"Understand that all experiences either make you bitter or better "



I pray to be better.

"Many things are not within our power to change."


"Love ought to manifest itself more by deeds than by words."  St. Ignatius Loyola


I do things in your name.
Everything I do is in your name.
I  honor you in this way.

I pray for peace for you.
I pray for peace for me and all our family.

Peace peace peace.

"The only truth is love beyond reason."  Alfred du Musset

 "Seek peace and pursue it."  Psalms 34:14

"Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
of Eros and of dust,
Beleagured by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."

 excerpt from W.H. Auden

May the affirming flame come through me,
may I pursue peace
may I love beyond reason....

You, in the advancing sky, expand beyond body and mind,
into the glorious spirit and soul that you are, without end.

I pray for you, expanding and thriving in another space and time.

I pray for peace.

Amen

"We are not our bodies or our emotions or our minds or any of the structures and restrictions we experience around us.  We are an infinite part of the God Force using the physical form to experience spiritual development through a special teaching called "daily life."  Miracles, Stuart Wilde


It would be a comfort to believe it.
I'm still in the "Great Doubt."

I want to believe you completed your mission here on earth
and now can be free in light and love.

I pray for that to be.

I pray for you living in love.

I pray to not worry about anything.

I pray to be thankful for every day,as you were.

Amen.

I'd like to send all this somewhere you can read it, somewhere you can hold it in your hands and smile, or look at me with tears in your eyes,
it will take all the saints in heaven pulling for me to dig my way out of this snowstorm.

the waking at 3 am
the endless days of nothing, errands, doctor's appts, cafes.

I watch Libyans dying on the street
I want to know why no one does anything,
I am the no one who does nothing,
if you were here
you head would shake,
and shake in disgust,
God said, you would say, you can either love each other or kill each other,
you, a friend to God.
you had known God.

I don't know why you had to leave,
we had so much more to see together.

I've got to make good on all of it.
how I do that, I don't have a clue.

"You don't love a flower for what it does, but for what it is."

 you love someone for what they are, not for what they do.

" I will ask you to stand and  all join hands in a little while. But first,  we realize we are going to have to create a new language of prayer.  And this new language of prayer comes out of something which transcends all our traditions and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of our differences, real emotional friction.... The things that are on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real.  We are creatures of love.  Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts.  I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all.   I have no idea what I am going to say, I am going to be silent a minute and then I will say something...

Oh God, we are one with You.  You have made us one with You.   You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us.  Help us to preserve this openness and to fight with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection.  Oh  God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You , and w e love You with our whole being,because our being is in Your being, our spirits is rooted in Your spirit.

Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present  in the world, and which makes You witness  to the ultimate  reality that is love.  Love has  overcome. Love is victorious.  Amen.. The Asian Journal, Thomas Merton

"Spiritual discipline means "bringing about a change in oneself not in the environment.  Changing the external world to suit one's desires is the way of worldly men;
that is like carpeting the whole earth to avoid being hurt by thorns."  a quote from Murti in The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton


Let me not look to "carpet the world."

I pray for discipline, spiritual and earthly.

I pray for you, for your soul, for your heavenly being

to live a life I can not know or understand.

I pray for your heart and soul to be with  my heart and soul eternally.

"What is important is not liberation from the body but liberation from the mind. We are not entangled in our own body but entangled in our own  mind."  The Asian Journal, Thomas Merton


"A congruent person can afford to empower others."  Unknown


 I pray to be liberated from my mind.

I saw you as a congruent  person maybe that's why you did empower others.

I pray to become congruent..

I pray for peace for all souls.

I pray for the peace of your soul.

 Love is Supreme.

"Grace is the enlivening life (spirit) of God supporting and transforming creation.  It expresses throughout the field of nature and from within every soul.  It directs the course of evolution and awakens souls from their "sleep" of mortality.  When we are less self- centered  and more soul centered, less grasping and more giving, less contractive and more expansive, grace more obviously expresses to order our lives and circumstances."    Roy Eugene Davis  Mediation Guide


I pray for grace,

I pray to be more soul centered.

I pray to expand and resist contracting.

I pray for you, expanding somewhere in the universe,

counting stars, surrounding the universe with your love.

I pray for you......

"The monk is one who has to struggle in the depths of his being with the presence of doubt, and to go through what some religions call the Great Doubt, to break through beyond doubt into a certitude which is very, very deep because it is not his own personal certitude, it is the certitude of God Himself, in us.  The only ultimate reality is God, God lives and dwells in us.  We are not justified by any action of our own, but we are called by the voice of God, by the voice of that ultimate being, to pierce through the irrelevance of our life, while accepting and admitting that life is totally irrelevant, in order to find relevance in Him.   And this relevance in Him is not something we can grasp or possess.  It is something that can only be received as a gift.  Consequently, the kind of life that I represent is a life that is openness to gift; gift from God and gift from others.


