14th and Broadway in Queens

The sky that was heavy and threatening rain

showered its moist brew upon the dirt-dry earth

while wandering Broadway to Isamu's dream

Caught in the downpour of the shivering sky

I parked myself in the doorway of an Indian motel

awaiting respite before continuing my walk

I'd never been to a quick-sex joint

but here I was standing before the rate-board chart

letting rooms for 3 hours or more

Couples come and go during the array of thunder

hope-filled enough to pay the displayed prices

while the owners chat about the approaching sun

Outside the cage the prosties munch

the peanut butter and jelly sandwiched in their hands

as I thumb Campbell on the myths we share

*Missing

out of nowhere

I

find myself

missing

the I

I thought

I had to

earn

only

to find

myself

given

simply

given

for

given 

for

ever

       

                                           -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -We rush past questions in order to avoid anxiety.

  -...in order to forget one first must know.

  -To live may also involve losing your faith and coming to realize that you are "possessed" by it.

  -By his absence-presence Jesus is more present than in the flesh.  Every spiritual experience, if it's not  just imaginary, is rooted in this understanding.

  -...to meet God is at the same instant to deny him.  Every certitude is a way of "putting God to death."

  -To create is the only important thing, to rediscover the fervor that produced the thing you're weeping for.

  -A true revolution always rediscovers the source of a tradition and expresses it in body and soul at the same instant.

  -...in order to be unrooted it's first necessary to be rooted.

bright-light

You are bright-light

and yellow bar of splash

criss-crossing the universe

shooting across my heart:

Light emitting light

to sun and moon

and stars of galaxies unknown

making darkness light

to play away the night

You sing of love and mercy

understanding-care

for us who bedevil your might

providing ropes for safety

and ladders that we might climb;

laying highways straight on bent paths

and paving them with care

setting food on the waysides

setting tables lush and fare

You are marvelous daystar-You

natural life devoid of death

So I run running-run

where You trod, plod and sod

following your call

ready, abandoning all

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Spiritual life...is possible only because of not-knowing.  The mentality that presents faith as natural betrays it while pretending to serve it.  That's why a rigid faith is merely flight from oneself and overcompensation.

  -Believers almost always imagine that faith means certitude.

  -Learn to recognize the faith that reveals a secret despair.

  -For me the absence of doubt would be disturbing.

  -I'm speaking of an active doubt that hunts out prejudices and every kind of idolatry, an ongoing discovery that grows stronger by overcoming all obstacles.

  -To hesitate, to change ones mind, to make mistakes, these are proofs of honesty.

  -We rush past questions in order to avoid anxiety.

  -...in order to forget, one first must know.

break in the grey sky

i.

clouds  enclosed Char

comforting her

wrapped in the grip

of winter's cold hands

her woman's heart wanted something akin to sun

wanted a man to swallow her heated breasts

and between grunts and passion-eyes

lay light upon her flesh

ii.

against clouds grayed by Winter-winds

and the down of chilly nights

she opened to the sun

locking her clouds away

laying open her wanting flesh

granting him both time and day

twas a wonder-moment of heat

a scene of smiles released

when he broke the surrounding darkness

with bowls of liquid-light

laying it upon her ground

with a breakfast of laughter complete

*"...there are no pain-free options.  You have to choose which future regret you're going to live."

-Andrew Anthony

*"...you never get a second chance to make a good first impression." 

  -Peter Galbraith

*"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

  -James Baldwin

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The path toward faith is also a matter of unlearning things.  Spiritual sanity resides in a youthfulness which spontaneously rejects everything that is static.  Almighty God, King, Lord, Prosecutor, Judge, Spouse, Lover of the soul, Father - get rid of all those words, and thousands of others, until nothing is left.  Nothing, that's our name for God, condemned not to intervene, for fear of making us all immature.  That means we shouldn't be afraid to use the most everyday words.  Only you know what you've put in them - hidden love, deep laughter.

  -Remember, God speaks through the lips that happen to be there - those of the unbeliever as well as those of the saint and through the silence of those who no longer have anything to say.

