To love others

To love others

To love others, the preacher said,
we must feel others' pain

but, how might we possibly do that
unless we first feel our own?

Turn and embrace, without looking
over its shoulder, our own pain.

Breathe in the saved-up-from-childhood
darkness and ignorance, panic and dread,

just to see if we might survive.
Flight, the sum moments of our lives

might be described as, from one anesthetizing,
enisling distraction to another, inside

and outside the mind while the truth
we need face may only be shadows

flitting about the room above our crib.
Pain is real, elemental, unavoidable

but its accompanying fear may not be -
and it is our own interior frontier

we must traverse - our cowering hearts
holding the torch, leading the way.

O child of God, to love our neighbors as ourselves
means nothing if we do not love ourselves.

                         

A living lie

A living lie

Jesus said, I am the Truth.
My Master said, I am nothing

but a living lie . . . .
For the two-millenniums-old Jesus,

the tattered scriptures, the crucified Christ,
He said - I am not the body.  I am not the mind.

For the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha's mu,
He said - I am not this.  I am not that.

Jesus' phrase, having become a complacency,
is rejoined by a provocative conundrum.

I am nothing, said my Lord, but a living lie
of the truth that is Me.

To enter the realm of illusion (apparently)
Truth eternal must become a living lie -

not just for the Godman
but, for all God-in-human-forms.

O child of God, Meher added . . . and unless
the lie is dead, the Truth cannot be.

                   

various photos

 

 



Caleb

 Gus and Caleb

Austin and Elijah



Brian and Debbie

The Darnell Boys

Gus and Meg

Lily and Debbie

Brian

Austin, Gus, Caleb

Gus and Patrick

Lily

A babe in the woods

A babe in the woods

I fell for the world
and all its promises,

dream remnants
strewn and discarded

over a sad and painful terrain
and now I have fallen for You.

Will You let me down? -
a babe in the woods

to be led to and fro,
hither and yon,

no wisdom or discernment,
no knowledge or instinct

upon which to draw and depend.
No place to stand my ground.

Can I trust You?
How to trust one thing

over another?
asks my Lord.

Why not trust everything?
Stop playing the game

and only God is left
holding the bag.

O child of God, wanting and having nothing,
leaves nothing upon which to gamble.

                       (Unpublished)

In a marvelous way

In a marvelous way

This realm grows stranger every day.
Thus, lightly, humbly now I tread.
In a marvelous way, in a marvelous way,

the dream-contours fade, begin to fray,
new configurations emerge instead;
this realm grows stranger every day,

light shot routinely through the clay,
expectations turned gently upon their heads
in a marvelous way, in a marvelous way.

The game grows deeper the more I play;
partaking heartily of the holy bread,
this realm grows stranger every day,

out gingerly from under illusion's sway;
savoring the path where once I sped.
In a marvelous way, in a marvelous way

practicing the holy be-it-as-it-may
where this wondrous, crooked path has led.
This realm grows stranger every day
in a marvelous way, in a marvelous way.

                         (Unpublished)

The rumor of love

The rumor of love

Seeker of God, you call yourself
but, in truth, all you've ever sought -

(chased your whole life long) - is the faint,
elusive, barely audible rumor of love.

(What a lonely life you've led!)
You have loved as much as most,

yet, (even so) it seemed always
more a suggestion, a penciled-in sketch.

What need would you have for God
if a deep, massive, substantive love

came swelling in?  Love enough to drown in;
not just the heart but the soul, too carried away;

love enough to drown the universe
farther than the eye can see,

the mind can imagine,
the heart can hold out for.

It breaks with longing so desperately, your heart
(according to the scriptures) for wholeness lost -

the rejoining of your detached self
to the Source of Truth.  O seeker!

The rumor you chase starts with the moan
and murmur of your own incontiguous heart.

O child of God, the seeker is the Sought,
Meher says.  God is the love you seek.

                       

Not this

Not this

Neti, neti goes the Gita;
not this, not this.

Try it after each phrase
in the Prayer of Repentance,

neti, neti - not what I expected, Lord -
not this; not what I meant to say;

it wasn't what I lacked after all;
it blew up in my face, Lord;

neti, neti - not what I'd hoped for;
insufficient, unsatisfactory;

lost now - slipped away;
not this, not this, Lord, not this -

not what I wanted;
not what's in my heart;

not at all what I'd envisioned.
Neti, neti; neti, neti -

the clock is ticking away
the moments of choice, attachment and hope;

the constant failures we speak of -
being fooled again and again

by illusions self-created
through our ignorance and limitations.

O child of God, to repent of our failures is to list
the illusions we fall for moment to moment.

                           (Unpublished)

The beauty and necessity

The beauty and necessity

At first, to move away from the world
is to move toward God but, make no mistake,

at some point, to move away from anything
is to move away from God.

This is not a decision to make
but, a beginning to see

the beauty and necessity of every moment.
Nothing happens twice but, patterns recur -

not to learn the lesson (at last)
but, to drain it dry,

dipping the ladle deeper and deeper
or, maybe it never gets empty

because the Essence is there
every moment, every ladleful,

when we reach a point of seeing deeply enough,
seeing all the way through to the other side.

O child of God, twist and turn or, concede and release,
God has you irrevocably in His net.

His perfect humanity

His perfect humanity

To walk the earth God becomes Godman.
This makes perfect sense -

the One, entering the realm of duality
must split Himself in two

in order to be seen and heard.
God alone is too terrible to approach

with our mortal, paltry hearts and hands
but, the Godman we can embrace,

praise His perfect humanity, His purity and virtue
and blame God (in the backs of our minds)

for the atrocities and injustices
which occur daily in this dual existence.

God lures us away from ourselves . . . toward Him
with the Love-personified,

perfectly human Godman
with Whom we may easily identify

until we surrender the last of our veils
and barriers and turn our human faces

toward the terrible Truth
of Who He really is.

O child of God, who are you?
God alone exists.

                       

The giver-away

The giver-away

Somewhere down the road
you met your Master

perhaps, millenniums ago,
the start of an arduous and tedious process --

the transfer of ownership.  Or, maybe,
you were just nine years old -

giving Jesus your trembling life,
aware not of how deeply thorough

your surrender must be,
as you know not now what you might do

to reach that critical depth
but, beginning to see

your well-connected, in-the-flesh self --
its deeply-rooted loves, alliances,

duties and responsibilities --
(to your utter shock) has no skin in the game.

Give your life to Jesus because
(they should have told you)

you belong to Him and at any moment,
the chit may be called in for payment due.

Surrender (your life) to the ultimate admission
that owning not yourself, you hold no sovereignty.

O child of God, love (somehow) is the ultimate destroyer,
the giver-away of everything you think you own.

                   

God in heaven

God in heaven

I come to You because there is no one else.
Others who would comfort me, help me,

who love me, would only be, in their flesh,
further burdened by my grief.

There's no one else.
Whether the pressures subside or deepen,

(You say) You are to blame
and viewing this blighted realm's

daily mayhem, horrific circumstances -
all of which happen on Your watch -

if I had another throat in which to bury my face,
another chest to soak with tears,

(You know) I would hurry to it.
Embrace a different hope.

Yet, again, God in heaven, I turn to You,
on hands and knees calling Your name,

my heart laid bare; I ask -
am I not Your child?

O child of God, whatever God's love for you,
He's the only hope you have.