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