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?