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.