O Lord, let us, let us!

Can our "beauty" capture the beauty that is in you?
Can our "truth" do justice to the truth of you?
Can our reason reason out the reason in you?
Can one man's theology lead another to you?
Is there one among us who knows the way to you better than you yourself do?
O Lord, have mercy on us, help us never to let our theology replace you!
O Lord, let not your light shine upon us in vain!
O Lord, let us, let us!

O Lord, let not your light shine upon us in vain!

Merry Christmas to all, believers and nonbelievers.

A 27 secs street scene

Beggar: Brother, Can you spare a penny?
Passer-by: Here! (he gives him a penny)
Beggar: Thanks and God bless you!(so that he may continue to give)
Passer-by: Thanks and God bless you too!(so that he does not have to beg)

What's in a name, Bishop?

"The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah. It is also common in the Arab world: Christian and Muslim Arabs use the words God and Allah interchangeably."
Christian Arabs use the word Allah because it means God in their language.Christianity being older religion than Islam, it is obvious that Christian Arab used that word long before the Muslims. However, that does not make the word "allah" more appropriate name for God than the word "god". Bishop Musken,if you want to call Him Allah or Ishwar or Bhagwan or Laininghtou,or whatever, that's fine by me.Just don't expect me to follow your lead. And don't you be coming around with a proposal like "let's all celebrate mass in Arabic". I like to pray to God in a language that I speak. I like to listen to sermon preached in a language that I understand. I believe that God is the giver of all tongues. So, naturally,He speaks all languages. But I, on the other hand, understand and speak only one or two. So, when I call upon His holy name "God" He can surely hear me just as well as He can hear you call upon Him in Arabic. By the way, I, at times, feel that Islam is a vehicle for Arab hegemony.

The blinds also see!

Blind #1: God does not play hide-and-seek with man.
Blind #2: On the contrary, not only does God play the game of
hide-and-seek with man but also hides in places where He
cannot be found.
Blind #3: No need to get bogged down with any debates and dialogues!
Just plant your faith, and He will give it its fruits.
Blind #4: We are all blind and God is thinner than air!

Because

Because I cannot speak
I try to write;
Because I cannot write
I try to feel;
Because I cannot feel
I am silent
Having turned into stone.

Origin of species via natural selection

Catholics ought to embrace Charles Darwin's theory on the origin of species by means of natural selection. After all, it is a process operating at every levels of animate and inanimate world and is as obvious as the back of one's own hand. Also, it surprises me when a Christian fundamentalist while vehemently denouncing evolution as an agent of creation of life and everything else, conveniently forgets that Gregor Mendel, the "father of genetics" was an Augustinian monk. In addition, a Jesuit priest by the name Georges Maitre was responsible for what is known today as "Big Bang theory" of the origin of the universe. Interestingly, both these contributions strike at the very roots of origin of life and the universe we live in. These men ought to be elevated to the status of prophet, for, indeed, it is to them that God revealed the wonders of His magnificent creation.

Thus

I went to the old market to buy some fish.

Out of many that I saw, I made my choice

Upon one as handsome as any salmon can be,

And asked the man to clean it for me.

While he was working the scales from head towards the tail

I asked if he would too sever its head.

Politely, he offered to crack mine open instead

and at no cost examine it, if there ever was a need.

I was told he was a neurosurgeon of great repute

(And he left practice of surgery due to a dispute)

Now offering his service for free,

While making a living selling fish.

Then, with the precision of a well-practiced surgeon

He brought down the cutting-edge of the knife upon

where it was meant to strike sharp

And in one skillful stroke thus

Separated irreversibly sanity from all insanity.

Memory

Misuse of Imagination

Dust

I sleep on the floor on a bed

Made from a firm pad of foam

On a 6 by 8 Afghan rug

From where I lay my head on a pillow

I can see a fresh layer of dust on the hardwood floor

I remember cleaning and wiping the floor not too long ago

There is dust everywhere on the floor on the wall and on my name

At this rate I will soon be six feet under the dust

If I understand infinity I understand it only through the omnipresence of dust.

What I heard on CBC Radio Today

Lord, I believe in You.
Hope, You believe in me too.

Leaving my massacred city/ trying to escape

In the wider sense of things, every town is a big town.
My beloved city of vicious gunfights and brilliant poppy!
I will not forget of the days you nursed me to life
with water dripping from your festering wounds
You were once a city that rose from a field of dream, morning after morning,
Now you lay massacred in my arms.
Your drunken walls are falling over the bullet riddled streets
Every rundown street leads to the edge of some blown up field
And graphics of spilled blood left uncleaned for lasting effects.
So much bloodshed in the street, every time the traffic light turns red
I run for cover to hide my unknown face behind a wall of glass.

Be not angry with me, my maternal city, born of the rays of morning star.
I got to lay you down some place and I got to get me out o’here to some place,
Way beyond that untouchable space, if possible.
All I got is a bagful of cheap tricks learned in your whore houses
But not much education.
They take me so far, so far as the end of the street and not much beyond.
“Why walk when you can fly” is what others say. Too bad, I cannot fly!
I was born a fish with a pair of fins that for a while won’t be becoming wings .
Days of my life are numbered, although I do not know how many there are.
I believe Death will come soon knocking at my window.
I got to think up something before it is too late to worry about.
But when you got no education and the brain has no regulations,
It always dreams what it wants to dream.
And it often dreams of spilled blood in a blown up field of poppy.
And soon, I too start to bloom like a poppy without petals
at the bottom of a ditch which was once a city.

I like a bit of drama but this is much more than I can handle.
Time goes by and no amount of drama can stop it.
I am thinking of long and dry summer landscape
filled with stones in the dust
Wondering how not to find myself
at the foot of a busted rainbow.

Building Balance Sheet

Lines - struck out, words - highlighted
For emphasis,
Faces - erased from memory,
Strange words bringing life to my voice,
All daylong I edit in and I edit out the hours.
What I added to the morning,
I canceled it out in the evening.
See, how I play tricks with life, and it lets me
Get away with them, time and again.
But in the profit and loss analysis
My days look like one messed up balance sheet
Restated many times over for clarity.
A scheming being getting lost
In the labyrinth of his own design!

Let me grow dizzy

Twirl me, twirl me around your fingers,
O Lord, and let me grow dizzy in loving you.

Names

Kenneth Lay Enron Corporation Bernard Madoff Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. R. Allen Stanford Stanford Group Conrad Black Hollinger International Bernie Ebbers WorldCom Dennis L. Kozlowski Tyco International Jeffrey Skilling Enron Corporation Abraham Kennard Pastor Milorad Rod R Blagojevich Illinois Governor Al Parish Professor Charleston Southern University Lou Pearlman Andrew Kissel Barton Watson Charles Ponzi Theoneste Bagosora Rwanda Augustin Bizimungu Robert Mugabe Marion Barry Paul Greenwood Stephen Walsh Westridge Capital Mgmt Mark Bloom North Hill Fund Stephen Walsh Paul Greenwood W.G. Trading Co. Dr. Charles Smith Pathologist City of Toronto Madoff made off Dr. Cecil B. Jacobson Reproductive Genetics Center Ltd Dr. Quincy Fortier

Long Way Home

"But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify".- Richard Wilbur

What I heard in the Street

Those who kill themselves rarely live to laugh the last laugh.
And the nations that promote killing babies in the womb go into extinction before long.
Absence of evidence ain’t no evidence for absence. Therefore, God is true.
Snowboarding is a pleasure while waterboarding is a torture.
Nothing can uproot Hamas from Palestine but the people of Palestine.
A tiger, though a powerful beast, is ill-equipped to kill a fly. So, Israelis should change their war tactics against Hamas.
And that scientists are the better-evolved philosophers.

A Stone for Mother

Absence, an absence of knowing, hangs
like a thick veil over her aged face.
Her memory – graying and fading fast.
Mother is losing her memory.
She knew she was losing memory.
It began as one or two incidents,
of confusion and misplaced mementos.
Mother said it was only natural.
It was only natural for someone, like her,
who has lived well beyond her prime,
like an ancient star burning its last out,
burns up the old memories,
burning all the bridges
to one’s childhood and words.
She lived her prime,
prime of her life in raising,
single-handedly,
all of me to all of heavens,
her only child
from a marriage
that was undone
By a vague sentence left
unwritten between two stanzas.
O woman,
from the plains
of a certain sun-baked continent,
I can’t let you cease to be my mother,
even though, I stopped existing
in your vanished memory.
O woman, who lives
in a reality diminished by forgetfulness,
even though,
you exist forever beyond my reach,
as some benevolent deity,
you are still my mother.
From mother to daughter,
From womb to womb and
to the womb of the Earth,
at the end of the long sentence,
an amorphous stone with no inscription.
But the sentence is not complete,
It will not complete
Until I too pull the veil of absence
over my face ,
turning into silence.

