a storm of leaves

rustled by the wind

fell noiseless upon the ground

like the sound of crackling

 shifting in its bag

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -It's here, now, that glory exists, in this tiny fragment, each instant of life, death, and resurrection.

  -From the start I feel close to all those whom society has marginalized - tramps, addicts, freaks, even "establishment" types, empty of spiritual substance and beginning to realize it.  They live in the midst of steel, glass high-rises, highways that have become cemeteries, sex shops, and the rubble of human failure.  But at the same time I notice with amazement that a song of freedom flows through everything, a paradoxical joy more powerful than my pain and mediocrity, the hope which those who bear it within them say they recognize. 

  -To remain in a dream of the past or the realm of ideas is to compromise with death.  Since the absolute has become incarnate, how can one not be present at each moment of time, with its particular style, in the uncertain, irrational and painful flux of life, as well as in the bright lights of cities and in every human creation, in order to reveal that perhaps there are cells of purity even in the midst of Vanity Fair and that all things conspire toward unity and joy?  Not to be contemporary leads inevitably to betrayal.

  -When will the clergy realize that they're not being asked for their ideas about society or the current crisis or the future of Catholic Action, but for a word from him who rose from the dead?

A moldy warrior's apologea

What do I stand for  sitting among the dead   as they lay upon their coffin-beds?

Can't I rise to something   or do I fear the known?   Am I the

coward-king   martyred in dreams and whisked away at my awakening?

Coward-kings rule everywhere:   in white houses and walled temples

columned halls and limousined stalls   at the measured speed of bureaucrats

with filed cases discussed ad nauseam   What's the use is stamped upon their

heads   I'm one of a multitude of believer-citizens   armored in grace 

and untouched by sin   suburnbanized and guarded from the cursed

I wrench at the truth of it   my concrete-feet avoiding noble deeds   My mouth

speaks at computer-pace   the alphabet-sentences of sounds too weak to miss

I'm a molded-warrior   lacking attentive eyes and a prophet's might

 uncourageous to speak and might to walk  until my oppressive fear is balked

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-Conceptual man is exiled from communion; death tears away from him the only thing that counts, possession.

-The West with its mechanistic intelligence has thus become the third world of the spiritual life.

-We say, "We believe in" but we're not "Moved by."  That's why joy rarely visits us, and when it comes we feel guilty.

-Because eternal life doesn't run in your veins and you haven't learned to laugh, you have to feel important, like small gods.

-God is the silence of every word.

he made no sound laughing

he made no sound

laughing

his belly bobbed

his cheeks filled

he raised his hands

his body rolled

but he made no sound

laughing

like some child beaten

in silence he stood

in this zone-forbidden

this death-trap called "home"

joy flashed his eyes

where laughter could not move

in the joy of the moment

with laughter in his veins

with a smile on his face

he made no sound

laughing

*Christians are people whose idol is a criminal and whose earliest followers were killed for their criminality and on the words they shared.  When we call ourselves Christians or profess faith in Jesus, it is worth remembering our criminal past and the heretical roots of our communion  and ask ourselves if being Christian is worth dying for.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The Palestinian story is marked by a fundamental uprooting: the exodus, the wandering nomads.  Time takes in its sails.  You have no permanent dwelling place.

  -Thought eliminates the body to reach the universal.

  -To want to communicate is not to express oneself.  Be willing to speak in the dark, perhaps to stammer.  One takes what one can bear.  He who has ears to hear....Symbolic language laughs at preestablished meanings.  It provokes a vibration, opens up a space.  Both bold and humble, it doesn't pretend to wall in an inexpressible experience.  A trace, a suggestion, it reveals and veils at the same time, makes us want to continue to search for its source.  Instead of saying, "It's all in the head," from now on all you have to do is make an effort.

a dream on the edge of time

on a frosted morn near the barn

before the rising storms pushed in

or the orange-bright orb of sun had set

i sit wake-full watching o'er the scene

quelling whatever fears stir within

there's peace upon peace and assurance at hand

as the coffee's roast is a pleasuring treat

warmimg my hands, teasing my nose

mulling thoughts of the inhabitants in my care

why bother about the outside air

as in the house ones kin is dear

dash-back to bed and their embrace

the gift of Love in self and them

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Art and culture have little in common.  Culture is a compost pile, a humus that one looks after, smooths out, that one puts to use on a marked out plot where everyone tramples on it.  But art is only interested in itself.  Solitary, it emerges from unexplored depths and lives on its riches.  It has no purpose except to harness its difference, which allows it to rejoin the universal.  It has no answers.  It exists in shadows.  Don't ask it to improve anyone.  It simply exists and invites us to exist.

