God Does Not Kill!

Julia Sievers ca. 1870s

To the religious ideologues who insist they know what is right and wrong, to those who kill in the name of all that is sacred and true and to those who wonder why hatred appears to bloom in our world, a letter from my Great Great Grandmother written in her journal 1898.

"God does not kill! Neither by flashing lightning, the whirling wind, the roaring water.... God does not kill with poison, pestilence, plague, famine, or flame. God does not kill with disease or disorder, with heartache or headache... God does not kill anyone, anywhere, or at anytime!

The doctrine that God takes away a child to punish or afflict a parent; takes away a husband to humble the wife... that God comes into a family like a lesson of destruction, to kill afflict and sadden; that God bankrupts or burdens any one good or bad; the doctrine of providential affliction and distress and sorrow; This is (an) unloving, godless and pitiless doctrine, (it) has no place in the thought of today only because it has had the sanction of the hoary ages Not because it is true, or reasonable, or good, or acceptable, or helpful, or hopeful.

Julia Sievers ca. 1940

(It is) Not because the Bible, or philosophy, or history, or science would have us believe it. But simply because we have been taught it, and have not had the courage to deny it.

God pities and helps, and guides and leads, and teaches, and hopes for us, but does Not destroy us, or hurt us, or hinder us. The theologian may have to teach us apostate thought to harmonize us with his system of so-called truth, But We Know Better; and in all justice and fairness let us quit accusing providence of inspiring crime and promoting disease, and in encouraging death....1

"Think and speak love, joy, peace, truth, Mercy. The Good is here and it is ours, it is for  you and me and to you and me.

In exalting the faculty of the Soul, we annihilate in a great degree the delusion of the senses." 2

Written by Julia M Sievers, Dennison, Iowa 1898


I love you Great Great Grandmother. May your prayers of love and clear thinking bloom in our world.

Rick

Notes:

1. Julia's hand written journal is full of quotes and prayers and thoughts, all in devotion to God as she understood him. I was only the second person to ever read this passage until today. She notes that she adapted this first section based on an editorial from the Fort Worth, (Tex) Register.

2. This last four lines has the name "Martin" inscribed underneath it.


Copyright Richard Sievers, March 2013, All Rights Reserved

Eternity of Moments

My Brother and I in August 1972, three months before he passed away. These are happy moments that still live in my body.

Moments
of silence like song.

My brother in Idaho 1972.

Moments.
That's what I have,
moments in a circle
that once looked like
a straight line.   

 From my new book Simple Life

If you had just one moment to begin eternity in, if there was a moment from which you could launch into forever, what would it be?

Pause and sit with this.

Is it hard to choose just one moment from your life?

Or is it  hard to choose any moments?

What does the answer say about your life or your presence in your life?

Let's narrow down And expand the scope of the question.

Choose a person that you currently consider a close friend. What moment in your life with them would you choose to carry with you into eternity? Any? Many? Are there regrets that need to be released or healed?

And expand even more: 

Think of a past person, animal or place you've loved. Is there a moment you had with them that you would want to carry with you, or even live in? 

Now go deeper and refine the question again. 

What about experiences that were mixxy, perturbed and challenging.  Was there an instance of clarity or healing that you would choose to recall in eternity? What about someone who has vexed you. Did that person touch you and bring joy nonetheless?

Looking at the question in another way:

Today... What if this day were The Day you'd live forever? What if you could move through this very day without regard to linear reckoning? What would you choose to believe, to do or inhabit? Which senses, sights and bodily sensations would you want to foster?

If this very moment was the launching point for eternity what would you pray or think or do in your life right now?

This is my glimmering on life:

The Moment of Eternity IS NOW.

I wonder if our heavens and hells and purgatories are not out there somewhere, someday. I wonder if the supposed afterlife is more akin with how we choose to inhabit and really experience this life.

