awakenings

pleas and entries

obliterations and destruction

have turned light into dark.

vengeful monsters

torch our waters.

why our national posturing?

why our twisted and disputed truths?

why these pages put of time?

does blindness squelch insight

when our eyes are packed

with wax and lies?

our distorted and deviant life

growls like a bully-child

threatening strife.

stop now and smell the roses

lest our make-believe becomes real

and we lay weeping in our tombs

our fears flowing warmly

our bones bleaching on slabs

our friends passing by

without prayer or trust

with smirks and disgust

we stinking from our lusts.

look! see the signals of hope

awakening the crippled.

hear the dead captives tinkering

in the dungeons of the damned.

*Pain

it is winter

all is green

I turn

attention

to

the pain

slip

into night

into

knowing

how

the door

opens

                                                  -Jerry Schroeder,Cap.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -In the last analysis it is the Gospel that inspires and guides the Church.  Popes, bishops and priests are servants of the Word and our servants.  They exist only to make sure it remains alive, and to point out the way to go.

  -If to read is to set out, to be transplanted, to create anew, we can see why the men of the Church find it(the Gospel) so painful to read.  After all, the way things are done now, it's as if they were the authors of the text.  How can Christian communities be freed by the Word when they transform it into a form of knowledge to which they hold the key?  The Church continually represses the prophetic voice until an event takes place that shakes it to its roots and unleashes the tide of the Spirit.

groaning into holiness

i am a bruised vessel

empty and cracked

waiting to be patched

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

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

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Human beings are not looking for just anything but for the absolute, even when they believe they are turning away from it, or when they unknowingly repress it in a search for material things. Every passion is an arrow aimed at the other shore.

  -Reading is completely pointless if it doesn't teach us to understand life, especially the burning passion of life itself.

  -The Gospel ...plunges us into the openness of the instant.

  -Attitudes are made up of ideas, opinions and prejudices which form a protective shell.  A new thought is accepted only when it has force on its side - that is, strength of numbers, when it becomes normal and can take its place in the overall system without danger.

  -...a spiritual message cannot possess the power of what is normal except by denying itself.  So it must use the weapons of the rebel. The warrior of the spirit, who knows that meaning is always in a state of suspense, expresses himself through paradox, humor and parable.  When, through fear of solitude or because of a flabby notion of charity, he comes to adopt the language of the tribe - a language which inevitably aims at permanence - his betrayal is greatest at the moment he is most applauded.  If he refuses to take the broad and illusory path of "communication" it is because our everyday wisdom, with its lazy language of adaptation, offends him.  He pierces our sleepy consciences and becomes in turn ironic, enigmatic, a kill-joy.  People start calling him paradoxical, destructive, or even crazy.  If he's actually preaching the Gospel, they'll say he is familiar with the data.  He ought to fit the text into the broader context.  After all, it was written in another age.  It would be dangerous if people started to realize that paradox simply unveils the hidden and crucifying reality within us, that truth is shy, that the path it opens up is endless, that harmony and calm exist only within the limits of everyday banality,

  -The warrior of the spirit is never perfectly adjusted to society.

Hotel Ecclesiastica

i've seen the dry tears of actors

the disclaiming violence of the sincere

their ears plugged like 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

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-Savior, Messiah, son of God, Risen One - these glorious titles veil the image of the Galilean, just as richly decorated copes and golden monstrances prevent us from seeing the tortured man or understanding the humility of bread and wine.  There is a need for security among teachers who proclaim the official truth, and a corresponding need among those taught, which gets covered over by the name of faith.

-The peasant-rabbi is not born of philosophy or theology; he is the way.  Therefore, it is by following him step-by-step in the humility of childhood, in the hidden life of his first thirty years, in his battle against and with the law, against the scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees, in the distance he kept from his family, in his fidelity to the Father, that he is the Liberator.  To claim to believe in him without going through a metanoia, upsetting our old chain of values, is simply a farce.  Glory is to be found in humiliation. 

-Let the Church have faith in God, Jesus Christ.  Let it become transparent.  That's enough.  Let it  live by that faith.  The news will get around.

-Reality is more beautiful than any dream, once we rid it of the illusions that we mistake for it.

