*Naturally, God doesn't need prayer.  Let's stop turning God into a potentate anxious for homage.  It's you and I who need prayer so that we will no longer be alone, in order to get out of our shells and rejoin the universal body of love.  We can't link up with others without passing through what is furthest away; to get there it's necessary to lose ones identity.  It's in that loss that I can find you, that you can find yourself.  To pray is therefore to introduce love, humor and death into every action and ideology.  Hence prayer is the revolutionary act par excellence, the very opposite of alienation.

To count sheep or the cracks in the sidewalk, to surrender to habit in order to feel we've settled accounts with ourselves and with God-why not?  It can happen that the most wretched prayer is lifted up by love, to the confusion of all hypocrites.  But the person who wants to hold back, to keep everything locked up, secretly refusing the flux of time and death, is only pretending.  It's the same as multiplying formal gestures of courtesy when love departs.  Politeness is the surest way of keeping one's distance.
-Jean Sulivan

The new normal

With the new normal

our want of security

we walk round and round our sore

so that all else is prattle

words passing by 

never through

Ours are shallow reckonings

weak and slaughtered

enough to humor

pretend we're alive

grasping for a cord of life

We induce suiscide

leaping past pain

the splattering of blood

the flooding of tears

So, round and round we walk

with the cool hatred of cowards

our scabs hardening into rock