Fig leaf

Fig leaf                                                                                                      

One of the most fortunate (for us)

attributes of God the Omniscient

is He’s never disappointed. 

We can’t let God down.

He didn’t build a garden that through

human error went hopelessly awry.

Shame before God is a dishonesty,

a lack of humility, hiding behind a fig leaf,

seeing ourselves as more culpable

than we could ever possibly be.

Humility is a way back to the garden,

recognizing God’s sovereignty,

offering God our worst and best.

Humility is the opposite of shame –

it unravels our pretensions –

presenting ourselves to God (and to everyone)

nakedly honest, precisely who we are

not who we wish we were nor hope to become.

O child of God, how haughty you are

to speak so freely of God or humility.

Lost lane-end

Lost lane-end                                                                                       

I dropped my house key somewhere down a dark alley.

I search for it under the streetlamps where the light is better.

Everything is happening right now,

where I stand, but instead of studying it

through my particular chink in the fence

I prefer to view the world spaciously,

spending my time in the bright lights,

near the traffic’s roar, amidst the milling crowd.

The lost bright key to my house awaits me

but there are too many unknowns down that dark rabbit hole.

I might get crushed or go missing with no one

to hear me cry out, console me or lend a hand.  

Better to blend and pretend to myself and others

I’m faithfully attending to business –

fatedly ignoring the only chance I might have

this lifetime of entering again my home.

O child of God, you search like Wolfe before you

for a door, the lost-lane end into heaven.

Eternal sweetness

Eternal sweetness                                                                                   

On its outward flight, the honeybee

zigzags its dogged way amidst the garden 

scents and colors, collecting in its honey pouch

here and there the makings of sweetness.

But on returning – home to the hive –

there is no waywardness, no lingering in its labor. 

Laden, ponderously caked,

full of pollen it makes a beeline

for the dripping honeycomb

and the Queen’s golden haven.

Would that I be, Lord, on my way home,

forsaking the world’s bright wavering garden,

having foraged all I need of it to enter in

and turn the inner realms into eternal sweetness.

O child of God, how fanciful you are

in depicting your inevitable return to Reality.  

This time around

This time around                                                                                                

Friends of mine tour Europe.

Some attend the Super Bowl.

Others go to Yosemite or the Big Apple,

rock concerts, skydiving, sailing the high seas.

Africa, China, the Middle East. 

Fine and wondrous adventures

I will miss out on this time around. 

These things are not what I care for.

These things are not what I lack.

This time, when I kick the bucket

I want it to ring hollow,

resounding in the chill air

throughout the somber countryside,

tolling for my Lord and for myself,

for this brief stretch of our adventure as companions

this time around on my arduous trek back to Union.

O child of God, everyone is on their way home

by as many routes as there are wayward souls.

God instead

God instead                                                                                              

I don’t know the particulars

but I’m going to have to leave

this world one day, the only one

I ever remember knowing;

leave behind everyone

and everything I hold dear

because the sea is (after all) cardboard

and the moon is made of paper.

I’m not talking about death’s overtaking

but as a clear-eyed, deep-breath resolution.

Because if I and Love are eternal,

my affections and their objects (like myself)

are but pale, irresolvable reflections.

And to reach beyond the facade I must one day

unhand voluntarily their brief, illusory

solace and choose God instead.

O child of God, repeating the mystic promises,

you hover constantly near the edge of the abyss.

Faith in love

Faith in love                                                                                             

Words fail, but one word refuses to go away –

love – which Meher Baba uses to cover all bases

and list under one category the inexplicable.

Love which we know well enough

to desire its taste but not well enough

to drown in – its depths to reveal.

So we are left with faith instead, through it

to learn a new blind, deaf, dumb way to live,

nearer to love, nearer to truth, rooted in the ancient way,

trusting everything we are to His will and whim.

O child of God, faith in Meher Baba

is faith in love.

That promised quenched peace

That promised quenched peace                                                           

Once my heart lush green, fresh from sky and earth,

time soon turned a fiery red, flush with hot-blooded desire.

A constant thwarting chilled its ardor, withered it yellow, 

a timid fellow burrowing deeper into my chest

where bound in icy veins, it turned a dark bruised blue.

Today before its inevitable ceasing altogether

it beats a weathered gray, slow in its movements,

shedding its tears and quietly turning hoary white.

