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.