Tuesday, December 22, 2015

A Christmas Prayer

When I am in Florida in the winters, I attend a weekly group (about 20+) which begins with some Biblical readings, then goes on to discuss thoughts that the reading stimulates.  Our discussions range widely and sometimes become controversial, but we all enjoy them and feel enriched by the varied perspectives.   Last year at the meeting before the Christmas break we had a poem whose author was unknown, the group was awed by it and I now wish to share it.  If anyone recognizes it and can identify the author please let me know, I would love to give him or her credit. 

A Christmas Prayer


On that holy night,
Somehow,
It happened.
Somehow,
God took a handful of humanity:
Proud, petulant, passionate;
And a handful of divinity:
Undivided, inexpressible, incomprehensible:
And enclosed them in one small body.
Somehow, the all too human
Touched the divine,
And was not vaporized.
To be human was never the same,
But forever thereafter,
Carried a hint of its close encounter with the perfect.
And forever thereafter,
God was never the same,
But carried a hint of the passion of the mortal.
If God can lie down in a cattle-trough,
Is any object safe from transformation?
If peasant girls can be mothers to God,
Is any life safe from the invasion of the eternal?
If all this could happen, O God,
What places of darkness on our earth
Are pregnant with light waiting to be born this night?
If all this could happen, O God,
Then you could be, and are, anywhere, everywhere,
Waiting to be born this night in the most
Unbelievable places,
Perhaps even in our own hearts.
Amen









Tuesday, December 15, 2015

A New Millennium

In the 20th Century we stopped believing in what we mistakenly call God
      --our Santa Clause in the sky.
We had manufactured our own image of a fabricated deity
      --then, tiring of it, discarded the essence with the fantasy.


We became the existentialists who proclaimed
      defiant strength to embrace our aloneness.
With Nietzsche we tried to shape superman
      to march out and conquer the void,
            Armed with
                  Machiavelli’s politics
                  Adam Smith’s wealth
                  Ann Rand’s selfishness
                  and Hollywood’s morals
            We set out to build a brave new world
                  ...and got lost along the way.


Is God?
The question cannot be answered!
Yet whether or not there exists a cogent being of Spirit,
The God-concept embodies all goodness and truth
      which we need to make life worth living.


When we stopped believing in God
      we turned away from
      values, purpose, meaning –
      all that we most need
      to become fully human.


In this new millennium, where is modern man to look
to avoid constructing another illusionary god?
A  bigger god, God of the Universe
Can we learn to embrace Mystery and not demand an image?

                             --I AM, Life IS--

The Wisdom literature of all peoples contain words that search the dark
     ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God’.