sitting naked on the edge of his bed

he seemed stunned

as if some revelation or forgetting

possessed him to notice nothin'

not even himself, belly bulging

his thoughts silencing the moment

his world blurred, his movement halted

before he stretched toward the morn

my voice caught itself, saying nothing

back-tracking less the sacred be ruffled

tip-toeing to my inner sanctum

i mulled the myst'ry witnessed in a pause

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Any experience that shatters our existence and shows up the terrible fragility of things is capable of stopping the world.

  -...the really creative and free souls I have encountered all have been shipwrecked at one time or another.

  -The basis of true self-surrender is a proper self-love.  Without a regards for the nature and dignity of the self, how can there be a genuine self-offering.  Believers begin with the assumption that they have a self to surrender, even if their sense of it is minimal.

  -If you want to live life to the full, you must surrender life.

  -Those who seek to preserve their own lives have already lost them.

Never said Good-bye

Fragments of mem'ries float before me

slide upon my mind in a dream

You rise from the sea

where the dead were laid to rest

reaching for a rescue

a "Good-bye" never said

no hug, no kiss

a transition without woods

I'd prefer it otherwise

but fragments must do

We're gone from each other's side

and mem'ries the treasure at heart

The recurrent wanting says

"I miss you, hidden among the dead"

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-We  live and we die together.

-While the desert way of believing is always ready for the appearance of an angel, it also seeks to identify elements in human life that keep us apart and are the bearers of deadlines.

-Death comes in many guises and has to be unmasked before it can become for us sister or friend.

-The desert way and the way of psychoanalysis often "feel like death" because both are concerned with our not being the center of our own attention.  To realize that I am not being the center of everything (even of my struggle and self-pity) makes me panic.  If I give up that centrality, surely, I shall be no more?  When I cling to my being at the center, a deadliness sets in from which there is no promise of resurrection.

-To the believer, this vast inner emptiness is nothing less than the dwelling place of God.

-From a psychological and spiritual point of view, we have a two-fold task: one, to be open to the shock of revelation when it comes; and two, to keep the shock alive is us after we have said, "Yes" to it.

All pathology is a case of mistaken identity.
                                             -Dr.Janet Foy

vulva-butt

whose girl was i

acting out some secret ritual game

'tween boys learning to be "men"

was i some booty-prize

a boy pulled into a marriage bed

for rites deflowering a "girl"

an object of lust

was i a vulva-butt opened and explored

a descending shadow of ghosts our fathers knew

the reflection of rapes our mothers fought

i'm a pierced and broken vessel

unwelcome liaisons spinning in my head

i long the bandaging of my fractured self

sitting near empty and confusion filled

with cold hardness and deadening pain

my wounds of character seek relief

what seeps, seeps trough in silence

a search revealing losses of the past

sex an escape from mem'ries now tainted

nakedness rushing to reclaim my ass

who besides me must i forgive

bundled in abuse before denying eyes

stalked by demons battling in my chest

somewhere on this path farewell must be said

and embrace the suff'ring that is seasoning for the soul

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -To live our life from the point of view of our death is not necessarily a capitulation to despair, to withdrawal, to passivity. Rather, it can become the basis for our being and doing in the world. The more we refuse to look at our own death, the more we repress and deny new possibilities of living. We are all going to die, and our life is a movement to that sure end.  Believers find that meditation on this simple fact has a wonderful way of clearing the mind!  It enables them to live every single moment with new appreciation and delight.  When I say to myself, "This moment may be my last," I am able to see the world with new eyes.

  -The desert way of believing relieves us of having to lie about anything, especially about suffering and death.  Real hope cannot be based on sham or sentimentality.  I don't know why it is, but there are some things that cannot be learned apart form suffering.

  -Sometimes we suffer not individually but collectively.

  -We live and we die together.

