small minds

the time is not ripe for the adventure of peace

small minds swing on the play toys of power

history yet nurses off the blood of the envied

her roots entangled in the bones of the quelled

the conquerors of evil bind the dove in chains

her olive branch stripped to whip the bad

the righteous empire uses the trappings of faith

to dispose of God, their collateral pawn

their every move reflects the will of God

on their journey to victory, in the excitement to win

they chase the leaders of the world they choose

clothed in the muck from the swamp of their lies

kingdoms lay on the gurney of destruction

wronged and mocked by infidelities to justice

small egos rule the halls of conquest

their ribald spirits re-imaging the world

through tales their blind eyes tell themselves:

that the darkness they see reflects the desirable light

along this path many nations journey

in pursuit of empire fashioned by their hands

rulers of fancy chasing their need for image

they guide their flock toward an acridly flavored life

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-To be a soul (to be fully mature and alive as a person) is to struggle in hope with love, because we know that at our deepest we are loved.  To be a soul is to know what it is to be a terminal case - to come to terms, however minimally, with the fact that we are going to die.  To be a soul means to know what it is to struggle for, to achieve, and to be denied power.  To be a soul is to live in time, with all its opportunities and limitations.  Our life is a story that slowly unfolds in time.  The believer understands that the great wild card promises that we are to be understood, recognized, and known in terms of our future, which is secure in God, rather than our past.  This means that there is much to regret, that past does not determine who and what we are.  We are in God's hands...the past does not have the last word. 

Why do you warn your children, "Be careful!"

when you enter my neighborhood?

Don't you see

I've lived here all my days

through its dangers, trials, toils and joys

or are we more alike than some

cause in your neighborhood

I watch for the boogieman too?

On this Thanksgiving Day in the USA 

I thank all of you who look at and enjoy

or dislike what I place before you

for, at least, looking at it and expressing

yourselves over it.  I enjoy realising 

that these images and thoughts, held to myself

over these many years but now freely released 

for both myself and you to see and ponder upon, 

and, for me, to rejoice in and over,

however painful some situations have been. 

If nothing else, I have discovered 

over these numerous years and multiple experiences 

that God Is Love..and is that, Absolutely.

Enjoy your days...with gratitude.

"When people are saying, "Peace and security", then sudden disaster comes upon them like pains upon a woman in labor, and they will not escape."
  -1 Thessalonians 5:3


i pray against empire
against it's pledge of universal freedom

a copy-cat mickey mouse way of living

where ev'ry mall repeats another

and we kill ourselves striving to look alike

"God, spare the world this imitative curse"

i pray against empire
against its pledge of universal freedom

informers with a patriotic scent

stir toilets to analyze ingredients within

where ev'ry enemy of mine will be theirs

and i'll be suspect when i finger their friends

i pray against empire
against its pledge of universal freedom

protective pulp circles the fearful seed

and like religious kitsch fills its emotional needs

moments of humor are primed by sitcoms

the last laugh for all being History's ghost

i pray against empire
against its pledge of universal freedom

the poor are snuffed, intellectuals spurned

the arts are targeted as corrupters of youth

the military machine drives the minds of most

distinguishing not between friend or foe

i pray against empire
against its pledge of universal freedom

peace and security no one can give

when your mind's not free and your spirit's chained

for fear smothers freedom, love frees one up

the kingdom of the human always tragically ends

i pray against empire
against its pledge of universal freedom



*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-The wisdom of the saints and mystics comes to us only after we have placed ourselves in a  position of waiting and receptivity.

*Longing and desire play a great part in soul making.  It is as if God has deliberately put unfulfilled desires into our hearts so that our hearts may be stretched beyond their present capacity.

*To be a soul (to be fully mature and alive as a person) is to struggle in hope with love, because we know that at our deepest we are loved.  To be a soul is to know what it is to be a terminal case - to have come to terms, however minimally, with the fact that we are going to die.  To be a soul means to know what it is to struggle for, to achieve, and to be denied power. To be a soul is to live in time, with all its opportunities and limitations.  Our life is a story that slowly unfolds in time.

