Consciousness, Creation, Buddhism and the Bible in 60 seconds

Port-of-Call

At birth,
      we disembarked to a port-of-call
             full of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure.
We may view it as a furlough,
       as a life sentence of imprisonment in a body,
             or as an all-day pass at an amusement park.
When the Captain blows the whistle,
        we stop what we're doing, return to the ship
                     and sail on.

IN THE BEGINNINGS: A Semi-serious Sonnet

So ...

God rested on the seventh day.

We have accepted that on faith.

But Scripture doesn't really say

what He did on Day the Eighth.

It seems that only Heaven knows

just how God spent that second week

With omnipotence would you suppose

He'd hit the beach in Martinique?

No!

Creators don't stop making things!

He would make some more dimensions

Full of divine imaginings,

    truly marvelous inventions,

        and Creatures unlike me and you.

That is what creators do!

What is LOVE? Who is GOD? Mysticism for the Shallow Mind

 LOVE is GOD ~
     for GOD is LOVE (1 John 4:8) ~ 
All of it! 
Every warm feeling or thought, 
Every kind word, spoken or written,
Every secret longing, every unselfish action or prayer ~
    ever and everywhere, since the first light of the first dawn.
The unseen, often unfelt, centripetal force that makes us One.
That is what Love is -- and that is who God is.  
Powerful beyond comprehension.  
All the rest is garbage or glitter.
Any more questions?

--  an excerpt from the imaginary anthology, "Mysticism for the Shallow Mind"

Parallel Universe

(click to enlarge)

In Memoriam: Meus Deus-Pater

A man of joy.
A man of sorrow.
Easy to love.
A contemplative genius
Too deep to fathom.

He looked like Santa Claus.
The children, for a while, believed he was.
No ... the beard was too well trimmed.
More like Hemingway, I'd say, though
Hemingway's prose was not as poetic.

He excelled at everything.
Even warfare for which he later atoned.
After bombing Nantucket, accidentally,
A fighter pilot in the oxymoronic Pacific War.
He came home more penitent than triumphant.

No mother, no father -- but embraced
by aunts, uncles, cousins and a brother,
plus a new brotherhood of disciples
of Ignatius, in which he made reparation
for acts of war by facilitating Acts of God.

A teacher, missionary and spiritual director.
On countless occasions,
he touched thousands of souls
in hundreds of ways over scores of years,
sharing the grace of one God.

Not without a demon.
In his hour of darkness
he made it down that hallway
with the help of others.
I know he helped them, too.

Even after being struck down,
unable to talk, unable to walk,
his eyes were clear as a starlit sky.
I looked into those eyes one day
as I cut up his chicken dinner.

There was no doubt that my Godfather
was still in there, with an awareness
that would make Buddha smile.
Liberation would inevitably come.
When the Father called, he went in peace.

PONDERING LIFE AFTER DEATH and RAMBLING ON about it, too.

PONDERING

Will there be Life after Death?
Will we find God or Nothing?
We need not fear -- it doesn't matter.
A difference without a distinction.

If there is no afterlife, we won't know it.
If there is, it is beyond knowing,
at least until we get there.
What's the difference between unknown and unknowable?

Two questions,
but just one answer.
One Truth.
One.

RAMBLING ON

We've heard it again and again,
this same answer to many other questions:

"I am the Alpha and the Omega"
"In the end, there can be only One."
"E Pluribus Unum."
"One, singular sensation ..."
"Om."
"We get to carry each other.
      One. One."
One.
"What's so hard about that?

ETERNAL LIFE

In the Here and Now,
Time is a non-entity
Just as it is in Eternity.
In the absence of Time,
We cannot be moved or stopped.
We cannot cease to be.
Eternal life is Here and Now.
A gift that few unwrap.

GOD'S IMAGE and MAN'S IMAGINATION

The Good Book says God created Man in His own image and likeness.
Man returned the favor -- and Michelangelo notarized it
by creating a corporeal image of the Creator, as well as for Adam.
Scripture is still assumed to refer to bodies rather than souls.

Life then imitated Art; and millions more made the same wrong turn.
Man's imagination tends to be limited by his senses.
Even a genius, in the role of artist, has this limitation. Besides,
the fussy old pope probably demanded a picture he could see.

God is a whole lot bigger than our little brains can imagine.
The Universe, His creation, is not merely what it appears to be.
Neither are we. There is much we don't know about ourselves.
Of that we can be certain, humbly confident of our ignorance.

REALITY

Reality is, more or less, the Will of God.
Our Free Will accounts for the "less".
Nothing is anything,
if (or unless) God wills it,
or at least allows it.
So...
I can do anything I wish, God willing.
Conversely, without God, I can do nothing.
Sometimes, God lets me do nothing.
He doesn't expect me to do anything!
Isn't that something?

LIKE SILENCE

You will shatter it
if you name it ~ like silence.
Why dissect a rose?

A DIFFERENT WORLD

A dream is real until it becomes a tale.
Words are from a different world.
They will fail you.
So just embrace it.
Let it rumble in the depths.
Hold the unspoken with your soul.

BE STILL ~ Based on Psalm 46, more or less

There is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence.

~ Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

Be still and know that I am God

Be still and know

Be still

be

b

...