January 25, 2007 :




The witness and the albic dawn of things equally real….

I remember the turgid green of a sea breaking with force against its eastern shore, Cyprus invisible in the far distance. The color was beautiful and the water dangerous. It came to me with the recitation of these words: The sea is his for he made it…. (Venite) I remember the wind. It all surprised me, knowing the Mediterranean to be non-tidal, and nearly enclosed, and so much smaller than the Atlantic and Pacific, despite the stories, I thought of it as placid.

I think about that sea, the symbolism of it, the turgid green danger of life…is his. It’s a profession of faith, a way of interacting with the world. (Clearly there are other ways.) Not the absence of danger, but the belonging of the danger to the source of it all.

The last verse of a lesson appointed for this morning: And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. He would have prayed to the him of the sea, words he would have had memorized the Psalms being his prayer book, though the referenced sea, I presume, was Galilee, a sea also of high dangerous winds sweeping down from Mt. Hermon (Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.... Descend from the crest of Amana, from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. You have ravished my heart….) and turgid waters.

The heights of the hills are his for he made them. He went up the mountain to pray, the mountain that was his. It was late; he had crossed the sea twice or at least had moved along the shore twice that day by boat, so the story goes, and was near Bethsaida (location uncertain) on the northeast of the sea. He went up a hill alone to be united with the one he called Father.

I wonder: Was he witness to the albic dawn.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

January 25, 2007 : Reverie on the Venite





The witness and the albic dawn of things equally real….

I remember the turgid green of a sea breaking with force against its eastern shore, Cyprus invisible in the far distance. The color was beautiful and the water dangerous. It came to me with the recitation of these words: The sea is his for he made it…. (Venite) I remember the wind. It all surprised me, knowing the Mediterranean to be non-tidal, and nearly enclosed, and so much smaller than the Atlantic and Pacific, despite the stories, I thought of it as placid.

I think about that sea, the symbolism of it, the turgid green danger of life…is his. It’s a profession of faith, a way of interacting with the world. (Clearly there are other ways.) Not the absence of danger, but the belonging of the danger to the source of it all.

The last verse of a lesson appointed for this morning: And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. He would have prayed to the him of the sea, words he would have had memorized, the Psalms being his prayer book, though the referenced sea, I presume, was Galilee, a sea also of high dangerous winds sweeping down from Mt. Hermon (Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.... Descend from the crest of Amana, from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. You have ravished my heart….) and turgid waters.

The heights of the hills are his for he made them. He went up the mountain to pray, the mountain that was his. It was late; he had crossed the sea twice or at least had moved along the shore twice that day in a boat, so the story goes, and was near Bethsaida (location uncertain) on the northeast of the sea. He went up a hill alone to be united with the one he called Father.

I wonder: Was he there as witness to the albic dawn.

January 24, 2007 : Finding the Lumionous Amongst the Gore

It is a nightmare to begin a day pondering on the head of John the Baptist! a gruesome still life on a platter. What gave rise to such a fiction just outside the caesura of grace? In search of the luminous element. Once, long ago, in a hospital room a man of Greek Orthodox persuasion showed me this head dripping gore tattooed on his left forearm. We were saying prayers for his wife. The detached head was an icon for him of some spiritual power, an identity unretrievable for me, a representation of faith speaking into the face of worldly power.

Contemplation: a reverent and pious approach, the prelude to the poem;
Laughter: the eternal sea will never learn to laugh.

There is in Mark perhaps a little element of humorous derision, an insider’s wink, toward Herod Antipas whose step-daughter would never have been called upon to entertain his guests with the dance of seven veils, and a harkening back to the alluring and painted Jezebel Ahab’s queen, patron of the Astarte, womb of the universe, before whom Elijah stood as the prophets of Baal bloodied themselves and raved on, and who were later slain by the sons of this Elijah enthused with the Spirit of Yahweh: and God was in the still small voice. A contrast in styles.

John the hermit dressed in exomis vis-à-vis an orgy of excess. Who is remembered and honored this day, the king Herod or the hermit whose head the king could have, but whose spirit was still alive in that hospital room?

The sea raves humorless and indifferent, and still we must laugh in the face of the pretense of the powerful.

January 23, 2007 : The Double Helix of Splendor



It is as if there were this bracketed dispensation of grace, a short period of time anointed with receptive guilelessness, a time of wholeness when word and touch whisked up a double helix of splendor. I wonder what would happen if cynicism died, of course: a pretend. So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them. Then a snake parting the grass by Emily Dickinson: But never met this Fellow / Attended, or alone / Without a tighter breathing / And Zero at the Bone—

Both of these are luminous things. Both are a parting of the grass where a spotted shaft is seen, and then a closing that opens further on. Both a Zero at the Bone though one a more profound Zero than the other, one a dispensation of wonder in sanctified history, the other a marvel in a sanctified backyard.

