Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Column

“…In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world ... in our personal world as well. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

“ ... Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.”

--cpe

Dear Brave Souls: When I began driving a pickup truck, having spent a jillion years with old cars that kept breaking down ... and with most cars whizzing by without looking ... I vowed that I would if I could, stop to help anyone I saw broken down at the side of the road ...

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.

You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting
your heart toward heaven -- only you.

It is in the midst of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says
nothing good came of this,
is not yet listening.

What do we owe to our kith and kin who have been injured by those who professed holiness, but who acted in egregiously unholy ways instead?

La noche oscura del alma: The transformative dark night of the soul

Hazme las cuentas claras y el chocolate espeso: Make for me the accounts clear and the chocolate thick.

This dicho, or saying, when said to a person retelling the family stories too harshly and without sincere love, means: Tell me the old stories clearly, but make them dulce, sweet and nourishing.

I was remembering that old exhortation when I saw the pope this week on TV. I realized that I have many more memories of Cardinal Ratzinger than I do of the pope -- yet they are the same man.

But are they really the same man?

I saw evidence to the contrary this week.

When someone says, "We're saying the same thing."
Say, "We are not saying the same thing."
When someone says, "Don't question, just have faith."
Say, "I am questioning, vato, and
I have supreme faith in what I think."
When someone says, "Don't defy my authority."
Say, "There is a higher authority that I follow."
            --Cpe

In an article in The Washington Post, April 13, Daniel Burke, a national correspondent for Religion News Service, writes about how some imagine President George Bush is actually a secret Catholic "believer," and how he has met with and surrounded himself with Catholics during his administration, that his policies have directly grown out of Catholic social justice teachings and that Pope Benedict is coming to see the president and his Catholic appointees specially, as the pope is his ally -- even though the pope disagrees with President Bush's Iraq war and torture.

“On the 7th Day, it is said, God Rested…
What naiveté
of the unawakened human mind
made us think
God was done ?”

A third set of holy books

And, what if we have not two, but three sets of holy books? The first set of sacred books, from nearly every part of the world, lets us fall through the pages into the Creation story, into the generative, then next into sagas of life conduct; an inquiry into human nature, heroics, the diabolical, tracking the rights and wrongs of God’s humans and angels.

Followers of Christ have a second set of holy books detailing the never-ending story of The Word literally arrived fully on earth, hiding and sheltering that precious Life during siege. Next, come all the miracle memes, all prophetic, horrific, upbracing matters drenched in Divinity.

What if comes then a third set of holy books? The set of sacred volumes comprised of Nature and the Cosmos: its flowers, songbirds and animals being the words; its forests, stars, oceans and tides being the sentences; the smallest creatures and all the planetary glitter dusts being the commas, ampersands, ellipses. What if we were the avid students? What if nature was an avid teacher of God’s ways?

Wherever the land is dry and hard, you could be the water ...
or you could be the blade disking the earth open;
or you could be the acequia, the ditch that carries water from river to fields;
or you could be the just engineer mapping dams that must be taken down,
and those which would serve the venerable all, instead of only the very few;
or you could be the battered vessel for carrying water by hand;
or you could be the one who stores the water, protects it, blesses it or pours it;
or you could be the tired ground that receives it;
or you could be the scorched seed that drinks it;
or you could be the vine green-growing overland in all wild audacity ...

If there is an ancient secret to caring for and mending the significant lacerations to this “Oh-my-dear-God-beautiful” earth we’ve been given, by soul’s light it might be just a tiny four-word prayer from Creator to humanity:

“Please, just start anywhere.”

A meditation for Holy Week and Easter

If one were to cease dreaming bold dreams, then bold and much needed actions on earth would also cease, for dreams are the primary fuel for the engine of doing. If it cannot be dreamt, it cannot be done. Thereby, protect rather than pre-empt the dreamer in your own soul.

Massacre of the dreamers

In our family it is said, that once, long ago, Moctezuma, cacique, chieftain of Mexico, in or about 1519, had been hearing constant rumors about pale-skinned warriors descending fully armed from the east coast of Mexico. Moctezuma, uncertain what to do or believe, sent for all tribal dreamers from all villages across the empire.

Hope. Hope seems to have broken out in the U.S. electorate; hope of a kind many have not seen since the end of World War II with its estimated death and maiming toll of more than 70 million people, equal to more than half the 1945 population of the United States.

The hope message of presidential candidates has become a call and response song between contenders and voters, complete with drums and chanting. This “mass hope” appears to have created a collective energy that can move a moraine overland, pushing everything in its path ahead of it, accumulating, growing, carrying an almost evangelical vigor similar to the Great Awakenings of the last many centuries.

When I was a child, our two-bedroom-one-bathtub saltbox in the boondocks suddenly overflowed with arrival of "The Babushka Brigade."

The old women refugees called themselves “old believers” and “last of their kind.” Until now, they’d lived all their lives in a tiny farm village in a part of Hungary that some said used to belong to former Romania-Yugoslavia-Transylvania-Austro-Hungarian Empire, but would soon be Soviet.

My adoptive father, an immigrant to America himself, had searched for his large Catholic family in the ruins of post-WWII Europe. He’d say: “War is not over because governments say so.” “War is over when enough hearts stop hurting … hating.”