Questions and answers

Are my words perpetual holes

falling down a miasmic field of dust

or are they rising from the same

burning fissures in the fabric of trust?

What's the truth within:

a shelly face armoring what's real

encasing motives unclear to myself

forcing out some good that I feel?

Do You embrace the carapace

crack it or warm it to growth?

Am I wedded to failure

taking a vow that shatters both?

I am a ragged beam of Your cross

splintered wood that longs to be glued.

I am scattered shard stumbled upon

a nomad pursued.

You are carpenter/potter

using me as fodder for the clay

pounding rounding, kneading, soothing

massaging, forming, coloring my gray

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez

   -...what 9/11 should teach us is that religion is a human motive as strong as sex or eating or sleep, and the secular world that has pretended we can simply ignore it is foolish.

   -The notion of a dark God is one that we have to take seriously as the fierceness and hostility of religion becomes obvious.  It seems to me that this is an exciting time to be religiously inclined and also a time when one should be very embarrassed by one's religious faith.

A not-so-Sunday, sunny afternoon

Why do they look so happy

and we Blacks ever angry?

Why do tears swell the heart

when trespassing the village?

Is it worth the risk of smiling?

Should rejection be accepted as a gift of life

sitting on the wrong side of town

yet fearing death if one departs?

Death gnaws where Life escapes

a hole boring deeper for the thirst that's Quench.

Suicide can seem the natural door to death

yet murder is quite commonplace.

What a demanding state wherein the prophet speaks

vomiting the Word that few will eat.

The affair of living is a dance with demons

who always seem content at the other's ball.

Yet Dancing is the joy of Day

even when the demons sway.

While dancing we discover Who our partner is

steadily we are led, His arm about our back.

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

  -I want people to be confused.  I remember as a young reader I was always patient with books in a way that I don't think young readers are any more.  I am looking for the reader who is patient with books, who is willing to find insight through puzzlement.  I don't want to save the reader from that extraordinary freedom to be puzzled.

 -We are moving far away from our Puritan ancestors in some way in our spirit of play, and yet in our determination for the individual to become what she will, we are very Puritan.  It seems to me that the freedom to be ourselves is very Puritan indeed.

there is that moment when

there is that moment when

when what leaps free is YOU

is YOU, however bound

when the inner chains snap

and Life escapes

and all manner of wellness is peace

no matter what

this moment is music

a song signing Thanks

the Pris'ner has freed the jail

and all manner of life is well

you own your self

are loved by God

breathing free

no matter the cage you're in

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

  -I see, for example, that my own individualistic generation is beginning to think about growing old.  Already there are suggestions that a lot of single people may be brought to live together in their old age.  I certainly saw community develop in the Castro district of San Francisco.  Here you had a highly individualistic gay culture facing the inevitability of AIDS, and from that suffering came a community quite unlike anything I had ever seen before.  It was not a familiar type of community - because in many cases families wouldn't want anything to do with it - but it was the woman next door, it was the man across the street, it was a whole community of strangers coming together to form a new city.  I m interested in that prospect.

When I lecture to young people, I try to teach them this paradox: American young people need to realize that their I, which each generation necessarily believes it has invented - that each person in that generation has singly invented - is itself a communal value.  That it comes to them from their grandfathers and from their great-grandfathers.  That their individualism is what ties them to America, to the tradition of the community.

Contemplation in the house of noise

The noise is loose

in the house of me

a zigzag of sounds

disturbing the peace.

I complain loudly

wish the culprits flee

soften the buzzing

invading my soul.

But discovering soon

it's me

the dj of my space

scanning the spectrum of sounds

unfixed in myself

floating free of my Anchor

disturbing my peace.

Anchoring again

again and again

locking my focus

on the Silence of Sounds

snuffs the sounds

encouraging the noise

I've lain on the culprits

disturbing the peace.

Beneath the earth lay our fears

that rise if we sit with what seems dead.

For how long can tears be shed at the gravestone

without flowers blooming, inviting a new day?

Tough flowers sprout after violent storms

though tears seem worthless for nurturing seeds.

Does the breeze stir to further monsoons

blow petals beyond the borders of our world?

Breezes blow while the monsoons pass

and the warmth of the sun

knows how to hug the patient sod.

