follow

sound the gong

call the faithful

the abbot comes

leading the monks in prayer

retrace your steps

and follow

God calls

you are near

in the midst of town

walking toward the message

softly drifting to your ears

follow the red umbrella

approach the echoing gong

bow down in the temple 

and settle into song

*Thoughts of Gil Bailie:

-To be a Christian is to believe in mediation, and to believe that this mystery [the crucifixion] must come through bread and wine and music and incense and architecture and visual art.

-It seems to me that artists are the technicians of sacramental sensibility.  Their job is to transfigure the senses, to move us from idols to icons.

Is this the way:

that we are boxed  bodies

smiling from our rears

in pretense that our fronts aren't gleeful?

We are frightened containers

afraid of the gift our bodies are

the Gift we dare not claim.

What bare souls!

What guilt our spirit would cast aside

if there were a Yes

to all the poop the Lord released

to ev'ry drop of funky sweat

to all that bonds us to this flesh

to all the Kingdom's rejoicing over it

forever and ever amen!

*Thoughts of Gil Bailie:

-...we must not, in that dialogue, ask of people to drop their truth-claims at the door.  We must not ask Muslims to stop being Muslim in order to have a democracy.  And likewise, we Christians should not be expected to drop our Christianity in order to engage in that conversation.  I think it's much healthier, and we're more inspired to be charitable, if we acknowledge those differences and learn to love each other in spite of them - and in some ways because of them.

-These playwrights [Greek tragedians] understood that if you see violence, you get caught up in it, aroused by it.  I read not so long ago that the link between television violence and actual violence on the part of young people is more scientifically verifiable than the link between tobacco smoke and cancer.

-Violence is part of the world we live in, so it has to be a part of art in some way.

-...I would say that if the depiction of violence is going to be healthy for us, it should result in our experience of compassion, our sense of the pitiableness of the human condition.

No-Win

                                                                                                         (Dream poem)

Backed into a corner

alone and very confused

Tired of running away

My manhood has been abused

Not my choice 2 be so blunt

But u must fight fire with flame

I allowed myself 2 run once

and was haunted by the shame

if I must kill I will and if I must do it again

I would but the situation is a no-win

-Tupac Shakur

What of me is bleeding?

All of me is bleeding.

What of me is grieving?

All of me is grieving.

What of me is silent?

All of me is silenced

all about me prayer:

urgent emergings

rising from my soil;

itching surprises,

nothing surrounding;

ladened rebellions,

the Wind espousing;

needful pairing,

all of me journeying;

I walk stumbling.

Someone's on the Way.

"Come toward me

all you weary ones,

I will wash your feet."

*Reflections of Gil Bailie:

-...we must not...ask of people to drop their truth-claims at the door.  We must not ask Muslims to stop being Muslim in order to have a democracy.  And likewise, we Christians should  not be expected to drop our Christianity in order to engage in that conversation.  I think it's much healthier, and more inspired to be charitable, if we acknowledge those differences and learn to love each other in spite of them - and in some way because of them.

-Violence is part of the world we live in, so it has to be part of art in some way.

-...I would say that if the depiction of violence is going to be healthy for us, it should result in our experience of compassion, our sense of the pitiableness of the human condition. 

And 2morrow

Today is filled with anger

Fueled with hidden hate 

Scared of being outcast

Afraid of common fate

Today is built on tragedies

which no one wants 2 face

Nightmares 2 humanities

and morally disgraced

Tonight is filled with rage

Violence in the air

Children bred with ruthlessness

Because no one at home cares

Tonight I lay my head down

But the pressure never stops

gnawing at my sanity

content when I am dropped

But 2morrow I c change

a chance 2 build anew

Built on spirit, intent of heart

and ideals based on truth

And 2morrow I wake with second wind

and strong because of pride

2 know I fought with all my heart 2 keep my dream alive

-Tupac Shakur 

why were my eyes full

I.

why were my eyes full

my heart shattering?

