God Loves Atheists

I have long thought that dialogues between atheists and religious believers (especially monotheists as in Christianity) could be fruitful for both groups.

For atheists, it could bring into question their demand for empirical proof that God exists before they would believe, since by definition God is non-material and not subject to the dictates of materialism.  For Christians (and other monotheists), it could bring into question their domesticated and comfortable, thus greatly limited, ideas of God.

For example, in my poem, “God Loves Atheists,” these lines focus on the problem of theists having marginal or even distorted ideas or images of the God of Jesus Christ, even to the point that God is an atheist regarding all the meager and self-serving ideas about Himself:

                                     God loves atheists,
                                     His unknowing images,
                                    loving them to death
                                              or rejecting ideas
                                             of God so convoluted,
                                            so completely cramped,
                                             caved in upon themselves,
                                            but believed by so many
                                              believers that even God
                                             is an atheist to such
                                             pathetic presumptions
                                            and withered, shrunken
                                              concepts of what He is.

Has God ever been called an atheist before?  I hope what I mean comes through the poem.  Atheists, with their critique of belabored ideas of God, can help Christians realize that God wholly transcends their images and ideas of Him, that God is not tame or just “nice,” but is a somewhat wild God, wildly and madly in love with all the humans he has created, including atheists who reject his very existence.

Perhaps atheists, in seeing the passion and contemplative wisdom of Christians who realize that God always eludes our control of Him by our words and ideas, and that He is a desert God who confronts the good and the evil within each of us, can begin to wonder, even question, their presuppositions about what it would take for them to believe in God. That physical evidence is contradictory to the very notion of God, and that we can know through additional means than only scientific empiricism. Reasoning, faith, imagination, mystical experience are some of those ways.

From my faith perspective, I hope that atheists would re-imagine their assumptions and avoid the dead-end of scientism in approaching the existence of God question. Perhaps allowing a little ambiguity to exist would help them understand more deeply how and why devout Christians have been willing to both live and die for their faith in Jesus Christ. 

The Christian God is strange, even absurd to conventional thinking, but it is a sacred absurdity, not the absurdity of a Camus or Sartre where life is meaningless, without purpose, and death brings instant oblivion. 

I wonder how many atheists secretly, perhaps even to themselves, wish the astonishing Christian story were true.  And for Christians, it is.  For atheists who are truly seekers of truth, it can become so.

Desert Elephants & God

Desert elephants are few in Africa, but their story is analogous to human hope, and a spirit of utter perseverance through circumstances drastically destructive to life.

                                               Bush elephants
                                                perpetually walking
                                                Namibian deserts
                                                slogging for hours
                                                through oceans
                                                of tidal heat…

How much do we want to not only physically live on, but how much do we want to know mystical union with God?  To have faith worth dying and living for?  What will we do to struggle for a breath if we are caught underwater?

                                                marching
                                                to a wavering
                                               horizon of hope
                                                before death’s
                                                final fire descends
                                               from infinite skies
                                                upon the majestic
                                                magnificent tragedy
                                                of this absolute
                                               passion to live on
                                                one more step…

These elephants stretch finite perseverance to the limit and beyond.  They epitomize a kind of animal-hearted passion for the next breath, the next step. They do not go passively into the night, but fulfill their destiny of survival.

                                                quite indefatigable
                                                & unrelenting enough    
                                               for such daunting
                                                survival daily
                                                until the dyings.

We humans crave life, but life with more dimensions and depth than these amazing elephants.  Besides physical survival, we ache and long for experience of the sacred, for being loved by and loving others, and our God, for the seeds of eternity hidden in our daily lives.  In the Bible and ancient times, the desert was the place to encounter both the devil and God, a fierce place of extremes where no distractions exist and the reality of being alive must be faced radically and in the stark fullness of truth.

We are humans of the desert in search of not only some meager fruit and leaves, and some water, but of what love really is, of what our finite and eternal destinies are.  Along the way we write poetry in the sand that is soon covered and gone.  But in the act of creating those poems, we became more aware of what and who we are.  Unlike the desert elephants, we can realize we are meant for God, here and always.

What will we do with our greatest longing?  Will we slog through the desert of infernal obstacles with hope and faith?  Will we risk everything to breathe underwater, and find a way through the ocean of the desert, if God is both waiting for us and heading towards us?

Modern Art Without God

A urinal.  Soup can paintings.  A crucifix in a container of urine.  A wine bottle rack.  Paint-splattered canvases.  Shrill and dissonant music.  Much of modern art (painting, music, drama, poetry, sculpture) bears the burden of being made in the absence of belief in God, or even the possibility of there being a God.  The result is art that is alien to the human spirit, and often grotesque to human sensibilities and aesthetics.