To address the world as Thou, the ethic of dignity, redeeming the serpent, re-sanctifying touch.

I rise in search of that opening further on, that bracketed dispensation of grace to come, when hands and words form the tender of the realm in which we abide along with the song of the pine warbler in the predawn dark, the dark shimmer of aubade that too tightens the breath.

January 22, 2007 : Cranial Occlusions




The sun has failed to appear
Today as have words. There’s an Indian,
Red American, not Asian, who believes
The written word to be the death
Of the spirit of language. I was
Reading of him--only way
I would have any knowledge of him--
While sitting in the red chair
In the corner of the orange (sunset)
Room, though much of the house
Is a sect of orange. Above me
A hole, ragged and irregular, has formed
In the ceiling scratched from above
Where nests a gray squirrel that entered
From the shed roof of the added room. Earlier
I climbed a ladder and sprayed
Red fox urine into the nest
Hoping to put the fear of place
Into the soul of the rodent(s)
And for it to repent and leave, implying in a sense,
The food chain: red fox eats gray
Squirrel. I believe
The Indian.

January 21, 2007 : Morning Miracle



It’s morning.
The wind is rising and the rain is coming.
I read of a dead beetle on a foreign road—
I pictured it dirt—
Originally written of in Polish.
The vision of the sunlight reflecting off
Its hard green-bronze carapace is my own,
Three pairs of legs neatly stowed the poets.

I read of a man who lay by a pool thirty-eight years
Waiting; he was lame. What else was to be done?
I wondered about the number thirty-eight
That neither twelve nor three is a factor of.
It is a factoral prime and it is the number
Of slots on an American roulette wheel. John
Would not have known this. It is eight
More than thirty: a really long time to wait.

I wondered about his atrophied muscles
If suddenly some one said to him, Rise,
Take up your pallet and walk. It was the Sabbath,
A day of rest. The beetle could do it.
The man could not. Already in the outside,
Even in the dark, the pine warbler sings
In a world full of birds and miracle.

Revisionism and Creation : the Origin of the Super Bowl



We rise to the Sabbath, the day the Lord we are told drew back from his work and rested. This much is true. Now for the rest of the story:

Having plucked two or three ripe avocados and having made a sumptuous guacamole, and having chopped a couple tomatillas with cilantro and notched up a bit with a little Serrano, God sat back with a bowl of chips, the dip, and the salsa verde, put his feet up on bole of an oak made for this purpose, and intended to watch the Super Bowl 4000BCE. Imagine the divine disappointment in finding the Super Bowl had not yet been invented. In all his divine omniscience God just had not given this detail any thought: imagine, a day of rest and no football! Making a note of this God decided to create a Pete Rozelle DNA and toss it into the gene pool on the morrow. Since a thousand years is like a day to God it would not matter much if this gene formed in the womb about the time of Abraham and Sarah, a thousand years later when bushes burned and were not consumed (think of the advertising windfall this would have inspired), or within fifteen minutes or so coincident to the creation of the Mustang. Needless to say, world history (and the fate of Detroit and therefore the careers of Eminem…the Supremes…Smokey Robinson) may have been a bit altered had this gene come to term during the reign of Decius what with the ascendancy of the Lions and their favorite arena toy the Christians. (Well, it didn’t; ‘nough said, no need in speculating about divine providence, kismet, or whether Joan d’Arc would have driven the Brits from Orleans on Friday May 8, 1429.)

God satisfied divine intention, but by the time Rozelle’s era did finally (in human currency) arrive, Saturday had become Sunday and Nikola Tesla had discovered AC allowing for football as well on Monday in lighted arenas and domes and things (thank goodness, that is to say, Providentially, Dandy Don Meredith was willing to lay aside bass fishing for a few seasons), and hence we have both Super Bowl Sunday (after Mass, which is before breakfast) with Monday Night Football thrown in.

After the game God could be heard saying, That salsa is good, in fact it is very good; it is simply divine.

January 19, 2007 : Stillness: Surrounding, Sustaining, Strenghtening




…Into your hands I commend my spirit
(for you have redeemed me,
O Lord, O God of truth).


A foreshadowing of Passion Sunday as today Psalm 31 is appointed, and (in part) is recited by Christ from the cross as his last words according to this year’s Passion narrative, Luke.

A gracious death portrayed, and not that alone, to die as one had lived…in the hands of God, apparently without reservation. This is portrayed by Mark differently (in today’s Gospel): Jesus asleep in the stern on the storm-riddled sea, Peace, be still.

