“I
do feel helpless,” he said in response to a question at a wide-ranging,
emotionally charged news conference here in what has served as the
headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile for nearly 40 years. “I
feel very sad, very serious, very anxious. Cannot do anything,”
His
aides said they had received reports from Tibet of 80 killings on
Thursday and Friday alone, in and around the Tibetan capital, Lhasa,
including 26 slain just outside a prison called Drapchi. Chinese state
media has reported 10 deaths and characterized most of them as
shopkeepers ”burned to death” during protests.
Tibetan exiles here said they had also received news of at least two
Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire as an act of protest; that
claim could not be independently confirmed.
For the second straight day on Sunday, protests spread into different
Tibetan regions of China. Buddhist monks and police reportedly clashed
in a Tibetan region of Sichuan Province. A crowd of 200 Tibetan
protesters burned down a local police station, news agencies reported.
One
witness said a police officer was killed in the confrontation. But the
India-based Tibet Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported that
the police in the region had killed at least seven Tibetan protesters.
The
Dalai Lama, who heads the government in exile and serves as the
spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, called Sunday for an independent
international inquiry into the recent violence.
He endorsed the right to peaceful protest, called violence an “act of
suicide,” and accused Beijing of carrying out “a rule of terror.”
Asked
if he could stop Tibetan protesters from flouting Beijing’s deadline to
surrender by midnight on Monday, the Dalai Lama, 72, replied swiftly:
“I have no such power.”
He said he
had received a call on Saturday from Tibet. “‘Please don’t ask us to
stop,’” was the caller’s request. The Dalai Lama promised he would not,
even though he said he expected the Chinese authorities to put down the
protests with force.
“Now we really need miracle power,” he said, and then laughed. “But miracle seems unrealistic.”
Jim Yardley contributed reporting from Beijing.
*******
From Father Jake Stops the World:
Matthew 26:69-75:
Now
Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. A servant-girl came to him
and said, "You also were with Jesus the Galilean." But he denied it
before all of them, saying, "I do not know what you are talking about."
When he went out to the porch, another servant-girl saw him, and she
said to the bystanders, "This man was with Jesus of Nazareth." Again he
denied it with an oath, "I do not know the man." After a little while
the bystanders came up and said to Peter, "Certainly you are also one
of them, for your accent betrays you." Then he began to curse, and he
swore an oath, "I do not know the man!" At that moment the cock crowed.
Then Peter remembered what Jesus had said: "Before the cock crows, you
will deny me three times." And he went out and wept bitterly.
1. We begin in silence, quieting our minds and our hearts, becoming silent, empty, and open to God.
2.
We engage the text, preferably reading it aloud to ourselves, listening
for a word or phrase that seems to speak to us at that moment.
3.
We return the silence, meditating on the word or phrase we have heard,
and noting the thoughts or images that it brings forth.
4. We
read the passage a second time, now listening for what God might be
saying or showing us in this passage. We listen with our hearts. How
does this passage touch your daily life?
5. We read the passage
a third time, listening for what God might be calling us to do in light
of this time of reflection and meditation.
6. We return to the silence, resting in God's presence.
Comments will be in moderation mode until I land in California sometime late tonight.
J.
Posted by Jake****
From Solitary Walker
Travelling
is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that
place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be
intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace
my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there
beside me is the stern Fact, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with
sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me
wherever I go.
This comes from Emerson's great essay, Self-Reliance.
Surely Bob Dylan had read this essay before writing his song, Trust Yourself, for the 3rd paragraph begins: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Posted by The Solitary Walker
****
Embracing Insecurity
{From "Jacob's Hip" by Kerry Walters}
"As
Martin Smith discomfortingly reminds us, "We sin by thinking and acting
as if other forces in the world were actually more powerful than the
creative love of God and thus had to be submitted to on their own
terms."
The gospel tells us, "Be not afraid!" The good news is
that Christ's entry into a precarious world has subverted fear, freeing
his followers from the age-old dread of insecurity.
For the most
part, We Christians have assumed we should be unafraid because we are
under Christ's protection and thus insulated from worldly dangers. But
this is false. When we're told not to be afraid, the implication isn't
that God's patronage somehow makes us invulnerable (the roll call of
martyrs tells us this much), but rather that vulnerability isn't
anything that ought to panic us. Insecurity we will always have with
us. The trick is to accept it -- indeed, to embrace it -- as a
necessary and even welcome part of the human condition. It is only by
balancing on the edge, dancing on the margin, that we become fully
human. This is how Jesus himself lived, and it is the way he encouraged
us to live. When we shy away from his invitation to vulnerability, we become underground creatures who give us sunshine and fresh air for the sake of a false security.....
***
A Spirituality on the Edge
John
Dear says we must come before God as we really are, and that means in
all our vulnerable nakedness. To do that, we must embrace a
spirituality that frees us to live with our frailty. The heart of that
spirituality isn't safety and security. Instead, it is what Dorthy Day
called 'precarity.'
In the minds of most, precarity (or precariousness)
is a bleak state of uncertainty and danger. The word connotes
instability, poverty, marginalization, the absence of a safety net. A
precarious economy, a precarious state of health, a precarious
relationship: each of these spells trouble. We fear precarity because
precarity is vulnerability. Yet, counter-intuitively, Day claims that
precarity is a grace for which we ought to pray. "We usually get what
we pray for," she says, 'and maybe we are afraid to pray for it
{precarity}. And yet I am convinced that it is the grace we most need
in this age of crisis, this time when expenditures reach into the
billions to defend 'our American way of life.'"