Lately I've felt this existential challenge about what is all this work and experience for? What's the point? Is this all there is? How much do I really inhabit my everyday experiences? And does it matter that I do? I've wonder if hell is really just a way of regret. Perhaps hell is when you realize that you've lived disconnected and separate throughout life. Like there was no real joy and now it's too late. Well it's never too late to re inhabit your life, or re-enliven memories of your particular experiences.

I have a theory that a life purpose is simply to share all my experiences with Creation, Creator and Community when it comes time for this particular body to dissolve. At that time no experience will be either good or bad. But I think that the quality of how we inhabited experiences, the Vital essence of our bodily life, will be like manna to our spirits.

So I ask the questions again. 

If this were the launching point of eternity how would I be present in my body and life, how would I connect with people and love them in a way beyond sentimentality and yearning? How can we really be with each other in this gift of life and living? As William Stafford said: "Someday is now."

 Rick

PS. The series Two Weeks in an American Ashram, will continue later in March.

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, March 2013, All Rights Reserved.

Days 9-10 You Say...I Say

If you receive a version of this blog sent by email press the title link to see the blog in its full format. This posting is a segment of my ongoing series Two Weeks in an American Ashram begun in November 2012. To see the previous entries just scroll down or click on Journal Archive at the right. 

Heard in Prayer:

Child of mine:

You say that you have not done enough to match my grace.

My Grace is sufficient; that's why it's called grace.

You say that you have mostly failed in your callings.

I say that by Grace you serve 

and by Grace you offer what you will.

You say that your mind wanders too much, 

that you are too much a hermit and too little a friend.

I say that my Grace fills the space between your words.

I say that you are beloved on earth.

I say you are wholly mine.

I say you are a strand 

in the very fabric of my purpose 

here in this world of now.

Peace,
Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, February 2013, All Rights Reserved.

Day 8: Patience of a Cedar Tree

The Ancient Cedar Tree that Became My Sanctuary in the California Hills

This posting is a segment of my ongoing series Two Weeks in an American Ashram begun in November 2012. To see the previous entries just scroll down or click on Journal Archive at the right.
          

“Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes space around you.

Let the darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

move back and forth into the change…

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there…”

Rilke*

   
There are over a thousand acres to be free in. I walk. I am a wanderer in the hills of this intentional community. The rolling oak strewn, mesquite tangle of central California is my land today. I wander and survey all that I steward with presence and remembrance.

I walk for miles, through savanna and forest. I traipse through the village of people who have chosen to live in a binding freedom with each other. This place of farms and frictional unity. This splatter of homes that have stood through forest fires and schisms and holy blessings for over forty years.

I wander through the central square of the community and its humble collection of white clapboard houses. I walk by the little shops full of gems and amulets of astral magnetism. I wander past the temples and the altars. Then through the herd of goats and deep into the woods.

In the middle of all of this community and beauty I feel that familiar voice, a tinge of I am alone, even here. Which I now believe is a spell I have woven deep into the tangle of my life.

I am more than half way through my time here. Halfway in any endeavor often is a time of resistances. Today I am tired of the sacred songs. I feel non-pulsed by the lofty texts. I am slightly wary of the people that smile at me. And yet… And yet, I know that this is real here. There is family here. That community of virtue and devotion is real on this earth. A tug occurs between the old and the new within me.

So much of the world’s pain has come with me, even here. I need to let that go.

“Just breathe” I tell myself.

I take in three circles of breath. I feel the wind move in spirals through my sinuses. I feel the welling of living air in my lungs. I taste the happiness of release as I exhale. Then I hear the clouds moving through the trees. I am standing beneath a mighty cedar. This being is gnarled from storms, burnt from lightning, bruised by man and his machines. Yet it continues to stand here. Magnificent. Ten feet across. And perhaps 180 feet tall.

I lean into the tree. I sit. I watch the land and empty myself the best I can. But I continue pondering and recalling the old spell that wends its way through me: I am alone.

I think of my father, as I often do at these times, how I miss him. I think of the family who has declined to speak with me and won’t tell me why. But I don’t spiral any further into the inner night. A voice clear and ringing rises up through the wisdom of my body. The voice is from someone who is beyond all names. He speaks:

“You’ve known no father. I would be your father, in a family of love, right here, inside this time, inside me.”

