perhaps

perhaps i should kneel and pray

perhaps i should sit nakedly still

perhaps i should catch you on tv

perhaps hope must trust to be screened

perhaps i should trust queries and doubts

perhaps in the morning answers will rise

perhaps you're kneeling by my side

perhaps the stillness is your robe

perhaps solitude dresses your silence

perhaps there's none like you upon earth

perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

i'll silently sit, patiently awaiting you

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -What makes us choose a particular story, a particular narrative, by which to interpret our experience and not another?

  -As the philosopher Diogenes Allen writes, "When we treat other people as objects subordinate to our goals, their mystery has no effect on us.  The larger mystery into which genuine personal encounter can lead us never becomes open to us".  Sometimes we use force to protect us from the mystery of others.  Our desire for control cuts us off from the depths of the truth that comes to us only when we are available to the others.  The necessity of being available to others in order to achieve a deeper kind of truth understandably makes us nervous.  We take refuge in "facts", in the hard truths of science.  Facts, after all, are more reliable than people.  Middle C is always middle C.  Better to stay with what we know than leap into the abyss of the unknown and untried. 

  -When life is simply one thing after another, with no connecting narrative, what are we to do?

  -What happens when there aren't any certainties left to undermine?

  -We should take care what stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and yet the point is, we cannot do without a story of some sort.  The facts demand it.

  -Literalism is the enemy of truth in this deepest sense because its lens is too narrow.

  -One of the early Christians accused the heretics of taking all the bits and pieces of the life and work of Christ and assembling them into the head of a fox instead of the face of Jesus.