Blaming escapades

We'd like to save ourselves

but can't

We blind ourselves to our escapades

escaping, if possible, the original fall into dis-grace

We fall deeper into the ancient hole

dug while fleeing the first

It's tragedy we long

Responsibility we set aside

Felix culpa we sing at Easter Mass

yet quickly suppress the message therein

wrapping it in blaming tones

unable to face our own

With difficulty we accept ourselves

and the pathetic state of our kind

but if we would responsibly say Yes

our present stumbling would occasion grace

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

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Evangelism has been infested by the desire to package things for easy consumption.

  -...you can't sell Christ the way you can sell a car, a deodorant, or a bottle of scotch.

  -The question for the desert believer is to tell the truth in faith so that what we are and what we present is both genuinely hopeful and uncompromisingly realistic.

  -The Gospel is grotesque.  We have got to give in to that idea, no matter how repulsive, no matter how - and especially because - it goes against every culturally conditioned notion of "significant issues" we have.  The Gospel is ludicrously incongruous in our world.  It is not headline material.  It cannot make it onto C.B.S. News.