Mud Floors, Tibetan Sephardim, and Tuscany in SE Jung Guo

In other news, I had an absolutely lovely conversation tonight about (what else?) theology (with a friend soon to depart for another hemisphere.) He gave me a book which was absolutely perfect in many ways, not least of which is that it is entirely relevant to a rant I have not yet given into, since I'm terribly lazy and would have to buy another little easel in order to have three books propped up around the little laptop in order satisfyingly to vent my spleen.

But, now I will feel impelled to buy my little easel (is it truly an easel? I don't think so; I don't know what they are called, but people who collect things with cats on them use them to display plates with either state insignias or details of Botticelli's greatest hits printed in Fujian) and tell you what the Dalai Lama had to say about 'Tibetan Buddhists' raised in Farmington in a John Main Seminar in the '80s or '90s. The Lama, not the Farmingtonians. I don't know that many were raised in a John Main Seminar. But I am open to possibilities. Not to mention, in the distant future, good nutrition.

In the meantime (not to hold all 7.3 of you in too-great suspense), here is how John Dunne, who is neither John Dear nor that John Donne, weighed in briefly - and similarly - on the issue: 'I think of a Sufi sheik I met on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem who told me and the two young Israeli women who were with me, 'Go deep in your own religion.' Okay, fine, I already know which book I'm trading him. But God bless those Sufis, eh? Here is the spiritual work one Naqshbandi master gave to an aspirant: Pray nothing, think nothing, say nothing, but 'Oh, God,' all day every day. When the disciple came back saying he had succeeded in that task, the teacher told him no longer to speak it, but to breathe the prayer in his thoughts, to think and feel nothing else but 'Oh, God; Oh, God,' all day. After internalizing this, after training his spirit to unceasing dhikr, one day a loose beam fell from the roof of his house onto the pupil's head. The blood that dropped to the ground spelled Allah on the mud floor.