I answer the voice: “Please be patient with me. The sadness is deep in this world. I want to grow closer to you.”

And the reply: “I am eternal, outside of time. Patience is not even a reality of need for me. Remember, the kingdom belongs to the prodigal. What has abandoned you on earth will never harm you in the ascension of now.”

Profound, mysterious and yet clear words.

A simple peace moved all around me. When I breathed in again, peace took root as a small seedling within me. Much like this ancient sentinel of a tree that began so small and now touches the clouds. I knew that I must have patience with myself. And I saw glimpses of love that is real and true and lasting… right here, right now.

Rick

*Rilke From Sonnets of Orpheus, Part Two XXIX

Selection from Rainer Maria Rilke's In Praise of Mortality, p. 132

Trans: Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Copyright Richard Sievers January 2013, All Rights Reserved

Days 6-7 A Fire Ceremony in Winter

This is what we keep

going through, the lyrical

changes, the strangeness

in which I know again

what I have known before.

Wendell Berry: The Recognition

New Collected Poems, p.185

Winter comes for a visit. It is 28 degrees outside and 42 degrees inside the trailer. So, I move down to the warmth of the dining area to work on a long time writing project. Everyone else is working in the kitchen or in yoga training or in meditation. I sit at a long table, alone with eleven empty chairs. Outside, snow spirals lazily. Inside the darkness of my own karma sits as shadows all around the table.

I am, again, writing and arranging the story I've held in my body for seven years. It's a story of spiritual power and ecstasy, a story of illicit love and the death of my best friend. It's a story I long to tell, somehow,  someday, or my life might feel incomplete. And it's a story that vexes me at every keystroke, every rewrite and every attempt to say what I really want to say. Here I am, again writing and plotting. This is the work that I love and that loves me. And this is the work that I sometimes dread and resist.

For eight hours I endeavor to move the contents of 280,000 words into some order. I feel driven and sure of my mission as I write and re-write this book. But there is an emptiness about it too. Because words fail to convey the real truth of what love and loss are capable of.

Toward the end of the day, as the ice begins to thicken, a friend walks in and invites me to a fire ceremony. I accept the invitation and I close the computer and walk with him to the temple. The gist of the ceremony is to become clear on what one wishes to release, describing that intention to the congregants and then literally burning the old ways as a public recognition of moving onward.

Here I was in ceremony, writing something again. I knelt at the altar with a trembling sheet of snow white paper. Upon it were words like "not being enough", "being dishonestly nice", "feeling alone much of the time". I burned the paper! The facilitator (swami) laid her hand on my spiritual eye in the middle of my forehead and blessed me. And it was over. No bells or flashes or thunder. Just simple communal ceremony.

The next day I awoke with the driving desire to get my writing just right. I went down to the dining hall. Same table. Same snow. Same drive. I turned on the computer. There was an unexpected event in the hard wire. All the information I'd so feverishly rearranged and rewritten had disappeared from the memory. I had little reaction to the loss, which I found to be curious. I just said to myself "Oh, I guess that's that."

And I wondered "Who is it that observes all of this coming and going within me?"  

I noticed how I was different after my work disappeared. Not so heavy. But instead of feeling surprised I thought "This is how I naturally feel: Light". I wondered how many limitations I had set on my writing and my life with the need to call myself by labels like depressed, too sensitive for the likes on mankind, unseen, alone etc. etc.?

Then I closed the now blank progress of the old writing project. It was not as if the sad sorry feelings had disappeared. It's that I could hear other parts of me with more clarity.

So, I opened up a new screen and wrote a poem. It was a poem that had little to do with my projects or wants. It was not a good poem or even one that has deep meaning. It simply made me smile. It was just my little song at that moment.

I looked outside. The sun was peeking through the swirling clouds. Our two days of winter had passed. More snow will come in the future I'm sure. But not now.

Here's the little song I wrote

Moon of my night,

Star of my morning,

Earth of my day

I love Thee 

I love Thee

I love Thee.