*The believer understands that the great wild card promises that we are to be understood, recognized, and known in terms of our future, which is secure in God, rather than in our past.

on the horizon

i ask myself

who will see it

who will notice those cries heard in the night

be complicit in the crimes outside our door?

will ours be a voice trembling 'neath a dimming bulb

warning that the light we see is dark?

totalitarians love war as if bred for their tables

blood, the red wine coating their throats

when people disappear, they'll help them hide

because crimes against the struggling are cause for more

we'll shake our heads when the warning sirens wail

longing that the enemy would learn that we are right

who imagines our sincerity to be tainted

nothing is more natural than knowing God's on our side

when we smell flesh as the dust rains upon our heads

will the silent torture of convictions spew vomit on the streets?

when The Bomb. our bombs sprinkle the lawns of our villages

will then a whimper arise to explore the rubble of despair?

when bodies return wrapped in their symbolic flag

will it be too late to redirect the silent movie

to cancel the show about dandelions on our lawns

and show the face which horrified the dreams of our parents

now possessive of our lungs as a suffocating theme?

are we to salute or weep the dead murdered at our hands

for they will be our brothers, our children

our neighbors slain upon the carpeted earth?

then the airy transparency of our majesty

will lay crumbling like a yellowed constitution

released finally from its vacuumed tomb

who will see it

who will notice

complicit in the crimes outside our door

as oblong clouds stretch cross the azure sky

as if beds awaiting heads to rest upon?

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

*"Whatever remains unconscious emerges later as fate.

  -Carl Jung

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Gigantic questions about love, death, power, and time feed the soul.  They do not confront us as problems to be solved, but as mysteries to be wondered at, or intractable darknesses to be raged at or endured.

  -...we need to learn that there is power in surrender, in contemplation of the gigantic things.

  -Without the willingness too be still on the beach and play poker, we won't have the energy or resources that laughter and simple exhilaration in being alive brings.

  -Soul making...has something to do with paying attention to the Things Invisible, things which do not lend themselves to manipulation and control.

A wild chap was he

walking slowly through the wood

eyes grabbing each movement of leaves 

the dance of trees, the swaying wind

He was a wild thing the land reclaimed

for ev'ry ant and twittering bird

entertained his curious glance

His was no rush past nothin'

No insignificance dodged his sight

for ev'ry piece of life be there

a presence like God in hiding

 covered neath clods of green

Just an old man they thought

strolling through the park

an almost dead somebody

or nobody meaningful to watch

But there in his eyes shone wonder

and his heart beat life's excitement

walking slowly through the wood

watching expectantly for life

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...the shortage of mystics, desert believers, explorers of the the inner world is the reason why we are undergoing a crisis of soul in our society, why we do not know how to love.  Love is transformed into psychic poison when it is used as a means to an end, as a way of "solving a problem." 

  -...we need to understand that our basic relationship to reality (we might even say to God) is one of gift, the wild card.

  -Souls come into being when they are willing to contemplate gigantic things, when they are willing to allow the wildness of the wild card to enter their systems.

  -Gigantic questions about love, death, power, and time feed the soul. They do not confront us as problems to be solved, but as mysteries to be wondered at, or intractable darkness to be raged at or endured.

  -...we need to learn that there is power in surrender, in contemplation of the gigantic things.

  -Without the willingness to be still on the beach and play poker, we won't have the energy or the resources that laughter and simple exhilaration in being alive brings. 

...if we had not loved each other,  none of us would have survived.

-James Baldwin

Outagamie County Jail

Who would have thunk?

Who would have thought it?

