New Poetry, Summer 2013

People Might Get the Wrong Idea

To pray for you

May be nothing other than the impulse to hold you

In my arms and share what you’re going through,

To take the suffering away from you

And give you whatever part of me happens not to be sad or afraid.

This being the best I can do in face of the fact that
God doesn’t usually honor my requests to eradicate your suffering.

Poem: Near-Enemy

There’s generosity.

And then there’s something that resembles it.
It wants the favor returned,
This thing that mimics generous.

We Catch Fire: Some Observations about the Transmission of Knowledge

“It is a common mistake to think that education is on the level of ideas. No! It is always a transmission of experience…. People are not convinced by reasoning; either they catch fire or do not.”—Father Alexander Schmemann¹

 

There’s a tradition in Mahayana Buddhism that the Buddha once gave a sermon without uttering a single word. An expectant assembly had gathered around him. Some of them may have sensed from observing him that something remarkable had happened. Maybe some had heard that there was something about the quality of this man’s presence that inclined one to listen to what he had to say by way of explanation. He regarded the crowd with compassion, wondering, I like to think, if it would even be possible to convey anything about what he had come to understand.  Then he did something unexpected: he picked up a flower and held it up for them to see. He scanned their faces for hints of

Not-Religion: Reflections and Theologoumena

The tiny stone church of Osios David, named for a saint who lived in a nearby tree, is up a steep hill in the Ano Poli neighborhood of Thessaloniki, Greece. It’s thought to have been built in the late fifth or the early sixth century as part of the long-gone Latomou Monastery. It now seems to serve as the neighborhood parish, but the nave is so small that it couldn’t hold many people even if they were to spill out onto the pretty terrace, which I assume they do on feast days.

            The mosaic of Christ in the semi-dome of the apse is the main attraction. It’s from the same era as the church’s construction, thus it’s one of the rare examples of a large Christian image that pre-dates the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries. It’s said to have been successfully hidden from the anti-image activists under a goatskin. A few hundred years later, it was plastered over by the Muslims who prayed there during the Ottoman period, only to be rediscovered in the 1920s around the time of the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece that took place then, when many of the churches that had been made into mosques were restored to their original purposes.

Poem: A Simple Step

What passes for faith
Might better be described
As pretending,
Ninety-nine times 
Out of a hundred.
But the one person 
Out of that hundred
Who takes the step, 
Simple and inevitable,
Past pretending
Saves the other ninety-nine.

Poem: Liturgy

There are as many ways to stand in church 
As there are neuroses. 
You can do it with righteous gratitude like the Pharisee. 
You can do it for fear of doing something wrong, 
Or in hope of Doing Something Right. 

Faith and the Magic Loudspeaker

“The inhabitants of the moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the earth, being about 6 feet in height. They dress very much like the Quaker style. . . . They live to be very old; coming generally, near a thousand years.   This is the description of them as given by Joseph the Seer, and he could ‘See’ whatever he asked the Father in the name of Jesus to see.”
—Oliver B. Huntington, citing a revelation received by the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Joseph Smith¹

The above howler is just a drop from the fountain of weird beliefs that flow from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and that modern Mormons are so skilled at spinning when their efforts to keep them hidden fail.  If they were to explain this one away, as I’m sure they can, they still can’t spin the fact that they very literally believe that God the Father lives on the planet Kolob with his many wives, that Jesus and Lucifer were rival brothers in some pre-earthly existence, and that, as he ascended into heaven, Jesus made a side trip to North America to preach to the natives, who were none other than a lost tribe of Israel. The usual Mormon tactic when confronted with the hard-to-swallow tenets of their faith is a question they hope will be taken rhetorically, along the lines of:  "Well, now, doesn’t every religion have its own peculiar beliefs?"