museum pieces

we black men curse

we groan

we snarl

we hate

and in anger's passionate heat

buy guns

to air fate

pointing their barrels

at black one's to shoot

a loony coot

dead 

from the sky

we pass our lives

as zombies dying

dying without hope 

for tomorrow's tomorrows

as our destruction looms near

and we grin from our cages

from museum display cases

as objects for extinction 

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -If we are to believe he(Jesus) is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

  -...love that is forced is of course not love at all.

  -Love must live in the freedom not to love; it must take risks.  Love must be prepared to suffer even as Jesus on the Cross suffered, and part of that suffering is doubt, even as Jesus  on the Cross doubted.

  -But if we have no proof that he is alive, we have many witnesses, two thousand years of them, and yet we have more than that.

  -The greatest miracle that Christianity has to proclaim is that the love that suffered agonies on that hill outside the city walls was the love of God himself, the love of God for his creation, which is a love that has no limit, not even the limit of death.

Milking

I pulled, I yanked

squeezed hard and soft

both hands together

sometimes oned

toward the impatient pail

awaiting in silence

for some trickle as proof

that I drew milk

milk from a teat

Now those long years have past

I, growing old and grey

have learned quite late

the secret of the task:

I never, occasionally

patted her ass

*I am a joyful sinner.  I am not the first nor am I the last but I am a joyful sinner.

*We raise children to let them go.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the noblest ideas that men have had - ideas about love and freedom and justice - have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish men for foolish ends.  Emmaus is where we go, where these two went, to try to forget about Jesus and the great failure of his life.

  -The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears, reveal only...the gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal.  But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all of our being and our imagination - if we live our lives not from vacation to vacation, from escape to escape, but from the miracle of one instant of our precious lives to the miracle of the next -  what we may see is Jesus himself, what we may hear is the first faint sound of a voice somewhere deep within us saying that there is a purpose in this life, in our lives, whether we can understand it completely or not; and that this purpose follows behind us through all our doubting and being afraid, through all our indifference and boredom, to a moment when suddenly we know for sure that everything does make sense because everything is in the hand of God, one of whose names is forgiveness, another is love.  This is what the stories about Jesus' coming back to life means, because Jesus was the love of God, alive among us, and not all the cruelty and blindness of men can kill him.

  -If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof.

manure

the ordure in trough and pen

and other feeding things

is sharp smelling squish

barefoot farmer children

press their toes between

it's fodder for the plants

that color and bejewel our days

a meal for varied gardens

spawning rations for creature needs

this, the offering of all beasts

holds a lesson for our lives:

the cross of our human living

is manure for our spiritual spine

*The problem with/for Jesus is that we have made him "a religion" instead of someone we follow.

*One never kills the baby because someone else may abort it

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...the storyteller's claim, I believe, is that life has meaning - that the things that happen to people happen not just by accident like leaves being blown off a tree by the wind but that there is order and purpose deep down behind them or inside them and that they are leading us not just anywhere but somewhere.

  -...all that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of a an eyelid or the tone of a voice.

  -...nothing is entirely black, you know.  Not even the human heart.

Mannequin male

he's a wannabe-girl

not knowing why

His vagina's fake

twisted flesh

shaped by a cord

Questions play games

boggling his heart

fracturing his soul

Skinny from guilt

playing hide and seek

tagged by tears

Disturbing God:

his journey is long

even when next door

-"Our hearts were made for you alone, O Lord, and they cannot rest until they rest in You."

-Unknown

-"You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's sufferings and not your own."

-Flannery O'Connor

-"...one must search for the humanity behind the inhuman."

-Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iranian scholar

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness - a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin.

  -Part of the inner world of everyone is the sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away.  In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him.

  -Our days are full of nonsense, days that God speaks to us words of great significance - not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them.

Luminous Gift

The planes have stilled their flying

The sky is free of stench, this night

The air sings her dusky arias

and the Spirit blows where She wills

Just a breeze tousling the hair

on Autumn-trees' luxuriant heads

meditating upon the full-moon

this eve before jubilee

Tis luminous gift, this dark

this stilled moment of day

resting in Quiet's engulfing arms

and God's near, incarnate grace

*Is it You I want or some image or idea of You?

-"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

  -Albert Einstein 

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -We must gird our loins with truth, and for us, in the end, there is only one truth, and it is the Christ. He is the truth about who man really is, about it is the Christ.  He is the truth about who man really is, about what it means to be really human, and about who God really is.  And his Cross is the truth about what the darkness is, in us and in our world; and his Cross is the truth about what love of God is, in us and in our world.  We must put on the breastplate of righteousness, and righteousness in the last analysis is love - not love as an emotion necessarily but love as an act of the will: love as the act of willing another's good even though we may despise the darkness in him just as we will our own good even though we despise the darkness in ourselves.  It is not until we love a person in all his ugliness that we can make him beautiful, or ourselves either.  Above all, we must take the shield of faith, and faith here is not so much believing this thing or that thing about God as it is hearing a voice that says, "Come unto me."  We hear the voice, then we start to go without really knowing what to believe either about the voice or about ourselves; and yet we go.  Faith is standing in the darkness , and a hand is there, and we take it.