Without allowing art to be iconic, or at least tinged sometimes by the sacred, it becomes brooding narcissism and nihilism, sterile and without a sense of both the deeply human and the ascendent spiritual.  It is why so many people cannot connect to modern art and see it more as distraction and a caricature of art than disclosing the profundities of suffering, love, isolation, death, hope, good v. evil, passion, beauty, emotional and spiritual truths, and much more.  Instead of being the object of contemplation, truth, inspiration, modern art leaves the viewer or listener out of whack and with a soul-less vertigo.

With the rejection of God, art has lost not only its relevance, but its portrayal of meaning in human and divine love in the face of separation, suffering, time, and death.  It has become an aesthetics of hollow absurdity gleaned from postmodern presumptions and dead-end deconstructionism.  What is missing in modern art as a whole is a soul, an incarnational and transcendental identity.  The numinous, holy, and mystical are either neglected or ridiculed as superstitious.  The irony is that atheism is the home of superstition with all its thin-soup beliefs that assume a superior insight.  As has been said, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”

When art loses its enchantment and sense of the sacred, it becomes profanely profane, unable to inspire wisdom and new ways to experience experience.  Since God is The Artist, the amputation of God from consciousness leads to an art that is neither fully human, nor somehow baring traces of the divine.  Art has the potential to be epiphanic, but modern art is more solipsistic and deadening. 

The age needs art that does more than reflect spiritual sloth and abandonment of truth.  It needs an up-rising of art that integrates and involves both the body and the soul, the mind and the presence of God.  Art without hope is a prescription for depressed focus more on trivialities than upon aspects of common life that can be windows onto impermanence, eternity, and beyond.

Too often what is lacking in modern art is an experience of the sacred in human consciousness, experience, and culture.  With a memory of the future, art can regenerate itself and once again be both relevant and transformative. In the Book of Proverbs it states that without a vision the people perish.  In art without vision and some dimension of the sacred, beauty and truth perish, along with art itself.  A resurrection is needed.
        

Intimations for Younger Generations

What can an old man say to younger generations?  Do they want to hear anything from an old poet writing in the desert where God and demons are faced?  Can anything be said at all?  This entry is based upon a poem I just wrote, “Intimations.”

                                 Speaking from the twilight zone
                                    where old age dances at last
                                    in a crescendo of disappearance,
                                    I have much of nothing to say
                                    to those in earlier seasons
                                    except a few intense intimations
                                    from my still warm-blooded soul.

Even if I have only a few simple things to say, or if no one cares to listen to such a buffoonish guy, let’s see how it goes here. 

                                    Whoever you are, whatever you do,
                                    do not distract away into disregard
                                    and bury in shallow graves your
                                   greatest longing, the liminal quest
                                    to be found alive & loved by God.

My new book of poetry that is in the process of publication right now is entitled The Greatest Longing.  What is that longing?  What is your greatest longing, deepest yearning of all?  Is it for something, anything, other than the Presence and Love of God?  If it is, why?   

                                    Face your death mask now
                                    in a full staring of mortality
                                    and love without calculation
                                    while the bird of dawn still rises.

Confess to yourself your own death now so to reduce any fear of it.  Realize you will die and that you are not terminally unique and will avoid the experience of all us others.  Love and death are our destinies that begin here and now.  Love itself is a dying, a withering away of ego and the fears, anxieties, delusions, and distractions that come from it.  God became death for us in Jesus Christ, the most crazy and beautiful story and event in infinity and beyond.  Love is our passage through life and our crossing of the threshold of death.  Faith in Christ is a sacred gift, a perpetual dawning in the wake of the Lord Jesus’ resurrection (which is also our resurrection). 

                                    No matter your daily work,
                                   allow yourselves to be poets
                                   of sense & spirited imagination
                                    & mystics naked to the sacred.

Whether you work with AI, own a small business, are a physician or laborer, an accountant or astronaut, all of us are called to be Homo Poetica and Homo Mysticus, people who dare to contemplate being a human being and being human, who risk finding beauty in ugliness and pray with imagination to our imaginative God.  Don’t flee from being poetic and mystical in mind and heart.  It is part of our destiny to experience this life in all its catastrophes and bliss, to encounter the sacred in the ordinary and the sublime, here and now.  Not some other time, some other place.  The experiences of daily life are intimations from God of His Presence and the mad love, the bizarrely astounding love, He has for each of us.

Doubt and Faith: A Bittersweet Crucible

My narrative today is to comment on sections from my poem, “Prayer of Doubt,” as a way to wonder about the mysteries of doubt and of religious faith.  For those enduring doubt, you are not alone, not “terminally unique.”  Doubt is in some ways an aspect of faith.  Doubt can be the introduction to faith, the impetus and grounding for faith.  All very strange and ironic and paradoxical, as are most things in the spiritual or mystical life.

