Surrender, God, Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me, tradition, saints, and sinners

***

At the point it all stops, everything keeps going.

And so I say humble yourself and you shall not need to be humbled.

Until you bow down you shall not be grabbed and lifted.

Step by step you shall stumble, death by death you shall crawl.

Stay low. Rise high.

God will not forget you if you do not forget god; come not to the alter as a proud and clean saint, come as a humble, dumb sinner. Come as you are.

Oh, I tell you, peace will come, but not before you have spent your last bullet, screamed your last curse, and shed your last tear.

In the end I did not even heroically renounce the world- I was, so to speak, renounced; I did not, with divine finesse, detach from the world- I was asked to leave; polite, but uncompromisingly, I was ordered out.

It was a thorough abandonment in the 'Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?' stale old, nauseous tradition.

The person who has been relinquished has in fact lost nothing, for compared to what they have received, what they have endured ...is nothing.

***

These selected fragments are excerpted from unpublished writings by Jack Haas; selections from the notebooks 1990-2005.