From the crude cry which we have so often heard during the war years: “If there is a God, why doesn’t He stop Hitler?,” to the unspoken questioning in many a Christian heart when a devoted servant of Christ dies from accident or disease at what seems to us a most inopportune moment, there is this universal longing for God to intervene, to show His hand, to vindicate His purpose. I do not pretend to understand the ways of God any more than the next man; but it is surely more fitting as well as more sensible for us to study what God does do and what He does not do as He works in and through the complex fabric of this disintegrated world, than to postulate what we think God ought to do and then feel demoralized and bitterly disappointed because He fails to fulfill what we expect of Him.

embers of a dream, and firelight
the years slouch on, the world becomes shorter as we age
from the ground lifted, forgetting our yesterday’s weight
(did we even exist in that ambiguous time?)
faith in my inmost inmost fires
home to a thousand unnamed words, a vocabulary of silence
compelled by the illusion of time to accelerate my wondering
(imagine time, wrapped around itself: a rose)
we live our lives shrouded in sound
darkness slips from our grasping; we hold nothing at all
the transience of the dream, glances off our perceptions
(returned from nowhere, the moment is blank)

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’,
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

– Bob Dylan

to follow the trail by the faintest scratches in the dirt
shall we believe in infinite silence, in the before and the after?
swimming in our senses when the swirl of whispers becomes too much
i see life shifted red, in the distance we feed in our busyness
hidden in the light like an unknown angel shall we drive the point
into the storm shall we follow in the footsteps of immortals
emerging from the fray to a field of vast quiet, in twilight
i trust the hands of strangers with all my precious dreams…
fear not! light has never been an illusion, nor does darkness exist
and death cannot calculate deeply enough to zero our voice

Philip K. Dick described God as being found in the trash layer of the world. This struck me as having a high content of truth. What are we to make of that statement? Why would this be? For is not God found above the highest heaven? Is not Heaven God’s throne, and earth merely a footstool? Yet I look back, when He visited this world, and showed His true nature. He came not to rule, but to serve, the reason why almost all the Jews rejected Him as the messiah. He was the opposite of what they were expecting — the Suffering Servant, not the conquering king. This, too, I find thinking has a significant quality of truth to it. In the very nature of nature we find the surprises that now we don’t think about, like the great dinosaurs all dying out and the lilliputian rodent-like mammal sweeping over as the victor of evolution (for now). Now we do not find it at all unusual that an image of a crucified man, we use to give us strength. Selah.

After the shouting as he rode on a donkey, “Hosanna in the highest!”, what happened then? This is God, your King, o people, come down from on high. This is God with us, our Immanuel. We have waited so long for our Savior to come, and now He comes in peace into the City of Prophets, the city of the Presence, the Temple. Do we make Him, then, King over all the earth? For God so loved the world, that He gave us this man, His only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in Him, it is as if that soul were never to die, even if they were to leave this green world. What can we possibly do for such a man, who saves us even from our own selves? For being the Son of God means that He is God, for one God there is, and so the Son of God must share God’s very nature. God with us.

Must it be that the stone the builders rejected become the cornerstone? What is to be if He were given to the archons of the Temple, the elders? Will they not pay Him tribute? Or will they pass Him along to become like a curse, and “for the good of the many, is one sacrificed”? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) What do they say has the crowd demanded, if it can be believed? One thinks it no small thing that those who cheered this King of the Jews now turn away, afraid. Who are we, now, leading Him to His final fate, through the streets of Jerusalem? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) Who is it now, who asks for forgiveness for those who slay Him? Who is being raised upon a tree, upon a cross? Who have we crucified, for all of the world and people and eternity and angels to see? Who? (I’m cold, I’m cold…) It is God. And we have thrown him away….

i imagine fingers emanating the aroma of wine
like a whisper that things are not as they seem
i am a subversive truth, with hints of another world
verily, have i dreamed so very often?
i cry out that darkness will not withstand our fire
but these are only candles that we wield
symmetries broken as we learn to doubt
though will i find asylum in the memory of my rose
time is a vagrant air we ignore till it becomes deadly
swirl the possibilities till they all assemble
in magic does life imagine the smallest of destinies
and i breathed of the high smoke of eternity
to return, still me, wearing the soul of a saint

Mordecai Ardon: The Red Dew

Click on the pic for a larger version.

If you have in mind to make sense of things, as you might, you should go the path of faith and reason. If you need to pick one of the two, pick reason; but if both are available to you, put faith first. Further, if you go deeply enough into reason, you will end up in the parlor of science. All that science is is that it means you’re indeed deadly serious about wanting to make sense of things. If it can be measured, and if a proper mathematics can be developed around it, science can make sense of it. Unfortunately, we do not as yet have any way of measuring God, or in fact, anything of the spirit world (not even imaginary things are as yet susceptible to science’s calipers, as of this writing, and the spirit world is definitely more subtle in nature). This may not always be so, however. Stay tuned.

So as it happens that more of the world is unexplained rather than explained, it is wise to rely on faith. Just make sure that the source of your faith is tested, and you’re basically good to go. Not that you’ll never make mistakes. For Heaven’s sake. The best science is prone to mistakes, and you think your faith is miraculously bulletproof? Have realistic expectations, especially about faith. And then, if you go deeply enough into faith, you will hit the height of sainthood, which I think is pretty much universally acclaimed as a “way to be”, if we’re talking the real deal. It was thus I set a goal for myself in this life: to be a scientist saint. I might actually get there, too. That’s sort of a scary thought.

in the vastness of alone am i a pebble in the desert
the society of my mind has its infidels, bent on war
(i hover: a center, a dreamlike quiet stills my know)
a madness so perfectly designed, as to make one sane
i breathed in the vapors of time, as to make one wise
drifted from island to island in imaginary eternities
(i have seen out this window the dreaming pass by)
the vision pours from my eyes, formless and void
words spoken in solitude return to infinite silence

Thomas a Kempis speaks for all the ages when he represents Jesus as saying to him, “A wise lover regards not so much the gift of him who loves, as the love of him who gives. He esteems affection rather than valuables, and sets all gifts below the Beloved. A noble-minded lover rests not in the gift, but in Me above every gift.” The sustaining power of the Beloved Presence has through the ages made the sickbed sweet and the graveside triumphant; transformed broken hearts and relations; brought glory to drudgery, poverty and old age; and turned the martyr’s stake or noose into a place of coronation.