I bounce between sacred and profane

ping-ponging 'tween up and down

in and out of mud and grace

bathed in light with a dirty face

The "all or nothing" seems in vain

dancing upon a shifting ground

My baptismal gown of whited lace

acquired quickly a sinner's stain

The pull in me is toward the sane

To fly toward heaven seems quite sound

but dodos rise to make a case

wondering why I'm in this haste

My soul expresses inner pain

planting flowers among the thistle-down

then pound them with my devil's mace

standing before God in utter disgrace

I long to be much more humane

and for gross sin to replace a crown

but seems to me that in this place

my altering moves are common-place

A man can drive himself insane

playing messiah on life's merry-go-round

The Messiah's blood I need embrace

cleansing my heart of pollution's waste

*Humanity was before humans were.

*We all pass our titles on to someone else.

*There's always someone smarter than you in someway.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Because of compromise Christianity doesn't appear in its truth - a truth that is often unacceptable.  It is revealed only in tension and debate, provided that it's not looking for power and prestige.

  -The true universality of the Church consists in its ability to root itself in particular situations and to rise above them, arousing the effective love which shows itself without distinction among a certain number of men and women whose inner voice is in harmony with the Word and who appear as witnesses.

  -The true, universal Church is not the one that affirms its will to be so, but the one that, without being too interested in itself, communicates the faith in love to everyone.

  -The Church exists everywhere there are communities that give testimony of universal love.

i am a fish

of many faces

like Job

with many faces

swallowed like bait

from God

the swallowing Whale

sucking us in

with his cross-hook

drawing us

to himself

for the meal

of himself

for eternity

i am your fish

full

with many faces

full

in my sucking gut

with your hunger

for me

and for others

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -We go on trips, taking notes while passing through half-starving continents where cadavers are piled up each morning along with the garbage.  We no longer can put up with the parable of the good Samaritan.  Faith becomes impossible, nothing is what it used to be, but we go on cultivating the moral garden of the West!

   It's obvious that the Church is not catholic but Western.

  -Because of compromise, Christianity doesn't appear in its truth - a truth that is often unacceptable. It is revealed only in tension and debate, provided that it's not looking for power and prestige.

  -The true universality of the Church consists in its ability to root itself in particular situations and to rise above them, arousing the effective love which shows itself without distinction among a certain

number of men and women whose inner voice is in harmony with the Word and who appear as witnesses.

Hypertension

Sneaky bastard

with your death-scythe

sweeping closer, closer

to my feet

no, my heart

I'm not ready to drop

nor die

to call you Sistah

in the manner of Francis

but like Paul

insist I've tasks to perform

Life suppressor

calm down

relocate

I'm round for the battle

to bring you under

slice your numbers

thwart your pressures

I'm uncorked

will bounce beyond your best

unwind

and fly on the wings of life

I'll whip your ass

but why have I squelched my-self

gagged the voice of my heart

that it screams this illness?

*Behind every story is a story.

*We human beings are so intent on proving ourselves to be gods and goddesses that we end up proving ourselves to be devils.

*...living in the illusion of our professional importance.  

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -I mustn't have had much imagination.  For a long time I believed that the Church could only exist the way secular societies did.  After all, wasn't the essential thing to be able physically to pass on the Word and the Eucharist?  It didn't matter if the visible Church was a party to inhumanity. It was a question of incarnation.  It was up to some of its children, who had been nourished by the Church, to live Christianity dangerously.  But they'd better not expect the Church to run to their aid!  It's more apt to reject them - except for beatifying them after death has made them inoffensive and useful.  The harsh law of necessity prevailed in all this, as when superpowers disown their own spies.  For what society would endure if it glorified the faithless steward, the prodigal son, the worker of the eleventh hour, and didn't wage war against its enemies?  We'll believe almost anything in order to justify harmony and serenity!

  -...faith and humor go well together.

  -The Gospel in its pure state was too great a danger.

  -The Church, I now believe, is invited to live a paradox - to break with the order of the world, to stop wanting to be a society complete in itself within the civil society - in other words, a competitor, yielding or resisting depending on circumstances.  It's impossible for the Church to make its message real unless its mode of presence is itself a sign.

humor

it's a waste to mouth jokes

that do not laugh on their own

whose humor comes with a sign

and not from the gutsy pit of life

the liver is tickled pink

when laughter rises red

from the touch of sand and sea

on the beach of us gods

who recognize the quirky

and our wealthy imperfections

*Our personalities and individualities, with our array of dysfunctions make life interesting, frightening and humorous.  No wonder God loves us.

*All of our heroes have mud on their feet.

*When Sister Death arrives, we'll be ready.  She's the only way to go.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -It's hardly surprising that disciples all over the world seem no longer concerned with the Church but with poverty and human freedom.  Every genuine community enlarges the Christian commonwealth.

