Dan Pallotta

4.10.2004

Sunday, April 11, 2004

Happy Easter, to those of you that celebrate Easter. Happy belated Passover too.

The world could benefit by reflection on resurrection. There are some things we need to bring back to life in this world. We need to bring hope back to life. We need to bring compassion back to life. We need to bring living back to life. Our priorities are all reversed. We have let the beautiful things die and we have brought nightmares to life. Stress and anxiety are alive and well and thriving. Murder and violence too. And hunger and starvation. The AIDS death toll is being nurtured by indifference. It thrives. But real hope is dead. As is real optimism. As is any real sense of possibility.

In a real way, we have it within us to raise the dead - dreams that are dead, joy that is dead, a beautiful world that we all imagined as children that has died to the forces of greed and fear. This is how resurrection is relevant in our lives today. We don't need to wait for another savior to come around and rise up from the dead. We need to bring life back to life on our own. This is the best way to honor the life of Jesus. This is the best way to bring Jesus back to life.

Saturday, April 10, 2004

"First...a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it." William James, "Pragmatism," 1907

4.08.2004

Friday, April 9, 2004

I remember when I did the est training one of many amazing things they taught - that peoples' purpose in life is either to dominate or to avoid domination. It alternates between the two. Well, this is what we see going on in the outside world, so it must be going on in each of our inner worlds too. The Americans trying to dominate the Iraqis and the Iraqis trying to avoid the domination of the Americans. The Republicans trying to dominate the Democrats, and the Democrats trying to avoid the domination of the Republicans.

In a system ruled by domination, no one can win. Only the system wins. Some of us have a consciousness about this, but often even we don't know what to do. We just try a different twist on the same system - we try to avoid being dominated by a system that either dominates or avoids domination. What is the way out?

Well, probably the most enlightening thing they taught us, or rather, that many of us experienced in est, was that there is no way out. It has always been this way and will always be this way. This is how human beings are wired, and we can't change our wiring. This is it. This is as good as it gets. We can stop trying to find a way out. It doesn't exist.

Doesn't exist? What a dark thought. This means there is no hope, right? Well, in one way, that's right, but that's not so bad, because in a reality where there is no hope, there is also not its opposite - that is, there is no hopelessness. And in another way, it's not necessarily so that there is no hope, in the way most of us think about hope. How is that so? Well, once you have truly accepted the fact that there is no way out, in a strange paradoxical way, you have found the way out. You have accepted yourself exactly as you are and exactly as you are not. From that place comes love for ourselves. And from love for ourselves come love for one another. And in a context of love we do not make it our purpose to dominate and avoid domination. We make it our purpose to love and to understand.

This is not easy, and I have probably achieved it once or twice in my life. The rest of the time I run around dominating and seeking to avoid domination. But when I am "out," oh is life ever a beautiful thing. Mostly I get "out" when I spend time in meditation or prayer or in nature. This may be why the great masters consistently say that the way to world peace is through inner peace. This means that the way to world peace is not through a gigantic exterior peace movement, but through a beautiful movement toward peace within.

4.07.2004

Thursday, April 8, 2004

There is a show on TV right now called "The Swan," in which they take "average" looking women and put them through a gauntlet of plastic surgery and lipo-suction and weight training to turn them into "confident beauties." I only saw the introduction and had to turn it off. They were slicing the faces and flesh of these women to pieces in order to squeeze them into society's idealized and homogenized definition of beauty. This is not so bad I guess as the slicing of flesh that is going on in Iraq where young Marines are being squeezed into black plastic body bags at the ages of 19 and 22, to say nothing of the Iraqi teenagers being squeezed into pine coffins 60 years before their time.

In both cases we are rejecting God's work. God doesn't understand beauty as well as we do, apparently. And God certainly doesn't understand how to keep the peace as well as we do. Doesn't God know that you have to decimate life in order to preserve it? What a stupid God we have. What good is it to have a God if you're constantly having to improve on his work and correct his mistakes and teach him the proper way to do things.

It would be better if we just dispensed with God and did the job ourselves. Oh, but wait a minute. We already have!

4.06.2004

Wednesday, April 7, 2004

The world is in need of a great and inspiring task. This is what would change everything. Some great vision of compassion, unparalleled in human history, that all humanity could unite on and on which we could all work together. There is no shortage of options. End the global AIDS epidemic in the next five years. Feed, immunize, and educate every child in Sub-Saharan Africa within the next five years. Contribute ten percent of every nation's defense budget to provide free rural health centers to all the world's poor within the next ten years. The people of the world are desperate for a mechanism by which we can demonstrate that our problems are not inevitable. Desperate for something new - some great tornado of hope to come swirling from out of the mediocrity and the complacency to blow down all the walls of impossibility that cynicism and laziness have constructed.