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

  -...when I hear Americans talking about their need for emotional closure, I realize just how awful our fear of the past is.  This country has been written in tragedy, and we have been willing to forget it.  It doesn't seem too far fetched to me that in another generation this might be forgotten too. Americans are brilliant at that.  We have given ourselves to amnesia.  That's why the world wants to come here.  We could call the land virgin, we imagine it is a place where nothing had ever happened here before and where every tragedy is the loss of our innocence.  Even your question proposes that now we will have to face this thing, but we have never done so before.  The Civil War was not the loss of our innocence after all.  World  War II was not the loss of our innocence.  We keep getting past it.  We are puzzled by Bosnia.  We are puzzled by Northern Ireland.  We are puzzled by wars that persist. We are puzzled by the Middle East.  We are puzzled by Israel and the Palestinians.  We don't know why they can't solve it, and that's our best American impulse, I think - just to put an end to it.  We say, you can't go on fighting forever like the Hatfields and McCoys.  Move to California. Move to Georgia.  Leave your in-laws behind.  Do something, but don't get mired in the past.  It's brilliant.

The tragedy and irony is, many of us belong to memory religions, and this is the great, continual contradiction in our lives.  We come out of a culture that is so individualistic, so Hellenistic, so centered on the individual's possibilities of moving beyond the group, beyond family, beyond community, reestablishing, redefining, re-imagining himself as herself, whatever - and we are also people who call ourselves Christians and Jews and Muslims, and therefore belong to an entire tradition.  We have never been able to resolve the two impulses, and so we are constantly at war.  We want to pray before the football game in East Texas, and then some individual takes the case to the Supreme Court, and the Greeks in their temple decide in favor of the I.  We struggle constantly with how much to remember and how much to choose to forget, or pretend to forget.

Beneath the earth lay our fears

that rise if we sit with what seems dead.

For how long can tears be shed at the gravestone

without flowers blooming, inviting a new day?

Tough flowers sprout after violent storms

though tears seem worthless for nurturing seed.

Does the breeze stir to further monsoons

blow petals beyond the border of the world?

Breezes blow while the monsoons pass

and the warmth of the sun 

knows how to hug the patient soil.

-Good Gospel is good psychology.

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

 -Christianity and the desert religions generally, and Islam certainly, have a great deal to learn from the Asian traditions of contemplative life as a moderating force to the activistic tradition within the West.  Someone once said that not until Christianity arrives in Asia  do we really know its full history, and I think there's some truth to that.  India and China could shape the quality of activism on Christianity and give it a much more paradoxical quality.

 -I do find an element of playfulness in Christianity that's present from the very beginning, from the stable. 

*The loss of self-consciousness, i.e., self-centeredness, is the door that opens to God.

  -Duffy Lawson 

*There is an interaction between seeing and being.  The kind of person yo are effects the kind of world that you see.

 -Simon Tugwell

God i kill You in me and in life about me 

i smoother Your presence with my lying ways

if i could cry, cry hard and long and deep

if i could see beyond my pleasure

beyond the insatiable curiosity binding me

in searches upon searches for some loose piece

unable to be found, some piece of myself

unknown but flashing in my desires to be found:

grant me tears hard falling, washable tears

to scrub the holes of my soul and world

tears construable to build new stories

strong to fashion another vision of worth

than the sought, the bought or caught

grant me what You know i need and can see

see through my muck-blockaded view

eyes that want You more than life

that wants You for life as Life

that You that is freedom and love

beyond all my imaginings to want 

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez

-The achievement of the Judaic tradition is that it identified God's presence as historically true, that God acts in time.  It also establishes what I argued is a strong masculin cult, which characterizes the desert religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  It has also made of those traditions an activistic cult, in that we are required to participate in religious life as actors in history - just as God does -rather than ejecting ourselves from history.  This is a powerful idea, and our present calamity has come about because the desert religions are at each other's throats.  We find ourselves faced with a religious experience which is only masculine, and nowhere more so than in Islamic fundamentalism, almost to a hideous degree.  The feminine impulse is largely missing from that history.

-While I continue to find abortion abhorrent, I no long trust male domination of the woman's body.  I also have my own crisis of faith.  As a gay Catholic, I find the sexual break down of the clerical order astonishing and not without interest, not only in that it has been so predominantly homosexual, but in that it is infantile, preoccupied with children almost as though it were an expression of a kind of unformed sexuality.

