Gospel.singing

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A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.

Wendell Berry
"The Loss of the Future"

Church this a.m. at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
The gospel for the day is Matthew 6: 25-34

Do Not Worry

25"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life[a]?

28"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

(a) Matthew 6:27 Or single cubit to his height

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Psalm 78

A maskil of Asaph. [a]
1 O my people, hear my teaching;
listen to the words of my mouth.

2 I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter hidden things, things from of old-

3 what we have heard and known,
what our fathers have told us.

Psalm 78:1(a) Title: Probably a literary or musical term

*

Patty, Shalin and I went to Ebenezer Baptist -- I loved the singing, the energy, the seamless way that the choir and the preacher and the ushers move the service. How the congregation know their parts, how they understand and participate in the theology. God is moving through history, God is present in our histories both personal and societal. God is moving us right now, at this moment. The theology never loses sight of the fact that each individual has his contribution within the community, but it is the story of the community that we are celebrating as our life within God's hand.

The opening chant /song (after the Battle Hymn of the Republic) was

"The Lord is still Good --
After all I've been through --
The Lord is still Good."

The metaphors within these traditional hymns seem different within each setting. What is the battle ? Who is fighting a battle and what is it for? Is it really a battle , or does it just feel like one? Is the battle internal or external ? The feeling of the hymn is colored by the community that sings it.

Then there was a chant which expressed the sentiment :

"Forget about yourself -- come and worship God, Forget about yourself, come and be with the people of your community and think about the needs of the people."

This seemed to be a gentle reminder. Remember . Remember who you are, why you're here, remember who God is, who you are. Whose son or daughter are you ? Where have you been? It isn't just you, or , you are more than you think you are. There is an aspect of you that can only come into being as part of a or this community.

Then the minister basically preached about Obama and about "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

[From Wikipedia:]

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" — often called "The Negro National Hymn" or "The Negro National Anthem" — was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) and then set to music by his  brother John Rosamond Johnson (1873–1944) in 1900.

"Lift Every Voice and Sing" (now also known as "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing") was publicly performed first as a poem as part of a celebration of Lincoln's Birthday on February 12, 1900 by 500 schoolchildren at the segregated Stanton School. Its principal, James Weldon Johnson, wrote the words to introduce its honored guest Booker T. Washington.

The poem was later set to music by Mr. Johnson's brother, John, in 1905. Singing this song quickly became a way for African Americans to demonstrate their patriotism and hope for the future. In calling for earth and heaven to "ring with the harmonies of Liberty," they could speak out subtly against racism and Jim Crow laws—and especially the huge number of lynchings accompanying the rise of the Ku Klux Klan at the turn of the century. In 1919, the NAACP adopted the song as "The black National Anthem." By the 1920s, copies of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" could be found in black churches across the country, often pasted into the hymnals.

In 1939, Augusta Savage received a commission from the World's Fair[1] and created a 16 foot tall plaster sculpture called Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing. Savage did not have any funds for a bronze cast, or even to move and store it, and it was destroyed by bulldozers at the close of the fair.

During and after the American Civil Rights Movement, the song experienced a rebirth, and by the 1970s was often sung immediately after "The Star Spangled Banner" at public events and performances across the United States where the event had a significant African-American population.

In Maya Angelou's 1969  autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the song is sung by the audience and students at Maya's eighth grade graduation, after a white school official dashes the educational aspirations of her class.[2]**

Bear den, Rom are and Henderson, Harry. A History of African-American Artists (From 1792 to the Present), pp. 168-180, Pantheon Books (Random House), 1993, ISBN 0-394-57016-2
^ Angelou, Maya (1969). I know why the caged bird sings. New  York, New York: Random House, 169-184 ISBN 0-375-50789-2.**

The first verse is the one most commonly heard.

Lift every voice and sing,'
Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,'
Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.**

Our sermon was the "God of Our Weary Years" -- Despite our fears, or loss of hope , we remember that Faith and Memory are inextricably connected. When we recite and recount what God has already done, we recall also the sacrifices made and the pain suffered. We recognize ourselves in the stories about people brought through history to a particular time and place. In we see the themes in Psalms 105, 106 135 and 136, we have songs like "Lift Every Voice" that recall for a later generation what has been done. We remember because it helps us to ''envision God's bright future.''