  -Don't expect manna every morning...

boy, i'd like to

boy, i'd like to tear you from your mother's breast

snatch you crying for her soothing chest

whisk you into the forest dark

have you strip at the water's edge

sit naked among the ghosts of night

frighten hell from your trembling bones

that you might question till the breaking day

till the sun crawls upon your nervous back

then talk with you man to man

cov'ring you with strength that wisdom brings

that you might stand tall in the ancestral tree

and learn yourself the masculine strain

through the death your initiation brings

for then you'll live having walked through death

with your  name newborn unlike the rest

returning grown commissioned to live

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -We don't decide to to doubt; it just happens that way.

  -To tear down the idols that exist outside oneself doesn't mean much.  To destroy idolatry within oneself is far more difficult.

  -In the area of faith it is both vulgar and stupid to try to prove anything.  Fight for truth?  Never. People fight for convictions in place of truth.  Someone who genuinely loves the truth seeks only to let it fill her whole being.

  -Don't try to change people's opinions or convert anybody.  Be what you are and perhaps someone else will be led to become what she is.  Adopt a genuine manner to tell us what moves you, without worrying about the consequences.  That's neither laziness nor amateurism, but a spontaneous self-discipline which has nothing in common with the party line.  It might better be compared with the constant practice of someone who wants to play a tune.

Bored

I sit staring blankedly at the darkness

staring through the holes in my mind

through the emptiness of my thoughts

I sit straight-jackedly straight

within an id, cramped dungeon-deep

jailed by the fiend of loneliness

I search for a key to free the humdrum of me

to unchain the dazing spirit

holed-up in my butter-fly cocoon

Mine is the plight of an introverted me

an unsure creature growing sour

awaiting boredom's mate to lift me from the floor 

*The more you protest against life, the more bogged down you get in it.  That's a truism.  The problem is how to leave this earth behind, rise up and go further.

  -Ilya Kabakov

*Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

  -Kant(?)

*The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools,

  -Thucydides

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Someone in love doesn't constantly go around saying "I love you."  Love speaks just as well in silence.

  -Not a day, not an hour rolls by without my thinking, in some way, about eternity.

  -Yes, I am a believer - like you, unless you've yielded to the illusion that the dividing line between faith and belief only passes between one person and another and not within each of us.

Before the Blessed Sacrament, exposed

I feel like a pagan yet am redeemed

like one not knowing Christ yet holding on

wanting to chuck him yet drawn to his side

desiring to wallow yet aware that I'm washed

the barbaric holding tight while grace whispers thin

I canter the futile tha 's decoding my sins

the "easily got" tantalizing my heart

Looking toward Jesus as at some distant fog

I doubt and un-doubt in cycles spiraling round

down to nature's base, finding rest and escapades 

Yet being here is a statement, a hopeful deed of faith

staring at my savior in his ciborium-cage

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Just as in art and literature, the real, or what we call real, is grasped by those who give such unique expression to it that each authentic creator can be immediately recognized in a page, a single phrase, one canvas.  Just as a child recasts the world in his or her uniqueness before being harnessed for useful purposes, each Christian "author" only knows how to speak in his or her own voice.

  -In societies where people exist only in terms of their profitability, the vocation of Christianity is to remind them, against all evidence, of their royalty.

  -Humor should be part of Christian language.

  -Almost no one looks for or listens to a truth that reveals its roots.  People prefer ideas that function apart from themselves, that won't make any trouble.

  -You are lucky not to have to become a celebrity, because nothing makes you grow old before your time so much as fame - you begin to take yourself seriously.

  -Too much reverence kills life.  Too many people become suspicious of a thought when it becomes flesh and blood, word.

  -Formulas are useful, as necessary as the mileage markers along the highways, but they are not the way.

i.

bare skin

 bare bones

nichts to offer

 nothing given

pitied and plucked

plopped upside down

stretched forth, 

like a Lazarine beggar

kicked and leaked

soured and beat sore

begging for pennies

awaiting some hand-out

pennyless, duped in

scouring nude pockets

accepting foreign coins 

given without kin

ii.