*Self-definition is the highest form of integrity.

  -Lethe Bashar

*...solitude leads one away from other people to bring you closer to them once you are able to face yourself in your entirety.

  -Carl Jung

*Generosity is the one thing that cannot admit of delay.

  -St. Gregory Nazianzen

There's a fire blazing

There's a fire blazing in my mind's dungeon

in my dark's deep damp space

down where leeches suck life from the heart

from the soul of seekers probing for life

for a baby born pure again

where God is Lord and not an after-thought

I am there now having peered past Truth

where sought after lies leave me empty

I want more but find myself damp

damp and muddy in this dirt bin

I cry out but hear only myself in responsive squeaks

my ears plugged with filth from my searching

my eyes closed to Light brighter than I

I am like a lost cause before a judge without a lawyer

pleading for deliverance from the prison settled in

I want to cry and cry and cry

weep until the flood sweeps my grime away to a flushable sea

to the toilet of Hades, scrubbed to new life

with a smile entering my heart

covering my face

and I be new, new, new, new, new, renewed

Oh, I don't like self-death

suicide of the spirit

but Life in capitals, I wish

Life-Life with each and ev'ry breath

Life as is

(and this might be IS but I'm not living it

loving it, sharing it as if it is You

with all of me for You)

Help me, I plead

flush away the darkness from my eyes

cleanse anew me as David begged for snow

to blanket the avalanche of his sin

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez

-What bothers me about the rhetoric of victimization is that it implies that we can belong to only one side of history, whereas the moment you participate in history, you participate in impurities.

-The notion that somehow I can claim victimization implies too easily that the lines connecting to the past are innocent lines

that prayer i was to say

kneeling before the The Space

empty of words, feelings and thoughts

hollow of meaning and meaningfulness 

was to be my prayer, full of hope
that The Ear would open

at the confessing of sin, my sin
full-nest resting in my breast

birthing wrongs that fly both night and day

i was to pray to that The Transformer

 would cast a miracle and change my eggs

into a fighting gift of aliveness toward Him

the i would move beyond locked-in-here

that some new one of me might mature

that some one more Christian than my wobbly-self

would emerge from the woods

yet i am here present kneeling before The Father

by the soft bed of my weakness

and the cold heart of my flesh

that plugged ears of me might open

and the doors of me fling wide

i pray for conversion like Paul in his desert cave

for hard scales to tear from from my eyes

the devil way of seeing

my futile way of viewing

i pray and plead, confess and implore

that someone new be born 

and Easter rise again

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

-The love of God, which is to say the willingness of God to become man, to enter into history, is a very brown act.  It is deeply paradoxical, and it engages all the failures and inevitabilities of our human bodies.  It seems to me that Christianity is a very brown faith.  I am interested in the impure religions, and in our historical moment I find Christianity to be impure.  That is, it has always confronted the body powerfully.  I notice a number of friends who are dying have chosen to have their remains cremated.  There is no corrupting body any more; we spread the body across the glade in Idaho.  But the corrupting body is for me central to my Mexican Catholicism and my Irish Catholicism, too.

-God's willingness to participate in history is still little understood.  In some sense, as the Irish nuns quite properly taught us, it redeems history.  It redeems our bodies, and it redeems creation.  Everything becomes holy; everything becomes blessed.  But at the same time, God is willing to become contaminated in our history, to become brown with us.  I find this quite moving.  Christ appears in this book by surprise, as he chose.

-Nothing disturbs me more than pious church leaders gathering to denounce hate crimes, when in fact the most devastating crimes of the Church has stumbled over have been crimes of love.  The Church has not only tolerated massacres, but has refused to admit the possibility of interracial marriage, and now the great crisis of faith has to do with whether or not homosexuals are capable of loving.

*The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

  -Carl Jung

Is this what Truth is:

a disguise behind words

a life hid under cloaks?

Is there no truth to be told

beyond life lived in disguise

parading behind masks

prancing 'round poles

as if a pillar of fire?

O that un-truths were vaginal:

un-poked, sewn, strapped to appear as whole!

