Bottleneck

Bottleneck                                                                                                 
 
There’s a bottleneck ahead,
multiple lanes merging into one,
 
other vehicles escaping via numerous exits,
shooting off somewhere toward greener pastures
 
so that I end up alone on a narrow one-lane
strip of asphalt, overgrown and broken,
 
twisting through hill country and deep woods,
no road signs or mileposts.  I know not
 
what’s ahead or if I am on the right road
but it no longer matters. 
 
It’s my route, my journey,
my destination and now I know
 
I do not travel it by chance
and I do not travel it alone.
 
O child, if God is with you,
the journey and goal are secondary.

His yoke is easy

His yoke is easy                                                                                         
 
It was once my habit to find myself always guilty
while never quite owning up to just who I am.
 
Now I answer only to the all-forgiving One.
I lived in fear no one could love me as I am.
 
Then I became a lover of the Essence of Love,
Who cannot do otherwise.  Shamed repeatedly
 
by my imperfections, now I serve the Perfect One
Who declares He and I are one. 
 
How I respond these latter days    
to the travails of life, signals to me clearly
 
who I am at the moment serving –
my small, frightened self or my merciful Lord.
 
O child of God, His yoke is easy
and His burden is light.

Grace and whim

Grace and whim                                                                                      
 
Creation began on a Whim;
sustained by Divine Grace.
 
One terrible attribute of grace and whim –
both are devoid of rationale;
 
beyond the grasp of human will.
We’re ever at the mercy of God’s Grace,
 
a mercy best described as fathomless
both for its infinite depth
 
and its incomprehensibility.
And our devout efforts and pursuits
 
toward liberating ourselves
from the grace of that original Whim
 
seem to be merely benign ways to spend the fated,
inevitable terms of our individual confinements.
 
O child of God, the most tenacious
of human attachments is the desire for autonomy.

Met by Your majesty

Met by Your majesty                                                                                 
 
Take me over.  Take me all.
Only You.  None of me.
 
Whatever cross is required,
it will be You who must bear it
 
for I will have ceased to exist.
It will be Your courage where needed. 
 
Your will never to waver.  Humiliations
to endure – met by Your majesty.
 
Fears that arise – drowned in Your love.
Take me over, Lord.  Take me all.
 
Only You.  Let none of me remain  
to spoil the holiness and splendor,
 
gentleness and power, the love
and truth of Your essence.
 
O child of God, ask for nothing, said Meher.
Never think that means go it alone.

God happens

God happens                                                                                             
 
If I try to explain myself, I indulge us both
in the notion that we each determine who we are
 
and in the persistent idea that we exist
apart from God and from each other.
 
Instead of explanations, let me just say: 
God happens and I am moving along with Him.
 
The parade is going by and I push my way
to the front to get a better view
 
of myself as a sheriff on horseback
or a high school kid pounding a bass drum,
 
or the twirler of a baton, maybe Jesus
on the cross of a church float.
 
What explanation then will you accept
for the identities you and I take ourselves to be?
 
O child of God, the world offers the illusion of stasis.
Oneness is an ocean in a constant state of flux.

Motionless and shallow

Motionless and shallow                                                                          
 
Deep in quicksand and the first thing to do
is to calm myself, stop flailing about;
 
stretch out motionless and shallow on the surface,
all the while praying fervently for help.
 
Meher Baba said, “Don’t worry, be happy”,
not because He especially wished His lovers
 
to be comfortable and complacent
but because worry is always about Illusion.
 
(No one worries about Reality.)
Our concerns, ever for the future,
 
are for mortality, vulnerability, pride,
pain and suffering, all of which,
 
according to Meher Baba,
do not, in Reality, exist.
 
O child of God, stretch out (prayerfully), motionless
and shallow, on the treacherous surface of the great Illusion.

The impudence of inquiry

The impudence of inquiry                                                                          
 
Where do I end and You begin –
this host of heart-strangers
 
crowding out its one, true resident?
At what boundary do we meet and cross, Lord?
 
Have I missed you somewhere? 
Do I miss You often?  At what point do we blend –
 
not in someday Union but in everyday existence? 
Should I expect answers from You –
 
when my questions are the mere seeking of attention,
the voicing of my emptiness.
 