We rejoice because we remember. We aren't remembering so as to settle scores or be bitter. Every person here, even Barack Obama didn't get here all alone. Where Obama stands today -- you stand. He didn't get there by himself, and no one else did either. We recite and recount what God has done, what our ancestors went through. We tell the stories so that we stand in a common knowledge of where we come from, and where we seem to be headed. We remind each other of our stories so that we don't lose heart or lose faith.

When we shout in the present, we look in the rear view mirror at the past -- [the objects are always closer than they appear.] When we see a turtle on a fence post, we know that someone put him there. No turtle gets up on a fence post all by itself. We are all these turtles on fence posts. We are all walking the fine line between crazy and prophetic. We are acting walking singing and saying because of those who came before us , and fought the battles that they fought. We stand on their shoulders, and need to remember that.

We believe that God is moving across History -- moving everywhere, in and amidst and in spite of "the wine of the world." The world is a place of forgetting, a place of getting lost. We need one another to recall.

We rejoice because we remember.

Then we sang , held hands, lifted up hands, greeted, thanked and prayed with each other. It was a huge energetic transaction -- the voices, singing, gesturing, spontaneous response, the songs with big hand and body gestures.

In my church, we never reference politics except in the most general sense. In the past, there has been a lot of conflict and contention about political and cultural matters. Which I don't think is a bad thing. What is unfortunate is that the past conflict has seemed to lead to our present conflict adverse situation. It creates a stuck energy that is keeping us from really "listening to what the spirit is telling the churches." I just know that , if God is truly the God who moves and speaks through history, there is something in the wind. That I wanted to be with people who were going to celebrate Obama's victory. It seemed too big to let it pass unremarked in my community. It transcends a 'personal' celebration -- the fact that it happened at all seems to validate the theology that goes "no man is an island, complete unto himself alone." That says that our religion speaks of a people , not just of personal acts of observance and piety.

So Patty and Shalin and I headed downtown to the King center, and gave thanks to God and to the larger community , a community which gives assent to the covenant and remembers and is faithful to:

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.*

*

The Sacrament of Waiting

Macrina Wiederkehr

Slowly
she celebrated the sacrament of letting go.
First she surrendered her green,
then the orange, yellow, and red
finally she let go of her brown.
Shedding her last leaf
she stood empty and silent, stripped bare.
Leaning against the winter sky
she began her vigil of trust.

***

START CLOSE IN

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.

Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's questions,
don't let them
smother something
simple.

To find
another's voice
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.

Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don't follow
someone else's
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don't mistake
that other
for your own.

Start close in,
don't take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step you don't want to take.

~ David Whyte ~

*

Fred / Slacktivist

Shine a light

Racism, bigotry and xenophobia are immoral, of course, but they are also, just as fundamentally, They are untrue.unreal. They provide a theory and a framework for living in the world that cannot be reconciled with the reality of this world. The person who chooses to accept that unreal framework is thus constantly forced to choose between unreality and reality, between the theory and the facts. To hold onto the unreal framework, they must continuously reject reality. And every time they do that, they get a little bit dumber.**

**

The truth is that unreality is simply unsustainable. Maintaining one's belief in an unreal and untrue theory takes too much work. The vigilant rejection of reality has to be, on some level, exhausting. Even the elaborate support structures provided by Fox News and AM radio cannot wholly shield one from the constant intrusions of the world that is. Denying the existence of that world requires more help than even the voluminous right-wing echo chamber can provide.

This, I think, is part of why we're seeing such desperate vehemence at the Palin rallies. The crowd realizes that the unreality it has chosen cannot long survive if the majority of their fellow citizens and neighbors refuse to play along. As long as the entire crowd is choosing to "see" the emperor's splendid new clothes, then it's relatively easy to go along with that choice. But once the crowd reaches a tipping point, once the majority are choosing reality and the truth, then the emperor's nakedness become impossible to deny. For those who have chosen bigotry, racism and xenophobia, this election represents just such a tipping point. They're watching unreality slip through their fingers and they're trying, desperately, to grasp it even tighter.

After this election, part of our task -- yours, mine and our new president's -- will be to find a way to gently invite and welcome these folks back into the real world. My suspicion, or at least my hope, is that eventually, once they are unburdened by the need to constantly choose unreality and therefore stupidity, they will find this a great relief.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

* I'm not here discussing more structural or institutional forms of racism, nor am I talking here about the more general self-justifying mythologies that every privileged people repeats to itself as an apologetic. Set aside here the question of whether or not bigotry is a pervasive, endemic reality in American culture. For the sake of this discussion, let us recalibrate our tools to discount for whatever pre-existing base level of bigotry there may be so that we can here focus on the exceptional bigot -- the sort of person who stands out as more bigoted than the surrounding/underlying culture as a whole.

