The gardens of the Christ

The gardens of the Christ                                                                                 
 
In Meherazad’s quietude, no one around,
not even myself; opposite Mandali Hall,
 
the pillowed floor, the adorned chair,
not having the heart to enter
 
or even to step upon the veranda or around back
to mount the narrow stoop to His bedroom door. 
 
Instead, I sit in the weeping dust, a mortal,
cumbersome sacrilege in the gardens of the Christ.
 
How heedless and indulgent were my visits!
How unsettled and self-centered among the mandali,
 
more concerned about fitting into a foreign milieu
than baring my soul to a majesty and grace
 
I had not imagined existed; nor ever could exist.
And the mercy then and now of my Lord
 
overwhelming me in the imagined Meherazad dust,
as He forgave and forgives my ignorance, my trespass,
 
my effrontery and bids me welcome.  As no one ever has,
ever had or ever could, He bids me welcome.
 
O child of God, as Rumi said – You knew my coins
were counterfeit and You accepted them anyway.

Like love

Like love                                                                                                         
 
Freedom of a sort is belief in an ironclad destiny –
leaving one with little to contest;
 
relieved of the onus (if not the habit)
of evaluation – approval or censure.
 
The idea of free will is intrinsically
bound to the idea of human autonomy
 
with its associated errors, sins, failures and regrets.  
Like love itself, faith in destiny sets one free from judgment,
 
holding no one, none of us, responsible
for our human nature, for the karma we’ve inherited
 
and for who in ignorance and illusion
we have taken ourselves and others to be.
 
O child of God, your perceptions are threatening
to turn your whole world upside down.

Toddler

Toddler                                                                                                 
 
Each morning I say the Prayers –
I have for years – words well worn,
 
rolling off my tongue slightly sweet – like prasad.
I begin earnestly but, soon my mind
 
drifts away like a lost kite; like a boy
gazing from his classroom window
         
or a toddler nodding off in the church pew.
Would anyone fault that schoolboy 
 
for preferring the day’s green pleasures?
Or the child wandering off to dreamland
 
under a preacher’s sonorous tones?
I go easy on myself, saying the words You left,
 
trying to keep awake, trying to stay focused
on the blackboard at the head of the class.
 
O child of God, it’s arrogant to consider yourself more
than a toddler playing at the Master’s feet.

                                (from  A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Gift from God

Gift from God                                                                                                  
 
Don’t lead your life, said my Lord.  Tag along behind it. 
Give it to God and let it wander where it will. 
 
Don’t think of what happens to you as your life
but God’s creation, gift, game and adventure.  
 
Not a plunging through but a parting of the foliage
to discover all along where it leads
 
and what within it is your task to perform.
Everything is locked by fate firmly into place
 
yet it is flowing, flowing, flowing.      
Look upon your fate as following that flow.
 
The Avatar avowed He is one with karma.
Try to be one with karma also, said my Lord,
 
others and your own, while in your heart
knowing it could never have been otherwise.
 
O child of God, in Zen they named it tathata –
thusness or suchness.  You may call it gift from God.  

   

What will happen

What will happen                                                                                             
 
What had to happen has happened, said Meher.
And what has to happen will happen.
 
The Avatar is one with karma, it seems,
not an agent of change but of fulfillment.
 
There is no what might be.
There is only what will happen.
 
Time is not linear and endless but thinner than a razor’s edge.
No past, no future and thus no change.
 
Time, chance, change, choice, effort and hope –
the tentacled, conceptual foundations of illusion.
 
O child of God, you always were, you always are
and always will be.
There is only what has to happen.  And it will.

Private stock

Private stock                                                                                        
 
We’re not the kind of drunks who
engage in arguments and fisticuffs;
 
who climb upon tables and loudly hold forth.
We drift to the edges;
 
sink deeply into intoxication;
wonderment holds our tongue.
 
We know when we’ve had enough –
the wall we’re leaning against becomes the floor.
 
We might be coaxed into singing,
cheek to cheek with other drunks,
 
the timbre of some clear
with purity of intent,
 
others raspy from longing
and a lifetime of sorrow.
 
We’re the ones with sodden hearts;
sour breaths; befuddled brains. 
 
If we have a clear thought at all,
it’s how extraordinarily fortunate we are
 
to have found our way to the Tavern and been served
from the Winekeeper’s private stock.
 
O child of God, how rare is this gift of wine?
Few in all the world have ever known its taste. 

                               (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

A pale fortelling

A pale foretelling                                                                                             
 
I’ve faith in the notion that one day
my faith will overwhelm me,
 
upend my impassive tramp
down the narrow way, throwing me       
 
into a reeling loop of bewilderment
and intoxication, my Companion
 
persuaded then to maketh me
lie down in green pastures;
 
cleanse my dusty self
in the soul-restoring waters;
 
whisper to me gently and directly
that this response is but a pale foretelling
 
of the true experience that is the Mystery,
the mercy, the benevolence of God.
 
