Our daily bread

bread buttered with tears you see

bread craving our hungry lips

bread filling the bellies of lives;

bred that smells of war and pain

 the fractures of rape and tortured minds

the neglect of love and abandoned friends;

bread torn apart by friends we know

fam'lies that pound us into dough

bending wills, reshaping souls;

bread, Your bread, spit upon the poor

to whom we toss out crusted spite

avoided in clubs and on city streets

blamed and cursed for being near:

this is the bread that's daily

the bread upon which we prey

the bread You offer us pray upon

with tears of shame and re-memberings

to shape us whole as nurturing bread;

this is the bread we're given to eat

bread to be given as hope to feast.

when our teeth grind the host

blood unveils the whisp'rings of our lips;

Your Christ leaks through what we intend forget

each drop of Him falling 'pon the weak of us;

and when Your priest holds aloft the sacred bread

it's us You see

each clown acting out their own charade

our false and tainted scripts revealed.

skilled Molder of the Human Clan

knead the dough of us anew 

that we might feast without guilt

bearing the shame that truly frees;

and You weeping with Love

with tears to wash our crusty hearts

press forgiveness into our filthy hands

the Bread You unstintingly give.

-Think straight.  Stand up.  Walk tall.

-May your crosses be steps in the Resurrection Dance.

-Sometimes you gotta get mad to do somethin'!

    *street prophet in San Francisco

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

-Spiritual life...is possible only because of not-knowing.  The mentality that presents faith as natural betrays it while pretending to serve it.  That's why a rigid faith is merely flight from oneself and over compensation.

-Believers almost always imagine that faith means certitude.

-Learn to recognize the faith that reveals a secret despair.

-For me the absence of doubt would be disturbing.  Not the kind that suggests flight, laziness, a preoccupation with oneself in the guise of intellectual difficulties.  I'm speaking of an active doubt that hunts out prejudices and every kind of idolatry, an ongoing discovery that grows stronger by overcoming all obstacles.

nude upon a cross

if we saw you naked Jesus, we'd stone you

nail you to a cross

the thought of a naked prophet

what horrors you'd bring to mind

don't you know we're respectable

what would your mother think

to hear you're nude upon a cross

no matter that 

don your under-shorts

there are morals to uphold

don't scandalize the children

in the realm of the righteous

we don't care who you are

*"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

  -Martin Luther King, jr.

*Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

  -Samuel Beckett

*We all can speak as if we're innocent yet we all are guilty.

*"...the good simple people in his novels...are what the wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those (for) whom he ought to live, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels as the opposite.  From the one who feels the opposite, I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel, I try to live my life.

 -Charles Dickens to Fyodor Dostoevsky

*I'm gonna stay Black and die. What the f-ck! 

a sleepy breath 

a bird's invite

a kitten's purr 

a beating heart:

Silence between

silence heard

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

-The path towards faith is also a matter of unlearning things.  Spiritual sanity resides in a  youthfulness which spontaneously rejects everything that is static.  Almighty God, King, Lord,  Prosecutor, Judge, Spouse, Lover of the soul, Father - get rid of all those words, and thousands of  others, until nothing is left.  Nothing, that's our name for God, condemned not to intervene, for fear  of making us all immature.  That means we shouldn't be afraid to use the most everyday words. Only  you know what you've put in them - hidden love, deep laughter.

-Remember, God speaks through the lips that happen to be there - those of the unbeliever as well as  those of the saint and through the silence of those who no longer have anything to say.

-Don't expect manna every morning, comrades.

Sound O

Stop and listen:

at its birth

God

in its sound

God

at its center

God

at its death 

God

in the silence 

God

-Self-improvement is always a personal project which may affect another positively.

-America, smell your own sh-t. It's as stinky as the rest.

-There's only so much snot your tissue can hold.

-If death doesn't get you, something else will.  

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

-In the area of faith it is both vulgar and stupid to try to prove anything.  Fight for truth?  Never.  People fight for convictions in place of truth.  Someone who genuinely loves truth seeks only to let it fill her whole being.