O child of God, you waver between the impudence
of inquiry and the audacity of discernment.

The dreamed-up polarity

The dreamed-up polarity                                                                                    
 
A fantasy of retribution, then
a counter-thought of forgiveness,
 
shunning the first as my lower self,
embracing the second as the higher.
 
Or frame it as the false self and the True,
an angel battling the devil, or perhaps,
 
past life sanskaras impinging upon
present moment awareness and restraint,
 
or merely emotion versus reason,
anger versus poise, volatility versus forbearance. 
 
But all these depictions are rooted in duality,
which separates me from God and from others;
 
partitioning the world as well my interior being.
The way to spiritual poise is through Oneness,
 
not purity; not through becoming wholly one side
and none of the other.  It is not our sins
 
we must transcend but the dreamed-up polarity,
within and without, of our existence and ourselves.
 
O child of God, with virtue and sin you know
well the routine, but how to regain Oneness?

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.
No place to stand my ground. 
 
Can I trust You?  How to trust
one thing over another? answers 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.

As the world turns

As the world turns                                                                                              
 
Keenly I’ve felt the terrible distance
between what I say and what I almost know,
 
my inability to turn the world as I perceive it into words,
praying my inarticulacy will soon leave off
 
in a silence deep as the ocean, deep as space,
stilled like my Lord’s tongue in His holy handsome head. 
 
As the world turns and souls writhe, estranged
from God, His silence is not lost nor enervated,
 
but coming to the fore, reinforced, reiterated,
as I take my time to grieve only briefly for us all –
 
our pain and ignorance, bewilderment and fear,
our wrong-headed certitudes, deep red sanskaras
 
(apparently), our fierce laboring to break free
and all the dues we have yet to pay
 
for ourselves, our souls, for God’s timeless emergence
(we are told) from His quiescence and oblivion.
 
O child of God, inscribe in your heart
Meher’s promise – nothing is real but God.

God the Beloved

God the Beloved                                                                                        
 
My attraction is toward God as Knowledge Itself.
That’s the territory into which my wits carry me daily
 
as I collect the world’s trifles – surmise, expound,
opine and record my clever gleanings and commentary,
 
the neti, neti of my journey toward
the ultimate abandonment of mind –
 
my heart not being in this quest,
my heart being engaged instead
 
in a quest for the all-merciful,
eternally benevolent God the Beloved.
 
O child, while your head tries to figure it all out
your heart is leading you steadily home.

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.

Desert father

Desert father                                                                                              
 
Faith in the Christ requires a divestiture
of worldly consensus, evidential experience,
 
human reason – all that is knowable.
How odd, how mad, it must seem
 
to eyes and ears tuned into cyberspace,
western radio, tv sets and movie screens;
 
to institutional religions, cultural mores, the daily news. 
I’ve become an eccentric sort of desert father;
 
non-physical is my isolation, my seclusion
is my silence, moving through the mainstream,
 
amiable and non-descript; unscathed. 
Unspoken and unrevealed is my allegiance
 
to a most radical conceit and a personal relationship   
with a Mystery both unfathomable and ineffable.
 
O child of God, identify yourself only
as a lover of Avatar Meher Baba.

The song of Meher

The song of Meher                                                                                 
 
As a child, like a bird in a cage,
everywhere I went, I took Jesus
 
and the song of Jesus with me
but, the world easily crushed
 
and scattered that cage; the bird flew
and the song I heard no more.
 
Until Your song.  Like a bird in a cage,
I take You everywhere.
 
Now that cage is coming apart,
not from the crush of the world
 
but, from the inside out,
the bird and its song too deep,
 
too large, too strong, too universal for the cage to hold.
What once had meaning, now has three meanings,
 
a thousand meanings, multifarious, ever-shifting
and the whispering love song within
 
echoes from the bars and rafters
of this realm’s farthest reaches.
 
O child of God, let the song of Meher
free you from that bone-ribbed cage.

The thread of time

The thread of time                                                                                               
 
From the truth of the needle’s eye, projects
a false reality in each direction along the taut thread.  
 
