A LETTER FROM GOD
Why are we so stupid, Lord?
Why do we yell and shout,
Rant and rave, pillage and kill?
Why do we cheat and lie,
Ignore and disdain,
Leave and abandon?
We could all be so close,
So loving, so kind.
After all—
We all share the same things:
The fresh air, the blue sky,
The moonlit nights.
We all have the same fears:
Loneliness and sickness,
Poverty and death.
We all hold fast
To the same hopes and dreams—
Friends and family of love, perhaps
Happy children whirling
Like small dervishes
In their own little worlds.
A bit of praise, a kind word,
Work that goes well.
I wrote this as a poem
But it is really a prayer.
I spoke it aloud so many times,
Even unto the thickest part
Of the blackest night
Until I fell into a deep sleep.
When I awoke the next morn,
The mail had come early.
I opened an envelope
That had no stamp.
Handwritten in unreal beauty,
It began quite formally:
‘Dear Mr. and my name,
I have broken my own rule
To write you, but you are
So very persistent!
If life were easy,
You would not feel alive.
If love were easy,
You would not value it.
And if I were easy,
You would never seek me.’
Faithfully yours,
God
A SECOND LETTER FROM GOD
I suppose I should have been satisfied
With the first letter—I mean, how
Often does the Almighty write to us?
Not since He did it on stone, I suppose.
But I am human and so rarely content—
Then too, I still had so many questions,
Like why must children suffer cruelty
Or deathly ills—and why are the aged
So oft forgotten, ignored, neglected?
Why do so many hunger for vengeance
While others thirst for a drop of love?
Before the act is always the thought—
So why do we lessen the other, turn
Him into an animal, some predator
To be feared and hunted to extinction?
And why do we peacock ourselves
With plumes of ego and pride, then
Go strutting into the world like
Petty kings, woodhearted queens?
And always, always, we are we less
Than we could be, sad thin shadows
Of that person we know could, and
Should walk free on the sun-lit earth?
I wrote this unmailed letter knowing
He would read the words before I
Could put them down—but I did
Not expect an answer-- so when I
Found another letter slipped under
My door, this too written in a hand
Of unearthly beauty, I gasped it with
Guilt and fear—was I too greedy,
Too foolish to want to know the
Mind of God: why He made us
The way we are, what He wants
From us, of us, for us? Now I
Began trembling, my heart
Pounding like it would burst.
Still,
I opened the letter and read—
‘I really am breaking all my own
Rules in writing you again, and
I’m not sure why—yes,
I don’t always know my
Own mind—I told you
You were made in my
Image. I suppose I am
Intrigued –the answers
You seek have been
Sought throughout
Time, ever really
Since I put that
Immortal part of you
In your ancestors,
And turned animal
Into human and
Instinct into choice.
I gave your species
Everything needed:
Reason, imagination,
Speech, and my
Greatest gift—love
Strong enough to
Transcend time.
And what did you
Humans do with
All these wonders?
You waged war
Endlessly and
Oppressed the
Weak, breaking
Them as though
They were clay
pots and not
My children….
I sent prophets
To warn you
To chose light
Before the dark
Ate your souls—
I even sent my
Only son to
Lead you home—
But you killed him.
And you wonder
Why life is hard?
As always,
faithfully yours—
God’
A DOCTOR BLIND TO GOD
My friend, a retired surgeon,
tells me he would like to believe,
in an almighty and loving God,
but claims science, annoyingly,
keeps getting in the way—so
I ask why, why is that?
After all, one is of this world,
the world of physics, of math,
the world of flesh and blood,
the world of nature, full of
contradictions, unpredictable,
noble, beautiful on occasion,
cruel and base at other times
[and I make clear to him, by
that I mean nature’s nature,
with its sunsets and rainbows,
hurricanes and earthquakes,
and human nature, with its
art and music and poetry and
war and genocide and slavery].
But God is not of this world--
in it, yes, through it, yes, yet
always unimaginably beyond,
a Being that is a Force that is
a Presence, that is the All…
so how could my friend, or
anyone who can think only
one thought at a time define
such a One? Or worse, talk
about God as though God
could be measured, weighed,
evaluated… captured by a
puny being whose existence
spans a handful of decades
and never really can know
its own mind completely?
