"Hold me up once more"

Soul-mates

Hugging with passion

chaste as a virgin's blush

we hold as friends

caring in sharing

lovers intercoursing

guiding sex toward the heart

with a God-loop of hope

tween our centered selves

Ah the full embrace

the straight talk in trust

and full-light of truth

that we come and go

till the tide lifts us ashore

and we sit face to face

nestled in God's grace

*Death  is our greatest freedom.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -As we get older, the full truth about ourselves involves a long story of mistakes, betrayals, loves, failures and successes.

  -When we look back over our lives there is more and more to regret.  There is much to be thankful for, too, but it is often the failures that stick in our minds.

  -Our longing for truth becomes much more like a longing for integrity and forgiveness than the longing to rearrange the facts of the past in our favor.

  -To be committed to the truth is to be betrothed to it.  And like all intimate relationships, it is subject to betrayal and disappointment, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Someone

on whose breast I might rest

or they on mine and be at home

I'd say yes modestly but sure

and pillow down upon fleshy bones

to roost in their moods secure

I'd pick heart-beats to sing

or hum lullabies to nurse upon

in knowledge that they'd heed

with caring ears to sooth me thereby

I'd thank Jesus like John

posing questions and sup in peace

gathering crumbs that drop near lips

upon that board treasuring my tears

or any manner of me lounging there

content

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-Truth-tellers are called to disturb boundaries, erase thresholds, and muddy clear divisions, because - to use the language of faith - in Christ there is a new creation.

-Contradictions helps us identify false truths and move into more generous ones.  It becomes a means of transformation.  Truth-tellers are always looking to change the rules of engagement that diminish and enslave us.

-The process of integration requires cunning, the old principle of losing oneself to find oneself.

-We become authentically human by transending ourselves, by being pushed beyond what we think are our limits.

-There is a special happiness in "letting the world happen."

-Wonder eludes us when we insist on having a "fix" on everything.

Sol Invictus

Sol Invictus call it Christmas    allied with dollars    to get rich quicker

Feast of Lights    the Lord of Light    now forgotten    midst material delights

People prancing    dollars dancing    lots of buying    children crying

We seek a savior    in this punning    slow down people    he's a comin'

Christmas 'pon us    benefaction    pause from running    for conception

Sol Invictus    Jesus savior    born within us    if we let him

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The liturgy is one of the instruments of God's loving cunning.  The sacrament of bread and wine unmasks us and feeds us at the same time.

  -Part of the church's task today is to be subversive, but subversion must be driven by gratitude and joy, not resentment and fear.

  -When you are in a world that you experience as a great lie, how do you change the "false truth" into a liberating one?

  -What do you do when you are born into a world where two distinct moral systems are in conflict?

  -One of our tasks is to steal the restored image of God back from those who diminish others.  What rules, for example, should we violate in obedience to the inclusive and subversive table of the eucharist?

softly

below the window-sill

birds land

pecking at scratch

laying bare the soul of the grey stone

exposed beneath the trees

in which they shape their nests

artist's sketch

to rest from work

and laborers rest

between their play

watching both another day

another day

of rest from play

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Truth and fact are different from each other yet intimately connected.

  -...we need the poetic imagination to tell the whole truth.

  -Religion tends to be abused for political, ethnic, or personal advantage, so that "truth" becomes a weapon to do harm in the name of righteousness.

  -Money is a vaccination against one of the most virulent diseases of the soul:boredom.

snowflakes fell timely

in groups

bunches of white-down floating

then whisked upon a wind-draft

to a sound of music they hear

at the dance of the universe

swaying on mysteries

unexplained

such was the afternoon quiet

that birds spoke

while the ground lay cold

coaxing the six-point stars

to warm it

with heat behind clouds

to cover it

with blankets of soft

till the sun calls it upward

to the clouds from which it birthed

*Death is our greatest freedom.

*More than ever, we'll need to constantly keep in mind that memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing.

 -Elizabeth Loftus

*It is not the magnitude of our actions but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.

 -Mother Teresa

*The more you protest against life, the more bogged down you get in it.  That's a truism.  The problem is how to leave this earth behind, rise up, and go further.

 -Ilya Kabakov 

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -As neighbors we need to recover the old humanizing disciplines of imagination, worship, and human conversation, which take a certain level of civility.

  -...civility on the part of the powerful has always been a ploy to keep the powerless in their place.

  -...civility requires that I treat my fellow citizens as people of good will.