In July of 2001 the Quakers held a conference in the mountains of Virginia the theme of which was:

Stillness: Surrounding, Sustaining, Strengthening

Here Stillness was defined in the words of Thomas Kelly, that objective, dynamic Presence which enfolds us all, nourishes our souls, speaks glad unutterable comfort within us, and quickens in us depths that had before been slumbering. Somehow in the boat on the storm-riddled sea as well as on the cross Jesus had this stillness until death, was embraced by the objective, dynamic Presence.

January 18, 2006 : Thursday : The Hinduish prayer





…In you we live and move and have our being. The collect for Thursday, the Hinduish prayer, inside and outside the mouth of god; living in the river of God challenged by the spiritual assertion of deutero-Isaiah: there is nothing outside of the moral provenance of God along with the insistence, the absolute insistence, that overarching the universe and under girding it, justice and mercy, despite all appearances (an assertion the author of Night disputes whose soul as a child witnessed the death of God. All is grace, responds Mauriac. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him—the immutable, ever running river).


The tail wagging the dog (the Bible is not without its ethnocentrisms), or early experiments in chaos theory, that behind it all, the Strange Attractor…. This is a story of Marco Polo telling the Great Kahn of the Invisible Cities and the name of the city is Ersilia, a city of webs of intricate relationship seeking a form. (This, of course, is also the morning.)


And I have read from A Book of Luminous Things of a dragonfly, carnation, and of a butterfly as the cold near-ice rain falls sounding gutturals in the gullet of the downspout, a toll: all things with wings, all beautiful and delicate; all perishable things.

While reading about aboriginal forms of birds painted on a ceiling obsessively by a man who suddenly ignored all other responsibility and about whom it came to be known was suffering from Parkinson’s or some form of dementia, it came to me that before he died, Kingsley Amis had typed over and over again on a piece of writing paper while sitting before a window, seagull: the mystery of wings and spiritual entities, all things spiritual are represented with wings, all departures are flights. The dove of Pentecost, the dove and raven of Noahan lore, the Raven of the Koyukon people by whom the world was formed: Ponder the ravens for they neither sow nor reap.

All is grace: we are simply not the product of our own doing: we came to be in the womb of another. Though all conceptions are not immaculate, there is more than one immaculate conception.

January 17, 2007 : a dream-compelled narration



5:20AM: already overcome by a welter of words (and I have spoken none): a penitential psalm of great antiquity, words of Isaiah from the time of Cyrus the Great (6th century BCE), a lesson from Ephesians that could not have been written before 80 or 90 of this era (deutero-Pauline), the Gospel of Mark from about 70CE, several collects; a poem of a Polish poet born 10 years after me, and one of an American living in Hawaii born 25 years before me. Read the plot summaries of both the film The Incredible Shrinking Man and the novel it was based upon, and a phrase of Martin Amis, “(his) soul had been doing the work of decrease” (self-referencing comments). And there are still the images of that strange detritus of the night, dreams … that are, I suppose, the detritus of the previous day(s). Is there an eye (I) to this storm?
The psalm (38) spoke not a word to me; it felt a little like self-loathing…self-indulgent.
Am fairly amazed by this Isaiah who claims Cyrus is a servant of the Hebrew God doing this god’s calling though he, Cyrus, does not know this God. It is a remarkably open and embracing posture from such a provincial setting: reading world history from my backyard.
How modern, meaning normal, this church in Ephesus seems with all its little petty disputes and conflicts; how really sweet is the message: be tender to one another.
You wonder reading Mark why someone(s) allowed this sermonette to be attached to the parable; it too is a work of decrease.

But it’s water, peaches, and the sun that remain etched in my brain, the poetic images and the little orchard we planted this fall, an Asian pear, a Fuji apple, and two Georgia peaches.
Does the setting sun recite its own poetry … believe in its resurrection?
The rain from two days ago will move from the iridescent clay, up through the roots of the peaches and become the nectar that dribbles down our chins back into the clay as we bite into one of those peaches (two years from now) ripened by sun that will have resurrected numerous times despite its indifference: the irony of divine love, or the divine irony of love.

January 16, 2007 : Mark 3: 19b & ff

Will be a day of sun
Locked out behind iron
Curtain and rain. Rising to ruin
Dream land, though key to pick up
Wonders of new day: there once was a woman
With the phthisical mate
Who used his still body to incubate
Hen eggs before he died…and cooled;
Then: of those who tried to seize Him
And those thinking Him
A money bank try to enshrine Him
For profit, set up shop: they would come
And pay to pray to; one hates to think
Of greed amongst the Holy
Family; Mark did: before there was belief
There was cool detachment, willingness
Toward pragmatic exploitation
Of prayer and magical power. Just lay your hands
On the TV set: feel the healing
Power …. send the check: better the woman
With the phthisical mate
Who used his body to incubate….

