The
Great Enigma
Comparisons
are odious,
say
the Zen Buddhists.
Everything
you say about God,
insisted
Eckhart, is untrue.
God
alone is real, declared Meher Baba.
God’s
aloneness makes Him incomparable.
To
evaluate God is to judge Him
through
illusory perceptions,
depict
Him through illusory descriptions,
His
attributes a list of everything we are not,
telling
us little about Him
and
everything about us.
O
child, my child, God exists as the Great Enigma,
incomparable in His
Oneness.
The
One without a second
In
the beginningless beginning
(before
the dawn of time),
God
woke up, an apparently disoriented newborn,
wondering
for a few timeless moments Who He was;
felt
a whim for exploration, then for light and vision,
creating
the stars and sun to reveal and reflect His glory;
followed
up with a whim to create an other, a witness
to
His glory and began the evolutionary chain
and
there came along numberless others
to
imagine Him, fear and love Him,
worship
or ignore Him, call upon Him
by
a host of names and images
and
to come to know intuitively
that
their separation from Him is illusory
and
that in some timeless future they will come
to
know Him entirely, first as the Beloved
and
then as their very own Self – the Only One,
the
Ancient One, the One without a second.
O
child of God, your connection to Meher
began before the
beginningless beginning.
Ardent
inarticulacy
My
Lord is the ancient, unspoken Word.
I
am infatuated with the common tongue.
All
poems are a description of this earthly realm.
This
realm is naught but a description of Reality.
Meher
Baba is the Truth.
That’s
why He stopped speaking.
Each
night I curl up with my dictionary,
thumb
through its assorted
definitions
and descriptions,
delve
into my trusty thesaurus;
quietly
roam the contours of my extensive vocabulary.
Words
on paper. Words on the screen.
How
can I not be infatuated with words?
They
are the nearest thing I have to His silence
and
I only become silent myself when His Truth
brushes
up against me and I am robbed of speech.
O
child of God, how loquacious you have become
in
your ardent inarticulacy.
(painting
by Joe DiSabatino)
Another
fine mess
Words
never contain the truth –
it
pours right through them
splattering
onto the immaculate page.
But
I am not yet comfortable with silence
which
feels too much like
the
loneliness leading up to death.
You
were silent in Your Onlyness.
I
have only words to offer.
You
were silent in Your Wholeness.
I
am not silent because I am not whole,
habitually
voicing my words
of
praise and complaint
for
yet another fine mess
You
seem to have gotten us into.
O
child of God, another collection of words from you.
When
will you be struck dumb by your own presumption?
(drawing
by Rich Panico)