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 free

a symphony lays within the links

though the dungeon holds their souls in isolation

like a score holding music

around which the dancers dance

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

who knows only to cry when the chained dare not

who daily long 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 in the union of silence

until what is longed for breaks as a surprise instantly expected

when survivors walk free with loose hanging smiles

beneath eyes wondering whey it took so long

*Who is this Man who accepts us as we are, invites us to exist within time and with chance, without hiding places or privileges?

*To kill evil one must kill the significance.

  -Anon

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-If one wants to distinguish, there are two layers in the Gospels.  On one hand, there is a rejection of all conformism, an invitation to awareness communicated by a boldness of tone.  On the other hand there is love and the community of sharing whose perceptible sign is bread and wine - the Eucharist - which is both death and resurrection.

-If love is not to be reduced to a new formalism or community to ritual while pretending to overcome divisions of money, class and race, they have to avoid ideology and sentimentalism, which means that they must begin to be fulfilled.  Otherwise, in spite of all good intentions, love and ritual become only more examples of inertia, made worst by fakery.  To believe that love can be intellectualized and made as obligatory as ritual, that people can be taught about a community of sharing in abstract terms, is to open the way to all sorts of illusions. 

-The Gospel is not made to dominate the world.  It's the grain of sand that upsets the worlds' machinery.  One can't inhale its fragrance and be content to leave everything the way it is.

-Emperors are no longer crowned or deposed in his name but in too many countries he remains the symbols of social and political immobility.

-There is always a danger in exploiting faith as a form of human knowledge.

-...it's the poverty and pain that men and women undergo which contains the seed's of Jesus' glory.

-When the soldiers took off his clothes and covered him with a scarlet cloak before putting a crown of thorns on his head and a reed in his right hand, crying, "Hail, king of the Jews," they were enacting the ultimate truth of all time.

a shadow frightened the crowd

as you set your hands to guard your face

to  ward off sounds tapping in your brain

see their cry is for you Lord always for you

and it breaks forth from the stillest choice

from bodies at once dead yet breathing

hoping for a big ear that hears

and patience to live long enough to see

vengeance and love yes vengeance and love

while the shadows of fate hang loosely overhead

ready to drop like a net gathering in the dead

yet hope ekes through the tears steadily falling

from failed ties and mouths ever crying on high

cries eating at my nerves grating them to movement

to dance midst tears on which they slide

as i grab the cries and cry awaiting your coming

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-...can we expect all university professors to be pioneers, all parish priests to be prophets, all bishops to be successors of the apostles?  Each of them has been recruited haphazardly, with his own share of goodwill, insight and blindness, his own wounds and ambitions?  I'm not shocked by this.  I'm not preaching purity.  Jesus is delivered up; he always will be.  It is necessary that these things happen.

-Ordinary people like us identify with the story of the child hunted by Herod, with the young man of thirty who was always on the go, whose own family considered him mad, with the one who was crucified and rose again, with that rebel whom every society - sometimes by using violence, sometimes veneration - will inevitably try to keep from spoiling everything. 

-...what is even more amazing is that always, within the womb of illusion and hypocrasy, lost in the crowd, there have been saints.  The word has never ceased finding its way into the flesh of men and women.

-Our task is to live the benediction and the insurrection at the same time, the love and the humor, the unimportance of everything and its infinite importance.

-...it's impossible not to see that at the heart of the Gospel there is a radical rejection of all convention. Its uniqueness does not lie in some idea that will  harmonize all differences but in its tone: the shock which upsets our complacency and invites us to interior reappraisal.

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 of out of Hell

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

the hell of life where 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 light, out of sight

packed with doubts, full of pouts.

out of sorts within the sordid gripes

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 that 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.

 *Live the truth of love with all its light and pain.

*Who is the Man who accepts us as we are, inviting us to exist within time and with chance, without hiding places or privileges?




*Reflections of  Jean Sulivan:

  -No Gospel exists in its original freshness.

  -The essential task is this: to forget what we know or believe we know and to receive the text in its purity, to be brought alive by its breath.  We undoubtedly need a kind of grace to recover our second innocence.

