kill god

kill god

that god be God

freed from musts 

and freed from wants

from puerile dreams

from cash and prayers

from self-charming thrusts

that bridle God

then smash the idols

letting them go

for god is God

when God IS God

un-bottled, un-throttled

roaming' free

then one might find

what one has lost

by holding tight

to the One Who's True

*There is nothing as Beautiful as God.

*Reflections of Frederick Beuchner:

  -Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless.  It is most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart.  It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

  -To say that love is God is romantic idealism.  To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

  -In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will.

  -This other war is the war not to conquer but the war to become whole and at peace inside our skins.  It is a war not of conquest now but of liberation because the object of this other war is to liberate that dimension of selfhood which has somehow become lost, that dimension of selfhood that involves the capacity to forgive and to will the good not only of the self but of all the other selves.  This other war is the war to become a human being.  This is the goal that we are really after and that God is really after.  This is the goal that power, success and security are only the forlorn substitutes for.  This is the victory that not all our human armory of self-confidence and wisdom and personality can win for us - not simply to be treated as human but to become at last truly human.  

kicking ass for Jesus

vested in his devotional best

soutane with cowl and a floppy hood

he was an artless hack

standing on the corner in his collared shirt

baby blue with Reebok's covering his feet

a rosary and cross stuffed in his karate belt:

for sure, a man of faith ministering in the night

poised and geared to kiss ass for Jesus

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -We find by losing.  We hold fast by letting go.  We become something new by ceasing to be something old.

  -Principles are what people have instead of God.  To be a Christian means among other things to be willing if necessary to sacrifice even your highest principles for God's or your neighbor's sake the way a Christian pacifist must be willing to pick up a baseball bat if their's no other way to stop a man from savagely beating a child.

Jesus didn't forgive his executioners on principle but because in some unimaginable way he was able to love them.  "Principle" is an even duller word than "Religion."

  -To suffer in love for another's suffering is to love life not only at its fullest but at its holiest.

K-mart Jesus

twas mid-October

the turkey hadn't been dressed

when I strolled into K-Mart searching

for some item other than what was found

saw baby jesus decked in $wadling clothes

displayed with tinsel that was sure to impress

his name had been changed

his face sprouted a beard

they called him Santa Claus

giving him reign near a mysterious crib

jammed with assinine stuff

for the corporate god-head

jesus was enough to draw money in

duping the poor with illusory "more"

pulling cash from their pockets

while stocking the shelves

tis the season to be jolly

putting jesus on the shelf

Santa with his $alesman laugh

having duped the believers again

*How does one go about searching for lost visions, lost hopes in an atmosphere of dreams and lust? Much appears a dread river, flowing with sour tea, moving toward the "whatever", slipping through the lips of degenerate guides.

*Reflections of Frederick Buechner:

  -"If there's one thing makes me want to puke, it's a friendly divorce,"  Bebb said.  "If it's got to be, give me a divorce that's hateful.  When you're friends, stay put.  So what if it's not all moonlight and roses?  What is?  Stay put because if you don't, you'll spend the rest of your life looking to find each other in the face of strangers." 

  -...suffering is holy.

  -That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: that not even across great distances of time and space did they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate.  And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move us closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth. 

  -Part, at least, of what I believe the New Testament means by calling Jesus himself the Word of God is that in the final analysis not even the most authentic and inspired words he ever spoke could exhaust the mystery he came to reveal, and that when he proclaimed not "What I say is the truth" but instead, "I am the truth," he meant, among other things, that the truth cannot be fully caught in any expression of the truth in words but only in the great eliquence and complexity of his own life