groaning into holiness 

i am a bruised vessel

empty and cracked

waiting to be patched

peering into clouds

searching for a scoop

groaning into holiness

born of the worn earth

i live in a field of cautions

setting out, stiff of heart

an uptight preacher of the Word

the irony borne on crumpled bones

asleep in hope

beneath a wreckage of doubts

what am i to say to the weary-worn

forlorn of heart with thirsting souls

but that we encircle the table and have a drink

partake of bread

affirm our common bond

*Thoughts of Sidney Poitier

-Talking with her was a pleasure, mainly because I wasn't interested as much as in getting into her pants as getting into her mind.  She seemed to know a bit about everything, and I knew she could help me fill in the blanks in my own general knowledge. Her words touched familiar chords I had often heard inside myself, her voice lodging complaints we both held against the state.

Her language, too, inspired me.  For instance, the phrases "rhetorical bullshit" and "disingenuous motherfucker." "Bullshit" and "motherfucker" I had heard before, of course, but what kind of bullshit gets to be "rhetorical,"  and what need a motherfucker do to be considered a "disingenuous motherfucker"?  "Bourgeoisie Negroes" was another.  We got locked in a conversation once, I remember, about who she was and who I was, as individuals, in America.  "How we see ourselves, how we see each other," she said, "should be determined by us and not by people who generally don't like us; people who pass laws certifying us as less than human.  Too many of us see each other as 'they' see us", she continued.  "Time for that shit to stop.  We're going to have to decide for ourselves what we are and what we're not.  Create our own image of ourselves. And nurture it and feed it till it can stand on its own.

She looked through the plate-glass window of a coffee shop at snow ffalling on the Brooklyn street near where she lived.  "I'll tell you one thing," she added, "If I have anything to say about it, by the time my grandchildren get here, this hypocrisy democracy is gonna do some changing."

Hotel Ecclesiastica

i've seen the dry tears of actors

the disclaiming violence of the sincere

their ears are plugged life other ears

their eyes blocked like other eyes

their lies sour like other lies

their rules kill like other rules

their taste for life is like other tastes

they abandon those who are their own

i fuss and cuss like all the rest

being part and parcel of the mess

while my protests on deaf ears rest

a sinner midst sinners in its nest

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -Just suppose  for the sake of an admittedly fantastic argument that he is the One who is to come, full of grace and truth and all that.  Have you ever considered, have I whose trade it is to consider it really considered seriously, just what it is that the Lamb of God is going to have to take away?

   I mean if I have any inclination at all, or you, to start being whatever in God's name it means to be "a child of God" - and let's say there is no argument for having such an inclination but let's just suppose that at certain unguarded moments we have it, this inclination to start being children of God - have we any idea at all what by the grace of God we are in all likelihood going to have to stop being, stop doing, stop having, stop pretending, stop smacking our lips over, stop hating, stop being scared of, stop chasing after till we're blue in the face and sick at the stomach?  O God, deliver us from the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world because the sin of the world is our heart's desire, our uniform, our derby hat.  O Lamb of God, have mercy upon us.  Christ have mercy upon us. 

  -Passion without wisdom to give it shape and direction is as empty as wisdom without passion to give it power and purpose.

the union of silence

the bound lift their hands and the chains rise

clanging and bouncing off each other

in a dance of bondage wanting freedom

and a symphony lies with the links

though dungeons holds their souls in isolation

like a score holds the music

around which the dancers dance

for a while all seems lost until a baby's born

who knows how to cry when the chained dare not

who long with each other for some open heart

some crack in the facade of humanity presumed sane

but lost behind words of kindness limited to a few

what music is made occurs united with silence

until what is longed for breaks as a surprise instantly expected

when survivors walk free with lose hanging smiles

beneath their eyes wondering why it took so long

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

-The dance of the nations is a dance of death.

-The question is, what are we defending, our enemies and we?

-...what sort of peace can there be when terror is at the heart of it?