It is not that we go out into the world with a capacity to love others greatly.  This too we know in ourselves, that our capacity for love is limited.  And it has to be completed with the capacity to be loved, to accept love from others, to want to be loved by others, to admit our loneliness and to live with our loneliness because everybody is lonely.

And so I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

And among those people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible.

And the deepest level of communication is not communication but communion.   It is wordless.  It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

Not that we discover a new unity.  We discover an old unity.  My dear brothers we are already one.  But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are."

The Asian  Journals, Thomas Merton


Maybe I'm in the Great Doubt.
Not to be so bold as to step into line with monks...
 yet there is doubt in me.
but I  have certitude that you were among those few
who "dare to seek"   that you were not dependent on social routine, that you had communication on the deepest level.
You had communion with God, the Divine, to you it didn' t matter what name was given to God.
Your fatherhood was your vocation, you lived it well
I pray that communion with the Divine is yours eternally,
I pray that I may find communion with God, the Divine, beyond words, beyond speech, beyond concept.

Amen

 you, full of grace

 may the divine be with you.

I can't ask you for anything,

you've given enough to me and everyone.

May your soul rest,  may you have all the rest you couldn't get on earth.

Amen.

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, loving someone deeply gives you courage."   Lao Tzu


As you would say, "Amen."

I pray for courage.

Your love gave me strength.

Let me know how to find that strength in the here and now without your physical presence.

I pray for that.

Learning to be humble, that is my prayer.

Nancy and I drove home to Manhattan just at Sunday dusk under a streaked sky of steel gray long thin clouds and deep blue and pink background clouds.

We had spent the afternoon with my mother, bizarre in some ways, yet also ordinary.

We started out listening to an opera CD that my brother David made for my mother.  The music was to accompany the manicotti making that was about to begin.

"It just felt right," my mother said, "yesterday when I was making the pizza,to be listening to opera.  "Some of it was so sad," she said, "even though I didn't understand the words, I was  crying while I was standing at the stove."

 Then my mother  darted from the stove to her CD stash.

  "I love the Beatles," she said.   "Let's get rid of the opera."

  After she ejected poor Maria Callas just in the middle of the heart crushing Mio Bambino ( my mother doubted it was Maria Callas and since she is also a singer I should believe her)   she put in the Beatles ( or so she thought).

    She turned up the volume too loud, just like my teenage nephew does when he wants me to hear the latest music he loves, and she started sliding back and forth on her kitchen floor.

         "All we are saying is give peace a chance,"  she sang.

          I didn't have the heart (or the courage) to tell my mother it wasn't the Beatles, but an ex Beatle, John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono with The Plastic Ono Band.
          I just couldn't do it, it would have burst her Beatle bubble.


           She kept singing, her voice getting louder with each chorus, her fingers finding the volume control and turning it up each time they chanted, "all we are saying is give peace a chance." 

        "I just love the Beatles," she said again.

        I remembered another winter, years before 2011, when I was sixteen, my hippie boyfriend and I went Christmas caroling in our little suburban town.

      When we got to the first door and were about to knock, he said, "what carol should we sing ?"    "Let's sing "All we are saying is give peace a chance,"
I said,  completely taken with myself for a moment at the genius of that, the Vietnam war was still going on and I knew my town neighbors might have had a different opinion than my blue eyed bearded boyfriend and me.  I don't know if I was a rebel in the making or a brat.

      Back to my mother in her newly painted, newly sinked bright and cheerful kitchen - the song continued, Nancy and I looked at each other big smiles on our faces at my mother's glee at the song.


      The music changed, John Lennon and Yoko sang another song but my mother didn't sing along.  It was back to the lesson.
      The manicotti lesson we had come to learn

       The afternoon changed as the sun moved away from the yellow kitchen window.

  My mother got serious, giving instructions ( or orders ) to Nancy and me.

      She's always right, so it's hard to do anything but obey. 

        "Don't use that pan," she told me when I started to butter my small Cuisinart frying pan.

          I persisted, "Let me try, " I said.  Failure met me at the gate, and soon I had a ragged puddle of manicotti batter in the pan, doomed to feed the Pearl River birds with my ineptitude.

       The lesson continue more easily once I gave in to my mother's expertise.  
     
        While she cooked she told me a story I had never heard.   Picking up the manicotti shell with two fingers, hot to the touch but not too hot for her, and placing it gingerly onot the plastic wrap layers of finished shells, she said, " You know, Grandma De Leo used to make the manicotti shells in boiling water, it was not easy and often they fell apart in the water.  I saw this new method in a magazine and I told my mother-in-law about it.