O merciful God, giver of harsh laws,
if You had wanted her to be stone
why as a woman was she born,
to be my mother?

Hmmm

Outside, something has been falling.
Rain or snow, I cannot tell.
But something has been falling & falling real hard.
I hope it is food and drink falling from heaven.
it is day 3 or may be 5 since my last meal.
I am hungry, really hungry.
Hunger eats man alive.

It is early spring in Ontario.
Still cold, but I see green of grass
Among the brown leaves of winter.
I see also new buds on the naked branches of trees.
Winter is not wholly gone yet.
The words that I wrote last night
All have melted in the chill of the morning air,
And rise above the horizon as blue mist.
Those were the words about love.

Winter is not wholly gone yet.
SUVs and pickup trucks and their fluorescent head lights
Are speeding fearlessly on the snow-covered Queen E W
Burning holes in the back of my neck
Burning holes in the retina of my eyes.
Man, what are you doing here?
Drive fast or get out of the way.
The meek shall inherit the earth
And inherit they did till
They too turn mighty.
Both meek and mighty –
Life is like an egg balanced
By an uncertain breath
On the tip of a blade of grass.
I don’t drink and drive and
Among them I drive fearlessly on Whiskey highway.
But I like drinking wine, it is like listening Chopin.
It makes me feel fortunate that I have a moment.
A moment of undisturbed living to ponder,
About love without longing.
The words that I wrote last night,
All have melted in the chill of the morning air.
Robins haven’t begun their song.
Although winter is not gone yet
There is still left some unexercised happiness.
Love having fallen from the sky,
Lies melting in my doorway
As a pile of white snow.

Seed Leaves

(the last two stanzas of a poem titled "Seed Leaves" by Richard Wilbur)

This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast and climb
To the tip end of time
With all of space to fill,
Like boundless Igdrasil
That has the stars for fruit.

But something at the root
More urgent than that urge
Bids two true leaves emerge,
And now the plant, resigned
To being self-defined
Before it can commerce
With the great universe,
Takes aim at all the sky
And starts to ramify.

Wall Street crumbling

Oh those wall street wizards! It's time someone throws their asses in jail.

Prayer

Once before the day begins and
once at the closing of the day,
she kneels down on the ground uneven
to gather in her arms the sky and the earth
and in a language foreign to me
mumbles a word or two; making a sign of the Cross.
And we passed the night unharmed.
Then did I realize, to her God she had been.

Canada

By Billy Collins from Sailing Alone Around the Room

I am writing this on a strip of white birch bark
that I cut from a tree with a penknife.
There is no other way to express adequately
the immensity of the clouds that are passing over the farms
and wooded lakes of Ontario and the endless visibility
that hands you the horizon on a platter.

I am also writing this on a wooden canoe,
a point of balance in the middle of lake Couchiching,
resting the birch bark against my knees.
I can feel the sun's hands on my bare back,
but I am thinking of winter,
snow piled up in all provinces
and the solemnity of the long grain-ships
that pass the cold months moored at Owen Sound.

O Canada, as the anthem goes,
scene of my boyhood summers,
you are the pack of Sweet Caporals on the table,
you are the dove-soft train whistle in the night,
you are the empty chair at the end of an empty dock.
You are the shelves of books in a lakeside cottage:
Gift from the sea by Anne Morrow lindbergh,
A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Ann of Avonlea by L. M. Montgomery,
So You are Going to Paris! by Clara E. laughlin,
and Peril Over the Airport, one
of the Vicky Barr Flight stewardess series
by Helen Wills who some will remember
as the author of the Cherry Ames Nurse stories.

What has become of the languorous girls
who would pass the long limp summer evenings reading
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, Cherry Ames, Senior Nurse,
Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, and Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse?
Where are they now, the ones who shared her adventures
as a veterans' nurse, private duty nurse, visiting nurse,
cruise nurse, night supervisor, mountaineer nurse,
dude ranch nurse (there is little she has not done)
rest home nurse, department store nurse,
boarding school nurse and country doctor's nurse?

O Canada, I have not forgotten you,
and as I kneel in my canoe, beholding this vision
of a bookcase, I pray that I remain in your vast,
polar, North American memory.
You are the paddle, the snowshoe, the cabin in the pines.
You are Jean de Brebeuf with his martyr's necklace of
hatchet heads.
You are the moose in the clearing and the moosehead
on the wall.
You are the rapids, the propeller, the kerosene lamp.
You are the dust that coats the roadside berries.
But not only that.
You are the two boys with pails walking along that road,
and one of them, the taller one minus the straw hat, is me.

Three

As son of Mary, as Jesus, born into a world of harsh laws,
God came installing Himself rightly within man,
Giving himself up ultimately became a mortal for his sake.

Two

Gautama also called Buddha,
As man he came cancelling God
Wrongly in his wake.
By a twist of fate,
However, men had made him god palpable
In their midst.

One

Because God is within man,
In the twilight of consciousness,
Man claims: I am God therefore I am.

Out of clay God created man in His image,
So man is only a god made of clay,
A god who is a mere man who returns to being dust
In the end.

A prayer

I wanted to share this prayer with those who by chance stray into this blog. I believe it is one of many prayers of the Carthusian monks. I picked it up from a book titled "An infinity of little hours" by Nancy Klein Maguire. Here it is:
“Sustain me, Lord, as you have promised, that I may live; disappoint me not in my hope.”

Mysticism: is it the real thing ?

Liquid like water

If you see me in deep waters,
I ask you to please let me be alone,
I am not drowning. When I am liquid like water
I want to be with the weightless sea.
I want to remain suspended, beneath the surface,
breathing in and breathing out thick marine air
with immense lung of the deep. Because answers
come to me in bits and pieces of undefined questions,
I like to think with the hollowness of wind,
Being liquid I soak up all things – trash and truth.
Like the sea, I am filled with filth and purity
Heavier than many lifetimes.

Sin in sex

If only sex were boring and painful, there would be no worries about sins and ills of illegal sex. Imagine there is no pleasure in sex we would avoid having sex like the plague. The population of course will dwindle and the species will fail. Then, not to have sex would be a grave mortal sin, truly!

Building a sun, one word at a time

You came from those pale blue eyes,
disregarding all my concerns and opinions,
at such a time in my life when I almost did not exist.
You came in my life, like music from another ocean,
With unfamiliar rhythms and tragedy.
Your words and songs made little sense to me.
I had not begun to understand then.
What did you expect of me, I was only
a kid from rough end of the village,
unlettered in your ways and language,
interested more in my existence than your resurrection?

Because it was dark when I came to this world,
I wanted to place another sun in the sky.
I spent hours, working often late into nights,
Trying to build a sun out of my available resources.
In the scheme of things which is greater than I can comprehend,
Perhaps there ought not to be two suns in the same sky,
And half a dozen suns can never dispel the darkness within.
I have realized that certain things must be left the way they are
and original order of creation being one among them. Since then,
I have abandoned my project, although I am no quitter.
Now, I understand, my existence in eternity is
a function of your resurrection in reality.
So, I say let night be night and it is perfect, perfect like the weather.
Let dust cover my face and name and that too is perfect,
As perfect as a flower blooming in the distant memory.
Your words when spelt out become stars in my sky.
Be my sun, simply, O Lord, in the dark sky of my soul.

Stolen fire wounded earth

Before the thick dusk from the dark water rises
we lit brightly the earth by a certain fire
said to have been stolen by a man named Prometheus.
Prometheus, it was said of him, as punishment, was fed to vultures when he was alive.
On our degenerating liver we now let the vultures feed, to keep the fire alive.
While the world shines bright, the glow in our souls gently fades.

There are inventions and uninventions in every cycle of progression and regression.
There are questions to be asked and answers to be found.
For all the answers that are sought there is earth, rare and rich.
At will and with no concern, we dig, and dig deep with arms
hewn out of iron and corrugated imagination.
We are surprised by what we find and we marvel at our reach. Truly,
if the earth were human, we are the worms feeding upon her flesh,
killing her slowly, killing ourselves consequently.
Earth perforated, earth scarred,
Earth too much wounded by civilization,
Who, among us, will heal her?

