o heart-down place

where life bubbles with the Spirit's grace

where slow-motion murmurings herd

into the ears of contemplative space

dark waters flow 'neath inner light

irrigating dry-prayers of the night

planting faith 'tween rows of hope

in soil plowed by blades of love

there, Living is alive

and the Real, seed for persons and bread

*Now

where

nothing

moves

everywhere

                                               -Jerry Schroeder

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Many experience the past as a burden, even a tragedy.  When we experience life as a waste of time, we lose hope.  As Jacob Needleman writes, "There is that in us which could give us an entirely different kind of future than the one we are trying to fabricate from our anxious imaginings."  He points out that the way we experience the passing of time depends entirely on the degree to which we are either seeking truth or pursuing a lie.  It is because of our lies and self-deceptions that we suffer from spiritual starvation.  What are we?  What are we meant to be?  Whom are we meant to serve? These are both faith questions and truth questions. The spiritual life is about beginning again, about rebirth, about God as a great incomprehensible presence within each one of us.  We are not what we think we are.  We are both more and less: more, because we are deeper and lovelier than we know; less, because we often inflate ourselves by power, money or arrogance to compensate for our feared insignificance.  As Needleman write, "We squander our time because we do not remember the truth about ourselves or about the world in front of us."  When we pursue a lie, we are ruled by negative emotions: fear, guilt, self-pity, hurt feelings, anger, lovesickness.  We nurse these feeling and become addicted to negativity, self-pity, and resentment.  We even hug our guilt over trivial things.

  -The deeper we get into the subject of truth-telling, the more complex it becomes.

  -If I want to know the truth about you, I have to rely on your reveling something of your inner self.

o what a morning

the silent night lays her dress upon the grass

that evening's spring might leap into morning's light

naked sprites dance freshness upon the land

during hours of sleep when dreams tumble with the night

birds gather for their morning chat

talking o'er the pickings for the day

laughter-peels roll about in play

bunching themselves in balls upon blades of grass

*Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world, a heaven.  Know then, that the world exists for you... Build, therefore, your own world.

                                    -Ralph Waldo Emerson

*...there is life in theory and there is life in practice.

                                         -Meera Subramanian

*A happy ending is only an approximate good, pointing beyond itself to a time when happy endings will be happy for all the deserving, and evil will be fully recognized and purged.

                -Paula Maranty Cohen

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Is a truth spoken with a motive to hurt really a truth?

  -Truth-telling is hard work because it requires a discerning and loving heart as well as respect for accuracy.

  -Real truth telling involves some uncomfortable admissions.

  -He found that at the root of the search for truth is always a call to a change of life (conversion) and a renewed mind (repentance).  When I seek the truth I have to be prepared for a revelation about myself, which may cause a revolution.

  -Being the truth involves sorting out memories and impressions of the past in order to live in the present without  pretense.

o God of the piecing quiet

you say more in silence

than we in our noise

speaking to us in gentle voice 

when will we enclose the din

with the attentive sounds of silence

when will we echo your spirit

with the tumult of the quiet

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -It is easy to see how truth - if we pursue it diligently - always leads to questions of trust.

  -Truth-telling actually creates a community of trust.

  -...if its impossible too have courage without convictions, it's equally impossible to have convictions without knowledge and understanding.

  -The pursuit of truth has its own disciplines of accuracy and collaboration, of trust and humility. Truth and trust build community.

night's hungering

a mouth reeking of venom

and lips flashing red

my hands reach for love

smeared with the sap of a fir.

one might believe it's Christmas

as colors blink 'bout my face

but it's the light of the damned

flickerings of those who feel lost.

i stand before an icon

Christ's eye's black with judgment.

they're rods rolled in fire

cauterizing the wound of my soul.

joy's flown, lighted upon a height.

rough climb, the rocky precipice

more than my skills allow

need assistance as companion

to scale the sharp outcropping rocks.

need joy, need peace

as sadness rots my gut

as anger smokes my bones.

my night's hungering for daylight

my dark groans for the sun.

*The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

-Paschal

*The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers.

-Goethe

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -If we begin with sloppy or inaccurate information, we will soon find ourselves caught in a web of deception.

  -Concern for truth cannot be taken for granted.

  -We know that what is accurately true and what is accepted as true are not always the same.

  -The problem with the culture of victimization is that it obscures the real victims.  That is one of the reasons why it is important to go on searching for the truth even though it is often messy and difficult.

  -Because we cannot know everything does not mean that we cannot know something.

Night Interior

The lights flee in the night as if afraid of their own shadow

awaiting the announcement of a  bombardment of fire-flies

Before the nighttime crumbles under the weight of daylight

a trumpeter awakens the droggy ones who fled the distractions

believing the hour had arrived for the challenge to be set aside

and await the Armageddon that would set them again in the world

As the blasted music builds to a tone from which blues exudes

patrons blabber complacent words searching for some hope

privileged to be the spokespersons for their temporary gods

I sit listening to the wailing sound trapped in the noisy air

restless as a spirit caged within a silent box

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Dislocation prepared him for revelation and opened him up to new possibilities.

  -He simply woke up to the truth that he had only one life to live, that it wasn't a rehearsal, that we are mistaken if we think that we can stand on the sidelines of our lives and be spectators.

  -"Until you want the truth as strongly and passionately as you wanted that breath of air, don't come to me asking for enlightenment!"

