Dear “The Truth”

Dear “The Truth”

As you know, you recently placed this comment in one of my posts:

“There is no God, but good plan. Just be, you know, nice. By the way, you stop existing after death, there is no soul either.

Sorry for the spoiler!

And yes, I do know.”

I realize that it’s unlikely that you ever make it back here to my blog.  But I figured I’d give it a try.

I want you to know that I feel bad for you, but I actually find the whole thing a little bit funny.

It seems like maybe you are having some trouble figuring out just who you are and what you want to be.

I agree with you, that it’s a good idea to be nice.   But I’m wondering how your comment models that behavior… being nice.  It seems like if you truly believe it’s nice to share the truth with people, and if you believe that the truth is that there is no God, then you’d try and spend a little more time being persuasive about it.  Your message doesn’t really give me much in the way of reasons to think that you might be on to something. 

Further, it seems like telling me that I’ve got a good plan must be intended as sarcasm.  And to be honest, it strikes me as rather bitter sarcasm at that.  It certainly seems strange after the whole “be nice” thing.

It was nice of you to apologize for the spoiler, but the truth is,  I think maybe you and are watching different movies.   My “movie” has an ending I’m quite excited about.

Usually, it’s we religious folks who get blamed for being pushy and irrational.  And sometimes, this blame is quite deserved.

But this is a case where you wandered into my blog and decided to share some opinions that really didn’t have much to do with the post at all.  Of course, if I’d had a major issue with your comment I would have simply deleted it.  I want to be clear on this point: it’s o.k. with me if you did that.  But I’d like to ask you, “The Truth”  How would you have felt if I wandered onto a blog sharing atheistic beliefs where the post made a quite specific point, and my comment was just sort-of a vague sharing of basic Christianity?

Part of the reason that I posted this is that I do hope that you’ll come back and I wanted to give you a natural place to do it.  (I have written some other posts that would be more logical places to debate theism versus atheism… but it’d probably be pushy for me to suggest that you ought to hunt around on my blog for them.)  I’m not afraid of disagreeing with people.  Maybe we can learn something from each other.

You’ve given me a little bit to work with in that brief couple sentences you left.  So I’ll pose a few questions for you:

#1) If there is in fact no God, does “the truth” even matter?  As limitied and finite beings, will we ever even arrive at it and recognize it for what it is if something greater than wiser than us isn’t helping us along?

#2) Is there any real reason to being nice if there is no God?  I can see why appearing to be nice might be beneficial sometimes, but when the chips are down and the lights are off, why should we be nice at all in a world without God?

#3) If in fact there is no soul, how would you account for the differences between what is detectable by science and what is observed from within our personality?  More specifically: Science might be able to trace a certain synapses firing with certain brain activity… But there’s no good reason to think that we’ll ever be able to analyze those synaptic firings in such a way that we’re finding out what someones thoughts are simply by looking at the biological artifacts. 

#4) If there is no soul, how do you account for the existence of so many constructs which aren’t related for biological survival?  I have no problem with the Neodarwinian account of how we phyiscally evolved, but do you seriously hold to the evolutionary accounts of how art, altruistic love, religious impulses, the universality of conscience and taboos against muder, nudity, and incest?  And if you do hold to the evolutionary accounts, whose do you hold to?  And how do you explain the neodarwinism has had a fairly easy time explaining physical structures but can’t arrive at the most fundamental agreements in explaining how these cultural constructs arrive.

I realize that this debate has been going on for milenia.  But each of these was a can of worms that you opened in some part in your response.  I hope that you (or someone like minded) will try and explain how you see these things.

Not Me at those Harps

Not me:

at those harps

sporting a stylish halo

walking on cotton ball clouds.

Beyond conflict,

Receiving everything I want

even before I ask for it:

Not in my heaven.

I used to only know what it wasn’t.

But the gift

of the last

few weeks

has been a taste of what it will be.

I was nearly wrung dry:

I hope you will permit me to torture that metaphor

and clarify:

the towel

of my soul

was just

barely

damp.

In moments of peace

there was solace

in the fact

that I’d done some good.

But I needed peace

to find that peace,

a thorny dilemna.

And then there was the ocean

not waiting for me

except that it was

waiting for me.

What deep hidden part of me

does the white noise rhythm of the waves

awaken? Why does the salt

carried on the breeze

remind me who I am?

And in the middle

of the rest and the peace

we held a war council

to recover one of our own:

But even this brings a deeper peace

than the surface battles we fight:

I am reminded of who is by my side.

And the capping moment

that next time

A legacy reawakened

through its own force of will?

How could you know

that my own grandmother

stored up her change

for me way back then?