O child of God, to experience that sort of faith,
abandon your every hope and notion.

  

Desert traveler

Desert traveler                                                                                                 
 
O desert traveler, you are much too fat
for your camel-self to squeeze
 
through the needle’s eye gate of paradise. 
You had hoped to become more ethereal by now
 
but it is the heart of you the guards reject.
You lack the proper credentials.
 
To be welcomed in, you’ll have to accept
a nakedness that goes deeper
 
than the marrow of your bones;
become more insubstantial than the winds
 
howling at your back, so that you may cease
to be your habitual, pretentious self
 
and come by subduction to the truth
of who you really are.
 
O child of God, you are knocking at the door
of your own house.

 

Hemlock wine

Hemlock wine                                                                                      
 
Beware of love, o pilgrim.   It’s a barbed hook;
a ball and chain; hemlock wine.  
 
It’s a cliffhanger, a pyramid scheme;
a title loan with ballooning payments.
 
Love is a lake of fire – I say that
having never entered the flames.
 
I’m still leaping about on the griddle.
They call You Lord of Love,
 
Father of Mercy, yet, at times,
I’ve found Your love to be quite merciless.
 
Forgive my incapacity to understand.
Daily my faith grows without evidence . . .
 
and love . . . love is an apparition floating by
the window of a haunted mansion.
 
O child of God, let not the word love escape your lips
until your heart knows enough to speak wisely.

                                   (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

My enchantment

My enchantment                                                                                              
 
Meher advised me to follow (not lead)
my false self, peering ever vigilant
              
over its shoulder – claiming not credit nor blame, 
simply observing how attached I am
 
to being someone who in truth (my Lord says)
I am not – enamored of its God-given talents,  
 
embroiled in and despairing of its shortcomings;
obsessed with propping up, before my eyes and others,
 
its image – this character of God’s game
in whom I am deeply invested, my enchantment
 
keeping me from turning away, turning away –
toward my Lord, toward the truth of Who I really am.
 
O child of God, live in the world, say the Mystics,
but never consider yourSelf a part of it.

 

Connect the dots

Connect the dots                                                                                              
 
The small boy was given a scattering of ink
arranged seemingly at random on paper.
 
Taught to connect the dots, he created a star –
a concept and representation accepted
 
in his mind and throughout the world.
Around the same time, the boy
 
was taught the printed word God.
Farther from the reality of a star
 
to dots on paper, is the word
and image of God to His Reality. 
 
Schisms have been and are created,
wars fought, sins committed, hearts broken
 
by that seemingly-at-random arrangement,
a name on tongue and paper,
 
an image in the mind,
being mistaken for the Truth.
 
O child of God, stop confusing reality
with the swirling images inside your head.

The last excursion

The last excursion                                                                       
 
You said hold on to Your damaan
like a child in the marketplace
 
holds to its mother’s skirt.
I find that when I dawdle,
 
distracted by the crowd,
enticements in the shop windows
 
or a shining trifle in the gutter,
You slow Your step to wait for me.
 
When I run ahead, sure I know the way,
letting go of You in pride and excitement …
 
or when I tug on Your skirt to direct You
the way I want to go, You keep Your patient,
 
loving pace and guide me gently toward the goods
we came for and the true road home.
 
O child of God, hold on to His damaan, until
the last excursion -- when you have come of age.

                                  (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

 

 

Pull off the road

Pull off the road                                                                                               
 
I’ve wanted to pull off the road for a long while.
I don’t care much about arriving anymore.
 
Almost a whole lifetime spent, rarely
carefree and cozy in this old world.
 
Fear is mostly what I’m made of;
not much love to counteract it. 
 
This old car stalled again at a crossroads.
Rather than attempt another repair
 
I think I’ll abandon it altogether;
strike out through the rough country;
 
find out for sure (or not) if there is
and always has been, a companion at my shoulder.
 
If He’s not there, I’ve lost nothing
I had before I started and surely
 
the desert will welcome me
into its warm and empty, ragged arms.
 
O child of God, Meher said most wayfarers
turn to Him only as a last resort.

Available for grace

Available for grace                                                                                         
 
I’m not living in the world
but viewing it through a tiny window,
 
uniquely stained, pitted, bleared and smudged.
I’m not the window but through it I follow my life,
 
fatefully attached, a perspective
painfully at odds with my expectations.
 
The trick say the Mystics, is to stop looking
beyond the glass and study the patterns
 
of its surface, revealing the window to be
a narrow, peculiar distortion of a wondrous truth; 
 
turning away then, to at last become
available for grace – to end the separation,
 
the abstraction, the estrangement
from the Truth of Who I really am.
 
O child of God, you will never learn the Truth
but you are destined to become it.

