Belief Systems – Jane Tawel

The Smell of The Crowd

The Smell of The Crowd

By Jane Tawel

October 8, 2026

Can you imagine what they smelled like?

That rag-tag bunch of men who smelled like fish?

Those women who smelled of childbirth?

(no time for baptismal purification, with all that housework

for her ladyship);

The gardeners who arrived,

Necks bent permanently from kneeling in the mud and manure?

(no time to change from cultivating his honorable so and so’s garden)

And all those little children!?

(who let them come?)

Kids so used to being neither seen nor heard,

Unable to remember what it was to play,

Day after day, picking through the garbage thrown out in the streets,

(as many of their families had been)

Children came.

Children who smelled like, well,

children.

These were the multitudes with no free time

for baths or baptisms,

no spare change for deodorants

or gifts of frankincense and myrrh.

A people with no paid vacations

or access to spas.

In fact, probably a lot of them

knew they’d lose their jobs,

or get beaten by their mistresses

(if they were allowed to return to work).

Maybe some of the teenagers

had run away from home –

Just to hear Him speak.

By some miraculous communication,

Long before telegraphs or cellphones

Before television or Tik-Tok,

These stinky multitudes got The Word.

Straight to their hearts, His words

The Word

Found them.

And they Knew! Knew!

They had to, simply had to,

Leave everything if they must,

and come to Jesus.

They Knew! Knew!

That they would be welcomed by Someone

Who was wise, and good,

and who cared about them.

Little did they imagine,

That they would be loved.

That they would in all their odiferous reality,

Be seen as something More,

Be touched as flesh that mattered

Be heard with their questions of importance,

And be inhaled like a fresh Breath of Life.

They wept and laughed and hugged each other,

To think they would be

Embraced by Someone who Loved them.

They could barely imagine.

Barely hope or pray

That they would be accepted as they were,

Loved even.

But they were.

But can you imagine,

in your fresh clothes washed by Tide,

And your shampooed hair, smelling of gardenias,

And your brushed teeth compliments of Crest –

Can you imagine —

Just for a moment —

All of that disgusting, decaying flesh

pressed up all around

Each other and Him?

All of those calloused hands that dug the earth

or hauled the catch,

or wiped the bottoms of the rich and famous?

Can you get a hint

of the smell of those armpits that sweated

in the harsh sun and the baking furnace rooms

in the private gardens of the wealthy

and the gated houses of the powerful?

Can you smell the oozing pus

from their scrapped and bloodied knees

bowed, and bowed, and bowing again and again

in the endless service of those

with leisure and time and place and money

those who could imagine they had

cleaned away for one more day

the body’s smell of daily dying?

And can you imagine their surprise

When Jesus didn’t ask them to bow down,

Or even to help out?

But He invited them to sit and be served.

And to eat. Relax. Chill out. Enjoy.

“Take eat, there is plenty. More than enough.”

(Even his closest friends thought he was a bit nutty).

But Jesus knew he was preparing them to one day hear:

“This bread is my body, given for you. Take. Eat.”

Oh, yes.

The dirty masses snuck away

from those too busy and with hands to clean to come

to hear a Man who had a different definition

of being clean.

Can you imagine?

Can you smell the needy stench?

And Jesus not only gathered them,

Invited them in,

Fed them,

And taught them things they’d only dreamed about,

But He stuck his nose deep in their

Greasy hair,

and smelly armpits,

and knees that knelt in putrid labor all day long

and the hands of tiny children, sticky with snot.

And He held them.

And He loved them.

And He Imbibed —

every stinky, smelly, poverty-stricken, bodily-entombed

one of them.

After all –

Jesus came

to smell like one of us.

And He smiled as He chased the scent.

Being One with The Hound of Heaven.

Jesus knew that The Kingdom

was not behind the walls or in the mansions,

But right there in the Unseen masses,

But who had eyes to see;

And right there with those with ears to hear;

And in the so-called Untouchables,

But who had open hands, willing to hold them out to others

and touch the Hand of God.

And Jesus knew that in the pungent scrums

pressing up against Him,

were a multitude of noses,

broken, misshapen, fractured

by years of being stuck to the grindstones of the temporal

but there with Him,

ready and able to smell the fragrance of The Eternal Holy.

And little did they know,

That with every sense informing Christ’s soul,

He was preparing for the ultimate Reek

of His body, hung like offal on a Roman Cross,

And the decaying stench of His body,

Given for us,

So that we might go

and smell likewise.