  -In a similar way religious learning has little to do with faith.  It puts ideas into some people's mental outlook and can produce automatic reflexes.  It's especially useful when faith doesn't exist; it can take its place.  In short, it reflects absence as much as presence.  When faith emerges, religious culture becomes almost pointless, like the ground installations that make it possible to launch a rocket.  Faith burns, creates the desert, and recreates everything in its own image.

  -Every conceptual construction raised up against time tries to ignore the fragility of the body and the immediate instant.  It keeps us from drifting by providing mental anchorage but doesn't touch us at that point where flesh and spirit are joined.  "Thought is the daughter of fear," Chekhov says.  That's why it goes so well with sadness.  Instead of curing us of death through an interior experience, it represses it.

  -But if death is repressed, the resurrection becomes only an idea, a dream, or a wager that gives no life to existence.

a day-dreamin' hero

in my head

so many "do's"

in my hands

so many "don'ts"

my feet, like statues

feel nailed to a stone

wanting

but won't

a day-dreamin' hero

i'm stuck in "go"

my goals are glued

at the center of my will

i curse in others

the curse sheltering me

my road to fullness bent

in wisdom with a quirk

*Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ.

  -Anne Hutchinson

*...when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts?  They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves.

  -Carl Jung

*...solitude leads one away from otherr people only to bring you closer to them once you are able to face yourself in your entirety.

  -Carl Jung

*...nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero.

  -Carl Jung

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...what is important is to receive the Gospel with one's whole being, so that the Word will spring forth and gather together the body of God and the earth.

  -...the Gospel, in its first centuries of development, found itself at the heart of a totalitarian ideological empire to which it was ideologically foreign.

  -Tirelessly, the Church proclaims the very Word that places it under judgement.

  -However pathetic our efforts, each of us must act as children of the kingdom.

a cry rises from the gut of me

longing for the hand that'll hold me together

but i miss the voice passing my ears

as it moves to layers of outer-space

to planets circling the universe beyond night

what am i to do with myself

rarely able to hold down the food for my soul

hold down the hope that feeds faith

struggling with the burdens of doubt

where's the comfort i keep missing

where's the Someone who hears my turbulent creams

my doubts reach for the savior

who'll yank me from my spiral of failures

as i succumb to distortions and struggles

to confining fate, contending for something new

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Certainly, Christians know that the Gospel makes demands on them, but only a small minority experience these demands from within.

  -Everything - even love and holiness - takes place in contradiction and mockery.

  -Only saints and mystics were able to break though to a world of freedom and love.  If it truly wants to be universal, Christianity has to become again what it really is.

  -What is needed is to create out of the depth of one's being, to give existence to one's faith.

  -Why, although they pay attention to the Word, do so many people seem to be ashamed of it?  Hoping to make themselves understood in the worldly mode of communication, they research, analyze and criticize; they prepare the ground but they don't sow the grain of the word that emerges out of their own life.

barren desert

a lone lank shadow paints black the desert floor

a single man trudges upon the arid sea, alone.

his frame wears upon his flimsy coat

the dress of hunger's search, the search for satisfaction's peace.

but the sea swirls micro pellets into his jaws

tanning his flesh in wind-beaten style;

cold wind wraps him in her heated coat of warmth

slowing his progress along the barren coast

what thinks him while he drinks in the hellish sun

where molten sands firebrand his papyrus flesh

a man in search of life's oasis drinking font

miraging life's oasis drinking font?

why cry out to the waste-fields of wilderness alone

where winds bark loud their bachelor voice to all

to turkey-stuff the parched lips with droughted waters

of arid desert's welcoming sands?

he treks by day in warming heat, by night to know the cool;

no rest the wicked way will give, so only on to goal

to gain the oasis drinking font where rest is to be with death

for weariness's companioned, restless friend

reach not for the empty space of airy fill

as sand-weighted feet sink down into the deep;

and though the the horse-men four from their nebulaed trough should swoop

trudge on, trudge on and conquer the real alone

the arid sea yet bears the image of a man

crossing the barren desert strip making his slow advance

yet there will stand his life's oasis drinking font

and in her quiet somberlence his laggard bones shall sleep

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -I invite you to stop hiding behind the abstract pyramids of ideas, or, when they collapse, to no longer wall yourselves up in agony and bitterness.  Hoping to embrace everything, everything escapes you; wanting to be everywhere, you are nowhere.  Be suspicious of the absolute, the unsayable.  Prefer a tone, a phrase, a face, which express the unsayable. When you hear someone speak of the beyond, tell him, "Only one life at a time!"  When he speaks of the infinite, ask him how far he is willing to go to help people live or die.

