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.