  -To view the literal meaning of Scripture as an absolute is a roundabout way of rejecting the Word, which must be a new creation.  It's seeing God behind when in fact he is always ahead of us, unpredictable.  A word that is completely divine, objectified, a form of knowledge, will only produce slaves; it would be the funeral monument Hegel speaks of.

  -And why should the Gospels be readily accepted?  Breath, rhythm, gesture, parable and paradox - poems - are at once simple and secret, and can be only gradually unveiled.  A poem accomplishes what it speaks of, but through a process that is never complete.  The persons who receive it must return into darkness where they will never finish exploring it.  The idea of exploiting it never occurs to them.  Instead, they allow it to grow within them, to occupy more and more space.  Bad poets do harm by trying to cash in on their talent; they think they possess it, since they're not at all possessed by it.  The poem of the Gospel deals with existence and is intended to rise like yeast.  Its style is just the opposite of a message that tries to control our lives with slogans and principles.

  -If Jesus is often rejected before being given a real hearing - or worse, if he is admired as a great man, a "hero of our civilization" - it's because piety has presented such a lukewarm, legalistic, sometimes even worldly, image; it is because the malleability of children and "the poor" has so long been exploited to fabricate worshipers, and because many are still discussing a dead man even when they think they're talking about resurrection.

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 closed eyes

and plugged ears?

some sit in prayer

list'ning to the unlikely

to the in-between

where the holy lies

and poems are writ on patient souls

i listen to my wavering heart

the incredulity within belief

between the silence and the words

i hear "Wake up!

God's closer than you think"

this strange encounter is music

an invite to sing ones self into a question

here God and i duet

and a temple is built of song

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Naturally, we always read the Gospel in terms of our own desires.  When I speak of Jesus, whether I want to or not, I'm speaking about myself.  One can realize this and still keep one's sense of humor.

  -It's impossible to avoid risk or the need to interiorize one's faith.

  -Every message that does not ripen in the individual conscience is dead.

  -Doctrinal unity, however necessary, is ultimately only an administrative unity.

  -The Church has no need of power to sweep us along by its very size in the manner of political societies.  Meaning organized according to some rational process tries to substitute itself for the Word is a rejection of the Holy Spirit.

  -An interpreter of the Gospel can only be an explorer and prophet, not the administrator of its meaning.

a sleepy breath

a bird's invite

a kitten's purr

a beating heart:

Silence between

Silence heard

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Spiritual  life implies a constant sobering up in order to enter a greater joy.

  -We have only a clumsy and sometimes pathetic vocabulary with which to express the Gospel message. 

  -Faith doesn't mean credulity.

  -To venerate the Gospel as a sacred object which automatically produces beneficial effects is a practice of magic.  Genuine respect calls for constant research.  Just as it was necessary for Jesus to go away in order for the Spirit to come, it is also necessary that his word be tossed out, nourished, spread abroad and recreated by men and women with the random influences of particular individuals, environments and circumstances.  The important thing is not our believing in it but that "it should grow within us," as Claudel says.  There is an inexhaustible richness in this fact.  The difference in perspective among the Gospels, their lacunae, ambiguities or contradictions - even our uncertainty as to what belongs to Jesus and what is the product of copyists and scribes - enlarges the freedom of Christians.  There can no longer be any question about it.  Spiritual pluralism is inscribed in the texts themselves, as it was in the experience of the first disciples.  Unity cannot be established from the outside by ideology; it is an interior reality and takes root within differences.

  -What I want to hear is the Word cried out at constant risk just as Jesus offered himself to every risk.  I want a word that is spacious, unprovincial, not the stilted language of devotion, not tiresome harping and academic commentary.  Let preaching be the Gospel today.  Let it be encounter, having form and breath, with the text and interior word that speaks in every one of us, the same word, yet different.  It's pointless to talk about the resurrection if our words have not been raised again, unless joy beats its wings within us.

