take me another 40 years to find and read. But the bit of cinema and the bit of a book had aligned like tumblers of a combination lock clicking into place and opening a vault of language and imagination.

By broaching the notion of substitutionary atonement—that Jesus came to die for our sins, in particular the residual stain of Original Sin that closed the gates of Paradise to us—upon which much of western religiosity rests, the film image of the sin-eater and the Puckle paragraph established a visual and textual alternative to the nearly naked “savior” hanging dead on the cross as the sacrificial lamb of God at the center of the sacred theater of the liturgy I’d grown up with as the child of practicing Catholics.

The loaf andHe is trying to keep body and soul together. And these poems articulate the mixed blessing and contrariety of my own life of faith—pre–Vatican II to the Current Disaster. I have been variously devout and devoutly lapsed.

The church of my childhood—the “holy mother” it called itself—has left no few of its children more damaged than doted over, more ignored than nurtured, orphaned and hungry, fed a thin gruel of religiosity rather than the loaves and fishes of spiritual sustenance. The ongoing failure of its management class, its up-line politics and old-boy malfeasances have done remarkable damage to generations of faithful servant priests and faithful people.

Of course, the life of faith is never settled, driven as it must be by doubts and wonder, by those experiences, losses and griefs