Jesus gave the poor and lost and least

a strong whiff

of what it means to live within a Kingdom

Imbued with the Earthy,

smelly, pungent scent of humanness

and yet — -

within each,

there lurked

the aroma of the Divine.

And He encouraged us

to go —

and smell likewise.

Hope in the World, Just Not Yet at Home

by Jane Tawel

In the past couple days there is evidence of several amazing world events and leaders that give me hope — they just aren’t in America sadly. (Let’s hope that there is a “yet” to that first sentence.) Hungary — Wow! Canada and Prime Minister Mark Carney — Wow. Wow. Pope Leo — WOW! WOW! WOW! These three examples alone of moral integrity and truth spoken with love are lights in a dark time. This is unlike the haters and foolish, dark-minded people currently in our nation’s administration, congress, and in the ranks of their supporters, (either openly or behind the scenes), who are running our nation into the ground. They instead are gleefully filling their coffers or excusing those who are using them for their own enrichment while offending everyone, creating fallacious conflicts that kill innocent people, and ruining not just America’s and the world’s economy, but creating decades of dire problems for our children and our planet. This is overwhelming enough but add to that the continuous drip, drip, drip of blaspheming or changing beyond all recognition what some of these people say they believe as a world view, Christianity, and that they even say they want to be our national “religion” (something our nation considered a dangerous oxymoron) but a belief system if when looked at honestly, stands against everything that we see coming to horrible fruition today; a Faith which is truly and in actuality the moral imperative good people of all religions or just all good humans are called to follow. We have slid down the slippery slope the oligarchs and capitalism have long been slipping on.

But despite what we are hearing: Exceptionalism isn’t individualism, it is holding oneself to an exceptional standard; leading without morality isn’t leadership, its narcissm; and empathy is not a weakness but the best way to understand the onus of the greatest power the universe knows — Love. I know there are enough people in America who remember what we are called to be at our best — caring, sharing, accepting, just, truthful, and free. There is always light, no matter how dark it may seem, if we look hard enough. Keep looking ahead; keep looking around you; keep looking for the helpers. And keep hoping. Be the Light you are called to today.

Mires and Wires

Mires and Wires

By Jane Tawel

February 17, 2026

Some of us dig in.

We dig, dig, dig down

into the sands

of our times,

into the tidepools

of our minds,

into the sucking mire.

We are seldom able to fly,

but like birds on a wire,

we are called to balance —

precariously, it is true —

but trusting

that not one of us can fall

without the Weeping of the World.

Here, where some of us have landed,

poised with wings tucked tight,

there is no room to gather

that which cannot be eaten today.

But those who choose to dig holes

like moles and augers in the land,

store up their treasures

leaving their names on the inverted pyramids

sinking into famed obscurity

and drowning in the solidity

of their false hopes.

Poor creatures —

so richly mistaken

and shaken to the core

by the fears of their impermanence.

I have dug myself plenty of holes.

But now I place my own small hope

on small movements of mine

fluttering, hopping at times from foot to foot,

attempting to share in the tight-rope act

of small beings barely balanced

in this singular time and place.

And like a small brown wren

I wonder how or when

in what future unknown space

will we, little birds —

(being now so often trapped and caught,

and bought — a dozen for a penny) —

will we at last be gathered

like chicks to Our Mother’s breast?

Here on this unsteady string of life,

we long for The Nest

and for the rest we once knew,

and yearn to know again

covered by The Father’s Mighty Wings of Refuge.

It will not be by digging in

like a burrowing beast,

mistaking flowers for tares,

that I will find peace.

Nor will we know the love we seek

by running like lemmings or hares,

after any crown or prize

that we may chase.

We fledglings live encased

and see only through the cracks

of our embracing shells.

But incubating here

we wait to rise in glory.

It is still the same old story:

Only by falling and falling

and failing and flailing

into grace after Grace

will we learn to fly.

And someday, we will see The Face

of the One Who has kept us

hanging here in the balance

between life and death

where the faith of small birds

finds hope.

By dust we were created

and to dust we shall return.

But The Wind blows where it will,

and some will spread their wings to catch it

and will rise in flocked flight.

Farewell to my Belief-Prison

Farewell to my Belief-Prison

By Jane Tawel

December 26, 2025

I woke up — gradually

And in pieces

And slowly, slowly

It dawned —

That my comfortable belief-system

had become a prison.

All the other people –

Friends and family that I love

Beckoned me

through the prison-bars of their beliefs

to: “Come back. Come back.

You are wrong to leave the safety of confined captivity”.

Holding out their hands

They did not

could not

would not

See.