*Now

happens

always

always

 has

 always

 will

 to know

 the this

under

 this and that

  just

 this

is

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

a shadow frightened the crowd 

as you set your hands to guard your face

and ward off sounds tapping in your brain

see their cry is for you Lord always for you

and it breaks forth from the stillest voice

from bodies at once dead yet breathing

hoping for a big ear that hears

and patience to live long enough to see

vengence and love yes vengence and love

while the shadows of fate hang loosely overhead

ready to drop like a net gathering the dead

yet hope ekes through the tears steadily falling

from failed tears and mouths ever crying 

cries eating at my nerves grating them to movement

to dance midst tears on which they slide

as i grab their cries and cry awaiting your coming

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

-We have it in us to be Christ to each other and maybe in some unimaginable way to God too - that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us.  We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his rejoicing at another's joy as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last.  And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by, the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all.

-The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.

I do not understand what I do
for I don't do what I would like to do
but instead I do what I hate.
                       -Letter to the Romans

crawling out of Hell

why don't i leave the place i casually walk into

the hell of my life wherein i play with fire?

when the devil is me

what is Satan to do but join in for the ride

enjoying the ayes and ways of my wickedness?

i don't know why i relish the pain of  fire

the smell of Death engulfing my heart.

i shove Christ toward the edge of my life

out of site, out of light

packed with doubts, full of pouts.

out of sorts with the sordid

i've convinced myself it's good for curiosity.

oh that blessed curiosity

of which the Evangelizer John says

"cover your eyes, pluck them out

push back desire lest the stirring desire

curses you for placing your hands

into the mush the nourishes not."

i find myself there again and again

for the umpteenth time

wondering when i'll come to myself

bend my knees and crawl home to God.

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

-...crucifixion is part of our stories too, because we too are men and women of sorrow and acquainted with grief.

-In spite of every reason to give the whole show up, we're here still just able to hope; in spite of all the griefs and failures we've known, we're here still able to rejoice; in spite of the darkness that we all of us flirt with, we are here still just a little, at least, in love with light.  By miracle we survive even our own shabbiness, and for the time being maybe that is resurrection enough. 

they yell, they howl

they scream against the soft-sounds

as if God rides on the breeze

on the rim

but no one hears Him

these sounds

are they a "Why?", a "Help!"

a call to awaken those with shut eyes

those with plugged ears?

some sit in prayer

list'ning to the unlikely

to the in-between

where the holy lies

where poems are writ on patient souls

between the silence and the words

i hear, "Wake Up!

God's closer than you think"

i listen to my wavering voice

the incredulity within my belief

this strange encounter is music

an invitation to sing ones self

into a question

there God and i duet

there

a temple is built of song

*Human nature: the beautiful face with  the ugly scars.

*Loving one another is loving God...with all the if's, ands and buts...but it isn't easy.

*I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

  -Galileo

*Painting is a faith and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

  -Vincent van Gogh

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -And in the end they got him(Jesus).  And forget all the grim paraphernalia of his death because the obscenity and horror have long since been ritualized out of it.  They got him, that's all.  He wasn't spared a damned thing.  It was awful beyond telling, god-awful.  And then it happened.

  -... but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one - to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth.

  -...to acknowledge a miracle is to have to act on it somehow - to become some kind of miracle ourselves - and that's why they scare us to death.

Christ, I hate your nails, I loathe your pints of blood.

Artificial passion

I.

What's artificial is their passion.

It's akin to the "Just Like" colognes

from the dollar store:

no pain, no doubts

nothing hot enough to burn someone;

nothing raw enough to expose ones blood.

It's sanctity that's dead letters in a book

ones we dream "if only's" about.

II.

I trip upon my struggles

my pretences to follow you

to cling tenaciously with passion

to whatever I need to mimic you.

Your feet have pressed into the land

that mark of passion that's real obsession:

red roses soaked in gall

beaten and stirred to the sweetest fragrance

borne stately like thorns ringing the skull

and binding like nails through ones wrists.

You rub against my coward's flesh

to summon me whene'er you call

your niggling spirit pushing me

through tears difficult to swallow.

III.