We ought to keep in mind that precarity doesn't simply mean "uncertainty." It also suggests radical dependence: the Latin precarious is
the state of being dependent on another's will, being upheld or
sustained by another's force. So a spirituality centered on precarity
acknowledges the racical uncertainty or contingency of human existence
and our utter dependence on God. .....
One way of getting a
handle on the full meaning of precarity is to translate it into the
more familiar scriptural phrase "spiritual poverty." Jesus commends
spiritual poverty in his Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:3) , giving it pride
of place among the beatitudes. The implication is that the other
blessings are somehow subordinate or flow from this first one. Unless a
person has cultivated spiritual poverty, mercy and meekness and a hunger for justice and peace are hard to come by.
Many
of us tend to think that what Jesus means by spiritual poverty is a
turn-the-other-cheek kind of passivity. But in fact this is too timid
an interpretation. Jesus' understanding of poverty is much more
subversive than that. If we look at the Greek, we discover just how
dark and frightening -- but also liberating -- his words actually are.
The expression translated as "the poor in spirit" is ptochoi tou pneumati. Ptochos is one of two words for "poverty" found in scripture, and it has a terrible meaning. To be in a state of ptoches isn't simply to be materially poor in the sense of living from hand to mouth. A person of ptoches
is destitute, bereft of the necessities to even sustain life. Whoever
falls to this depth is utterly without resources and must depend on the
largesse of others or perish. the street person who huddles on a city
grate or lives in a cardboard hut is ptoches.
The material destitution suggested by the word ptoches
is frightening enough. But Jesus adds an entirely new dimension of
foreboding to the word when he uses it in a spiritual sense. His
implication is that there is an inner destitution analogous to material
ptoches, a spiritual
poverty that strips us of internal resources and makes us helplessly
dependent for our spiritual survival on something other than ourselves.
A
second, complementary way of thinking of precarity is in terms of what
the theologian Johannes Metz calls the "poverty of provisionality." As
historical creatures, we are constantly on the move, trailing a long
past that is over and done and facing an uncertain because
not-yet-happened future. We may long to hunker down and stay in place,
but this kind of stasis is impossible. What we are at any present
moment is always a flowing toward the future. Thus we are provisional,
contingent, not yet complete. To be human is to "face the risk of a
future that is yet to be," and this entails that our fundamental way of
being is more along the lines of "not quite yet" than "solidly here and
now."
***
The Dalai Lama's autobiograhy
Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of The Dalai Lama is a truly moving story that is virtually a modern myth of courage and faithfulness and rebirth.
Not
long ago, the question was posed to His Holiness the Dalai Lama as to
why he penned his autobiography -- Freedom in Exile. To this query he
responded with: `I am human being who had quite a lot of sad situation,
yet my mental health seems not bad. I think some people might find some
idea [in my tale], some small contribution for inner peace, for
happiness.'
If one positive thing has resulted from his having
to depart Tibet, was that he was brought closer to the plight of his
own people and the rest of the world. Tenzin Gyatso, now the 14th Dalai
Lama was given the chance to see things as they really are. In `Freedom
in Exile' the message becomes a universal one - one that transcends a
locality and that is what makes this book so compelling and necessary.
From being the most secluded leader of the modern world, the 14th Dalai
Lama is now among the most traveled, most celebrated and best known.
The humble figure in maroon robes has become the locus of attention for
the world's angst about Chinese authoritarianism and ideological
expansion. The situation of the Tibetans - as penned by the Dalai Lama
in `Freedom in Exile' is proof positive that despite Mao's utterances
that `Religion is Poison' - we are left thinking perhaps the reverse is
true - `Non-Religion is Poison'.
(from Amazon review) Permalink Miguel Llora
***
In
the Dalai Lama's recent visit to Atlanta and Emory University, he and
the Tibet in Exile community took great pains to host many events
designed to communicate the universality of our common concerns as
human beings. His instructions to his monks concern the monks'
education in science and mathematics. His intent seems to be to
translate much of the 'technology' of Tibetan Buddhism into the less theological language of neuroscience.
The
Palm Sunday story struck me very hard today. That the Jerusalem of
Jesus' time held millions of people who had come for passover. Some had
come for the circus, the carnival, some had come for passover, and some
had come for revolution. "Hosanna" was a way of saying, "Save Us!" The
brutality of Herod was legend. At one point , Herod had taken 2000
revolutionary plotters and crucified them all , side by side in a
spectacle that stretched for miles. Into this world came Jesus as he
gave himself 'to be handed over.'
****
BLESSING FOR SUFFERING
John O'Donohue
May you be blessed in the holy names of those
Who, without you knowing it,
Help to carry and lighten your pain.
May you know serenity
When you are called
To enter the house of suffering.
May a window of light always surprise you.
May you be granted the wisdom
To avoid false resistance;
When suffering knocks on the door of your life,
May you glimpse its eventual gifts.
May you be able to receive the fruits of suffering.
May memory bless and protect you
With the hard-earned light of past travail;
To remind you that you have survived before
And though the darkness now is deep,
You will soon see approaching light.
May the grace of time heal your wounds.
May you know that though the storm might rage,
Not a hair of your head will be harmed.
***