  -"I finally understood what life is about; it's about losing everything.  Losing the baby who becomes a child, losing the child who becomes an adult, like the trees lose their leaves.  So every morning we must celebrate what we have."

narcisso castrato

as surge of pain

hot on the tip of his nerves:

the scaple spared no haste

in trimming of his flesh

to shape his falsetto range

he sings to what they chipped

with sounds alone issuing from his throat

no voice his own

beyond the cream and prettiness

superb and brought by a knife

a disfigured male is he

wounded where the hormones played

when testes to their ashen bed

fell, flinging the man away

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -When the tie between information and human purpose is severed, what use are little bits of information?

  -We go shopping for myths and stories, particularly those that give us reason to blame something or someone for our pain. 

  -...truth without love is a lie.

  -Only love can be entrusted with the truth, and the truth about you is a complex and multi-layered story.

  -...when it comes to the truth about another person, compassion is the interpretive key

if ever you wish to fly, run

with all the strength within you

run like a gazelle, leaping

leaping o'er the obstacles you're holding

bearing them to the box of your containment

release your self from the trap of containment

from the leech encircling your heart

allow your tears to flow, be freed

from the barnacles of ancient ghosts

who laugh at your wasted tears

washing away the pain of struggles for freedom

you are more than a baboon dancing on a limb

green with frustrations for you to eat

you are a human, a broken finger on the Hand of God

holding you up under the pressure of glory

glory, glory, if you decide not to plop

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -...to be a child is to be all of one piece, to respond to life, to love, as totally and unthinkingly as even we, who are no longer children, can still respond to the sound of our own name if someone shouts it out suddenly.

  -After we have given  so much of our lives to the task of trying to understand, after we have been so continually anxious lest our faith wither and bear no fruit, then it is a real shock to be told that it is only by not trying to be that we become, that it is only by not resisting evil that we defeat it, that it is only by losing our lives that we save them.

  -It is just when we realize that it is impossible by any effort of our own to make ourselves children and thus to enter the kingdom of Heaven that we become children.  We are children perhaps, at the very moment we we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not because recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he  loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

write me a letter with your words upon it

words unwilling to bite my hand

or suck the feelings from my hampered smile

write, simply write and i'll know you're there

there where i fled when you chased me from your room

you were the dream of my haunted past

the stigma laying on my breath as i attempted to speak

what was i to do but run, run both to and from the...

you know what i mean as i hesitate to speak

somewhere down the road of our constant fleeing

we'll turn to look, to observe, to hold whom you're chasing

is it you, yourself, caught up in the the bog

trapped in the quagmire of our constant disappointments?

i want to know, to know because we're both at our end

and no one can heal us but us as we collapse on the floor

stretching for forgiveness with blood on our hands

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

  -People pray because they cannot help it.  In one way or another, I think, all people pray.

  -Christ never promises peace in the  sense of no more struggle and suffering.

  -His own life speaks loud of how, in a world where there is little love, love is always lonely.

  -...if there really is a God who has this power to heal, to make whole, then it is wise to be very cautious indeed because if you go to him for  healing, healing may be exactly what you will receive, and are you entirely sure that you want to be be healed?

  -It is a wise man who bewares of God bearing gifts.

my tears stood cowardly this eve

afraid to fall even in the night

while the children's ghost rose from the developing pan

peering at me 'neath the darkroom light

their shadows lay in the moment of my mind

as it dragged memories before my eyes

their voices distanced by the grasses of the field

as if kidnapped from my ears

*We raise children to let them go.

*Nothing is as simple as we'd like to make it.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -What is the ultimate motive that underlies the unending movement of our lives?

  -To be a saint is to  work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews.

  -To be  saint is to be a little out  of one's mind, which is a  very good thing to the be a little out of from time to time.  It is to live a life that is always giving itself away and yet is always full. 

  -...however inanely and blindly we are seeking the kingdom of Heaven, and in the damndest places, literally, it is also seeking us.  Because it is our secret purpose to become saints, it is God's unsecret purpose to make us saints.

  -To live is to leave, that is all.

my heart sits

heavy  

tons of life

pulling

into earth

waiting

the crush

of my body

wanting freedom

to grow

*Wherever you are, I'll be there, sometime, after you.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

-...as  in every human enterprise, there is a good deal of self in it too - the lure of adventure, of becoming known as the kind of person who does interesting things, and so on - but of course most of them know this perfectly well themselves, and yet they follow along anyway because the voice that we hear over our shoulders never says, "First be sure that your motives are pure and selfless and then follow me."

-So when later on the voice says, "Take up your cross and follow me," at least part of what is meant by "cross" is our realization that we are seldom any less than nine parts fake.

-He (Jesus) is the one we are free to follow or not to follow, the one we begin to know fully only by following.  As we follow, we become, such as we are, his church, which is to say his body - a weak thing in most ways, half-hearted and of little faith, but full of hope for all that - and the only body that he has in this world, the only hands and feet to do his work.  And such is this power that even through us others may be led to follow too.

My days speed quicker than light

set'ling the queries of doubt

closing in for the snatch

hurling me through life

So pull me, black-hole

upward beyond the sky

beyond its flickering gas

into the stars of the milky way

Falling up toward the stars

and down some spout from earth

I fly beyond sister death

in a motion towards abundant Life

I float with a propelled spirit

toward the stratospheric lands

that trust me toward God

toward the Presence awaiting all

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -You do not come first to understand a person fully and then to love him(her), but love comes first , and then it is out of the love that understanding is born.

  -Faith is the word that describes the direction out feet start moving when we find that we are loved.  Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.