Dwelling Places

(for Josefina Saenz Tamariz (1921-2013 of La Mesa, NM)   "Ahhh Precipice on You we kneel! Gently holding cooling wrinkled hands Of virgin pallor, 'til the other gentle forces tug Them up away from us as we are down, And they are up and even up... but we, Behind, a holy knighting's dub,  cry hopeful ... Kneeling on a holy ground,  a sangreale , do find Ourselves with arms arisen reaching as to Follow wisped-in-air like tail kite there aft. But we...so softly...unadapted, stand departed from; And they departed to; yet sacredness of place Transfirms to sacredness of memory; Alas, it's There, to magic-kingdom-meta-thought we go; At least for now, to life's uncertain span of Meantime; 'til the day we find our hands In others' hands, so softly touching skin to skin, Our harbinger of incubated "us-ness." palm in palm As palmers dance with fingertiplets split apart,  To wave goodbye, t o levitate so gentl...

I am convinced that there is no measure to God's mercy. It simply can neither be weighed, nor can it be measured in the same way you can do so with gold, or other commodities. People invest in commodities in the Futures Market. You might ask, "How can mercy be considered a commodity?" In the end, what I have found to be the case is this truth: God's mercy is the only futures market commodity worth investing in. It pays an eternal high rate of return on such a small investment.   I don't want to sound mercenary about something so sacred and solemn as the "mercy of God", ... but we do live our lives in measures of sorts. Let's, for instance, compare the context of our lives to the measures on a music staff. Five simple little lines running across a page are divided into "measures" within which are seated notes either on the line or in the spaces between the line. Each note, like a soul, has an identity and uniquely (sometimes undetectabl...

Ezra McNeil lay waiting for that most peculiar moment. Ezra McNeil hung on as best he could. These had been the 99 most productive years of Ezra McNeil's most complicated life. He did not want to die. He was not ready. He wanted, rather as always, to be productive. To Ezra McNeil, dying was not productive. The doctors had said his blood was clotting too quickly, and that it was likely that there were no pharmaceutical remedies that would effectively alleviate the clotting and consequently the platelets that form the clot would monkey pile onto already old and damaged blood vessels. Then, like some time bomb, a piece of the platelet would crack off the monkey pile and like a projectile head directly to his 99 year old brain. Ezra McNeil thinks to himself: "I have all this money to pay these doctors. I practically own this hospital. I rented the entire south wing of the top floor and employed even the best hematologists from all over the world." Ezra McNeil...

Somebody asked me recently: "Deacon, do you think we are in the 'end times?'" I am assuming the question was prompted by the countless news items on television and the newspaper about tornadoes, unusual storm events, strange lightening and thunder events, the state of the economy, etc. Even the new Pope has generated all the fascinating speculations about his being "the last Pope" according to the prophecies of St. Malachy.   My answer was simple. We have been in the end of days since the birth of a baby 2000+ years ago. Will we see the skies darken and the sun turn red, exploding before our eyes? Yes we will because that is what the sun does. It explodes. We just can't see the nuances of the kinds of energies that explode off its surface area which i ... s primarily gaseous. We tend to think of it as a solid when it is for the most part a pulsating ball of burning gas placed in the sky in a remote part of the milky way ironically at the unusually c...