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?" 

Poem: The Cure

Our great shared illness: 
Belief in the Supernatural. 
Koan becomes a riddle to be solved  
(with a prize, naturally, expected). 
Eucharist becomes a magic trick.

Poem: Karma

It’s really only this: 
That you don’t get away with anything. 
Which comes as a surprise 
Only if you ignore the incontrovertible evidence 
Of consequences.
It’s not so much that your eczema 
Is payback for that slave you mistreated, 
Back when you were Cleopatra 

Poem: Accusation

They lie 
Who say awakening is joy, 
Because that’s only part of the story. 
Because what you wake up to 
Transcends joy and sorrow— 
Or any other emotion you can identify—
Even as it includes them. 

Nothing to Worry About

“Jesus said…Split a piece of wood. I am there. Lift up the stone and you will find me there.”—from logion 77 of the Gospel of Thomas¹

 

There’s a tradition in Buddhism as it’s practiced in North America called the circle talk.  It’s a ceremony of closure at the end of a meditation retreat, at least in the Zen and Vipassana traditions in which I’ve practiced. For those unfamiliar with them, retreats  generally consist of multiple days spent sitting motionless on a meditation cushion mentally following one’s breath or concentrating on some confounding question like, “What is my face before my parents were born?” This punctuated only by short periods of walking, meals, work, and sleep  during which an attempt is made to maintain the same quality of attention.   The circle talk occurs at the end of the final period of “sitting” on the last day.  Meditation cushions are drawn around into a circular formation, everyone takes a seat, and, going around the circle one by one, each retreatant is given a chance to say a few words. Because the idea of verbalizing the experience feels counterintuitive to me, and I’d usually prefer to say nothing at all, I’m amazed at the volume of words that gush forth from my co-retreatants. I take the impulse to “share the experience” in this way to be a particularly American phenomenon.  I suspect they don’t do circle talks in Asia.