  -"Laws on sexual harassment and 'hate speech' sprout up when people do not share a code of civility" (Stephen Carter)

snagging a spot of silence

for silence

(the silence of hearing

the sounds about one

the silence within one)

is pleasure most scarce

a waif bears of hands

one grabs for the treasure

clings to the pleasure

till the air fills the space

and smiles up the face

as the treasures spill forth

in the hole in the soul

the spot's a longing

a foundling

like a babe upon a stair

for loving-embracing

for nurturance and grace

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Truth lies in the interpretation.

  -Words mislead as well as reveal, lie as well as tell the truth.  We can say even true things falsely.

  -...there is very little agreement on the meaning of words we use to convey our deepest sensibilities.

 -We have lost the skill of seeing our life as an art in which we try to discern many different levels of reality at work.

  -...each one of us is a work in progress, and it takes a long time to make a human being.

slow drag 

a jag

of youth on the prowl

for a dad

fled from hell

to hell

and stench

and chains

and dreams of riches

with bubble baths

and worn loins

and sad laughter

for a dead child

dogging messiahs

to heal their tears

blowing bubbles to air

nursing with care

feelings coddled in worth

for some body

dads stalk sure

their youth

and lost boyhoods

still lost

wending

and twisting fixations

with restless lust

like blind men poking

into their wooded past

eros tracks the young ones

in the shadows of the street

with the phantoms of their soul

near the crevice in their heart

a carnal quest of lost gods

seeking a ME in their eyes

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The Hebrew Bible helps to make us rebellious, as does  the Christian mystical tradition.

  -The mystics believe that the universe is trying to tell us something about ourselves.

  -Love itself is a form of knowledge.

  -The point of reading the Bible is for mystical transformation, not for defending a particular position or punishing those whom we  regard as deviant.

  -Conversation is closer to conversion than we thought.  We have to be in an obedient community, one where the members listen to each other.  According to this tradition, life is the peregrinatio pro Christo, "exile for Christ's sake," an ongoing process of conversion.  Conversion means continually being pierced to the heart, also called compunction - a form of clarity that makes us open to new possibilities.  Like a good conversation, conversion offers the constant promise of change 

Sitting on the edge of tension

waiting, taut, for the door to spring

The black hole of its invitation

holds me at bay

Staying put in the dark of it's off'rings

while the Spirit tames the chaotic sea

shapes me 'neath the troubling waters

bears me through on rustling wings

like Jesus saying "Yes!" to the Father

kneeling in Gethsemane, sweating blood

*Reflections of Alan Jones:                                                                                                                     

  -In the pursuit of truth and the stories that seek to contain it, we need a way of speaking that opens and suggests and does not conclude or define.

  -An open, supple system is not wishy-washy but morally challenging.

  -The main text of our culture is that we are rivals of each other for finite and limited resources.

  -...we may live better than most of the inhabitants of the planet but "the fact that compared to the inhabitants of Africa and Russia we still live well cannot ease the pain that we no longer live nobly.

  -Our dominant story of competitive violence tears at the social fabric by reducing life to a contest to see who can have the most and who can have it first.

  -Truth is about trust, about a covenant that binds the haves and have-nots in one community.  Truth in the end is about kinship.  We are members one of another.  We are pilgrims to, not the possessors of truth.  We have to be on the move and it is no accident that the second book of the Hebrew scriptures is called departure, exodus.

when much is spake, little's heard

silent

the Word lept

one winter night

in fleshed response

to pleas soaked in blood

*Play, play, play while day has dawned cause night comes so quickly.

*...trying to make holy-sense out of the insane around us.

*"You're invited to sing the wrong song."

  -anonymous WSU student

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...a revered text like the Bible has the power to hurt and to heal, depending on the community holding the key of interpretation.

  -A flat, literalistic approach to the Bible-as-truth does damage both to the text and to those for whom it is the authority.

  -One of the great results in the pursuit of truth, however, is the unmasking of the ideas we take for granted.

  -It is a crucial element in our search for truth that we sometimes undermine the authority on concepts and constructs.

  -...the God of the Bible has a great deal to teach pilgrims of the truth, not least because much of it is written in Hebrew, a language well-suited to our journey since it is endlessly imprecise and unclear. 

Self in a fallen world

Rocks we throw at God

the Self that is un-fallen

as if like our bruisings

tint God black and blue

We toss our suicidal selves

from bridges uniting nothing

into to pits of self destruction

driving dark delusions

Then we fall upon the earth

piling our bloody boulders

at the feet of Jesus

to balance and steady the cross

*We can all speak as if we're innocent yet we are all guilty.

