MeisterEckhart

Some people say: 'Alas, sir, I wish I stood as well with my spiritual life and devotions, that I had as much devotion and were as much at peace with the Spirit as others are, I wish I were like them, or that I were so poor'; 'I can never manage it unless I go here or there, or do this or that. I must get away from it all, go and live in a cell or a cloister.'
--advices from Master Eckhart


Eckhart, spiritual guide and mystic, wrote on the subject of finding peace and comfort in the world. From his view it's dependent upon the fact that the reason for unease lies entirely with yourself and with nothing else, though you may not know it or believe it: restlessness  arises in you as the self-as-it-wills; whether you own it or not.
We may think a person must avoid certain things or people; that they seek other places, people or methods, company or activity.  Yet according to Eckhart, none is the reason why you find yourself held back: it's you yourself in the pursuit of those things which prevents one, 'for you have an inaccurate regard towards things."

Therefore he recommends one start first with oneself. Observe yourself.  In truth, unless you let go first of yourself, whatever you try, you will find obstacles. There will be indecision and restlessness, no matter where you are. 
If people seek peace in outward things, places or methods or in people or in deeds, the elimination of other people, poverty, humiliation, however great or small, is all in vain because it garners no peace. Why? Eckhart would say that its lack is due to the pursuit, rather tyhan opening ones' hand in the stillness of the world many seek forcefully to acquire.

 What does often result is that this chase, the pursuit of the desired result itself becomes the focus, a sort of ends though not one which often results in spiritual or other peace.
Observe yourself, and wherever you find yourself, leave yourself: that is the very best way, because we often find ourselves in ways and places we did not first imagine. Yet we are there, and that may not be a poor place to be. The spirit moves as it will. May we move likewise.

The Feast of Saint Valentine

The name "Valentine", is derived from valens, meaning worthy, and was popular in late antiquity.
Of the Saint Valentine whose feast is on February 14, nothing factual is known except his name and that he was buried at the Via Flaminia north of Rome on February 14. It is even uncertain whether the feast of that day celebrates only one saint or more saints of the same name.

At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February. One is described as a priest at Rome, another as bishop of Interamna (modern Terni), and these two seem both to have suffered in the second half of the third century and to have been buried on the Flaminian Way, but at different distances from the city.

Of both these St. Valentines, some sort of Acta are preserved, but they are of relatively late date and of no historical value. Of the third Saint Valentine, who suffered in Africa with a number of companions, nothing further is known.
~excerpt from The Catholic Encyclopedia

The feast day of Saint Valentine, priest and martyr, was included in the Tridentine Calendar, with the rank of Simple, on February 14. In 1955, Pope Pius XII reduced the celebration to a commemoration within the celebration of the occurring weekday. In 1969, this commemoration was removed from the General Roman Calendar. However, it remains one of the Catholic saint days.

The full history of St. Valentine's Day is blurry and nobody really knows who the real St. Valentine was. There are many stories and myths, and there were three different Valentines who were martyred. One was a priest who lived in Rome and was supposedly martyred in 269 A.D. The second, a bishop, lived in Interamna (modern-day Treni) in Italy. There was a very obscure third Valentine who met his fate in Africa. The first Valentine, from Rome, is generally considered the right person and is associated with a charming but also gruesome story:

During the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius II from 268 to 270 A.D., it became important to recruit young men to the army, but the response was low because men didn’t want to leave their wives and families. In reaction to the low interest, the emperor decided to prohibit marriages. But Valentine didn’t accept this and secretly performed marriages between young Christian men and women. He was eventually caught and sentenced to death.

The Roman emperors were firmly against the Christians until the fourth century A.D. and persecuted them because they were considered a subversive group. One of the major stumbling blocks to accepting the Christian church were the many holidays in celebration of the pagan gods, in which the people of the Roman Empire believed. For instance, the Apostle Paul founded an altar in Athens to the deity who was called "Unknown God," and immediately used this unknown God to introduce Christianity into that community. By this means the faith came to be accepted.

