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.