*I'm gonna stay Black and die.  What the fuck!

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-The great enemy of freedom is fatalism - the acceptance of the inevitable as inevitable.  Part of the work of truth is to subvert some of the texts we take for granted and reveal them as frauds.  Even though a text is inevitable, it does not have to be this or that text.  We have a choice.

-Many of us are kept afloat by subscribing to an energizing lie, to the distortion of a particular text. To suggest that a person's treasured story about themselves could do with some revision is very threatening even when we sympathize the condition.

-Often our descriptions of mental and spiritual states fit a particular cultural situation, and the descriptions change when times change.

-A text is a particular interpretation of a set of facts, and it is good from time to time to review the facts we are interpreting.

screaming sounds

society gone mad

children in tantrums

in fits without respite

music polluting

boggling our ears

fouling the day

corrupting the night

mooching off death

cause Life isn't sung

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -...being in a perpetual state of revolt is another way of remaining under the spell of our past.

  -No one can live entirely without an appeal to the authority of a story or text, and authority always has something to do with what we think is the truth.

  -A new story is possible when something happens to us to break the force of habit and recover our power to choose.  We have a choice with regard to how we live in the world; each of us has a personal covenant with life and with God that is shaped by a story.

  -One way to get at these hidden covenants is to ask, "What is my unforgivable sin?"

Ruler of the Nations

constant, silent lover

faithful sempiternity

vapor-soft whisperer of joy

lusting for the longing Spirit

fanning the still ember of flame

into hot-heat from the cold heath

the coals ache for your blowing

push fire toward the whispering wind

that the vim held in their veins

flair with the glow of your presence

branding love in the hearts of all

lighting bonfires in the universe allied 

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Life is both a festival and a nightmare of mutuality and reciprocity.

  -Imagine someone knowing you better than you know yourself and finding you lovable!  We barely know the truth about ourselves.  If we did, we would behave differently.

  -Have I the depth of imagination to see something splendid struggling in the life of every human being, even the most wicked?

  -Light comes when you look into the eye of another human being and know that he or she is your brother or sister.

roach-fate

you don't know what hit "chou", roach

as i slammed hard like a thonging bomb

to splatter-bomb you into yellow ooze

squished over four inches of brown

pressed into the linoleum floor

my rubberized sole rid me of you

you and your playful hide and go seek

as you ran for your life in the muggy damp

tween the bathroom tiles of green and blue

yes! i stopped "chou", roach

smashed "chou" with human craft

and with my hatred of your sneeky kind

i squished "chou" joyfully dead and fine

'o'er the space of that immobile floor

no! you don't know i hit "chou", roach

when i caught "chou" roamin' about my room

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -It is a fearful and wonderful thing to be a human being.  The theological way of expressing this truth is to say that we are made individually and collectively, in the image of God.  This is the deepest truth about all of us.  The divine is our true form, beyond our grasp and yet in our flesh.

  -Institutions help or hinder us in our being open to the true form.

  -In order to tell the truth I need a deep connection with my own inner life, a respect for those with whom I am closely associated, and a commitment to building a community of free people.

  -Human unhappiness springs from a faulty diagnosis of the human condition.

rains fall

as if this town needs cleansing

as if a foul stench rises from its core

perhaps this the reason for

these heaven-dropped tears:

to scrub blood from the pining streets

murders are up, statistics say:

race and rape demand attention again;

drugs make cash while frying heads;

the heat from guns bake more than bread;

nearby the homeless rest in parks

while food spoils sitting on a shelf

this storm cries about us this night

dropping hints

there's something odious about

but rain can't wash these stains down drains

and down-pours never scrub the human heart

soul-tears and hands-on, along with other dreams

wash open wounds scarring the city's charts

*Every place one settles in, has what one needs and don't want.

*Generosity is the one thing that cannot admit of delay.

  -St. Gregory of Nazianzen

*Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must  be demanded by the oppressed.

  -Martin Luther King, jr.

*Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.

  -Samuel Beckett

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -We cannot help having minds furnished with something, so we might as well see to it that they are as well furnished as possible.

  -It is a fearful and wonderful thing to be a human being.  The theological way of expressing this truth is to say that we are made, individually and collectively, in the image of God.

  -The divine is our true form, beyond our grasp and yet in our flesh.