I don’t know if Opening Prayer is going to be my last book, and maybe that’s the best way to proceed. It seems that I have to live the books as I write them, and every lurch forward involves some sort of sacrifice, a giving up of what I no longer need, assuming I ever needed it to begin with. Last year, I decided to burn my notebooks, starting with a little gray journal I kept when I was 12 and solemnly declared in secret that I was an atheist. The stack was almost two feet high — Big Chief notebooks, school folders, loose-leaf binders, fancy little Moleskines, you name it. I’d already dredged through the lot when I wrote a memoir a while back, and I knew that the entries were mainly just grousing and existential agonizing, familiar stuff to most writers. Still, it represented a lifetime of diligence, a sense of self. I started burning the oldest one first, then the high school pieces, then college. After 20 minutes, I still had most of my adulthood left and the ashes were filling up the fireplace, so I put the rest in garbage bags and left them on the curb for the weekly trip to the landfill. “Wet garbage” as they say in recycling. Earth to earth.

That was a good feeling, getting rid of all that paperwork. I felt lighter, unburdened. You’ll notice fire as a theme in this book, and I keep in mind that creation depends on some sort of destruction, a tearing apart or reconstitution, as in cooking, carpentry or religious conversion. To be reborn completely, we have to die completely, no fudging. I’m 65. I’ve given up being a writer several times, and I keep trying to reach the silence that makes a place for language, that allows it to be understood, and a language that points to silence. At times, I think I’m making real progress. Then something happens.

The next four posts will be taken from the preface of “Opening Prayer,” my third book of poetry. I’ll be explaining what  I’ve been trying to write over the past four decades as a poet and how the three books follow, for better or worse, the development of a spiritual career.

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Over the years, two themes have emerged in my writing. The first is how we make a living — money, work, business, corporations, and everything we mean by “trade.” The second is the inner life, which in my case has included poetry, painting and a religious conversion. Their ongoing development, including their complex, uneven marriage with one another, is much of what this present book is about.

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I wrote my first book, The Glass Children, when I was trying to lead the ideal writer’s life, at least my notion of what that was. I lived on day jobs and little grants, delving inward to escape relationships or any responsibilities whatsoever beyond a dedication to the page.

When I stand at the brilliant edge of the roof,

There is always the man who continues forward

Without hesitation, slipping smoothly out of my skin

And I’m lost, watching the back of his head,

His strong arms spreading open as he steps

Soundlessly over the edge.

That seemed like a kind of courage at the time, but I was trying to make a religion out of art. Why not? Like so many young writers, I wanted to astonish. Beyond that, I felt there was something at the very core of things that I could reach if I only wrote well enough. At times, transcendence made a brief appearance. The book’s last poem, “In New York the Women Are Dreaming,” served, I thought, as a grand prelude, a kind of announcement of a new life, but the poem’s energy, a feminine energy, was all the greater from being checked, contained and forced inward. The book began with an image of limestone caves and ended with an emergence not yet achieved. Art was a beautiful shell. I was listening to music I couldn’t hear.

This started as a catastrophe but eventually found its way, perhaps with a little outside help. Who intercedes for us?

Here’s what used to look like a wounded bagel, condition now stabilized. The orange is actually Indian Yellow, a beautiful color that I’m still trying to adopt. We might need just a bit more Alizarin red here.

I’m trying to depict a conversion, a turning toward something unexpected, a grace of light blue.  Originally, I was thinking about the narrative of before and after  — I was lost and now I’m found. But that seemed too simple. I remember what Joan Didion said: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

Aside from the portal at the center, I’ve left just a few edges here. While I was painting this, I was thinking about all the discussions in art classes and art books about edges, how to “steal” the edge, either from the figure or from the background.  But I was also thinking that mystics see beyond the edges. That’s a part of what they do.  I’ve been reading The Night of the Confessor by Tomas Halik — excellent book — and he says “Love is the only force that unifies things without destroying them.” Yes, I thought. That’s what’s I’m trying to do here and with other paintings these days. Unify things — soften the edges — without destroying them. Be on nodding terms with what I used to see.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem keeps moving through my head. This painting is called “Fire Root.” I built up a thick landscape of acrylic molding paste, let it dry, and then followed the bumps and contours of the little ridges and valleys of paste. (The painting is just a bug, 8 inches square, but a bright bug, part of my series on fire and combustion. “Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on..”