  -The decisive war is the other one - to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone.  It is the war which every man can win who wills to win because it is the war which God also wills us to win and will arm us to win if only we will accept his armor.

love-making You

i kneel before You in peace

bebside You in twists and turns

in angst and all manner of gyrations

on bared-knees praising

kissing the floor as a love pact

with the sole dream of love-making 

You in eternity

a soul-dance of vision-spirits prodding

gliding through the flotsam and garbage

with assured conviction

that darkness is a doorway

that light speeds through

an ark-tunnel with the strength of silence

and the force of patience

where Adam plays in the solitude of Eden

You walk there accompanying dust

molding clay as the one assurance

that those waiting are heard

Your knees folded in prayer

*The Kingdom is spread, not through fighting but feeding, by bringing in, not by chasing out.  The early Church eucharist is the symbol Jesus gives as the sign of expansion, of expanding the Kingdom of God.  Love and forgive all, regardless, because God Is Love, always.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -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 the 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 other selves.  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 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.

  -Call it what you will, the evil in this world is greater than the sum of all human evil, which is great enough, just as the evil in ourselves as individuals is greater than the evil that we choose, and that is great enough too.   This is the darkness we need to be liberated from in order to become human.  This is what the great war of liberation is all about.  "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"  This is the cry at the heart of every man and at the heart of the world. 

Living on the ledge with fear

poised to panic at some approaching Boo:

eyes stare past in friendless glance

Theotokos*

*(God-bearer in Greek - name given to Mary, mother of Jesus)

inside

the improvisation

never ceases

the jazz

of blood called

child

                                            -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...part of man's longing for love of God can be satisfied by the love of man - the love of friend for friend, parent for child, sexual love -and thank God for that, literally thank him, because for many people human love is all there is, if that, because that is all they can believe in.

  -...wherever love enters this world, God enters.

  -...the power of God stands in violent contrast with the power of man.  It is not external like man's power, but internal.  By applying external pressure, I can make a person do what I want him to do. This is man's power.  But as for making him be what I want him to be, without at the same time destroying his freedom, only love can make this happen.  And love makes it happen not coercively, but by creating a situation in which, of our own free will, we want to be what love wants us to be. And because God's love is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again.  This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of powers, God's power, is itself powerless. 

  -...if you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.

Lazarus in his tomb

i.

He's dead!

Did he wish to live

laying bound in a hollowed rock

a corpse twined in strips of gauze?

ii.

I'm dead

but wish to live

a house clothed 

in tattered sins

My body rests granite-stiff

on the bier of my bead

I don't feel freedom stirring

in the marrow of my bones

Pop-psychologists would have me

rise from the dead, preaching

that my freedom 's deep-sleeping

within my driveling veins

I can only hope my Friend

will decide to come and pay respects

shed a tear perhaps

and groan before returning home

or perhaps

longing to see my face

stand at the fetid tomb

and bellow out my name

*Is it You I want or some image or some idea of You?

*Flannery O'Connor says, "Life is the will of God..."  But does God will every happening in life?

*In the area of sexual abuse, our bishops chose expediency over justice, doing a disservice to both the victim and the accused, indeed to the entire society. 

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -I believe that what Genesis suggests is that this original self, with the print of God's thumb still upon it, is the most essential part of who we are and is buried deep in all of us as a source of wisdom and strength and healing which we can draw upon or, with our terrible freedom, not draw upon as we choose.

  -There I was, making a fool of myself spilling our to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes.  It was at that point that a Black student got up and spoke.  "The reason I do not say anything about what I believe," he said in his stately African English, "is that I'm afraid it will  be shot down."

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost.

  -To love our neighbors as we love ourselves means also to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. It means to treat ourselves with as much kindness and understanding as we would the person next door who is in trouble.

lay down naked like fallen trees

leaf-bare and winter cleared

blanketed like moist grass beneath the snow

a beauteous shock of untouched flesh

dressed in the barren colors of chilling air

awaits the musical whisper of warmth

*Judas was an addict.  He was habituated to stealing but he gave up on himself.  Christ and the disciples knew he was addicted to thievery but they loved him by not kicking him out of the group.  They continued to trust him with the item which was his temptation.  It's not by denying what is or fleeing the issue that we face in our lives that will frees us. It's when we recognize that it is our own issue and own it but rise rise above our habit by sharing it with others who care for us that we can be in the midst of the temptation and say, "No!"  Judas never shared his addiction or owned up to it with those who loved him and cared for him and, consequently, was brought under by the addiction.  He tried bearing it by himself but it was too much to bear - alone.  So, instead of turning or re-turning to Jesus and the disciples for support, he gave into despair because all he recognized in himself was failure, a closed door, darkness.  He, himself, was the doorknob.  All he needed to do was ask assistance from those by his side.

Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we fear more than anything else.

  -Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself  known to each of us most powerfully and personally.  If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually.

knotted gut

i be with knotted gut

with constipation of the soul

bearing the grey pallor of despair

lusting for that peace

which this world cannot give

mine is the suffering of the mocked

desirous for life, not crafting its path

yet longing more than dopish bonds

or stilted chatter before the tube

freedom whimpers somewhere

somehow its squeaking cry escapes

oh God, there's more to life than this

there's more than dour months and cold friends

crucified God-Man

sweating in the sauna of hate

i sense the devil's kiss upon my lonely brow

arising from the tomb i bear

blind the Father of Lies

dwelling within my heart

True Word upon whom my faith doth rest

speak hope to the gut my dungeon holds

Your light draws darkness

from it vanquishing night

by the Breath of your love

breathe and freshen the night

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -The more alive and alert we are, the more clamorous our lives are.  Which do we listen to?  What kind of voice do we listen for?

  -...it is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preacher's sermons that are the ones that we hear most powerfully.

  -We can love (Jesus), we can learn from him, but we can come to know him only by following him - by searching for him in his church, in his Gospels, in each other.

  -The stories that Jesus tells are about us.