Would it ever have crossed the old folks' minds

that in this place of enclosure

Negro children would be skippin' for joy

in jumpsuits, binding them to jail?

went searchin', went huntin'

not for coon nor gray possum

though these at times were sought

but for mama, for papa

for people i never knew

for grandpas and grandmas

for uncles, for aunts

for brothers, for sisters

long to mem'ry lost

went searchin' 'neath trees

into records of the country seat

in cabins, in graveyards

in mementos that have been bought

some glimpse, some earful

of tidbits deposited there

went huntin' for recovery

through swamps and bayous

among cypress, neath pines

to anything that might speak

a name in rings buried 

or agein' 'pon secret sites

still huntin' for an inkling

for signs of our shattered past

longing and working

to straighten our burdened, broken backs

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -True loving requires the kind of commitment that assumes a future where things might get better or they might get worse, but the loving will go on.

  -We use each other as a means to something else: food, narcissistic gratification, power, to scratch an itch, or as a means of diminishing another person.

  -The making of the soul as well as the making of a lover requires the receptivity to life of the mystic rather than that of the problem solver.

  -Love is transformed into psychic poison when it is used as a means to an end, as a way of "solving a problem."

  -...we need to understand that our basic relationship to reality (we might even say to God) is one of gift, the wild card.

  -Souls come into being when they are willing to contemplate gigantic things, when they are willing to allow the wildness of the wild card to enter their systems.

the never-were-a-people-people

neither Ifo nor Ibo

not Ameri-cans but Ameri-cants

a people from their covenants

the Middle Passage having ripped that out

we are a no-people of the Negroid rout

shades of valor many dislike

an outside-people hating ourselves

unto thefts and deaths that cut  us out

danger-zones to others and to self

pushers and dealers we often succeed

for the Man uptown, the ones out-there

who knows how to live, making us the show

our heritage is the be Ameri-cants

hooked  on dough, on dust, on mush

cloning Thurman our peculiar pride

no matter how much we incorporate

no matter how bright our flesh is right

no matter how proper our diction or fare

we're a no-people, a visual nightmare

remnants of a time that offered few grants

frightening colors disturbing the shamed

*When we reach love, we have reached God; our road is ended and we have crossed to the island which is beyond the world.

  -St. Isaac the Syrian

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The development of the gift of negative capability is difficult and painful.  Yet without the nourishment provided by the ability to rest on uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, the soul begins to starve.  "It cannot live on fun alone.  If the soul gets no food, it will first tear apart other creatures...

then itself."

  -...love is more like Anne Sexton's game of poker into which has been slipped the wild card of the unconditional.  Love, for most of us, is often a scarcely veiled reciprocal trade treaty.  Love is the name we sometimes give to a kind of spiritual cannibalism where two people devour each other.  It can be another name for a parasitic or smothering relationship.  When the real thing is unavailable, we look for terrible substitutes.

  -I do not "happen" without assistance.

  -Here is the basic paradox of soul making: in order for me to be myself, I need to be able to be alone; in order to be myself, I need to be with others.

  -There are those who think they love God because they don't love anyone else.

you can always tell when you're on the outs

when you're talked about behind your back

cause insiders always treat you differently.

their eyes curl behind your back like a knife

ope'ning a hole for the poison to alight.

you can tell by their bright address

the elisions in conversations

the silence in movements

the manner in which they treat you like a guest

in your own home, a stranger from another town

to be watched and locked out like stray dogs

searching for some warmth with their tails 'tween their legs.

you can always tell by their enthusiasm to move

move on to the next place of safety and abandoned talk

with unmasked questions slipping from their lips

like saliva that pools beneath their tongues

with no place to go 'cause swallowing they forgot

and you are filtering their sacred space.

they rarely call or treat you like their own

even when you're more than they are to you

when you're the elder who's paid their fare.

it's a cancerous hurt to be neglected without regard

when in humanhood you're the outsider you've always been

the uninvited at the party they call LIFE.

around their wrists are bands of yellow and white.

What Would Jesus Do? is the question they wear

and you wonder though you know right then and there.

you've done what they have done but kept you out

sitting atop the ocean wall waiting for the waves to smash

and take you to the heaven of your nightmare of regrets

meeting God undercover, hiding from your face

cause you were not worthy to stand before their face

having decided you couldn't stand before the The Countenance.

you can tell 'cause you've been to hell before

and their heaven is just as close 'cause their devils smell

knowing how to keep distant from the sinful of the earth.

you can always tell when you're on the outs:

chewing gum when you'd prefer to eat flesh

cursing yourself, wanting to cuss others out.  