  -Our griefs are doors, pathways for coming joys, on behalf of other sorrows, other joys.  One sinks, the other gushes forth.  Nothing is finished.  Don't blame anyone - for example, someone who has hurt you badly.  The function of morality is not to crush anyone; it exists only for itself.  That there are laws and policemen is something quite different.

  -Stop looking for reasons, complaining that public morals are declining or that faith is dying.  No, religion is doing very nicely; the archbishop is invited to dinner at the best homes....When the sea seems to recede, it is breaking on other shores.  Besides, the normal world is the pagan world of unbelief.  Eroticism is natural; so is the love of money.  Since evil is natural, let good grow within it and take its place.  Complaining and protesting are only excuses for idle gossip.

  -Expressing oneself doesn't mean wanting to communicate.

  -The desert that you carry within you makes genuine encounter possible.

  -Let the wind blow freely among you, and keep your embraces brief.  But each gesture, your very glance, should express your friendship, your taste for the real, and in the meantime your ardent patience. 

On going to St. Michael's

O black room of ebon' space

door framed in grac-ed light

you, friend of risk and sweet mystery

draw to yourself my troubling doubt

The Orange Sun-Dot pinholes your bosom dark

a blazing stream of fiery beam

bending back 'pon Fear's embrace

for rites of Hope where eyes can't see

*We say, "never again" but we ever again.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -It has too often been repeated that rejecting only one truth was enough to destroy faith.  People who said it were convinced that belief happened in the head and not in the heart.  But glances, everyday gestures, one's breath, a profound impulse - all these things express the truth of a person, with or without ideas.  What keeps you alive? - that's the question.  Keep yourself in a state of active anticipation.

  -How I'd like, for once, to make a book out of tress, water, roads, skyscrapers, crazy love, and poor people who march in the night, and let the Word speak for itself.  The invisible in the visible, the absolute in the tangible, nothing else.

  -Let the single dream of your life be to wake yourself up.

  -I invite you to stop hiding behind the abstract pyramids of ideas, or, when they collapse, to no longer wall yourself up in agony and bitterness.  Hoping to embrace everything, everything escapes you; wanting to be everywhere, you are nowhere.  Be suspicious of the absolute, the unsayable. When you hear someone speak of the beyond, tell him, "Only one life at a time!"  When he speaks of the infinite, ask him how far he is willing to go to help people to live or die.

go! climb through the loops of the over-hanging ledge

and leap and run, yes leap and run for once in your life

see the edge of tomorrow flair-up before you

as the evening moon-light streams with the heat of ageing

i run searching for today's tomorrow to flair and flame

digging deeper into the outer quest for the goods of humankind

but it is a narrow road we travel upon 

with hooks to grab and lines of want to cross

it's a strange and elusive journey, the some-thing thing into the quagmire of earth

amidst hungry humans wishing to be alligators devouring some prey

reaching into the sub-sub metrical valley of the sea

for the promised-paradise opened just for a "me"

but it's never there, ever absent and fleeing

hiding in the quagmire of wants hanging on the mind-traps of human beings

ah, we weep waiting for the some-thing to crawl toward our lustful eyes

to fill us with the illusory game-prize captured in the twinkle of an eye

what then Lord are we to do to arrive at the paradisal-gate we've been ejected from

arriving in the open-air of a heaven filled with the light of joy

it's home, Your Home for us to dwell with the mystery of You

yes home, Your Home for us to dwell in peace with the mystery of You

*...when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts?  They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves.

  -Carl Jung

*...nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero.

  -Carl Jung

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -How can I speak of the heart of things?  If I knew, there would no longer be anything to say.  There is no heart.  I will only say this: follow your deepest instinct.  Passion creates meaning - on the condition that no calculations are introduced....  The authority of the word is absolute, but only in relation to a particular being.  The fundamental error, the sin, is to make use of the absolute authority of the word without taking into consideration your concrete relationship to others.  All reality is within you.  Everything, good and bad, is for your spiritual creation as long as you don't remain outside of life, because outside of life there is nothing.  If my wish has a meaning: may this book leave you broken and dispossessed, if you are not already, desperate for a joy you've never dreamed of.

