that prayer i was to say

kneeling before the The Space

empty of words, feelings and thoughts

hollow of meaning and meaningfulness 

was to be my prayer, full of hope
that The Ear would open

at the confessing of sin, my sin
full-nest resting in my breast

birthing wrongs that fly both night and day

i was to pray to that The Transformer

 would cast a miracle and change my eggs

into a fighting gift of aliveness toward Him

the i would move beyond locked-in-here

that some new one of me might mature

that some one more Christian than my wobbly-self

would emerge from the woods

yet i am here present kneeling before The Father

by the soft bed of my weakness

and the cold heart of my flesh

that plugged ears of me might open

and the doors of me fling wide

i pray for conversion like Paul in his desert cave

for hard scales to tear from from my eyes

the devil way of seeing

my futile way of viewing

i pray and plead, confess and implore

that someone new be born 

and Easter rise again

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

-The love of God, which is to say the willingness of God to become man, to enter into history, is a very brown act.  It is deeply paradoxical, and it engages all the failures and inevitabilities of our human bodies.  It seems to me that Christianity is a very brown faith.  I am interested in the impure religions, and in our historical moment I find Christianity to be impure.  That is, it has always confronted the body powerfully.  I notice a number of friends who are dying have chosen to have their remains cremated.  There is no corrupting body any more; we spread the body across the glade in Idaho.  But the corrupting body is for me central to my Mexican Catholicism and my Irish Catholicism, too.

-God's willingness to participate in history is still little understood.  In some sense, as the Irish nuns quite properly taught us, it redeems history.  It redeems our bodies, and it redeems creation.  Everything becomes holy; everything becomes blessed.  But at the same time, God is willing to become contaminated in our history, to become brown with us.  I find this quite moving.  Christ appears in this book by surprise, as he chose.

-Nothing disturbs me more than pious church leaders gathering to denounce hate crimes, when in fact the most devastating crimes of the Church has stumbled over have been crimes of love.  The Church has not only tolerated massacres, but has refused to admit the possibility of interracial marriage, and now the great crisis of faith has to do with whether or not homosexuals are capable of loving.

*The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

  -Carl Jung