Let there be ownership

Let there be ownership

Say "Yes" when your slaves arise

Free them, cutting chains apart

that their shackles be pavement

'pon which you toward freedom stride

Take hold of peace

She's yours when lips are pressed

to festering wounds and pallid face

to repressed truths and pilgrim feet

Fire your nerves for noble feats

Unbind yourself from ownership

The owning is of  your self

your prison gates ajar

Look toward the horizon's edge

where suns do set and nights arrive

where days begin and evenings rest

Let there be ownership  

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -It is true that detachment is the key to freedom, but it does have its lighter side.  The humor us not, however, escapist; rather, it is a device to help us take ourselves less seriously.

  -One should not expect to be thanked for encouraging one's fellow pilgrims to thing about death.

  -To one degree or another, we all suffer from a fundamentalist mindset.  It is hard for us to see that truth operates on many levels and comes to is in many forms.

  -A deed is a voluntary act by which the doer discloses (oneself) to others; behavior is involuntary and discloses, not a unique self, but either those natural deeds common to all, or those diagnosable complexes which the patient shares with other sufferers of the same kind. 

what's surprises me?

nothin' surprises me, growing old

growing ole along the lanes of hist'ry's path of knowledge

trekking the bloody trials of red, painted in tears of years

along the murky paths of justice on hold

imagined by the brilliance of multi-faceted notions

of innocence entangled in the destruction of peoples

via multiple delusions presented to lead them home

home to a land of muddied illusions

roads with prescriptions muddling their minds

emperors with nothing but dreams un-stapled

hoping for the taste of some mystical freedom

to be once, for once, themselves in charge

stuff without rocks or piles of snuff

clearing a vision of heaven on earth

a cloud of crowds already in hand

drifting into seclusions as one rushes to be

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -We inevitably must let go of the things and the people we love most.  Everything comes to an end.

  -Is it only in the presence of death that we can see so clearly what love ought to be like?

  -The believer affirms that even our despair has to be given up and seen as the ego-grasping device that it really is.  Despair about ourselves and our world is, perhaps, the ego's last and, therefore, greatest achievement.

  -"That is how you have to be - like the dead; beyond cursing and praise, unaffected by the opinions of others." (a desert father)

  -To discover that our lives are "rooted in silence that is not death but life" one must first keep quiet.  And keeping quiet entails anxiety.

kill god

kill god

that God be God

freed from musts and needs

and puerile dreams

from words and cash

and self-charming wants

from dread and gain

that bridle us

so smash the idols

and let them go

for god is God

once un-bottled

and roaming about

then one might find

what one has lost

by holding tight

to that One sought

Human nature: the beautiful face with the ugly scars.

There's always someone smarter than you in some way.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -As we begin to face issues of character, we find ourselves running into the numinous, the realm of mystery, the dimension of the moral and spiritual.

  -Contemplative commitment is a necessity.  The command is "Be attentive!"  In the Divine Comedy, Beatrice uncompromisingly ordered Dante to look and to look well.  I too need someone who will relentlessly draw my attention to those parts of my life that remain hidden even from myself, and yet which hold me in their power.

  -Most of us...find the command "Look!" hard to obey.  This way of naked attention for the sake of love seems impossible to maintain.  We prefer to love others by interfering with them.  We enjoy tinkering with others in the name of love.  We enjoy, above all, being demonstrably useful.  All in all, we need rescuing.  We need a Savior, but we need one who will save us from our craving him.  This is the painful paradox of this way of believing.  Our longings must be purified in the fire.  Our neuroses must be given up.

  -The desert tradition could teach psychoanalysis about its own unconscious but deeply religious base. Psychoanalysis could help believers face the fact that what passes for religious is bogus and/or neurotic.  Believers claim to be born again.  Analysis provides us with a second chance to grow up. My vision is of a way of believing that would bring new birth and help me grow up....the churches tend to breed, nurture, and encourage infantilism.  A number of us believers are caught between what we have been taught and what our own hearts tell us.  This makes us infantile.

  -...we need to appreciate anew our "fallenness".

revelation

his lips could never speak it

alone hardly say it

without the gentle coaxing

of a mirrored life reflecting

what's truthfully in his head

what's roaring in this heart

each beat accompanied by longings

as precious gifts of grace

treasured above all others

his lips would never speak it

alone could hardly say it

what's roaring in his mumbling

and tweeting in his singing

he's in love in the roaring

he's loved in the speaking

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -It takes practice to spot angelic presences.  But practice alone is not enough, unless one can practice being taken by surprise.