if i could i'd hold you

and keep holding you

holding you

cause i'm damn scared

and need holding too

and i would drop large tears

to drown the hatred in the land

and water flowers somewhere heartily

in a heart somewhere, heartily

yours and mine

and anyone who'd be ground

for some new thing

for crazies rule the world

and they curse the ground

dropping bombs to contain bombs

produce terrors to contain terror

and ev'ry word they speak

cause dictionaries to flee

for truth has found no home

even there

and like lies told cent'ries over time

this time's no different from the past

their slippery words passing through the filth

placed upon our tables as milk

that stinks

stop me from walking on their path

remind me again and again

what's human

what's Christian

ways to forgive

to own my faults

my weakened faith

let me share slivers of love

when slivers are all i have

hold me that i may hold you

for what do we have to give

but hugs to each other

this is a time of madness

in the grip of the crazies

but we will live

though death falls about

and madness seems to reign

cause God is full of laughter

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -I had to wake up from the old human dream of the universal and absolute which I had confused with the love of God.

  -There is a frenetic passion for the absolute, a taste for the marvelous and for miracles, that is only a camouflage for self-love, one means among others to bottle up the desire by refusing to surrender the dream, face up to reality and set out on one's journey.  It is possible to fall upon God as into vice.

  -Begin then by curing yourself of the desire to be God at any cost.  Instead, return to your center, become one person among others in an experience based on brotherhood.  In Christianity, unlike in Eastern religions, it is not the absence of desire that saves.  Desire cuts through the event and becomes salvation when, by grace, it is transformed into oblivion and gift. Nevertheless, without denial or repression, one needs to be cured of desire in order to create space.  For the God who fills human hunger is at the same time the Unknown, the Stranger.  Only his absence-presence allows a person to be oneself.

  -...to lose oneself spiritually it is first necessary to find oneself.

  -To be only what one is, to consent to the fragility of existence, to refuse to be everything and everywhere in illusory fashion by surrendering to the magic of abstraction, to stop making God the idol of a dream, to create a new relationship - this is the way.  When people discover their own truth, there burst forth an alleluia that permeates all that lives without putting obstacles in the way.

  -Every authentic spiritual life, it seems to me, first goes through disappointment.  A day arrives when we hate illusions, and perhaps we then become less dishonest disciples, a little more capable of hearing the word.

what shall i call you

when they come to kill us?

mercy's not in their verbiage

manifest destiny in our bones

before our minds open toward the seas

we must be victims of systemic fright

failed, flailed, decrepit like older states

like the thieves of this nation

ruling on the periphery of fright

we must smell sin's putrid odor

stare into the coffins of our rotting dead

taste their blood dried upon our lips

upend God who's stretched across the Vine

as we mummify our gods

at the collapse of our funds

we may see the limits of license

with capital's gold dragged to it's grave

we sill have joined the human race

cursing our gods for the abandonment of us

trapped in the cage of arrogant thrusts

affections submerged 'neath desolate loves

people wasted on the boasts of leaders

brain-washed, herded before whimsical crowds

mauling our selves in the cesspools of wants

selling our souls as advertisement's prod

having thrown our selves into failed visions of life

war's being televised with cocktails on tap

setups and snackables before din-din is served

we'll die delighted swallowing olives without ice

but before we hoist another drink

you never offered to tell us your name

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The fundamental insight of the Bible...is that the invisible can speak only by means of the perceptible;....only theology attempts to distinguish faith, love and action, a distinction that has no foundation in Scripture.

  -A choice has to be made between ideology and the primacy of word/poem/action.  The former is a doctrinal system that transforms what should be an interior birth into a categorical imperative: this is what you ought to think, believe, say.  In this way the concrete human being is made subordinate to the idea, and we make someone a slave while telling her that she is free.  By killing all creativity, one falls into sterile repetition, which produces both sadness and disaffection.  I know what I'm talking about; I, too, played this game in all sincerity.  Don't forget: I cooperated in this conditioning process after undergoing it myself.

  -It's not a question of rejecting reason,  I am well aware of the fecundity of the "concept", which has made it possible for humans to dominate the earth.  Without it we would have neither the sciences nor progress and modern conveniences.  So what?  We wouldn't have pollution or atom bombs either. But let's have a truce with hypocrisy; it's not a matter of either dreaming or scorning.  We are part of the West; it would be childish to forget that fact.  But let reason stay in its place.  Some morning I'll try to explain why it seems to me that in the spiritual order it's appropriate to go beyond reason by means of reason.