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -I want to affirm this world in such a way that I do not turn a blind eye to tragedy, suffering and failure.

  -To believe is, in part, not only to acknowledge but also to bear the wound in the heart.  Willingness to bear the wound comes when we begin to realize that we are loved.

a person in five phrases

i.

held in the vise of despair without visions of hope

nails sharpened into swords while the stomach sours

bellowing a volcano of spite: i walk about normally

with the abnormality of insanity crying for dead dolls

washing their dirty faces to see mine in a clearer light.

but can Pepto-Bismo coat the sorrows that already cause me to blush

that flush wholeness into the life i bear

to muster whatever laughter i can bundle like a hyena after a kill?

ii.

i reach through the fog that sits at the center of my mind

and touch whatever of limbs limp toward the earth

stretching to touch a caring one somewhere in this universe

a prisoner shackled and manacled upon the the torture floor

awaiting the CIA to enter and smash the dead soul of me

into some meaningful life so that questions arise.

they see not blood nor hear the streams of screams.

they bruise not humans with a name

but immune, beat those with answers that kill some self 

more notable than i, some other more barbaric than they, they say.

iii.

the one-color world bothers me.

i look into the eyes of grey and see darkness.

all about are smiling faces with glued expressions

and i am frightened by the sincerity they bear.

the tenor of their conversations is noise

unhealthy at the end of all.

iv.

a humming in the atmosphere reminds me of a lost butterfly.

somewhere between a need for freedom and healing

the spiritual and the mental fall apart.

it needs to return to the flow of life

unable to maintain positions o'er the mystical sea.

attacked like children chasing a fleeing ball

it's a slab of flesh destined for abuse

to be chewed upon, then vomited into a trough.

it's how i feel, atrophied: gnawed and discarded.

what is this death in me? regurgitation?

an attempt to reclaim a life before the surgeon arrives

to apply the knife?

v.

i'd like to fill the world with water and light

with clapping and exuberant laughs

but my limbs fall limp and my spirit faints

feeling lost among the lonely, fumbling

in search of meaningful land. 

*I am not what happens to me; I am what I choose to become.

  -Carl Jung

prison of the mind

the prison in our mind   it's that that draws us 'round from cemetery to cemetery    from tomb to tomb where our stinking pasts are laid

we long to douse the smoke clouds hovering above the smoldering of our deeds     the garbage pit that yawns as we watch     here we stood attempting to burn the rubbish that taints us     the refuse of sins thought long discarded in the dump we called "home"

we're like fools in dunce caps facing the wall of rejection     twiddling our thumbs waiting for some trapdoor to spring     hurling our vision into bas-relief on the wall of lost grace

like dour virgins posing for a date     we sit staring into cameras that hold our image without a soul     seated and staring into the coated glass     hoping our Mate will ring and lead us to Spring  

but will we remain stuck on the hinges of old queries     trapped in the questions that philosophy can't resolve      as we travel the road hungering for Light 

*Reflections  of Alan Jones:

-In the face of the rise of a virulent, ultraconservative form of believing that is all answers and absolutely no questions, it is very hard to "climb the cross of the moment and see our illusions die."

-...a human being is unfinished business.

-The intractable "isness" of things can be either a source of delight or the occasion of despair.

House of Rest

a caterpillar ripples

along a leaf

into flight

a sunflower

bends

into seed

a river

empties

into

itself

                                                -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

while nigglets clown

i.

we wait for Bethesda-waters to churn

that we might dive in and be healed

but no angel arrives to stir the forgotten pool

nor the stagnant pond besides which we kneel

we need a hand, a body to drag us in

our crippled limbs too heavy to bear

ii.

we journey as if on the dark side of the moon

where craters bleed and sand dunes blow

pushing the heat from our cooling hearts

forcing the chill into our trembling hearts

shivers of silence encompass our poisoned minds

iii.