The whole of the film is arranged, each frame
projected separately through the one gate
 
of beginningless, endless existence. 
Heedlessly, we speak of aeons,
 
millenniums, cycles of time
with no individual evidence,
 
while time, say the Mystics  
is briefer than even our mortality.
 
Only the moment exists.  The thread of time,
and our consensual misapprehension of it,
 
binds us, every eternal moment, more firmly  
to this sputtering realm of ignorance and delusion.
 
O child of God, the Mystics’ description of forever
is a chink in the foundation of your complacency. 

Union of a sort

Union of a sort                                                                                          
 
I haven’t a clue how to cross His threshold
but I know now He has crossed mine,
 
surely come to me, answered my prayers –
evident in my daily life, my heart and head,
 
outward circumstances.  It’s union of a sort,
on my own ground, in my native tongue, an intimacy
 
life has only ever hinted at, a mercy
I had dared not hope for, delivered unfathomably
 
unto my being and growing ever deeper, more vital
every moment of my life’s remainder.
 
O child, Meher says, the seeker asking, Where is God?
is really God saying, Where indeed is the seeker!

Ever lover's wont

Every lover’s wont                                                                                             
 
I seem never to tire of being wrong!
Quelled and mortified, after a short while
 
I’m right back at it – the wise guy approach.
Not to catch my Beloved out at this late date
 
with some impossible contradiction
but to show my prowess and attentiveness,
 
a child reassured more by the Father’s answering
than His answers, His understanding of me
 
more than His understanding of the incongruities
I present to Him.  The Silent One answers me
 
in personal, multifarious ways which I gratefully now
imbibe with as much of my being as I might.
 
This strange discipleship He allows in His love,
this reaching out to Him in the only way I know how.
 
O child of God, so many paths to God – 
accommodating every lover’s wont.

Of life eternal

Of life eternal 

The Gita says, what is born must die.
And as the bodies pile up,

our noses continually rubbed in the dust,
we begin to tremble before such a truth.

But in that truth lies a subtle assurance.
What is born in illusion – our temporal selves

over and over again born of ignorance,
must by the same truth someday die eternally

while the God part of us, the part never born,
never born, can never die. Can never die.

O child of God, take note of death
only as a harbinger of life eternal.

Who I am not

Who I am not                                                                                            
 
Life and I pass each other by,
never in conjunction, never at rest. 
 
Choices are made, accepting as best I might
their consequences, numerous happenstances
 
over which I hold no sway. 
That’s the game I was taught – 
 
how well to keep head and heart until death,
balancing sorrow with happiness,
 
triumph with tragedy, peace with fear. 
But lately I’ve come to know –
 
the game is other than that.  Not life at all –
life being merely the arena in which it is staged.
 
The game is finding out first
who I am not and don’t have to be;
 
who I am not – in route
to the truth of who I really am.
 
O child of God, you checked the roll
and found yourself absent without leave.

No leave-takings

No leave-takings                                                                                        
 
One by one, my sons left home – walking each
down to the property’s edge; entrusting them  
 
reluctantly to God, themselves and fate.
One day, I’ll stand at the same gate
 
and watch myself disappear over the hilltop,
knowing, at last, that I do not, never did
 
hold any sovereignty over that character
I’ve known so thoroughly, portrayed so well.
 
To get to God, apparently, is to forsake
the only other intimacy I’ve ever known,
 
neither of us having any real existence
or relationship beyond the omnipresence of God.
 
O child of God, in truth there are (says Meher)
no leave-takings, no loss nor gain.

Water strider

Water strider                                                                                            
 
Whatever you say about God,
declared Meister Eckhart, is untrue.
 
(Including, presumably, his own
aforementioned pronouncement).
 
Buddha simply smiled and upheld a flower.
Meher stopped speaking altogether.  
 
It was the best He could do for His lovers –
with their scaled eyes, human ears,
 
chattering brains; fledgling hearts
beating erratically in their chests.
 
This poetry is not about God
but about the swirling images
 
and ideas surrounding God.
The water strider knows well its milieu
 
but it cannot, could never (spindly lightweight),
fathom the depths below the surface;
 
incapable of deep submersion;
incapable of ever drowning.
 
O child of God, Meher gives you words
in lieu of the real things.