And I wonder

Once I came across a man. He seemed happy,
happy like a ghost visible in the broad daylight.
Without a care, he was walking, making his way
among the automobiles of one late afternoon.
And he walked as if he was walking on the water,
touching the ground barely.
One might say, of sorrows he seemed truly free.
Although, what you see is what you get, clearly,
there seems to be more than what meets the eye.
Life, I remember, is not containable,
not in a jar of one word.

Then they came, they came from such distances
for the pure joy of devising immortality and
designing unbroken lines of happiness. But
happiness as I know exists as geometry of fragments and
immortality, after certain age, loses its charms.
The old will leave the stage for the young,
because time does not reverse its course,
not under ordinary circumstances.

They keep coming from all directions and tribes
inventing privileged languages, symbols and signs:
Alpha and omega, cosmic constant, universal love,
ligase and kinase, centromeres and telomeres et cetera,
little realizing what telomeres are, the tail ends of
a chromosome, not really the center of life
in a world governed by forces besides fictions.

Outside the imaginable paradigms
a new life seems to be dawning.
And the life I once knew is already at stake.
I need to find my way back to Eden.
Someday, man will devise his own immortality,
but I wonder If he can save himself from all his ingenuity!

What are dreams if one cannot

If the heaven does not open its doors,
if the river did not return as rain,
who will water our dreams? And
wouldn’t the lilacs of spring crumble and fall back
as broken water upon an abandoned altar?

Branch by branch, from stamen to stamen,
a small grain of life ascends towards the infinite
to fill the space as keen as eye of a needle,
and in the end, to die a death which is full of happiness.
A happy death, having paid the dues in full measure!
A happy death, having arrived at the appointed destination!

Man cannot live without dreams having once dreamt before.
But what are dreams if one cannot undream them?
The river may never return or the lilacs may never bloom again.
But amidst all the unmapped corners I pause to offer
a simple hymn to the Almighty that
in dreaming life may be granted
a respite from its many schemes
and awakened free of harsh regrets.

Becoming

With clarity in my vision I step off the cliff-edge

to ride on the back of a beam of light.

My head explodes inside my mind,

I am thinking aloud and my thoughts have no voice.

To speak is human, I speak a language

and my language has no vocabulary.

Where I am, the space is filled with sky

and I fill the sky with invented voices.

My body is inside another body which is not mine.

Her lips spell me out and it is the silence.

With silence I erase my invented sky,

And, bit by bit, I become myself in solitude.

A short biography of river

From faraway mountains of my homeland,
a drop of water, a mere globule as slight as a trickle,
Drop by drop, dripping at one point in space
and over length of centuries, began its course
as thin as a ribbon of wet substance
towards an unknown geography.

It scratched out a line from winter to summer
across a map of unfamiliar landscape, full of
Dark nights and salamanders.
Drop by drop fed by dew from roots and leaves
of forest vegetations and wild grass, by fits and starts,
That water, that tiny drop of water became a river
between two regions of living with their opaque meanings.

Sometimes the earth opened its submarine gate and
At other times the mountains parted
and through their infinite thickness a river runs,
Enriched with spilled rubies and yellow stones.
Through them, a river runs to the call of another life,
its course as long as the eternity.

Amethyst of water from the hands of God,
in the land beyond its native horizon!
To that granite audacity which is humility
even the mountains must sometimes bow their heads.

Water

Water, that primeval element of creation,
Being humble, it is containable taking easily
The shape of that which contains it.
When poured into a kimono it blooms as a blossom of cherry,
Upon falling, it falls into a pair of blue eyes, turning into an ocean.

But when I fall into a haiku, I become a river.

Christian missionaries can help eradicate poverty

Efforts of several luminaries to get the rich nations to write off the debts of the poor nations are a wonderful gesture. In spite of these efforts, poverty will prevail if people do not have access to financial and business management knowledge. To give alms to the poor is a noble thing, but it is never enough to cover the face of poverty. Not even for one short single day. It will show up again soon. It is sadly true though, as some one wise once said, we will always have our poor. But we can reduce it to a manageable level. Western missionaries provide valuable social, educational and medical services in the poor countries of the world. Perhaps, these missionary teams may also consider including team members with financial and business skills who can teach, the people they are trying to help, how to run profitable small business and even make microloans to help them change their economic conditions. When given such knowledge, people tend to be more enterprising. Entrepreneurial spirits, together with good government-policy, can result in a vibrant economy.

“God seemed vaporous as any perfume” – Mary Karr

Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer by Mary Karr

To confess my unlikely Catholicism in Poetry—a journal founded in part on and for the godless, twentieth-century disillusionaries of J. Alfred Prufrock and his pals—feels like an act of perversion kinkier than any dildo-wielding dominatrix could manage on HBO’s “Real Sex Extra.” I can’t even blame it on my being a cradle Catholic, some brainwashed escapee of the pleated skirt and communion veil who—after a misspent youth and facing an Eleanor Rigby-like dotage—plodded back into the confession booth some rainy Saturday. Read the full article here

When Death Came Looking for Him

When death came looking for him he shouted back at it, “I cannot shut God's House!” This is the story of how a young Iraqi priest Fr. Ragheed and his companions were gunned down in the street. To read the full story click
here.

Woman indivisible

He cuts her up into cubes of shadows and light.
He pastes using many invented conjunctions
her eyes and their adjectives in the middle of my poetry,
and in his canvas pronouns of her various feminine forms.

At all angles and under varying shades of brightness,
there she is, for all to see, as prevalent as
parts of speech of language.
She sits in many of her fragmented poses,
Revealing only who she could have been,
While effortlessly concealing who she is, right
in the middle of our painted sentences and framed canvas.

Despite the earnest efforts both with paints and words,
she, something of her, always escapes our finite knowing
And stands outside of our vanquished labor,
incomprehensible and indivisible as infinity.

Inseparable

One single land dissected by two great rivers.
One solitary mass of earth divided
by a line of doubtful identity.
Here, rain ceases to be rain and
Children grow as bloodstained leaves of grass.
This land, some call it the battlefield;
for others, it is their homeland.
Here, the stray dogs greet
the dwellers in the morning
with insomnia of sharp yelps, and
vultures feast on their lifeless bodies
in the harsh noon.
Among these ruins one can not live.
But we live among these ruins!
Live among these and not have a heart
which is not wounded
by the memories of a vanished homeland?
Impossible in my language!
The wound needs healing.
Instead of the vile smell of gunpowder,
fragrance of jasmine in the air,
this spring, and the spring after that.

Having lived together long,
longer than many lifetimes,
in this parenthesized geography
We have become inseparable,
as friends or foes.
To take up arms against another is
to descend into the heart of the inferno.
To unlearn history is
to enter a nightmare without an exit.
There is hope if we close, once and for all,
this book of divided theology;
if we sharpen the edge of our love
and not of the knife,
there is hope
for a chance in a lifetime
to wake up free, free of fear
and climb the heights of history
under the sky of peaceful Mesopotamia.

I am returning a few things

From behind the aisle decked with
juicy cantaloupes and apples and more apples,
from a pair of anonymous eyes,
two hummingbirds darted off to where
I am picking up a box of cereals
for breakfast and I see her seeing me.
I have not turned into a pillar of salt
and she has not turned into a heap of ashes!
Who is she? What is she doing among these carnivores?
Is she also one among them crocodiles?
Sated momentarily,
having fed on half the human race.

Be whatever that you may
I am returning without a contest
these eyes shaped like hummingbird
to your hyacinth head filled with springtime
while retaining this drop of pure and ancient light
as my own.

Bravo! Bravo!

Crucifix Will Stay in Quebec National Assembly Says Premier
Says "We won't rewrite history. The church has played a major role in who we are today as a society…"

By Hilary White

QUEBEC CITY, May 23, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com ) - The crucifix above the Speaker's chair in the Quebec National Assembly will stay, says Premier Jean Charest. Responding to a report by a pair of academics on the problems of integrating immigrants into Quebec society, Charest said, "We won't rewrite history. The church has played a major role in who we are today as a society, the crucifix is more than a religious symbol."
You can read the full article here

Fire

Before the thick dusk from the surface of the dark water rises
we have lit brightly the earth by a certain fire
said to have been stolen by a man named Prometheus.
Prometheus, it was said of him, as punishment, was fed to vultures when he was alive.
On our degenerating liver we now let the vultures feed, to keep the fire alive.

