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.