Our daily bread

Bread buttered with tears you see

bread that curves our hungry lips

bread that fills the bellies of our lives;

bread that smells of war and pain

the fractures of rape, the tortured minds

neglected love, abandoned friends;

bread torn apart by folks we know

fam'lies that pound us into dough

bending wills, reshaping souls;

bread, Your bread, spit before the poor

avoided in clubs and on city streets

blamed and cursed for being too near.

This is the bread that is daily

that bread upon which we prey

the bread You offer us pray upon

with tears and shame, re-membering

to shape us whole as nurturing bread.

This is the bread we're given to eat

bread to be given, given as feast.

When our teeth grind the host

blood unveils the whisp'rings of our lips;

your Christ leaks through what we intend forget

each drop of Him falling 'pon the weak of us;

and when your priest holds aloft the sacred host

it's us You see clown acting our own charade

our false and tainted scripts revealed.

Skilled Molder of the Human Clown

knead the dough of us anew

that we might feast without our guilt

bearing the shame that truly frees;

and You weeping with crucified love

with tears to wash our crusty hearts

press forgiveness into our filthy hands

the bread You unstintingly give.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Victims bear no responsibility.  They live in a world where blame and fault can be laid elsewhere.

  -For those who profess and call themselves Christians, the lens through which everything is interpreted is a person: Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection.

  -We cannot do without a paradigm to help us live.

-Human beings need a ritual, an icon, a holy place that will lift them our of the terrifying grip of a deadly everydayness.

  -"Choose and be chosen" is a law of the psychological and spiritual life.  No one can avoid choosing or being chosen by a "paradigm."  It is where we locate our sense of identity, where we find ourselves, our place.  Human beings have found their identity in such diverse models and paradigms as celibacy, sex, war, reason, equality, buffaloes, snakes, tea, peyote, alcohol, tranquility, money, ecology, psychoanalysis, Mao, and Christ.  Choosing, therefore, is very important, because who we are and where we stand will depend on our choice.

no sound

he made no sound

laughing

though belly bobbed

though cheeks bounced

though hands waved

he made no sound

laughing

like some dog whipped

silently snipped

Don't Perturb flashin' 

nervously 'cross his mind

in a death-trap house

a forbidden zone

making sound splatter

so thus he was there

in comedy's air

making no sound

laughing

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Human beings take a long time to come to maturity.  We are not made overnight.

  -If we would learn about love and the making of the soul we have to enter the world of metaphor, and image.  We have to surrender our desire to control reality by analysis and system building.  These are vital skills for human growth and flourishing; but love (and therefore soul making) require surrender.

  -Soul making involves the willingness to cultivate a certain disposition towards the world and to other people; an attitude of receptivity and openness.

  -The hardest part of moving into mature believing is to allow oneself to be the object of God's delight.

Artificial passion

I.

What's artificial is their passion.

It's akin to the "Just Like" colognes

from the dollar store:

no pain, no doubts

nothing hot enough to burn someone;

nothing raw enough to expose ones blood.

It's sanctity that's dead letters in a book

ones we dream"if only's" about.

II.

I trip upon my struggles

my pretences to follow you

to cling tenaciously with passion

to whatever I need to mimic you.

Your feet have pressed into the land

their mark of passion that's real obsession:

red roses soaked in gall

beaten and stirred to the sweetest fragrance

borne stately like thorns circling the skull

and binding like nails through one drooping wrists.

You rub against my coward's flesh

to summon me whene'er you call

your niggling spirit pushing me 

through tears difficult to swallow.

III.

There's no escape but death

no assurance to measure ones step.

Send quickly then your Paraclete

and coax me up your hill.

I'll cry, "Abba-Daddy, give me a hand"

cause I'm scared to taste your redemption meat.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

-Love is a kind of pain for which we are starved.  The pain comes when all that we have tried to deny will be denied on longer.  The soul suffocates when it is walled up. No wonder it resorts to violence when the pressure gets too much.  Love, the wild card, comes to such a soul by first puncturing the hardened shell in which it has encased itself.  Love, therefore, often comes as a terror - a threat to the self-protecting carapace under which we shelter.  A friend explains to William Golding's hero Wilfred the dire consequences to the soul that constructs for itself  a protective shell.

You see, you are what biologists used to call exoskeletal.  Most people are..endoskeletal, have their bones inside.  But you, my dear, for some reason known only to God...have spent your life inventing a skeleton on the outside.  Like crabs and lobsters.  That's terrible, you see, because the worms get inside, and...they have the place to themselves.   So, my advice...is to get rid of the armour, the exoskeleton, the carapace, before it's too late.

The task of love is to help us rid ourselves of the exoskeleton, to lay us bare, to set us free.

visions of a promised land

the silent tears of the foreign-languaged

heated by the visitation of homing mem'ries

brew in a cauldron of screaming images

spilling o'er the edge like waves on a turbulent sea

their minds, a roiling lake sloshed about in reflections

churning dreams bombarded with sorrows.

they are invisible bodies wallpapered with greenbacks

that monied hands hang like carrots before their face.

affections rise for air in hopes drowning in need

when they think about their fam'lies, oppressed and baited.

visions of a promised-land seduced by a prostitute's voice

they chanced their bodies against the desert's death

thrilled to have arrived across the borders of fate

with homes awaiting the news of freedom's price.

sons and brothers, dad's of various stripe

bear the blows of their scourging

escaping toward a promised life.

Rachel wails still the song forlorn women wail

when the loves of their lives are ghosts haunting their dreams.

they who ne'er wrote, lay dead with sand in their eyes

while the captured are bound to the land of the their birth

handcuffed in jails, awaiting some sentence

no better saved than those who escaped near-free.

but God loves each howe'er their plight might end

for each is Jesus bent upon the pillar of their scourgings

receiving wounds bearing the carcasses on their backs.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -Love...can easily become a device for avoiding unpleasantries and denying tragedy.  In the name of love we tend to deny "pity, joy, grief, and passion" and all for the sake of an egocentric "peace".

  -It is in...daily incidents when pity, joy, grief, and passion are denied that the soul is aborted.  Our neuroses are God-given signals to us of these denials.  Life will not be denied.  If we cannot or will not live it out creatively then life erupts in "a good drunk", a fit of meanness, or uncharacteristic behavior.  We often hear someone say, "I don't know what came over me."  What "comes over us" is those parts of us that are denied and unlived.  They need air.  Without it they smell, and the odor of those repressed and unlived parts of us eventually finds its way to the surface.

  -...our weaknesses are signs of life trying to get out.  Love without a strict regard for the truth of what lies under the surface of things is not love at all.  Souls are not made by lies, denials, or avoidances.