My candled paper
lantern
My faith is a chochin
lantern
shaped from bamboo and
paper
with past impromptu
fortifications
of old shoelaces, paper
clips,
rubber bands and Scotch
tape.
It’s an easy target
for the glib and
resourceful.
I rarely bring it out in
public
to withstand the
buffeting winds
and random crushing
blows.
Not that my faith has
ever been
doused or shattered by
mere words.
It shines for me in such
an incommunicable way –
my candled paper lantern
with its bright, fragile
covering.
It shines for me dangling
afore,
offering steady, silent
comfort and guidance
through this great
harrowing darkness of a world.
O child of God, keep your
little lantern lit
until you become a six
foot blaze yourself.
You never let go
After I wised up, I told
my adult self
I knew not what I was
doing –
nine years old tramping
down the aisle
to give my life to
Jesus. But lately I see
I knew exactly what I was
doing,
my untouched heart
roughly awakened
and refusing then to
settle for anything less.
Very soon I wised up,
took back my life
and went my worldly way.
It was when I began
to reawaken and search
for You
that I knew not what I
was doing
yet reduced by the
painful invalidity of the world
to having nothing else
worth doing.
And learning later that
once You accept
a lamb into the fold You
never let go.
It was You who initiated
my adult search
for the one Who is within
me all along
and for that child, lost
but not abandoned,
being now mercifully
relieved
of all his worldly wisdom.
O child of God, you have
not changed a whit
since that surrender and
neither has your Lord.
Fig leaf
One of the most fortunate (for us)
attributes of God the Omniscient
is He’s never disappointed.
We can’t let God down.
He didn’t build a garden that somehow
through human error went hopelessly awry.
Shame before God is a dishonesty,
a lack of humility, hiding behind a fig leaf,
seeing ourselves as more culpable
than we could ever possibly be.
Humility is the way back to the garden,
recognizing God’s sovereignty,
offering God our worst and best.
Humility is the opposite of shame –
it unravels our pretensions –
presenting ourselves to God (and to everyone)
nakedly honest, precisely who we are
not who we wish we were nor hope to become.
O child of God, how haughty you are
to speak so freely of God or humility.
Eternal sweetness
On its outward flight,
the honeybee
zigzags its dogged way
amidst the garden
scents and colors,
collecting in its honey pouch
here and there the
makings of sweetness.
But on returning home to
the hive
there is no waywardness,
no lingering in its labor.
Laden, ponderously caked,
full of pollen it makes a
beeline
for the dripping
honeycomb
and the Queen’s golden
haven.
Would that I be, Lord, on
my way home,
forsaking the world’s
bright wavering garden,
having foraged all I need
of it to enter in
and turn the inner realms
into eternal sweetness.
O child of God, how
fanciful you are
in depicting your
inevitable return to Reality.
This time around
Friends of mine tour
Europe.
Some attend the Super
Bowl.
Others go to Yosemite or
the Big Apple,
Africa, China, the Middle
East;
rock concerts, skydiving,
sailing the high seas.
Fine and wondrous
adventures
I will miss out on this
time around.
These things are not what
I care for.
These things are not what
I lack.
This time, when I kick
the bucket
I want it to ring hollow,
resounding in the chill
air
throughout the somber
countryside,
tolling for my Lord and
for myself,
for this brief stretch of
our adventure as companions
this time around on my
arduous trek back to Union.
O child of God, everyone
is on their way home
by as many routes as
there are wayward souls.
Faith in love
Words fail, but one word
refuses to go away –
love – which Meher Baba
uses to cover all bases
and lists under one
category the inexplicable.
Love which we know well
enough
to desire its taste but
not well enough
to drown in, its depths
to reveal.
So we are left with faith
instead, through it
to learn a new blind,
deaf, dumb way to live,
nearer to love, nearer to
truth, rooted in the ancient way,
trusting everything we
are to His will and whim.
O child of God, faith in
Meher Baba
is faith in love.
God instead
I don’t know the
particulars
but I’m going to have to
leave
this world one day, the
only one
I ever remember knowing;
leave behind everyone
and everything I hold
dear
because the sea is (after
all) cardboard
and the moon is made of
paper.
I’m not talking about
death’s overtaking
but as a clear-eyed,
deep-breath resolution.
Because if I and Love are
eternally One,
my affections and their
objects (like myself)
are but pale,
irresolvable reflections.
And to reach beyond the
facade I must one day
unhand voluntarily their
brief, illusory
solace and choose God
instead.