    ( My grandmother was a master self taught cook.)

    My mother said, "She listened to this new method and concluded it was worth a try.

If it were me I probably wouldn't have tried it, but my mother-in-law had an open mind."

     Just like my father did, now I see where he got it from.

      By mid- afternoon my younger sister Dorothea had arrived.   She went to my mother's window- like mirror, staring into a pane.
   
 "Look at my wrinkles," she said, "they're coming."

     "Stop looking," Nancy laughed.  "That's what my twice face-lifted sister tells her clients, she works for a plastic surgeon and tell women to stop looking at their wrinkles..."
      and live. I wanted to add.

          By 4:00 pm the manicotti were constructed, one demonstration by my mother of how to carefully place the three cheeses was done Nancy and I were left to complete the task.

         My mother had calculated by eye exactly how much ricotta cheese was  needed to fill all 16 manicotti.

         I made the incorrect assumption as we were nearing the end that we would be short cheese and added some.

          My mother came over like a supervisor, "that was about right," she said, after looking at the cheese that remained.

      But as the last manicotti was stuffed I saw that the amount remaining was just about the amount I had added !

       My mother had been right.

       As usual.

        At 4:30 we were sitting down with the baked manicotti and a bottle of my mother's latest wine find, a California zinfandel called, Dancing Bear.
       
        "French is better," I said.    "No, I don't want to give my money to the French, I'd rather give it to California," she said.
        

        My mother had a broken wine opener, missing its most vital piece.  My mother told my sister to try anyway.

            My sister got the opener in the cork but couldn't pull the cork out.

        Nancy, a native Texan and petite, like a Dallas wrangler, planted her feet on the floor and released the cork.  The sound of the pop and the force of the cork releasing sent Nancy back a step or two and a small gush of red wine spilled onto the creamy light floor.

       My mom sat with her wine and her manicotti.  She ate the first bite.   "Good," she said.    "It's good."   

      "The cheese could be a little more melted," she added to her initial thumbs up.


      We all ate.silent.  Nancy closed her eyes and put the first bite into her mouth.   "Delicious," she said.


        At our meal my mother told a story about Lydia Bastinach and her daughter.   On their cooking show Lydia's daughter had baked a cake,
when it was time to cut it, she cut herself, my mother showed us with her hands, a large piece of cake.  My mother was horrified that they
would eat like this on TV slathering their cake with whip cream and pouring chocolate sauce over it.

      "Dad didn't like Lydia, " I said.   "He said she was what was called "high Italian."     (It means snobby, or thinking you are better than others.)

      "He was right," my mother said.

      "He was right, fortunately or unfortunately, about everything,"  she sighed, her head dropping down.


     We went away, each of us in that moment, to him, mourning him and loving him, speaking of him,  knowing he was with us, yet his physical absence so hard to understand, accept, and live with for both of us in our own way.

      We went to our own cone of grief then, like a silent tornado starting at our planted feet and lifting all the way to our head, grabbing us violently out of normality, a disaster,    returning with no pattern or prediction to when it may come back.

       I've stopped running from the tornado, as my father taught me about the ship heading into the waves not trying to avoid them, head in to the waves, and you will survive, try to circumvent them and you will perish.  Although it seems frightening to head into the storm you must.

      My own private tornado came up over my head at my childhood kitchen table so palpable and real to me I felt  almost like it could be seen, then it rushed away and we returned to our assessment of our homemade family meal, a meal my father would have loved, cooked by his favorite women for our favorite man. 


      He was a lucky man, and we were lucky too.

"Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast, and love sincerely the fellow creatures, with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live." Marcus Aurelius


I pray that you knew, know that I loved you sincerely,
and I was never so blessed as to have you as my father, destiny ordained it.

I pray for you to know that, forever and eternally.
when all the books of life get written, may that page be among the best.

I pray for peace for you.

"When you are a light to yoursefl, you are a light to the world, because the world is you, and you are the world."  J. Krishnamurti, "This Light in Oneself


You were a light onto yourself
and that is how you lit the world,
my world, and all you encountered.


I pray to be a light onto myself.
I pray to follow your example.

I pray for you and your love to remain eternally ours.

"Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod."  Aristophanes

Advancing, that's the way I can look at your departure.
And that I too will "advance"  someday.
"The day is coming when I'll fly off."  Rumi

These old masters had wisdom as you did.

I pray to become wise, to become sure that all you have done is "advanced a stage or two."

And I pray wherever however that stage is it is a glorious one.

I pray for your soul advancing....