The darkness of the world is dispelled with light from a stolen fire,
To keep the fire burning, light has been banished from our souls,
While the world shines bright, the glow in our souls grows dimmer and dimmer.

Earth injured

There are inventions and uninventions
in every cycle of progression and regression.
There are questions to be asked and answers to be found.
For all the answers that are sought there is earth, rare and rich.
At will and with no concern, rocks are lifted and blown up into pieces,
the ground is turned upside down with arms hewn
out of steel and corrugated imagination.
We are surprised by what we find and we marvel at our reach.
If the earth were human, we are the worms feeding upon her flesh,
killing her slowly, killing ourselves consequently.

Earth perforated, earth scarred,
Earth too much injured by civilization
Who, among us, will heal her?

Holy Communion

The moon, new and dark, in the sky
marked with stripes of black and white,
having consumed the sun,
rises, full and bright, in the sky
still marked with stripes of black and white.

Hymn

A cluster
of words
as sweet
as grapes
and voices
cool as water
running
over
my hand
knotted in
a tight fist
opening up as
a wild flower
for a brief
rendezvous
with destiny.

I live

in a quaint village, on a hillside
not too steep and conveniently accessible,
overlooking a wide pastureland.
For neighbors – villagers who are neither rich nor poor,
and only with snowflakes to talk to
on dark nights illuminated mostly by pure imagination.

Irreversible Water

Who are the masters and who are the pupils?
Who are these people who speak a privileged language?
Alpha and omega,cosmic constant, universal love,
ligase and gyrase, centromeres and telomeres.
This place, a place to seek the light of knowledge,
Some strange light of some strange knowledge!
Telomeres – the tail ends of a chromosome is not the center of life!
Life, life, there is such a thing called life outside all imaginable paradigms.
Is life more or less than life if such and such constants were
to be so and so variables? True or false, tell me, tell me in one word?

Once I came across a man, he was happy,
happy like a ghost visible in the broad daylight.
Without a care, he walked,
he walked in the middle of the road
teeming with automobiles of late afternoon traffic.
And he walked as if he was walking on the water.
Indeed, he walked barely touching the ground!
He was in truth a happy man who seemed to have
firmly grasped life by its slippery horns.
I raised my hands to him and asked if he would
let me write his life-history. He replied, “From the time
when water became wine which turned into blood,
Life has never been the same again. Bring me a glass of water
and I will tell you instead the long and short of your own
biography in a burgundy-colored drop of wine.
While searching for the meaning of life you have lost happiness.
While searching for happiness you have found a life fragmented by discontent.
You brought fire from heaven and fuel from the bowel of the earth.
Out of these elements, by a strange alchemy, you attempted
to create an endless happiness and immortality.
Man,you may devise your own immortality
but can you save yourself from your extravagant ingenuity?"
I say no, because we have begun to breathe,
begun to breathe our own stale and acrid breath.
All to you, O endless happiness and immortality!
But some must still die so that others may live,
it has always been so and it must continue to be so, for our own good.
If all must live forever then it would not be long before we are forced
to drink brine of our own body. What price! Indeed it is a heavy price
to pay for a bagful of gloom of our own creation.
Such immortality with promise of so meager a return, I do not want it.
Such tormented immortality – a deferred dead amidst misery, I do not want it.
I do not want it, for life becomes but once, without turning back.

The present must cease to be so that future can become.
The old must make way for the young and the river must flow, for water is irreversible.
The old must not suck life out of marrow intended for the young.
for then there may come a day when nothing is ever enough.
(Those with myriads needs must not desire immortality.)
They may cover their ears, but they will still hear
the unmuffled voices of children crying out for justice.
They may dig their hands deep into their breasts and
history will not absolve them,
they may plait their hands into a bouquet of roses
but the future will not condone them,
even though there is such a thing called
life outside the established paradigms.
The truth is this: the earth rests,
trembling, on fragile wings of a butterfly.
Let us return it to its primitive purity,
before it is too late,
though the water is still and irreversible.

Anticipating the Passion

If you had really wanted to be strong,
you would not have come from a woman's womb.
For messiahs are quarried from mountains
where the sturdy and strong comes from stone.

Are you not sorry to have despoiled your land
by such limitations? I am weak, don't you see;
I only had streams of milk or tears to offer,
and you were ever so much more than me.

So much ado when your birth to me was announced.
You could have been born fierce and wild from the start.
If you only needed tigers to tear you to pieces,
why did I learn gentleness as an art

by which I wove for you a soft, pure gown
without even the slightest seam
for comfort--: that's how my life has been,
which you now have turned upside down.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1912)
(From the Life of the Virgin Mary)

To cast a spell on the world

I write a poem knowing little what a poem is,
Knowing little what it is I want to write about.
I pick up a dictionary, as if it were a telephone directory,
To look up all the words and their addresses.
I spell out all the words, one by one, starting with alpha and arriving at omega,
Looking and feeling for the word to describe what I do not know.
And out of blue sky, words begin to fall, as drops of rain --
Self-contained and mercurial.
They fall heavy, as heavy as waves, upon the shorelines of my forehead,
And together, they flow out into the open space as a deluge.
Must one always seek to find oneself in a widened horizon?
Does water seek the wider expanse of itself in the ocean?
I ask and continue to ask for advice from the river, wind, sky, everything.
I ask, as one who is lost in a foreign city,
In a broken version of the vernacular which is foreign to me.
Perhaps they do not know what it is I want to know.
How can they tell, when I myself do not know what it is I am trying to know?
Once I found myself looking at the middle of a blank page,
And it looked back right into my face with the white of its eyes.
There was horror in that two dimensional emptiness!
In fright I spelled out an uncertain word and it became the pupil in the eye.
I saw my desperate plight in its abject whiteness.

I am desperate!
I say to myself: write whatever it is, write,
Write to seduce the world with peace,
Write to intoxicate the world with peace,
Write so that we may come closer to the Word
Which is greater than the sum of all infinities,
Write, write to cast a spell on the world
So that it may forget how to hate and be spell-bound by a lasting peace.

The last three paragraphs

Homosexuality in the eyes of J. M. Coetzee
“Youth” p79: the last three paragraphs

One evening he allows himself to be picked up in the street, by a man. The man is older than he – in fact, of another generation. They go by taxi to Sloane Square, where the man lives – it would seem alone – in a flat full of tasseled cushions and dim table-lamps.

They barely talk. He allows the man to touch him through his clothes; he offers nothing in return. If the man has an orgasm, he manages it discreetly. Afterwards he lets himself out and goes home.

Is that homosexuality? Is that the sum of it? Even if there is more to it than that, it seems a puny activity compared with sex with a woman: quick absent-minded, devoid of dread but also devoid of allure. There seems to be nothing at stake: nothing to lose but nothing to win either. A game for people afraid of the big league: a game for losers.

Faith and Reason

Reason is a product of human intellect
Human intellect is limited
Therefore human reason is limited
One journeys to God through reason and
Only as far as reason can take and not beyond
Common sense reason is Newtonian Mechanics of spirituality
More than enough for most of us mortals, though.
Mysticism, on the other hand, not approachable
Through common sense logic,
With reason all turned topsy-turvy, is
Spirituality’s Quantum physics.

Does the Catholic Church Need an Extreme Make-Over?

In the search for deeper sense of identity in Christianity, one tends to oscillate between two choices: to adapt the way we live to the Church teachings or tailor the Church teachings to fit the way we live. Which choice do we identify with? If we allow our way of living to influence the church teaching, as the way we live changes from age to age so will the teachings of the church. In a few years such a church will find itself with teachings which are diametrically opposite to what it taught a few decades ago. That day will demonstrate that that church teaches no truth but only a changeable doctrine of convenience. Then why church at all, government can do that for us?

Church is not a simple administrator of code of social conduct. It is much more than that. It is a vehicle to reach the divine, a place of worship, a place of gathering in prayer and unity in time of crisis, a place where one can come face to face with God. In the Catholic Church, we practice our faith in continuity with the faith of the apostles. Therefore, if we are wrong today then they were wrong then. However, nearly two thousand years of history of the faith, our spiritual heritage passed down to us through saints, mystics and simple believers testify to the contrary. Therefore, many among us adhere fast to the root of our faith not only because it is rich and ancient, but also it contains fuller truth of the divine Christ. So why do we attempt to dilute the truth of our spiritual heritage to fit the way we live today?

