Jacob's angel

unseen yet rubbing thick against my soul

with a painful ache comfortingly sweet

Jacob's angel kneads  my nerves

into a struggle akin to an Old Testament feud

i tussle with the rawness of God

thee masseuse who drags me

o'er the rocky desert floor

full with the intensity

of the healing wound of Fire

i'd like to flee from God's arms

rail against the rough guidance received

but might miss the comfort God's presence would bring

rubbed down with peace in the oil in his arms

the medicinal balm my sore nakedness needs

*Live the truth of Love with all its light and pain.

*Reflections of Sue Halpern:

  -...silence is a great equalizer, eliminating disagreements about politics and inferences made from accents.

  -Here we can live in a community and have solitude, thanks to the silence...

  -...silence is the road to take if you're looking to pray.

  -Perhaps the Old Testament is easier to read if you know the New Testament is coming.

  -...poverty that is voluntary and chastity that is wholehearted go against the grain of our ambitions.

It's silly

being other than called

being both-and

when I am

caught in the silly

the silly of my making

You're here

the Now

for fools like me

foolish Yourself

loving this fool

to death

At death I'll wake

cutting the crap

grasp the You in me

and be

forever

without facade or mask

the both-and

and be

celebrating You

*Reflections of Sue Halpern:

  -...absence of electricity doesn't simplify things; it keeps them simple.

  -...poverty is a matter of desires as well as of means.

  -Nor does he (Ned) confuse religion with God.  Religion is the creation of people - to Ned it is as artificial as electric light.

  -Forty years in the woods earning a life, not a living.  "A lot of  people, I think, wished they would have done it."

  -You're a thinking machine when you are alone.

  -...because we're sentimental about animals it is easier to forgive their trespasses.

  -Isolation is like having hell all to yourself.

Is there a slight chance

that priests may be "fixed"

when they slide out the birth canal?

The crowds want models

untouched by sullied earth

balloons tethered to a carnival board

This feeds the myth of divinity-priests

with necks bound and wrapped in black

serving God on silver plates

Their praying-field is a prison-yard

a cage filled with household pets

who beg for victuals at their owner's feasts

A key swings about their necks

but will they unlock the gate and flee

and be equals in the Jesus-quest?

*Reflections of Sue Halpern:

-This belief, that housing is a right, is deeply held by Janet Driver and her friends, and shared by many of those who work on behalf of the homeless.  It is a fundamentally American belief, this belief in rights; it is what becomes of a nation with a written, amendable constitution and philosophical affection for individualism.  Yet it will not do.  Rights, even natural or God-given ones, often require that governments and legislatures and courts codify them and when they are not codified, they cannot be said to exit.  And rights are transient: If they can be given, they can be taken away.  To call housing a right is to shift the debate away from the issue at hand - homelessness - to something more abstract -jurisprudence.  To call it a right is to misconstrue its real character.  Housing is,above all else, a need.  It is a need that exists and will continue to exist independent of any right that may satisfy it. But we are uncomfortable with needs unless they are our own.  In the language we share, the language of rights and duties, there is no word for giving people what they need.  The words we do have, like benefits and entitlements, are about granting people what they are owed, and what they are owed is limited - it is a line item in last year's budget.  We are lacking the vocabulary to think in broader, more generous terms.

Invitation

She looked at me with a smile

her thighs open wide

to grasp my flesh

Her labia spread there au natural 

an open cave

full of mystery and surprise

Seeing those lips of pink flesh

pursed as for a kiss

I smiled No and left

*God is the best weird experience there is.

*Not everything you say "Yes!" to is what you want.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Solitude is not necessarily a retreat from communion.  The deepening of subjectivity can be liberating for others.  A day can come when you will belong totally to yourself - that is, to what created you, when alleluia breaks forth.  Then you'll no longer want to wall yourself in, and in communion with all things you'll rejoin the universal in a vital experience.  You will sweat blood, but a tiny unshakable joy awaits you in every corner.