-Don't try to change people's opinions or convert anybody.  Be what you are and perhaps someone else will be led to become what she is.  Adopt a genuine manner to tell us what moves you, without worrying about the consequences.  That's neither laziness nor amateurism, but a spontaneous self-discipline which has nothing in common with a party line.  It might better be compared with the constant practice of someone who wants to play in tune.

Our

"our" is the possessive form of "we"

as Jesus spoke Father a-glow

we knew he spoke to us

but we keep speaking "mine"

as if deaf to anything ours

including God belonging to us

"we" are a truth abandoned

stilled by the selective tribes

as if god's only form for "us"

the possessive form of "we"

embraces the uniquely truth of "me"

and ev'ry form of "we" in "us"

thus God is ours

having Parented us

and we are God's

as God is ours

as we are each others

since God parents us

this day and ev'ry day

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan

-In the area of faith it is both vulgar and stupid to try prove anything. Fight for truth? Never. People fight for convictions in place of truth. Someone who genuinely loves the truth seeks only to let it fill her whole being.

-Don't try to change people's opinions or convert anybody.  Be what you are and perhaps someone else will be led to become what she is.  Adopt a genuine manner to tell us what moves you, without worrying about the consequences.  That's neither laziness nor amateurism, but a spontaneous self-discipline which has nothing in common with a party line.  It might better be compared with the constant practice of someone who wants to play in tune.

What shall I call you

when they come to kill us

Mercy won't be in their vocabulary

Manifest destiny's in our bones

Before our minds open toward the seas

we must be victims of systemic fright

failed, flailed, decrepit like older states

like the thieves of this nation 

ruling on the periphery of power

We must smell sin's putrid odor

stare into the coffins of the rotting of our dead

taste their blood dried upon our lips

up-end God who's stretched across the Vine

As we mummify our gods

at the collapse of our funds

we may see the limits of license

and capital's gold dragged to the grave

We will have joined the human race

cursing our gods for their abandonment of us

trapped in the cage of our arrogant thrusts

affections submerged 'neath desolate lovers

people wasted on the the boasts of leaders

brain-washed and herded before whimsical crowds

mauling ourselves in our cesspools of wants

selling our souls as advertisement's prod

Having thrown ourselves into failed visions of life

the war's to be televised with cocktails on tap

setups and snackables before din-din is served

We'll die delighted swallowing olives without ice

But before we drink

you never offered your name

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-Yes, I'm an unbeliever - like you, unless you've yielded to the illusion that the dividing line between faith and disbelief only passes between one person and another and not within each of us.

-To tear down the idols that exists outside oneself doesn't mean much.  To destroy idolatry within oneself is far more difficult.

-In the area of faith it is both vulgar and stupid to try to prove anything.  Fight for truth?  Never.  People fight for convictions in place of truth.  Someone who genuinely loves the truth seeks only to let it fill her whole being. 

if i could i'd hold you

and keep holding you

holding you

cause i'm damn scared

and need some holding too

and i would drop large tears

to drown hatred in the land

and water flowers somewhere

heartily in a heart somewhere

yours and mine

and anyone who'd be ground

for some new spree

for crazies rule the world

and they curse the ground

dropping bombs to contain a bomb

produce terrors

to contain a terror

while ev'ry word they speak

cause dictionaries to flee

for truth has found no home

even there

cause like lies told cent'ries over time

this time's not different from the past;

slippery words pass through filth

placed upon tables as milk 

stinking in each drink

stop me from walking to their pad

remind me again and again

what's human

what's Christian

ways to forgive

and own my failures

while nurturing my weakened faith

let me share slivers of love

when slivers are all i have

hold me

that i may hold you

for what do we have to give

but hugs to each other

for this is a time of madness

in the grip of the crazies

but we will live

though death falls about us

and madness seems to reign

cause God's full of laughter

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

-So much striving, but at the end of the day, we are still, as Walker Percy wisely observed, struck 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, and is, and is to come.

is prison where the bars ban

or where the mind sits

where the bars bind

or where the Wind blows?