** At this point you may be suspecting that this post is little more than an elaborate attempt to repackage the argument of the book of 1 John in non-sectarian terms. Well, yeah. Did it work?

Posted by Fred Clark on Nov 03, 2008 / Permalink

**

"...There's no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn't know whether God had died, or whether there had never been a God at all. Either way I felt free and I didn't know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I even swallowed it. A taste--a memory--a landslide . . ."

"In one way it was hard to leave the Church . . . but in another way it was easy, because it made sense. For the first time ever I felt I was doing something with all my nature and not only a part of it."

--Philip Pullman, *The Amber Spyglass*, pp. 398-399

**

"The trouble with trying to make yourself stupider than you are is that you very often succeed."

--C.S. Lewis

**

saying no to lesser gods

Learning to say no is how we clear space for a few carefully planted yeses to grow. Saying no to lesser gods is part of saying yes to God...

Barbara Brown Taylor, author of Leaving Church

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Stretching: The Truth

WHEN DUANE KNUDSON, a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Chico, looks around campus at athletes warming up before practice, he sees one dangerous mistake after another. “They’re stretching, touching their toes. . . . ” He sighs. “It’s discouraging.”

If you’re like most of us, you were taught the importance of warm-up exercises back in grade school, and you’ve likely continued with pretty much the same routine ever since. Science, however, has moved on. Researchers now believe that some of the more entrenched elements of many athletes’ warm-up regimens are not only a waste of time but actually bad for you. The old presumption that holding a stretch for 20 to 30 seconds — known as static stretching — primes muscles for a workout is dead wrong. It actually weakens them. In a recent study conducted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, athletes generated less force from their leg muscles after static stretching than they did after not stretching at all. Other studies have found that this stretching decreases muscle strength by as much as 30 percent. Also, stretching one leg’s muscles can reduce strength in the other leg as well, probably because the central nervous system rebels against the movements.

“There is a neuromuscular inhibitory response to static stretching,” says Malachy McHugh, the director of research at the Nicholas Institute of Sports Medicine and Athletic Trauma at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. The straining muscle becomes less responsive and stays weakened for up to 30 minutes after stretching, which is not how an athlete wants to begin a workout.

THE RIGHT WARM-UP should do two things: loosen muscles and tendons to increase the range of motion of various joints, and literally warm up the body. When you’re at rest, there’s less blood flow to muscles and tendons, and they stiffen. “You need to make tissues and tendons compliant before beginning exercise,” Knudson says.

A well-designed warm-up starts by increasing body heat and blood flow. Warm muscles and dilated blood vessels pull oxygen from the bloodstream more efficiently and use stored muscle fuel more effectively. They also withstand loads better. One significant if gruesome study found that the leg-muscle tissue of laboratory rabbits could be stretched farther before ripping if it had been electronically stimulated — that is, warmed up.

To raise the body’s temperature, a warm-up must begin with aerobic activity, usually light jogging. Most coaches and athletes have known this for years. That’s why tennis players run around the court four or five times before a match and marathoners stride in front of the starting line. But many athletes do this portion of their warm-up too intensely or too early. A 2002 study of collegiate volleyball players found that those who’d warmed up and then sat on the bench for 30 minutes had lower backs that were stiffer than they had been before the warm-up. And a number of recent studies have demonstrated that an overly vigorous aerobic warm-up simply makes you tired. Most experts advise starting your warm-up jog at about 40 percent of your maximum heart rate (a very easy pace) and progressing to about 60 percent. The aerobic warm-up should take only 5 to 10 minutes, with a 5-minute recovery. (Sprinters require longer warm-ups, because the loads exerted on their muscles are so extreme.) Then it’s time for the most important and unorthodox part of a proper warm-up regimen, the Spider-Man and its counterparts.

“TOWARDS THE end of my playing career, in about 2000, I started seeing some of the other guys out on the court doing these strange things before a match and thinking, What in the world is that?” says Mark Merklein, 36, once a highly ranked tennis player and now a national coach for the United States Tennis Association. The players were lunging, kicking and occasionally skittering, spider-like, along the sidelines. They were early adopters of a new approach to stretching.