A handful of metal and lint and miscelania…

through the banks alchemy metamorphed…

and then changed again:

Whatever I wanted,

stuff simultaneously

worthless and priceless…

And so my heart tells me it will be like this

In the Great Then:

Rest and battle, trials and the continuance of all the good things…

But there is something more!

I will not play a harp but I will hear it

maybe we will hear it

maybe this is the Great Difference:

Our acts, all of them, will be the

voices, the strings, the harmony.

It turns out there is a truth hiding in that simple-scary vision of Heaven

We will hear it in some new way:

Earthly music will turn out to be only a castrated echo

of this thing our actions themselves will proclaim:

Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb.

Not Me at those Harps

Not me:

at those harps

sporting a stylish halo

walking on cotton ball clouds.

Beyond conflict,

Receiving everything I want

even before I ask for it:

Not in my heaven.

I used to only know what it wasn’t.

But the gift

of the last

few weeks

has been a taste of what it will be.

I was nearly wrung dry:

I hope you will permit me to torture that metaphor

and clarify:

the towel

of my soul

was just

barely

damp.

In moments of peace

there was solace

in the fact

that I’d done some good.

But I needed peace

to find that peace,

a thorny dilemna.

And then there was the ocean

not waiting for me

except that it was

waiting for me.

What deep hidden part of me

does the white noise rhythm of the waves

awaken? Why does the salt

carried on the breeze

remind me who I am?

And in the middle

of the rest and the peace

we held a war council

to recover one of our own:

But even this brings a deeper peace

than the surface battles we fight:

I am reminded of who is by my side.

And the capping moment

that next time

A legacy reawakened

through its own force of will?

How could you know

that my own grandmother

stored up her change

for me way back then?

A handful of metal and lint and miscelania…

through the banks alchemy metamorphed…

and then changed again:

Whatever I wanted,

stuff simultaneously

worthless and priceless…

And so my heart tells me it will be like this

In the Great Then:

Rest and battle, trials and the continuance of all the good things…

But there is something more!

I will not play a harp but I will hear it

maybe we will hear it

maybe this is the Great Difference:

Our acts, all of them, will be the

voices, the strings, the harmony.

It turns out there is a truth hiding in that simple-scary vision of Heaven

We will hear it in some new way:

Earthly music will turn out to be only a castrated echo

of this thing our actions themselves will proclaim:

Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb.

The White Stone

I would not have imaginedthat something so light could be so heavy

that a thing so small could be so tremendous

I bare this white stone.

A gift.

I run my finger along the backside of the thing.

Smooth.

It is milk-colored

An irregular oval and yet it is a perfect.

A whole bored through the center,

threaded with a leather strap.

I know the way of this place in the way we know things in dreams.

it is a perfect knowing.

I will wear this around my neck forever.

And so I wait to look because I am afraid.

Could what I know really be true?

Is fear now just phantom pain in a shed limb?

I do not trust what I know although I know.

It seems to good to be true.

That is why I am afraid, still afraid.

I know and yet I do not know what is on the front of the thing

I know it is a glyph, a symbol, a sumnation.

Of who and what I am and am made of.

No facades here, a God’s eye-view.

His view. Perfect. and as deep as the deepest that there is.

It will stand for a word in Adam’s language.

My True Name.

I will recognize it.

I am afraid I will recognize it.

That is why I wait.

I feel the sympathetic hush of anticipation.

I slip it over my head.

It is a reassuring wieght upon me.

And I look down.

It is who I always prayed I am.

The Valley of Shadows

There are two valleys of the shadowof death.

There is a place where the dusk opresses

like a sopping wool blanket.

It is winter in the desert.

I was there.

And I did not know

if I was thankful that those sheer cliffs

blotted it out, blotted most of it out.

Because If the pall it cast was this,

this terrible wieght,

what of the source of the shadow?

There are two valleys

of the shadow

of death.

They are located in precisely the same place

and yet they are not the same.

I am in the other one, now.

and I rejoice.

You are with me,

You will always be with me.

I see that there is something else that might be meant by

The Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Death has been made small

Death has been brought low

Death has been demoted;

it now bares a lower case “d”…

death is a shadow of what it once was,

and at the other side

of this valley

waits Life Eternal.

Rain

The blue

burned

out of the sky.

It left this terrible emptiness

this dead pale emptiness.

And I imagine the processional;

The only way out of the dust bowl

was up Jacob’s Ladder.

Each of them Joad’s

stood for a million and a million

displaced dispossessed

with no way out

but up

and only at the end.

I wonder if the damp

felt like an alien on the skin

or if it felt like home

or if it felt like both

I wonder, if they ascended

into a rain

into the blue

if their hard stoic, blood shot eyes

leaked in sympathy

as if to urge onward the rains.