(It is rather frightening, after all,

to escape from a prison in which you are only

being held by your collective fears).

Oh, how I looked with love and longing,

Back to those I had toiled with in the fields,

singing our jailhouse songs of Grace,

and doing penance in our mixed-up views that Faith,

would one day set us free, and we would be home —

Never realizing we were already free.

And we were already Home.

Here. Now.

Oh, how I knew and understood

My dearly beloved fellow inmates.

For while their prisons kept their outsides clean

Their innermost God-cups

were overflowing in dogma poop.

In our belief-prisons,

Our fat-fingers, smeared with holy and unholy oils,

Pointed through our imagined prison-bars,

Neglecting to see the beams

We had used to build our barriers;

Thinking that the shacks made out of splinters

that our neighbors lived in

were what had put them into debtors’ prisons,

(prisons not nearly so nice as ours).

And yet we continued to chant —

Forgive us our debts,

(but God-forbid! —

don’t make us forgive

those we have made our debtors).

And so, One Day,

When I could no longer recite

the same old lies that buried the Truth

in our entombing stories,

of resurrection for Someone else,

but never resurrection for our dead souls;

I stepped outside the prison’s Open Door

(and knocked over a small table in the process).

And while the fresh air was bracing

And my heart was absolutely racing

I kept inching forward

Step by step,

Led only by the millenniums

of a thousand pinpoints of Light.

Balancing precariously

on the Universe’s Bright Enlightened Beam,

and tiptoeing carefully

on the Cross-road had never been many roads

but only, always One;

I stumbled upwards and onwards,

Here and Now,

along the Narrow Way.

I do admit, I miss at times

the custody I mistook for communion,

and the finely decorated walls

I mistook for Creativity.

Oh, how I raised my hands in praise

and feeble offerings to those I once thought

were blinded by The Light,

(but in fact, were only blinded by The Might.)

I preached from within my prison

to those (I thought) outside the fold

of the security of my imprisoned-beliefs,

And in those comforting black and white walls

of the old prison I had long embraced as home,

I did get glimpses of clear Sky.

And I am still so very grateful

for the many dearly loved prison guards –

who had, after all, only tried to keep me safe

and who had, as even blind guides can,

opened my eyes to what had been born

and Who was eternally being Born

in the Heart’s longing for salvation.

But I am no longer sorry, even though still sad,

That when I stuck one small-Soul foot,

Outside my belief-prison’s walls,

the other prisoners shoved me

the rest of the way out;

for they could not bear to leave behind

their imaginary Maximum-Security Prison

and they could not bear to think

that I might find a Home outside their walls.

I do bear the stigmata of their hands

shoving hard against my back,

pushing me out and forward

like a blowing Wind

that one day, God may use beneath me

to help my wings grow strong.

And I have found that Now —

and wildly, freely, only Here and Now —

(and yet also, There and Then)

I have stumbling found

that we were born for freedom,

and that Salvation is only ever, True-ly grasped

by letting go

as Love leads us

further out, and out, and out

and further in and In.

I thank You,

Creator-Word,

For sparking a burning flame

In this small human being.

And for standing at the door

Of my imprisoned self

And knocking hard and long

(and also softly and in Stillness).

I thank you, All

My freedom-fighting and freedom-finding

many and yet One, brothers and sisters,

Who trembled and still tremulously shine

from different points of view and

different points of the One Light,

to tell the World

about a better Way.

And I join my small self’s soul

With All of Yours

as One, we journey on,

out of all

the crippling, darkening belief-prisons,

and onto the Soul’s Free Path,

the One I-Am of Truth, and Love, and Light:

leading, yet not leaving;

moving, and being moved-in;

out of this world’s incarceration

and In-to Eternity’s

Incarnation.

Here. Now.

Born in each moment,

And eternally in and among us.

May it Be. Amen.

Will I Stand Up?

by Jane Tawel

Will I Stand Up?

By Jane Tawel

February 2, 2025

Will I stand up,

if courage fails?

If lies prevail

and all seems lost?

Will I stand up

when others scoff?

When I’m cast off

as weak and frail?

Today I stand

upon The Rock

and weep to see

a House once strong,

now willful, prideful

tearing down

its firm foundations

its Cornerstone,

erecting bent beliefs

on shifting sands.

Will I stand up

when hope is torn

from bleeding Heart

from bleeding Hands?

No —

I shall fall…

But I will raise

No flag,

No creed,

No weapon but,

The Banner of

God’s Love for All,

Yes! — “All!” I’ll cry,

with my last breath,

and though I can not stand —

I’ll crawl.

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