Church is a bridge between God and man who lives in the society. In the eyes of many, Catholics and non-Catholics, Roman Church seems to have lost touch with reality. It seems so from time to time. That is because man wishfully thinks that God would adapt to his whims and fancies. He would like to worship God according to rules set by him and not by God and he wants the Church to understand his many needs. Therefore, the Church is caught between God and man. But man by nature is prone to change his views and opinions. What he professes to be as true in the morning, he rejects it as false in the evening. He is here today and gone tomorrow. So knowing what it knows about man, Church rightly and wisely adheres to God who is unchanging and eternal. It is not the Church that has lost touch with social reality of the day it is some of us who have lost touch with eternal reality of the Church.

Search for deeper sense of identity should be a sincere exercise to understand why we do what we do as a Church and not to dismantle the fabric of our rich faith. Yes, the Church does not always fully grasp the truth about natural reality. But I believe it has the Truth about God. That Truth is neither a fossil nor a line in the sand. It is never out of fashion. It does not need an extreme or partial make-over.

(I am neither a theologian nor a sociologist nor a church historian. I am just a practicing Catholic. What I wrote in this post, I wrote from the perspective of an ordinary church member. I may be totally, totally wrong.)

To Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI

Welcome to America & Happy Birthday!!
What are 81 years, we wish you many more productive years in the service of our God.
Christ is forever, therefore, Catholicism is forever!

Trees in general

At the instant of our birth, yours and mine,
You chose to be an olive tree and
I with a coat of stars and stripes couldn’t be anything else but a Jaguar.
We are blessed, each in our own ways --
I with feline mobility and you with grounded stability.
I left, I had to. You knew I would come back,
As one returns to one’s roots, as always.
Since then, every day I live, I live hunting shadows and illusions.
Even with sharp claws and fearsome fangs,
Even with all the agile forms and symmetries,
Life in the jungle is often hard and freedom is not cheap.
This is life as encoded by genes and determined by genetics, I guess.
I only live for myself, day in and day out.

You, on the other hand, tall and beautiful in your simplicity,
You are rooted deep without splitting the earth --
Deep with knowledge of yourself and beyond.
And such tranquility that a forest fire can not extinguish!
If I should in hypothesis try to tear you apart with my sharp talons,
I know you would let me shred you into pieces instead.
And if I should try to rob you of your riches,
I know you would let me plunder your granary.
Satyagraha, ahimsa, satyagraha, sunyata,
You are almost Jesus in bark and branches!

All these years and year after year,
Through your xylem and phloem, out of the rich earth
You have brought the elements of the earth and the air
As fruits and flowers and other gifts to the world.
All you do, you do for others. You bloom for others,
You prosper for others, others, others, others,
Your whole botanical being for others.
In them you attain your immortality although you die.
You,
As I see through the eye of a needle,
Are the Tree of Life within,
A reflection.

I knew it would happen someday.
And that day arrived from lichen-covered stones
Drenched with jungle dews and it brought a hard message.
So, I came back,
I came back to the dense foliage of jungle memory
Ready to lose my stripes and spots.

Upon finding a rusted key on the side-walk

I
Upon finding a key rusted by time and dirt
On the side-walk of a busy street, I wondered
What a strange place for a key to be,
A key with such sturdy features and reliable outlook!
It might have, once upon a time, opened
A whole range of mountains or an archipelago.
No one can ever tell for sure.
I decided to save it as a memento.
One day, I may invent a history for it
And reunite to its many mysteries.

II
There are many ways to God.
And to Him is drawn
Each one by a road paved
In a manner differently from all others.

A verse for every man,
For every man there is a verse written,
In the Book of Life.
When armed with that verse,

Alone and with nothing else,
Man can cross the Sahara barefoot and
Lift the earth into the realms of heaven
Without lifting so much as a little finger.

III
I say:
Love first, then knowledge.
And again, I say:
Love more than knowing.
Lead, O love, to that abundant knowing
And abundant union.

IV
Though fully clothed, I am naked.
Where I stand, space has no dimension,
Or should I say infinitely dimensional?
Although I have a name it is only a formality here.
If one speaks it is without substance.
Silence is the lingua franca around here,
Being rich in vocabulary.
But, love, I am told, is a language which needs no speaking.
O love,
Is this key, rusted and soiled by time and dirt -
The sum total of my annihilated being,
The key to that love among ruins?

O Africa

O Africa, O Africa,
Impoverished princess among the southern climes!
I can not say if the Lord is in the midst of your suffering,
But if the world should turn a blind eye to your afflictions
Then I know for sure, as sure as the sky,
That Lord is no longer in our midst.

i am all wings

i am all wings without feathers
i am all eyes without vision
i am all i am without i am.
!
It is time,
It is time
i take up my cross.
My cross, my cross,
Carry me kindly
to the journey's end
where all things are new again.

You (Another Version)

Being revealed in all things,
How have you become invisible!

I would like to know you.
I like to know you as you really are
And I like to know you
As reflected in all things.
By what thread of equation
Can I weave the invisible
Out of your many mirror-images?

Knowing all things
Should I be?
I,
Made ignorant by too much knowledge,
Should like to know you instead
Without knowing things of the world I live in.
Through knowing you I shall know all things,
As all things are made known through you.

To be with you is to be truly omnipresent,
Being present everywhere.
But it is you I want to arrive at
Without having been anywhere else.

And,
All things though unfinished
In the world circumscribed by my blinded eyes
Are complete in you
Already
As complete as a newly hatched stone.

You

Knowing all things
Should I be?
I, made ignorant by too much knowledge,
Should rather like to know you first
Before knowing the ways of the world I live in.
Through knowing you I shall know all things.
Being with you is to be everywhere
And
All things are complete in you
Without being finished
In the world circumscribed by my blinded eyes.

Whenever you walk into my mind

Whenever you walk into my mind
My eyes become filled
With clouds of Assamese monsoon;
The iceberg beneath my breast
Being warmed by melting blood
Bursts out in precarious imbalance
Steadied only by an unknowing wisdom.
This
Strangely feeling
Amidst uncommonly stirrings
Is vividly comforting.
Even the unruly words
Which so brazenly
Make my lips utterly
Stand silently
Whenever you walk into my thoughts.

Perhaps So

I like the sound of your warm summer voice
Tender and organic
Also I like the golden threads of hair
Falling
On your face of gentle marble
Your eyes of oceanic melancholy
Filled with fire and new day

A heart of flesh and blood implanted in a statue
A heart of flesh beating fast in the vortex of dark nights
A heart of flesh wondering
If love has a fragrance, flavor or a color
If love were a happy melancholia
If love were an untamable beast
And if it spoke in tongues
Perhaps, love is a note of exclamation
In the systolic and diastolic heartbeats
Or just a dream full of questions
Perhaps so
Perhaps it is so
But when it arrives
Even a soul saturated with dirt and soil turns into
A newborn butterfly spreading its wings of transient immortality

Learning to walk

City of dream
A city in a dream
Descending
With a strange joyous melancholy
Of a church bell
Ringing
Far somewhere in the sky
Upon the shadowed walls of

Dreaming
Dreams with thousand walls
Walls with thousand doors
If these doors did not open into one dream
If these dreams did not wake up into one river
And if this river did not flow into itself
Would I crumble and fall back
As broken water
Upon an abandoned altar

Here

Amidst all the unmapped corners
And forgotten census
Let me pause to offer
A simple hymn to God of Resurrection
And fruitfulness and happy death

That

For a change
I may kick the habit of being myself
And stretch out the boulevards
Unfold all the avenues and vistas
Heat up the sidewalks scorched by winter
Open wide the gates of freshly baked bread
And malls of fleshy grapes of succulent life
Perhaps in such imagining
Life may find a brief respite from its many schemes

I can not hold on for long to
The leftover laughter of yesterday’s carnival
I will have to build shelters
To shelter the homeless thoughts

For

What are books without pages
What are pages without thoughts
And what are thoughts without men
And what are dreams if we can not undream them
To chart out a new blueprint for a
Full measure of an undetermined destiny
And a little cottage at the edge
Of an expanding town

For a change
Let me raise my hands and touch
My furrowed forhead
For a change
Let me no longer pretend at undreaming
And perchance wake up free of harsh regrets

In a universe created by you

Having oriented myself towards you in the east
I turn naturally my back on you in the west.
Having learned to speak a language,
I forget so easily that you speak many languages.