O child of God, repeating
the mystic promises,
you hover constantly near
the edge of the abyss.
His One perfect response
Any question asked of God
is an implicit demand for
an answer.
After a lifetime (to my
dismay)
of such implications, I
am beginning now
to hear (by His grace)
the one answer
which has always been
there – His silence
(wherein only real things
are exchanged
and wherein God alone is
real).
I took a silent,
invisible God
to be distant,
unapproachable
while He’s been
faithfully
answering me all along
in a Voice – because it
is so unlike mine –
I’ve had not the ears to
hear.
Now I might grasp a bit
more His admonition –
Love doesn’t ask . . .
because Oneness hasn’t a tongue.
O child of God, Love is
silent, benevolent,
His One and only perfect
response.
The bosom of Abraham
It’s not about solving
the mystery anymore;
locking in the puzzle
pieces.
It seems now to be about
forbearance
(in lieu of utter
acceptance). About giving up.
An attempt to care no longer
for my self
for the sake of all the
other selves I do care for,
knowing all the while I
make my way just as they do –
alone . . . alone except
for our mutual Friend.
Towards the end of a life
of compulsions,
the one option that seems
open to me
is to disregard the
interior prods and pulls
and the exterior
promptings that trigger them
and to nestle myself,
such as I am,
into the bosom of my
particular Abraham.
O child of God, the
Friend who is guiding you
is the Friend who is
calling you home.
The ring of truth
Thank You for all You have given me
and all You have taken away;
for remembering me
and for allowing me to remember You.
Thank You for wisdom’s ripening;
for the dust of the grave;
the shards of my poverty; for the rasp
of the world which has sharpened my longing.
Thank You for Your name
and the knowledge of Its significance;
for the soul’s dogged progression;
the inevitability of the goal;
for the human joy and affliction,
the revelation and mystification
which leads ultimately to dissolution,
to the unveiling of the indwelling Self and Union.
O child of God, the gratitude you’ve expressed
for years has begun to bear the ring of truth.
Join the tended sparrows
Everything is in God’s
hands.
So says my faith and what
a relief
to feel powerless and
ineffectual –
personal culpability
abdicated to karma’s iron law;
proceeding afresh without
the capacity
to botch entirely my soul’s
journey
or hurt any other except
as just another
heedless agent of God’s
inexorable will.
So let me stop now
wrestling with my bindings,
join the tended sparrows
in song-praise
among the God-noted
leaves, above
the numbered grains and
mustard seeds,
even to the corrupting
moths and rust
let me celebrate these
swaddling clothes;
tightly secured as I am
until fully accountable/
acceptable to God and my
destined ultimate liberty.
O child of God, whatever
occurs is perfect
and whatever does not
occur never could have been.
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.
Elegy
Not a word of scripture
to be quoted
over these bones but, at
graveside,
he would have tolerated a
short, silent prayer.
He took it as it came;
for what it was worth.
Good for the sake of
righteousness.
Honest in the cause of
truth.
Brave for honor’s sake.
Kind by decree of the
human heart.
He’d put aside any
fanciful notions
of heavenly reward or his
possible rebirth –
(he was convinced of his
own annihilation)
and thus, resolutely, he
went to his death.
Quietly cherishing joy,
enduring the pain,
he came closer to
surrender
than any religious man I
know. If he lacked anything,
it was the imagination
and longing to be anything
other than the man he
was.
As they lower his body
now into the grave
I am struck by how
closely
a coffin resembles a
crib.
O child of God, to surrender
is to yield,
earnestly and humbly, to
your destiny.
Chanji
He found you in Chowpatty
washed up on the beach
by life’s betrayals,
cruel vicissitudes.
You were ready to drown
by then,
hopeless, not caring if
you lived or died.
He persuaded you
to go a-travelin’ with
Him.
Apparently, the Way is so
narrow
there’s only room for one
to walk it at a time
which doesn’t mean
we go it alone
but that we must stay
hard on the heels
of our traveling
companion.
Chanji, by the end of his
days,
was one with You, ready
for drowning,
hopeless, not caring if
he lived or died
as long as it pleased his
Master.
O child of God, nothing
ever changes . . . it just gets larger –
more height, breadth and
depth than we could ever imagine.
Waiting in the wings
The moon is a disc, not a
sphere.
Flat as the earth; the
sea
pasted onto the bottom of
the sky;
stars poking through a
threadbare canvas.
