Rejoice
Rejoice
when your life has become smudged,
yellowed
with age, corners curled up
like
an old snapshot viewed too many times.
Rejoice
in your longevity; not everyone reaches this shore.
You’ve
been given it for a reason. Rejoice
in
your friends and loved ones who have gone before,
moved
on to another opportunity. Rejoice in
your infirmities
which
encourage you, in your many-lived journey,
to
quit your infatuation with your body.
Rejoice
in your immobility – there to teach you
that
there is nowhere to go. Rejoice in your
fading mind
which
has misled you all of your days.
Rejoice
in your failures – graciously teaching
you
to bow down humbly before your Maker.
O
child of God, in this great migration toward God
every burden holds a
hidden blessing.
Nothing
matters
When
you come to the truth
that
nothing matters (per Meher)
in
this dream of life but love for God,
standing
helpless and hopeless
before
your Maker,
you
may gain then a foothold
on
the approach road leading
to
your own demise and liberation.
A
life of perfect surrender is one in which
nothing
matters
– come what may;
where
every moment is received
and
humbly accepted with acquiescence
by
the faithful servant, the perfect lover,
as
the sacred will and wish of the Beloved.
O
child of God, view this dream of life and death
as an important
journey wherein nothing matters.
(drawing by Rich Panico)
SomeOne
of authority
It’s
a winding course I’ve taken.
It
seems to have been set by someOne else.
I
feel like a pawn in a grandiose, enigmatic game –
an
unsettling notion at best yet not nearly as fearful
as
the possibility that I make my way
through
the world alone and unobserved.
I
seem to possess abundant faith in God the Creator
but
not so much in God the Beloved.
Our
Creator I have generally taken to be self-evident,
but
it took someOne of authority, someOne I trusted,
to
insist that God is Love . . . so that I began to follow
my
heart, upturning all my previous assumptions.
This
ongoing examination and interrogation of mine
is
not evidence of my disbelief
but
proof of my abiding faith,
my
skepticism merely a signature trait
(as
the Creator is well aware)
of
just who in the world I am
or
at the very least, the imperfect role
I
have been chosen to play.
O
child of God, you can’t know the truth of God’s love
by looking it up in
the dictionary.
Ode
to Fear
Lifelong
have you hounded me,
thwarted
my surrender,
the
great contradiction being,
as
my constant companion,
you
have also been the compelling force
in
my flight toward surrender.
For
that, I begrudgingly give you credit.
God
by definition is fearless, so why and how
do
you manifest so inherently in His children?
Per
the Mystics, you are merely
one
aspect of God’s everything,
an
illusory absence
in
the eternal essence of Love.
O
these incongruities and contradictions!
Such
is my life on the battlefield
which
underneath (They tell me)
has
always been a vast green and fragrant meadow
leisurely
raked by the random summer winds.
O
child of God, where there is love, said Meher,
there is no
fear. Where there is fear there is no
love.