  -In the same way that Jesus' intention, clearly shown in the Gospels, was to lead each of us back to our center, it seems to me that the primary mission of Christianity is to rescue men and women who have been overcome by our present age and treated as mere consumers, and, whether they are politically active or not, to offer them a spiritual space.  Everything else is insignificant.

  -...my experience also taught me, contrary to the general opinion, that there was more freedom in the Church than anywhere else.

  -...we never understand perfectly what influences us.

Home-bringing for Mr. Ed

Ed "passed", in common parlance.

Tears fall heavy...and mixed

arms pressing comfort

upon the backs of mourners

Gathering frees tales

as  memories stir

bearing scenes long-lain

in the sub-conscious pot

Food tastes lonely.

Tales alone sustain

'tween the silent moments

of the gathered clan

Tis the home-bringing by Sister Death

Life's magnetic Guess

standing here at center stage

directing Ed's theatric skit

*...forward is the challenge, the surprise, the discovery.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Why keep repeating, "The Church of Christ, the Church of Christ"?  Why are you so fearful?  That Church doesn't yet exist, and that's a matter of joy - we're still en route to Jerusalem.  Let the Church become the Church of Christ, people will notice.  But let it leave publicity to popular advertisers who spend millions to influence opinion.  To think that the Church could simply be illumination and light is absurd - fortunately!  Otherwise, we'd already be in eternal life; admit you're not really keen on the idea. 

  -Be suspicious of those who glory in belonging to the Church.  It's not a matter of belonging.  We are the Church on the march in all its diversity.

  -"Holiness," they say - "if only there were more holiness, everything would be simple!"  They talk about sanctity the way others talk about oil.  That's their style, naive and cunning.  As if it were understood that holiness would leave everything the way it is.

  -How well ordered and glorious the Church was in the days when Popes and cardinals waged war and practiced various vices!  Morality might receive a few setbacks but at least doctrine was never breached.  That proved God was somehow present in it.  When I was a boy apologetics knew how to make use of anything.  How stupid!  The time soon came when people could perceive that this doctrinal fortress was the symptom of dead minds that were only interested in control.  The marvel was that the Word managed to make its way underneath all this, like a spring that is both protected and impeded by a large rock.

  -"Is virtue fatal?" ...Cioran asks?

Home, behind bars

Can't make the break

though the key's in the cage

Just can't, just can't

Tis home

Need the cage to be free

free from my hardened face

Tis lonely out there

scary 

being a hero on the street

I wanna get back

as quick as I can

be with the bros in the hole

and the man who is my ho'

in the security of my home

in the environs I know

The jailers lock me in

keeping me from the drivelling-free

feeding me three squares of meals

for being so bad, so bad

Call me crazy if you will

but I'll annihilate your ass

if you mess up my gig

my freedom from the streets

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...someone who has truly been wounded by the Gospel, and has personally verified that the  Church preaches the Word and makes the death and resurrection of Jesus present through the paradox of agony and contempt, can never find a pretext to desert.  The one who leaves the Church proves he has never entered.  Or rather, he drags the Church along with him.  

  -History lies.  It retains only appearances and glorifies what is strong even when it is oppressive.  And it neglects what is weak.  It is the order of power.  When history sees the Church surrender territory, often more because of the pressure of circumstances than because of greeter spiritual profundity, it speaks of decadence and decline.

  -Faith makes us see everything differently.

  -Where did we get the idea that faith existed in order to prop up the social order of this world? 

hitch a white stork in flight

and fly to the edge of the clouds

passing through the yielding fluffs

to the horizon's untouchable home

touch eternity beginning to swell

far beyond the imaginings of the heart

and taste the longings of the carrier-stork

for the nest where rest is a must

know your arrival at the stepping-off place

where the stork lifts you with amazing grace

*The problem for Jesus is that we have made him a "religion" instead of someone we follow.

*One never kills the baby because someone else may abort it!

*Everything human-made has a fault-line; everything divine holds a mystery.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-The Greeks invented a monstrous theophany to express the invisible and we remain its victims far more than we think.  That race of architects and sculptors suffered from an exaggerated tendency to see things in terms of mirror images.  For them the temple was only a machine for looking at the world in order to cure it of contingency.  The Jews, in constrast, knew that the invisible has never been seen.  To see God is to die.  The God made visible is an idolatrous image.  That is why Jesus had to die, and after the resurrection had to go away in order that the Spirit might come and interiorize all things.

-We believe with gestures, steps, the whole body.

-The questions isn't how to teach but how to live.  Christianity doesn't exist in order to be known, and can be nothing but an intake of breath that will be quietly expelled, unless it temporarily creates slaves - those who simply recite the faith of others.  The Gospel can only be the expression of an oral tradition in the movement and song of life.  We don't teach anything to anyone; we only hand on that which gives us life.