II.

our tech-gods had chosen their twelve disciples

marked their heads with friendly fire

as if their death was some how different

since they died at commanders' hands.

heroes before the ground engulfed them

privileged mortals unique among the rest

God promised as their undisputed shield

swooping down to snatch their martyred souls.

III.

freshening-up evil as a good we needed to hear

the ram'blings of gods soothed the enraged souls

to lead us deeper into the dangerous frontier

stationing us stealth'ly beyond the heart of war.

IV.

thus my eyes are full

my heart is shattered

seeing a hundred thousand victims 

pilloried to a cross

Thoughts of Gil Bailie:

-The thing about Christians is that, at least formally, we make a point of saying that we are sinners -  not that we used to be, but that we are - and that you can count on our continuing to be so.

-We should all think of ourselves as religious Semites, which , by the way, would put us a little closer to Islam.

-Any time you have a marker, whether ethnicity or race or gender or physical handicap, when a society falls into chaos or crisis, there will be people who will seize that marker as a way of directing their confusion and fear, setting up the whole scapegoating business which [Rene] Girard has analyzed so powerfully.

The Promise

"I will give u liberty, but first give me ure spirit

This I must confiscate because the evil fear it."

I too would he afraid of passion governed by reason

An open mind 2 trying when corruption is in season

The promise that they claim

2 be completely true

is hypocrisy at its finest

A trick 2 silence u

never will I believe a promise

from the masters of the Art

trickery does not succeed

with those with Honest Hearts

-Tupac Shakur

a neck-craning chicken

chauffeured on a truck of fated hens

cackled from her mobile cage

"LOOK!"

*Thoughts of Gil Bailie:

-The question"Who am I?" needs to be set aside.  Instead, we should ask, "Where am I?  There are two grids on which you answer that question.  First, as a biblical person, I am called and sent - to the person next to me, to my family, to the people I run into today.  My vocation is very mundane, and it can shift daily.  A friend of mine, when he was first ordained, lived with an elderly priest, and at breakfast one morning my friend asked him, "Father, when did  you decide to become a priest?" The old priest said, " When I got up this morning."

Secondly, I'm always situated in history.  I'm called and sent at a historical moment, a moment that will impinge upon my vocation and my life and challenge me.  I have to be a loving person and a witnessing Christian in this situation.  I can't just stand on the soapbox and preach the gospel.  I have to speak to my time.  This is especially true for artists and poets and musicians, people who have a creative vocation.  If you want to redeem the time, you have to pick up on its confusion.

pause

there!

in the gap

between the notes

in the soundless void

there the message

there the call

the ground to stand still

and be

there the deed

the altered act

the world

a life

do you not hear the frozen breath

the angled gasp

the swallowed words

the dissected cords

do you not hear the sigh of love

the whimpering child

the tortured man

stop!

cock your ears

slow your breath

whisper and pause

there is the door to the universe

the opening

where all waiting worth hearing

is

himself, perhaps

without love, he was a shallow grave, a tainted reliquary

where dogs bury bones for future consumption

he was aching for resurrection from his tomb

to leap about the temple of his world

he dreamt of sowing cheer for once

and bear the presumptions others assume

but it was life that was missing

had escaped into the wilderness of loss

of a childhood smothered beneath a mountain of loss

beneath the garbage dump where seagulls swarm

he longed to rise crying

to scrub away filth from the treasure at hand

to flush the muck binding his feet

but who'd hug him in his funk

choose him, a trinket cast off as junk?

who will notice and enfold him in care

who other than himself, perhaps?

*Thoughts of Gil Bailie:

-No group of  people is more unalike than a group of really committed Christians.  The saints are as unusual and unique as you can imagine.

-Christianity is all about imitation, not in the slavish sense, but in the sense of being inspired to the same aspiration.

-Heaven is not where you are, it's who you're with.

*How Can We Be Free

Sometimes I wonder about this race

Because we must be blind as hell

2 think we live in equality

while Nelson Mandela rots in a jail cell

Where the shores of Howard Beach

are full of Afrikan corpses

And those that do live 2 be 18

Bumrush to join the Armed Forces

This is so called "Home of the Brave"

why isn't anybody Backing us up!