You are me

the Me i won't see

begging with nothing

a nichts wishing mercy

touch my virtue

spark my assurance

spit on my blindness

clear my failing eyes

to view You in me

in the pit of my hell

'gainst the fence-post of heaven

where Abraham rocks You

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -You only have the right to speak about the grain of truth that grows within you.  You can't talk about faith as if it's something outside of you, a kind of spiritual satellite that turns around in the heaven of ideas.  The gift of tongues takes place in the depth of a living experience.

  -It's not the living who imagine that faith is disappearing and morality is crumbling, but the dead. Whether they realize it or not, such people consider morality and faith as a product, and men and women simply as supports for a human condition.

  -If a person wants to be something more than the mouthpiece of the dead, she must let the Word percolate within her until it emerges, the same and different.

  -The word-poem doesn't get just into ones head but stirs body-consciousness into movement, like a roar of laughter.

  -To get out of oneself, to rediscover oneself, is the same thing - it's connecting with the universal. Absolute and silent within us, the words slit open the world of contradictory desires, tries to break past the barriers of egoism, expresses itself in bursts of anger and joy, revolt and prayer, and acts out a dance.  It's like the pre-verbal stage of childhood when  you found it hard to distinguish your body from the body of life, when you didn't exist as a separate individual.

  -To create literature is to give life. 

i.

at the site of myself aging

magma boils below the ground

churning in the earthiness of flesh

awaiting the pressures fo fear

eager to blow through the bones

of skeletons hid in the hold

in dark tunnels of the heart

to destroy the peace in the park

ii.

the battle-ground is greening

flowering with the rose of Sharon

towering before the Philistines

whose pebbles are vehicles of hope.

blood will spill out freely

like beer at a tail-gating party

and will pour into national chambers

where white cells tremble from the cold

iii.

a soldier squats like a child at toilet

struggling to rise like thalidomide at play

fears slicing into his wholeness

amputating his integrity and grace.

physicians mold his prostheses

as he reviews the movies of his mind

wishing down the shadows of hist'ry

and longing the embodiment of love

*Today is my mother's 97th birthday.

*Today, President Lincoln emancipated the slaves in the District of Columbia (1862).

I continue to weep.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Both means and obstacles, words lie as much as they tell the truth.

  -Dead truth is worse than error; at least you can react against error.

  -The word of Scripture or the word of someone who proclaims the Gospel anew, the same yet different, reaches us with body and soul intact.  There is the shock of a superabundant life with its burden of enigma and its secret, which draws us toward the risk of adventure.

  -It's impossible to cheat reality.  Reality will always take its revenge.  The abandonment of the Church, indifference, the much-publicized religious crisis, are undoubtedly related to the new structures of society which no longer have credibility.  It's not that there is less faith but that sociological conditions are changing.  That's true, but to an incalculable degree those structures are  the crystalization of our illusions and lies.

  -To become aware of the abyss that separates words and reality, to live with that pain, is to pray and thereby reduce the split, regardless of the poverty of words.

  -...it's not verbalization that best brings people together, but something more obscure and vital, a breath, an aspiration, a movement, gestures, that make people who have opinions recognize each other.  Even among those who use the same vocabulary and the same ideas, if that quality doesn't exist, a declaration of community is only a veil of illusion.

  -Since people are not always inhabited by the superabundant life of faith and the joy that goes with it, they surrender all the more quickly to the urge to convince others.

  -The thrust of the Word can only be borne in the hollow of consciousness, without any detour.  Loves offer no explanations or proofs.  It takes you by surprise, disorganizing before recreating; it invents it own path, the path of communion.

as wetness rushes like a solid form

o'er the rocks circling the pond

minnows strain and press their grey

into invisible currents pulling neath the light

they dart toward the shade

brushing 'gainst the rocks

i watch their movements

envious of their wants

*House at Rest

a caterpillar ripples

along a leaf

into flight

a sunflower 

bends

into seed

a river 

empties

into

itself

                                            -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-All religious discourse is empty if it does not present its proof in a breathing body.  Unless you're convinced that faith is only an assent to propositions and not an existential experience in which the message is grasped with your bare hands.  And that the community of proclamation and explanation had been definitively substituted for the living and confessing community.  And that the interior kingdom promised by the Gospel is only a lure, and that it's enough to obey, watch and wait.