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

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

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

-One aspect of receiving and having faith is some fundamental reordering on 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 and things into objects to satisfy our appetites.  Faith provides a different food for that gnawing hunger - "...he/she who comes to me shall not hunger, and he/she who believes in me shall not thirst."  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.

collected poems

a gathering of species

far and wise

in greening woods

'tween cement cracks

by candle light

on the graying day;

a searching as if

 Sherlock would magnify

some displaced gem

hiding beneath ones bed;

worlds of feelings

or heavily scaled

like rhinoceros hide;

bored minds

one's guarded soul

pleasures fresh

tickling a simple heart;

childhoods taken for granted

the flinging wide of gated doors;

what has been found

in the world of authored worlds?

surprises for ones self

tidbits of human grace

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

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

  -If the secularized aesthete wants to confuse art with religion, the Christian temptation turns 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 his 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 last 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 relinquish the freedom that is a hallmark of contemporary art. 

*All of our God-talk doesn't mean we are God-focused because God can still be used as a gun to keep people in line or to be eliminated.

*Death is natural.

*God is not an extra in a movie.  God is the movie and we're the screen upon which God is viewed.  God  must be seen in a new way and that way is love: love of self and love of the other as self.

beyond eyes

beyond eyes

'tween iris and pupil

beyond the vitr'ous

down the anchored ret'na

questions gaze back

piercing the observant eye:

do you love me?

am i someone?

do i matter?

will you hold me?

can i trust you?

will you hurt me?

will you mirror

the good i see

the God i need

the hope that enriches?

can you love me for me

and not for gain?

are your eyes damaged

that they might damage me?

Look into your eyes.

Tell me what they be.

*The Price of Admission

know 

there is no price

break

the ban

against

silence

let

words go

beyond

themselves

await

the unnameable

weigh

the wind

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Horsefeathers

blue

they drop

few

they are

at  once

neither

of

either

yet

they one

they 

wonder

they

wander

for 

child

to hold

awhile

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

Meat or Man

I.

When I stare past your naked eyes

within your naked bod'

a raw question rises:

"am I meat or am I Man"?

I scour your naked body

avoiding your naked eyes

answering:

"You are meat and I am man."

But I am pulled into your heartache

where your question's filled with terror

and I know that I'm a lecher

and know that you're the Man.

II.

Looking through the eyes

of the flesh upon which we gaze

with ears open to heart

questions rise to sight.

The face makes known the message

the silence wants to share

and a human projects before us

to challenge who is Man.

III.

With what eye will we see?

With what ear will we hear?

Is the other our reflection

the mirror of our fear

the fear of being meat

of Man to be cast aside?

IV.

Cannibals slay to take in souls

Christians presume to instill life.

No Man is meat for eyes to eat

each is Other for feeding Life.

*Thoughts of 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 Last 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 and jeers, shudders, mutterings, and finally incessant rocking as we search for the next "best thing" for our lives.

   -What strikes me about our cultures's preoccupation with weight growth and transformation is it seems born of a desire for control.

   -I am certain that the result of the personal growth industry is a collective inability to discern what constitutes significant change.

   -Whatever the reasons, we Americans have problems distinguishing major achievements from interesting diversions.

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

attentively

stroked by the air

sit straight

in the chair

attentively

wait 

in your void

with hope

silently say

"Expectation"

let Empty hold you

lightly in this space

before shifting

attentively

for "NOW"

as a sudden gift

arrives as Light

beyond which

you were sitting

give thanks

moving over

attentively

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

-...the deliberation within our soul to intercourse with the world must be the first and primary broader crossing.  You simply cannot get anywhere without passing through that terrain.  That movement is inevitable for life to proceed, and is often spiritual.  When God speaks to us, he moves us. But I suspect that you also may have experienced the terror of being stuck, and of not being able to move, even when you deeply desire to press on.  So this movement is neither automatic nor certain.