There's no escape but death

no assurance to measure ones step.

Send quickly then your Paraclete

and coax me up your hill.

I'll cry Abba-Daddy, give me candy

cause I'm scared to taste your meat.

*Thoughts of Frederick Beuchner:

  -Peddlers are people with packs on their backs full of things they want to sell, and the things they try

to sell hardest are the things they think will sell best.  Peddlers are less concerned with what the world needs than with with what the world wants or can be made to settle for.  Peddlers are salespeople who are interested less in the quality of what they're selling than in the success of their sale. So if the peddlers of God's word happen to be preachers, it's preaching as an end in itself they're apt to concentrate on.  They do their best to be effective, eloquent, original. They choose the stories that will go over best and be remembered to their credit longest.  Or if we happen not to be preachers, then when it comes to just speaking of, and out of, our faith in a general way, we, like them, tend to stick to the salesmanship of it and speak of it whatever is easiest to speak and whatever we think will go down most easily.

  -Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are, and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all, costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare.

  -The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light.  It is a story that hides more than it revels.  It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeakable beauty at the heart of it yet by no means a pretty story though that is the way we're apt to peddle it much of the time.

visions of a promised-land

the silent tears of the foreign-languaged

heated by the visitation of homing mem'ries

brew in a cauldron of streaming images

spilling o'er the edge like waves on a turbulent sea

thire minds, a roiling lake sloshed about in reflections

churning dreams bombarded with sorrow.

they are invisible bodies wall-papered with greenbacks

that monied hands hang before their face like carrots.

affections rise for air in hopes drowning in need

when they think about their fam'lies, oppressed and baited.

visions of a promised-land seduces like a prostitute's voice

as they chanced their bodies against the desert's death.

thrilled to have arrived across the borders of fate

their homes await news of freedom's price.

sons and brothers, dads of various stripe

bear the blows of their scrourging

escaping toward a promised land.

Rachel wails still the song forlorn women wail

when the loves of their lives are ghosts haunting their dreams.

they who ne'er wrote, lay dead with sand in their eyes

while the captured are bound to the land of their birth

handcuffed in jails, awaiting sentence

no better saved than those who escaped near-free.

but God loves each howe'er their plight might end

for each is Jesus bent upon the pillar of scourging

receiving wounds to bear the carcasses on their backs.

*The only face I see of God is the face of another human being.

*The statue of limitations expires on all childhood traumas.  We have to get over it, fix our lives and move on.

-Quincy Jones

*A work of art has no existence or function apart from its effect on human observers.

-Marshall McLuhan

Like a tether

i'm like a tether

knocked about

bouncing off

the flat of Your hands

kneed in the side

i limp along

bent and aching

like Jacob, panting

his sciatic acting up 

'pon wrestling You

i don't understand myself

hanging out with You

as if sadism's Your trait

and punishments all i want

who'd think a Daddy would

stand by, doin' nothin'

watch His son nailed

mocked upon a cross?

You're weird, you know

quiet as they come

yet  Your silence holds me

where'er i turn to run;

fleeing from Your presence

You always seem to be

breathing down my back

even when i'm alone

ever since i've know You

felt You as a strange pain

i've been riveted to Your presence

a weird-wonder to refrain

why are You so difficult?

how distant can You be?

yet i love You none the less

Your tether and Your call

*For a human being to say that the cosmos is all there is strikes me as like a worm  in an apple saying that the apple is all there is.  Even if we could solve all the problems of the cosmos and stood here healthy, solvent, adjusted, and proud in our knowledge at last, we would still stand here like Moses with the muck of our less-than-humanness on our shoes and the feeling in the pits of our stomachs that the cosmos can never entirely be home because we know as surely as we know anything that  though we have never seen it except in dreams, our true home lies somewhere else.  Those dreams are the ultimate madness the church is built upon, or, because those who call them madness are themselves the madder still, the ultimate sanity.

-Frederick Buechner

Implosion

I.

The imploding society sits in the pit of imbeciles

nursing on blood-myths their leaders sing.

