by John Blumberg / Anthony de Mello reminds us that we never meet a category — only the one standing in front of us. John Blumberg on how quickly a label closes the door it seemed to open.
Label Makers
by Anthony DeMello
Life is like heady wine.
Everyone reads the label on the bottle.
Hardly anyone tastes the wine.
The Buddha once held up a flower to his disciples
and asked each of them to say something about it.
One pronounced a lecture. Another a poem.
Yet another a parable.
Each trying to outdo the other in depth and erudition.
Label makers!
Mahakashyap smiled and said nothing.
Only he had seen the flower.
If I could only taste a bird,
a flower,
a tree,
a human face!
But alas, I have not time!
My energy is spent deciphering the label.
— Anthony DeMello SJ from The Song of the Bird
John’s Reflection
There have been many times that I have been quick with labels. I meet a person and within moments I have named them — their role, their politics, the box they belong in. It subconsciously feels efficient. Clean. Tidy. Yet once I’ve named them, something quietly closes. I have assumed the label helps me see. Mostly it just lets me stop looking.
The disciples each had something clever to say about the flower. A lecture. A poem. A parable. And every word carried them a little further from the one thing in front of them. Only Mahakashyap said nothing. Which said everything.
Here is what stays with me. A label can only ever describe a category — all the ones like that. But no one has ever met a category. We only ever meet this one. This face. This story I do not yet know. And the distance between all of them and this one is the whole distance between a glance and an encounter.
I confess how often I have settled for the glance — how often I have deciphered a person rather than truly experiencing them. It felt like knowing. But it was only the label on the bottle. I never opened the bottle, poured the wine, and allowed it to breathe. And the depth I was longing for was waiting the whole time, on the other side of an efficiency I was so sure of.
How the Word Works
Every form of writing we have encountered this summer — poem, parable, proverb — uses words to point past words. They are not trying to explain experience. They are trying to return us to it.
De Mello’s parable makes this explicit. The disciples who spoke most eloquently about the flower were the furthest from it. It was silence that finally proved equal to the moment. This is the contemplative tradition’s oldest and most countercultural claim: what we most need to know cannot be said, only received.
There is an old teaching that words are like a finger pointing at the moon. Concentrate on the finger and you miss all that heavenly glory.
A Simple Practice
This week, choose one encounter — a conversation, a meal, a moment in nature — and resist the first label that arrives. Don’t categorize the person or the experience before you have fully entered it. Stay in the silence of receptivity as long as you can, and notice what happens when you allow yourself to really taste the experience.
John’s Bio
John Blumberg spent an 18-year career at Arthur Andersen before leaving in 1996 to become a professional speaker and author. His work centers on integrity as wholeness — a theme he now shares each weekday in a contemplative series called Whispers. His path into contemplation began through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius and deepened as part of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Living School. He has cohosted the Monday Morning Chapel since Still Point began in 2019.
Poems, Parables & Proverbs was a Sunday email series shared with the Still Point community through the summer of 2026. Each week offered a text, a reflection from a member of our community, and a simple practice for the week ahead.