Our

"our"

is the possessive form of 

"we"

as Jesus spoke 

"Father"

before he spoke to 

"us"

"we" 

keep speaking 

"mine"

as if deaf

 to anything

"ours"

including God belonging 

to anyone of

"us"

"we" 

are a word abandoned

stilled by the selective tribe

as if God's 

only for

"us"

the possessive form of 

"we"

embraces the uniquely form of 

"me"

and ev'ry form of

 "we"

pressuring the form

of 

"us"

thus God is 

"ours"

having Fathered 

"us"

and we are God's

as God is ours

as we are each others

'cause God parent's us

this day

and 

ev'ry day

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  *Encounter - how I dislike that word!  A meeting of that kind is never an accomplished fact, but always still to come.

  *Is the Gospel only a mirror that reflects my own desires?

  *...you've (classical theologians) led people to believe that faith was simply a matter of accepting those truths. Sooner of later, we must be liberated from that notion of faith.

There is a healthy doubt that connives with authentic faith.  The path of doubt frees us from faith in our own ideas, for we are apt to make an idol of truth, pliable to the laws of a cultural logic.  But the truth, Pascal says, is not God.

  *The word is divine (use a capital "W" if you prefer) not because of the idea but the breath.  It's in it; my doubts are only in my head.  My doubts and I are both in God.  This hand that is writing, knows better than I; it reaches out toward communion, even when it rejects false comradeship. 

  *Those people in the service of a religious ideology that is mistaken for faith participate in the assassination of Jesus.

What of me is bleeding?

All of me is bleeding.

What of me is grieving?

All of me is grieving.

What of me is silent?

All of me is silenced. 

All of me is prayer

with urgent emergings,

itching surprises 

rising from my soil;

nothing surrounding

ladened rebellions.

The Wind espousing

needful pairing;

all of me journeying,

I walk stumbling.

Someone's on the Way.

"Come toward me,

all you weary ones;

I will wash your feet."

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The fish doesn't know the water which makes it live, only the absence of water from which it dies.

  -I know God only through Jesus.  The unique grandeur of Christianity is its belief in a poor God, like a wound in the absolute.  God, the child in a manger.  No man could invent that; it requires a revelation.

  -To know something of his (Jesus') tenderness and his exactness, it's enough to read the parables. Don't project them into history, but listen to them today, pronounced by the Spirit who is the spirit of Jesus.  They are words that have to be fulfilled; otherwise they become pathetic legends to console us.

Is this the truth:

that we are boxed bodies

smiling from our rears

in pretense that our fronts aren't gleeful?

We are frightened containers

afraid of the gift our bodies are

The Gift we dare not claim.

What joy we'd bare!

What guilt our soul could cast aside

if there were a Yes

to all the poop the Lord released

to ev'ry drop of funky sweat

to all that bonds us to the earth

to all the Kingdom's rejoicing over it

forever and ever amen.

God is the best weird experience there is.

Not everything you say "Yes!" to is what you want.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -To restrict oneself to ideas without ever referring to oneself is nonsense.  Yet that's what many thinkers do, never committing themselves.  They want us to believe that in the moral and spiritual order there is a logic of ideas that goes on apart from living experience.  A humility that consists of not speaking about oneself while identifying with great ideas is the worst kind of pride.

  -The person who agrees to reveal his deepest self withdraws into the humility of anonymity even though, at the very moment he detaches himself from the I that is naturally social, people think he is an exhibitionist.

  -In our society, to consent to live out one's difference is to become a rebel, someone who rejects "automatic" attitudes.

  -...when you hear prayer used as a medication, a kind of yoga, by some fashionable spiritual director, you feel like saying that the spiritual life is just another product, like a washing machine or new car.

  -The Gospel gathers and condenses the wisdom of the Orient.  There is the same call to inner upheaval, to awakening.  At the same time it is a revelation, since it points to a love whose logical conclusion is the communion of sharing.

returning home with no music

oh, bitter death

i meet you upon return

with sadden ears and a poisoned mouth

i wish that you would hide

enough i've had of your seductive rage

piercing through the heart-range of my life

enough

i say

enough

it must be time to die

time for some new me to arise

and touch someone with my cries

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-To write is to enter into silence, to speak in a low voice for the few who enter into silence with you because they recognize a voice that is rising up out of themselves.