While static stretching is still almost universally practiced among amateur athletes — watch your child’s soccer team next weekend — it doesn’t improve the muscles’ ability to perform with more power, physiologists now agree. “You may feel as if you’re able to stretch farther after holding a stretch for 30 seconds,” McHugh says, “so you think you’ve increased that muscle’s readiness.” But typically you’ve increased only your mental tolerance for the discomfort of the stretch. The muscle is actually weaker.

Stretching muscles while moving, on the other hand, a technique known as dynamic stretching or dynamic warm-ups, increases power, flexibility and range of motion. Muscles in motion don’t experience that insidious inhibitory response. They instead get what McHugh calls “an excitatory message” to perform.

Dynamic stretching is at its most effective when it’s relatively sports specific. “You need range-of-motion exercises that activate all of the joints and connective tissue that will be needed for the task ahead,” says Terrence Mahon, a coach with Team Running USA, home to the Olympic marathoners Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor. For runners, an ideal warm-up might include squats, lunges and “form drills” like kicking your buttocks with your heels. Athletes who need to move rapidly in different directions, like soccer, tennis or basketball players, should do dynamic stretches that involve many parts of the body. “Spider-Man” is a particularly good drill: drop onto all fours and crawl the width of the court, as if you were climbing a wall. (For other dynamic stretches, see the sidebar below.)

Even golfers, notoriously nonchalant about warming up (a recent survey of 304 recreational golfers found that two-thirds seldom or never bother), would benefit from exerting themselves a bit before teeing off. In one 2004 study, golfers who did dynamic warm- up exercises and practice swings increased their clubhead speed and were projected to have dropped their handicaps by seven strokes over seven weeks.

Controversy remains about the extent to which dynamic warm-ups prevent injury. But studies have been increasingly clear that static stretching alone before exercise does little or nothing to help. The largest study has been done on military recruits; results showed that an almost equal number of subjects developed lower-limb injuries (shin splints, stress fractures, etc.), regardless of whether they had performed static stretches before training sessions. A major study published earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control, on the other hand, found that knee injuries were cut nearly in half among female collegiate soccer players who followed a warm-up program that included both dynamic warm-up exercises and static stretching. (For a sample routine, visit www.aclprevent.com/pepprogram.htm.) And in golf, new research by Andrea Fradkin, an assistant professor of exercise science at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, suggests that those who warm up are nine times less likely to be injured.

“It was eye-opening,” says Fradkin, formerly a feckless golfer herself. “I used to not really warm up. I do now.”

You’re Getting Warmer: The Best Dynamic Stretches

These exercises- as taught by the United States Tennis Association’s player-development program – are good for many athletes, even golfers. Do them immediately after your aerobic warm-up and as soon as possible before your workout.

STRAIGHT-LEG MARCH

(for the hamstrings and gluteus muscles)

Kick one leg straight out in front of you, with your toes flexed toward the sky. Reach your opposite arm to the upturned toes. Drop the leg and repeat with the opposite limbs. Continue the sequence for at least six or seven repetitions.

SCORPION

(for the lower back, hip flexors and gluteus muscles)

Lie on your stomach, with your arms outstretched and your feet flexed so that only your toes are touching the ground. Kick your right foot toward your left arm, then kick your leftfoot toward your right arm. Since this is an advanced exercise, begin slowly, and repeat up to 12 times.

HANDWALKS

(for the shoulders, core muscles, and hamstrings)

Stand straight, with your legs together. Bend over until both hands are flat on the ground. “Walk” with your hands forward until your back is almost extended. Keeping your legs straight, inch your feet toward your hands, then walk your hands forward again. Repeat five or six times. G.R.

**

This is consistent with yoga and pilates, as well as any other certification that I have done.   The point of pranayama in yoga is warmth,  circulation and internal preparation and toning.  We are so used to conceptualizing exercise from the outside in,  that we think of exercise in terms of formulae -- 10 of these,  two of these, rather than the purposes and intentions that form the practice.  Still, the spider-walking thing and the scorpion thing are cool,  I'm trying them.

Half of Doctors Routinely Prescribe Placebos (October 24, 2008)

To the Editor:

Re “Study Finds Many Doctors Often Give Placebos” (news article, Oct. 24):

Many “effective” medications have only a marginal effect on disease processes or symptoms, and direct comparisons between competing treatments have been rare.

Wise doctors appreciate the weakness of many remedies and the scarcity of good information, yet continue to prescribe and hope. There is no clear line between placebo and “real” treatment.