The passage  from insight to action is always incomplete, and bear unexpected results.  Pope John Paul II alludes to this in his 1999 letter too artists.  He says:

     All artists experience the unbridgeable gap which lies between the work of their hands...and the          dazzling perfection of beauty glimpsed in the ardor of the creative moment.... Their creating is no        more than a glimmer of the splendor which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit.

So even when we have the ability to move from interior perception to artistic form, what we make bears only a passing resemblance to what we perceived within.  Disappointment has been the downfall of many young artists, and some older ones, too. 

...and there was naught

i stepped onto my porch

and there was naught.

pale white engulfed my face

from left to right

up and down.

before and across

was bland and blank

chalky grass and sky

rocks and roads

homes and populace

cars and sounds.

stretching, i touched a fog

a veil o'er the eyes of all

in which the weeps and wails of Earth

bellowed like a pregnant cow

paining to birth

the life breached within.

i turned toward my house a-wondered.

is this a shell midst these i dwell?

is my life a facade against the mountain view

a front displayed without Christian depth?

this feels like Hollywood

and i'm an actor on her stage.

will Hollywood crumble 'neath a rumbling quake?

the fault-line abuts my walls

and i could slip into her jaws.

i touched the fog and prayed it weep

to wash the chalk blinding our lives.

*Thoughts of Theodore L. Prescott:

  -Crossing the border means that you are opening yourself to change - a risk that many people try to minimize by using some sort of guide.

  -...who you are to yourself privately is not the same as who you are in the company of others, just as you are different at rest than you are in action.  Others may access and respond to your actions, but they can only make calculated judgments about what is in the inner recesses of your heart.

is this what night is?

is this what night is:

to turn over our pillows

and sleep on the other side

is night for flavor-some restlessness 

while evasions stir up a crisis

for tight crawling beneath blankets

while the cold blankets the poor

night is brotherly/sisterly confrontation

a companion to accompany your sleep

an awaking to revelations

and visions smothered in light

to God's nauseating presence

churning questions in one stomach

whispering secrets when silence is done

good-night bothersome brother

let us lay upon our beds in peace

crafting babies while playing sex

holding our beloved in our arms

while dreaming of money we'll make

let your darkness flee for hell

taking our dreary-demons with you 

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

  -We  are now entering a time when we can no longer control history.  Not only can we not control history by putting fences around things and saying, This is clean and that is impure," but we are now participating in a time that we no longer know exactly how to imagine.

 -So many of the most interesting Muslims I know are displaced Muslims, and I want to become that kind of Christian.

Leave the town you roam in

along-time blind

a long-time dead

leave the town you roam in

don't look back

never return

don't grab a morsel

nor the Past left behind

where food is poison

where your spirit was drugged

where your eyes were boarded

your feet were bound

leave the town you roam in

keep on steppin'

on the wings of Freedom flee

your eyes have been purged

your health restored

your limbs swing freely

your thoughts are renewed

leave the town you roam in

out of the dark

into the light

recover your dignity

let Joy rule your life

leave the town you roam in 

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

 -I am puzzled by the hunger for purity among people.  The people who walk down the street with bottles of water, for example.   They have a drive to cleanse their bodies of all that is impure, a dream of escape from the impure.  I am very impatient with that.  We have to reconcile young people to the idea of the unsettled, the indeterminate, the compromised life.  That is my moralism, a brown moralism.  I'm not urging people to any accommodation of truth or light or a path.  I like the idea that my impure lover would be the one giving communion at Mass as a eucharistic minister.  That's what the church should be about, it seems to me.  We should always hand the Eucharist over to a sinner.

 -We are now entering a time when we can no longer control history.  Not only can we not control history by putting fences around things and saying, "This is clean and that is impure," but we are now participating in a time that we no longer know exactly how to imagine.

*The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers.

 -Goethe

*The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

 -Paschal