a little balm, a little care, a gentle joy

would brighten the gray side of our minds

guiding the pain of hist'ry hobbling our feet

into that mirror darkly we peer

into shadows bouncing back upon the glass

probing the faces that have molded our truth

iv.

the multiplication of sorrows soon forgot

rise behind the stained-glass of emancipation-lords

enjoying the circus while nigglets clown  

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...many believers treat "God" as a mascot, hobby, or household god.  If our questions about God are narrowly based, then the kind of God we believe in will fit the shape of our questions.  If we believe, without question, that God is all powerful and really rules the universe, we are likely to suppress questions about this all-powerful God's responsibility for suffering, injustice, and evil.  If we are willing to ask shocking questions about, for example, the pain of God, then a wiser view of God may begin to emerge.  We need to let our uneasy conscience, our radical identification with others, and our sense of failure speak to us of God.

  -Faith requires the willingness to be wrong and to be found to be in the wrong.  Ever-deepening questions are its lifeblood.

  -The more we question, the more we are faced with questions of our identity.

awaiting liberation

who'd say it

who'd spit that word "liar" out

clenched behind false teeth

biting themselves to avoid release

for it's a lie

spoken with grace and deliberation

that the detractors fool 

with the trembling in their throats

what assurance!

i am betrayed

and sulk like soaked peas 

waiting to be thrown into the pot

a prisoner of incompetent words and thoughts

a diagram of dismembered smarts

words were said

there stiletto-style stuck to subjects without verbs

incomparable sounds against truth

while it's truth i desire

i long for freedom now

bound in the throats of liars

diverting it to the killing fields

where the lovers of death yet dwell

zombies fixed on harm and shame

and the burden of gross falsification

while i lay here still

a bound body

sweating beneath the heat of breath

filled with untruths that slay with skill

awaiting the liberation that truth would bring

even though in prison i die 

*Our personalities and individuality's, along our dysfunctions and the like, make life interesting, 

frightening and humorous.  No wonder God loves us.

*All of our heroes have mud on their feet.     

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

*Reflection of Alan Jones:

  -Graham Greene offers us three distinguishing marks of the believer.  First, the believer has an uneasy conscience, and so is incapable of committing atrocities (however minor) with equanimity.  Second, the believer identifies with all human beings - the good, the bad and the indifferent - and thus is an unlikely candidate of totalitarian seduction.  Finally, the believer has a certain capacity for disloyalty - disloyalty to existing arrangements, to the principalities and powers.  The believer is not good at the usually excuses.  The phrase "I was obeying orders" would stick in the throat of the believer.  The Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, has become the exemplar of this unimaginative obeyer of orders from above.  He was pronounced perfectly sane; and as Thomas Merton has pointed out, "It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared."   

empty minds

dying from a pornography of bilious suppositions

an incessant supply of tortured words

we collapse like fattened whores

drunk on the wine of debauched dreams

hoping for release from programmed fears

that hold us captive to junk food mush

coursing the cells of our starving selves

our wills flattened by laws and courts.

to live or be larger than narrowed whims

passed on to us by gaseous heads

we die at their hands

in suicides hatched by the dim witted

a people too blind to think or reflect

having lost the truth of ourselves within.

thus we gaze into glass coffins

hoping to spot the next coming

who we'd like to be whenever discovered

when uncovered by studious researchers

buried with our empty minds

and they assessing who we are.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The persecuting personality is marked by clarity and precision. There is no room for indecision. There is nor room for guilt.  There is no room for doubt.  Such are the distinguishing marks of a totalitarian state or totalitarian church.  The divided mind, the uneasy conscience, and the sense of personal failure, bring us in their own way to the fiftieth gate, the the place of faith; and it is at that point that they lose theirs crippling power and become vehicles of hope.