When they c those crooked ass Redneck cops

constantly Jacking us up

Now I bet some punk will say I'm racist

I can tell by the way you smile at me

then I remember George Jackson, Huey Newton

and Geronimo 2 hell with Lady Liberty

as at the end of night

i walk in the night

stain my eyes, stub a toe

move toward the dawn

itching for the light

all about lay felled limbs

reaching out to snare me

night creatures molesting me

from the underbrush of their domiciles

i sense the chill of darkness

darkness cov'ring my dimming light

eating at whatever spark of hope

flits about my soul

each step is a prayer

a prayer for courage not to lay down and die

not to abandon childhood's believing

that out there somewhere sleeps the dawn

priming my eyes to mate her

to touch her light at the end of night

i push away the dross clinging like spider webs

poised to wrap a morsel in their silky hands

i press forward, toward, to glimpse the dawn

straining to greet her with a kiss

*John Paul comes to the defence of sexual intimacy.  He points out that intimacy is what's being betrayed.  Nietzsche - whom you have to thank for his candor - says that if you want to destroy Christianity, not to bother challenging its creed, because who cares?  If you want to destroy Christianity, you have to attack its ethic.  Fundamentally he's talking about the ethic of empathy for victims, but it's also implicit that the sexual ethic is part of what has to be held in contempt, and this is powerful.  We don't realize that the attack on the Christian sexual ethic is an attack on Christianity as such.  My reasoning comes from a reading of John Paul: we are made sexually, that is, with sexual differentiation, so we are made incomplete.  We are made for each other in an absolutely physical way.  Our sexual desires are a kind of homing device which makes us want the other, and it's that encounter with the other, at which Adam said, "This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," that John Paul calls "the moment of hominization," the moment when mystery breaks in.... The mystery, the real human sacrament, is when they look into each other's eyes and say, This at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh," which is an exclusive claim.

-Gil Bailie

a power we own

with lust in the eyes to see more of...what!

of the same dissatisfying stuff of death and emptiness

emptiness multiplied again and again

on dead faces and dead screens as if they were the real

this is the prison we're in

believing walls are parameters of the world

the horizon of life in a rotten wheel

we feel barred from the journey

abandoned to grey coffins

colliding with selves avoiding the drama of life

we sing songs of righteousness

bonding hell, making joy a loss

our pleasures becoming punishment

like the twistings of wars

what a gift it would be to break this strangling mold

and discover the gift of freedom along the road

uncover life with light and regain our sight

smelling the roses as power we own

*Reflections of Gil Bailie:

-One has to say something about beauty.  The three essentials are truth, goodness and beauty - and they're interrelated.  

-The revelation of the cross comes down to what the centurion said at the moment Jesus died: "Surely this is an innocent man."  What he saw was goodness.  The revelation was not of the ugliness of human acts, which is predictable, but of goodness shown in its midst.

-I get help in the liturgy, in the sanctuary, and from the artist, the poet, the musician.  They're not providing a commercial break from the clutter; they're there to show us that in this concrete material world of earth and the body and nature and culture, salvation can be visible.

"Where There Is A Will"

Where there is a will

there is a way

2 search and discover

a better day

Where a positive heart

is all u need

2 Rise Beyond

and succeed

Where young minds grow

an respect each other

based on their Deeds

and not their color

When times R dim

say as I say

"Where there is a will

There is a way!"

-Tupac Shakur

personal bomb

his face was a flag

his eyes were bricks staring

packed with charges atop a hill

to melt those standing below

he was roaming dynamite

a time bomb steadily ticking

eating up minutes with a red glow

his pressure running high

banished like sin from memory

who thought of him as a risk

as a burden needing a sling

to hold up dreams for healing?

so we suffer waiting for death

our peace scarred with anger

left as bread to feed our hearts

as we trudge toward safety faintly had

oh how we yearn to raise the high-five

in pretense that brotherhood was always our lot

but truth won't stop shackling our buckling backs

with each others hate and concentrated lust

i wish i knew what not to do

in weighing the already breaking backs

but i'm caught in the ever reeling cycles of violence

that moved him to charge up the hill

when fraternity has been strangled

and all conversations failed

fear has no face to flee from

and is an explosion walking blind

*Thoughts from Gil Bailey:

-We live in a world that has calloused our sensibilties, a world where we are bombarded visually, ravaged by stimulation until we can't see or hear or taste or feel or touch anything, and in this world the artist is charged with bringing us to our senses.  This is the sacramental sensibility.