The songs of their sirens are beautifully wrought

being cover-ups for the vulgarities of law.

Their dead words enliven the poisoned air

their morality, justification for their crass suppositions.

They poke about swamps for the remnants of regret

searching for something to be sorry for.

"Shock and awe" encircle their lips

their mouths encrusted with a pestilence of lies.

We follow without question, groveling in fear

lest be be terrorized midst their promise of freedom

for these torturers punish the least suspecting

being escapees from public demotion.

II.

Inward we'll fall into hellish destruction

of persons, of values, of a once treasured life

fodder strewn on the old land dying

awakening life, now barren and sour.

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -...if we come to church right, we come to it more fully and nakedly ourselves, come with more of our humanness showing, than we are apt to come to most places.  We come like Moses with muck on our shoes - footsore and travel-stained with the dust of our lives with us, our failures, our deceits, our hypocrisies, because if, unlike Moses, we have never taken anybody's life, we have again and again withheld from other people, including often even those who are nearest to us, the love that might have made their lives worth living, not to mention our own.  Like Moses we come here as we are, and like him we come as strangers and exiles in our way because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost.  Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name - something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs.  We come here to find what we have lost. We come here to acknowledge that in terms of the best we could be we are lost and that we are helpless to save ourselves.  We come here to confess our sins.

  -It is the same voice that Moses heard and that one way or another says GO! BE! LIVE! LOVE!  sending us off on an extraordinary and fateful journey for where there are no sure maps and whose end we will never fully know until we get there.

When Dracula wants blood, red wine will not suffice.

-ken stewart

Hangling

dangling

naked of bod'

the scribe swung scribbling

scribbling upon the ground

upon the flesh of the sages

we ritually neglect

while cov'ring the lessons 

on the biology of hate.

In a short while

the lords of anger will plunge

a crucifix into his groin

neutralizing his voice.

Tis the day of castrations

the proclamation of guilt

the guilt of accusations

separating truth from facts.

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -And then Moses hid his face, the Book of Exodus says, "for he was afraid to look at God", and well he might have been afraid if he had any inkling of what God was going to say next, because what God said next was as holy and fiery a word as there is in the Old Testament or anywhere else.  That word was GO.

  -For those of us who are in the habit of putting on our best clothes and going to church from time to time, maybe it is a good idea to consider what a church is, of all things. What are all these churches we keep coming to, year in and year out?  A church in the sense of a buiding is walls and a roof erected on the proposition that this ancient story of Moses and his burning bush is somehow true - that however you choose to explain that story, you cannot all that easily it away.  Something extraordinary took place a long time ago on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Aquabah, and our presence in churches, and the presence of millions like us, is evidence that the reverberations of the event are felt to this day. It is the reason why churches exist.  It is the reason why we go to them though we often forget it and go for shabbier reasons. The old church walls, the old church roofs, were put up in the faith that God is present anywhere in the world, he is present everywhere, and that if the ground that Moses stood on was holy, then the little patches of ground where churches stand are holy too.  The whole earth is holy because God makes himself known on it, which means that in that sense a church is no holier than any other place.  God is not more in a church than he is anywhere else.  But what makes a church holy in a special way is that we ourselves are more here.

The taste  for something

She longed the taste of something

something to fill her mouth

her ear

or any place open to fill

with some delight to satisfy 

her oral fixation

for the moment

She gave these free reign:

ham

strawberries

substantial bread

rolled to please

to fill

divert her need

for the moment

Could it be

that these would be enough

enough to sate

the hunger in her gut?

*Thoughts of Frederick Bueckner

  -What scared the daylights out of me was to see suddenly how drawn we all are, I think, to the very things that appall us - to see how beneath our civilizedness, our religiousness, our humanness, there is that in all of us which remains uncivilized, religionless, subhuman, and which hungers for precisely the fare that Forty-Second Street offers, which is basically the license to be subhuman not just sexually but in any way that appeals to us - the license to use and exploit and devour each other 

like savages, to devour and destroy our own sweet selves.  And if you and I are tempted to think we don't hunger for such things, we have only to remember some of the dreams we dream and some of the the secrets we keep and the battle against the darkness we all of us fight.  I was scared that stiff that I would somehow get lost in that awful place and never find my way out.  I was scared that everybody I saw coming toward me down the crowded sidewalk - old and young, well dressed and ragged, innocent and corrupt - was in danger of getting lost.  I was scared that the world itself was lost as I was mad.  And of course in a thousand ways it is.