January 11, 2007



The day began with a reading of a resurrection appearance from the 6th chapter of John…Jesus walking by night in the storm to the boat: He crosses the sea to be with those who follow him: the power of allegory. How the Gospel written “from above” though as allegory becomes “from below” so accessible, so meaningful, and moving, so hard-and-fast real. Jesus, then, in these post resurrection times (that is, the same dispensation as the disciples in the boat) is not our friend who is with us as an unmistakable companion, but rather one who is a vague but sure presence who appears to us as an embodied intuition… to me in the dark silence of the pre-dawns, to all of us, despite Nietzsche, when 2 or 3 are gathered in his name.
My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire
as does a spider
hang her baby on a thin web.
…just a thin vein with blood pushing back and forth in it
and some love.
(Anne Sexton)

January 4, 2007 Ponder the Raven

I wonder if there was ever a moment when a cardinal sitting outside my window sat there in blazing splendor signifying nothing.

We benefit greatly from rabbinic commentary on all aspects of Hebrew Scripture and so too on the Burning Bush of Exodus though I do not believe any scholar has suggested that the Bush was in fact a cardinal sitting in blazing splendor. Rabbenau Bechaya suggests though that the Bush is a paradigm for all physical reality that being a spiritual creation of God is overwhelmed by a spiritual flow emanating from God, and that the Bush is not consumed is a sign of God’s providential sustaining of the universe: we are not alone.

It has also been stated that the Bush is a sign of humility, that God is present in the most trivial of things…a bush. And it has been stated that this was an early undeveloped exposure of Moses to God, later he could hear God directly absent the need of a visual structure unlike all other prophets of the Old Testament.

A theodicy, we are taught. Different from an epiphany, which is an insight, an idea made manifest; a theodicy is an experience of a god’s self-disclosure, that is it is a sacrament, a mediated experience of God. In the burning bush that was not consumed Moses experiences Yahweh’s total and infinite compassion, the God who remembers the people’s suffering and inspires the will of leaders to act on God’s behalf with the transforming power of God that saves without consuming: the Eucharistic wafer is eaten and there is no less the body of Christ, but the more of it in the world.

I sit before the window. The fires burn blue. Why this year for the first time do the blue birds come to the feeders in half dozens? The cardinal blazes in divine splendor, the blue bird simmers the sustaining and sanctifying truth of the divine superabundance available to eyes, ears, hands, and mouths of the blind, the deaf, the feeble, and the hungry. Ponder the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap....

A Tale of Two Visions


Pat Robertson was visited by God
and this self-proclaimed prophet
foretells of a reign of chaos and destruction
and christens the politics of fear
as the new gospel: Fear conquers love.
How different his dream than Jacob's, for instance,
at the spot he came to call Bethel,
where a ziggurat reached to heaven
atop of which danced those messengers of God
in divine beatitude
commercing with the creatures of earth
and above them Yahweh, presiding;
here the exiled Jacob at war with brother and uncle
is promised a home ... a reprieve from terror ...
the old way of fear is transcended by the new
the way of promise, hope, prosperity, future,
and that which is the most solid symbol
of eternal life: children.
Again, the assertion, I am with you...
we are not alone (in this): the Christmas name
Emmanuel.

January 2, 2007

Lech lecha: experiencing the world as home, the birth of the ecological principle.

Much has been said about these ancient obscure words (appointed for this morning’s prayer) that have no direct parallel in English, the words that form the matrix of ethical monotheism. I believe it is Ravelstein, Saul Bellow’s last literary character, who says in profound nonchalance, As everyone knows, we are alone. Bellow is a respectful non believer, non practicing Jew, a scion of Abraham but not a follower, though like Abraham an intellectual whose intellect challenges the received orthodoxy: Abraham’s assertion: beyond the sun and the moon there is one organizing personal force of Grace, a universal brainstem integrating the two lobes of the brain, more like a person than a blind force, but as a force, more like the tug of gravity that is the physics of love…the Strange Attractor of Chaos Theory.

That aspirant, the breath of life, that wind of creation, that Spirit of Pentecost, is added to his name signifying the spiritual element of God has entered him; that Ravelstein is wrong, we are not alone and we belong to this earth; it is our home wherever we are from, wherever we roam, even as we experience ourselves as alien, disaffected, living in estrangement.

The words function like the Christian cross, a call of renunciation and in that a promise of hope: to have a future of Grace the perceived absolutes of the present must be denied, the gamble must be waged.