'tween myself and MY SELF

i stand staring toward the horizon

in wonderment how i arrived here 

to this edge on the trail of time

has been no smooth trekking

the wars of the world are wedged in between

witness and model to my own

bearing peace's tattered flag

the buried dead have risen from their tombs

blown the trumpet lest Gabriel blows too late

revealing the rotting of their carriage

on their path to the Promised Land

here Satan snakes through the deep sea grass

while Hope churns eternal within the wasted life

life, squished 'tween the halves of self

pondering the blessings God loosed upon the earth

the Sun rises westward when one least expects

and is promise that life will meld

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -You should grieve for the sake of the God who grieves for you.

    .St. Ephrem

  -Over a dead body you weep, but over a soul dead and separated from God you do not weep!  Tears falling on a corpse cannot restore it, but if they fall on a soul they will bring it back to life...Give God weeping, and increase the tears in your eyes; through your tears and his goodness the soul which has been dead will be restored.  Behold, Mercy awaits for your eyes to shed tears, to purify and renew the image of the disfigured soul.

  .St. Ephrem

 -Compunction is the means by which we begin to love our neighbor.

 -...the pursuit of our own perfection is as ludicrous as it is impossible.  In the heart of God is our hearts' desire, and nothing less than God will satisfy us.

 -There is humor and gentleness in the desert as well as rigor and discipline.  These believers know that they have not made it as perfected beings.  More important, they know they don't have to make it.

 -...we are incurably forgetful and need a jolt from time to time to wake us up.

Inner-city lovers

Home of the used and the duped;

victims of fear and charity;

people moving no where

except from kitchen to handouts

through the largess of the caring-in-flight

the "Them" standing 'gainst the "them"

to help "them" stay in houses once fled

 groaned o'er as a dead memory of love

I hate Inner-city lovers.

I loathe the cages of the strong,

their "treat-them-with-dignity" smiling

their gifts set as cheese on a trap.

Who sees a face without tax breaks?

Who sniffs the balm of the poorly wiped butt?

Who knows hollow eyes from the inside?

Inner-city scapegoats are coaxed to the slaughter

and die waiting for the system to set them free

their hues confining them

binding them the wrong side of right

ever expanding, their tones rattling the suburbs.

I hate the Inner-city lovers.

I loath the cages of the strong.

*When you care what other people think, chose your own jailers carefully.

  -from a homily at an artists workshop

*All ministry is prison ministry.

 -Jerry Schroeder

*Believing is seeing and we see with our feet.

 -Anonymous

*Although the truth may hurt, it is still the truth.

 -common wisdom

The red tattoo

My heart is a zillion whirlpools

spinning in symphonic chaos.

I race 'tween doubt and doubt

to touch one second of assurance

enough to push me through the gate.

The twisted road of his'try

where the sure and the lame are halt,

is the only trail homeward

where You stand at the door.

There I'm Yours, all Yours

a tattoo upon Your arm

written, "Mine, all Mine",

my name inked in red.

No mad eyes rolling out of sockets

no putrid anger torching the toxined air

but You, a Door-jam Daddy,

eyeing the distant past

awaiting my return from the stockyards

where I fashioned a house of filth

midst the stick horses of the world.

Tis there You stand

searching the far-off vista

as bedraggled I come, remembering

Your tattoo writ in red.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Penthos or compunction is the way believers accept both the judgement and the mercy simultaneously.  The gift of tears is a sign of the mending of creation.  We and the world are on the mend when we wake up to our deep desire and longing for God.  We wake up to the fact that God reigns.

  -In order for me to have an accurate sense of who I am, I must also have a sense of limits and order in my life.  Life without borders, with no reason why I should do one things rather than another is, in the end, destructive.

  -To be truly free we have to be accountable, to be able to answer for ourselves and our actions.  A world that has no place for us to lay our burden of guilt (the real not the neurotic kind), and which allows no possibility of our expressing gratitude and joy, is s deeply broken one.  It is a world over which one would spontaneously weep.

From the deep blue chaos of creation

You pulled light to brighten ev'ry way.

You stared into the blackness of night

snapped Your fingers and commenced to dance.

