The Inner Source - a Henri Nouwen Lecture

Lecture 3, 1 December 2001
by Anselm Grün, Germany

Excerpt from THE SPIRITUAL PATH AS PATH TO HEALING

"Many people nowadays complain about stress, burnout and exhaustion. For me stress is always a spiritual problem. We try and manage by using our own strength. Prayer is the path to the inner spring. Inside us the spring of the Holy Spirit flows over. If I am in contact with this spring, if I work from within it, I can perform many tasks without getting exhausted. My internal spring is eternal, because it is spiritual.

"Many people are exhausted because they have a harmful lifestyle. They work with the motto: "Hopefully I do everything well. Hopefully I don't make any mistakes. Hopefully we won't get into conflict". With such life patterns we are soon out of breath and burned out. According to Evagrius Ponticus prayer leads us to the inner place of contemplation and peace. Evagrius calls this place "God's place" because God himself lives there, and "Jerusalem", because it is a place of peace. The mystic tells us that there is already a place in us where there is complete peace, where God is already in us. But we are separated from this quiet place, separated by the internal and external noise of our worries and problems which lie like a thick layer of concrete between our heart and this internal place of peace and quiet.

"Prayer penetrates this concrete layer and enters this internal place. In this place where God lives, other people don't have entry and we are not touched by opinions and condemnation, neither by desires and expectations, rejection and hurt. There we are whole and complete. In spite of our fears, we may experience that in our inner self we are whole and complete. That experience is indestructible. The pain only touches our emotions, but not our true identity, not the inner reflection God has formed of us.

"Prayer is the way to the inner place of wellbeing. In the Eastern church especially, the Jesus prayer is the path to the depth of the heart where Christ himself lives. It is a place of gentleness and compassion, of love and freedom. Our own guilt has no entry. In this place we are blameless and pure, without sin. On December 8 the church tells us this in our celebrations of Mary of Immaculate Conception, who is an example for us through Jesus Christ who delivered us."

Fireproofing?

I watched Fireproof some time ago. The film detailed the Christian - and natural - struggles of human relationships. Between husband and wife, child and parent, and between friends too.

How do we 'fireproof' our relationships in a Godly manner?

A friend posted on Facebook this note:

The most-intimate relationship is marriage between a husband and a wife.
Unfortunately, relationships today are under more cultural and interpersonal pressure and stress than ever before in our history. But it doesnít have to be that way. Together, we can make a long-term difference for healthy relationships and marriages Ö starting with yours!

What can you do to make a difference?
http://www.fireproofmymarriage.com/

If people actually knew the amount of sacrifice and humility needed to make marriage work - and how much we need to make God the centre of it, not ourselves - we might not be so quick to jump into one.

The allure of loving someone and being loved is sometimes to great for us to see that a relationship - and marriage - is given to us by God to reveal who we truly are, and how we continually lay down ourselves and let God increase.

But God is gentle and loving. It will be what we can bear.

So, sometimes before we can be fireproofed, we need to let the fire come and rarefy everything. What's left of the cinders - something refined, something pure, and something simple that God can use.

So, I see, that's what it means to say, 'God, here I am. Take all of me.'

It actually means all. And wow, the best is yet to come, cos His blessings will come in a torrent, once we're ready to receive it, with our empty hands.

Unclench your fists, and let go of what your eyes can see. Open your hands, and see that, no matter what you add to them, they will ultimately be empty.

Thank you, God, for your everlasting love.

Real art

“The real art of conversation is not only to say the right things at the right time but to leave the wrong things unsaid at the tempting moment.”

World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves.
This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City.
More info, background and info on future releases can be at facebook.com/pages/World-Builder/73936485659 Become a fan and keep in touch.

Join my 'gang' and turn around

It's not the end when you make a mistake. Check out what Glenn and his 'gang' have to say after spending time behind bars, in this video on youths at risk.

God is in control.

Lomo makes cents... and dollars

Yeah we know it - it's possible to start up an online shop and earn some spare cash. Especially now, when times are spiralling downwards.

But what does it involve? Easy, but how easy? We need to know the nuts and bolts!

So we did a show on beating the economic blues by setting up online stores on Point Blank . A lomography shop, a lifestyle shop, a jewellery shop, and of course... fashion!



I've got a new-found interest in lomography - simply put, using plasticky film cameras and cross-processed slide films to get wacky, super-saturated and surreal photos, complete with light leaks and all.






Judging from my super-long previous sentence, you can probably tell I like lomo quite a bit :)

I just got my Blackbird, Fly!! It looks like this:




You can find out more about what lomo is on Point Blank: DIY online store

Love it!

Do you have a hobby viable enough to turn into a business, you think???

I could try whistling.

Weather you will change or not

is anybody's guess. Change, they say, is the only constant.

The weather has been slightly wacky. I know, this is Singapore, but still.

Am I chatting about the weather? Yep, I am.

I fell ill yesterday. Actually, since Mon night. The weather went round a sharp bend. From a hot, humid, smoggy grey to a cold, humid, soggy grey. I could hear my air con unit last week creaking from working doubly hard to combat the heat.

So I went under, with flu. It's a strange kind of flu, I must say. I've been riddled with this strange flu for, like, the third time?