Breath of my dreams,

Fire of my experience,

Water of my eternal birth

I love Thee,

I love Thee,

I love Thee.

Earth: Holy, Holy.

Life: Sacred, Sacred.

Death: illusion, illusion.

Beloved I love Thee

Beloved I love Thee

Beloved I love Thee.

And I smile, reading this again.

May you discover who observes this life experience within you.
And in the discovery, find a simple thought or song or poem that brings a smile to your face. It doesn't have to be pretty, proper or correct. It only has to be yours and real in these moments of sun or passing snow.

Peace
Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, January 2013, All Rights Reserved

Day 5 - Lineage

My Great Grandfather: Ludwig Muther ca 1900

How astounding that all we usually know about our ancestors are a few tidbits and facts. After a few generations even those facts fade. Is that all that is left of us when we are gone, facts and then nothingness? My gut says NO, our essence lives forever somewhere, somehow. And a competing voice in my gut says: YES, this is all there is. This, what we see and touch. Perhaps both voices are correct.

I went to the community of Yogananda's disciples to dive into the dueling voices inside of me. I also went to discover more about my great grandfather. He was a devotee and direct disciple of Yogananda.  My great grandfather once was a part of this community. He was an American aspirant to bliss in the 1940s. And he was way ahead of his time.

I never met Ludwig Muther.
Like most modern people, I know very little about my ancestors.
These are the scattered facts I have gleaned about my great grandfather:

- Born sometime in the later 1800s.

- In the early 1900s he left Germany in shame after he and his cousin became pregnant with my grandfather. He was separated from his son and entire family. He was pushed across the Atlantic Ocean by a Germanic version of Catholic guilt.

- He immigrated to Flint Michigan and worked as a machinist.
- Married most of his American life to a woman, his best friend, named Bert. 
- In 1930, or so, he reconnected with his lost son, my grandfather Rudolph, and sponsored him as an emigrant to the United States.
- He saw my mother (his grand daughter) at least one time. This took place in the late 1940s in a spiritual community founded by a man named Yogananda, in Southern California.
- My mother saw him and Bert with Yogananda (A glowing man in golden robe: my mother's description) where they shared a meal in a dining hall.
- He was a German Catholic devotee to a yogi from India in post World War II America.
- He is buried with his wife Bert in Flint Michigan.

That's what I know.

I also have one ceramic painted plaque of him when he was a young man. I often look at it. I sometimes ask him if my life brings a smile to his face. I wonder if the struggles I am working through are like his struggles. I have told him of my hopes that my work here can somehow bring healing to him in his time, in his life.

I wrote a prayer to him while I was in the Ashram:

You preceded me here by 65 years. 

I am here now, Great Grandfather. 

Are you here too? 

I'd like to see God with you. 

I'd like to live our family's highest and most healing destiny.

I'm the end of your family line on earth. 

I have no blood and bone descendants to follow me. 

The press of time is upon me Great Grandfather. 

So few breaths are left. 

Yet so much living remains for me. 

Who are you in me? 

And what needs to be said or done before I leave this place?

I began to think of lineage. How important it is to touch someone or something connected with another generation? I have a glimmering that what we do, including our smallest habits, directly affects those who came ahead and those who follow us. That time is a circle, not a unidirectional line. I'm not sure that human beings have the physical capacity to understand the physics of spirit and time, yet.

Try to imagine this: everyone you ever loved or hated, every event that sings in your blood, every voice in your genes, every being, is alive right in the here and now. Just because we cannot see through time and dimensional space does not mean that we are alone in this moment. Perhaps God can see all the ancestors and descendants. And God sees them always right in the here and now, along with me and you.

So I come on faith, into an American Ashram, to find parts of me I'd forgotten. One of those parts has a name: Ludwig Muther.

There are moments in everyone's life that are transcendent, where figuring it all out loses its gravity. Where connection with love and lineage and being present are all that is real. Those moments ask us to have faith, action and will.  If we pause and pray we can touch what is hidden all around us in plain sight.