-If so many human beings live in appearances and exhaust themselves in the theater of the world, it is in order to cover over the depth of the abyss.

-*...to write is to forget, to allow memory to become flesh until there emerges the millennial word of that instant which is  also eternity - that is, that glimmering of life and death when they meet between the nothingness of the past and the night of that which is to come.

-To write is to set out, rejecting the language of the tribe, enrooting  oneself elsewhere.  Hence it is necessary for the writer to consent to become a stranger, to forget what he knows, or thinks he knows, to run the risk of losing his friends, to not be afraid to lose his audience just when he begins to have one.

hesitations

...and maybe-

they'll see you

...and maybe-

they'll hear you

...and maybe-

they'll like you

and maybe

you'll go on movin'

on and on

until that day

that night

that moment of chance

when someone might stop

to thank you for trying 

to thank you for crying

for creating and being

for speaking and singing

who you sense you to be

and maybe...

...then maybe

...maybe

An innocent child!  There is no such creature.  Ask those who have to live and play with them.  They may be cute and ignorant but not innocent.  No human is innocent.

For some, the God they love is the God they hate.

*Wherever are, whoever we are, the responsibility for the integrity and beauty of our personalities cannot be shirked.  I must get up each day, take life into my own hands, and put my distinct, unique, and unrepeatable stamp on it.  I must freely decide to create the mood of the day rather than let the circumstances and conditions of the day rule my life.  With my spirit, the breath of God in me, I will transform the raw matter of my life and make it beautiful.  That is my human vocation and my moral duty. (William McNamara, OCD)  

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -How many men were there whom I could think  of as brothers of the Son of Man?

  -Brothers and sisters who meet together in truth - that's the Church.

  -An audience wants to recognize what it already knows. They like to be stirred up, but as little as necessary. Except for a small number, they haven't come to search for the Word.

  -...once out of adolescence, I had never believed the Church was about to present a perfect image of the kingdom.  On the contrary, I believe the ultimate destiny of the world is being played out between the Church and the Word; it is to the degree that it battles against its own sclerosis that it is the light to the world.

weep and cry

what else are we to do

but weep and cry

wail and flail

far and wide

o'er the wild minds

of badgered clowns

of people crying

for some respite to drive

freeing from the chaos of hell

but we are self-enclosed

denizens of total choice

of goddesses and gods

with little to lose

shouting and laughing

at crowds on the loose

searching for enemies 

imagined and stewed

ah! if we'd stop and stare

into a mirror with light

we'd uncover ourselves

'neath our pimples and glue

on our un-powered face

with snagglely tooth

awaiting the truth

we'll unbind our foot

freeing us to move

and weep with live tears

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Good bye to nostalgia.  People should stop talking about the anonymity of cities.  We don't know our neighbors in the next apartment - so then what?  Hurrah for freedom, and an end to hypocrisy.  In cities people get together with those they choose; such meetings are more true, as brief as life.  

  -Yes, large towns were always accursed - it says so all through the Bible.  Condemned to endless wandering, Cain invented the town as a substitute for Eden.  Cain and his posterity.  That's why towns are accursed.  Babylon and Nineveh, like cities on the edge of the lake.  Jerusalem itself.  For they are all tied to a greed that is never satisfied, to power - that is, to war.  So, sooner or later, they perish by arms or fire.  But ultimately God accepts the human project.  The town, like Jerusalem, become the image and promise of the holy city of the Apocalypse, which "has no need for the sun and the moon to shine, for the glory of God has illumined it!"

  -What happened keeps on happening, endlessly.  How much time do we need to understand it?  The scribes and the high priests live in us, in you, in me, and they never lay down their arms.  Just as Jesus was rejected, tracked down and killed out of fidelity to God, in the same way, out of fidelity to the message, his Word has been hardened - "ossified," as the Jesuit anthropologist would say - by the very ones whose mission it was to announce it.  They know no what they do.

  -When they talked about Jesus, they were generally talking about something else and their own unhappiness.

