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.