You danced and played while the world You formed;

gathered clay and rolled a ball

pinched and punched, squeezing here and there

Your image and likeness breathing life into cells.

Set in the playground named Mother Earth

naked we danced and sang freedom songs.

We whirled till our spermal fluids flowed

till our eggs embraced the swimming lot

till makings of ourselves squeezed through 

the channel of fright

and the dry-tears of hungry babes

wailed in the Garden named Paradise.

These were bearers of the serpentine curse

images of God with distracting thirsts.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -...of all the choices that we have to make, there is nothing harder than having to give up something good for the sake of something better.

  -It is as if God has placed time-bombs inside us, programmed to go off at certain intervals to make a gaping hole in us so that we can continue to be open to life.  (God) is always creating new space in us by means of these explosions.  We are continually being given the space to choose either "heaven" or "hell", to act in such a way that we are either more and more curved in on ourselves or more turned towards God.

  -Suffering and joy are bound together in our struggle to choose life and not death.

  -We cannot do what is demanded of us without help.  The last word for believers is not their own failed efforts, but the free, spontaneous, and explosive love of God forever making new space in them.

Rebel twins

When they catch you

they'll beat you

they'll screw you

they'll flail you

they'll humor you with Jesus

then hang you on a tree.

Then all the children will flee you

spitting your name in mud

calling God to curse you

for your blackened-words of war.

Believers will be frozen

walking home, defeated

abandoning Christ

in his moment of glory.

Two truths you never swallowed:

Christ points arms at no one

lifting arms bearing each other. 

Our personalities, individualities, with our dysfunctions, make life interesting, frightening and humorous.  No wonder God loves us.

When Sister Death arrives, we'll be ready.  She's the only way to go.

All of our heroes have mud on the feet.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Learning to love without possession and finding that one is loved without conditions is what it is to receive the gift of tears and to be surprised by joy.

  -My willingness to struggle with myself contributes to the well-being of thh commonwealth.  The desire for security and the anxiety over safety at all costs makes war more and more a possibility and springs from our "impure hearts" and double minds.

  -...real desire means the candid acknowledgement that I am incomplete and need something in order to be real myself. (Rowan Williams)

  -...of all the choices that we have to make, there is none harder than having to give up something good for the sake of something better.

White mansions

White mansions rock like old madames

fing'ring mem'ries in their lap.

They watch o'er niggras hauling cotton

cross fields slaves once trod.

The intenseness of their gaze cause fires to flair

in woods once guardian to lingering smoke.

Wisteria drapes them front and back

a Godiva clad in tangles and knots.

The weathered boards of their yellowed flesh

witness to tales hid behind their web-framed house.

Who cares what visions twinkle in their eyes

curtained behind the glaucoma of their frosty panes?

Who'll sit long among their wizened boards

or press their ears to the blackened earth

to hear the blood gurgling in their hearts?

These old ones are too soon wrenched

from the history of our soul

our mem'ries shackled and twisted

and torn out of place.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Knowledge without love can lead to despair.

  -...no matter how much truth we have seen about ourselves, it is never the whole truth.

  -From the believer's point of view, all our knowing has to be set in the context of grace and hope. Our knowledge is never full and final, and we may thank God for that.

  -Simple attentiveness puts an enormous question mark beside everything, and this question mark makes us anxious and brings us close to tears.

  -There's a sort of no-man's land in me with which I am unfamiliar, and yet which is very much my own.  It is the place familiar to all of us where we know ourselves and yet are strangers to ourselves. 

Moments of contradiction in a realm of distinctions

The tongues of the virtuous speak from hearts gone sour

then languish aft sherbet sweetening their breath

What's implied when we're chewing on bullets

that backfire in our mouths, painting our lips with hate?

With guns as the power behind their convictions

the children claim vict'ry at the Battle of Dunce

Who believes what's included at the Liar's Debate?

Will their girls have erections at the initiation rites?

As the natives are waiting for just compensation

the agents insist that their treaties were forged.