-Those who live on the boundaries between blasphemy and adoration are sometimes more stimulating than the machines that produce religious propaganda for today's fashions.

as Schiller's painted image looked down

leaning flush against the red cafe wall

a couple sat staring past each other's eyes

catching conversations floating their way

stiff of posture, they awaited the meal passing by

their taste for communion being left unmet

their smile poised as if a surprise

dining quietly in panelled warmth

any mirth would have been gourmet to them

the bread of their meeting being silently dead

*More than ever, we'll need to constantly keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.

  -Elizabeth Loftus

*It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.

-Mother Teresa

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-So much that we call understanding can develop into make-believe.  Even in the order of human knowledge, to understand is often simply a matter of putting a new word among words that are already known.

-It's the same, even more so, when it comes to eternal things.  The natural tendency is to come to a stop at signs, with a pretense at understanding that shows laziness and pretension.  For example, the concept of a personal God in itself, apart from a spiritual experience, is only a projection into metaphysical space of someone who has a high opinion of himself and passionately desires to be immortal.  Everything gets organized on that basis.  If God exists, he is all-powerful, all-good, etc. Hence, if there is disorder, man is guilty.  Such a God must reward and punish.  This is the kind of irrefutable logic that forms the foundation of many religious consciences.  Religious knowledge is often a shriveled chain of reasoning that starts with an idea that can't be questioned, the recognition of the need for a solid foundation.

-Language cannot be distinct from the person speaking; one might even say that language creates the speaker.

apostles

minding their own bus'ness

casting nets and scaling fish

some rabbi splashed their ears with words

that swamped their fishing hearts enough

to abandon all and follow him

to fish the waters of the world

saying come follow me

hang out on his drying rack

*Play, play, play while day has dawned cause night comes so quickly.

*...trying to make holy sense out of the insane around us.

*You're invited to sing the wrong song.

  -anonymous WSU student

*More than ever, we'll need to constantly keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.

  -Elizabeth Loftus

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The element of the unknown in the resurrection is like an aspiring emptiness.

  -The very vulnerability of its proofs gives faith its essential character, which is to be incapable of being possessed.

  -The object of faith is not a means of knowing, any more than the mystery of Christ is an object of historical knowledge.  We can't reach it across twenty centuries of history, but faith instantaneously makes it contemporary.  Hence it represents neither object nor an effort to understand but the transformation of the subject.

  -Thoughts by themselves have never produced a single act of love.

any thing but this?

any thing but this:

going crazy

as if the trip was complicated

cause your marbles fell loose

having no bag to collect themselves

or

holding conversations 'bout a stint in jail

as if they were peaches and cream

served in a blue Wedgwood bowl

no!

going crazy may be a blessing

a welcome break

from the buzzing madness busying your mind

with the chatter of shrill voices

incessantly speaking confusing words

in tongues of blurred and buried forms

you might wish this on yourself

when lunatics attempt to flee the bottleneck

of whispers swirling near your ears

bouncing about the bones in your head

sequestering sanity

like one listening for the Voice

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -In contrast to faith as knowledge, faith that is experience and word immediately gives us the reality that it aims at, the way a poem does.  What is separated in reflection is not necessarily separate in reality, though knowledge always tends to dry up living forces.

  -Get ride of the idea that secularism has prevented the Gospel from getting through to people.  It's the rationalism that was introduced into the message, making it abstract, imperialistic ideology, that undermined it.

  -A faith which produces fear or sleep is a false faith.

  -...reason recognizes that no choice is made once and for all.

  -...to sing the Credo is not necessarily to live the faith.