  -Faith is the eye of the heart, and by faith we see deep down beneath the face of things - by faith we struggle against all odds to be able to see - that the world is God's creation even so.

hushed tears swell, words without voice

from a well sacred in my breast.

there's a tugging in my heart

as the Ralphian strings twine like cords

drawing affection from a sanctuary

deserted of prayer and long forgot.

a needling dream rises to the air:

an eagle's flight, an up-draft hawk

swept beyond the reach of wings

beyond the echo of their call.

i know not what cry to sound

wandering 'round the airy chords

nudging my mind, my thoughts to heights unseen

my soul to the Center long untouched.

my lost-ness wanders through a dark wood

blackness blinding what Light surrounds.

my feet shuffle in the night-time of my wanting.

the night-stars shine as to offer hope.

an Ascending Lark sings amidst the strings.

i hear Her voice saying, "Come!

run till you drop, drenched in tears of release

sweated, bathed, filled with your longing."

oh, Beautiful Love, it's You tugging at my soul:

Your voice of assurance, Your invitation to sup

Your wine of plenty, the peace of Your hearth.

i hear.  i come.  i run to Your heart

released, naked, straight to Your arms.

i feel Your warm Breath caring about me

your Flame-embrace fueling my within.

*Observations of Frederick Buechner:

  -I've seen the not all that pretty girls and less than good-looking boys - many of them hardly more than children, runaways - trying to keep alive by clumsily, shiftily selling themselves for lack of 

anything else too sell; and staggering around in the midst of it all, or slumped like garbage against the fronts of buildings, the Forty-Second Street drunks - not amiable, comic drunks you can kid yourself into passing with a smile, but angry, blood shot, crazy drunks, many of them blacks because blacks in New York have more to be angry and crazy about than the rest of us.

  -What scared the daylights out of me was to see suddenly how drawn we all are, I think, to the very things that appall us - to see how beneath our civilizedness, our religiousness, our humanness, there is that in all of us which remains uncivilized, religionless, subhuman, and which hungers for precisely the fare that Forty-Second Street offers, which is basically the license to be subhuman not just sexually but any other way that appeals to us - the licence to use and exploit and devour each other like savages, to devour and destroy our own sweet selves.  And if you and I are tempted to think we don't hunger for such things, we have only to remember some of the dreams we dream and some of the secrets we keep and the battle against darkness we all of us fight.  I was scared stiff that I would somehow get lost in that awful place and never find my way out.  I was scared that everybody I saw coming toward me down the crowded sidewalk - old and young, well dressed and ragged, innocent and corrupt - was in danger of getting lost.  I was sacred that the world itself was as lost as it was mad.  And of course in a thousand ways it is.

Is insanity required for following Christ?
 -Kenneth Stewart

You

I didn't leave looking for You.

I wanted slippers to rest in

to stroll quietly about the house.

You nuzzled in

as if I were insane to follow You.

I wasn't shopping for You

till You poked Your nose through Mars Hill

leaping in sight with questions and coal.

I perused the fated review

as You peeked through ink and page

and like Parker, O'Connor knows

bought You who'd been riding my back

Your eyes fixed upon my baptized flesh.

12 bucks and no slippers eased from my purse.

I wasn't looking for You

but you fingered me

thrusting Yourself before my face.

I noticed You

and couldn't turn away.

What do You want of me

more than of these?

I'm a coward, a frightened man.

Don't know if i can give You what You seek

if I trust myself to be crazy enough

to follow You through sink or swim.

So what was I to do

as You touched my iconed flesh

but say, "Yes!",

trusting my gut that You're here

no matter what?