  -Don't take away anyone else's certitude.  Everything ripens in its time.

  -Strangle the phrase with which you are going to compare the present with the past or fear for your future.  Leap into the present instant; the past and the future are contained within it, and it carries its load of the eternal.  Stop torturing yourself, poisoning your own life.  Disappointed hopes, a broken heart - she has wounded me to death, he has destroyed me - what vanities these are!  Happiness is not in happiness; it's in the unending process.  Then let's get going, live as long as you are alive, do something, something absurd.  Or better, who knows, if you've just had dinner, quietly do the dishes.

invisible

some colors are faceless

gone invisible

their places traceless

and invisible

their hues

not invisible

but blind excuses

gone invisible

Black-Browns

are invisible

like Red-Yellows

are invisible

mighted-Whites

aren't invisible

removed from sight

yet still visible

racism the foe

still visible

denied but

still visible

if God hated colors

be visible

racism has no colors

just invisible

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Since it's useless to cry out, smile at yourself, since you're not so brave every day.

  -...don't waste your time in being for or against.  Let the almost nothing between the lines grow within you and take form.

  -Refuse to live for work, money, the illusion of happiness, the distant future.  Your sons will take care of themselves.  They are no more important than those of the janitor.  Therefore, reject efficiency at every price and any action that isn't meaningful to you.  Give top priority to the decision to create a space and time for games, gratuitousness, the unexpected, for what can be neither bought nor sold, the instant: "enduring love."  People don't decide to love, but if the way is cleared, love sometimes survives.  These are sufficiently in agreement with Christian experience.

  -It's harder than you think to prosper in society such as it is, to accept its ruling ideas, without participating in inhumanity.

  -If you're caught in the daily round, let your anger build up: it's an indication of hope.

  -You'll have to  to be willing to lose respectability and all false social virtues, but you'll give joy to someone, to a few - and that's enough.

in the sitting

silence

in the vacant

no

in the space

God

*We humans keep trying to  create heaven on earth, attempting to make earth paradise according to the Adam-Eve experience before the Fall.  But, we can't do it and won't do it, no matter what.  The Word took on the entire human story before creating us in order to teach us by word and deed how to be broken and incomplete but also Godly and healing by loving and forgiving as we personally journey to the Kingdom of love and forgiveness.  We are individuals made for God by God through each other, loving and forgiving others since that is what God does to each of us on our journey to the kingdom where we'll be one: One Word of Love in the Spirit of Christ.  The journey is not simple nor easy but fruitful if we strive, personally and individually, to be loving and forgiving.

*God is the best weird experience there is.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The rebel is uninterested in ordinary purposes: growth, the standard of living, success, respectability.  How could she feel guilty about this when she sees so many others passionately concerned about them, and with such high seriousness, finding them the only reason for existence?  Her mission is to point to the absence - it's not exactly her mission, more her nature.  Amidst prophets who have become publicity agents, she invites us to make the world revolution in ourselves.  Her only merit is to accept silence and solitude on days when she is tempted too quit.  But no one should mistake her for an ascetic or a sage.  I'm impressed that she seems to want almost nothing.  She hardly dares to call herself Christian.  Another word would be needed, more modest.

  -...whatever rises up in her against society is also that which secretly is in league with it. 

  -Be suspicious of the rebel who uses her insurrection as stepladder.

  -It's impossible to grow without dying.

