Like, take journalism, doctor.  Good journalism is Buddhist.  It question the assumptions people get caught up in.  Are there really weapons of mass destruction?  Is Saddam an enemy more than anyone else?  Is the terrorist in any one place more than any other?  What is a terrorist?  How do they come about?  What about Domino Theory?  Who are 'we,' who are 'them?' Only the people in general can put a leash on the big egos.  And the big egos are the ones who, by definition, have and like power and like to use it personally for their own advancement.

Yes, people who've been on the wrong side of ostracism respect circumspection.  People aren't as bad as made out to be.  It's a particular individual who divorces himself from the rest of humanity.

And this is the Christian story, too, of the stone the builders rejected, that which is misunderstood by empire and by its minis, its knockoffs, the littler empire of socio-economic temple societies invested in status quo.  Power is enforced through judgmental habit, quelling the broader mind as a threat to its order.  Maybe you can't even blame anyone for wanting to impose order, we need order.  But, sometimes it's overdone.  That is the crucifix, the pain which does not go away, absorbed into the body, properly, for the rest of life.  And once absorbing that pain, you know better than to judge or to put an inappropriate definition upon on another.  When you've been judged, the only recourse, the only way to stand up, is through words.  "Wist ye not I was at my father's work," he observes as a boy.  He defines things on deeper terms.  He becomes a man of words more than action, the money changer's tables an exception.  A poet's passivity, almost.

Obsession-- this question probes into me, asks of me to open my creative furnace, the dynamo , the power plant, the boiler room, the hot nuclear core.  I did not make her up.  That's my creativity, my own look into Christian suffering.  You're asking me to take it out, as if to unplug it?   I had to go through it all in order to gain more fully the insights I had in me, that 'normal' people might be afraid of in pursuit of their own morality.  Christianity is not just for the sick and the dispossessed, but for everyone, applicable to the truth behind all life which is suffering.

And we can have normal lives and relationships even with such understandings fully seated within us, so that we don't try to hide or cover up solitary pains of the kind that foster wisdom and understanding.  Healthier than attempting some sort of fleeting happiness as an answer to life's problems.  It's our own bare humanity that gets us through, the ability to interact with neighbors, to find friendship.

But it seems an unlikely journey.  It might seem too depressing for the main part, too honest.  And it can only begin and grow and act through the gentle instrument of words, words which strive to capture the deeper thoughts.  And that's why we read poets, like Shakespeare, like Larkin, as they offer an honest picture into life, rather than trying to conquer it or white wash it all with happy pursuits.

I felt no great power or ability with words, natural as the poet has.  Maybe every now and then on a good day.  My obsession, or one of them, was to write better, to create literature.  But really all you can do is tell the truth as you find it out.  Know or realize the truth of suffering, its prevalence, enough to take the supposed unhappiness from it, making it bearable out of a knowledge of, as they say, doing the right thing, of knowing the universality of events that make individuals sad.

When you know the truth, that all lives share, then you can go on and live your life, do the work you were cut out to do for its own reasons.

That's why I wrote a sort of subversively Christian, for lack of a better term, novel.  It has many of the elements of the original, brought down into ordinary life.  I'm okay with all that.  That's life.  That's how it goes.

And then, realizing all this, then you can move on in your life.  It's not too much of a leap of the imagination if you think about it.

Otherwise the whole story would be irrelevant.  You'd have to be able to walk on water to be a Christian.  Being Christian would be narrowed, like, you can't believe in birth control or some silliness like that.  It wouldn't have any life in it.  It wouldn't be applicable to daily life.

And yeah, Christian meditations, these things take time.  They take wisdom, life experience, the barren lonesome desert.  They take years.  And it's like Bonhoeffer himself said, Jesus, if he were around, would not like so much the church built up in his own name.  Free thought.  An outsider's perspective.  Focus.  A willingness to have a sense of circumspect humor.  Some irreverence.  Like Dostoevsky.

It never was about trying to win her over.  Even though it pains me that it didn't work out.  It was more about me trying to find meaning, to find a career for myself, a way of becoming mature, seeing to adult responsibilities as I saw them.  You can't blame me for that.