  -"Holiness" is another name for this self-effacing, uninterfering stance towards another human being.

  -As we begin to face issues of character, we find ourselves running into the numinous, the realm of mystery, the dimension of the moral and spiritual.

  -A process of contemplative purification is essential if there is to be any healing work done in the soul.

ready to rise?

i.

i am a mountain ready to rise

pushing 'gainst the crust o'er my life

in a drive to move beyond the borders

of fears, doubts and laws

holding bound the spirit inside

i want to grow

ii.

so, why mountain, won't you rise

push your head above the terrain

break the crust encasing your heart?

push through liberated

with the might of your heart

shov'ling back the words locking you down

Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -While we do much of what we have to do on our own, companionship is essential if we are not to lose our way.

  -The opportunity for a conversion is brief, and our lives are littered with missed opportunities.

  -From time to time, everyone needs someone to play the role of "analyst" or "desert father or mother."  It is not a role that many of us are for on a long-term basis, but there are moments when we can play that part for someone else.  Each of us needs someone to behave towards us in such a way that our neuroses are not allowed to take over and dominate the relationship.  We do not always appreciate such people, but they serve, at particular moments of revelation, to move us from the neurotic to the numinous.

  -It takes practice to spot angelic presences.  But practice alone is not enough, unless one can practice being taken by surprise.

Hypertension

Sneaky bastard, with your deadly scythe

sweeping closer, closer

closer to my feet

and now to my heart

I'm not ready to drop nor die

not ready to call you Sis

but being ready like St. Paul

insist I've got tasks to climb

Life suppressor

calm down and relocate

I'm 'round for the battle

to bring you under control

cut your numbers

thwart your pressure to win

I'm uncorked

will bounce beyond your best

will unwind

and fly on the wings of life

I'll whip you

but why have I squelched myself

gagged the voice of my heart

that it screams this illness out? 

*I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

-Albert Einstein

*You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other peoples's sufferings and not your own.

-Flannery O'Connor

Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-Remembering is an important part of the process of growth.  We often get caught on the treadmill of repeated acts.  Every confessors knows the agony of people who are tormented by a "besetting sin." The treadmill of repetition can only be stopped by a process of remembering, which is often painful. From the point of view of the believer, memory plays another important role in the work of healing. We are not only urged to remember our own past, but to enter contemplatively into a corporate memory that guards healing stories of salvation.

-Our own history, has in some way, wounded us.  Our neuroses spring from hurts we received as children.  Salvation history (which, for the believer, is heard in the Bible and the Liturgy) provides the antidote for those hidden early hurts that continue to wield great influence over us in adult life.

i see through what you see

yet beyond what eyes conceive

i see history repeat 

i see tales told beneath tears

i see despair on front pages

i see faces caught in unflattering pose

i see propaganda of the media

i see americas  hidden  despicability

racism arising twisting us about

perhaps i'm blind and over-sensitive

perhaps i'm emotional and beat

perhaps i'm a perhapsible freak

submerged in illusionary dreams

perhaps, perhaps...

but hist'ry is red with the excesses of justice

and my people are buried neath the excesses of excuse

i'm one lone voice anguishing at the vision

and death is the picture that describes it best

for that is what i've seen, i see

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-Learning to love is learning to renounce the other for the sake of the other.

-...there is nothing arbitrary or haphazard or accidental or meaningless in anything we do.

-We are not as free as we think we are.

-The God News is that in Christ we no longer have to lie. That is good news.  In fact it's the best there is.  Unfortunately, too much of both religion and therapy has to do with passing on mere information. The notion is that, once our ignorance of something has been lifted, all will be well.  Recovery and new life is is bound up with "understanding" something or other....A mere description of mystery or the numinous doesn't feed the soul and more than the words "filet mignon" satisfy hunger.

i am dance

i am a dance

feet in flight

skipping upon the air

tickling the floors

toes sashaying in twists

i am a bundle of pirouettes

of movements and leaps

framing a world of play

composing fun

prancing about in tights

i am a dance

and all of me is war and joy

is slave and free

is sad and mad

and all manner of wit

holding sway within

i am a dance

a choreographic swell

releases me

*If you are silent, be silent out of love; if you speak, speak out of love.

