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.