Luke 24:13-24 —… Christ will appear on this earth as calmly and casually as he appeared to the disciples walking to Emmaus after his death, who did not recognize this man to whom they had pledged their very lives; this man whom they had seen beaten, crucified, abandoned by God; this man who, after walking the dusty road with them, after sharing an ordinary meal and discussing the scriptures, had to vanish once more in order to make them see.

Matthew 5:1-12 —… the man
not of this world …
… sat down
and into the quiet quietly blessed,
all the sufferers, all the troubled ones.
Matthew 5:45 — … as Nature continues
serenely her world-making, in spite
of us if we oppose her, indifferently using us
if we would be her friends.
Luke 20:38 — … I know at last haw all of us
are held in the union, communion, the assembly,
the great membership of this world’s live
that comprehends its numberless
becomings and farewells. In the Kingdom of God
all who ever lived are living.
Only we humans, we the poor,
suffer the ancient mistake, dividing
the living from the dead, confusing life
with time. We divide life from death
for the purpose of killing each other, killing
ourselves, or we confuse living bodies
with machines, the truly dead, to increase
happiness and “create wealth.” …
…
The Kingdom of God is life itself.

Genesis 3 — Then the gods said to themselves, “Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals.”
“This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.”
“If Adam should eat of our tree … there’s no telling how he might deceive himself.”
“If [the story] had been written from the Taker point of view, the knowledge of good and evil wouldn’t have been forbidden to Adam, it would have been thrust upon him.  …  [The Takers] have always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right.”
One of the clearest indicators that these two stories were not authored by your cultural ancestors is the fact that agriculture is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse.  … agriculture is the lot of the fallen.”
“… saying yes to Life [Eve] and accepting the knowledge of good and evil are merely different aspects of a single act … When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit.”
“Reading the story as if it had been authored by someone with their own point of view, they didn’t stand a chance of understanding it.  …  Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture.”

Genesis 4:1-16 —“What was happening along that border was that Cain was killing Abel. The tillers of the soil were watering their fields with the blood of Semitic herders.”
“If you read it as a story that originated among you own cultural ancestors, it’s incomprehensible.  It only begins to make sense when you realize that it originated among the enemies of your cultural ancestors.”

Matthew 5:33-37 —[Paolo] Prodi examines how this could happen, how people could tire under the enormous burden imposed on the ordinary word of having to be always truthful, and how this could lead them to make an institution of their mutual engagement by calling on God to witness their oaths. … God becomes, so to speak, the necessary instrumentality when he is summoned as a witness.

Matthew 5:6 —One day I complained to Suzuki Roshi about the people I was working with.
He listened intently.  Finally, he said, “If you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.”

Mark 2:15-17 —A student asked Suzuki Roshi if he kept and eye on his students to see if they were following the precepts, the Buddhist guidelines of conduct.
“I don’t pay any attention to whether you’re following the precepts or not,” he answered.  “I just notice how you are with one another.”

Ezekiel 37:3-3 — quoting “Slaveships” by Lucille Clifton

Mark 5:25-34 — She doesn’t think to herself “why not” but instead feels a compulsion in her heart that she does not understand but understands that it requires action.  The scripture tells us that Jesus feels “virtue” or “power” go out of him, and maybe what this unnamed woman first felt when she heard the name of Jesus was pain going out of her–and she went to find the man who had the name that could make this miracle come to pass.  …  There is not a person reading these words … who does not have, festering somewhere, a bullet in them. Sitting down to write these thoughts was the first time I ever considered all the other people around Jesus when he healed that woman with the issue of blood. They, too, had their issues of blood. It’s a wonder Jesus didn’t shatter from the sheer pressure of all those unspeakable pains around him. But then, eventually, I guess he did.

Mark 14:32-42 —“Not my will, Lord, but yours.” That’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane before the Roman soldiers come to take him to his death, just after he has sweated blood, begged God to let the cup of suffering pass him by, and wept to leave this world that he has come to love so completely and, it seems, helplessly. And then: Not my will, k Lord, but yours. It’s difficult enough to pray a prayer like this when you’re thinking of making some big life decision. It damn bear impossible when your actual life is on the line, or the life of someone you love, when all you want to pray is help, help, help.

Luke 20:18 — (But this sort of self-destruction, according to Weil, does not work. Is too late. The self that is destroyed from the outside rather than from the inside is subject only to degradation and humiliation, an erasure that raises nothing in its wake. Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken, says Jesus, but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.)

John 11 — “Love Song,” Adélia Prado
“Ah,” said Martha and Mary, “if You had been here,
our brother would not have died.”  “Wait,” said Jesus,
“let me cry first.”
So it’s okay to cry?  I can cry too?

… Jesus weeps even though he knows what is going to happen:  he will raise Lazarus from the dead.  His knowledge spares him nothing.  It’s almost as if “what is going to happen is contingent upon human grief, as if fact had to pass through feeling in order to be fact.  That the fact here is a miracle only intensifies the strangeness.
… The scene with Jesus suggests that time itself becomes sclerotic without proper sorrow.

1 Kings 19:1-18 — I’ve been through the cycle enough times to know what happens after the period of tears, the downward spiral, and the temptation to flee. After that there is nothing. A quiet mind. Darkness that reveals starlight, a blanket of strange comfort. 
Mark 1:15 — Benedictines pledge to an outwardly paradoxical life of simultaneous conversion and stability—a constant evolution of mind an spirit within the rootedness of a particular community. … adsum. I am here.