I’ve turned away from the
latest backdrop,
heading toward the
interior.
It’s all to be pulled
down anyway
at the performance’s end.
We flow through time
apparently
but, also, time flows
through us,
life delivered daily to
our door.
How could I ever cease to
exist?
If I cease, existence
ceases, the void
once more reigns and even
then
I’ll be waiting in the
wings.
The scenery incessantly
changes but still
I stride the stage,
emoting, aggrandizing,
gesticulating, playing it
to the hilt.
O child of God, follow
the script.
The pageant is endless;
without resolution.
(drawing by Rich Panico)
The last resort
Most people come to You
(You have said) as a last
resort.
There’s a fundamental
wounding
in coming to You, a
violation of the self
in even our most timid of
intimacies with God
or any of His
manifestations.
In Your infinite mercy,
You draw us past
our intuited fear and
allow us our first
quavering steps toward
annihilation,
gathering us in, tucking
us under Your wing.
But, even after we become
Your lovers,
years later, we often
come to You
in pain and fear only
when our most familiar
worldly comforts have
been tried,
exhausted and found
wanting,
our last resort yet . . .
because
within every surrender,
every intimacy with God,
incrementally, now and
then, here and there,
moment to moment, there
is a fundamental
wounding, a violation of
the self as we move
so timidly – a gesture, a
word, a few steps,
an embrace – closer to
our own annihilation.
O child of God, come unto
the Ancient One,
the last resort, the
final refuge of the soul.
(Drawing by Rich Panico)
Love interest
Existence You compare to
a motion picture
with God playing every
role.
You, of course, are the
love interest.
When Your face hits the
screen
every pulse quickens.
Let the storylines get too
sad, predictable
and You are thrown into
the mix,
to stir up the plot by
espousing
the most difficult task
in existence.
Love God, You say. Love God.
Again and again, You
enter the picture
to round out and soften
God’s rough edges, awaken
the human heart to
love. To love.
You make it easy -- so
that we might begin
our arduous approach to
God;
to love God, to become
God,
to become God the
Beloved.
O child of God,
impossible to love the self;
next to impossible to
love the Self.
In the drink
Everyone is in the drink
–
laboring to keep their
heads above water;
no piece of solid real
estate
in this vast sea of
illusion
upon which to make a
stand,
gain a foothold – a
perspective, stability, bearings.
Some are swift and fancy
swimmers,
others fat and lightly
floating,
some sink like stones
but,
everyone, everyone, is in
the drink,
paddling about, waiting
for the One
Who walks upon water;
Who surveys the horizon
and sets the course;
Who offers navigation,
buoyancy, consolation;
truth, hope, explanation.
Be kind, o child, and
dubious,
studious and soft-spoken;
be clear-headed,
one-pointed, alert.
O child of God, everyone
is in the drink
until they drown in the
Ocean of Love.
The illusion of God’s
absence
The rich have their
diamonds and pearls;
the poor – the moon and
stars;
the pauper emerges from a
cramped hovel,
peers upward into a
starry night
going on forever. Upon every doorstep –
the infinite sky, the
eternal now,
filling us up everywhere
we turn
upon the spectrum of
agony to ecstasy.
The Lord is our shepherd
– we shall not want.
Every brimful moment – we
shall not want.
No one is slighted; no
one goes without.
Our inheritance – our
just and proper due –
life in minutia, in all
extremes,
the essence and price of
being human.
Preference creates the
illusion of want. Judgment
and desire create the
illusion of God’s absence.
O child of God, cultivate
indiscriminate gratitude;
purchase Oneness with the
jewel of desirelessness.
O child of God, in the
stone’s crevice
shall bloom the perfect
rose.
Just shining
You are the Light of the
world
and light makes no
sound. It just shines.
Those who couldn’t see
the Light asked for words.
You pointed out certain
arrangements
resembling the Light and later
wrung from the air
approximations that
delighted Your lovers –
they printed up cards,
pamphlets,
magazines and books. How sad for You,
at times, also, for the
Mandali, Your flesh ablaze,
eyes aglow, the roaring
fire inside
and Your lovers in their
blind faith
praise and bow and
plaintively beseech You
for descriptions of the
Light. For evidence,
for instructions; for
intimations,
for directions to the
Light. O my Lord,
You are the Light of the
world
and You took birth to
shine Your Truth,
silently; silent – just
shining. Just shining.
O child of God, he who is
blind, let him
muck about in the
business of words.