I was aiming to finish this by the 50th day after Easter. Late as usual. I wanted to put Mary’s flames in the middle, but somehow that didn’t work out. Perhaps we all burn equally bright before a loving God.

I’m thinking that this painting might be included in “Opening Prayer,” a book of poetry I recently finished.

“Are we there yet?”

Liberal Catholics squirming in the back seat of the Church are still looking for signs of change under Pope Francis. Yes, we see new leadership at the Vatican Bank. Yes, the Vatican has defrocked archbishop Jozef Wesolowski who was accused of sexually abusing boys while he served as the pope’s representative in the Dominican Republic. And yes, Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst of Limburg, Germany, lost his job after spending $43 million on a new residence and office complex.

However, we’re not there yet. In the U.S., the Conference of Catholic Bishops held their Spring General Assembly last month with very little to report. The bishops listened to presentations, voted to extended ad hoc committee work and approved limited revisions to existing documents. Business as usual. We can also note that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City is still in office 18 months after his conviction for failing to report a priest suspected of abuse. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony, Cardinal Bernard Law and other prelates enjoy retirements or comfortable reassignments in the wake of similar allegations regarding abuse by priests under their jurisdictions.

For many Catholics, the discouragingly slow pace of institutional reform represents a similar opposition to change in Church teachings. What really divides us is the Church’s position on matters of gender, sexuality and hierarchy. Conservative Catholics argue that the Church’s teachings have never been and should never be changed from what was divinely revealed. Liberals, as they say, are “cafeteria Catholics,” picky eaters who only choose what suits them. On the other hand, we might introduce a new term here — “concrete Catholics” — where every Catholic position is set in concrete and reinforced by rebar, resisting change even if the world changes around the Church and ultimately leaves it behind.

As a member of the Catholic family, I see myself somewhere in the tortured middle. If the Church is a cafeteria, that means it’s a business where the customer is always right. If a particular item doesn’t sell, it’s taken off the menu. But as Catholics, we’re not customers of Christ; we’re followers of Christ, and our faith is not a matter of preferences. At the same time, if the Church hardens into rock, it ceases to become the living body of Christ, alive and open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Both extremes are necessary, and, equally important, both need the other. Concrete says no. That’s its job. That’s how foundations work, and the Church needs strong foundations to support the deposit of faith — the scripture, teaching and traditions handed down through the centuries. That deposit doesn’t change. However, what does change is our understanding of how we apply it to a modern world. Vatican II wasn’t business as usual. The implications of the Council are still being worked out, but that’s my point. Our Church is a pilgrim church moving along, however slowly. Even a glacier is a river. In fact, slow can be good. That’s how you get to be 2,000 years old. We’re not there yet, wherever we need to go, but we’re always moving and always at the speed of God.

Think about love. It can be glorious and it can be painful. The Romance languages know this. Amore and amour mean literally “to death.” A-morte. I love you to death. That little arrow from cupid can really hurt, even if it’s a blessing. And look at the word “blessing.” It comes from “blodden,” an Anglo-Saxon word meaning to bloody, as in an animal sacrifice. We can’t sacrifice what we don’t break open, even violate in some way. I once read that the word “blessure” in Old French means both “blessing” and “wound.” The Catholic Passion Week is a love story where wounds and blessings can’t be separated, and where each is needed to complete the sacrifice.

(photograph by William Eggleston)

Being a word guy, I look up etymologies. It helps me think. I was thinking the other day about conversion and conversation. They don’t have quite the same roots, but their roots are side by side. Both words mean a turning about, and a conversation is an ongoing turning back and forth. A single exchange is usually just that — “a brief exchange” — but a conversation has a development, a career to it, each party building on what the others say. Unless it’s a poor conversation, we don’t talk past each other but with each other, both sides sharing, both sides gaining.

So too, conversion. It’s not a moment but a dialogue, an ongoing process. I believe that God is a listening God. He always listens as we talk — in prayer, in the way we live, in silence. But do we listen to Him? What has God told me today? What did I say in reply? Am I the girl in red or the girl in blue?