-"The final flowering of the pedagogy of the rabbi-peasant Yeshoua of Nazareth, " he (Marcel Jousse) wrote, "is at the Last Supper, in the mime-drama of bread and wine where the teacher not only offers his teaching but himself as food and drink....  Here we have the most awesome expression of the primordial human mechanism."

had

looking but not finding

finding while not seeking

found in the searching

searched while not seeking

lost while not losing

losing yet maintaining

maintained in the losing

losing what was found

flights without planes

without cars or mopeds

speed us toward ourselves

at the heart of our urgings

we are lost and found children

of parents without fingers

strolling through a garden

in search of a store

ours the plight of not knowing

that we are known and loved

by the Unknown Lover

inspiring us to know

o strange journey and dark-drives

in the limo of our striving

driving us toward the Driver

by the light of the Spirit

thus we had though not wanting

and had when not searching

had when not holding

yet held in our fallings

*The distance is nothing; it's only the first step that is difficult.

  -Madame du Deffand

*I want to show all that death is preferable than a life without justice and liberty.

  -words of Yenesaw Gebre (an Ethiopian) who set himself afire, and died, to protest against the Ethiopian government, November 7, 2011

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -An excessive love of absolute abstraction only indicates a spiritual impotence.

  -To be read is to be eaten.  The best reader is the one who transform the work totally into herself, enjoying her own music.

  -In the spiritual order there are no professors, only discoverers who reveal to others while they gradually renew themselves.  They're the only ones whom we try to re-enact within ourselves, start us on our way without even wanting to.  They hold no worldly authority; their only authority is that of authors - that is, those who engender, nourish and increase life.

grandma's on a monday visit

dimmed-eyed, stretching wide to see

the silver-carred bodies of mom, Edward and me

at grandma's, with Sis Liz, in  womanish play

dance and jig and cut-up like youth

prancing and skipping and hopping about

laughing from guts with glee in their eyes

shouting, "who's tired?" and "oh,oh, oh!"

 with great praise of "God is so good"

full joy bursting gracefully from their mouths

oh what laughter there was

the joy of visiting home

more fun than TV comedy 

could ever give

oh what a day is was

grandma's on a monday morn

blackberries making passionate love

kissing each of us with their purple lips

"glory to God", what a trip it was

searing itself upon my thoughts

my heart roaring

full of joy 

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...when someone sets out on the road it's never in the name of an abstract idea.

  -Set out from where you are; otherwise, you'll never arrive anywhere.  Nothing takes place without communion, but no communion ever dispenses us from being true to ourselves.

good night

black world

dark yet full

full of piercing Light

you aren't as dark

dark as a night of faith

that bears the Spark

for the Christian herald

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -To speak in the name of God, to pretend to know his ways, both in daily life and history, is to surrender to ideology.

  -One does not capture truth; it leaves only its feathers behind in our descriptions.

  -"They love God," Eckhart says, "the  way a peasant loves his cow, for the butter and cheese it produces."

  -This God who created Adam in order to be glorified bores me.  There are too many people preoccupied with what it all means; you are the meaning and the way.

  -Life bears its reasons within itself.  When it looks for them in ideas, it's a  sign of weakness.  So many people today no longer listen to the Word, and hence can't go out to meet it, because they're in poor health.  They're preoccupied with the meaning of life instead of living in a way that would give it meaning.

  -"The act of belief does not terminate in what can be expressed," Aquinas says, "but in the thing itself."  

God rarely talks straight

I listen obliquely

Our conversations claim space

and I seek a place

to stand toe to toe
to speak tet a tet
a homey turf packed
with respectfulness

My body's no ear 

though God is all ear-ing

for all of me hearing 

ev'ry mood of me searing

slipping through my holey-head

a tossed salad, God craving 

to balance God's taste

Staying put with God is work
dwelling with me can be hell

God takes my hell to work me through

holding through 

till list'ning and speech 

speak straight

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -To pray is to confess.  Confess what?  That we are empty, that we are hungry.  We all use our mouths to eat and to cry out.  A vital necessity, prayer is an act of poverty.  Damnation implies privation. Those who do not pray damn themselves - that is, they remain deprived, shut up in their private property. 

  -Malraux writes that "Art highlights the honor of being human."  The honor of whom, of what?  The Legion of Honor to be placed on our coffins?  And Nietzsche says,  "It is shameful to pray."  While art may be a sign and promise, for the disciple art is only a dream and a lie.  To the words of Malraux and Nietzsche the believer responds that honor does not consist in the survival of the work of art which does not have the time to see the stars go out, nor in the "dialogue of forms through the millennia," nor in the rejection of humility; all that is only wretchedness, distraction, and self-complacency.  Honor means opening oneself to the transcendence that every work of art implies.  It is to struggle against the closed universe, the pretensions of every geographical area, and all doctrinal, ideological or aesthetic frameworks - which we easily turn into fortresses.  "Modern man," who is so degraded that he no longer takes pleasure in the tragic vision of his destiny, but yields to the indifference of the herd on the way to the slaughter house, should remember that prayer, like death, far from being a humiliation, bears witness that we can only attain our full human stature by opening ourselves to the absolute.