Gold mountain

Is this the gold mountain we've been searching for

out here in the space of No-where in our minds

It shines invitingly, an enticing flame

full of promise to enrich our purse

We climb as daylight breaks the clouds

struggling to peak before night claims our eyes

lest what we've searched crumbles into dust

lest we 've fooled ourselves ev'ry step of the way

Yet tis true we do pretend

The prize we seek

is the one before our eyes

a shining rock gleaming neath our soles

and not the Empty Space our feet would touch

if we'd descend in our ascent to own

*Tattoo

inside

out

outside

in

when

will I

find

where

I

belong

                                                               -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.  

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Today all we have are poor people who have not succeeded in  getting rich.

  -The Gospel emerged from a world of peasants and sailor.

  -It is obvious Jesus lives in the depth of non-duality - that is, where God, the other, and ourselves form only one reality.  This is my body, this is my blood.

"But, of course, neurotic!

A multitude of words fly in the press

stirring the soul, channeling blame

"Whites are neurotic!"

"Them!"  "Criminal!"

With appropriate talk, the first walk free

but for the the lesser, Them, the electric chair

When we need think of it, we don't

cause mem'ries prod our heads to shake

and all of that's suppressible

Re-call harms the preset mind

hampers resolves, making a culprit of fear

binding our thoughts in anguished cords

History's acquittals appear just in filtered files

cause scapegoats seek compatible hearts

There's unity in the pointing hands;

pointing hands smoother the guilty

The absolving palm covers all

unbinding hearts and his'try's fictions

challenging fear, suffering in hope

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -"In his mercy God suffers with us; for (God) is not heartless." (Origen)

  -There is a cross in the heart of God.

  -Every human being has to decide not so much what is real, but rather the true nature of the reality in which we find ourselves.

  -Art, particularly the best of modern art, has a way of showing us our own patterns of alienation.  Liquid Sky may have something of the prophetic in it.  And, insofar as it is prophetic, it is a work of art.  It shows our lostness and alienation.  Anne Carlisle is right.  We are all behaving like animals in some respects.  If we go on doing so, human lives will be diminished and destroyed.  I cannot, however, be sure that the makers of the movie have understood that somewhere in the middle of creating the film they made a choice about what reality is.  Some people believe that art should be "uplifting" and "wholesome".  But there is the terrible art of prophecy that holds up a mirror to us to show the true condition of things.  The artist is called to show us glory.  He or she is also called to show us how far we have fallen from it.  Art that is only "uplifting" easily degenerates into sentiment and hypocrisy.  Art not only ennobles the soul, it also judges it.  It is said that after a performance of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in London during the reign of Queen Victoria, a member of the audience asked his neighbor what he thought of the play.  "Very interesting," he replied, "but so unlike the family life of our own dear Queen!"  There are two "realities" to contend with: the wildly irresponsible love affair on Cleopatra's royal barge, and the stuffy formalism of the Victorian court! They are both "real"; both represent aspects of reality that have to be attend to. 

  -The area of freedom is in fact very small; but it is enough to make a different.

  -Soul making is a matter of choosing the reality of love against which all other realities are tested as if by fire.  The choice is ours.

mystic

dare drink IT

then laugh aloud

harder and higher with each ingestion

each  swallowing

each gracious off'ring of the Word

communicate

be foolish with the thought-less

guide their spirits to The Holy Jokester

one will have thought thunder broke

                        as the iron gates twist and shatter                       

blessing the fracture of self-adherence

with tears gathering for healing

inviting all to dance

*Everything Depends

on being

             in

on eating

                   what is

                                                                          within

                          yet beyond

not being

            up

but down

                  wardly

                                                                          mobile

                                                                     -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...what we think about God determines what we think about ourselves.  The structure of human identity is dependent on how we view ultimate reality.

  -One of the places where the connection between what I say and what I do is celebrated and tested is in the life of prayer.  Prayer often provides the occasion when false connections are broken and new starts are made. Prayer is the process by which we become the friend of God the Father, through the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

  -The question, "How does God experience me?" suggests a fresh way to look at ourselves and our way of being in the world.