Eric M. Wassermann
Bethesda, Md., Oct.  24, 2008

The writer is a neurologist and medical researcher.

•

To the Editor:

It seems natural that doctors give placebos to patients, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the dictum that patients must know everything concerning their health.

If the prognosis is bad, knowing everything can lead to depression and loss of hope. A placebo may reassure a patient that the doctor cares.

Besides, doctors are not necessarily being dishonest in prescribing a placebo. That placebo may be better for a patient than all the side effects written in tiny print on some new medication.

Ethical challenges will always be present in the medical world.

Trish Hooper
Portola Valley, Calif.,

Oct 25, 2008

•

To the Editor:

I was not at all surprised by the results of the survey of doctors. Doctors act as if every office visit must end with a prescription. The prescription pad signals the end of the visit in a graceful, caring way, and also reinforces for both parties the doctor’s special power. Nobody else can wield that pen on that paper.

Doctors may defend themselves by saying patients expect prescriptions, but doctors, because of the balance of power, are in the best position to alter those expectations. If they did, health care would improve, health would improve, and health care costs would go down.

Roberta Morris
Menlo Park, Calif.,

Oct.24, 2008

*

Wiki

Placebo is a substance or procedure a patient accepts as medicine or therapy, but which has no specific therapeutic activity. Any therapeutic effect is thought to be based on the power of suggestion.

Placebo controlled trials are trials where some participants take a placebo as a control and the others take the drug being investigated. Here the placebo is an inactive substance designed to resemble the drug being tested. It is used as a control to rule out any psychological effects which may show during testing. Most well-designed studies include a control group which is unknowingly taking a placebo.

The placebo effect or placebo response is a therapeutic or healing effect of an inert medicine or ineffective therapy,^[1] or more generally is the psychosocial aspect of every medical treatment.^[2] Sometimes known as a non-specific effect or subject-expectancy effect, the placebo effect (or its counterpart, the nocebo effect), occurs when a patient's symptoms are altered (i.e., alleviated or exacerbated) by a treatment, due to the individual expecting or believing that it will work. The placebo effect occurs when a patient is treated in conjunction with the suggestion from an authority figure or from acquired information that the treatment will aid in healing, and the patient’s condition improves. This effect has been observed since the early 20th century.

**

It always struck me that a placebo was pretty damn impressive.  Anything that could cue the body's own reserves, the body's individual pharmacy -- is nothing to be sneezed at.  Wouldn't ANYTHING  that could predictably do this be a 'miracle' substance or person?   Non-toxic -- it would be the safest option .

I used to know a man who had documented the 'psychic surgeons' of the Philippine Islands over a period of time. At a certain point, he discovered that the psychic surgeons were palming chicken gizzards as the bloody clots that they seemed to be pulling out of a patient.   When confronted with this,  far from denying it, they said, "Well, duh, of course we are."  It was not a ruse intended to cheat or deceive the patient.  It was a piece of theater that was meant to be so authentic that EVEN THOUGH the patient KNEW it was an illusion,  he/she would often feel great relief that something diseased had left him/her that he/she would get well, or experience healing.  They said, only in the US are people so unsophisticated as to not understand the process, and to get indignant,  as if they has been taken  advantage of.   Part of the theater of healing is the doctor/practitioner's authority and calm allowing the patient to let go of his fear and dread and allow the healing that the body was already attempting.

Friday prayers in Bagdhad

* Around and around the house
the leaves fall thick,
but never fast,
for they come circling down
with a dead lightness
that is sombre and slow.
- Charles Dickens

*
Matthew 25 Network launches pro-Obama ads on Christian radio

The name of the Matthew 25 Project comes from the 25th chapter of the Biblical book of Matthew, quoting Jesus: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit.

*
Someone says "I can't help feeding my family.
I have to work so hard to earn a living."
He can do without God, but not without food;
he can do without Religion,
but not without idols.
What is one who'll say,
"If I eat bread without awareness of God,
I will choke."

