Boat the oars
Boat the oars and bewildered lie
in your gently creaking casket;
view the flowering stars
without clarity or curiosity.
Shatter your sword. Give up
your one shot at redemption.
Abjure the bindings of every proposal.
Store no provisions.
Abandon all fantasies of rescue,
mercy; pardon and reward.
Invite your own demise without really knowing
what it might be like nor how to go about it,
solely as the next obedient, sequential phase,
your last wisp of a motive being
the release, as best you can,
completely, of fallacy and fear.
O child of God, hope for hopelessness.
Attempt utter passivity.
I came across Christ
I came across Christ stripped of scriptural
restraints;
uplifted in outstretched, agonized triumph.
I came across Christ as He double-crossed
the stone sepulcher; came across death,
across Truth in a walkabout that led to Jesus in
India,
thousands of years from the sophistry,
the accumulated errors, the calcified ruins.
I came across Christ, the palpable flesh and blood
hanged from a cross of the Carpenter’s own making,
His silent returning, His timely, masterful,
merciful
descent, the ethereal made extant in the milieu
of our latest, chronic human lunacy and despair.
O child of God, follow the ancient thread that runs
from
Zoroaster’s kushti to the sadra of Meher.
Original grain
I want to not know
any other way to be.
Cut my alternatives
down to zero, the original grain
good for me, good for me;
truth will out and out of that truth
a worn out humbleness, holiness revealed;
holy however imperfect, impure, impaired.
Dream if you must
of unbridled potential.
I want to not know
any other way to be,
rubbed down to the nub, the original grain
and go with that, go with that, go with that.
O child of God, the Way, said the venerable
Lao Tzu, is gained by daily loss.
Something better besides
To seek the
truth
is to covet
what God knows.
To seek nothing
is to honor His secret.
To seek nothing is the ultimate faith.
A dearth of trust is truth-seeking,
the self-seeking of reward.
To seek nothing is to abandon
the paradigm of loss and gain,
truth being only what is now.
Nothing else to be known; unstorable,
untranslatable into knowledge.
Grasp at truth?
Or hold out simply
your God-issued begging bowl?
O child of God, truth is greater than illusion
but
there’s still something better besides.
It takes a death
It takes a death, often
to bring us down to
earth,
to the dove’s heart a
blow,
an arrow bestirring the
dust,
a crucifixion of some
sort,
whether on rough timbers
or the rotting beams of old bones;
grave dust lading and silhouetting
our common little crucifixes built humbly
upon the rickety bridges of nothingness.
But also revealing the
genuinely endearing
human qualities of valor and gallantry –
for how else may God be brave
but through us?
Clearing the air long enough to glimpse:
Everyone is continuously
reaching for God,
for love, for the above ground truth of who we are.
O child of God, there’s
nothing to seek;
nothing to find but the
omnipresent One.
Streets without love
Hold to My damaan, Meher said.
For those times when there’s left
not a shred of anything else within reach;
one last hope to grasp where He dare not refuse;
when you need to unburden your chest
of the weighty function and duty of self;
when you can’t possibly weave your way
any farther through streets without love;
a damaan with which to dry tears,
clean slates, bind wounds;
to yield a small sheer rectangle –
the fluttering flag of surrender.
O child of God, hold to His damaan
until you are ready to unhand everything.
(drawing by Rich Panico)
Climb down
Climb down from the crow’s nest,
its queasy, exaggerated susceptibility
to every roll and sway.
Secure yourself below
the water line, go for broke,
all or nothing, ready to drown.
The head is a precarious perch,
a tiny bucket of fear
with a false perspective.
Climb down
into the heart, fearless heart;
rest in the ship’s deep, hollow, oak-ribbed hold.
O child of God, worry is a lack –
of heart-sense and faith in God.
Love comes first
Love overflowing;
love enough for everyone.
Jesus feeding the multitudes
loaves and fishes.
Love enough for everyone,
plenty left over, and still yet more.
You showed me such a love once.
You filled my basket. Overflowing.
I should have spent the rest of my life
hovering near that deep well undistracted,
plumbing its depths, bringing it to the surface,
ladling it out, breaking and sharing such a love
as You are, as You bring,
as You have given.
Love should come first
–
to become a feeder, a slaker of thirst,
to become an aperture
through which Your light might shine.
O child of God, Meher keeps you
as
near to the wellspring as you can stand.
The truth of illusion
Moths circle the lamp,
hover
and hurtle, attracted to
the flame
but, also driven from the
midst
of their dark
surroundings.
You reach God
when you come to the end
of yourself.
You get wise. It’s the truth of illusion
that shatters, that
jades;
the truth of illusion
that bores, sates,
disheartens, disenchants.
You rush toward God when
God
outshines His
surroundings.
When the dark has gobbled
you up –
bones and blood.
You rush and flail
and hurl yourself toward
the light
when you see there’s
nothing
in the darkness worth
living for.
O child of God, turn from
illusion
toward the way, the truth, the light.