  -If we are not open to wonder and to pain, then we deny ourselves any true interaction with another - this is the very stuff of soul making.

  -When we are frightened of experiencing others, something in the soul begins to die.  A capacity for wonder and a readiness for pain are essential for the life of the soul.  And the place where such capacity and readiness are fostered is in prayer. 

The box in the square

Go 'round

Skirt the box at the core

in the center of our lives

the one holding our secrets

the shadows of our lives

Place it in another courtyard

Blame them for the contents veiled

The beauty of its packaging

will surely draw reply

Paint it invisible

Cover it with envious green

that in time it will disappear

flying to the stratosphere of Eon

removing reminders of our faults and trials

Such the difficulties of truth-owning

the defects of a flawed perfection

the problem of nudes midst the naked

of not claiming our box in the square

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-We become what we love, because it is that which makes us who we are and is our center.

-Sin is the lost or damage of our homing device.

-The art of arts is the art of love (William of St. Thierry)

-The lover, the loved one and the love make three.

-You see the Trinity when you see Love (St. Augustine)

Talking Life and Death

It's change that's radical

chasm-hopping

death-bearing 

change

Behavioral-fluff and trite words

are many

when truth's underground

and all shadows thrown down

neath the eclipsing sun

The pollution of applause

smothers moral issues

for popularity and appeal

The hanging tree bears flowers

unable to hide its fruit

a fruit souring mouths

born from toxic hearts

smelling of righteous offal

rising from the thrones of the just

We're talking life and death

cases of the accused of the land

reflectors of our inner life

of us who haven't been caught

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-The doctrine of the Trinity speaks to our basic need to be able to say I and We at the same time.

-This truth is expressed in the central act of Christian worship, the Eucharist.  There is only one bread.  Thus each bit of consecrated bread is not a piece or part of the Body of Christ (as if we had to gather all the bits together in order to make up the whole Christ).  No - each piece of bread is the bearer, sacramentally, of the whole Christ.  In the same way the Church is not a federation or consortium of isolated congregations, the fullness of which is only expressed in great gatherings of the World Council of Churches or at the Vatican Council.  The fullness of the Church as the Body of Christ is present where two or three are gathered together.

-When it comes to more intimate personal relations, the Trinity speaks to the structure of love itself.  Love, to be love, requires both union and identity. The lovers seek to be united, but in such a way that each remains his or her unique person.  Indeed there is a tenderness and deference in true love concerning the separateness and uniqueness of the other.  The question is, "How can you and I be totally one, and at the same time honor the special and glorious differences between us - those things which make you you and me me?"  The doctrine of the Holy and Undivided Trinity (as torturous as it seems to some) is a paradigm of loving.  It shows us first that we are loved; and second, how to love in such a way that unity and identity are perfectly balanced.

-"How true it is that mutual help and delight are without prejudice to distinctness" (Thomas Aquinas)

Gaze

Gaze

'til your eyes collapse

tired

and near blind

straining to catch a glimpse

of the Light

roamin' through the dark clouds

havin' fun

Gaze

 as if God were

beck'ning Life to seep

like trickles struggling

to find a gap in the abyss

Gaze

like the prophet seeing Nothin'

beyond nothing

where Fire kindles lightly

and the Blaze dances bright

Gaze

till you fall in death

hope-hungry

and tunnel-visioned

sighting Something

beyond your organs might

Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The vision of humanity provided by the  doctrine of the Trinity wages war against any reductionist view of human beings.

  -Our mistake, and it is a tragic one, is our finding "normative personhood only in the human individual."  We make the individual instead of the community the norm.  In Kunkel's terms we choose the isolated ego over the real Self.

  -Soul making can therefore be described as the liberating movement from being individuals to becoming persons.  The doctrine of the Trinity (or better, the very power of the Trinity) begins to come alive for us when we can say with all honesty, "I cannot be me without you, and we cannot be us without them.

  -The doctrine of the Trinity is, when properly understood, political dynamite.

  -Communism and Capitalism come to mind in the political realm, with their twin sins of envy and greed.  Both are enemies, in their extreme form, of the development of persons.  Both are soul destroyers rather than soul makers.  Catholicism and Protestantism come to mind in matters of religion.