  -St.Augustine

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Morton Kelsey wisely points out that Jung was far more concerned with helping people approach the numinous than with concentrating on their neurosis.  Real therapy lies in the approach to mystery. Jung believed that insofar as one is in touch with the truly numinous, the more likely one is to be released from the curse of pathology.

  -We need to be able to see, at one and the same time, the glory to which we are called and the distance we have fallen from the glory.  It is the task of the artist to help us develop that "double vision".

  -The concern of both psychoanalysis and the desert tradition is precisely "clear-sighted vision and critical contemplation" of what life has to offer.  This way of believing is a way of looking at the world. oneself, and others critically and compassionately.  It makes no easy promises.  It insists on an apparently bleak reality because it takes time to develop double vision.  We have to take time to look at the side of things that we have taken a greet deal of trouble to avoid.

Good Friday light in my closet

Light in my closet

you are tomb for my fears

I head for your string upon whose tail I swing:

you are welcomed day-light shining

 scarring the ghosts of my night

brightening my face, clothing my fright

Light in my closet

artist of shadows moving about:

you are friend to my secrets

coaxing them from the dark

protecting the souls of children

guarding the Child from harm

Light in my closet

announcing safety to my breast:

your faithful, watchful caring

grants freedom under duress

The masks of love that hound me

are excluded from my den

There's freedom under your wattage

and warmth in your caress

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-The problem with many popular therapies is that they feed our appetites rather than give us a way of experiencing the world.  They promise far more than they can deliver.  It is hard (when you're hurting and unhappy) to distinguish between genuine growth and the development of a mere coping mechanism.  Maybe the shallow therapies are right?  Helping needy and unhappy people cope isn't such a bad thing.  Better the adherence to a "vital lie" than to a painful truth; better to take lots of aspirin rather than find the cause of the pain.  Perhaps it is best not to dig too deeply?  Psychoanalysis is a long, hard road.  The radical therapy of the gospel involves drastic surgery.  Perhaps it is only for those who are not wise in the world's terms, or for believers who stumble into it by "accident".

-As a person deeply committed to the healing and transforming ministry, I find it extremely difficult to allow others to be instruments of healing and transformation to me.  This, in part, is why I do what I do; precisely to keep everyone at a safe distance.  Psychoanalysis is not the only "impossible profession".  As we have seen, much of what is claimed for psychoanalysis was known to the great mystics under such names as apatheia, indifference, emptiness, or detachment.  Freud's most original and radical discovery, the phenomenon of transference, was not unknown to the desert fathers, to St. Ignatius Loyola, and to Mahatma Gandhi.  But where Freud saw despair (or, at best, routine unhappiness), the mystics saw hope.  What Freud called transference was a cleaning operation that made way for hope and love.  It was the second way of "atheism"; the purifying of the concepts of God.  The process of purification frees us from the tyranny of the neurotic and prepared us for an encounter with the numinous.  Morton Kelsey wisely points out that Jung was far more concerned with helping people approach the numinous than with concentrating on their neurosis.   Real therapy lies in this approach to mystery.  Jung believed that insofar as one is in touch with the truly numinous, the more likely one is to be released from the curse of pathology.

give me a true gift

from the within of you

un-tinseled and air-fresh

show me a moist heart

drenched and blood red

wet from your eyes

i'll give you a kiss

warming with my lips

wrap you in joy

wider than a smile

you'll think it's Easter night

you'll hear the birds in flight

you'll see them stop to nest

in the crevice of your breast

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-Are not all our experiences distorted?  We receive our knowledge of the world, of others and ourselves only from the monstrous and distorted shadows cast upon the back of Plato's case.  Life is like scratching an itch (and let us not forget that there are intellectual itches). Experience, then, "is the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our appetites...and the desire for truth becomes the desire to master reality rather than experience it."