  -Destroy prejudices, liberate yourself, liberate me.

is sleep a passing-by

a letting-go

a death

or does one rise

to the fresh-ness of the moment

for new beginnings 

or

a letting-go

resurrected at the Now of refreshment?

who knows how to refresh the dead

of yesterday's dreams

or wishers straying about

for the beginning of something new?

i stumble along

searching for the eye of my beholding

that longing

waiting to pop fresh

fresh from the quagmire of our poverty

the tension of the now

the tightening that shades our breath

sliding to the Home of our rest.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...crowds are caught up in the rush to conformity.  Lured by money and success, they become raw material for dictatorships, and for the democracies which are partly or already dictatorships.  It sometimes happens that men decide to excel in order to institute reforms.  They usually end up destroyed, content to mediate between various tendencies, to adjust appearances, to bring laws into line with customs. Others set out to be revolutionaries.  But to employ violence against these evils is to bear them in oneself.  As soon as a cause triumphs, it's time to oppose it in the very name of the values that created it. 

  -My preference is for rebels, those whose sanity leads them to relativize the ideals and automatic reflexes that society produces in them.

  -The rebel is prejudiced in favor of a society that welcomes foreigners, the handicapped, wanderers, and all the parasites, which also permit it to breathe.  As soon as it closes its doors to keep itself clean, to exclude others, to line up everyone in ranks, it's goodbye to innocence and humor.  The rebel is on the side of the poor - those who aren't simply hoping to replace the rich - but don't expect the rebels to get aroused by electoral passions or be interested in the  ideology of parties, even though they realize ideology is necessary.  Rebels spontaneously see repetition in what is announced as different and they avoid false problems.  They are troublemakers because they want neither to command nor to obey, and hence they are hard to catch.  If only everyone would do the same!  There are always enough people who will follow, and enough others, drawn by ambition, who will jump on the stage, scramble for power, and conceal their disappointment in love.  They are our servants, assigned to the inhuman.  We owe them respect.

  -We are too prone to blame everything on circumstances.  They are in good part alibis.  Modern society oppresses individuals so much only because they are spiritually empty and secretly applaud this oppression which, for better or worse, allows then to live from day to day.

in the mean-time
when life is not always what it seems

nor is

when what is

distant is

from ideals and time's ideals:

we trudge through the mud

formed from our rain of tears

from heavy eyes fashioned 

from dirt and clay

clothing our feet
our wheels

life's not all we want

or dream

we search for flowers without thorns

yet thistles assert their beauty

we dream perfection
right now

all heaven on earth

right now

but Adam and Eve arrive

each day

with mirrors we cannot break

or broken 

we can't repair

we try forgetting

but need rememb'ring

for doing so might help

living in the mean-time

in our muddled selves

redeemed and earthed

now and forever

thanking God

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -No person can understand thoughts she doesn't bear already in herself.

  -Don't be afraid to leave the spectacle behind, along with the guilt and the categorical imperative, and turn toward a joyous life.  You'll communicate more happiness by living than you will with all your hard work and prudence.

  -The West is the third world of the spirit.  Its sadness can't be fathomed; it's the sadness of those who are separated from themselves, insatiable.  The poverty and destitution of the third world still leaves room for fraternity in collective agony.  In the West agony is individual.  Old and young, sick and handicapped - all are placed in the charge of specialists but are irredeemably alone.

  -Technocratic rearrangements are insignificant and can offer no remedy to the illness secreted by a profit society.

Improbable virgins

They are wrinkled old queens

sitting 'pon their ego-thrones

warming the ice in their mace

They won't say Hi

even to themselves

for fear of friendship

Their mirror is a threat

It may crack upon contact

with faces grown sour with age 

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Hardly anyone wants "truth made for the feet, truths that can dance."

  -I was in the middle of writing this when a letter arrived from Sarah, an English woman I didn't know.  She has a Russian name and has lived in France for a long time.  She says that a new faith is rising in Soviet Russia, which they call "Break-Rock," because it sprouts up in the fissures of rock.  It has little in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, despite his great courage, represents "an old faith filled with nostalgia and resentment."  That's why the West extols him, she says, because "the West extols only dead thoughts."  Break-Rock is a serene faith that has grown up in the cracks of the Soviet confessional sate which has taken the place of the Czarist state-god.  This faith is not shocked at being confronted with what is anachronistic and finds it natural that Christianity should be secret and dangerous because, fortunately, it's not accustomed to having power.