How Valentine's path to Sainthood began--the future saint’s jailer may or may not have had a young daughter, but in any case a young girl began to visit Valentine. He may have fallen in love with her or maybe not, but they met frequently. On February 14, the day that he was to be executed, he wrote her a note and signed it, "From your Valentine." And that is supposedly the origin of the custom of writing one’s beloved a note and signing it with that well-known phrase.
~excerpt from hurriyet.com

Here's the gruesome part of the story: Valentine was beaten to death and decapitated. In 496 A.D. Pope Gelasius set aside Feb. 14 to honor St. Valentine, possibly to turn Roman minds from the licentious behavior associated with the pagan holiday Lupercalia.
~excerpt from hurriyet.com

It is kept as a commemoration by Traditionalist Roman Catholics who, in accordance with the authorization given by Pope Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum of July 7, 2007, use the General Roman Calendar of 1962 and the liturgy of Pope John XXIII's 1962 edition of the Roman Missal, and, as a Simple Feast, by Traditionalists, such as the Society of St. Pius X, Roman Catholics who continue to use the General Roman Calendar as in 1954.

Saint Valentine continues to be recognized as a saint, since he is included in the Roman Martyrology, the Catholic Church's official list of saints. The feast day of Saint Valentine also continues to be included in local calendars of places such as Balzan and Malta, where relics of the saint are claimed to be found.
~excerpt from Wikipedia

Love Is Not Rude

"At the end of your life, you will be judged by your love."
--Saint John of the Cross

With the approach of another Saint Valentine's day, retailers remind us there are wide swaths of the world taken over by its sentiments.
While Saint Valentine was a real person in history, very few greeting cards, retailers or restaurateurs, candy makers or the like recollect this. Saint Valentine's belief and message to mankind was essential and simple. Like Saint John of the Cross he believed:
"as the bee draws honey from plants and makes company with them for that reason, so must the soul most easily draw the sweetness of love from all that happens to it. It makes all things subservient to the ends of loving God, whether they be sweet or bitter. In all its occupations, its joy is the love of God."
--Daily Readings with St. John of the Cross, ed. by Sr. Elizabeth Ruth, ODC

He followed in the way of the teaching to 'love one another.' But what does that mean? His view was something like this:  
Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, it is not pompous, It is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians chapter 12:31-13:13 or 13:4-13

Charity is the greatest social requirement. It recognizes and respects others and their rights. Charity requires the practice of justice, and charity alone make us capable of doing so. Charity is love. Because love has the function of uniting persons and communities, love is the center of human life.
 Celebrate the feast day of Saint Valentine, and Saint Valentine is with you, building your spirit in love.

Imaging the Kingdom of Heaven

"When you enter into my Kingdom." --Bible, Matthew Chapter 18

Many write, speak and think of the "kingdom of heaven" as a concrete afterlife place; they believe that the Christ's teaching was geared to the how and why of getting there. In doing so, many miss the perhaps most obvious and subtle of points. Jesus, the Christ was a Jew and the Jews of the time did not espouse a concept of heaven as a place. Their spirituality called for good works performed on earth, and earth as the kingdom of heaven. Indeed it is the place where the Bible describes the Garden of Eden.

Must we work on earth so as to ascend to a place called heaven? No, suggests author Thomas Moore, in his book, Writing in the Sand: Jesus and the Soul of the Gospels. Moore writes of the kingdom of heaven as the center of the gospels intention, and of Jesus' teaching. He writes, "it is woven into all the stories and teachings."
Your response to those teachings, or lack of it directly corresponds to your understanding about living the kingdom. In reading the bible stories one learns that Jesus' view was that the kingdom "is at hand," that we are surrounded by it. This is to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth, in keeping with the beliefs of Judaism.

In Judeo-Christian belief, what we learn about the kingdom through our life experiences, is what we then share and live in both a mystical and everyday way through our actions, and behaviors as well as our prayer. The Kingdom in this view is in you. "When you enter into my kingdom" is a strong message to all who consider the Christ message. It does not suggest if or maybe; it suggests when and it suggests life. We all learn lessons of love and pain; there is bitterness and joy in all lives. We seek our meaning in life, and we share our fruits with others.

If one does otherwise and expresses a tendency to zealotry, "not just about religion but about everything in life, he is easily thrown into deep confusion and depression... there was hope for them when they could laugh at the contradictions in their lives," writes Moore. He explains that when we doggedly hang onto our usual ideas and images of our self and our lives, passionate to find ways of making sense of it all, some do forget that life is complex, subtle; our spirituality needs to reflect that. Otherwise we may find our self in a very brittle position, neurotic and pained.