Imampur

Imampur                                                                                               
 
The neglected mosque at Imampur –
I last saw it in a cornfield –
 
built where Arangazeb’s soldiers camped
centuries before, carrying a part of his body
 
to a far corner of the kingdom.
Eruch, Pendu, Baidul and Gustadji,
 
encircled their Lord, loved and obeyed,
struck and spat upon Him,
 
as He endured and directed –
the Pure and Innocent One;
 
His servants balancing shame with duty,
helpless in the workings of the Unfathomable. 
 
O Meher, a part of me is buried in that field,
the part of me that died hearing that story
 
from Eruch’s lips – another nail in the coffin. 
O Beloved, build Your mosque in the grave-dust
          of my heart.
 
O child of God, every command of the Beloved
is pure, holy and of benefit to all mankind.

                               (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Only God

Only God                                                                                                        
 
The path diverges and where once I stood
fretful, long-peering in each direction,
 
now, more often, I follow the Spirit
(Who listeth where It may), shedding
 
my care as best I might, dedicating
to my Lord each summarily taken fork.
 
The true division (say the Mystics)
is not a choice but an identification –
 
the self-styled sojourner stumbling (at last)
upon the nature of his own non-existence
 
and then doing his (ordained) best
to keep out of the way, witnessing
 
and marveling for brief stretches at a time,
God’s arduous, illusory return to Self.
 
O child of God, what choices are left to you
when there is only God?

Love-pool

Love-pool                                                                                                        
 
Refresh yourself, said Lord Meher,
in that pool of My love within you.
 
Some might call it Original Face
or True Self – that always there depth
 
of pure awareness; that sharing space
of the divine and human.
 
Dropping the veils, shedding the fear,
a dip in that timeless love-pool
 
affords not a witnessing of any sort –
not a perception or concept,
 
metaphor nor imagining but a return –
a sudden immersion into being
 
Who you really are – a communion, Union
(in the interim) with your One true Self.
 
O child of God, His love within
is the living truth of Who you are. 

Captured

Captured                                                                                               
 
A moth captured in the lantern’s glass,
frantically hurtling to and fro,
 
until its wings turn to flame
and become light itself.
 
Entering Your Samadhi, I found a vastness
beyond the boundaries of any existence;
 
the clouded dome turned
into a night sky full of stars
 
and beyond Your fiery sepulcher,
a labyrinth of paths led into a dark woods.
 
I’m captured, O Beloved, in Your Samadhi,
moving frantically here and there.
 
There’s only one door in . . . and no way out.
When I exhaust myself, I’ll die at Your feet.
 
O child of God, let your wings turn to ash
then see what Truth shall arise.

                            (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Ageless and momentary

Ageless and momentary                                                                                   
 
I view now the stilled body in the coffin
I never was, curious as to where
 
my mind is wandering after the great parting.
The body I’ve mistaken myself for all my life;
 
the body everyone has tagged me to be.
And once free from it, (my mind
 
taken up with other matters), I find
there’s no visceral point at which
 
to pin down exactly just who I am
and might have been all those years –
 
surely not my adopted,
(only apparently) inhabited body
 
nor my spontaneous and fluid, chameleonic mind;
not my self-imagined, individualized soul
 
but somehow, somehow, (I am told)
a free-floating, ethereal, eternal ephemeral –
 
an unimaginable, conscious window pushed open
upon the ageless and momentary process of existence.
 
O child of God, devoid of body, mind and soul,
who is it then who requires liberation?

 

The one true flame

The one true flame                                                                                 
 
It might be described as a flame (perhaps) –
an oil lamp turned way down low
 
hanging at the doorsteps of the heart’s shop
dimly illuminating the arches within.
 
Or, perhaps, a tension (rather than heat
and light) not quite physical, which might
 
at any prompting become a loose flutter
and, perhaps, take flight.  Or, a slight tremor
 
below the range of sound, yet ever
on the verge of the melodic. 
 
An enigmatic presence to pay heed to,
to shelter with cupped heart-hands;
 
to forsake entirely the whole of the world
for this tiny, intimate flame-tension-tremor
 
within a body no longer mine, a mind no longer me,
an existence I have ceased attempting to grasp.
 
O child of God, look upon your every fellow creature
as yet another bearer of the one true flame.

The Truth of Meher

The Truth of Meher                                                                              
 
You said, ‘Don’t let go the hand of Truth.’
You are the only Truth I know
 
with a hand attached to It.
I’ve heard and read a multitude of words
 
claimed by scholars to be True,
but with You, Truth shook Itself loose         
 
from the page; walked around;
expressed Itself in Your cheeks, jowls and brow;
 
shone from Your eyes; sang in Your throat –
until Your throat became Your hands,
 
grasping the outstretched hands
of your Truth-starved lovers. 
 
O Meher, I won’t let go. 
You’re the only Truth I hold.
 
O child of God, if you really knew the Truth of Meher,
you would live It . . .  mind, body and soul.

                                   (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)