-Rene Girard has said many times that we want to talk about language instead of using it - we have a sort of postmodern hermeneutics of hermeneutics of hermeneutics.  "In the room the women go, talking of Michelangelo" is the condition from which the visual artist must save us, and the great mainstream of art in the twentieth century has completely abandoned the task. 

-The three essentials are truth, goodness and beauty - and they are interrelated.  Everything in our culture is either a perversion or a parody of or an inversion of Christianity. For example, we have the western avant-garde's notion that truth is ugly. 

*Tears of a Teenage Mother

He's bragging about his new Jordans

the Baby just ran out of milk

He's buying gold every 2 weeks

the Baby just ran out of Pampers

He's buying clothes for his new girl

& the Baby just ran out of medicine

u ask for money for the Baby

the Daddy just ran out the Door

-Tupac Shakur

not in Iraq

they ain't dead, y'all

none die in the 'raq

no show, no parade

no flag draped coffins on display

no trumpet call

no Guards ever fall

you're mistaken

your fears misshapen

thoughts distended

your vision barricaded

no, they ain't dead y'all

none die in the 'raq

If death doesn't get ya, somethin' else will.

*Reflections from Theodore L. Prescott:

-So much striving, but at the end of the day, we are still, as Walker Percy wisely observed, stuck with ourselves - and I might add, stuck with our particular gifts, and the weight of history.

-It seems that we live by moving, yet we know that not all movement amounts to living.  So we want to engage in purposeful movement, movement that really gets us somewhere.  But there are problems built into the idea of getting somewhere, both in art and faith.  It is very difficult to know where it is we want to go, or how it is that we get there.

-...our faith tells us that all ends are proximate, and even death - that seeming fearsome finality - is another passage in the borderlands.

-Perhaps hell is an unending futile movement in the same place, and heaven is finding peace and rest as we move toward and in Him who was, is, and is to come. 

...and the footsteps of beggars cause the earth to tremble once again.  [Monsieur Ouine]

farewell to Yesterday

crumbling, the cathedral is crumbling

listen to the cracks widening

the hammers swaying against the bells in their shells

see the roaches scatter

fleeing the failure of structures

of love, of truth, of caring for each other

listen to the cassocks dropping

curates and rectors from doors flying

listen to the stained glass falter

while all the saints of yore tumble

shattered and scattered as shards of glory

it happens that no stone's upon a stone

no sound of pipes awakens at Mass

or lulls one to sleep before they exit

is this the farewell to dead Yesterdays

the inauguration of a new Today

when flowers bloom through the salt

and the salt sweetens the waters again?

perhaps, now, perhaps...

Jesus might rise in the dead

and the saints in poverty can be true again

and go forth talking, taking Fire as a friend

*...encouraging an interchange between art and faith does not mean seeking the dissolution of their inherent differences, or the absorption of the one by the other.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*To engage art is to use it, and it will do something to or for you, even it if does not cause you to go on a buying spree.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*One aspect of receiving and having faith is some fundamental reordering of the way one looks at the world.  Faith begins to de-fang that hungry, omnivorous creature within each of us, the one that so easily turns people or things into objects to satisfy our appetites....  So one result of faith then is that we can begin to relax and get to know each other, and creation itself, not as means to our ends, but as God's means of display.

-Theodore L. Prescott

There are nights

There are nights when the snow is...

is light enough to lift haze from trees

and scrub shrubs with moon-curls and stars alike

yet rest beneath the clouds' high mystery

leaving silence to speak to any who'd hear

What's to be done when quiet covers the night

when sleeping snow holds warmth within

but be reverent and not disturb the un-folding awe

stealing one from the noises of night?