O Lord,
While the east and the west on the same locus may
Never be,
But wherever you are, you are everywhere.
In whichever language we pray to you,
We will always pray in a language you have placed
Upon our tongues.

A poem for a harlot

In the evening
Clad in your diaphanous skin
You walk the streets without name
Not knowing where they will take you

Tlok tlok tlok
The sound of your feathered footsteps
As light as the snowflakes of February

With the sound of your heartbeat
You time
The passage of epochs and eras
And your walk becomes
The unalterable rhythm of living

In your gait
All the elements of life are woven
Into a seamless piece of fabric
your body of gold
Epithets of shame when sewn onto
Your skin of ether become stars
And your body is the limitless sky
And you dear lady
You become a constellation

Liberals or Conservatives?

I believe that a society, at any point in time, is a product of dynamic give and take relation that exists between the liberalizing and conserving forces. To espouse liberal ideas is not necessarily unchristian. Jesus Himself taught some liberal ideas without undermining His identity and mission. “It is not against the law to do good deeds on Sabbath” being one among many. In my humble opinion, a society that chooses love over its laws will be an ideal Christian society. Where there is love there is no distinction between liberals and conservatives. Also, without the liberalizing forces, a society would turn into fossil. Similarly, without the conservatives, the society will inevitably slip into chaos. We need them both in our society and Church. I believe,for us Catholics, each idea and issue, regardless of theirlabels, has to be examined not only logically for maximal common good but also with our Catholic conscience.

Moses also Carried His Cross

In a voice quiet and gentle, God calls,
“Moses, Musa, where are you?”

Here, I am, O Lord, wandering in the wilderness,
Searching for water in the sand
And seeking solace among uprooted acacia trees.

The sun gathers its last rays
From mountain tops and valleys
And turn into a cluster of oranges ripened by
Soft autumn heat and sweetened water.

Lord, out of slavery I have brought them this far,
To this thirsty country of
No man’s inheritance.
This fractured land and of deep furrows,
A heartbreak can set it on fire.

I scratch the desert soil
And see the future
Slipping through my fingers.
The silence!
The silence asks me without asking,
“What have you done with us, Moses?”

From the mountaintop
The valley looks tranquil and grotesquely beautiful.
Funny, how distance masks the reality!
Funny, from a distance, how easy it is
To conjure up an illusion of happiness,
Even from the misery of sand and
Sun-dried rocks!

In the distance when we hear a thrush or a nightingale sing,
We believe it is the desert wind playing tricks with our mind.
In the distance if we see a palm tree, we think it is a mirage.
When will you lead us out of our altered reality?
Lord, my people are about to stone me.

Lighten up, Musa. I desire to make you glad
And prosper the work of your hands.

Come, people are thirsty and impatient,
Thirst is crawling up their throats,
And their parched tongues are turning into vipers.
Come, let us quench their thirst
By turning stones
Into icebergs in the desert.
Strike, strike with your staff,
These rocks of Horeb and let them
Melt like snowflake in the sun.
And let my people to their heart’s content drink.

O Lord!
I have with my own eyes seen
When you made water divide the day and night
And the sea, like melon in Egyptian summer,
Fell apart as two slices of moon.
Lord, you are our refuge.
Without you,
We are dust returning to being mere dust.

So, how can they stop me

How else can they stop a nightingale sing if not by slitting its throat?
How else can they stop an eagle from flying if not by ripping its wings off?
How else can they stop me from loving them if not by breaking my heart?
They will come, they will come seeking neither water nor food but my blood;
And I will give them my heart, let them strike at my breast, pierce my heart.
But, my heart, Moses, is indestructible and my love is immutable.

So, how can they stop me from loving them?

Absence

Between the departure and arrival,
From one home of disfigured fortune to another,
You have barely begun your short biography.
On the water were your footprints,
And some unreadable names, written in your blood.
In that geography of brilliant sunshine and endless searching,
We discovered, the excavated landscape of your fragile anatomy.

Ah, Angel!
With your innocence,
You faced the monster.
With death, you paid the price!
And in return we admit in shame,
We could not do you
Justice, you so deserve.
We failed you!

Oh, child of imaginary parents!
To be left so high and dry,
Is it to be your fate always?
Oh, those imaginary parents!
Are they real only in a hallucinated world?

Rise, Angel, rise from the belly of volcano.
Rise from your deep eternal slumber.
Rise with rising sun and freshness of morning.
Let ripples of flowing water cry out.
Let stones of rivers also cry out in protest,
Till absence itself rises with the elements
To unriddle, the enigma you left us.

In your memory,
I plant a drop of ink,
In the sky of this blank page,
May it become a witness to the horror, you saw
In the twilight hours of your frightened eyes.

And Beyond Belief

If I believed it to be thus, would the sun rise
In the west tomorrow?
Or if I believed it to be so, would the lilies bloom
On the dark side of the moon?

Truth,
Here stands truth,
Unconquered and unsubjugated,
Beyond belief and disbelief of man.
And in our knowing and unknowing
We are bound to it irreversibly.

Wherever You are

I live as one lives in a cave unmarked by lines of latitude and longitude:
A cave inside a cave which is my mind.
I live as one lives as naked as a vowel without knowing east from west.
I invent words to name the day I have not lived and let
The twilight erase them with a gesture.
I live in the cave of my mind with nothing but syntax of deep silence.
All day long, I listen to the silence, trespassing in the rooftop of my thoughts.
Confusion is clarity in the dark. I have no name to hide behind.
And, I am transparent without definition.
If I do not speak, it is because I know you can hear my silence.
I have no language to tell you that I love you.
And you do not have the need to hear me say that,
For, you know the weight of a butterfly suspended in its flight.
I do not want to pay the unacceptable price for happiness at all cost.
All I want to do is to collect the dust that rise in your wake,
And, fill them in an hour-glass to mark my time with you,
Walking in your footsteps.
Wherever you are, O Lord, you are everywhere.

Francis Goes to Heaven

It seems,
Out of each heartbeat he was recreated,
And again,
As a dove in an eagle’s feathers.
An eagle
Flying high inside the dome of cage,
Blindfolded and confined.
It was always a matter of time.
For who could keep it thus forever
When it could set the whole forest on fire
With its songs?

Who would have known this?
It seemed like only yesterday!
A man carved out of the rocks of Assisi!
A man setting foot on the roads of Assisi!

With each exhaling and inhaling,
He shed his cloaks of fine linen,
One by one, breath by breath,
Till there was nothing left;
Nothing but the vast and naked
Snow-covered plains of Assisi.

Here is Francis of Porziuncola,
Made uncontainable.
Here is Francis of Assisi,
Set ablaze by love.
Here is Francis of the infinite elements,
Fire, water, everything else and love.
How can a flame be not flamboyant
With so much fire in its wings?

Francis,
Who sings with birds of the air and beasts of the forests,
In one voice which is equal to sum of all silence and
Sum of all creations,
Ignited by love,
Wounded by mercy,
Enriched by poverty,
Hand in hand with his lady love,
Ascends the stairway to heaven;
Barely touching the ground.

My Search Ends at Your Doorstep

These days, I often think of thinking about serious and important thoughts.
And I search for ways to find what I am thinking. In this new enterprise of mine,
I find myself walking alone in the forest. And I am so obsessed that I even let
My past catch up with me. I am glad that they bother to show up. So that
I could ask them a few questions of really genuine importance.

I allow loneliness to drizzle like rain so that I can ask them too.
What is that I want to know from the lichens and the moss?
What is it that I want to differentiate a tree from a stone?
How does an inverted circle look like? Can a man love others
Without loving himself?

But when I ask them the questions, none would stick with me.
They would fall behind me one after another
Pretending to be lost in deep thoughts of their own.
I did not care if they stuck with me or fell behind me.
I kept walking in the midst of my solitude.
I wanted to get at the edge of all questions before the nightfall.
I am in haste. There is too little time and too few hours in a day.
There are too many things I wanted to make friends with.
There are too many friends I wanted to break bread with.
This way I arrive from one part of my past to another without knowing
What I need to know and without finding what I need to find.