                      God,
                      the ritual of thinking about you, fighting
                      over and with ideas of you is the pattern
                      of blood and scribblings and passings
                      all my life; my doubts, denials, dejections,
                      disappointments, distractions, delusions
                      with you are the weaving myth of my story.

When I was a young man and thought if I might become a Catholic priest and monk, it was doubt that led me away from that path, and it was doubt that would become a long-time, frustrating companion in my life’s story.
 
                      You are my contradiction and my confusion;
                      you are the question that keeps asking.
                      I think of you and my mind is a circus, a carnival,
                      a charnel house of memories, a feeling in the gut;
                      I have doubted you, I have been doubt.

At times, doubt defined me and was the perpetual question that was like an addiction.

                      There was a self-surprising, really absurd,
                      dawning in the harrowing heart of any despair
                      while you harpooned me and I screamed.
                      Is doubt my cross?  A thorn in my fleshly soul?

Could doubt be an absurd epiphany of sorts?  A godly virtue of a bizarre kind?  Was doubt my bloodless stigmata?  A graced, ambiguous, disturbing participation in Christ’s Cross?  Or something far less?  Was I just soaking up the zeitgeist in my mind and soul?  Did doubt lead anywhere, or was it its own dead end?

                      Doubt is the prayer, doubt the necessary nativity
                      for seeing the simplest thing; doubt is itself
                      the dying of doubt, the strange birth of faith
                      through the dark canal of doubt’s density where
                      new belief and old doubt are a lover’s quarrel.

Doubt can be an odd prayer, the seed of its own passage across the threshold of faith.  Doubt is not to be denied or fled from like an enemy of the spirit.  Doubt is to be my mirror in which I can long for going even deeper into the doubt in order to face all that it is regardless of the fear and pain.  In “doubt’s density” is found what has been sought all along, the convergence of doubt and faith in a crucible of love.  Doubt is a radical way to begin to believe.

                      God.  You are my doubt and consume my doubt;
                      my doubt is everything, nothing and neither
                      for You absorb my doubt and absorb me
                      in my every act of pure or murky abandonment
                      to You, for You are my absolution and sole hope.
                      Amen.

In order to be faith, faith needs to contain the seed of doubt.  Doubt is not a rejection of or comment about God for God knows my doubt as He knows me. Just as my existence and being contains some aspect of the nothingness out of which God created me, faith contains and is fertilized by doubt.  I don’t have to escape doubt as if it were a killer of faith, but simply love God (and people) through the doubt and all the ego-drama of my life.  God accepts me as a long-time pilgrim of doubt and welcomes me “in my every act of pure or murky abandonment” to Him.

Doubt has been a freaky friend over the years, one that has helped me seek the real God of Jesus Christ, not some idol or pathetic idea of a God. Without doubt, what and who would I be?  It is integral to my story that God is telling me, an aspect of faith and hope.

The Doobie Brothers sang “Without love where would we be right now?”  Without bearing and baring doubt through liminal and suffered passages, where would I be right now?  The mirror of doubt can become a nascent window to the sacred.  All very odd, consuming, and, essentially, wonderful.
          

[“Prayer of Doubt” was first published in Amethyst Review]

Sacred Poetry

The sacred is hidden and obvious in our age of superstitions (atheism, scientism, materialism, mechanistic universe) and relativism in truth and morality.  The idea  of a sacred dimension of reality much seem preposterous and grossly absurd to the “brights” and devotes of de facto nihilism.  But epiphanies are everywhere in the life of humanity and in the lives of individuals.

The sacred is manifested in some of the many obvious miracles or wonders of God, such as existence and being itself, space & time, matter & energy, a intelligible cosmos where order emerges from chaos, life of any kind, human beings, reason and consciousness, faith, hope, love (most especially relational love).  And for Christians, the whole story of existence centers upon the life, teachings, actions, death, and resurrection of a 1st century AD Jewish man, Yeshua (Jesus the Christ) where and when God became humanly present among us to express that He loves each one of us with an unrestricted, unlimited, infinite love.  What divine madness for the God of All to be crazy in love with you and me beyond our being able to imagine.  From God’s perspective, we are sacred because we are permeated with God’s love.

Poetry of the sacred is one of the deeply human ways to wrestle with and contemplate such a God who is humble enough to be literally among and with us in the life of Jesus then and in Jesus’ presence no less with us now.
 

                              As linguistic incense,
                               sacred poetry
                               gives faithful rise
                               to soulful hope
                               spiraling heartward
                               through dark nights
                              towards an eventual,
                               inevitable, irreducible
                               gracious dawning
                               of divine delight.

