kill god

kill god

that god be God

freed from musts 

and freed from wants

from puerile dreams

from cash and prayers

from self-charming thrusts

that bridle God

then smash the idols

letting them go

for god is God

when God IS God

un-bottled, un-throttled

roaming' free

then one might find

what one has lost

by holding tight

to the One Who's True

*There is nothing as Beautiful as God.

*Reflections of Frederick Beuchner:

  -Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless.  It is most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart.  It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

  -To say that love is God is romantic idealism.  To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

  -In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will.

  -This other war is the war not to conquer but the war to become whole and at peace inside our skins.  It is a war not of conquest now but of liberation because the object of this other war is to liberate that dimension of selfhood which has somehow become lost, that dimension of selfhood that involves the capacity to forgive and to will the good not only of the self but of all the other selves.  This other war is the war to become a human being.  This is the goal that we are really after and that God is really after.  This is the goal that power, success and security are only the forlorn substitutes for.  This is the victory that not all our human armory of self-confidence and wisdom and personality can win for us - not simply to be treated as human but to become at last truly human.  

kicking ass for Jesus

vested in his devotional best

soutane with cowl and a floppy hood

he was an artless hack

standing on the corner in his collared shirt

baby blue with Reebok's covering his feet

a rosary and cross stuffed in his karate belt:

for sure, a man of faith ministering in the night

poised and geared to kiss ass for Jesus

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -We find by losing.  We hold fast by letting go.  We become something new by ceasing to be something old.

  -Principles are what people have instead of God.  To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbor's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if their's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.

Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.  "Principle" is an even duller word than "Religion."

  -To suffer in love for another's suffering is to love life not only at its fullest but at its holiest.

K-mart Jesus

twas mid-October

the turkey hadn't been dressed

when I strolled into K-Mart searching

for some item other than what was found

saw baby jesus decked in $wadling clothes

displayed with tinsel that was sure to impress

his name had been changed

his face sprouted a beard

they called him Santa Claus

giving him reign near a mysterious crib

jammed with assinine stuff

for the corporate god-head

jesus was enough to draw money in

duping the poor with illusory "more"

pulling cash from their pockets

while stocking the shelves

tis the season to be jolly

putting jesus on the shelf

Santa with his $alesman laugh

having duped the believers again

*How does one go about searching for lost visions, lost hopes in an atmosphere of dreams and lust? Much appears a dread river, flowing with sour tea, moving toward the "whatever", slipping through the lips of degenerate guides.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -"If there's one thing makes me want to puke, it's a friendly divorce,"  Bebb said.  "If it's got to be, give me a divorce that's hateful.  When you're friends, stay put.  So what if it's not all moonlight and roses?  What is?  Stay put because if you don't, you'll spend the rest of your life looking to find each other in the face of strangers." 

  -...suffering is holy.

  -That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space did they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate.  And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth. 

  -Part, at least, of what I believe the New Testament means by calling Jesus himself the Word of God is that in the final analysis not even the most authentic and inspired words he ever spoke could exhaust the mystery he came to reveal, and that when he proclaimed not "What I say is the truth" but instead, "I am the truth," he meant, among other things, that the truth cannot be fully caught in any expression of the truth in words but only in the great eliquence and complexity of his own life

Jubilee

a thousand seconds of smiles

are poised ready for the Jubilee

when we'll loose the cosmetic smells and shells

masking our identity

when we'll shake off the hampered flesh

and skeletons of our post-edenic selves

when the Wind blows through our bones

rattling them to life with soul

we'll dance nakedly fresh

bumping each other with estatic joy

*How does one go about searching, looking for lost visions, lost hopes in an atmosphere of dreams and lust?  Much appears a dread river flowing with the dust of revenge and sour tea, moving toward the "whatever" shipping through the lips of degenerate guides.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Perhaps there is no gift more precious than the gift of spontaneity, the ability of certain men and animals to act straight and fresh and self-forgettingly out of the living center of who they are without the paralyzing intervention of self-awareness.

  -If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter and the Last supper is the Mad Tea Party.  The world says, Mind your own business, and Jesus says, There is no such thing as your own business. The world says, follow the wisest course and be a success, and Jesus says, follow me and be crucified.  The world says, Drive carefully - the life you save may be your own - and Jesus says, Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever looses his life for my sake will find it.  The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love.  The world say, Get and Jesus says, Give.  In terms of the worlds's sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks he can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than  under a delusion. 

  -...a distaste for dying is twin to a taste for living, and again I don't think you can tamper with one without somehow doing mischief to the other.

Jennifer piss: Grosse Point

nearing as her wee-one pees

mom spots me

and in mid-stream

snatchers her away

rent and bare

wetting her pants

lest i see

i pass and laugh

eyed with dismay

or was it fear

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention.  If we are to love God, we must first stop, look and listen to him in what is happening around us and inside us.  If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors.  With our imagination as well as with our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces.  Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

  -Why did we weep? I asked myself.  We wept for all that grandeur gone.  We wept for martyrs cruelly slain.  We wept for Christ, who suffered death upon a tree and suffers still to see our suffering. But more than anything, I think, we wept for us, and so it ever is with tears.  Whatever be their outward cause, within the channel of the heart it's we ourselves for whom they finally fall.