In the middle of my solitary walk if I happen to see
A horned-bill woodpecker pecking away at the dead wood,
I instantly find a kindred spirit in him. I feel he is also after something;
Perhaps, a lost dream or two. But he is too busy to tell me his thoughts.
So I instantly grow a pair of beautiful wings and become a woodpecker.
I too begin pecking at the pages of old and unread trunks of dead trees.
I file away what I find under my feather and plumes.
But they are not what I am looking for.
They are not as important to me as the sun is to a newly germinating seed.
If I had wanted, I could continue to be Gabriel the weaver or so and so.
I could have continued to weave beyond the end of the street.
I could have learned just as much that way without being a woodpecker.

So this way and that way, I move from one dry well to another, and, finally,
Arrive at your doorpost with an empty pail, thirsty and hungry;
Still not knowing what to say when I come face to face with you, O Lord!

Heaven Inc.

(Industry: Savings and Love; Corporate Headquarter: 1 Mercy lane)

Heaven Inc.
A blue chip company
With strong fundamentals
And solid balance sheet.

For those looking to invest,
Heaven Inc. is a company
With an earning not so modest.

Known as the Ten Commandments
Their corporate law of governance
Has no history of amendment.

Sometime after 30 AD,
To suit the new millennial investors,
The company underwent restructuring;
Their strength being love and mercy.

The trading symbol used to be OT
Back in the day when Moses was the VP.
Well, now it is traded under NT.

You can buy them shares directly.
You can sell them shares openly.
You don’t pay them no commission,
And you don’t suffer no omission.

The brokers are on their wings
Always ready to place your bids
If you decide to give them a ring.

Telephone lines are open 24/7,
With a customer service
Always prompt and friendly.
They are only a prayer away
If you need their help in any way.

It is a solid company wheeling and dealing,
In an economy which is wide and spreading.

With operations in the far-flung markets of the universe
It has undergone many stock-splits many times over.

All over the world there are many analysts
And Heaven Inc is always in their buy lists.

You do not need a financial adviser,
Because, it never has a bad year.
You can put your trust in the CEO
And invest your money in his portfolio.
And you will never be sorry that you did.

Your return will multiply,
And soon you will realize,
That there is a hundredbagger
In your portfolio!

Are you looking for a way to save up
For your years in golden eternity?
Then consider investing in Heaven Inc.
You will be glad you did.

Heaven Inc.
Our Service is saving soul;
Our strength is people;
And we are located on 1 Mercy Lane.

One and the same

“To see the world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.” – W. Blake from “Auguries of Innocence”

“The child is the father of the Man.”-- W. Wordsworth from “My heart leaps up when I behold”

“……Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father.” --Jn. 14: 8

St. Francis of Assisi said

Start doing what is necessary; and then do the possible; and suddenly you find yourself doing the impossible!

Speak little
Learn the words of eternity.
--Rumi

Rumi on Humility

Enter the ruins of your heart
And learn the meaning of humility.

On the Heights of Calvary

For many,
It begins here,
Upon this very mountain,
Upon Calvary,
A journey.

A river also begins,
As if from an undiscovered fountain,
“To run towards the world,”
Towards itself,
A crucifix.

Upon this new Calvary,
Upon this banquet table,
Upon the altar,
We break the bread of flesh,
We pour the wine of blood.

In breaking of the bread,
We take up our own crown of thorns.
In drinking of the wine,
We climb upon the cross.

On the cross with Him,
We hang, in spirit,
On the other side.

In dying, we die with Him
In rising, we rise with Him
Clothed in new body and
Crowned with new spirit.

(The expression “To run towards
the world” is borrowed from
Poem of the Man-God by Maria Valtorta)

Conversion

To spread the chromatogram of thought across
A meadow of electricity.
To rearrange the bisected hemispheres of the earth
Into time without its days and nights, and
Into space without dimensions.
To transform the evening moon into
A butterfly, luminous and flying across the sky of dreaming.
Conversion, a bird of prey hunting for an idiom
In the vertigo of riddles and paradox, and to resurface
As the morning star with crown of flame amidst darkness.

A Poem

Upon this cross is hammered a poem,
A limitless poem for the undead.
Upon this poem is written a lamentation,
A limitless lamenting for a sparrow fallen.
Poetry,
Where will you go from here?
What is your message?
What would you say to
“The land of Zebulun and Naphtali
On the road by the sea
Across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles?” (Mt. 4: 15)
Repent!

Repent,
To rekindle that extinguished nebula,
To rebuild those decrepit boulevards.
Or, would you sit
By the rivers of Babylon
To weep and mourn,
And mourn and lament, without stopping?
Lament!
To refresh,
That faded summer of marigold,
To renew,
That withered sunflower of hope.

Repent, lament and mourn!
The hour of rejoicing approaches,
The hour of comforting approaches.
Rejoice!
Unto us a child is born,
Unto us the earth has been given, as our inheritance,
And the City of God rises out of blood and dust.

After all that
Rejoicing and lamenting,
In the end,
We find in you,
The unwritable Word,
Written on the expanse of ancient papyrus,
The unutterable Word,
Uttered with the ancient sound of silence.

Poem!
Stay here awhile with me.
I need to lament with your voice,
I need to weep with your tears,
To repaint the faded summer of marigold,
To walk these boulevards in the City of God,
And out of blood and dust, the City of God rising!

Poetry

At what depth of the ocean,
From which root of the sea,
Were you born?
From which block of marble,
With what chisel
Were you carved?
With what tender feather of words,
With what slender snowflake of quill,
With what shade of colored ink
Were you written?

You are neither straight nor winding.
Unknown fruit of the ancient tree!
Unforgotten flower of midnight sun!

I do not know when you will arrive,
Or when you will leave.
I have learnt not to know you
Between your arrival and departure.
I have tutored myself not to think,
Not to think about you between those waking hours.
You often leave me without telling me,
Without telling me that you are not returning.
I can let you go just as easily as
I welcome you in the dark void of mind.
But I would rather have you with me for a good deal.
Not having you with me makes my day grey and long.

Poetry,
In what ancient cave were you created?
In what cultured city were you brought up
That you are at once within and outside
My fractional understanding?

If you try to plant your roots in my breast
I will not protest, and without protesting
I will let you do to me what spring does
To the lily of the field.
I have lived with you
Without knowing you.
I have loved you
Without understanding you.
I have kissed your honeyed words,
And dreamt your winged forms.
You are more beautiful
In that veil of opaque transparency.
So, let me love you without knowing you
And let me spell you out without speaking.

Inseparable

Under the blue Mesopotamian sky
There is a land where barefooted raindrops
Dance on the bloodstained leaves of grass.
Some call it homeland.
For others,
It is a battlefield,
Where ravens of war devour
The expanse of the sky,
Where, in the morning,
The stray dogs greet the dwellers
With insomnia of sharp yelps,
And in the harsh noon,
Vultures feast on their lifeless bodies.

How did we, after having traveled so far,
Arrive at a nightmare such as this?
How did we, after having learned so much,
Join in this carnival of rotten flesh and gunpowder?
In the midst of so much shredded sky
And bloodied landscape
Can one ever find that neglected hope?
Where can one find that refuge?
Will God ever remember to raise,
From the exploded remains of conscience,
Our children without malice?

It is true that we have fought bitterly as foes.
But we have also lived together, long,
Longer than many lifetimes,
In this parenthesized geography.
Isn't it time to close
This book of divided theology
And realize, instead,
How inseparable we are
Under the beautiful Mesopotamian sky?

Acceptable Sacrifice

The sacrifice acceptable to God
is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart,
O God, you will not
despise.
(Psalm 51: 17)

Is it wrong to put the Lord to the test?

Although it is commanded that one should not put the Lord to the test, He Himself, from time to time, challenges His people to test Him. I find at least two such instances in the Bible:
In Isaiah 7: 11-14
Ask a sign of the Lord your God; let it be as deep as the Sheol or as high as heaven.
12 But Ahaz said, I will not ask and I will not put the Lord to the test.
13 Then Isaiah said, “Hear then O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also?
14 Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Look the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name Him Immanuel.
And again in Malachi 3: 10
Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.

A Prayer of Simon

The universe is
In the palm of your hand.
You arrange and rearrange
The galaxies and the constellations.
You set the laws of the seasons
And the monsoon rain.
Before Abraham, You were.
And, here you are,
Yoked under the unwanted cross
Of our collected iniquities.
The bruised dusts of the street rise
To settle on your bloodied brows.
And your blood turns into petals
Of rose scattered on the street.

