More on: hunger

I set you children a lesson, Mary says. Our unknown is I am.

First try, the bird dropped                                              from the sky, belly-flopping the surface that separates our two worlds, and came up empty.                                     He rose again and wung away in easy, languorous strokes, as if it was all part of the plan. Hunger returned him. But whose? What surprises us now, despite our dragnet…

And one, from hunger and bitterness, wrung the loaf as if it had absorbed all the promises he had believed. But between hands it regathered itself, the way a cloud gathers itself from within, and they didn’t see that it stayed about the same size. He listened. His lips sweetened. Then he slept. When he…

And the heart of man is a green leaf: God twists its stem and it withers. ______________________________—Nikos Kazantzakis At first the hunger in his belly did not burn, nor did it lie at the bottom with the heaviness of stone. It was like iron hammered flat, like the dull edge of a knife pushed against…

I mean the kind saints praise and scripture calls blessed, the kind that inherits heaven where maybe what’s left of us will be more like a clear broth, than the vegetables and meat we chop here, as the radio blasts war, soup kitchen fills, and down the block a crowd gathers around two men yelling…

The following is adapted from a presentation given at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley in January 2015 during a convocation on the topic “Blessed Are You Poor: What Does It Mean to Be a Poor Church for the Poor?”   I SHOULD HAVE TOLD Father Michael Sweeney that if he really…

Many days into any kind of drought, whether lost faith or drying riverbed, god from machine seems the only way out. While the ospreys and quick kingfishers scout for their food in prayer, waiting to be led, many days into any kind of drought begins to weaken resolve and feed doubt, so that birds scoop…