Anguishing the Holy

Let the wolf howl, Myst'ry

the beasts cry

those mating, Fate

gathering as they cry

Let the myst'ry play

on the unpredictable paths

beckoning the heart to walk

to walk, to walk, walk tall

through darkness and light

to the forks that chart

one's unknown course

to cascades of castle rocks

to the beasts of moving life

Go tither there

go with forward chest

with feet firmly placed

though knees in tension knock

and hands shake

and fear unseen assails

and unknown groans mock

Christ walks beside you

stands silently inside you

is met with prayer within you

as the tremoulous journey begins

until your tremoulous journey ends

*History is selective memory.

*We can all speak as if we're innocent, yet we are all guilty.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Who would want to drink at a dried-up spring?  In the spiritual order everything is spontaneity and beginning.

  -Faith is not communicated by means of doctrine only, but in spite of and apart from it, to everyone who believes that something opens up beyond human experience.

  -...in the last analysis neither laws nor rituals create love; they imply it.  The death of Jesus radically challenges for all times those social mechanisms that substitute culpability or repression for love.

  -One has to want to be a dupe to believe that love can be harmonized with worldly prudence and good will, with "virtues" that help arrange our comfort or a "justice" that is nothing but the organization of universal greed.

am i a hermit

and there is only

You

for my cell-block

only You

neath the logs

 of this hut

where love's nostalgia

homes?

i weep wet-down

the face of my flesh

longlingly

as Hovhaness' horn

lures

the swarthy Black

of Solomon's song

he pines for her

his love

his dove

am i his cell

his prayer

his Black

his horn

and You

his Home?

do i pine for You

shepherd 

and Lord?

*Every place one settles in has what one needs and don't want.

*We all can speak as if we're innocent yet we all are guilty.

*Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

  -Martin Luther King, jr.

*Try again.  Fail again. Fail better.

  -Samuel Beckett 

*A reflection of Jean Sulivan:

-...it must be repeated, the memory of Jesus can be merely a glance behind, sincere veneration of a past that we see ourselves reintroducing into a life sprinkled with pious thoughts and symbolic acts.  But we will always go through the disappointment and disillusionment of Golgotha and the ascension.  To remember is to experience him as alive here and now in the unknown and to laugh at learned theories about the empty tomb, the appearances, and all that archaeological material with which people distract themselves; it means coming out in the open and creating a new relationship. Because as soon as that happens, it relativizes all the ideas, old and new, that we have or thought we had.

often fussing like blowing wind

we shuffle leaves that have already been raked. 

nothing's right.

no orders please.

no humor honors our strange dislikes.

we fear taking life as the trip it is.

journeying through incongruities 

like white-water rafters

we dodge bumpy rocks 

the best we can.

we play "Salmon" leaping 

toward certain death.

"to hell with it", we say

rambling about our stinking pits

holding us captive there

in what we'd like to escape.

*Afraid!  Afraid!  Yet we strive to dominate others with our fears - in the one space where God is: stillness.

*Every place where one settles has what one needs and what one doesn't want.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -We will never catch up with real people unless we start with the body of the earth, which is also our body.

  -...to laugh at having believed we had encountered God, to blush at having said it, to enter a kind of nakedness in discovering the artificiality of ideas that we had imagined were part of us. And in this way to begin to exist in a more relaxed style, more available to the first comer.  You can be like someone who all his life shouted out his faith, which he believed was his own, and suddenly, perhaps at death's door, realizes that he is surrounded by darkness and asks himself, "Have  you been lying?" Better to wake up before you're laid out for burial. 

  -There is no spiritual life which does not encounter deception and disillusionment, suffering and confusion.

a Word most precious

alights like snow

floating down upon the earth

gently quiet

and packaged light

covering lands of grass and stones

with freshness

moistening the hardened ground 

for Spring

tis "Come!"

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The message of the Gospel can come alive only in a mind that is timeless and therefore contemporary.

  -Christianity, once it becomes linked to abstract thought, merely skims over the surface; genuine universalism is concrete and has to have roots.

  -There's a long road ahead for those who try to follow the Gospel.