The sacred is preposterous and absurdly holy, but in a way that delights God and draws us to Him through all the sufferings, doubts, sins, evil, good, beauty, and love through which we learn that the heart of the matter is not our quest for God, but God’s quest for us.  Sacred poetry can be both contemplative and mystical in helping us stop running in the darkness and be still, to wait for our relentless and steadfast God to find us in spite of our ego-drama.

Next time you experience an epiphany or have a deep sense of the sacred, write a poem that combines words, vision, and plenty of silence. 

A Holy Life

What spiritual and psychological wisdom can Christian saints, mystics, poets, artists, scientists contribute to our awareness of the sacred in our lives?

The imagination is a glimpse of being able to experience the sacred from God’s perspective.  Without imagination, Christian poets, artists, scientists, even saints and mystics, would lose their creativity and spiritual insights, thus their wisdom. 

They all are seeking to know Truth, to know God, and to be able to allow God to know them.  It is this union of God and Truth, in the context of Love and imagination, that is the liminal threshold we must cross to experience the sacred in the most minute aspects of our lives on a daily basis. 

God is a hidden God, but does not hide from us.  Our ego-dramas and addictions to distractions and spiritual sloth hide God behind walls of our own making.  Saints, artists, scientists, and others risk traveling in the geography of the sacred by means of their imaginative mindfulness, creating openings for us to explore with our own imaginations. 

The quest for God and the sacred does not end no matter how spiritually wise one becomes for we always remain children in this quest, always beginners.  And that is a very good thing that we do.  With the sanctity, innocence, enthusiasm, and imagination of a child, we can negate the false self and false idol that is our ego, and be crazed enough to see the beauty of living a holy life in an age that despoils and ridicules all that is sacred.

It is growth in wisdom to know that joy, truth, beauty and goodness are what endure, as our ego-pleasures fade fast and can turn into a path to desperation and despair if followed to the end.  The “secret” of the saints and mystics of all sorts is that eternity includes time and permeates all aspects of it.  The eternal and sacred define us now, in the experience of our daily lives, and are our destiny.  It begins with seeing ourselves from God’s perspective.   

Attempts to Assassinate the Sacred

It has been said that on the spiritual path the way to Heaven can sometimes be through Hell.  Similarly, the experience of the sacred can be directly through the cold heart of the profane.  However, in our times where there are constant and continuous attempts to assassinate the sacred, the profane is often (ironically) deified in itself as the center of an impermanent human existence.

These attempts to eclipse the sacred, to forget it out of existence, take many forms, but one thing most of them share is that they are superstitions (irrational assumptions and attitudes based upon magical, materialistic thinking).  Such superstitions can take the forms of postmodern relativism and deconstructionism, the ideology of materialism, scientism, political utopias (as in neo-Marxism), de facto nihilism, militant atheism, and distractions of all sorts.

But the sacred does not go quietly and easily into the night of pure profaneness (in which there is no center, no purpose, no meaning or significance, no values, no goodness, no truth, no beauty, no God).  The sacred may be suppressed, neglected, attacked, mocked but its death is greatly exaggerated.

The sacred is not an addendum to life, a projection or unnecessary digression. It is the pulse of life and love, the presence of the divine and eternal in the heart of the transient and time bound.  The sacred is an epiphany, a theophany, “eternity’s saturation of the finite,” the theistic Presence hidden behind the brash, but fragile, masks of the profane, a presence of “gritty and painful grace… where here and eternity are one.”

Here are the first two stanzas from my poem, “Meditations:  The Sacred”:

                                      Sacramenting all mattering
                                      in a dramatic ritual sweep
                                      through the scandals of time,
                                    the sacred converts the profane
                            into itself, changing stubborn
                                      habits of being into spontaneous
                                      worship of the godly mystery
                                      of God beyond all theologies.

                                      Truth spirals through
                                      the raging, rugged
                                      rapids of delusions,
                                      retrofitting them
                                      with consecration
                                      to a holy & auspicious
                                     circle of good hope,
                                      dawning with eternity.

The attempts at murdering the sacred and throwing its remains into bottomless pit of oblivion have failed and will fail for the sacred is what makes being and existence possible.  The predatory profane shrieks for attention and acclaim, but it is the sacred that patiently endures, waiting with wisdom, to transform even the most vain-glory kind of profaneness.  The blood of the sacred is love, the very thing that the profane dreads and can never comprehend. 

"The Scream" and the Sacred

Munch’s “The Scream” is a metaphor for humanity stripped of the sacred, alone in a random universe, “condemned to be free” (Sartre).