-The problem with many popular therapies is that they feed our appetites rather than give us a way of experiencing the world.  They promise far more than they can deliver.  It is hard (when you're hurting and unhappy) to distinguish between genuine growth and the development of a mere coping mechanism.  Maybe the shallow therapies are right?  Helping needy and unhappy people cope isn't such a bad thing.  Better the adherence to a vital lie than to a painful truth; better to take lots of aspirin rather than find the cause of the pain.  Perhaps it is best not to dig too deeply?  Psychoanalysis is a long, hard road.  The radical therapy of the Gospel involves drastic surgery.  Perhaps it is only for those who are not wise in the world's terms, or for believers who stumble into it by ''accident."

Salmon lessons

Salmon know the pounding of rock

against their soft-scaled form

struggling upstream to spawn

Their innards bleed red

tinting pick their sweet flesh

thrashing and leaping, bearing life

This way and alone this way

are eggs shot forth, bearing life

for the next generation's birth

Their long-haul leaps end in death

nature rewarding them with a sweat repose

in a brown-bear's belly or a human's hearth

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Much in Christianity has been tamed and reduced to liberal or conservative theologies of adjustment.  Does the average believer want to pay the radical price of becoming more human and more free?

  -Is it possible to look, simply look, without prematurely interpreting what we see?  Could we do this without subjecting  ourselves to immediate self-definition and self-imaging?

  -"Be silent, wait and watch."

  -Are not all of our experiences distorted?

  -Experience..."is the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our appetites...and the desire for truth becomes the desire to master reality rather than experience it."

ev'ry eye in me is focused on You

even as i turn away in shame

You are the prize light my eye seeks

even in the shadowed nooks of my heart

You are the fullness of life

even in the discard box in my room

ev'ry inch of me belongs to You

even in the iotas i save for myself 

*The 4 B's

For

the bodacious

beauty

at the bottom 

of my 

being

I

fall

                                             -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Such

impossible

to word

the wind

into

water or

fire

or 

me

such 

impossible

delight

such

silence 

before

such

                                               -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-The desire to shame, humiliate, and get the best of our neighbor runs very deep.  Unconsciously, we like to hear bad news of others.  We like the idea of frustrating, outwitting, and defeating others in personal relations.  This desire can carry on even after the death of the other person.

-Most of us try to hide our vindictiveness as deep as we can, but it often wells up and finds expression in a variety of unlikely ways.  These hidden drives need to be exposed if our religious commitment is to have any kind of maturity.  Without such exposure, dreadful things can be done in the name of religion: cruelty is sanctified as moral rectitude; manipulation masquerades as love; vindictiveness poses as the desire for justice.  Where does the vicious cycle begin?  And how is the terrible cycle of cause and effect to be broken?

-In some sense we are all victims of victims.  One of the saddest aspects of the human condition is our apparent inability to stop transmitting crippling neuroses from one generation to another.

-Perhaps what was imitable about Christ was his firm acceptance of his destiny, and his adherence to it even when it lead to a shameful death.  It was the wholeness of Christ that had illuminated so many millions of lives....

Eros was there

...and they made love

with Eros between them

holding tighter and tighter

bonding in ev'ry twist

in ev'ry thrust and sway of flesh

there, urging in ev'ry Ah!

in ev'ry cry of joyous pain

in ev'ry soothing, passionate rub

in ev'ry heat-throb of nature's sweat

yes, Eros was there

through ev'ry volcanic rush of fire

through ev'ry taste of heaven on earth

through ev'ry rest in satisfaction's quest

in ev'ry kiss and stilled caress

until the awakened peace moved them to sleep

as Eros climaxed the night with passionate quiet

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

-Somehow, all the repressed material must come to light.  Psychoanalysis is one of the ways in which that which is repressed comes to the surface and is integrated into a more honest and open life. I would claim that another way of integration is that of contemplative prayer.

-...the most dangerous form of neurosis is that of revenge, the desire for vindictive triumph over others.

-We sometime feed our feelings of resentment by concentrating on the wounds we received in childhood.

-One way to safeguard oneself from disappointment is to harp continually on the shortcomings of others.