When the grace comes

When the grace comes                                                                                 

A wintry Atlantic far as the eye can see

backed up against the Meher Center.

Rough tide rolling in; soon to be withdrawn

by some ancient schedule, natural as breath. 

High tide deposits, ebb tide removes,

each drop illusory, transitory, necessary.

Disturbed neither by its bounty nor dearth

as it takes and gives not what I desire

but what I require.  Such is my faith.

Ever functioning in its to-and-fro mystery, 

there’s no lost book, its secrets to reveal. 

Read instead its ragged roar and song.

Allow it to envelop, permeate, drench,

ready you for when the grace comes

to repair, restore, return your soul

to its depths unfathomable.

O child of God, your Father is the Ocean.   

Every shore on which you stand is foreign.

Somnambulist

Somnambulist                                                                                             

I have come not to teach but to awaken.

We’re not here to learn but to come to.

To acquire – to get, grasp, gather, is to learn

while awakening is a loss through love,

a thinning of the dream’s substantiality.

This lifetime, I’ve been much more

a learner/gatherer than a lover/loser.

I’ve been a somnambulist on the path,

incessantly losing my way

to learn how very lost I am.

Loss upon loss until at last comes rest – 

the waking up from this tumultuous dream.

O child of God, your weariness has become your solace.

Halt now upon the path and become the sought.

The great pretender

The great pretender                                                                        

For many years His confidant,

His personal attendant, interpreter;

His servant and His companion.  Now, Eruch,

some declare you were God-realized all along.

Veiled to your own perfection, some say.

Others claim you were the great pretender

having fooled all the world

but for your Master and a few others.

These conjectures, earnestly asserted,

are meant to invoke awe and reverence for you.

I have no way to judge your status. 

But, the man I briefly met –

on Meherazad days

scattered over several pilgrimages,

I admired and revered

not for his mastery, but for his servitude;

for his humanity, not his perfection; 

his sincerity, not his cleverness;

for his ordinariness, his utter lack of pretension –

not his ability to pull off an elaborate pretense.

O child of God, as Eruch would advise -- look beyond

Eruch to the Godman he so artfully served.

Such a love

Such a love

You listed a number of ways for us to love God,

none of them ever directly hitting the mark,

all involving our relationship with others,

so incapable apparently are we to love

a mystery and majesty like You,

having no idea what such a love entails

or, more precisely, having only an idea,

a loosely-gathered, ill-defined concept

of a love without self, whose imagined majesty

negates the word as we define it.

A love forever beyond our grasp, 

effort and, perhaps, experience,

far from intellect, individuality,

our mortality and probing senses.

O child of God, having no heart for such a love,

you try to conjure it up within your brain.