Perhaps true love will some lifetime hence,

as faith requires, fetch it up clear and colorless,

as incorporeal as the mystery that inhabits it

since first it arose beating, lonely and dim

to endure the mortal assaults of ignorance and illusion;

plucked from its checkered, colorful path to rest

eternally onward in that promised

quenched peace beyond its fleshly ken.

O child of God, what florid poetry you use

to recount the brutal facts and pray for redemption. 

Return to Canaan

Return to Canaan                                                                                     

A pillar of fire and cloud guided Moses

and the chosen ones day and night

on their tramp through the desert –

their return to Canaan.  Arranged by God

to keep them from getting lost,

discouraged and distracted.

Meher Baba has replaced the fire and cloud

in our nowadays desert with His own image

and the sound of His name,

to keep us from getting lost,

discouraged and distracted.

Guiding His lovers – those newly gathered,

ragtag expatriates – in a night-and-day beeline

to our predestined, long-promised rendezvous.

O child of God, forty years is but a half-step 

in the journey that lies afore and aft. 

The bosom of Abraham

The bosom of Abraham                                                                          

It’s not about solving the mystery anymore;

locking in the puzzle pieces.

It seems now to be about forbearance

(in lieu of utter acceptance).  About giving up.

An attempt to care no longer for myself

for the sake of all the others I do care for

knowing all the while I make my way just as they do –

alone . . . alone except for our mutual Friend.

Towards the end of a life of compulsions,

the one choice that seems open to me

is to disregard the interior prods and pulls

and the exterior promptings that trigger them

and to nestle myself, such as I am,

into the bosom of my particular Abraham.

O child of God, the Friend who is guiding you

is the Friend who is calling you home.

(Painting by Joe DiSabatino)

His One perfect response

 His One perfect response                                                                      

Any question asked of God

is an implicit demand for an answer.

After a lifetime (to my dismay)

of such implications, I am beginning now

to hear (by His grace) the one answer

which has always been there – His silence;

(wherein only real things are exchanged

and wherein God alone is real).

I took a silent, invisible God

to be distant, unapproachable

while He’s been faithfully

answering me all along

in a Voice – because it is so unlike mine –

I’ve had not the ears to hear.

Now I might grasp a bit more His admonition –

Love doesn’t ask.  Because Oneness hasn’t a tongue.

O child of God, Love is silent, benevolent,

His One and only perfect response.

Puzzle face

Puzzle face                                                                                            

Life is a jigsaw puzzle

but all the pieces are the same-sized

small squares and all solid white.

Obsessively we arrange our world,

for a lifetime fooled by the flitting,

whirling, layered shadows that move

across the puzzle face – entrancing, yet shallow,

transitory, ultimately meaningless.

The trick is not to form a pleasing picture

but to stop our grasping, see below

the shadows to the pristine surface

upon which the ancient game is being played.

O child of God, puzzle-making is one of God’s pastimes

as well as storytelling and sleight-of-hand.

Buddhism in a nutshell

Buddhism in a nutshell 

Buddhism in a nutshell (so far as I can tell)

is an arduous inward trek to reach

and remain behind a one way mirror.

Leave completely the phenomenal world.  

Go deeper – behind the senses,

past thoughts, emotions and moods.

Deeper still, beyond the makeshift self

(that shameless impostor). 

Unattached then, settle  

behind the mirror, observe

without urgency the sundry layers

you have plunged through –

the whole of this highly synchronized illusion

inside and out, until destiny shatters

the glass of separation, annihilating

and returning you to the ancient underlying Void.

O child of God, balance on the brink

until you lose your mistaken identity.

Join the tended sparrows

Join the tended sparrows                                                                        

Everything is in God’s hands.

So says my faith and what a relief

to feel powerless and ineffectual –

personal culpability abdicated to karma’s iron law;

proceeding afresh without the capacity

to botch entirely my soul’s journey

or hurt any other except as just another

heedless agent of God’s inexorable will.

So let me stop now wrestling with my bindings,

join the tended sparrows in song-praise

among the God-noted leaves, above

the numbered grains and mustard seeds,

even to the corrupting moths and rust.

Let me celebrate these swaddling clothes;

tightly secured as I am until fully accountable/

acceptable to God and my destined ultimate liberty.

O child of God, whatever occurs is perfect

and whatever does not occur never could have been.

Simple praise

Simple praise                                                                                            

Baba said the best prayer is simple praise.

Not that God is in need of adoration.

