I came across Christ
I came across Christ stripped of scriptural
restraints;
uplifted in outstretched, agonized triumph.
I came across Christ as He double-crossed
the stone sepulcher; came across death,
across Truth in a walkabout that led to Jesus in
India,
thousands of years from the sophistry,
the accumulated errors, the calcified ruins.
I came across Christ, the palpable flesh and blood
hanged from a cross of the Carpenter’s own making,
His silent returning, His timely, masterful,
merciful
descent, the ethereal made extant in the milieu
of our latest, chronic human lunacy and despair.
O child of God, follow the ancient thread that runs
from
Zoroaster’s kushti to the sadra of Meher.
Original grain
I want to not know
any other way to be.
Cut my alternatives
down to zero, the original grain
good for me, good for me;
truth will out and out of that truth
a worn out humbleness, holiness revealed;
holy however imperfect, impure, impaired.
Dream if you must
of unbridled potential.
I want to not know
any other way to be,
rubbed down to the nub, the original grain
and go with that, go with that, go with that.
O child of God, the Way, said the venerable
Lao Tzu, is gained by daily loss.
Something better besides
To seek the
truth
is to covet
what God knows.
To seek nothing
is to honor His secret.
To seek nothing is the ultimate faith.
A dearth of trust is truth-seeking,
the self-seeking of reward.
To seek nothing is to abandon
the paradigm of loss and gain,
truth being only what is now.
Nothing else to be known; unstorable,
untranslatable into knowledge.
Grasp at truth?
Or hold out simply
your God-issued begging bowl?
O child of God, truth is greater than illusion
but
there’s still something better besides.
It takes a death
It takes a death, often
to bring us down to
earth,
to the dove’s heart a
blow,
an arrow bestirring the
dust,
a crucifixion of some
sort,
whether on rough timbers
or the rotting beams of old bones;
grave dust lading and silhouetting
our common little crucifixes built humbly
upon the rickety bridges of nothingness.
But also revealing the
genuinely endearing
human qualities of valor and gallantry –
for how else may God be brave
but through us?
Clearing the air long enough to glimpse:
Everyone is continuously
reaching for God,
for love, for the above ground truth of who we are.
O child of God, there’s
nothing to seek;
nothing to find but the
omnipresent One.
