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.