Praise for our benefit.

Humility is the root of all praise,

(for God and for others), a gentle folding

of our hearts into a kneeling position,

coming ever nearer to the true nature

of our relationship with our Creator.

O child of God, praise the One who accompanies you

on this rough but essential stretch of the highway.

The great assumption

The great assumption                                                                              

We are the lie no one ever told

who readily becomes the lie

we tell ourselves and others.

We are the great assumption

that never proves true and yet

we can never quite disbelieve,

escape our own lies and the lies of others.

The whole of humanity is whispering lies,

the smartest people in the world, in history,

insisting upon our collective view of truth.

So it all begins with faith and ends in realization,

if it turns out that you and I and the world

and our assumptions about it

are lies to ourselves and others

and Truth is after all what the mystics

have always asserted it to be.

O child of God, you are the living lie,

Meher said, of the truth that is you.

My old friend fear

My old friend fear                                                                                    

I didn’t start out searching for God.

My quest(ion) was – is it possible

to live without fear?  Yes,

though apparently only through

the almost impossible task of surrender. 

Now my fear has stepped into a better light,

an aura of beauty surrounding its dark shape.

Wasn’t it fear that began my search for God?

My old friend fear that has kept me on task,

shooing me relentlessly from each bleak shelter,

chasing me down the path towards the light,

the peace and bliss which is my promised destiny?

O child of God, everything in illusion

is an integral part of your unfolding.

The preliminary beauty

The preliminary beauty                                                                                    

Aren’t we beautiful?  Aren't we brave?

We try so hard

to please our Lord, to serve Him,

to give of ourselves, to connect with others.

We are not very good at it

but that doesn't weaken our resolve.

My very young granddaughter

is just learning to use her fingers.

Grasping clumsily at objects.

She’s not very good at it,

but it’s the beauty of her efforts,

the concentration, determination

and my already knowing she will one day

use her hands with such perfect grace

to express her love, to give and receive,

to serve and please her Lord.

O child of God, the more you see the preliminary beauty,

the nearer you are to the viewpoint of God.  

Journey to nowhere

Journey to nowhere                                                                                  

I’m no longer on a spiritual quest

nor in a battle for that matter,

though my low desires continue to manifest. 

My sole endeavor these days is to walk on water.

Not the ocean but a flat wide river.

Midway between the banks, I stroll

facing upstream with a pace only brisk enough

to keep my position fixed.  It’s not a trial

of faith. Often I fall, get sucked under,

find myself swept farther downstream.  No matter. 

With long-suffering effort, I shake it off,

climb to my feet, resume the balancing act

that defies the laws of the natural world.

I don’t look to get anywhere . . .

or not get anywhere.  I just aim

to maintain my place above the river’s flow –

a journey of constant failures; a journey to nowhere,

until the One who brought me here safely leads me home.

O child of God, your strategy makes no sense,

which is one point in its favor.

They also serve

They also serve                                                                                        

They also serve who only stand and wait,

Milton wrote, comforting himself in his blindness.

Stand and wait, stand and wait.

These days I have lain aside,

for the most part my quest

and comfort myself that somehow

this will serve Him best.

To stand aside and wait for my Lord

to enter and restructure this dark interior

according to His whim and authority,

my former strivings an apparently necessary effort,

the required creation for the impending removal

of this provisional structure and by His hands

its destined replacement, inhabitance and completion.

O child of God, surrender requires patience

and a certain passivity – a strong yielding to His will.

Naked to ourselves

Naked to ourselves                                                                                             

My Lord often stressed honesty,

not just with others but as an interior peeling down –

as naked to ourselves as we are to God. 

We can’t be perfect in this life, but maybe

we can achieve some honesty,

accepting our imperfection

as an essential part of who we are,

the human part, the necessary false

and transitory part which leads inexorably

to our transcendence and ultimate unveiling.

O child of God, the perfection open to you

in this mortal form is not purity but honesty.

The silent parlance

The silent parlance                                                                                  

There seems to be something sacred

in turning my ears around

long before my approach to the inner Path,

listening to the wind

upon the knolls and hollows

of my own interior landscape.

In all humility not traipsing about

learning from others how to live,

answering to others’ advice,

but heeding only and putting my sole faith

in that seemingly desultory inner voice,

the faint, unintelligible hints and suggestions

that come wafting across the moor,

often making little sense in the worldly scheme.

