You know something about brokenness. You know about the broken world. You know about brokenness in your country. But most personally, you know it in your more intimate life. You know we are broken people and we suffer very intimate pains. The pain of a desire for intimacy that hasn’t been fulfilled…the pain of a relationship that did not work…the pain of an addiction that is so hard to confess…The secret pain of loneliness that can bite us so much…And what I would like to say to you is don’t be afraid of your pain, but dare to embrace it. If you are wounded, and I know that you and I are, put your brokenness under the blessing.

five poems

August 7, 2018 / Bill Schulz / Leave a comment

Thunder and Wine
“I answered you in the secret place of thunder.”
Psalm 81:7

thick fog clearing
as thunder echoes
across Casco Bay

on Cushing Island
lights go dark
then Cliff and here

in this dim sanctuary
the cathedral bells
won’t stop ringing

no one sees
the stained-glass smeared
by the blood moon light

once again wine
turns to water bread
back to grain

Of God
Can you lift up your voice to the clouds,
so that a flood of waters may cover you?
– Job 38:34

what are my chances
when your words
linger and scratch

like wool uniforms
quietly removed
when the orphan

and widow flinch
at your whispered
good night

I’ll promise to lie still
if your light but touches
the water’s edge

there an egret
white as the moon
hunts in the reeds

Creating Myth
Notes on Jack Spicer – 1978
A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
– Jack Spicer

make myth by
destroying myth

then explain
what came before

one final embrace
before departing

into meaning
or a hell of meanings

everything slipping
or sliding

haunted by the poetic
and the laughter

the duplicity
of words

and how they replace
the historical

with an empty
vessel

and though we struggle
to pull them back

our hushed shadows
will not be closed

simply by stating
their closure

My Final Thought of You

It happens often now, forgetting
the words but not the thing
itself.

This week alone the words cilantro,
Curtis Mayfield, actuary seemed
lost, erased.

You, too, are there in a slight daydream,
a glimpse of a waning moon
on a sunny day.

A thunderstorm rises from Mount Blue
not 20 miles away. The birds and I
find shelter.

The stream is silent, hopeful. My breathing
slows as I count to measure the first
strike of lightning.

Three Halves
(in which the seeker discovers
he is that which is sought)

I am on a motorcycle
say a Triumph yes
a Triumph tearing

out of town on a moonlit
night Friday or early
Saturday morning and say

I am passed by a truck
an electrician’s truck
that has no business

passing a man like me
all in black leather
you’d understand

when I pass again
looking back to threaten
the driver flipping

the bird say or sneer
my surprise
that the driver is me

and all those cables
spooled on poles
by the breakdown lane

are mine to connect
or repair or destroy in this
the third half of my life

now I understand – the path to healing

July 29, 2018 / Bill Schulz / 1 Comment

Ronald Rolheiser – In his last book, The Living Flame of Love, John (St. John of the Cross) proposes a theory of, and a process for, healing. In essence, it runs this way: For John, we heal of our wounds, moral flaws, addictions, and bad habits by growing our virtues to the point where we become mature enough in our humanity so that there’s no more room left in our lives for the old behaviors that used to drag us down. In short, we get rid of the coldness, bitterness, and pettiness in our hearts by lighting inside our hearts enough warm fires to burn out the coldness and bitterness.

The algebra works this way: The more we grow in maturity, generativity, and generosity, the more our old wounds, bad habits, temperamental flaws, and addictions will disappear because our deeper maturity will no longer leave room for them in our lives. Positive growth of our hearts, like a vigorous plant, eventually chokes-out the weeds. If you went to John of the Cross and asked him to help you deal with a certain bad habit in your life, his focus wouldn’t be on how to weed-out that habit. Instead the focus would be on growing your virtues: What are you doing well? What are your best qualities? What goodness in you needs to be fanned fan into fuller flame?

By growing what’s positive in us, we eventually become big-hearted enough so that there’s no room left for our former bad habits. The path to healing is to water our virtues so that these virtues themselves will be the fire that burns out the festering wounds, addictions, bad habits, and temperamental flaws that have, for far too long, plagued our lives and kept us wallowing in weakness and pettiness rather than walking in maturity, generosity, and generativity.