Alas, my friend, the doctor,
just cannot see that science,
like art, music, poetry, and
that singular gift, sentience,
are just intimations of God….
After Costco, Before Ukraine
You saw the lines weren’t too long
so you went for the gas first---
spend a little time, save a lot of
money you thought. But it took
much longer than you expected
so by the time you went into the
giant store, you were feeling like
a crab trapped in a net as you
wrestled through the weekend
horde of bargain hunters….
Finally at home, you plopped
down in your comfy chair as
the nightly news came on and
sipped the fresh brewed French
roast and ate a piece of rich
chocolate cake you bought at
Costco and felt a bit sad for
those poor people in Ukraine
as you watched war in hi-def.
Still, the thought uppermost in
your mind, as your eyes scanned
so many dead bodies lying quiet
in the streets like stones thrown
randomly, was just how damn
good the coffee was and how
much you had saved going to
the big box store….
A Dead Love Poem
I hold her negative image
between my fingertips.
I study the X-ray of a face
loved and hated many times--
the alabaster dots replacing
those brown eyes that tripped
the clown, my soul, one day…
when? but yesterday?
The teeth a blackish-grey, apropos
perhaps a corpse but not a dead love.
Hair blonder than Scandinavian sun
entices memory of cold-black beauty.
I hold like a hollow man the negative
to the light, to see through the breasts
I had fondled in joy as the long-running
melodrama returns to the stage but
I no longer sell the tickets, there will be
no audience, the show will flop, and
I will take up gardening for growth is
life and the perforated celluloid which
I hold so gingerly between fingertips is
dead, unalive, inanimate, its enlargement
suitable only for framing in my memory.
Postscript:
Where are the sounds now?
The slammed car doors, the yelling,
the ‘bitch’ calling, the ‘bastard’ calling,
all prompted out of rage and intimate fear
along with the looks, glances trimmed
by a smear of hate, faces badly packed in
anger, ugly...they lie buried now within
love’s treasure chest, beneath the touching,
the emerald speckled kisses and eye-shared
secrets across peopled rooms…
the ugly is buried with the beautiful.
Essay: The Delusions of ‘Modern’ People
by Nolo Segundo
Modern societies in general and especially it seems those in the West suffer under the widespread delusion that people today are ‘better’ than their ancestors who lived long ago—not just better off in a material sense but smarter, more sophisticated, and far better educated. After all, we have cars and jet planes and air conditioning and TV and the Internet and soon there will be space travel (for those who can afford it). I’m in my late 70’s and recall my beloved Nana telling me how my grandparents courted in a horse and buggy—and I thought that so quaint. What I did not think on is what they experienced in their nine decades of life: the Industrial revolution, the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed 50 to 100 million people around the world (targeting especially those in their prime, like my great-uncle at 26 and my great-aunt Julia at 22), two world wars, and a Great Depression that bankrupted my grandfather’s business, leaving him to work as a foreman for the rest of his working life.
It struck me some years ago when I saw cave paintings in France from 40,000 years ago that people then were just as intelligent as we are. And I’ve learned from decades of reading history that human nature has not changed at all. The greatest proof of that, of course, is war. Look at today: the largest country in the world invades its much smaller, peaceful, non-threatening neighbour—for what? More land? If we cannot fully know ourselves as individuals [as honest, reflective folks will admit], then we don’t know ourselves as a species ether.
Now I am old, and I expect my nephews and nieces see me as ‘quaint’, or maybe just out of touch. They seem to find it amusing that I don’t fully trust their beloved digital world, and so like some Luddite own a printer to make copies of what I think are important papers. And should I dare to speak to them of God and the soul and eternity? I could tell them about the NDE [near-death experience] I had over half a century ago which destroyed my own youthful faith in secular materialism, the belief that only matter has reality in this vast universe-- so, logically speaking, only chance and extinction are real, the Universe itself was an accident, and we humans, the only sentient animal to have evolved in millions of years, are just flukes. Absurdities really-- we know we are mortal, aware of time and space, and so the fear of death hangs over us like an endless cover, making everything we do—if we are honest, as an atheist friend pointed out to me—meaningless. What does it matter if I make a fortune: I’ll die and someone else will use it, until of course they die? What does it matter if I create a symphony or write a profound book or paint the essence of life itself onto a canvas if I’m just going to become extinct someday? After all, why would it matter what we leave behind if someday civilization itself is destroyed? Perhaps by a plague with a 100% lethality or more likely we’ll be done in by ourselves-- a thermonuclear war, even a relatively limited one of a 100 or so nukes going off would do the trick, and our beautiful planet would become as desolate as the moon.