*Thoughts of Frederick Buechner:

  -Is the human heart the only source of its own healing?  Is it the human conscience                 only that whispers to us that in bitterness and estrangement is death?

  -We must each of us answer for ourselves, remember for ourselves, preach to ourselves our own sermons.

  -There has never been a time past when God wasn't with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our heart -  whether we believe in God or not - that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human.  To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

This might not be it

This might not be it:

the door to the inner chamber

the hidden levels of my spirit

the light searching about the sky

This might not be it:

the window receiving new visions

the air swirling freshness to the open

the search breathing freer during the night

This might not be it:

the stairway up to the depths

the moist earth shaping my womb

the ground rooting and growing again

This might not be it

but whatever it is

I'm here for it

and won't depart

until something births

and I am more than dust

We rush past questions in order to avoid anxiety
 -Jean Sulivan

Pass on the half-tales

the feel-good stories

the bold forgettings

An inner war's stirring

one with the outer peace

with a supply of death

and sniper fire to thwart despair

The skewed support of hopes and dreams

proof by proof 

man 'gainst man

moves Tomorrow closer

inch by inch

But God leaks 'tween the silence

that cottoned ears might hear God's voice

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan

  -To create is the only important thing, to rediscover the fervor that produced the thing you're                weeping for.

  -A true revolution always rediscovers the source of a tradition and expresses it in body and soul at        the same time.

  -...in order to be unrooted it's first necessary to be rooted.

Learn to recognize the faith that reveals a secret despair: Jean Sulivan

Awaiting

I.

Who understands the naked Christ except the naked child?

They're shoved into caves layered in our lives

waiting embrace, to be drawn nearer to light.

Our minds wound them in gossamer lies

finessed enough to categorize out.

It's completed with a smile, a toasted success to the visions of lords

who place peons on the pathways of degradation for their betterment

the civil cause served to conquer evil in their bearing.

Here dwell the victims damaged by fate

offspring of animals whose mothers were raped.

A real blessing their snatching from hell

that a taste of heaven will be their most memorable state.

"We'll screw you white, whiter than the salty sand

re-pigment your kind that you might gain insight.

See Jesus suckered upon the cross?

Embrace him.  He's funky like you pitiable beasts.

Press your bruised breasts upon his battered chest.

His sperm drips grace if you touch his sores".

II.

Help them, Jesus, help them

see the damage initiated trying to right the world.

Help before suicide is the fate of the wronged

before a thousand rapes take place in the name of the law

as filigreed memories support the fermented crimes.

Pat them on their backs for repelling the virtues of revenge

their anger seething, seeping like a pot of venom tea.

Help them, sweet Jesus, help them, learning your word

that mercy might attend to their slaughtered ghosts

as they await the revelation of righteous love.

Their wretched past is smoked o'er with vials of perfume

seducing the victims trapped in the agonies of shame.

III.

History is writ by the conquerors' hand

till the day of retribution yanks the scales from their eyes.

*Each day is only itself and I can't make it other than what it is.

*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.

*Our great temptation is to not accept being the Father's child and living as one.

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

  -To hesitate, to change one's mind, to make mistakes, these are proofs of honesty.

  -We rush past questions in order to avoid anxiety.

  -By his absence-presence Jesus is more present than in the flesh.  Every spiritual experience, if it's        not just imaginary, is rooted in this understanding.

  -...to meet God is at the same instant to deny him.  Every certitude is a way of "putting God to              death".

no sound

he made no sound

laughing

though belly bobbed

and cheeks bounced

though hands waved

and body swayed

he made no sound

laughing

a hungry child

whipped into silence

Don't Perturb

flashing 'cross his mind

trapped in a death-house

a frozen zone

for making sounds

including laughter

thus it was there

in comedy's air

he made no sound

laughing

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

  -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....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.

*What would happen to the consumer economy if we began to believe that any amount of happiness is enough.

-Gary  Greenberg

*All too often people are betrayed by the word freedom.  And as freedom is accounted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be sublime.

-Kafka

*Religions get lost as people do.

 -Kafka