These denizens now stand 'round the Lake of Extinction

awaiting morticians to whisk their spirits away

Midst orgies of protests sign'ling the demise of reason

the dreams of the insignificant are smashed one by one

Screams arise from an underground passion

where the burning of flesh fills the nights with incense

The rice-niggas sing praise in their bent positions

fleeing hell when freedom snagged their hearts

So many the stories of progress repeated

stories of progress newly deferred 

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Believing is never simply a matter of a scent to a doctrine.

  -To bring believing and being together can be a painful and tearful process.

  -It is no wonder that many religious people are deeply angry and resentful.  To be sure, their true feelings are often covered by a veneer of "oughts," "shoulds," and "good manners."  Resentment is a natural response to unrealistic and unreasonable demands made on people, as if they were finished and complete entities.  Harry Williams comments: "Why do people imagine that in order to have God you must also have all this kind of nonsense?  It is because...religion is to a large extent what people do with their lunacy: their phobias, their will to power, their sexual frustrations." 

  -Knowledge without love can lead to despair.

without faces

seen too many paintings

all motion, no features

Blacks moving, hither-thither

heads cocked, flung o'er a canvas's frame

dressed in reds, yellows and wonderful lush

ev'ry expression of human touch

resting in landscapes within the artist's reach

'cept faces, flesh-featured, in browns and blacks

where are the faces with eyes and lips

with noses sniffing the perfume air?

a faceless people can't feel themselves

they're blind performers in another's dream

dancers living on cadillac-clouds

hopeful of dollar bills raining down

i wonder why some paint this way:

imaging people with no face of their own

shouting,"Glory, glory!", with no face for God

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -The story is told of a young pupil who yearned for enlightenment and went to a wise man for advice and counsel.  The guru, without a word, led the disciple to the river and held the young man's head under the water.  When the pupil began to struggle for air, the old man held his head under with all the strength he could muster.  At last the younger man, with a tremendous surge of energy, broke away from the old man's grip and came up out of the water with an enormous and hungry gasp.  The old man looked at him and said: "Don't come to me to ask about enlightenment until you want it as much as you wanted that lungful of air."  Enlightenment is not a mere intellectual affair.  It is a matter of life and death.

short of magic.

  -Christian believers have tended to be nervous about and suspicious of the waking-up process because it is thought that Christianity has nothing to do with enlightenment, but only with salvation. The distinction is an unfortunate one.  Enlightenment, without some truly saving aspect to it, is little more than an intellectual exercise.  Salvation without the inner transforming power of self-knowledge is little short of magic.

  -Believing is never simply a matter of assent to a doctrine.

woman ascending the staircase

his eyes scoured the night

searching for eyes to see him

to watch yet not heed his hips

a secret wish his lips held tight

of the woman cloaked in shame and fear

within the armor of his manfulness

yet, as from a shadowed edge

a place beyond his sight and dance

i saw the one act of his nervous heart

the one his buddies did not catch:

his woman, free for a moment's glace

as he ascended the royal stairs of chance

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Penthos (compunction) frees the soul from the lying and the pretense that tend to dominate us when we are frightened, anxious or insecure.  It is also known as the gift of tears.  In the East, the sacrament of confession is sometimes called "the Mystery of the Second Baptism."  The truly penitent is "baptized" again in his or her own tears, which represent the tears of truth and insight breaking in and flooding the soul with new life. 

  -The gift of tears is concerned with living in and with the truth and with the new life that the truth always brings.  The tears are like the breaking of waters of the womb before the birth of a child.

  -Seeing without the possibility of transformation would be hell.

  -When we can see purely we can also act purely.  "Purity of heart" begins too happen when a person is willing to be pierced through with the arrows of compunction.

Boxed Life

Box it

we like to box it

wrap it in aluminum foil

and cover the core of us

that life be not seen

as pain

or truth

or freedom

for we might know our self

as mammoth mystery

as postered proclamation

hearing

I love you

I love you

I love you

against our will

our filtered judgments

for we might change

be self-forgiving

be the child

we rarely knew.

What must I do

to be unwrapped

be reflective light

be comforting heat?

Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-Christianity is a shocking religion, although many of its adherents have managed to protect themselves from its terrible impact.  Tears, an awareness of one's psychic fragility, and a deep sense of peace and joy are not the most obvious marks of believers  today.  Yet the shock of Christianity remains: the shock of its materialism and its particularity; the shock of its calling us to a messy and untidy intimacy.  It claims that the flesh matters.  It insists that history (the particularity of time and place) matters.  Above all, it claims that, in the end, nothing else but love matters.

-Much of the discipline of the desert  is concerned with keeping the shock and promise of love alive.

-...we tend to make religion of our better moments.

In the grace-charged time

when regrets melt-down years

like popsicles in a child's mouth

like weevils munching a cotton patch

God, long lost in the crevices

the recesses of our earthen-ware

ekes praise upon the lips of us

grace-touched by God's playful light

Tis the hoe-down of the soul

the heel-clicking partying of spirit

the release of prisoners from their jails

the wide-opening of gates to paradise

Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Tears flow when the real source of our life is uncovered, when the mask of pretense is dropped, when our strategies of self-deception are abandoned.  Trials and humiliations are necessary only insofar as they are the means by which our true life is uncovered.

  -To come to this place where one is truly alive, one must hit rock-bottom.  There must be a breakthrough to the place of deepest helplessness.  "Then at last", writes Andre Louf, a beginning can be made." 

  -Tears come when we learn to live more and more out of our deepest longings, our needs, our troubles.  These must all surface and be given their rightful place.  For in them we find our real human life in all is depths.  And when one begins with these unacceptable feelings and desires, which have to be submitted for examination, we must look closely at, and learn to live with, this amazing degree of weakness of ours.

  -Learning to live with this amazing degree of weakness is an essential element of the way of believing that we are exploring.  It means learning to live gracefully with our own extreme psychic frailty.  Perhaps this is the point where the believer and the unbeliever are forced to part company: not over a piece of dogma, but over the experience of grace.  The believer knows that grace enters into our experience precisely at the point where we are wounded, where our longings are deepest and most inarticulate.  The believer is brought to the end of his or her rope, placed in extremis, forced to wait in weakness.  The believer weeps.  This way of believing is shocking.  It cuts more deeply, and there is a great deal more to it than just having a good cry.

virgin

she is a fruited garden

that has never felt hands

where birds alight to feast

among the flowers of her orchard

trees stand tall before her

bowed by winds blown through her

she's a flowered meadow and glen

upon which to lay ones head

*Thoughts from Alan Jones:

  -Crying is a natural phenomenon and the withholding of tears appears to be dangerous to health.

  (quoted from the New York Times)

  -He who is aware of his sins is greater than one who can raise the dead.  Whoever can weep over himself for one hour is greater than the one who is able to teach the whole world; whoever recognizes the depth of his own frailty is greater than the one who sees visions of angels.

(quoted from Isaac of Ninive)

  -Something positive is released when tears flow.

  -Sooner or later, believers and unbelievers alike have to face the issues of misfortune, pain and death; and these issues are at the heart of religion.

  -Tears flow when the real source of our life is uncovered, when the mask of pretense is dropped, when our strategies of self-deception are abandoned.  Trials and humiliations are necessary only insofar as they are the means by which our life is uncovered.

  -To come to the place where one is truly alive, one must hit rock-bottom.  There must be a breakthrough to the place of deepest helplessness.  "Then at last," writes Andre Louf, "a beginning can be made."

to be

i believed the sun would shine

would ride high in the sky

warm the earth

light my face

wrap me in rays quite bright

it hid me somewhere behind the grey

above the chill

not moving for anyone

not for the gods who curse the day

nor for painters who tint and shade

nor for those demanding their private plat

i dwelt in the moment's cause

'cause it is gift to sleep upon

to mill within

to fashion work

to phone a friend 

to meditate

to be and be

...to be

*God is the best weird experience there is.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Slowly, in the life of faith, the thing that we dread becomes both companion and friend.

  -Sister Death challenges us to live life as fully and as creatively as we can.  The willingness to live with the knowledge of our inevitable death enables us to face, more and more, both the freedom of responsibility and responsibility that life offers.  This willingness to walk with Sister Death is the first sign of the believer's maturity.