In this physical form
Of Cyrenean countenance,
You placed this bird of my migratory spirit;
And made me a man.
Even before I was born,
You set me on this flight,
To be with you, at this hour appointed
In time and the space of history.
Out of this multitude,
You chose Simon, a man without a face.
If I could speak to the time,
It would tell me
I am blessed among men.
If time could name itself,
What name would it choose for itself?
A moment without history, perhaps.

You made me a man
And put me in this world.
So, I suppose, I am of this world,
And if indeed, had You desired
That I be an angel,
You would have surely made me one.
But You didn’t.
Grant me this, O Lord!
Let me live as man among men,
To love and serve You in their midst.
But remember me with mercy
When I come to your kingdom,
Not for the moment I was harnessed
Together with you,
But for those I was not.

Remembering Psalm 23

(A Psalm of David)
The Lord is my Shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down
In a green pastures;
He leads me beside the still
Waters.
He restores my soul;
He leads me in the path
Of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk
Through the valley of the
Shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For you are with me;
Your rod and your staff,
They comfort me.
You prepare a table
Before me in the presence
Of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy
Shall follow me
All the days of my life.
And I will dwell in the house
Of the Lord
Forever.

Two Lines and anti Parallel

Genesis
Chapter 22

2 He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
10 Then Abraham reached out his hand took the knife to kill his son.
11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.”
12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son from.”

Matthew
Chapter 27

22 Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” All of them said, “Let him be crucified!”
23 Then he asked, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Let him be crucified!”
25 Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
31……then they led him away to crucify him.

God was truly pleased with Abraham’s obedience and faithfulness. And He reciprocated this gesture of faithfulness to Abraham and his children by sacrificing His Own Son Jesus. The irony, however, is that while God was only testing Abraham and spared Isaac’s life, children of Abraham, on the other hand, truly wanted the blood of God’s only Son.

Against the Practice of Abortion

In the depth of your womb,
Half-dazed and half-frightened,
I cried out with my voice.
In that moment filled with panic, my voice failed,
And in vain, I cried for help.

I am your child;
Child of your love.
Mama, I present to you
My little hands of fetal innocence,
In the hope that they would turn into flowers
In your palm.

But I am frightened by the look in your eyes.
You are tying me up with the umbilical cord of my misfortune.
Why are you laying me down on this cold surface?
You are raising your hand high in the sky.
Why are you raising your hand against me?
Mama, I would like to be born in the spring
Under a deep blue Mediterranean sky,
And the air saturated with fragrance of jasmine.
Where is God of father Abraham?
Should I look for the lamb of the faithful?
It must be somewhere nearby,
Caught in the thickets by its horns.
Mama, what is happening?
Your manicured fingers of feminine elegance
Have turned into a hired killer’s knives.

Be pleased, O Lord, to have mercy on me.

You strike me once, you strike me twice and
You have destroyed, you have
Destroyed my fragile unborn geometry.
Now I can feel my blood rushing out
Out to be in the orange garden.

And it is finished!

I am love demolished.
I am love butchered.
O Woman,
Wounded,
Wounded by my brief existence.
I was your child once,
Child of your negligent love.

You butchered me,
On the altar of feminine freedom.
You butchered me to feed the serpent,
The serpent that lives on
The mangled bodies of discarded babies.

His Master's Voice

3 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
16 I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd (John 10: 3, 4 and 16).

Mary

When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would have a child by the power of the Holy Spirit, Mary was already betrothed to Joseph. When Joseph found out that Mary was with a child, he was not pleased. He could have uttered the “a…..” word but chose not to. He was considering putting her away secretly. Here, some scholars suggest that Mary’s pregnancy was by none other than Joseph himself during the betrothal period. In Jewish custom of the time, upon betrothal, the man and the woman are given conjugal rights by society. Even though they had not started living together, they were considered lawful husband and wife. If he was the father of Mary’s unborn child then Joseph did not have to worry about a scandal. It was not a scandal at all. But he did, thereby strongly supporting the belief that Jesus was not the son of Joseph. Why did he then decide to marry her in the end? Was it because he was so deeply in love with Mary that he decided to forgive and accept her? Could he trust her in the future? I do not know if anybody could answer these questions for Joseph. All sorts of thoughts and emotions run in a man’s body when faced with such crisis. At moments like this it would take a great deal of fortitude to be able to make a wise decision. My guess is that ultimately it happened just the way the Bible tells us. That is, an angel of God told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife.
When Mary said “……Let it be done to me according to your word,” she very well knew the danger she was placing herself in. It could be considered an act of adultery. And the price of adultery in the Jewish society of the time was death. Mary, though virgin and full of grace, could have died the death of an adulteress. But God intervened.
Thirty or so years into the future, we find Jesus standing between a murderous crowd and a real adulteress. “Anyone without sin must cast the first stone” was all He said! And a new day was born! Hallelujah!

Wedding at Cana

Recently, I was in our local public library and was casually looking at some of the books with interesting titles, and chanced upon a book titled Custodians of Truth (not the complete title of the book). I wondered what truth it was talking about. As I began reading, I found out that this book talks about our Lord’s marital status and his bloodline. It draws its conclusion on His marriage from John chapter 2 verses 5 and 7. I thought the book was trying to provide some semblance of evidence. So naturally, I was interested and did some reading. In verse 5, I find Mary asking the servants to do what Jesus told them to do. And in verse 7, Jesus was asking the servants to fill the waterpots. The book (Custodian) claims that they would not do this unless they were also members of the groom’s household. Because, in Jewish society, in events such as wedding, only members of the groom’s family could call the servants to duty. And from there, the book takes a big leap to the conclusion that wedding at Cana was our Lord’s own wedding. I was hoping to find citation of some hard evidence, something like an ancient marriage certificate or things of that sort. But none was mentioned. I was disappointed, to say the least. After further reading John chapter 2, I came to my own conclusion that verses 5 and 7 do not get Jesus married off to anyone. I think Jesus could not have been the groom in the wedding at Cana for the following reasons:
Verse 1 says “….mother of Jesus was there.” This does not make her a member of the groom’s household. Perhaps she was there as a relative, cousin, neighbor or an invited guest.
Verse 2 says “...Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.” How can the groom be invited to his own wedding? Never heard of such a tradition!
In verse 3, mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.” If she was the mother of the groom then I would expect Mary saying “We have no wine” as opposed to “They have no wine.”
In Verse 4 Jesus told His mother having no wine was none of His concerns. Would He have said that if He was the groom? Not likely.

Here is John 2 (NKJV). Take a look.
On the third day there was a wedding at Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.
2 Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding.
3 And when they ran out of wine, mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.”
4 Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.”
5 His mother said to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, do it.”
6 Now there set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece.
7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim.
8 And He said to them, “Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast.” And they took it.

To St. Philomena

There was a kind
Of antique resplendence
And purity of crystals.
There was a straight line
Of bloody death,
Drawn from one page
To another and
Then to another;
In that book of
prodigal obscurity
And burial.
There was death everywhere.
There were remains
Of unleashed infernos
In that ancient air.
But you rose,
From a deep slumber,
Into a new dawn
Impenetrable by water, salt and arrows;
Dividing the time into many equal parts
With your tender fingers.

On the other side of Calvary

I heard Your Voice in my head.
Without being there I was there,
Creeping along the walls behind the throng of men
To avoid Your searching glance.
I knew You were looking for me.
But I hid under cover of my own shadow.
I did not wish to feel the pain in your sorrow.
There was too much sadness in your sorrow,
A sadness more than I can embrace.
I was afraid!
I was afraid to look at
Your bloodied face
And blinded eyes.
I knew You saw me.
But You pretended as if you didn’t;
You moved on.
I heard Your voice in my head;
I heard You murmur,
“Ma, not to worry, not to worry!
I shall make everything new again.”
Perhaps, You were murmuring to someone
Plundered by love.

Atop the Calvary, from the heights of the cross
One more time, before Your last breath
You looked through Your blinded eyes,
Far into the future and saw me cowering
Under the cloak of my own shadow.
When You closed Your mortal eyes
The night ended and
My thin shadow of pathetic guise
Fell at my feet.

And I was in another street!

I was in another street,
Running fast, as fast as I could avoid
The darkness in the street.
I was running, running away from You
To be with You on the other side of Calvary
Without my unbearable sorrows.