Of course, we are the only species even bothered by this possibility. I don’t suspect any animal fears death—yes, of course they fear being attacked and eaten by a predator, but to fear dying I think you really have to know you’re alive and that you are mortal. One of the hardest things I’ve done in my life was to take Sam, our beloved Great Dane, to be put down at 11 to end her incurable suffering. The only consolation I had was that she did not know why we were going to the vet, and so had no fear at all.
The other side of the coin of sentience is that if I had ever asked Sam if she believed in God or the immortal soul, she would have just looked at me with those big beautiful eyes and smile her doggy smile, which is not really a smile. Again we are unique amongst all animals in that we can even ask such questions.
But today there is a mindset that finds asking such questions (or even postulating about an Intelligence vastly greater than ours) to be—well, dumb, stupid, the vaping of ignorant minds. Now there have always been those who do not, cannot, or will not see any reality beyond that we can perceive with our limited senses of sight and hearing and smell. We humans can only see a limited part
of the light spectrum, hear a limited range of sound waves, and my Sam could smell 10,000 times better than I could. And as large mammals, we are pretty weak, yet we have strengths tigers and bears and our genetic cousins, the great apes, would envy—if they could envy.
We are sentient beings, and so have awareness of time and space, and of our feelings, our hopes, our longings, our pleasures, our interests, our fears, our loves and our hates. We have reason and logic, and reading and art, and cooking and the enjoyment of food that seems myriad in the range of different tastes, each unique to one’s palette. But I think the most vital and unique ‘attribute’ we humans have evolved—or are blessed with in my estimation-- is IMAGINATION! Without it we would never had developed ‘civilization’, because logic tells me before the pyramids were built, some smart ancient Egyptian had to imagine them. And everything we have in the past 5, 000 years is because it was first imagined—right down to the poems I am somehow able to create.
Of course, if I try to ‘force’ myself to write a poem, it won’t work (I know, I’ve tried it and it’s always crap!) To me it seems that imagination is somehow like a bridge, one spanning perhaps the conscious mind with the unconscious. Creativity has to come from more than just the conscious mind, otherwise I could just sit down and ‘think’ a workable poem into existence. Perhaps some folks can, but I’m sceptical. For one thing, why are the great, or even pretty good writers, artists, scientists, composers, architects, chefs, and so on pretty rare, numbering in maybe the thousands throughout history while 70 or 80 or 100 billion people have walked this earth at one time or another? And far, far fewer are the number of great religious-philosophical teachers who continue to influence the lives of billions of people: Jesus, Moses, the Prophet, Buddha.
The world has many problems, and we humans are all deeply flawed, but try to imagine a world without their teachings, as well as the Karmic teaching of the world’s oldest great religion, Hinduism. As bad as things are now, what would the world be like without the ‘pause’ that all the great faiths give to us when our baser, selfish natures shriek into our conscious minds?
Of course since Marx there have been atheistic regimes, notably communism and national socialism that maintain control through fear and repression. Today, sadly, they still flourish, in nations both large like Russia and China and small, too many to name here. And even in the democracies there is a split that seems to grow ever bitter between the Left and the Right, with advocates on either side unwilling or perhaps unable to see any merit in the thinking of those on the other side of the cultural fence. This is not new: history is bitterly adorned with examples of humans killing humans because of differences in nationality, race, language, politics, class, and perhaps saddest of all, religion. Today it’s cancel culture and storming the capitol: will tomorrow be a return to the guillotine or lynching?
Is there a greater delusion than thinking we humans are the apex of the Universe?
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