Light and lofty

Light and lofty

The linnet bird touts
its high wire wisdom

without contention, knowing
not enough to be consequential -

a statement of conditions,
not a song of complaint or praise.

Brilliant, this moment of sunlight
in the glen on its warm

feathered, bird-boned back,
a smidgen of bliss

far as the breeze will carry.
How light and lofty

to be inconsequential,
above all, in God's corner

singing in, of and for the blue sky
and the wide green world

not one qualified, discordant,
contestable note.

O child of God, trade in your intuitive discernment
for the clean abandonment of not-knowing.

Love's vernacular

Love’s vernacular                                                                                    

No wonder You kept silent.  No one

knew what You were talking about!

Mighty lonesome in a world where

so rarely spoken is love's vernacular. 

O, how You roared and raged;

shouted;  paced Your cage.

Your silence fell upon deaf ears. 

All Your efforts were about love.

Love, we know not the meaning of the word.

And our own silence – we reject out of hand,

deathly afraid of it – the silence of submission;

the silence of non-existence.

O child of God, why speak of Meher?

Silence is the language of love.

Tinsmith

Tinsmith                                                                                                    

Mani gave the figure of a tinsmith

hammering a bowl into shape,

his other hand hidden,

supporting the blows from beneath.

With the mandali, You were exacting –

(merciless as the law of karma),

hammering home, time and again,

restraint, discipline and obedience,

Your rebukes tempered afterwards

with love-gestures and divine pardon.

With lovers afar (and yet to come)

You stressed remembrance and devotion,

allowing Illusion to deliver

the shaping blows, presenting Yourself

as the forbearing Companion,

the One Whose love is unconditional.

O child of God, each according to its ripeness;

the depth of its slumber. 

 

Where the day will take us

Where the day will take us                                                                         

Harder each year, becomes the routine –

folding and unfolding myself;

reach, stretch, bend and arch. Harder still

to flex that not-the-body pertaining to me –

to keep it vital, generous and receptive.

Jesus said, become as a little child –

when I went about where the day would take me,

shedding a life in time of hierarchical impositions;

exploring the outposts and wild purlieus

nameless and unruly; heroic and detached.

It’s not that unmarked tablet (lost on the way to school)

we must recover but, our flexibility, our susceptibility,

slipping out of our tendencies,

our utterly crushing contexts,

young and vigorous, lithesome and nimble,

adventuresome deep in our bones,

as we go about exploring the vast,

Godly paths of where the day will take us.

O child of God, are your own arrangements

superior to your Father’s intentions?   

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.

Just God

Just God

God roused Himself from slumber
and wondered Who He is.

God is the Word (the scriptures tell us).
One extended metaphor is all of existence.

We give God our qualities -
human emotions and motives,

exploits and purposes to avoid the terrible truth
that we, also, do not know Who He is.

God is the Word
but the Word has no meaning.

Just a whimsical utterance.  Just That.  Just God.
And the resulting (to the ego, unbearable)

truth is that our brief, aspiring lives,
beyond God, have no meaning.

We likewise are just an utterance.
Just That.  Just God.

O child of God, everything is zero.
No room for triumph or defeat.

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.

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.

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.

(drawing by Rich Panico)

Here is the crush

Here is the crush

Here is the crush,
garnered and pressed;

a hitch in the stream,
a knot in the grain,

an opacity in the clear, flat glass.
Purity is imperceptible.

Light must be fractured
(and there is a certain violence to it)

to yield its colors.  Here is the eternal,
indiscernible stillness

cropped, pared, hewn, here and there,
moment to moment, into illusory pieces.

Here is the inaudible essence
below the accompanying wail

and whine of the spinning orbs.
Here is the spangled sky, the lurch and yaw.

Here is the price God must pay
to perceive Himself.

O child of God, it's something about
looking through a glass darkly.

Of resolution and resurrection

Of resolution and resurrection

Beauty becomes a quiet comfort
in the latter years, giving of its depth

and essence without intentions or purpose,
earning our honor and attention

by virtue of its mere existence.
One day Truth will be like that.

We'll cling to it even through
the most bitter of circumstances,

the most fearsome grief because it lies
so purely, so resolutely beyond our grasp.

It will taste medicinal by then -
of resolution and resurrection.

One day Truth will come to our door
so pure, so vulnerable, so lovely

it will be beyond us
to ever deny it anything.

O child of God, pray for the day truth, love and beauty
all are expressed by the same silent word.

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.

(drawing by Rich Panico)

The mansion on the hill

   The mansion on the hill

Saint Peter let me through the gate,

embraced me, instructed me to go with Saint John

who would help me select a residence. As we walked,

I caught sight of a mansion on a hill.

I recognized it from my earthly dreams.

It had always been beyond a poor man's grasp,

but this was heaven. Paradise! Who lives there? I asked.

No one, said John. Would you like to see it? Yes, I replied.

We took a narrow path slanting upward

and in a short while came upon, to our right,

a whitewashed stone house, small and humble,

but immaculate, with a bare floor and a small garden

in the green yard enclosed by a white picket fence.

John fell to his knees before the gate

and said a short, silent prayer. He started back up the slope.

Whose house is this? I asked. Jesus lives here, he said.

I looked past him, to the mansion on the hill

and back to the house of Jesus.

I think I would like to live below, I said, down in the valley.

John smiled, clamped a hand on my shoulder.

There are some newly constructed residences there.

I’m sure you will find one you like.

They are very near to where I live.

We started back down the hill. But I turned,

ran back to the gate where, as I had done often in my earthly life,

I fell on my knees and gave my heart and soul to Jesus.

All reactions:

11