  -There's nothing to understand, Sarah.  No proof is given except that "In the beginning was the Word," that it has come among us, that it lives in the humility of  of bread and the Word, that some of us place our confidence in it without proof, except that it overcomes idols and offers superabundant life.

"immaculate conception" people

we're a strange and eerie deity

failed virgins, without hearts

who'll touch us, bring charges

fault our spotted souls?

we bear the cross without nailings

nor fiat Jesus with responsive living

we nail others as our key to heaven

lay blame them on, avoiding self

free in Eden, standing tall upon others

we're bare of sin, the virgin's twin

pedestaled on high in the church of graves:

candles, incense, knee bends without tears

sadly blind to our mocking pride

sadly blind to the humanity of God

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

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

*If the sea catches fire, turn off the water.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...it is not enough to transform apostles into community organizers, to have Jesus enter Jerusalem on a motorcycle, or turn Simon Cyrene into an immigrant worker.  It's right to admire their generosity and rigor of activists and agree with their criticisms of Christian society.  But at the same time something is missing: they believe too much in their own analyses and proposals, they identify too much with human hopes.  It all lacks fantasy, humor, and ultimately, interior freedom - eternal life here and now. 

  -The Holy Spirit is not necessarily linked to miracles or prophecy, as Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians, but to active love and our general life-orientation.

  -Is it so terrible to enter eternal life while still alive?

if ever there was a moment of...

it is now.

morale hovers at zero;

suicide's in the air.

clergymen sit like ducks in a swamp.

the Saved point to shoot ev'ry honest move.

tis a cruel time for crucifixion:

so much nailing and very little Christ.

it's the risk of flying which frees

fleeing from the slanderer's decree.

bishops bishop in their bishopric-red

angry at their slaves for the sins of their past.

be great if they'd discard their emperor clothes

knowing swamps, pitfalls, humanhood and all

but blood and snow mix before Spring abounds

with the promise of fresh-nests among the reeds 

congressed beneath the weeping sky. 

*...we live between two eternities of darkness, so we search for some factor to alleviate and compensate for that brutal reality.  And the compensation we seek, I beleive, is love.  We want to love and we want to be loved, every single one of us....  That's what makes our sojourn in the time-prison bearable - more than bearable: redemptive - life-enhancing, time - evading.

  -William Boyd

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -There is no crisis of vocations.

There are more genuine vocations, in small numbers.  The call never stops. Young people want to respond - I've met them.  All of them weren't rich.  They weren't leaving because they were rich. Sometimes the clerical atmosphere bothered them. Some embraced Marxism and then left it for the same reasons that they had halted on the threshold of the Church.

  -The apostle of our time does not have the social prestige of earlier times; he is incapable of glorying in his role or crying victory, thereby arousing envy and hostility.  Living more deeply, he experiences his own unbelief so well that he is the brother of atheists and unbelievers, not just in intention and words - that is, in illusion.  The Word of the Gospel and of the Church has become so much his own that he is like a humble innkeeper who rejects no one, whom one feels the need to visit, whether to be quiet or to talk, just as one visits a healer or guru - although he has nothing in common with a guru. Lucid, cured of many hopes and fears, no more virtuous than anyone else, capable of solitude and silence, without need of recognition, skilled in reading on someone's lips words other than those that were spoken, in gently uncovering the lie within insincerity, he's not afraid of enjoying himself, without which one can't give to anyone else.

  -The way of the master is inscribed in the Gospel and in the nature of the "inner" Christianity revealed "to the apostles and the little ones"; this makes it possible for then to avoid the illusion of general ideas proper to that external Christianity that only reaches the mind, when it reaches anything.  The master reveals God and eternal life in sympathy, in the very instant,  not through an abstract morality that leaves us foreign and indifferent when it doesn't produce guilt.