Having the great faith that You and I

shall one day converse until time’s end,

once I capture and master anew

the lost, silent parlance of my soul.

O child of God, to elude the self,

trek deeper and deeper into the interior.

The probe for truth

The probe for truth                                                                                           

I’ve reached the point where true

is not the opposite of false

or even the absence of false.  Truth

has shouldered itself beyond its borders. 

Its definition has been ripped from my dictionary.

Or maybe it was always like that.

In fact, the whole of my dictionary 

is an inadequate definition of truth . . . 

or what I suppose truth to be,

far beyond the grasping mind.

Such a great part of human suffering

is human beings clinging to a truth

that’s just not large enough to hold its meaning.

Not large enough to include everyone and everything.

O child of God, if you are sure of anything

be sure it is not the truth.

Face the music

Face the music                                                                                    

I never know the truth or always know the truth

(either one) and it is only my particular thumb

on the scales that bears false witness;

false also because of what it takes lightly. 

My thumb an adoption, an adaptation

according to my individual predominant fears.

The last neti-neti ends in nothing . . . or everything

but, perhaps it doesn’t matter what the truth is

out there but what it is in here

when only silence is left, vastness,

stillness and darkness, the guttering flame

at last having gone irrevocably out.

O child of God, dance ‘round and ‘round

‘til you’re ready to stop and face the music.

Ink-stained fingers

Ink-stained fingers                                                                                            

There’s no puzzle to solve. 

The crossword has been filled in from the first

(very faintly, with a soft lead pencil) –

an answer for every clue. 

We interpret it, in our mad dash

down and across, as a set of instructions

and with ink-stained fingers

put meaning to it, ignoring the inconsistencies,

the strange syntax, those troubling black gaps,

reading it according to our particular karma –

add the missing, leave out the intolerable.

There’s no puzzle to solve.  (Thank God!) 

We haven’t the equipment for it.

And in our blustering headlong interference

we ignore the original clues, miss the underlying solution,

cling to our dark, heavily-edited versions

rather than find the faith to live

without a solution, without answers, without a clue.

O child of God, begin to grasp the truth

by realizing your own profound ignorance.

One minus one

One minus one                                                                                         

The opposite of something is not nothing. 

The opposite of something is everything. 

(According to the mystics.) 

Roulette is a losing game,

round and round, round and round,

odds stacked heavily in the house’s favor.

The only way to win is to walk away,

a feat that has proven near impossible

what with the lure of the jackpot,

the mere exhilaration of the game

and the belief etched in the depths

of every mind that this elaborately staged table

surrounded by its fanatical players

is the only game in town.

O child of God, one minus one, say the mystics,

is not zero.  One minus one is God.

The word true

The word true                                                                                          

Nothing is true but God, said Meher.

That is – nothing to do with us is true. 

True? – such a flimsy word

dependent upon the false for substantiality.

As vague and elusive a concept

as heaven or Union or bliss

all of which become meaningless

beyond the purlieus of this and that.

What is true in the midst of a dream?

Which mist-veiled path leads up the mountain

to a realm of clarity, an awakened state

where truth is no longer claimed or spoken?

Once life and death are put aside

the goal disappears, is vanquished.

The word true becomes no longer utterable –

absorbed, let us imagine, in His great silence.

O child of God, you long ago stopped believing in words.

Now you are losing faith in truth itself.

Clouds of glory

Clouds of glory                                                                                           

Baba means father but also babe.

Your sweat-soaked sadra

before being washed was passed around,

the women mandali burying their noses in it  

to get a whiff of Your purity. 

Someone new to Baba once

picked up the same scent at Meher Abode

on Your bedspread under her bowed head.

Vernix caseosa and roses, she said. 

Vernix caseosa and roses.

A dewy new pale pink rose

born into this dusty old world

 

has put me again onto Your scent,

a newborn granddaughter

trailing perhaps clouds of glory

as You did Your whole long life, every step –

the fragrance of an ancient, inviolable purity,

the wafting, wondrous clouds of an unearthly glory.

O child of God, an old soul in a new body!

By dying and rebirth become yourself a child again.

The platypus

The platypus                                                                                             

I have evolved, similar to the platypus,

according to certain aquatic necessities

in spite of my sedentary, faintly terrene attributes.

It’s left me a rather misshapen hodgepodge

wondering at my true nature – if ever I was

or ever should have considered myself a river creature.

