Fagan's Beach, Moloka'i, Hawai'i 
"[Dietrich] Bonhöffer's analysis of religion addressed the fact that those anxious souls who used... Christianity in its transcendental clothing to answer questions about the unknown dimensions of life and death constructed a religious idol. What may be difficult for us to realize is that the entirety of the Christian tradition may be captured by this idolatry... Concerning God, the terms we have used to define the Divine like omnipotence and omniscience are in fact theological mistakes that say [more] about our relationship to power or our relationship to knowledge [than about God]."
p. 98, Jeffrey C. Pugh, Religionless Christianity,Dietrich Bonhöffer in Troubled Times, Continium Books, 2008.
Giant Bird of Paradise, Moloka'i, Hawai'i
Past
We have to discard the past
and, as one builds
floor by floor, window by window,
and the building rises,
so do we go on throwing down
first, broken tiles,
then pompous doors,
until out of the past
dust rises
as if to crash
against the floor,
smoke rises
as if to catch fire,
and each new day
it gleams
like an empty
plate.
There is nothing, there is always nothing.
It has to be filled
with a new, fruitful
space,
then downward
tumbles yesterday
as in a well
falls yesterday's water,
into the cistern
of all still without voice or fire.
It is difficult to teach bones
to disappear,
to teach eyes
to close
but
we do it
unrealizing.
It was all alive,
alive, alive, alive
like a scarlet fish
but time
passed over its dark cloth
and the flash of the fish
drowned and disappeared.
Water water water
the past goes on falling
still a tangle
of bones
and of roots;
it has been, it has been, and now
memories mean nothing.
Now the heavy eyelid
covers the light of the eye
and what was once living
now no longer lives;
what we were, we are not.
And with words, although the letters
still have transparency and sound,
they change, and the mouth changes;
the same mouth is now another mouth;
they change, lips, skin, circulation;
another being has occupied our skeleton;
what once was in us now is not.
It has gone, but if the call, we reply;
"I am here," knowing we are not,
that what once was, was and is lost,
is lost in the past, and now will not return. Pablo Neruda
Near Morro Bay, California, 2007
Dionysius
“...[God] is beyond assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and by virtue of its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial.” (Dionysius [sometimes Psuedo-Dionysius], 5th or 6th CE, The Mystical Theology)
from MONISM AND DUALISM, Chapter 3 of Christian Zen , William Johnston, Fordham Press, New York, 1997:
"...[In] past... centuries popular Christianity has spoken of God in dualistic and even anthropomorphic way[s]... Christian mystics, however, [tell] a different story. Here are men and women whose meditation (or contemplation) is more akin to that of the Zen Masters in that it embraces an area of experience which is beyond subject and object...This... author stands clearly in the great tradition of "theology of negation" that stems from Dionysius, passes to the Rhenish mystics, and reaches a climax with John of the Cross. Merton, too, belongs to the same tradition, and that is why he has such sympathy for Zen...God is not... an object. He is the ground of being. If this is not grasped, Zen will be called atheistic and its introduction to Christianity will be roundly opposed or regarded with suspicion. Nor is this to deny the dualistic aspect of reality, which for the Christian always remains. And here we come to the famous problem of "the one and the many," which has occupied the finest minds in the West from Parmenides and Aristotle to Aquinas. There is one thing; yet there are many things... Everyday life teIls us that there are many things; experience like Zen tells us that there is one thing. Why not stick to both? Must we deny one...?"
