There will be blood!

Water – two hydrogen atoms hooked up with an atom of oxygen, then some miracles.

God commanded Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt – over the streams and canals, over the ponds and all the reservoirs – and they will turn to blood.’ Blood will be everywhere in Egypt, even in vessels of wood and stone.” (Ex. 8:19)

Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord had commanded.

And

all the water was changed into blood. (Ex. 8:20)

Pray, pray, pray and pray for Japan!

Catholics all around the world, pray, pray for Japan!
Let us all pray for Japan, that God may be merciful
and pull Japan out of its misery.

Promote Same Sex Marriage!

If homosexuality is truly genetic in origin, then by promoting the same sex marriage, the responsible gene should be eradicated from the population, in due course of time, of course!

It is true God lives!

God is God unbound by limits of man's ideas, philosophy and theology.
It is true God lives. So, stop worrying, and instead rise and shine for His glory!

Just Wondering Why

When a pregnant woman is murdered, the murderer gets sentenced for double homicide and yet abortion is legal!

Where is Christianity heading today?

Someday, we will have to confront en enemy who is already at the gate. We can do this only as one body of Christ. Unite us and lead us all as one flock!

Of Priests and Pedophilia( with apologies to all the noble priests)

- Clergy pedophilia is no longer a local problem because of a few problem priests but has taken a global scale
- Pedophilia must have been going on for centuries in the Roman Church. Only that the Church was effective in containing it through suppression and intimidation of the victims. These tactics worked once but no longer
- It is time the Bishop of Rome wear sack cloth and do penance
- it is time the Vatican takes its own pill - Serious Examination of Conscience
- The Vatican should put in place a zero tolerance policy with respect to clergy abuse of children
- Sexual abuse of children is a crime. Individuals who perpetrate such acts are criminals and individuals who protect them are criminals by association. And no one is above the law
- The Vatican has a very rich collections of arts. To pay for all financial settlements that may arise out of these sex scandal lawsuits, it should sell all these valuable art pieces
to raise the required funds.It should feel the pain and the bankruptcy
- Tell-tale sign of a priest with problem of pedophilia is when the church authorities move him frequently from parish to parish for no apparent reason
- Parents who let their children serve as altar boys and girls must instruct their children to report any inappropriate behavior of priests without fear. Avoid overreaction, give the priest benefits of the doubt. Be fair. If the evidence is strong, act before much damage is done. Report to the police and the Church officials. However, with sadness I add this that the church officials are not to be trusted here.You cannot expect fair treatment from church officials. Evidence shows that in all these children sex abuse cases church authorities have always taken "It is us against them" line. The Church has always defended the culprit priests and turn its
back on the victims
- The Church is sick. Something nasty has hit the fan, the ceiling, the walls and it shows.
- It is time ordinary catholic men and women act to save the Church before pedophilia destroys it

Jesus, be my life's obsession

Smiling to yourself

I saw you under the yellowing poplar tree,
all by yourself, smiling to yourself,perhaps,
Realizing for the first time that life is free
and meaningless and love is transient at best.
Your eyes are green like my dreams!

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

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.