This late in the game, I hope to construct

a reed hut somewhere on the bank;

sit and watch the river flow where it will

and be not tempted to dip my hands, wet my feet;

no thought to follow where the river might lead;

no attempt to seek nourishment there, to seek a life.

O child of God, you are not the body or mind (per Meher)

of that illusion-soaked and oddly shaped creature. 

Before the angels

Before the angels                                                                                                                                                                   

A church bell at the end of my rope

might better suit.  I could tug it

instead of words and we could both listen

to the tolls and the tolls fading.   

The world at my windows is growing fainter, too,

little by little not quite there, having run out

of hocus pocus, steam and bluster which is all it ever was. 

The same faded repertoire to keep me at the knotted end;

coax me back from the cliff-edge darkness

into heavy traffic or inside the whispers and sighs

of so many naive and incoherent promises.

I have a darkness waiting for me and a depth

(I feel it), a light in the midst and so I repair, repair

with my Beloved into solitude and companionship,

mystery and resolution as the world in its wrong-headed way

keeps showing me how so very little I truly have to lose.

O child of God, lose yourself as best you might

before the angels come to cart you away.

The truth all along

The truth all along                                                                                 

The road of truth is along a narrow shelf. 

Stray to the left you hit stone.

Stray to the right you go over the edge. 

Nowhere to stop or turn around.

Very soon you want to be elsewhere,

relinquish the wheel, not from boredom

but from the unrelenting strain of concentration. 

But anywhere else is a looming threat,

an idle illusion, an escape from the task at hand.

Any delay is a postponement, not of arrival,

but of the truth all along – truth of the journey,

the route, the mountain, the vehicle,

the hands upon the wheel.  Truth of the One

Who has led you to where you are.

O child of God, your duty is to face Reality

as best you might, now and forever.

A desert silence

A desert silence                                                                                     

I have been as lost as the world

and in innumerable ways I still am.

The mystery of which I often speak

is only with the borrowed authority

of my Lord, the tenuous authority of my faith.

I am unequal to the world

but my Lord has overcome it,

shown me true things (I pray), inside and out;

leading me from my numerous trepidations

step by step; awakening me even here

in this bewildering wilderness with a desert silence.

O this restless world (!)

is but a dirt-encrusted pearl

spinning in silent space

having fallen from a necklace

torn from around His mighty throat.

O child of God, each day with trust and faith

you piece together His obscure, subjective clues. 

The exemplars

The exemplars                                                                                            

Where are the exemplars ?  I asked my Lord. 

The embodiments of Your teachings? 

We are old now.  Years and years

of Your tutelage and influence.

In myself and others, I see only

egoism, bewilderment and fear.

My Lord answered by allowing me

to chance upon His lovers at random,

opportune moments – soft words,

small gestures, kindness to others

while yet under the thumb of self,

not for show, not for show, nor gain,

not with calculation but striving silently,

solitary (except for Him), with little or no

reward or recognition their very sincere best

to live the way a faithful child of Meher should.

No long term motive – just the immediate reward

of love burgeoning from the dry husks of aged hearts.

O child of God, the Avatar is the measure 

but every other consideration tilts toward leniency.

Pretend game

Pretend game                                                                         

Meher referred to existence as the divine game –

but not a contest; not a flag to capture.

A pretend game.  A masquerade.

And once you find yourself

a mandated participant, the only course left

is to play your role best you can.   

The only way, apparently,

to bow out is to make that

holy, hair’s-breadth shift of perspective

where every moment you act

not for the moment but for the eternal,

ever aware of the pretense, recognizing

yourself and your fellow players

under the make-up and costumes to be

none other than God playing solitaire,

God the great ubiquitous pretender.

O child of God, follow the clues as best you can

until you are able to see through the charade.

The silence of Meher

The silence of Meher                                                                                  

You began Your ministry at a loss for words

amidst the human misery and longing,

enmity and despair.  What words to add

after three thousand years of empty human rhetoric,

the true teachings skewed and obfuscated,

almost never penetrating either hearts or heads?

Best to go back to a clean slate, a new language

older than clay, not intended for mouth nor ear,

straight to the heart, pinning

Your fortunate lovers to the wall,

communicating through the quivering shaft of your arrow.

And not just Your lovers (You say), all of Creation.

And only incrementally have I come to accept, mutely enrapt,

the power and primacy of your wordless awakenings.

O child of God, so many verses you have written
trying to express the silence of Meher.