It starts off with a sore throat. Right there, at the back of the nasal cavity where it meets the back of the throat. Then it starts hurting worse and worse. It feels like someone's been scraping my throat with a metal plate. A pounding headache follows. Soon it feels like my brain has swollen (not in the good way) and is about to implode. Throb, throb. No fever - not for the last two flus I had. Strange. I blow my nose, and feel hot stuff coming from the back of my throat. I see a bit of blood.

For the day, I can't think, my mind is focused on the pain. Then I tell myself, write a script. And I write a script. I tell myself, crack a few jokes, and I crack a few jokes. I tell myself, play the keyboard and sing, and I play a keyboard and sing. And so on.

Still, I did enjoy myself at the party on Tues night. I sang, I laughed, and forgot about pain for the night. My colleagues were a ball. So I got consolation prize for my song and dance, but, it was kinda fun. Free cash, too. Took a bit of work. It was even more fun catching up with my friends from work, in a quiet corner. That, for me, is the most meaningful part of the night.

But oh boy, the next morning. I went under with a crash.

So I slept most of today away. And wondered for a little while how fragile our bodies are. The human body is held together by tissue, sinew, and fluids. It's a miracle how organs, things, fall into place. Like how our lungs continue to expand and contract even when we're sleeping. God is an amazing engineer.

It's also amazing how our bodies respond to the environment. A slight tweak in the environment could be disastrous.

So I thought about climate change and global warming. I'm no tree hugger, but the situation is dire.

The world is in a precarious place, no matter how safe it seems right now.

It went from hot to rainy, and I came down with the flu. Maybe it's just me, a bit weak at the edges recently. But weather you like it or not, climate change is a matter of life and death.

End-times are near. God have mercy on us all.

Red-hot, I am shot

“Financial” has a married-with-kids rhyme with the words “turmoil”, “crisis”, “crunch” and other painful terms these days. I know, it doesn’t even rhyme. But what seems forced a few months ago appears easy as a Hawaiian breeze these days.

This uncomfortable breeze has fluttered its way to Asia, in the art corner of things.

In Reuter’s recent article (see below) , the ‘red-hot’ Chinese contemporary art markets seems to have cooled off somewhat, as bidders are shuddering from sub-zero temperatures rendered by the economic crisis.

Global financial turmoil was fingered the culprit for Sotheby’s poor showing at Hong Kong’s marquee autumn sale of Asian contemporary artwork. Shame-faced and in hiding, Financial Crisis nodded to its distant cousin – the Excess of Identity in Late-Stage Capitalism.

Proud representative of one of Asia’s rising identity incursions into the new world (order), perhaps all the attention on Chinese contemporary art has sort of made it out to be more ballooned up than it was intended to be.

Kind of like a shy child given too much exam stress. Buckles under pressure.

No longer a dumb comrade, Chinese contemporary art has taken on the veneer of East-meets-West, I-don’t-care-what-identity-you-canvas-cos-I-have-my-hybrid-own sensibility.

Yes, I have a voice. But what happens what late-stage capitalism catches up with art?

It has a price tag, its highs and lows, its place in the market. What happens after it’s dropped off unceremoniously from the good books of Big Brother?

People have short attention spans. Public memory is kind of taxed. Late-stage capitalism favours the excessive.

Put a price tag to art, you have an auction buyers and sellers.

Slap a price tag on identity, you get more than you bargained for. Too much. An excess of identity – bursting-at-the-seams identity, you don’t know what the price is any more.

It’s like a grotesque Frankenstein mish-mashing various nightmares into one ghoulish body.

Rather like that anime Paprika I saw recently, where people venture into each other’s – and eventual the general public’s – dreams. There was this festive parade of nightmare-bodies thrown together, and the moving mound of pulsating lives pushed on as it swallowed even more poeple-in-dreams.

What troubled me was this – these dreams eventually ate into (and ate up) reality.

Kind of like marrying a neo-Asian identity with consumer culture.

(Written in 'Writing for Online' course @ Amara)

–

FROM REUTERS LAST OCTOBER:

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Global financial turmoil has caught up with the red-hot Chinese contemporary art market as bidders failed to buy top-flight paintings at a major Sotheby’s auction in Hong Kong on Saturday.

For the past few years, auction rooms in London, New York and Hong Kong have crackled with fierce interest in Chinese contemporary paintings as prices broke record after record.

But in Sotheby’s marquee autumn sale of Asian contemporary artwork, a key twice-yearly barometer of market sentiment among the world’s top collectors, 19 of 47 prominent works went unsold and others barely hit low estimates.

"The results weren’t at all ideal, and prices of contemporary Chinese art seem to have reached a peak now," Jackson See, a Singaporean buyer, told Reuters in the packed auction hall.

"It is showing signs of a real correction," he added.

Works by feted artists Zhang Xiaogang, Yue Minjun, Liu Wei, Liao Jichun and Zeng Fanzhi failed to sell with Zeng’s "After the Long March Andy Warhol arrived in China," for instance, attracting bids far short of its HK$20 million reserve price.

Sotheby’s said that after 5 years of "unprecedented growth" the poor showing was to be expected.

"It is not surprising that there will be some leveling off, which is what we also experienced this evening, in addition to some estimates which were overly optimistic," said Evelyn Lin, the Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Asian Art department.

Test

My very first mobile blog entry. Hello world, on wheels!

Sent from my Nokia phone