My God
The real God
the monotheistic God
the God I could believe in
is not the God I hear described
by heartless folk
that love the judging
and throw their judgments
up up up to the sky
to form the ultimate authority.
My God would be
gentle and kind
full of forgiveness
for all the unrealized potential
of my being, and more than that,
in complete understanding of
exactly why that potential
could not be met.
My God would love me
and show me how to be
more like the ultimate spirit –
kind and forgiving,
compassionate and loving,
nestling me in warmth
(not hotness, not chill)
like a baby in the womb.
My God would show me
the meaning of ecstasy
that being outside myself
beyond language
a melding with the cosmos
a vision of the interconnectedness
of all things – and still hold dear
what makes me unique to him
or her, or that beyond gender
that so confounds our imaginations.
If there is an afterlife
I might ask for a moment
to see and understand
all the questions and problems
that so bothered me
as they lay unanswered
through my life
before moving on
to an entirely new way of being.
Having learned and absorbed
all that is possible to know
from the joys and sufferings
of embodiment and materiality
to find a new life in spirit
as the spark that made me
enters the warp and woof
of the cosmos in new form.
My God would be
beyond our human understanding
so that everything we know
about friendship and love
becomes a pale reflection
in comparision,
and yet, these things would
best teach us and train us
for the ultimate unity of
all things.
My God is beyond the
highest thought that we can think.
But my God is also very simple –
the ultimate source and definition
of love, the shadow of God
simply the limits of our
time-space understandings,
like trying to explain the
resonance of poetry
to an ant.
My God is best worshipped
by breathing, by feeling,
by kindness, by smiles,
by forgiveness, by actions,
by refraining from actions,
by the myriad of thoughts
and feelings and behaviours
that all of us already know.
We already know.
And if there is such a God,
(insofar as it is fair to reduce such a God
to the language of being)
such a God of love,
I invite this God to manifest
in my being, in and through me,
and to help raise me up
(and again, the metaphor of
upness is misleading)
to love.
And if there is no such God.
Do not speak to me
of religion.
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