Rumi, Mathnawi, II, 3071-79

*
At one point in my journey, my teacher's teacher, an eighty-year old man, had been in a serious car accident that had brought him near death. For months the master's condition was uncertain, causing all those who loved him to become acutely aware of what his living flesh-and-blood friendship meant to them. Eventually he would recover and live many more years. When he was well enough to barely walk, he phoned my teacher to tell him that he would have a special lesson if he could come to his apartment on a certain night. Since this was the first opportunity for the two of them to be together in months, my teacher was full of expectation. They took a walk that evening, so slow and deliberate that it emphasized the attention required for each painful step. They walked as far as one of the most elegant drinking establishments of that great city. My teacher's teacher opened the door of that tavern and they entered. It was as if they were perfectly invisible, while the patrons, the most fashionable men and women, continued in their loud, intoxicated conversations. "See?" he simply said.

*
In our ordinary state of being, both the outer demands of life and the inner processes of thinking and feeling alternatively monopolize our attention to such an extent that we cannot sustain true consciousness. By consciousness I mean not just perception or awareness which corresponds to the sensitive energy described earlier, but a field of awareness that includes both the contents of an experience and the one who experiences.

Spiritual work involves maintaining some balance between the demands of outer life and a conscious presence.  We wish to enter freely into the life of the world and still know presence,  the dimension of consciousness and freedom.  We can live through the essence,  which is the light behind the personality,  rather than through the limited,  superficial personality,   which is identified with each passing thought and feeling.

The personality is our superficial identity, our learned behavior and attitudes;  it is tied to the conditions of outer life,  to disapproval and approval,  like and dislike,  praise and blame.  We are working so that this essence,  which can truly say "I am," may come forward in the midst of life.

The personality,  which is absorbed in the external world and forgetful of the possibility of an inner life,  is governed by that world.  All its inner events are tied to outer events and things.  The personality  exists first of all in relation to other people and things and wants to have its way with them.  it feels its own existence through what it achieves and what it possesses.  Conversely,  each disappointment,  each rejection,  and each failure is experienced as a challenge and threat to its own existence.

Are we consumed by the experiences of life?  Or do we consciously experience life with mindfulness and trust?  Is our inner life dependent on outer conditions,  or is it becoming free of them?

The transformation with which inner work is concerned allows the "I" to exist more independently as a pure presence or witness.  The slavery to like and dislike is diminished to the extent that our feeling of "I" is grounded in pure Being and not in things.  The need to achieve our own specialness,  for instance,  or to receive attention from others,  is experienced as less important as a stable inner presence develops.  This inner presence is satisfying in itself;  it enables nonattachment,  equanimity,  and greater objectivity.

Presence guides us to a healthy sense of self-restraint and self-sacrifice,  enabling us to play with our attachments,  to confront our own prison.  We may learn to slip out of the stranglehold of egoism,  which is based in desire and in the thoughts generated by desire.  In being present to the play of desire we can diminish the ego's power over our inner being.

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We are knee deep in a river,  searching for water.  We are part of an invisible river,  but we are so distracted by outer things and what we imagine they could mean to us that we lost contact with the source of our own Being.  When we are caught in desire,  in form,  in externals,  we are pulled out of ourselves into a fantasy world,  a desire world.  We lost touch with the invisible river,  the waters of life,  through our identification with unconscious inner processes and with outer demands.

There is an energy of attention that we at first have in only limited amounts.  The loss of this energy has been described by the great thirteenth-century Sufi poet and saint Jelaluddin Rumi:

You have scattered your awareness in all directions,
and your vanities are not worth a bit of cabbage.
The root of every thorn
draws the water of your attention toward itself.
How will the water of your attention reach the fruit?
Cut through the evil roots,  cut them away,
Direct the bounty of God to spirit and to insight,
not to the knotted and broken world outside.

Mathnawi,  V,  1084-86

There is an energy of attention that must be conserved.  Can we see ourselves throwing it away?  Can we see ourselves wasting it on outer desire and satisfactions,  intoxicated with the random demands of the ego,  responding to all the needs of outer approval and validation?  Our dependence on outer satisfactions and requirements leads us to envy,  resentment,  pride,  guilt,  and anger.  Isn't this the contemporary idolatry?

Whoever makes all cares into a single care,  the care for simply being present,  will be relieved of all care by that Presence,  which is the creative power.  We can take a step back from the world of attraction,  comparison, and dependence on externals,  remember this vitality within us,  and connect with it.  Perhaps then we can be liberated from our compulsions and can learn to act through Spirit,  rather than through our limited egos.

If remembering Presence becomes our single care,  then we will waste less of our inner energy.

--From LIVING PRESENCE -- A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self
    Kabir Edmund Helminski

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"Love is recklessness not reason"

Helminski from LIVING PRESENCE

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