*...our presence together indicates that the idea of a wall separating art and faith is silly.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*...the grace that delights believers and unbeliever alike in beauty is indeed related to the beautiful Grace that is tasted in the mystery of Christ.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*If the secularized aesthete wants to confuse art with religion, the Christian temptation runs in a different direction.  Even if we are wise enough to know that the domain of art cannot be taken by force, Christians are still tempted by the idea that art should be a colony in the kingdom of God.  In one sense this is a biblical vision, where God's sovereignty is indeed kingly, and everything is subject to this rule.  The problem has been in the application of this image to social organizations, where the church and theology - that old queen of the sciences - have the first and the lastst words.  This model has produced works of great power and beauty, and some artists and thinkers have looked longingly back to the Middle Ages.  But historical distance obscures hard realities and lets us overlook the fact that we have very different ideas about art than medieval culture did.  While we may envy the integration of the arts into medieval daily life, I believe many of us would be reluctant to relinguish the freedom that is a hallmark of contemporary art.

-Theodore L. Prescott

returning home with no music

oh, bitter death

i meet you upon return

with sadden ears and a poisoned mouth

i wish that you would hide

enough i've had of your seductive rage

piercing through the heart-range of my life

enough i say

enough

it must be time to die

time for some new me to arise

and touch someone with my cries

*I am certain that the result of the personal growth industry is a collective inability to discern what constitutes significant change.  Of course this is a complex cultural dynamic, the fruit of interacting factors - our omnipotent communications technology, for one.  Whatever the reason, we Americans have problems distinguishing major achievements from interesting diversions. the growths of accomplishments listed in the Guinness book of records is impressive.  Many achievements recorded there required great effort and skill, but they seem of dubious distinction when compared to accomplishments found in earlier periods of history.  In my judgment this is not a phenomenon that exists only at the fringes of our society.  We certainly see it in the arts, and also in spirituality.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*..achievements are relative to the person making them...

-Theodore L. Prescott

*A River That Flows Forever

4 Mother

As long as some suffer

          The river Flows Forever

 As long as there is pain

            The River Flows Forever

As strong as a smile can be

          The River Flows forever

And as long as u R with me

                 we'll ride the River Together 

-Tupac Shakur

hesitations

...and maybe-

they'll see you

...and maybe-

they'll hear you

...and maybe-

they'll like you

...and maybe

you'll go on movin'

on and on

until that day

that night

that moment of chance

when someone might stop

to thank you for trying

for crying

for creating and being

for singing and speaking

who you sense you are 

and maybe...

...then may be

...maybe

*It is good to attend to and seek out the situations that provoke your sense of creative movement.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*...change is the only permanent condition in life.

-Theodore L. Prescott

*There are twelve-step programs, self-help books, talk shows, counselors, evangelists, psychics, and therapists, all glad to help you rearrange the furniture within your soul.  Walker Percy has marvelously parodied this in Lost in the Cosmos:The Self-Help Book.  The desire for transformation is hardly bad, but the accumulated effects of all the techniques and programs for crossing  into a better you, with subsequent glowing testimonials of new life, have  created the cultural equivalent of attention deficit disorder.  America's public discourse is full of nervous 

introspective twitches, spasms, ticks, jerks, shudders, mutterings, and finally incessant rocking as we search for the next "best thing" for our lives.

-Theodore L. Prescott

Untitled

Strength is overcome by weakness

Joy is overcome by Pain

The night is overcome by Brightness

and Love - it remains the same

-Tupac Shakur

weep and cry

what else are we to do

but weep and cry

wail and flail

far and wise

o'er the wild minds

of badgered clowns 

of people crying

for some respite to drive

fleeing from the chaos of hell

but we are self-enclosed

denizens of total choice

of goddesses and gods

with little to lose

shouting and laughing

at the crowd on the loose

searching for enemies

imagined and stewed

ah! if we'd stop and stare

into a mirror with light

we'd uncover ourselves

'neath our pimples and glue

on our un-powdered face

with snaggly tooth

awaiting the truth

we'd unbind our foot

freeing us to move

and weep with live tears