  -Introspection in the long run doesn't get you very far because every time you draw back to look at  yourself, you see again everything except for the part that drew you back, and when you draw back to look at the part that drew back to look at yourself, you see again everything except what you are really looking for. 

  -Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet, because where your feet take you, that is who you are.

Jesus saves

like Pilate the scribes from Roman-rages

and Judas from anxiety pangs

Jesus saves:

decaled salvation peeling off church busses

and paper-houses mildewed underneath

built upon dampness and neglect

Jesus saves

the faint from sinner's sins

the saints from rusting hearts

the rest from the junk on their manicured lawns

Jesus saves

the tragedian pimps

the hawking whores

those stuck in the plague of crack

Jesus saves

the ensconced boldness in Herod's breast

his love for John that a sword can't kill

Jesus saves

the saved for wronged seasons

the wronged for solid reasons

the fallen for salvation-pleasing

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Jesus Christ refused the crown that Satan offered him in the wilderness...but he is king nonetheless because again and again he is crown in the heart of the people who believe in him. And that inward coronation takes place, Buttrick said, "among confession, and tears, and great laughter."

  -God's coming is always unforeseen, I think, and the reason, if I had to guess, is that if he gave us anything much in the way of advance warning, more often than not we would have made ourselves scarce long before he got there.

  -Literature, painting and music - the most basic message that art teaches us is to stop, look and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot.  In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

Jesus if

Jesus, if I could ever mold you

I'd pour you black as tar

your hair as white as snow

with brown eyes and yellow face

and feet that know both sands and rocks

I'd plant you breasts upon your chest

hanging testes between your legs

your lips broad as the Ganges pond

hands soft as the meadow's down

your muscles rising as a canyon grand

your smile as wide as the whirling world

you'd hang on an inlaid cross

woods from ev'ry tongue and land

you'd die a freak in Palestine

rising, claiming Ev'ry One

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -I discovered that if you keep  your eyes peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas.  Taking your children to school and kissing your wife goodbye.  Eating lunch with a friend.  Trying to do a decent day's work.  Hearing the rain patter against the window.  There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinating because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly....If I were called upon to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: Listen to your life.  See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.  In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

  -...all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

  -...when it comes to putting broken lives back together - between it comes, in religious terms, to the saving of souls - the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best.  To do for yourself the best that you have in you to do - to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst - is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still.  The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from.  You can survive on your own.  You can grow strong on your own.  You can prevail on your own.  But you cannot become human on your own.

jesus crucified...again

how many crucifixions

have i caused?

how many spikes pounded

through the hands and feet of all?

how much blood forced

when i lanced the other's heart?

how many bones lay broken

beating the drum of their flesh?

how many crosses kissed

then powered into the ground?

how many jesus-twins have i crushed?

too many to count.

i've crucified jesus again and again

fixing him to a tree with consummate passion.

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

*For the Church/church to re-discover itself and be effective, it must break away from the political systems.

*How can I be substantial if I do cast a shadow?  I must have a dark side if I am to be whole.

-Carl Jung

*If you are silent, be silent out of love; if you speak, speak out of love.

-St. Augustine 

*Reflections of Sue Halpern:

  -"God makes us...capable of liking virtue before we possess it," the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says.  It requires exercise. And just as no one can run five miles a day and cede the cardiovascular effects to someone else, no one can trust for us.  Forgetting how to trust, we rely on random drug tests, honesty examinations, telephone monitoring, and credit checks of prospective suitors. Forgetting how to trust, we find ourselves in Ed Sklar's office, deciding between Garfield the Cat and the briefcase tape recorder. 

  -Without meaning to, the intern hits upon modern medicines greatest failing - its tendency to view people as bodies, and bodies as containers of data, and to treat the data and not the person - though he doesn't phrase it this way himself.  What he does say is: In this place you can do whatever you want to people.  It's like a dog lab."

Jerry's stations

vignettes on life to be lived

childhood passion crayoned bright

feelings stenciled straight

Jesus given, etched on hearts

Side Effects

begin

as soon as I start

to take enough

time to be

with you

ahhhhhhh

what ready

remedies

we become

for the other

then

                                                     -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Sue Halpern:

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

  -"...there is necessary for God's action on the human soul such a willingness to be at His disposal, almost as mere putty in His hands, that unless a man be willing to learn it by the hard discipline of obedience it may not be learned at all."  Putty in His hands?  This is exactly what we fear becoming in anybody's hands, God's or not, for such is the path to tyranny, cowardice, and to holocaust.  In his Holy Rule St. Benedict must have recognized the benefits of institutional cohesion that this sort of suzerainty would have.  But he also made obedience a school of faith, knowing it can be more difficult to abide by a man whose faults are apparent than by a God you cannot see.  The unavoidable danger, though, is that in time the man will be feared and worshiped, not the God, and the putty will be molded into something ugly and grotesque, something on the order of the crowd in The Brothers Karamazov who fall away from Christ when he is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor.  This fear - this is the what we think.  We fear, with good reason, what submitting to authority will bring.  Yet we fear, also with good reason, that we will - or you will - submit.  We fear what will be lost - property, status, mobility,  reason, ourselves.

  -...submission is the yoke of liberty.

  -What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?