthy elms.
Hold your child in your arms.

After the dishes are washed,
a kiss still warm at your neck,
put down your pen. Turn out the light.

I know how difficult it is,
always balancing and weighing,
it takes years and many transformations;
and always another loss to stop for,

to send you backwards.

Why do you worry so,
when none of us is spared?

The dream subverts Pharaoh’s nightmare. Jesus laid it out, having read the exodus narrative:

“Do not be anxious”—do not trust Pharaoh;
“Your heavenly father knows what you need”— then provides abundantly;
“Seek the kingdom”—care for the neighborhood, and all will be well.  (p. 36).

Solomon! Solomon of the great triad of wisdom, might, and wealth! Be unlike Solomon in pursuit of control and domination and safety. Be unlike the triad of Pharaoh, unlike the triad of the national security state, unlike the triad of old certitudes:  (pp. 71-72)

A person must be content to be as he is; a dependent being, as little capable of sustaining himself as of creating himself. If we choose to forget God and look after our own sustenance, then we are overcome with anxiety. It is certainly praiseworthy and pleasing to God when a person works for his food. But if he forgets God, and thinks that he himself is supporting himself, then he becomes burdened with the necessities of life. Let us not foolishly and small-mindedly say that the wealthy are spared this anxiety, while the poor are not. On the contrary, only he is spared who is content with being human and understands that his heavenly Father feeds him. And this is as possible for the wealthy as is it for the poor.

Worry about making a living, or not making a living, is a snare. In actuality, it is the snare. No external power, no actual circumstance, can trap a person. If a person chooses to be his own providence, then he will go quite ingenuously into his own trap, the wealthy as well as the poor. If he wants to entrench himself in his own plot of ground that is not under God’s care, then he is living, though he does not acknowledge it, in a prison.

There are many people you can see who consider worry a kind of duty. Back of this I think it is the subconscious feeling that Fate or God is mean or resentful or tetchy and that if we do not worry enough we will certainly catch it from Him.

[Me:  This “duty” can also be that of using the highest gift of our intelligence to look into the future and prepare for it, to create virtual plans.]

… I heard—really heard—the scripture reading about seeking first God’s kingdom and righteousness, and everything else being provided (Matt. 6:25-34).  Suddenly it occurred to me: This promise is falsifiable.  It can be put to scientific test.  During the coming summer I will stake my life on this passage being true, and, if God is real, by the end of the summer I will know.  I will act as if this statement were true.  I will prove or disprove it empirically.

That test proved stunningly successful.

Worrisome you

You worry for your mother, your father, your sister, your
brother, stepsister, stepbrother, stepmother, stepfather
You worry for your husband, daughters, sons, stepsons, stepdaughters

Now you’re worrying for Tom
Worry for you
not Tom
Tom worries for Tom
as tomorrow worries for itself
…
Wrinkles, gray hairs that dance their way through your skull
Worry not you!
Health’s too precious to swim with worries

I hear the sound of wings.
What man can abide the rule
of “the market” when he hears,
in his waking, in his sleep,
the sound of wings?

I have sometimes wondered if perhaps it was the writers of the Gospels themselves who put into Jesus’ mouth by way of explanation the words, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil not spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” I have wondered if perhaps Jesus himself, when the incident actually took place, merely pointed to the lilies and said nothing at all. (p. 100)

Coots, heads bobbing, forever urging themselves
fussily onward … How strong their neck-muscles
must be! One is put in mind of human philistines
toiling and spinning through their lives
anxiously complacent in pursuit of trivia.

Singing, flying, singing
the cuckoo
keeps busy.

By morning the strands of the nest disappear
into each other shaping
an emptiness within me that I make lovely
as immature birds make the air
by defining the tunnels and the spirals
of the new substance. And then
no longer hindered by the violence of their need
they take to other trees, fling themselves
deep into the world.

…  For the birds who own
nothing—the reason they can fly.

Can we count the hairs of a head?
Or clothe ourselves with lilies?

… the way the flowers were dressed in nothing but light.

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you—what of your rushed and
useful life? Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments, everything—
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep you life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

“Consider the lilies” is the only commandment I ever obeyed.

We join our work to Heaven’s gift
Our hope to what is left
That field and woods at last agree
In an economy
Of widest worth
High Heaven’s Kingdom come on earth
Imagine Paradise.
O dust arise!

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

… being part of one Creation, with one Creator, we must seek our happiness in the good of others, thereby realizing our own good and living like brothers in one human family.

What is needed is not frivolous. Everything depends on our right relation to necessity—and therefore on our right definition of necessity.