about 1997
I loved Milton's "Paradise Lost".  I loved the poetry.  But I did not 
love his God nor his ideas about subjection of women.  

Somehow to recreate those things for our day.  So much modern
spirituality, feminist spirituality ... is so sappy.  It doesn't run
deep into the questions of pain and mortality.  It's like pain and 
mortality is a taboo for us, they happen in hospitals where nobody 
sees, and a lot of the spirituality glosses over them.  We love youth
and health in this culture and the spirituality looks at things with 
the eyes of youth.  And separated from nature and the power of 
spiritual imagery.

The sacrifice of Christ is not a story about a human family.  It is a
kind of hope held out to every human being, who is incarnated like
Christ, tortured in the world and crucified upon matter.  A hope that
the final, real death, the surrender of all faith and love and 
everything high, the killing of the very soul by the hard exigencies
of the world, need not happen, because someone did not die that way.
That it was possible for God to be God in the world.  

It's the same cruelty that's done to everyone by God the skeleton maker.
and it calls to the wandering love around the skeleton.  a koan for
the heart in its wandering.