  -...if you're lost in the labyrinth of conflicting truths, over-whelmed by the law, restrained by fear, stop this game, free yourself from faith itself.  Live the joyous gift of today.  Nothing is worse than boredom and sadness.  Faith will not abandon you so easily; it's as persistent as crabgrass.

  -...glances, everyday gestures, one's breath, a profound impulse - all these things express the truth of a person, with or without ideas.  What keeps you alive? - that's the question.  Keep yourself in a state of active anticipation.

i search down the long road of freedom

to the placemats where the boundaries of slavery hang

for the entrance to the never never land of freedom

in the vanishing united states of ameri-can

where commissioners of freedom enslave

the people of color with their encouragement

to copy them in ev'ry vestige of their errors

of his'try tied to the apron strings of their lust

i weep i cry i shout out No in the place of our entombment

in the ;and they choose to label home

not here never here never in this space of entangled virtue

of evils generously embraced and encased

cause this place this space can never be home for the spirit of me

running free breathing like a live-man a virgin covered with dust

*Self-determination is the highest form of integrity.

  -Lethe Bashar

*Better to be cast out of the church than to deny Christ.

  -Anne Hutchinson

*...when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts?  They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves.

  -Carl Jung

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -In order to live profoundly, in time outside of time, to be of every age, it would be necessary to leave so many things behind! 

  -I write to keep up my courage and to respond to readers who've gotten in touch with me over the years because they thought they recognized a voice that also lived in them, and to others who have urged me to join the media circus and show where I stood in the "crisis."  I want to repeat that there is no crisis.  A few will be enlightened - those who already understand.  Those for whom there is no distinction between faith and love, not only because they know that this distinction has no foundation in the New Testament but because they spontaneously consider the New Testament as a poem, a way of existing in the present.  For whom faith is not a catalogue but the unseen sap that gives life to the tree. For whom the agony of the present situation is never anything but our fear of truth.  Those who know that when God is confused with ideas he only represents nostalgia, and that we must cure ourselves of the desire of being everything and lording it over others.  Some appease this desire with money, ambition, and vanity; others, sometimes simultaneously, with God and religion.  This god has to be put to death, for the  love of God.  In creating men and women, God has consented to his own unending death in human consciousness.  There 's no end to death, from one person to the next, from one generation to the next.  Humanity is like the animal that does not halt on the road to God.  Death is the imagination of God, erasing only in order to recreate.  In this way the quest for the infinite goes on forever. 

weep and cry

what else are we to do

but weep and cry

wail and flail

far and wide

o'er the badgered grounds

of people crying

for some respite to arrive

freeing from the chaos of hell

for we are self-enclosed

denizens of total choice

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

'pon our un-powdered face

with snaggly teeth

awaiting the truth

we'll unbind our feet

freeing us to move

and weep with live tears

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -By washing his disciples feet, (Jesus) overturns natural hierarchies, cutting the history of the world in two.

  -"All of the world since Adam," St. Augustine writes, "is the life of a single individual spread out in thousands of pieces over the earth."   Hence, here is neither male nor female, slave nor citizen, black nor white...My kingdom is not of this world.  My kingdom is not a spectacle; your roles are part of the script.

  -Before acting politically, faith acts poetically.  It creates a new way of seeing, it sings the Magnificat - that is,  it overturns the powerful, lifts up the lowly, not because it needs to but out of a sudden realization.  It sees strength in weakness, glory in the things that are ridiculed.  The enormous absurdity of the cross shatters what the world calls reality.  Truth is disarmed; it is a child in a manger, it arrives riding on a donkey, it hangs on a cross, returns from the night of death, and fades away after offering itself in the humility of bread and wine.  This was the poem that was reality for the disciples, a mere fable for others.  Who would not wish to take death upon herself, consume it, thereby existing in the joyous present, neither looking back nor ahead?

  -It's not bread and wine as such that are important but the basic food which sustains human life.  It could just as well be rice or millet, corn, fermented honey, palm wine.  It's through the nourishment of men and women that the universal body is created.  The pulp of the invisible is in the tangible.

  -We have scarcely begun to realize that simply out of fidelity, in order to become what it is, the Eucharist should be expressed in visible signs that would speak authentically within African, Indian, and Asian cultures.  This truth is repressed because it's painful to have to take a new look at the map of the world. 

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

thank you for crying

thank you for creating and being

for singing and speaking

who you sense you are

and maybe...

...then maybe-

...maybe

*The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

  -Paschal

*The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers.