  -It cannot be claimed that believers are better that unbelievers, or that the coming of Christ (for example) has made the world a better place to live in.  Believers may claim modestly that because there are those who believe there is a glimmer of hope in the world; but they can claim little else. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, describing the terrible situation in England during the reign of Stephen baldly stated the "men said openly that Christ and His saints slept."  In Shusako Endo's novel The Samurai, a samurai in seventeenth-century Japan says these words to the emaciated Christ nailed to a massive crucifix:

I...I have no desire to worship you...I don't even understand why [these Spaniards] respect you.  They say you died bearing the sins of mankind, but I can't see that our lives have become any easier as a result.  I know the wretched lives the peasants lead...Nothing has changed because you died.

  -The terrible cycle of blaming others, of finding a scapegoat, or persecuting the marginal, is brought to a halt everytime believers repent and accept their guilt.

-An uneasy conscience and a sense of guilt are two of the distinguishing marks of a believer.  Wherever human beings have a conscience sensitive to moral failure there is the possibility of change, because the believer knows that he or she has been an accomplice to all the crimes committed by human beings against their own kind and against the world in which they live.  We, the believers, acknowledge our guilt - whether it be due to cowardice, inertia, indifference, or ignorance. Believers experience a radical solidarity with the guilty, and this sense of solidarity prevents them from treating others as disposable or as insignificant.  Guilt for the atrocities of the world makes us all one.  Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov identifies with all and loves all.

Hate not atheists, the teachers of evil, materialists, even the most wicked of them, let alone the good ones among them...Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all who have no one to pray for them, and save those, too, who do not want to pray to thee."

elegy for a dead ken

rush to my funeral

you would-be brothers

come, marching in

bouquets in hand

lay them at the foot of my coffin

peer into the box

protecting my remains

speak your words of praise

while thinking thoughts of shame

i'll listen

won't budge an inch

fear not

jesus won't awaken me

hand me to you with tears

years to come

when you're free as me

buried with the dead

our names etched and forgotten

we'll meet to fuss, to cuss

begin to mix again

learning to love each other, for once 

for once, for once, again

*I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.

   -Carl Jung

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -If the world is to change, then first I have to change.

  -I come to faith in a God who is paradoxically revealed in the very struggle to name him.

  -The simple truth is that reality reveals its self to us in proportion to the level of our willingness to ask questions.

  -In a world where there is no room for doubt, ambiguity, or questioning, there is no room for genuine faith.

shoving the poor into the ghettos of our contrition

might trigger a long lost compassion, warming the breast

like a bright orange ball, full of sun

shivering in the coolness of our embrace

is this the need we're searching for

contending against crumbs flowering our world?

*A friend told me: "Sometimes we stumble into the will of God".  And I added, " Sometimes through that we fall into the Well that is God".

*When the parousia occurs, there will be somebody cleaning up the shit.

Reflections of Alan Jones:

*We are entering the realm of of faith - which is not assent to a set of propositions, but walking into the Unknown.

*Believing means not only come home to oneself, but coming home to others as well.  Many of us find belonging to a community of like-minded people sustaining and comforting.  The believer, however, understands that the relationship is not to a group of the like-minded, but to the whole human race: the ugly along with the beautiful, the failures as well as the successful, the brilliant along with the moronic.

*...behind the question "Who is God?" is the question "Who am I?"

*...contending with God, even in anger, is part of what it means to pray.

*Doubt is part of the arsenal of faith.  It keeps it fresh and honest.  In our daring to argue and in our struggle to understand, the blood begins to flow through a tried and worn-out faith.  But it is important not to try to do all this alone.

The tears of my friend

The tears of my friend

when I can't do nothin'

turns me dumb

His tears pull tears

from the corners of my eyes

staring into Myst'ry

Absorbing his pain

his manhood stripped bare

I attempt to breathe silence

lest noise profane his shame

With platitudes too empty

useless and disdained

I "Uh-huh!" my way to closure

and pray for the return of pride

*There are parts of my psyche that are still at the stage of pre-puberty and adolescents. That may be the case.  In light of that, I must recall that I am "me" this day, this moment and that whatever I decide or not decide is from this "now" and it is in "this moment" that I am responsible, that I love, I sin, I grow, I regress.  The challenge is to live "now", forgive "now", be "now", love "now".

