FootprintsintheWind.com

You do not live until you take into your
gut that these people are
real, not just
like you, but they are necessary to
complete you, and you are necessary to
complete them; and yet this is not sufficient,
for you will always be completing.

:- Doug.

There is a stage of faith beyond becoming one: faith is lived out. James’s works are not opposed to Paul’s justification by faith alone, but rather are the next step. Here faith comes alive. Faith has us. We must serve.

:- Doug.

Let us become a conversation
so our selves will become
yes, we will each be birthed
and yet this entity called
us will be birthed
to in turn give birth to each
we get there by turning toward one another
still that falls short
there is a hand that reaches for ours
in the dark just before dawn
in that meeting we can become a conversation
and become by a conversation.

:- Doug.

We don’t have, we become, conversations. This may be the answer to grace and ivitation: we don’t and can’t own conversations: we can only be in them, become in them.

:- Doug.

Martin Buber, p 11 of I and Thou: “The Thou meets me through grace–it is not found by seeking.” Does he mean we cannot, should not, seek it? There is nothing we can do but let it happen? But no, he says it is both suffering and action, both being chosen and choosing. So there is something we do when we look out upon the world of beings, each exclusive. It is a mutual role, it is a meeting. Even Buber speaks of degrees of meeting, as in the teacher-student relationship: the teacher takes both sides, the student only the student’s own side.

“Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me.” Both are necessary, but there is something more in his words here: he goes on to say “I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou.” Then the next paragraph is only 5 words: “All real living is meeting.”

So the central thing here is meeting. Do we not have opportunity to invite meeting? Perhaps that is the grace: we invite, but the grace is in when it actually happens. “No aim, no lust, and no anticipation intervene between I and Thou.” On the next page: “Only when every means has collapsed does the meeting come about.”

It is not about my wanting the meeting: that gets in the way. It is about actually meeting. Directly. No intervention. Get out of the way. Step in the way and invite, then allow the other to accept or decline. Get in the middle of life. Get yourself and your aims, desires, and means out of the way. Even perhaps your invitations? At least to allow the other to decline. It is the Thou which is found in grace, the invitation can come about through action. This is a mystery, this action and grace business. Is there another way to see it?

Maybe Buber answers it on p 15: “Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe…. but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.” So perhaps we do not need even to invite, but to turn. Turn and open ourselves to the meeting. That is the action.

We do need service in the universe: this is the hard hat of love, and its work boots, hammer and tongs. This is also life, for the way to have the real and the life in this world is to plunge.

Persons are seeking entrance to our lives. Whether they realize it or not. We need merely turn.

Or so it seems this morning.

:- Doug.

Is it true that conversation includes a whole continuum of interactions among people and other beings, from idle chit-chat which says It to dialogue which says Thou? Over all, the thread that runs through all, the stream that flows under the ground of all, is Thou. The Eternal Thou to be sure, but also the individual Thou which wants to come out.

It was perhaps necessary for Buber to oppose these two primary words, but they may not be so much two as infinite, and Thou dawns on us and we slip and slide from one to the other without realizing our movement until we find ourselves upon waking in the presence. So we need ever to be aware and to tug ourselves more to the Thou side and away from the It. Still we need to recognize where we are, and that life includes both.

Does this reduce the value of Buber’s understanding? I think it actually makes it more tasty, more colorful, more melodious. For the calling is to live in the really real. What is more real than G-d? Conversation is of G-d to be sure, so being real in conversation is a movement toward meeting, real to real. It seems more real to me to say It and Thou are on the same continuum of Thou. We can experience in here, or we can be in the presence of Thou, moving out, facing the fierce. When we go out of our house, we are not always either in or out, but we can be in the threshold, and where exactly is away from our house–out the drive, a mile away, the next town, state, country, continent, planet, star system, galaxy, universe? Continuum has some possibilities….

:- Doug.

We need to get people conversing
For that is how we progress
But it is something much larger than progress
It is the spread and advancement of life
–in the wild,
engaged.

:- Doug.

Who is the most wild,
untamed,
feral one?
G-d is
and G-d addresses
you.

:-Doug.

Some conversation is chit-chat;
some is real to real
–but the light which rises over them all
is Thou.

:- Doug.

When I say life
I often see G-d
When I hear conversation
I often taste G-d

:- Doug.

Experts are collecting the wisdom from many situations and people. They then digest, organize, and find the meaning of it. They separate us from the sources and the meaning and the fire.

:- Doug.

We are created each moment
and exploded out in all directions,
flung out to the center from the center
to embrace more and more!

You are the center;
you are the start and the finish
…and the trajectory as well.

Our task is to embrace, to shade, to nurture, to reach out, to invite, to welcome, to open, to attend, to receive, to offer, to accompany, to witness, to call into being,
to embrace, embrace, embrace,
to engrace, engrace, engrace.
Our task is also to be embraced, shaded, nurtured and all the rest.

There is no difference, no distinction.

We are immersed in love
we are to extend love.

:- Doug.

We were not put in
this world to
gaze up and out of it but
to get some work done
in it.

We were not put with
these people to
gaze up and away from them but
to engage
them.

:- Doug.

G-d is
real being
speaking to
me.

:-Doug.

The essential thing is that we engage.To engage is to love.

:-Doug.

I must confess to you that I am at a loss to describe to you this meeting. We come to it and meet in a way that shares more of us than we ever planned to share, and it makes us whole; it reveals our beauty–individually and as a community. It causes us to go out and do something we thought larger than us, beyond our reach, but there it is, being done. And when we come away, we come away changed profoundly and surely, and yet we are unable to put in words in what way nor prescribe a way for others to get there.

:- Doug.

How old and
closer to death
are you
that your eyes are dull
and you no longer see
the eyes you can brighten
the skin you can touch
the newness you
can bring to hearts?
Speaking with you is like
speaking with bricks.
Come, bring life to
another; you will
get it for yourself.

:- Doug.

Martin Buber says on page 120 of I and Thou that the way is a spiral, that each turn brings us more binding to fate and more opening to Thou. Every turn is closer to perversion and to the Kingdom “there between us.” The Thou is not an intermittent flashing, but the rising of a soft and gentle moonlight that covers and lightens all.

I like that “there between us.” That perhaps is the foundational expression of the Tao of Conversation. For it is in the between that we live, and that between is Spirit. Spirit is probably much more than this in between but we cannot see it nor touch it in this lifetime, for we are addressed. In this addressing we are. It is so bright and so loudly silent that we can see nothing else. It is the water in which we swim, the air in which we breathe, the ground on which we walk out our lives, the aeon in which we are born and die. This there between us is how we are addressed. That is the space of conversation, the time of it, indeed beyond time and space, for we are simply there as I AM THERE is there, between us, facing us, addressing us as Thou to Thou. Life means you; life means us. It is clear if you have understanding.

It is not a matter of finding the words, for words can get in the way, but of finding the person and the between. Sometimes we cannot get on the path between, sometimes the person or we ourselves puts up or put up shields, masks, walls. Do we crash through or turn away? There is a choice on each side, and sometimes love says Crash.

This then is love: to engage: to seek the path and the person.

:- Doug.

What are the most powerful forms of conversation?

:- Doug.

How does conversation grow?

:- Doug.

We work for larger than ourselves lonely.

:- Doug.

When we are lost we increase the number and quality of unexpected insights.

:- Doug.

We are one and
we are two:
only in living do
we know both as true.