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.