We humans speak with twists

contrived nuances chiseled into lies.

But we are what we are:

broken, bent, contorted

hiding behind godness

lest we meet God

and drop our props of importance

bearing Truth because She's more  pure

than any money at hand

or the fecal stench exciting our bowels.

Truth seeks to breathe free

that lies by strangulation will die.

The noble speakers' task will be

to pursue Truth that She'll run free.

*Words of Richard Rodriguez:

-I describe in Brown how an American Indian was not allowed to impersonate himself precisely because the Puritans at the university I attended, Stanford, insisted that they knew what reality was and that reality only had one face.  The Puritan impusle for me is an attempt to find clarity or even the handprint of God within history in a way that does not admit to the unpredictable or even the playful.  It is strongest precisely in those areas in our culture where we think we are free of color, free of Puritanism.  I have described the sexual excesses of the gay community in San Francisco  in the 1970s as very Puritan, and in many ways there was this kind of sexlessness to all the sexual license. It was not joyful.  It was manic.  It was an attempt to identify as gay in a way that our Puritan ancestors would have acknowledged - being one thing to the exclusion of being other things.  The idea that as a homosexual man, I can write in ways that are not homosexual, that I have other doors in the hallway of my imagination, remains very puzzling to a number of gay Puritan friends of mine.  They would call it a kind of oppression, because I do not see everything through one lens.

-In 1492 when the Indians saw the Spanish galleons on the horizon, they did not run to their ethnic studies departments in fear.  They came to the edge of the water to wait.  In the history of ideas, there is no more moving, no more touching moment than that, that strangers, complete and utter strangers, would not be afraid of each other but would be drawn by their differences.

-...the love of God - the message of Christ - is all about breaking boundaries and mixing.

to sit in the forest, awaiting Winter and wolf

or stand, walk, pursue the hungry two

is the question at the edge of Fall

is my body ready to release the fear of dying?

letting go is the pain

the pain that is gift

Wolf and Winter chase unto death

demanding all in my hesitancy

enter then the dark wood

where night comes quickly

and dawn, as dreamy way

enter where the creatures spy

and God might forsake

all seems cruel survival

but survival is a blessing

for those who strive

as dying, a blessing

for those who try

one never knows until you're done

crossed the ice floes, exited the grove

stand alive through the trial

yet then you may die as all will die

but you'll will know why death is what it is

with joy exciting your tightened mouth

go! face them both

they may befriend you

where you might betray your self

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

-...seventeenth-century Mexico calls the children of Indian-African marriage "Chinos."  Latin America is extraordinarily playful with matters of sex, which is to say of matters of blood, whereas the United States is severe and Puritanical about notions of blood precisely because we are insecure about issues of eroticism.  So we influence each other in exactly opposite ways.  I think Latin America will be highly influenced by the American notion of free culture, for the same reasons South America now is converting to Protestantism and capitalism and looser structures of family - meanwhile in this generation in the United States, the Latin American freedom from blood leads to a kind of explosion, a freedom from the notion of fated blood that earlier generations assumed.

-One sensed the same desire in the Columbine massacre in Colorado, where the grandson of an observant Jew chose Hitler's birthday to charge into the cafeteria.  These are children who want one pure thing in a world in which they suddenly realize there are only mixed things.

The sight of Michael after many months

His smile was miles large when he spied me

and I loved him when I saw him

when I hugged him

and pressed upon his cheek

And he kept smiling when I left

when I asked him to greet her

his Max with whom he dwells

for he smiled as if I meant something to him

something I can't elucidate

except within the smile that knew 

we meant something to each other

if only at this moment for a moment

for tomorrow may bring another tale

It is today that counts 

and smiles bear the proof

*Thoughts of Gregory Wolfe:

-Conservative Christianity does not have a monopoly on sentimentality.  There are myriads forms of it out there.

-The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: "There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity.  Beneath its ever  moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals.  It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy."

-Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love.  But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia.  And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion.  Unless compassion means the act of suffering with the other in their otherness, it becomes meaningless.  Well-intentioned as the purveyors and consumers of sentiment may be, they still want the luxury of an emotion without having to pay the price for it. 

