Time as objective reality has never made much sense to me. It's what happens that matters. How can minutes and years, devices of our own creation, mean the same thing to gnats and to cedars? Two hundred years is young for the trees whose tops this morning are hung with mist. It's an eyeblink of time for the river and nothing at all for the rocks...
If there is meaning in the past and in the imagined future, it is captured in the moment. When you have all the time in the world, you can spend it, not on going somewhere, but on being where you are. So I stretch out, close my eyes, and listen to the rain.
Frederick Franck turned to the door of the building, a massive wooden sculpture in the form of the sun and its rays, and pushed it open. I saw that it turned on a central axis, so that only one half of the door was open at any one time. To remind us, he murmured, that we step into this sacred space as we walk into life, alone and silently . . . I looked around me and marveled at this ninety-year-old man from whose hand had sprung everything I could see. He had carved the door, made the stained-glass windows and every other object in sight. Pacem in Terris, I realized, was one man’s act of artistic faith: a work of art outside the parameters of the art world, and also a religious statement unconfined by any religion.
The essence of nonviolence, the lack of any impulse to harm, lies in the peace passing understanding at the heart of all of us and of every religious tradition. From that place ensues trust in the unfolding process of life, at the same time as action to the greater good. It is the source of action because compassion naturally arises from wisdom and wisdom is the nature of that place. Compassion is being moved, literally, to act for the greater good.
