on the horizon

i ask myself
who will see it
who will notice those cries heard in the night
as companions to the crimes outside our door?

will ours be a voice trembling 'neath a dimming bulb

warning that the light we see is truly dark?

totalitarians love war as if bread for their tables
blood, red wine slaking their throats.

when people disappear, they'll make then hide

cause crimes against the struggling are cause for more.

we'll shake our heads when the warning sirens wail
hoping that the enemy will learn the we are right.

who imagines our sincerity to be tainted?

nothing is more natural than knowing God's on our side!

when we smell flesh as the rains upon our heads
will the silent torture of convictions spew vomit on the streets?

when The Bomb, our bomb sprinkles the lawns behind our gates

will then a whimper rise enough to explore the rumbles of despair?

when bodies return wrapped in their symbolic flag
will it be too late to redirect the movies in our dens

to cancel the show about dandelions on our lawns

and show the faces which horrified the dreams of our parents?

are we to salute or weep the dead murdered at our hands
for they'll be our brothers, our children
our neighbors slain upon the carpeted earth?

then the airy transparency of our majesty

will lay crumbling like a yellowed constitution

released magically from its isolated tomb.

who will see it?
who will notice
complicit in the crimes outside our door
as oblong clouds stretch across the azure sky
as if pillows awaiting heads to rest patiently
upon lungs possessive of suffocating themes?  



God is not an extra in a movie.  God is the movie and we're the screen upon which God is viewed.  God must be seen in a new way and that way is love: love of self and love of the other as self.



*I beheld the working of all the blessed Trinity, and in this beholding I saw and understood the three properties: the property of fatherhood, the property of motherhood and the property of Lordship in one God.  In our Father almighty we have our keeping and our bliss as regards our human substance, which is ours by our making without beginning.  And in the Second Person, in wit and wisdom, we have our keeping as regards our sensuality, our restoring and our saving: for he is our Mother, Brother and Savior.  And in our good Lord the Holy Spirit we have our rewarding and our recompense for our living and our labors which will far exceed anything we can desire, owing to his marvelous courtesy and his high plenteous grace.
-Julian of Norwich

 

I kneel in prayer without words, blankly looking at and seeing nothing. There. The patterns and wrinkles of the sheets stare, wonderingly, at me who cannot say, "I came to do your will" because it will be a lie. I can muster only, "I long to do your will" because I know my sin, my weakness, my failures which throw any promise to You back into my face, regretfully.  So, I kneel in silence, espying nothing, perhaps looking for You before I'm jolted by my inactivity to say something banal and common, trite and memorized because my words are still as my heart is searching.  To be loyal to You is my desire in spite of the lies of my life. I know what I want, perhaps, even what You want but I fail in the execution and, hence, am silenced and kneel down this way.

* Can Jesus, a male, be a savior for females?  Is the Christ figure a valid symbol  for women, fostering in them a healthy integration of personality and acting as their chief help in experiences of God?  Or has Christianity so identified the maleness of the historical Jesus with normative humanity that femaleness automatically falls to second-class citizenship in the community of God, a status we have seen historically translated as barring women from priestly office and power?  Have women by virtue of their sex alone been excluded from full

 representation in Christ's ministry, a sex that is somehow less important than the male in creation and redemption?  Is Jesus' maleness so precisely identified with the divine Logos that femaleness is excluded from divine status and participation?

-Ann Belford Ulanov

 *Hatch

what 

the winged life

wants

is 

to be

outside

in the open

commerce

of hearts

where 

nothing

is

bought

or 

sold

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

 

with blood in the eye

the marines are coming

the marines are coming

the guardians of freedom are running

with guns drawn, they are shooting

the people of the land in the name of freedom

they're squelching dissenters

lest fear trap the loyal in movement and care

rallying 'round god cloaked in red, white and blue

they capture strange folk skinned in black and brown

as their children kill friends near the cottage gate

for blood has moistened their eyes

and their hands are red from weeping

the land must be defended in the time of crisis

though we be the crisis whose time has come

Flee the gods that whip you.

Flee the gods of Desire.

Mouth open, fly 'cross the fields

fly and don't look back.

Run on the edge of death.

You need not be a whippping child.

All gods are passing-powers

fragile as their bended knees, pursuing.

Ready yourself for laughter.

Their fall is at hand

for other gods pursue as well 

amd these will be made the less

for all giants fall and bow to Death

have an end you know full well.

So, flee the gods that whip you.

You need not be a whipping child.

Flee the god within you,

the one with whip in hand.

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