No Christ
Suppose Christ left no benediction,
That he was nothing but a fiction,
Mythic and adjudicated,
And all about him fabricated.
That on the cross he got so dead,
For me, and you, and Uncle Fred.
Would it be a great big deal,
That he was mythic ‘stead of real?
Turns out that would be all right
He’d be completely out of sight
And having not much of existence
No virgin birth, and no persistence.
He still a miracle would do
If he’d not hung on cross for you
They were not ready for his kindness,
It looked askance at their great blindness.
The Passion Gospels
In the Orthodox church
We read some passion gospels, all eleven.
At every matins that we do, in the Russian tradition,
Every Saturday night.
They don’t agree.
And I like to imagine the seventy,
Who put together the New Testament canon
Back in Alexandria,
Knowing that, and winking.
Their lack of agreement is a holy thing,
An in your face sign,
That this resurrection,
Was not to be taken too literally.
The Miraculous
We’re here to learn love, that’s all that’s needed,
Though it’s embarrassing enough until it’s heeded.
It’s always a great miracle: compassion.
It goes against the grain. It’s ne’er in fashion!
Mindfulness
Happiness is found by us right here,
And now. We’re told. It is so clear,
If we’ll just learn to live the now, they say,
All our troubles, they will go away.
I don’t believe that for a single sec,
The present moment disappears, oh heck.
It always does become the past, you guys,
Changing into past before our eyes.
The trick is not to live this moment well,
But to not prefer it. Damn the sell.
To learn to live this moment, that is true,
But so is living with confusion too.
Both are always needed by and by,
One by itself will lead us to a lie.
Not What You Think
Enlightenment is not the trick,
(Unending bliss would make us sick).
Confusion comes too, and we say,
We like it when it goes away.
But here’s the real trick we discover:
Preferring not one or the other.
Handicapped
Disability’s a drag they say,
I’ve had to learn it anyway.
It doesn’t ever go away
For all one’s life, just as they say.
The first step’s seeing that it’s really there,
Then accepting that I really care.
Fiction
Al-Jawad or Ollie Twist,
Like Huck Finn they just don’t exist.
But neither’s past (it seems so real)
Your memory of it’s no big deal.
And future also is not true,
It all is speculation too.
Eternal present’s not much better, guys.
Becoming past before our very eyes.
Turns out that truth lives in imagination.
The fictive world’s, in fact, a consolation.
Likes and Dislikes
“Setting what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.”—from the Xinxinming by Sengstan (there about a zillion translations of this great text, all spelled differently. This one is from the Boundless Way chant book.)
What I don’t like:
Trump and his cult
Evangelical Christianity
The lids on top of drinks that straws go through
People who interrupt
Bad writing that thinks it’s good
Dumb writing exercises
Meat
What I like:
Jane Austen’s novels
Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Good films
Good TV
Grilled Cheese
Red wine
Simone Weil
Flannery O’Connor
The B Minor Mass by Bach
Das Lied Von Der Erde by Mahler
The Bauhaus school
String quartets by Haydn
Ella Fitzgerald
Hummus
The films of Ingmar Bergman
Some of the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Preston Sturges
Barbara Stanwyck
The “felafel” appetizer at Oleana
Zen sesshins
If I were perfect
These two lists would become one.
Or simply go away.
Thus, their existence
Is a constant reminder that I’m not perfect.
And that knowing something deep down,
Is different than hearing it and perceiving it to be true.
As Joni Mitchell teaches.
Kindness
Here’s the secret, no dilution,
Kindness is a revolution,
It goes against the grain, it darest,
Of revolutions it’s thus the rarest.
Humor
The people who are very smart,
Are also funny, that’s a part,
Of their clear seeing, don’t you see?
Between what is and what could be.
Learning Disability
Handicapped. It takes some learning,
Doesn’t cancel out my yearning,
For the way I used to be,
Which won’t come back. At last I see.
Praying for Trump
When the orange one acts with blindness,
This happens daily, seems to me,
I pray that he be taught some kindness,
It’s all that I can do, yeah me.
But there’s a secret in this madness,
My prayer he seems to just ignore,
His teaching I receive with gladness,
And I am he. Oh what a bore!
The Prisoner
Ninety-nine percent
Of the people all around us,
Are having a hard time.
I take a tai chi class,
On Tuesday afternoons,
After which I am usually tired.
Last Tuesday, after the class,
I sat for a long time,
In front of Demo’s,
Looking at the Dunkin’ Donuts across
Mount Auburn Street.
A woman appeared there,
Much worse off than me,
Very hunched over, and her hands waved wildly.
She only wanted to have her beverage quietly,
But her body had other ideas.
I meant to go over and tell her that,
I have been familiar with the body not obeying,
But then I thought better of it and didn’t go.
That would have made it extraordinary,
When in fact it’s quite ordinary.
Ninety-nine percent
Of the people all around us,
Are having a hard time.
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