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)