Many do not appreciate the extreme, radical nature of the Christ's call. It's a call to be more than to believe, and that's hard to do, especially in the modern world. The potential believers do not image it, they do not see who Jesus stood for or why he stood at all. These are radical questions that millenia has grappled with. The mystery of Jesus is the equal mystery of the kingdom. In Jesus' world, the kingdom is on earth, it is living, breathing, real, the now. It calls for all, demands all, gives all and forgives. In Jesus' kingdom Moore writes, there is " a place of bliss and idealistic values. The Gospels suggest it is more important to enter that kingdom than to [simply] live a good life."

Long Term Commitments Can Be Dangerous

"Our faith must be alive; it cannot just be a set of rigid beliefs and notions."
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Hanh writes, "In the beginning we might have embarked upon the path of Buddhism thanks to a belief in re-incarnation." However, he continues by noting that as the world in its impermanence moves, so must we. Continuing our practice and touching reality as it is, we may find that our beliefs change. Perhaps they are more defined, more refined; perhaps the change is more radical.

Yet we need not fear change because as we find our way through practice, through experience with the reality of the world flowing ourselves to that acceptance, realizing the Amida Buddha more and more deeply, we find a confidence and security that we may have not known before.

Our ideas are more solid, reflecting our core senses. When we form our ideas and beliefs in response to our own experience, more so than the experiences of others, we may for the first time, perhaps, find our voice, our way, our joy. In this state, no one can easily remove our belief from us.

"Making a long term commitment [can be] dangerous." If years and time pass without our continued practice, a continued commitment to living the results of our experiences, one day we may come to discover that we cannot believe as we once did. A great revelation, an epiphany may come over us informing us that our usual beliefs, our usual way is no way. We are plunged into fear, panic, darkness.

"Faith must be alive; it cannot just be a set of rigid beliefs and notions." Open to change, to experience, we open ourselves to the fruit of all--peace, joy, a spacious freedom and love. Sometimes we may think that "faith" is only thinking, only notions. Yet it is more. In our prayers, our meditation, we must put our whole self into action; we must live those actions. Merely thinking, sitting meditation is not enough.

Our actions may be modeled after those of the Buddha, a guiding example. Deeply thinking, deeply seeing the world as it is, the goodness of change will lead to us to our share in creating a more harmonious, peaceful world.

True Faith is Alive

"Our faith must be alive; it cannot just be a set of rigid beliefs and notions."
--Thich Nhat Hanh

Hanh writes, "In the beginning we might have embarked upon the path of Buddhism thanks to a belief in re-incarnation." However, he continues by noting that as the world in its impermanence moves, so must we. Continuing our practice and touching reality as it is, we may find that our beliefs change. Perhaps they are more defined, more refined; perhaps the change is more radical.

Yet we need not fear change because as we find our way through practice, through experience with the reality of the world flowing ourselves to that acceptance, realizing the Amida Buddha more and more deeply, we find a confidence and security that we may have not known before.

Our ideas are more solid, reflecting our core senses. When we form our ideas and beliefs in response to our own experience, more so than the experiences of others, we may for the first time, perhaps, find our voice, our way, our joy. In this state, no one can easily remove our belief from us.

"Making a long term commitment [can be] dangerous." If years and time pass without our continued practice, a continued commitment to living the results of our experiences, one day we may come to discover that we cannot believe as we once did. A great revelation, an epiphany may come over us informing us that our usual beliefs, our usual way is no way. We are plunged into fear, panic, darkness.

"Faith must be alive; it cannot just be a set of rigid beliefs and notions." Open to change, to experience, we open ourselves to the fruit of all--peace, joy, a spacious freedom and love. Sometimes we may think that "faith" is only thinking, only notions. Yet it is more. In our prayers, our meditation, we must put our whole self into action; we must live those actions. Merely thinking, sitting meditation is not enough.

Our actions may be modelled after those of the Buddha, a guiding example. Deeply thinking, deeply seeing the world as it is, the goodness of change will lead to us to our share in creating a more harmonious, peaceful world.