*Our ultimate act of worship is what we do with our lifetime.  Everything that happens to us can enrich that worship or simply be left to the side.

-Klempa

*You have to forgive yourself first for being human because to be human is to have lots of faults; so you have to forgive, and then the love flows in.

-Marion Woodman

*Reflections from of Alan Jones:

  -The more we question and probe the more we need to be rooted in a community.

  -"...beyond the fiftieth gate there is not only the abyss but also faith - and they are next to each other..."  And the Rebbe brought his disciple back to his people - and back to himself. (from a Hasidic story)

  -I've told you. You fell in love.  That's a start, but it's only a start.  Falling in love is egoism, it's being obsessesd by images  and being consoled by them, images of the beloved, images of oneself.  It's the greatest pain and the greatest paradox of all, that personal love has to break at some point, the ego has to break, something absolutely natural and seemingly good, seemingly perhaps the only good, has to be given up.  After that there's darkness and silence and space.  And God is there.  Remember St. John of the Cross.  Where the images end you fall into the abyss, but it is the abyss of faith.  When you have nothing left you have nothing left but hope...The point is, one will never get to the bottom of it, never, never, never.  And that never, never, never, is what you must take for your hope and your shield and your most glorious promise.  Everything we concoct about God is an illusion. (from Iris Murdoch) 

we are half-persons with quartered faces

lacking balance in our lives;

leaning on the edge of collapse

we embrace hope's escape from despair.

we cry with muffled tongues

a word swallowed in each sound;

thirsting for some wine of peace

we imbibe life's oblivion drugs.

we long for physicians to come

and patch our broken parts

to listen to our garbled response

hacking through dry throats.

we languish on the banks of Eden

surveying the tree across the way

awaiting  the cherub to sheath its sword

and Messiah to ferry us in. 

Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -The desert way of believing claims we are most truly ourselves when we are most at home with ourselves.

  -In psychological terms we may say that since God commands only our good, we may trust the inner processes of our own development.

  -God wills our good.  This means that everything that happens to us, including our sinning, can be turned to our good.

  -In fact, the gift of tears comes relatively late in a person's walk with God.  St. Gregory Nazianzen said that tears are the fifth baptism.  The first is that of Moses - a matter of simple water.  The second is that of John the Baptist, which is greater than that of Moses because it is one of repentance.  The third is baptism of the Spirit.  The fourth is baptism by blood in martyrdom, "which is the most perfect because Christ himself received it....Finally there is that of tears, more painful than martyrdom because it consists nightly of bathing one's bed and covers with tears..." 

-You have no tears?  Buy tears from the poor.  You have no sadness?  Call the poor man to moans with you.  If  your  heart is hard and has neither sadness nor tears, with alms invite the needy to weep with you...Provide yourself with the water of tears, and may the poor come to help you put out the fire in which you are perishing.  All the waves of  the immense ocean would not wash you as would these streams which the heart sends to the eyes. (James of Saroug)

taken hold and being held by some WANT

some mighty draw pulling us into the jaw of its NEED

some addiction seducing in its empty, outstretched arms

a face, once full, now rapaciously gray

starving behind the paints 'round hollow eyes

and shadowed lips

taken hold and held, i slide into its comfort zone

aching in my gut, spinning in my head

lusting what's promised, sorrowed at it's lack

needing more than a wish

the coaxing bearing a prize of leaves instantly dead

before they reach my hands

as I peer into the jungle where other WANTS crouch

poised to snare the plotted soul

a Face peers above the WANTS.

its tears of blood nurture the earth

feeding the flow'rs with each red drop

that can be plucked in the restless night

whose fragrance pervades ones environment

a healing remedy like the cereus  

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -...it often takes tragedy to bring us to the realization that our lives are held together by an extremely fragile web.

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

  -Sin often begins as a kind of forgetfulness, an absent-mindedness that allow us not to be truly present to ourselves - to be "not at home" so that we can, without compunction, steel our hearts against others and undermine the foundations of the City.

  -The desert way of believing claims that we are most truly ourselves when we are most at home with ourselves.