*So I Say GOODBYE

                                                                            Nov 20

I'm going in2 this not knowing what I'll find

but I've decided 2 follow my heart and abandon my mind

and if there be pain I know that at least I gave my all

and its better 2 have loved and lost than 2 not love at all

In the morning I may wake 2 smile or maybe 2 cry

but first 2 those of my past I must say good bye

-Tupac Shakur

From this fanfare of joy

rising from the rich o'er the poor

the strong o'er the weak

will come a roar of praise

the underlings alone can mouth

a day of renewing acclamations

of huggings and embrace

when the down'll be up

and the high-flung thrown into doubts

wond'ring "How could this be

when all my labors were for You

although they suffered for love of You

when all my claims were for staking You

for giving You reign o'er the terrorists of earth

o'er the realm of the Fiend;

How could this be?"

Ah, praise there'll be

that heav'n will ne'er tire to hear

cause all the rich and the strong

the grand upon the earth

will be drawn into the arms

of the victims of their might

of their pains to rid the land

of the dregs of Adam's sin

The Sin will have been them

brought through the Gate

by the forgiveness of the pained

and the love of the Lamb

*Thoughts of Gregory Wolfe:

-When we are too tender about something we can easily become too violent in seeking to defend or preserve it.

-The essence of Kinkade's sentimentality is the packaging of nostalgia.  It's an oxymoronic idea, but it has become a major part of our cultural life, as Florence King has noted: "True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories...but American-style nostalgia is about as ephemeral as copyrighted deja vu."

-The majority of his expressions of faith are fairly conventional, solidly within the evangelical mold, but his theological defense of the world depicted in his paintings is that "I like to portray a world without the Fall."

-...Christ's message was not to pretend the world isn't fallen but to take up our crosses and follow him through suffering and sacrifice.  To create a body of work illustrating a world without the Fall is, for a Christian, to render Christ superfluous.

-...Jesus took every opportunity he could to counter sentimentality.

*NIGHTMARES

                                                                                      Dedicated to those curious

I pour my heart in2 this oem

and look 4 the meaning of Life

the rich and powerful always prevail

and the less fortunate strive through strife

MISTAKES R MADE 2 be 4given

we R 2 young 2 stress and suffer

The path of purity and positivity

has always ridden rougher

Your insatiable desire 2 find perfection

Has made your faults magnify

curiosity can take Blame

For the evil that makes u cry

It isn't a good feeling when u disobey your heart

The nightmares haunt your Soul and your nerves R

ripped apart

-Tupac Shakur

What is it I'm searching for?

Is it You

or me

or both at one time?

What do I hope to find in figures

in flesh

in the myriad images copying each other?

I'm not sure.

Blindly I scour to find You

or me

or both at one time

the same.

But how can this be

that at the one and the same 

are we?

Is there a bond of blood that binds us bound?

Some pretend that people don't search

pick through alleys or garbage to find

some treasure tossed

some faint remembrance of a foggy past

some fabric of life worn thin

neath clothes of splendor

smelling of the sourness of shit

the stench of human failings

that ev'ry human smears upon itself

even neath other-worldly wear

cloaking the body 

though leading the parade. 

"O Lord!", they shout

cursing all the failed ones of love

en-helling them

with attempts at riddance

howe're they must

and bring about 

the unveiling of their designs

to be gods above the devils

seven times more

the children of hell than they.

Now I know what I search

and who.

It's You in some way

and I

always

that hidden, smothered self in muck

that sad and shameful me

standing naked before the Sun

undisguised and taking heat

for the sins I've homed

and the hope I've sown

assured that one-day

Truth will set me free

even if from prison I gaze

upon scars etched while falling.

I've found Life

and am breathing free.

George said

nothing is coincidence:

neither pain nor hurt

nor greeting nor move

nor ev'ry movement of sin

nor grace flying behind you

It's no coincidence

but God in mys'try

behind each event:

there to hold and love

forgive and push ahead

to wherever God's pushing

for the good of each

and each one's freedom

and each one's saving

including one's own

however that happens

including against one's will

*Thoughts of Gregory Wolfe:

-The Zen scholar R.H. Blyth once noted: "We are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it."

-...Oscar Wilde hits closer to the mark: "a sentimentalist is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it."

-When we are too tender about something, we can easily become too violent in seeking to defend or preserve it.

*There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

-Aristotle