media prostitution

i can't stomach prime-time canned humor

nor the hourly rehash of yesterday's news

the confessions of talk-show dummies chattering away our lives

the insults of judges mocking the sanity of the courts

it's a seduction of the senses where sensibilities ought reign

the control of our appetites with the abundance of choice

we're fucked up and over by the frightened and greedy

envious partakers of media prostitution

thank God for Hip-Hop and its no-shit allegiance

being the paranoia we swim in, sucking off our scars 

-There are parts of my psyche that are still at the stage of pre-puberty and adolescents.  That may always be the case.  In light of that, I must recall that I am "me" this day, this moment and what I decide or not decide is from this "now" and it is in "this moment" that I am responsible, that I love, I sin, I grow, I regress.  The challenge is to live "now", forgive "now", be "now", love "now".

*Thoughts of N.T. Wright:

-...it is part of living an authentically Christian life that you learn to forgive yourself as well.

-...because it's forgiveness we're talking about, not tolerance or indifference, this will once more mean exclusion as well embrace.  It will mean saying No to whatever it was in order to say Yes to God and God's forgiveness.  This will almost certainly take prayer and worship and perhaps the assistance of a wise counselor, but it's the way we are called to go, the way to spiritual health.  Those who insist on clinging to a sense of guilt all too easily become, alas, those who then pass on that sense of guilt to others as the burden becomes too great to bear.  Part of the answer to the prayer "Deliver is from evil" is that we learn to forgive ourselves, both for our own sake and for the sake of those around us.

of

tabula rasa's and rows of welts

of high blood pressure and bleeding nose

of tumbling down stairs and bloody beatings

of sparse mem'ries and an exceptional aunt

of constant corrections and brewing anger

of burning toys and touching butts

of too many niggers and segregated lives

of poison run wild and venomous hearts

of dreams un-grabable and untamed minds

of hatreds embedded and childhood abuses

of minding children and being too young

of depressing language and inflamed murders

of so many "shoulds" that feed depression

tying one down to the bottom of hell

a dot on a page in the hist'ry of race

destructive exclusion discrimination swelled

...and the toxins swelled, poisoning the heart

crushing the soul before life began

*Reflections of N.T. Wright:

-...in order to love our neighbor as ourselves we need to love ourselves first, so we know what the standard should be!  This point is well known and well taken.  But the same applies, more subtly perhaps, to the question of forgiveness.  Those with any pastoral experience will have met the person who says, "Well, I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself."  We can understand what they mean.  But it is precisely here, I suggest, that the prayer, "Deliver us from evil" comes right home into the human heart, imagination and emotions - or, if you like, the soul, which as I have said elsewhere is really a way of speaking about "who I am in the presence of God."

It takes spiritual discipline to forgive others; it takes a different though related, spiritual discipline to forgive myself, to echo within in my own heart the glad and generous offer of forgiveness which God holds out to me as well.  Here, too, my sense of self-worth comes not from examining myself and discovering that I'm not so bad after all but from gazing at God's love and discovering that nothing can stand between it and me.  (What we are doing is drawing down from God's future, in which I will know myself to be completely loved and accepted because of the work of Jesus and the Spirit.)  This astonished and grateful acceptance of the free grace and love of God is what some traditions  have meant when they have echoed Paul's language about "justification by faith."

The virtue lies in the struggle, not in the prize.
                                  -Chinese fortune cookie

beyond beyond

the search is about love

the looking about, the catching

at a glance, the chance

the sought, the never caught

the up and down the web-ways

the in and out of site after site

with bodies, the same bodies

on a different face, without breath

flat, unfelt, hoping

to touch some spot

to see, to find a piece

of my self, missing, long gone

long departed, long never there.

tis a strange journey through

 the surf-tide, through the

valleys of despair, the mounts 

the expectant, the plateaus

the plateaus, always the plateaus

the salt flats of the desert, my

desert, the flatland of my wants

my wish to find someday

the ever absent something

called love.

yet I continue on

let go, release the want

the beast, the albatross

swinging 'round my neck

to let it fly, let it flee

find new shores o'er which to sail

new waters to fish, new lands

to rest its wings, build a nest

lay down and die because here

I cannot rest free to be, to discover self

but somewhere beyond, beyond.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -When Christian liberty becomes the heart of people's existence, they lift up their heads and raise their voices.  Like animals who panic and turn tail, who can smell danger faster than the wind can carry it to them, the scribes and pharisees showed an obstinate and endless patience as they strove to immunize and neutralize society against the threat of liberty.  For joy, which is born of freedom and only from freedom, is a deadly peril.  It shakes walls, enlarges the soul, strips off old skins, and tells the stranger, the black, the Chinese, "You are my brother, my sister."  To the atheists it says, "We share the same unbelief"; to the prostitute, "You are no worst than many others; in fact, you're more honest." With its sense of humor, joy sees Christian liberty as rooted in faith; in its winnowing-basket it sorts out what is alive and what is only of archaeological interest.  Leaving the past behind, joy strains toward the future, treating what was been already been achieved as of little value.

  -A person is alive only to the extent that she achieves spiritual freedom, radiating the spirit of alleluia, no longer responding to external commands, having become one with God - who never gives an order because God is love. Civilization, culture, the Vatican, the pope, and the church exist only in order to permit each of us to become alive and free.