People are ready for brave new ideas and for a new vision of the world that is hopeful and truly optimistic. We all have it in our mind's eye. We long to surprise ourselves. We are tired of the rusted ideas, and of the limited horizon. We are ready for a radical explosion of possibility. This pattern of war and violence and scarcity of food and ideas will soon become a bore to us. In many ways, we have become addicted to it. We have become used to nothing changing. We have become used to boring political leaders. We have become used to a lack of new ideas. One day it will dawn on us, the way it does to an alcoholic at the moment they commit to recovery - that we are stuck in a pattern that is of our own choosing. We will have a collective epiphany that we no longer need to remain in it. This idea is wonderfully captured in a book that I love entitled, "Urgings of the Heart," by Wilkie Au and Noreen Cannon:

"Escape from bondage begins with the capacity to imagine that things can be other than they are, that things do not have to stay the same. Contemplation nurtures solitude and creativity, which, in turn, give birth to liberating alternatives to debilitating addictions. Suffering in itself will not deliver us from situations in which we feel stuck. Only when we see that there are other possibilities for being and acting and that our present suffering is unnecessary will we mobilize the resources available to us to bring about a change."

Tuesday, April 6, 2004

This quotation by Mark Twain is a more eloquent way of what I was trying to say about our founding fathers the other day. What I should have said is that it is far more radical to create America, as a living thing, than it is simply to protect America, in the abstract, as a concept. But even that is far less accurate than Mark Twain:

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them." Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898

4.04.2004

Monday, April 5, 2004

Try to take some time today to practice silence. Let your shoulders down. Let go of everything that has you worried or frightened - your bills, your future, your career path - whatever it is that seems today like it will destroy your world - let it go. Let the incessant badgering of your mind go for a few minutes. Breathe in a great big deep breath and let it out, over and over again. Stop troubling yourself for just a few minutes. You deserve a few minutes like that. Really, you deserve a whole life like that. Rest and listen to the sound of silence - the echo of eternity - the tender voice of all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be. Go for a walk, or find a quiet space - not to do more thinking - but just to rest your weary spirit and be kind to yourself.

If you wonder what it is that God is calling you to do in your life, or if you're troubled by the question of your purpose here, hold open the possibility for a few minutes that all God wants for us is to be happy. Hold open the possibility that to be wrapped up in a swirl of activity and concern that stresses you out is to deny the will of God. Hold open the possibility that God wishes we'd all take a rest and enjoy the quiet that she has composed for us. Hold open the possibility that it is not God that is pushing us to go faster and accomplish more, but that God is asking us to slow down and worry less.

There is that famous saying that we teach what we most need to learn. I write these things not because I am expert at practicing them, but precisely because I am inept. So, if you are using my advice as yet another reason to beat yourself up, e.g. "I'm so stupid - why do I keep forgetting this?" please know that you are not alone.

Peace. Can you take some time to be quiet right now?

Sunday, April 4, 2004

This is an excerpt from a wonderful book entitled, "Amazing Grace," by Kathleen Norris:

"...I was reminded of her (Emily Dickinson's) painful experience at Holyoke Seminary, when she first began to discern the extent of her difference from her friends. The worship there was part of what scholars now call the Great Revival,and often had a highly emotional pitch. Girls were asked to stand, or come forward, as a sign that they declared themselves for Jesus. But at one such meeting, Emily Dickinson, aged sixteen, was the only one left seated after the altar call. She sums up the experience in a flinty remark: 'They thought it queer I didn't stand. I thought a lie would be queerer.' Describing the experience to a friend (sadly, I believe, but also with a sharp critical eye), she vividly portrays the alienation that a sensitive, thoughtful person can feel during the enthusiastic worship of the Christian assembly. 'what a strange sanctification is this - that brings Christ down, and shows him, and allows him to select his friends!' Her exclusion from the fold of those who had converted to Christ was the first great exclusion of a life that would have many."

The story reminds me of a quotation by e.e. cummings that I saw in another wonderful book entitled, "A World of Ideas:" "To be nobody-but-myself- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."

Being oneself is reward enough for the alienation we might suffer as a result. I'd rather be exiled as myself than embraced as no one.