I see the results of all your good and difficult work, Great Grandfather. May I have faith in loving kindness. May my actions in these fleeting moments of forever bring healing and happiness.

Who sings in your veins? 
What actions and dreams yearn to live through you?

Peace,
Rick

Copyright Richard Sievers, January 2013, All Rights Reserved

Day 4 Dog Barking in the Temple

A Bridge of Light Over the Turbulent Yuba River

The Dog Next Door Barked Again and Again

Dog barked all day.
Then he barked all night.
Boring when you analyze it.
Sad when you feel it.
Background noise when you set it down.
Like a thought or a compulsion.

From my upcoming book Simple Life

This place has been a refuge from consternation and blaring static, with one exception. My seeming nemesis, the barking dog, is here.

I have pretty bad tinnitus, or ringing in the head. Something about the pitch of certain dogs actually hurts my brain. It’s not uncommon for people with nerve damage in their ears to experience this sort of jolt from certain noises. For me, it’s the ubiquitous barking dog. It’s noise that actually sends the shock of my ears into my veins. This jolt too often foments agitation and stories about neglectful dog owners. The barking neglected dogs seem to be everywhere for me, including here in the supposed silence. 

A hundred yards from the trailer a dog is penned in and alone. The dog shouts like the person coughing in a church meeting or a screaming baby in the coffee shop.

I went for a walking meditation on our third day. Then back to the trailer after morning meditation sadnha and asanas (Yoga postures) I am peaceful for moments. That’s when the barking dog begins his disruptive teaching. Why would they allow such a disruptive barker to annoy ME in this place of tranquility?

I went to find the source of the barking. In a cabin around the corner from us a dog was yelling from behind the windows. With each cry the curtains shook. My heart leapt. Why had I come closer to the noise that bothers me? Though I walked away, I was tempted to stay and just face my fears with the dog.

I decided to meditate instead. Not running away. Not going deeper into the illogical thing that vexes me so often. I went to the forest meditation structure. I sat. What can I do Father Mother? How do I manifest the fear and loneliness (barking) of this world inside of myself?

I sat until I felt a semblance of clarity. The dog continued to bark nearby. But the shivers had left my body along the rigidity in my shoulders and neck. Then I listed all the things I could do with vexation of feeling afraid in the world.

-          Shake it off like an animal shakes off the rain and fear after being chased.

-          Yell

-          Be the dog without asking the whys about the owner and circumstances

-          Be empty space, which carries no ordinary sound.

-          Sit with the moans and yips without absorbing its cuts and punches.

-          Gird myself with my practice

-          Confront the owner if I can or at least find out about the welfare of the one barking and crying.

-          Give up and become a victim

-          Avoid by obsessively doing something

-          Name it. Go deeper inside and say what the real issue is.

-          Bark and bark myself

-          Fix it

-          Blame myself for being too sensitive.

-          Hate dogs.

-          Love dogs.

The point became clearer. I have freedom to choose. There are a hundred options in this bag of curiosity. The other point is to pause and begin any action with non-action. Am I centered and truly more ready to be in the world that confronts one with sensory assaults at every turn?

The world was not meant to be lost in or be afraid in. I remember that the ways of the world are not a personal affront to me, unless I make it that way. An experience is neither good or bad, kind nor debilitating unless I react from a place mirroring those attributes. All of this is simple to say. But difficult to do.

I’m reminded of the poem by Basho:

The temple bell stops.

But the sound keeps coming

out of the flowers.

What I focus upon becomes the very thing I hear in my own thoughts and dreams.

Dear Reader: What is your barking dog in this world?
What seems to be so outside of you that it feels victimizing to experience it?
It could be the evening news, or a teenage son’s petulance.
It could be the rain that continues for days or a lover who has not returned your call.

I found some ideas to transform my barking dog issue. The first idea is that I have choices. My first choice is to pause and feel myself, not my stories. This is the practice of yoga.

What is your barking dog? What are your choices, right now and here?

Peace,
Rick

(c) Copyright Richard Sievers, December 2012, All Rights Reserved