Poetic Thoughts on God

         Witness, then, the curious hush where God is. We blush at His silence, and fall quiet ourselves. We have excused Him by manners and cheap metaphors; we pretend that ignorance is reverence for a mystery, or that to clothe an Emperor in comparisons is to understand. Burnt offerings we have not withheld: our hearts are put to fire till the blood evaporates, until the smoke must surely reach to Abram's Father, who will say, “No more.”
         But the soul lies sickly still, unrippled by that Finger. Dying, we have in desperation called this life. We have stretched that gift, Imagination, into sin: so that we lie, and lie so longly and loudly that we deafen ourselves. If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. Frantic, we drive the mendicants from the temple. The tongues of those in agony are plucked, and seeded with platitudes.
         All the while we stumble through our churches like lovers abandoned, young brides forgotten at the altar. Above us is the water where they drowned us, clapping their hands in welcome, and above that is an empty cross. So it is, we think, that we have cast our eyes about for Him, and He has only left to us His cross. We gambled with a card shark, we cast our lots for robes, and we lost. We lost everything.
         The human race has become a disease of the mind, an obsessive-compulsive. We enact our empty rituals to quiet flutters of anxiety. Fear is muzzled by withdrawal, by meditation, by emptiness. Where once we battered at the gate of heaven, now we supplicate a new god: apathy. He will save us from our desires, those mad tigers astride our minds, who rage with massive jaws grown wet with blood and foam. He will save us from our fears, for what pain can rally numbness? If we will but cast our cares on him, we will be free. Wanting nothing, we will enter like infants; for such is the kingdom of apathy, that it can soothe with lullabies that awful difference that we see in death.
          And in apathy we fall again to silence, that mortal silence, like lovers separated by death. That youthful optimism is burned away now, like a fever strength briefly flaring in the void. Apathy has cooled the brows to sleep that agony did not kill, and the fighter has laid down with the pacifist. Into an eternal silence we have fallen, again like lovers, now dreaming of our loss and wandering the nocturnal sphere.
         Yet there is a reason for His silence echoing in the abyss. It began a shout, and now can little more than whisper: as it must be. We thirsty souls will rage for the water that He hoards, yet our hearts would founder on the shores of His knowledge. Our greedy eyes would, under the light of Wisdom, grind themselves to dust. For our selfish hunger, that grasping poverty, would use His love-- would feign devotion to put its mouth onto the breast. Yet a finite human, suckling at that infinite breast, may drown. Turn consuming Fire onto pitted dross, and watch it weep. Love, to love, cannot leave us to ourselves, or hug us fully lest He crush us.
         (Oh! here I tremble, I shake as if attempting an arctic sea...I am peeling secrets back to bind your wounds, and I fear more harm than good. These mysteries, they hold the universe together, they are the pillars of the House of Man. I may lash the world to crumbles with so glib a tongue; yet can I outwit Mind itself? If He were to keep this silence close, could I snatch the words from Him? Love, shall you wield my words to meaning? Fill them with health to save your weary children...)

         So our Lover takes a subtle hand, and woos us through eternity. With soft kisses from behind a mask he courts us, in jazz piano and chocolate and an endless sky...



To be continued...