  -Goethe

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -One earth, a single body, of which we are members.  We have no need of drugs to transcend the contingency of life; the bread and wine of our days are enough.  Whoever you are, if you have faith and love, at that very instant you are what I am.

  -We announce that religion is declining in order to ignore the fact that what has disappeared is false pretenses.

  -Religious spokesmen talked about indifference at a time when many people believed they could find a more genuine fellowship elsewhere.

  -For two thousand years the words have been pronounced over bread and wine, and in spite of formalism and hypocrisy, there have always been men and women who participated in his death and resurrection.

returning home with no music

oh, bitter Death

i meet you upon my return

with saddened ears and a poisoned mouth

i just 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:

  -Read chapters 13 to 17 of John's Gospel, I beg you, and weep.  Or rather, learn it by heart.  To learn by heart is not what people think.  It's an act of love born of intimate sharing which has a radiating effect on the rest of one's life, returning that which was scattered by the instability of things, gathering together the living and the dead.

  -For John it's enough to live together in love; all explanations are pointless. 

  -One earth, a single body, of which we are members.  We have no need of drugs to transcend the controversy of life; the bread and wine of our days are enough.  Whoever you are, if you have faith and love, at that very instant you are what I am.

  -We announce that religion is declining in order to ignore the fact that what has disappeared is false pretenses.

  -Religious spokesmen talked about indifference at a time when many people believed they could find a more genuine fellowship elsewhere.

  -For two thousand years the words have been pronounced over bread and wine, and in spite of formalism and hypocrisy, there have always been men and women who participated in his death and resurrection.

we rarely return home to die

we rarely return home to die

tis not where we're born to live

but a different space we've moved to

like jack-rabbits digging holes in some yard

we move about, meeting new friends

then die alone without a plot

often some place outside of home

gone and a smidgen of what we long

we know not what we bring in transition

tho scars drag along with pain, oft times

remembrances of home-land bouts

times and blessings and of rot

when Death arrives at its unexpected hour

we slide into it as if "home" is what we want

wandering, drunk, sickly, insane

away from where we fled years in our head

now heading Home where we belong

yes, heading home where we meant to go

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The fundamental reason why Jesus has to die makes the question of responsibility for his assassination pointless.  Every society, Jewish or Gentile, that is founded on money, power, and law, condemns him.  He puts people first, making economics and politics less important than men and women.  In contrast, society, even when it says the opposite, deceiving others as well as itself, considers individuals simply as means.

  -Simply to realize that the Word made flesh ends in the cry that every word repeats: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabactani [My God, my God, why have you abandoned me].

  -Real presence.  We should speak of real absence....Mystics know that God becomes presence in (God's) absence.

  -To say that the resurrection was the cause of the disciples faith is a partial betrayal.  Paul speaks in that way, and through him the Greek way of thinking in mirror-images.  It might be better to say that the resurrection is the expression of the disciple's faith.  That which was external has become internal: love stronger than death.

  -What is more important is the transformation of the way we look at things and our subsequent creative acts.  The resurrection is a forward movement.

  -People come together and remember him, not in order to return to a past that is over, but in order to live in the present, to create a new relationship in harmony with the word that leads them on a difficult path.

cry me the tears of the crying

pouring like ice cream melting from some Himalayan dome

don't know what it is they're weeping for

but weep they do

paining

aching for some unknown home

Home

untouchable

but grasped as they grow

or flow

*Those who legislate punitive laws, often write themselves out of them.

*"God" is no narrow, little word that anyone can use to gain or have power over me.

*I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

  -Vincent van Gogh

*Reflections of a Jean Sulivan:

  -It's difficult to speak of the passion - it's like making the person you're talking about remain silent.

  -How the West has reveled in the representation and contemplation of disaster.  Painting, sculpture, the vast majority of monuments - except for those marked by oriental influences - as well as literature show an almost pathological fascination with the bloody battles waged for the possession of the world, which prefigure the deportation camps, Hiroshima, and all the unfinished wars that we never tire looking at and talking about.

  -I've never forgotten a conversation I had at the southern tip of India with a Hindu priest.  In trying to characterize the West, he referred in the same sentence to Jesus Christ, Napoleon, Hitler, Truman, and Stalin.  That was his perception of things; is ours less distorted?

  -The grandeur and terror of the passion gets most of our attention; the spectacular becomes more important than its interior meaning.  It's hardly surprising that the TV news, which shows us other passions, mockeries, and tortures in every part of the world, has turned Jesus' assassination into a legend, although for a Christian it is at the heart of human destiny and gives meaning to every agony.